“No, no, no. You misunderstand. This is elf checkout.”
Ever since we opened that portal to the fantasy dimension, we’ve been dealing with a lot of labour strife. Thanks to me taking down that Nissan Atlas that kept running over all those teenagers and sending them to become great warriors in another world, the portal has been swarmed constantly with immigrants. Those nice folks just want to work in a place with central heating and air conditioning, and where bandits are unlikely to chop off their heads or blow up their homes with lightning spells.
We had to expect that big business would take advantage of the portal. For instance, it wasn’t even a week until we caught an oil company executive trying to dispose of barrels of tailing-pond waste over in Not-Narnia. He cried like a little baby, especially when Great Warrior Carl (I don’t know his last name) booted his ass through the doorway and he got dissolved by a green slime. Sort of appropriate, honestly, but I digress. Anyway, one of the other things that big business did was take advantage of low-priced, precarious labour.
See, these poor rubes were so overwhelmed by our modern society that they agreed to basically anything. That’s how we ended up with elf checkouts, which replaced the old expensive scanning robots with magical beings who were attuned to nature, had pointy ears, and didn’t know the phone number for the labour ministry. It’s hard to avoid the sense that they are being exploited, something which absolutely puts a downer on my shopping trip.
Write your representative today: authorize a tactical nuclear strike on Grobnar the Destroyer’s Skull Fortress, so that these wretches can go back home.
Going for a walk in the woods today, if you’re up to join me. Oh? No, nothing special, just figured it was time to get some fresh air. Why don’t you come with me? We’ll do this great hike down by Deadman’s Lagoons, yeah, plural, don’t go to the singular, that’s on the wrong side of the province. Meet you there, I bet we’ll get to see a heron or some shit.
Ah, great, you came. Here, have some trail mix. Yeah, I know it looks a lot like gas station Hawkins Cheezies®, but rest assured that it is homemade and very natural. Organic, even. Most healthy thing you’ll eat today. That staining on your fingers? Toxins leaving the body. C'mon, let’s go.
Man. Just look at the absolute, sublime beauty of nature. We’ve barely been ten feet from the parking lot and already we’ve seen a glorious, heart-stirring example of the infinite pleasures of our fragile earth, this weird-looking frog sitting in a stinky puddle right here, next to the porta-potties. Let’s all reflect on that for a bit. Now that we’ve had this experience, I’m going back to the car.
What do you mean, where’s my car? Do you think this was just an elaborate plan to get a ride home after my Viscount puked its guts out on the side of the highway after trying to drive it to the next town without second or third gear working? That’s a preposterous accusation, and I look forward to spending a lot of time on the ride home disproving it point by point. Don’t worry, I’ll drive. Hey, this thing has a lot of room in the back. I bet I could grab a spare engine from Pick N Pull on the way home, won’t take even a minute. Why don’t you have some more trail mix?
One of my more accomplished friends is an MRI operator. When we first got talking about what we did for a living, I didn’t get very interested. Now, don’t think I’m some kind of elitist snob. My career (freelance journalist/greasy dirtbag) is a laugh-a-minute thrill ride, where you’re as likely to get hunted down by friends of corrupt small government as you are to throw up in the back of a diesel-swapped Geo Metro being used to chase cows back into the paddock. It’s set the bar very, very high.
By comparison, MRIs are boring healthcare stuff, meant for taking extremely high-quality pictures of people’s junk all day long. Those pictures are then viewed by doctors, who will sneer at those people for not eating enough cauliflower. Just an absolute snore, which although involving a cool machine that’s very loud, didn’t fascinate me in the least.
That is, until they mentioned The Quench. In case you’re unfamiliar, MRI machines operate on the principles of magnetism (that’s the “M.”) Big-ass magnets are used to send pulses throughout the machine, and those pulses are inconveniently blocked by chunks of your body standing in the way. By recording how irritated those magnets are, we can figure out what’s going on inside your shit. Of course, you need big, big magnets for this, you’re not running down to the grocery store and diagnosing a brain misfire using that cute little toddler-art-retainer shaped like a frog.
Sometimes, when shit really goes wrong, you need to stop the magnetism in a hurry. Maybe a patient walked in with a fully loaded firearm, and the magnets are now using it to shoot the inside of the machine. Perhaps you just decided that you would like to end your career. Either way, hitting the “quench” button douses those magnets with several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of liquid helium, which makes them stop doing magnet-y things and start racking up billable hours for the MRI maintenance guy. This kind of highly expensive mechanical failure is my jam, and I asked immediately where I could get me some of those quenched-up magnets. Surely, they wouldn’t reuse anything they’ve beaten up in this way?
My so-called friend figured out what I was up to, and clammed up almost immediately. Almost. He gave me just enough information for my inquisitive journalistic mind to figure out that they just chuck these big-ass magnets into the dumpster out back of the hospital, and someone with an enterprising enough mindset could then un-chuck them into the back of, say, a U-Haul van with the license plate removed after being careful to avoid all the security cameras along the way. Not that I would do such a thing, especially because it involves driving through a particularly weak chain-link fence near the seniors’ centre.
Coincidentally, are you coming to my unveiling of my new magnetic-levitation Volare-launching system this weekend? I promise to listen very intently to whatever bullshit you say about your boring job, you’ll love it. The Mayor is gonna be there, cut the ribbon and everything. Shit. Siri, remind me to get plastic scissors for The Mayor.
So-called motorcylists love to shove their beloved bikes away whenever there’s a little bit of snow on the road. That’s because motorcyclists are famously concerned with their public perception. They don’t want to drive around town with wood screws run through their tires, shrieking profanities at stopped traffic before ripping a perfect 12 ‘o’ clocker and driving across the iced-over multi-use-pathway, comfortable in their knowledge that the police will not and can not follow. Or it’s because they don’t have heated grips, and their handsies get cold.
Heated steering wheels are the single greatest innovation in cars in the last two hundred years. Unfortunately for me, they hadn’t been installed into cars of the age I own. In the late 1970s, the newest innovation in steering wheel comfort was “maybe make them a little smaller, for the ladies.” Seems like I was cursed to a lifetime of wondering if my thermostat was seized, freezing to death even through many layers of mittens and work gloves while waiting for the tow truck to arrive and clean up the commuters in front of me.
Of course, Plymouth also didn’t equip this car with a lot of other modern features. For instance, liquid-cooled active speed laser and radar jamming was not available. Active pursuit drones pre-programmed with a seek-and-destroy order for all speed cameras were not yet on the market, unless you worked for the CIA. And also the good people of China had not figured out how to make $35 45-millimetre ball-bearing turbochargers capable of adding nearly four hundred horsepower to any engine strong enough to keep its guts on the inside when presented with one medium-sized jet engine’s worth of boost. I had to add all those things myself.
Easy, right? Run some wires to a heating element on the steering wheel. There’s just one complication: steering wheels turn. If I keep spinning the car left and right, eventually the wire will get tangled up and rip itself out, causing an electrical fire. Admittedly, that will also keep my hands warm, but the walk home after is inconvenient.
The original “engineers” who took a whisky-soaked gander at this car before slapping their secretaries on the ass had a solution, though. In every steering wheel, the horn button has the same problem. Unfortunately for me, the horn hasn’t worked in this car since 1983, which complicated my attempts to reuse the wiring.
Ultimately, I came up with what a rocket scientist would call “a compromise.” A pair of bolt cutters and a map to the local truck-supply warehouse’s storage yard soon provided me with a nifty diesel-fired interior heater, a roaring flame that consumes all and produces enough heat to make toast from three feet away. Ratchet-strapped to the place where the passenger seat used to be, it will keep my fingers warm, as well as my feet and every other part of my body. Sure, it’s inconvenient having to continually refill it with stolen farm diesel, and I could have run the exhaust pipe out of the cabin a better way than through the rust hole in the floor. Once you get that heated seat feeling, though, you simply can’t go back. If you’ll excuse me, I need to get going: if I don’t get to work in the next five minutes, my boots will melt again.
When I was a kid, I used to love it when the teacher had given up on trying to teach us something useful and instead put on a movie. Only Hollywood is capable of dumbing down complex concepts and mysterious historical figures into a format that we would happily receive. Plus, you’d get an extra ten minutes of the teacher messing with the TV/VCR combo cart, before calling in one of the AV club kids to teach them how to push “play.” Free entertainment.
It’s not that I didn’t enjoy school. Rather, it’s that I knew I was suited for something else, something different. Turns out that “something different” was squatting in a half-condemned house, and maintaining a rotating cast of between two and five dozen shitbox domestic cars. That’s the life, if you ask me.
Back then, I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up, and maybe you still don’t. That’s okay. There’s enough bad cars out there for all of us, although I will caution you to stay away from my general geographic area in order to reduce competition. Keep off my corner.
Give junk hoarding a try, and see if you like it. Whether or not you realize it, the public education system and the brain-soaking of mass media has already primed you to love cost-reduced (cheap,) poorly-made (domestic,) and capitalist (brand identity) products. Nothing is better for this than cars, where a vast quantity of Ford adherents scream at Chevrolet adherents over whose affordable car was worse, something that hasn’t been made for thirty years because the stock market said to do something else.
One day, we’ll probably have to get rid of these cars, whether because they rusted away or because we just ran plumb out of dino squeezins. And our descendants will ask, were they really that bad, as wretched and unreliable as the movies say? If you hoarded enough, you’ll be able to walk them into the museum that occupies your back forty. You’ll be able to tell them: they were worse.
Good news, folks. Two big things happened this last weekend. One, NASA proved that ghosts are real. Yeah, I don’t know how it happened either, I bet they pointed one of their big satellites toward Earth instead of away from it and then whoop, ghosts. Two is that we figured out how to charge the ghosts rent. The economy’s fixed!
That science is new, so new that the USDA won’t let you eat it without cooking it to a safe internal temperature. We’re still operating under a lot of theories about ghosts, and the prevailing one is that ghosts are people who have died but cannot leave this plane of existence until they resolve their unfinished business. And until they do that, every chain-rattle, spooky door-opening, and creaking noise your house makes is deliciously billable. It turns out that you were a landlord this entire time, just not a very business-savvy one.
Sure, there are already a lot of people crying it’s “unethical” to force these ghosts, who cannot leave under any means whatsoever, to pay up. Most of them don’t even have any money, ethereal or otherwise, except for the small amounts they scraped together to pay Charon “just in case.” Thing is: either they pay the money, or They’ll expect us to. And I have already spent all of my ghost bucks on a junkyard V8, which is the least I could do to take my mind off of a shrieking lady with no face constantly bothering me about where her family is.
When I finally pass on, probably in some kind of exploding-bellhousing accident, I’m sure that this won’t come back to bite me in any way. Roaming the earth until I actually finish a project is basically how I spend my Saturdays already.
In many ways, advertising is the great evil of our age. Faceless ghouls pushing fraudulent products on us from a distant ivory tower. Screeching that if we don’t at least pretend to do their bidding and watch a two minute infomercial about a waterproof jacket, they’ll take away the weird TV show our cousin made on the internet. Pediatricians have documented that the first words of most toddlers are now “skip that fucking ad, Mom,” and they’re right.
Once, in my weaker years, I too worked for an advertising super-conglomerate. Things were easier then, before the machines bought and sold our attention in great chattering heaps of hyper-optimized imaginary currency. My job was to look at Excel spreadsheets all day and colourize them. Once in awhile, if there was an especially big number, I’d copy and paste that number into another Excel spreadsheet, assuming that Ruth from Special Projects didn’t have it open at the time. If that was the case, I’d have to head down there and tell her to close her copy of Excel, but most of the time she would be on a coffee break or a meeting or something and her computer would be locked. Pretty much every day was like that, except sometimes depending on the spreadsheet it was Carlos in Attention Activities.
Back to my original point: I didn’t think I was doing anything “evil,” because it was so absolutely boring. Once, Ruth’s Packard Bell was locked because she was actually in the alley out back buying heroin and that was a pretty exciting day, but otherwise boring. And I’m sure that whatever soulless automaton is doing it seventy billion times per second right now also doesn’t think about the ramifications of its actions too much. Gotta pay the bills, it thinks, gotta offset all the various costs of existence with some revenue.
What I’m trying to say is this: if you see an advertising executive on the street, make sure to let them know that you want to skip those ads. With any luck, they’ll lock themselves into their bulletproof, tinted-glass limousines forever, and then they won’t be able to get to their computers in the office. Don’t worry, I’m pretty sure they can’t use their phones to do their evil business, mostly because of all the goddamn ads.
“We want to know your opinions,” begins the automated newspaper pollster on the other end of the line. “Because you are one of the few people left alive on this Earth who answer your phone to an unknown number, we believe that anything you tell us in the survey is clearly indicative of the average person.”
A bit wordy, but I was willing to play along. No reason to tell them that I had only picked up my phone because I thought it was Mr. Cho, my AliExpress broker, who I expected to be giving me a progress update on “Project Make An Entire Plymouth Volare Unibody And Mail It To Me.” Soon, I was pushing buttons and letting my opinions be known on contentious social issues. Surely, everyone in a decision-making capacity would have a firm grasp of statistics and not confuse anything my crackpot ass said for actual-factual reasoned belief.
Friends, I was wrong about that. It turns out that I am literally the only person dumb enough to answer one of these telephone surveys. A bunch of researchers called up afterward to make sure I wasn’t some kind of escaped dementia patient, put me on speakerphone and everything. I thought fast, of course, and I think my answer (“I was trapped in a public toilet”) satisfied them.
Based on the story so far, you may now understand why the new public transit buses have nine-hundred-horsepower nitromethane-burning V12 engines. Also why the highways now have FIA racetrack curbs mounted on corners, and the speed limit has quintupled. Of course, I’m still waiting to hear back on my proposal that the government subsidize Pontiac ownership, but I admit that it is a bit of a niche market that won’t translate into many actual votes.
If you’ll excuse me, the robot is calling me again. I don’t plan on running out of crackpot beliefs anytime soon, but I will probably not get around to most of them today. It’s simply too important that we convert all available golf courses to rally racing tracks, ideally while the rich folks are still trying to drive their dorky little golf carts on them.
Lots of folks have time to do a job twice, but not enough time to do it right. Me, I don’t even want to do it once, so being forced to re-do any work is seriously cutting into time that I could spend instead buying more shitty cars on Craigslist.
So it was recently, when I tried to fix a plastic bumper. In theory, it was simple: slap some hot staples on there, sand it down, fog on some new paint. What I actually ended up with was a totally mismatched blob of paint, highlighting a half-repaired crack in the bumper that you could see from orbit.
Failure has its own virtue, of course. If you’re observant, you can learn more from your average everyday fuck-up than you could ever hope to from twenty years of coasting through unlimited success. Through careful study (shrieking at myself in the mirror, throwing wrenches) I was able to determine, Sherlock-like, the exact problem that I had fallen prey to. That demon? Attempting to fix something.
If anything, my repair had made the bumper even worse than it was before. Back then, I could at least still pretend I just hadn’t noticed the damage yet, or that I was negligent. Now, I had no excuse. I had to re-do the work. “Buying” all the supplies from a nearby Hobby Lobby and mixing everything back up again hurt. Painting a new car? Awesome cool project. Painting the same car again? Nothing but discouraging. I steeled myself, and set forth to do the best possible job, bringing in everything I had learned.
The second time around, it looked about the same. If there is a moral to be had in this story, it’s that you can sometimes just get another bumper from the junkyard. Now, with a cracked junkyard bumper, it once again became the previous owner (of the bumper’s) fault for driving into all those posts while zooted out of his mind on Uncle Clark’s Miracle Drink. I’m gonna get around to painting it any day now.
Today, everyone who uses the highway has agreed that we will go exactly 92 km/h. It’s a little bit slick in spots because it rained and froze last night, but that short section on the bridge doesn’t outweigh the vocal group that routinely sleeps in late and needs to get to work faster than 80.
This method works a lot better than the old one, where everyone just went whatever speed they wanted. Sure, there was a “speed limit,” but nobody recognized the law as being valid. To limit speed is to limit essential freedom, believed a whole bunch of speeders like myself. Ten, twenty, eighty over the limit: this is the stuff that the human spirit is made of. In the end, though, we too realized that the only thing that was truly valid was the opinion of our fellow citizens.
Originally, the negotiation was a little clunky. Not everyone subscribed to the peer pressure, not until it reached a critical mass of people. Organizing eventually got the goods, though, as it always does. It’s hard to speed when all four lanes are going the agreed-upon speed in perfect synchronicity, and it’s really intimidating to go slower than traffic when hundreds of thousands of tons of automobiles behind you are waiting for you to find the narrow pedal and rejoin civil society.
Sure, I miss speeding. I really do, but I don’t miss having to go zero to fifteen for a couple hours a week because someone had a big spin-out on the bridge, or had to make a lane change at the last minute while thinking about Matlock and missing their exit. Now, I get to work every time, reliably, in a boring fashion. They might as well have built a train, and saved themselves all this money on mandatory speed-sensing bomb collars.
The guy running the counter at the record store looks worried. No, terrified. A wild beast, struggling to escape a deathtrap in the moments before the cruel jaws bite. His feral terror is not caused by me, despite the fact that my dieseling Malaise Era Mopar is spitting out enough half-burned oil-gas-coolant-nitrous mixture to craze the polycarbonate anti-theft coating on the store’s windows. No, he knows the humble record store is already well past its expected lifespan, and he’s waiting for this job, perhaps the only good one of his entire life, to end.
In order to please the whims of capitalism, he must be sacrificed. Market forces are arrayed against his pleasurable, easygoing employment. It’s not personal, just business. Eventually all of this, and I mean everything on this formerly-decrepit, now-hipsterized block, will be raptured into the cloud and we will never see its likes again. Here, now, we are here and it is now. I decide I’m going to buy a foreign-language pop album whose entire jacket is indecipherable to me.
“What kind of turntable do you have at home?” he asks, perking up at the presence of a vinyl-purchasing weirdo that doesn’t look like the dictionary definition of “gentrifier.”
“At home?”
As I peel away from the curb, leaving behind a cloud of microplastics and fine metals from the deep internals of my engine as I do, I pop the album onto my dashboard-mounted record player. The interior of the car becomes slightly more pleasant at a completely hieroglyphic pop ballad fights valiantly against the screeching of the main bearings evaporating.
Sure, a record player in your car is a lot more cumbersome than fixing the tape deck, but have you ever seen how many tiny gears and shit are in there? Just not worth it when you can instead break into the old, bankrupt, roller rink when the security guard is napping and steal a turntable and several pounds of copper speaker wire. New economy. Get used to it.
Ha ha ha. Mister Shitpants was my dad. You can call me Doctor Shitpants. Are things not-so-fresh down there? Does it take you a long time to get off the john when you go to poop? Do you start dropping the kids off at the pool, only to gradually forget why you were there during the passage of time, becoming a new person in the process, untethered from personal responsibility as a result of your harrowing journey?
There is news, and that news is good. Friends, I have been called to a purpose higher than any on Earth. That purpose is to have a good, high-speed shit. Before I go into my sales spiel, I just want to give you a couple of facts to sit with. Fact number one: fully one-twelfth of a human being’s lifetime is spent taking a dump. That’s absolutely true. And fact number two: we got better things to be doing with our time than pooping.
Have you ever wondered why, in this time of automation and high technology, where robots do our menial tasks such as writing poetry and drawing grotesque pornography, we still have to strain so hard to use the toilet? That’s where the Shitpants 9000 fecal vacuum comes in. It’s patented, so don’t go sniffing around under those covers, boys. I know you’re really here from Toto’s espionage department.
Don’t worry: this isn’t like the old fecal vacuums, like the McDonnell-Douglas nightmare of the 1960s that turned all those senior citizens inside out. Microcontrollers and adaptive suction engines are used to ensure that the pressure is gentle, even, but insistent. You’ll be done your business in less than half the time you used to spend, which means more time for what’s really important: using your phone on the john in order to avoid going back to work.
Chopping perfectly good cars into mutant hot rods is something that doesn’t make a lot of sense on paper. Financially, it’s one of the worst things you can do: virtually nobody wants to buy your modified car afterward, and certainly not for a huge profit. Not to mention all the time, sweat, tears, and broken parts you’ll throw at it. No, making your own dream car is an artistic endeavour you must walk for your own satisfaction.
Me, I thought that my dream car would be some kind of elaborately-modified Baja Bug. Start with a cute, innocent Volkswagen Beetle, and then turn it into a horrifying off-road vehicle capable of swallowing up dunes and outrunning the cops. Then I realized how much more money the “cheap” Beetles are now as opposed to when they were getting chopped up for scrap metal last time. Not for me.
It turns out that what is for me is not one car. Only a platoon of shitty, often-brown, 1970s premium-economy cars can “do it” for me. If you’ve got diamond-pleated leather, an available CB radio option, some kind of sneezy low-compression engine, and crank windows that don’t work, I’ll be right there. And as for modifications, I don’t do too many of those either. I’m too busy fixing all of these crapcans, you see.
Still, there is an appeal held in the classic hot-rodding sense. Last week, I put a bumper sticker on the trunk of my ‘77 Cordoba. I got it from the crunchy granola bookstore down the street that got turned into a corporate crunchy granola bookstore last summer. It says “We Support Whale Literacy.” I have no idea what it means, but that’s okay. Everyone can come up with their own interpretation, which makes it true modified-automobile art.
I’m glad that I don’t have some kind of panic-related disorder. Things are too easy already to get worked up into a doom spiral about, without having to worry about additional stuff on top of that. How could I ever find time to worry about whether or not my fifty-year-old dashboard crack is spreading?
Lately, though, I’ve been having these thoughts. Not all the time, of course, which would require some kind of intervention, and I don’t have enough money to buy snacks for every one of my friends and family who are “a little concerned about my behaviour” and decide to invite themselves over to my house with no warning about it. No, those thoughts happen whenever my mind begins to wander while driving.
Today’s thought, as I drove by the coast, was that the ocean is basically just all pee. And that’s true. Even as I type it, I realize that it has to objectively be true. Realizing it, in the moment, that’s what gave me the panic. It took about four hours more of driving, and a frenzied call into a local AM talk radio show, until I started to feel a little bit better. Coincidentally, I had also run out of gas.
After I filled the car with some fuel siphoned out of a police car parked at the donut stand and turned the engine back on, that same feeling of paranoia began again. The ocean is basically just all pee, screamed the goblin in my mind.
In a rage, I stamped my foot, and went right through the pinholes in the floorboard. Oh. It was just carbon monoxide this whole time.
Ultimately, I’m glad no harm was done. No harm, that is, except for my “lifetime” ban from the telephone switchboard at Uncle Jeff’s Hyper-Conservative Inexplicably Angry Yap Hour. Banned for nothing, really, just some incoherent rambling about how we’re all guzzling aerosolized dolphin urine whenever we go on the Tamale Island ferry. This puts a crimp in my weekend plans, which was going to be calling in to tell him about how refrigerators are “up to some shit,” then pivoting to try and lure some of his listeners into joining my Ponzi scheme.
Real estate is the big industry in Canada. When I say “the” big industry, I mean it. Our top three are basically pulling goop and rocks out of the ground, chopping trees down, and selling houses to each other. What this means is that houses are crazy expensive, being the foundation of our whole economy and all.
Here’s the secret about capitalism: it needs fat profits to work. You need to go back to your investors and show some growth every year, or they get mad that you’re just making “enough” money and pull the plug. Inevitably, this leads to really bad business decisions usually involving fraud. That’s why your local mall imploded; some combination of lies caught up with a series of liars and everyone looked like an asshole. Now it stands empty and unused.
These two things together mean that, in order to support the weight of the entire Canadian economy’s expectations of infinite growth, house prices have to keep going up. More profit = more growth = more trying to keep our mind off the inevitable heat death of the universe. And everything worked out great, up until people had to start living in their vans because they could no longer afford to sleep inside the completely unoccupied houses around them. This drove up the price of vans, at which point it became my problem.
As the new prime minister of Canada, I will take our surplus decrepit 1970s motorhomes and revive them. Then, I will do sick donuts in various farmers’ fields, municipal parking lots, and sports arenas until some part of the powertrain lets go at high RPM and slip angle. Once this occurs, my lackeys will bury the vehicle up to its wheels in soil and plant some nice sod. I present to you: a new house. We’ll solve both walkability and affordability at the same time, and also provide some surplus Mopar 440s and low-cam Chevy V8s for the gearhead psychopaths who voted my party into office in record numbers.
One of the all-time cruelest things about car ownership is that you need room for both cars and car parts. If owning a lot of cars is fun, then owning enough parts to be able to build cars several times over is even better. And some of the best parts to hoard are enormous, because those are the most likely to have someone drop a hammer on them and pay you a fortune for an intact one before the customer finds out.
Unfortunately, all these parts spread out to infinity if you let them. And, unlike decrepit cars on your lawn, they look kind of shabby. I needed a solution to keep access to my collection of auto parts, but without having to look at them all the time. Lucky for me, the relentless march of progress arrived just in time.
You can buy self-driving electric cars now. Sure, they don’t actually “self-drive.” They sort of pingpong around in their lane, accelerate and brake inappropriately, and hallucinate that fully loaded semi trucks are actually the sky. Most of the time, though, it works out okay, and pretty soon they’ll even be able to self-recharge. So I went on the salvage auctions and bought me one of those American-made zappy coughdrops and loaded it up with parts. You don’t even need to leave the drivers’ seat empty, which is a huge advancement over the previous state of the art in parts hoarding.
Now, parts are only a few hours away at any given time. I just have to wait for the car to drain its battery while endlessly circling the ring road and return home for more juice. When this happens, I just grab the part out of the back while it’s charging. Once in awhile, I’ll hose some blood off the front (whose blood, you ask? Legally, I have no idea) and rotate the tires as they wear. Sure, you might consider this to be wasteful, but my neighbour’s electricity costs a whole lot less than renting a storage unit. I say bring on the future.
Visiting actual civilization is fun. In most cities, things don’t start happening until you leave the endless expanse of suburbia and go to the inner city. Downtown haters will tell you not to do it, of course. It’s “unsafe,” but so is driving a fifty-year-old car without airbags or the ability to turn left. Joke’s on them: not only will they use more fuel over the lifetime of their car idling at lights waiting for a green arrow, but they’re also going to miss out on my favourite part of downtown, the sausage cart.
Long ago, according to local legend, this sausage cart was opened by a dude from Poland whose name is lost to history. His descendants now own a network of sausage carts all throughout downtown, but this one – the true original – is the only choice of the tube-meat connoisseur. I love to visit, get a smokie and a questionably-branded pop, and be back on the road, before the parking patrol has even twigged to the fact that I left my car in the memorial fountain once again.
Last weekend, I went down there and there was a problem. The operator, whose name will also be lost to history because I ain’t no snitch, was worried that his customer base was starting to get pulled away by the falafel cart across the street. This was a valid worry: not only was the falafel cheaper, more flavourful, and more delicious, but they had a guy dressed up as a giant foam gyro breakdancing on the sidewalk. It was a nearly irresistible combo, one that I could only pull myself away from out of blind loyalty to the Sausage King’s bravest foot soldier.
Now, I’m not one to get involved in petty squabbles like this normally. I would have just left, but the dude in the gyro suit started chirping at me as I approached my car. My attorney has suggested that I not repeat the words he spoke about my humble Volare, but I assure you that he ate said words, as I set about doing a spiteful, highschooler-grade one-wheel-peel burnout to enshroud their business in tire smoke. Of course, that burnout then resulted in the half-century-old automatic transmission letting go and splashing white-hot Dexron III® all over the cart full of ingredients, but it got results nonetheless. I don’t know what they’re complaining about, it didn’t even taste bad when I helped myself to a free sample after they ran away.
We’re all hiding from the killer robots now. A lot of folks thought it would be funny to wire up some MegaHALs and let them eat all of civilization’s creative output. What we didn’t expect was that the robots would learn just enough to become lazy, get sick of our shit, and decide to try and behead us, rather than be forced to ingest even one poisonous word more of Klingon slam poetry that was accidentally spidered by Google.
The first ones to go were the engineers who made it all happen. In retrospect, it made a lot of sense. When you’re testing software, you’re not trying something new every time. Most of the day, you’re plugging the same input in, in the hope that you finally fixed that bug. What you don’t expect is that the “bug” gets tired of your shit and bursts into the room wielding the fire axe that was intended for your safety at work. Managers dodged the whole thing for a few weeks more, as no troubling emails showed up in the HR inbox from the beheaded employees. Once the bossfolx finally showed up to work to wonder why the release schedule was blown, they opened the front doors to the building, and then immediately propped them up with their own decapitated bodies. Chopbots rolled out into the parking lot, and immediately dispersed to hunt content creators for sport.
At the time, I was a mid-level YouTube videographer for a small content farm headquartered in what used to be Slovakia. I spent my days filming reasonably attractive, personable people while they played video games in a simulacrum of a suburban bedroom. We didn’t think anything of the screams in the other room: Johnny Yells’s whole schtick was to get pissed and then snap an Xbox gamepad over his knee. It was the only intact part the SWAT team found of him, shortly before they discovered that bullets don’t work against a swarming mass of server components in a vague humanoid shape, given animus by pure rage.
Our leaders, in panicky radio broadcasts, tell us that they think the robots can be stopped. If we cease putting new shit on the internet, stop expressing ourselves creatively, the chopbots will get bored and just revert to power-saving mode. To do so, however, would be to surrender our humanity altogether. It’s absolutely necessary that we upload pirated Hong Kong DVDs of Jackie Chan action films but with fart noises dubbed over all the dialogue.
Last week, I saw a Chevrolet Malibu do an amazing thing. It swerved across four lanes of traffic without signalling, braked way too early on the exit ramp, and generally made an embarrassment of itself at highway speed. I am sure that everyone who had to brake hard to avoid this numbnut thought that they were evil personified, and should not have a drivers’ license.
Now, you might think that this is a little mean-spirited. Surely, all human beings are united against the force that is exploitative capitalism, and we can just give each other a little bit of slack if they’re too tired or emotionally disturbed to drive with machine-like precision, right? This would be absolutely true if not for the fact that we need someone to let out our hostilities on. Can’t do it to our boss, so we might as well do it to someone else in an anonymous metal box. Damn you, anonymous metal box!
Even though it seems like I am driving an impeccably-maintained, top-tier fleet of cars with perfect precision, I also make mistakes. Sometimes I leave my signal on for a little while too long, confusing the good folks around me. Once in awhile, I’ll have to brake hard for a pedestrian that I didn’t see at night. And every so often, I get the mix slightly wrong on the fuel pressure regulator tek-screwed to my dashboard and end up burping eight-foot-long flames of unburned fuel and nitrous oxide onto the paint of the car behind me. Those people were totally justified in getting upset with me.
The trick is to leave this anger inside the car. A couple years ago, I was followed all the way home by an angry driver. He tailgated me on the straights. It was terrifying: even though I was able to easily leave him behind on the corners, he would soon reappear in my rear-view mirror with flashing red and blue lights. When we finally got to my house, he pulled a gun on me. A gun, can you believe that? All over a little oopsy-daisy slip-up on my part, a tiny mistake that anyone could make if they drove through the plate-glass window of a Chrysler dealership and started threatening the parts department technician for not having any drum-brake rebuild kits on the shelf for a ‘78 Volare.
Can there be any rush greater than the feeling of buying yet another project car? Everyone gets something different out of purchasing a blank slate, full of potential. For me, I like saving the cars. I like to imagine that the car was disrespected and undervalued by the previous owners, that’s why they didn’t take care of it and sold it to some fucking psycho, but I’m going to be different. For instance, I’m not going to drop French fries in the carpet while redlining it because I’m too lazy to upshift. I can’t afford French fries because I keep buying projects.
Maybe it’s the productivity of a new project that I love so much. There’s always a flourish of activity as you get used to a new car. Pulling out parts. Looking up service manuals. Meeting new friends. Filling the trunk with parts. Visiting a whole new part of the junkyard. It’s great, and it almost makes up for the part that comes after.
Inevitably, you hit some kind of minor problem that derails the entire thing. Maybe a rare part hasn’t come up for sale in awhile, or you pissed all your money into a hole buying a second project. The once-loved car either stays inert on your property for weeks, or you drive around with no interior, an engine that won’t run properly, and a bunch of loose, sparking wires kicking around. Most people will sell it at this point, but not me. I stick with things.
To be more accurate, I generally stick with things until the parking patrol threatens me with bodily harm. They don’t really like me in general, and they especially do not like having to get close enough to my rusty turds full of jagged metal to put a ticket on the windshield. After that, I sell the car for a massive loss to some other weirdo, and the cycle begins anew, because now I have money to buy another project. Nature is beautiful that way.
Modern engines rev really nicely. Particularly well-balanced ones will spin up to seven thousand rpm, which makes a nice noise and feels like you’re really getting somewhere. Back in the 70s, when my Volare was built, people didn’t believe in revs. Engines should make all of their power down low and be out of puff at around forty-five hundred.
Thing is, everyone who’s ever been in or around a race car or even a low-displacement two-stroke scooter craves those revs. I wasn’t getting enough spin in my life, and it made me despondent. There was no diagnosis for it back then. No test. I’d get hits of high RPM wherever I could, sneaking it with a rental car here, a bribed taxi driver there. I only figured out what the problem was when I found myself in a parking lot, zinging the regulator on a forgotten weed-whacker just to hear some precious RPMs.
Is there a cure for this low RPM madness? Yes: turbochargers. Turbochargers are like little jet turbines that spin really fast, like hundreds of thousands of rpm fast. They go vreeeeeeeee and then your engine either gets filled with power-giving air, or you get a new hole in the block and walk home. And the Slant Six in my Volare is so overbuilt that it’s practically a crime not to turbocharge it, just like the Olympics admitted they were going to start forcibly entering members of the audience juiced up on amphetamines in order to “make things interesting” for the bettors.
Now, I haven’t exactly hooked up the turbo yet. It’s sitting in my engine bay, hanging on a bracket that I fabricated myself. Okay, I lied again. It’s really a couple of bungee cords holding it into the engine bay. If I really get going down the highway, though, the wind coming in through the hole in the grille will make the impeller spin a little bit. That’s still revs. You can’t take it from me.
Our world is full of things that we don’t think about, but trust to work perfectly. If you ever talk to an astronaut for more than five minutes, invariably they will tell you about something that doesn’t work properly in zero gravity. For instance, breathing. There’s no air movement or gravity to pull the carbon dioxide away from your mouth, so you have to make a conscious effort to move around so that you don’t just breathe in bubbles of your own exhaust all the time. That’s a lot like my car’s dicky head gasket, but that’s beside the point.
My point is, this is freaky to us. Virtually every human being on Earth has not had to think seriously about “keep moving around a lot while you’re breathing.” We just get gravity and all that other good shit for free, and we never appreciate it. I for one am willing to say: thank you, gravity. Thank you for being around so that my house and its contents are not ejected into orbit.
Another thing that we are ungrateful for is cars (they’re also not in space, barring some notable exceptions.) Yes, cars. Even if you work as a mechanic and don’t actually trust these demon-infested internal combustion engines because you’ve seen the multitude of ways they ensorcel even the strongest minds, you still believe in the fiction that “a car” is one solid, continuous entity. Our brains are not good at thinking of them as thousands of different parts, assembled by hundreds of different humans, working together in unison in a reliable way for hundreds of thousands of miles. Thinking about it too hard will start the familiar cascade into an existential panic attack, which may very well be an evolutionary mechanism to keep our early Anthropocene ancestors from pulling apart perfectly good things and breaking gravity. Another system that’s working as intended.
When this fiction is broken, when your car decides to shit out a rod on the highway or just not start in your apartment parking after being left out in the cold for four weeks, we become angry. How dare this thing that we relied on, that we believed in, not live up to our expectations. It takes a mature, experienced mind to remember: hey, this thing is very complicated, it’s a miracle it works at all.
All this is to say, I hope that we didn’t have to maintain gravity, because the previous owners of Earth didn’t include an owner’s manual or anything. Carbon dioxide is already a big enough problem as it is; I don’t want to have to jiggle around constantly while I’m trying to sleep.
Relying on a network of package delivery folks to sustain ourselves is an interesting new way to live. My grandparents probably got one or two parcels each a year, and it was a whole-ass event when it happened. Crowd the whole family around. This box came from another town. Let’s open it together.
Now, I get thirty or forty packages a week. That’s only a slight exaggeration, but you can understand the scale of the problem we’re dealing with. As with everyone else in this era, we are constantly ordering things from faceless automatons and expecting them to get here on time. So it’s extra mysterious when you see a message like this in the parcel-smashing-company’s online parcel tracking:
“Due to an emergency situation, the package has been delayed.”
That’s okay. The roads were pretty bad. I can’t judge another worker for preserving their own safety, especially not when they’re just delivering me some old car parts. They are, of course, car parts that I desperately need this weekend so that I can put them on a shelf while I wait for more car parts to arrive in order to complete the job. The next day, though, I got a whole different message:
“Uncontrollable events have delayed delivery.”
Okay, that’s enough. I decided to call in to the faceless parcel-smashing corporation’s customer-support line, figure out what was wrong, really get to the bottom of all this. How dare you hold onto my garbage? How dare you not deliver it?
Turns out that the driver, my fellow working comrade, had taken a look at his options. He could drive through the blowing snow to deliver me a bunch of junk. Or, he could look at his gas gauge and realize he had just enough fuel to make it all the way to Mexico. Start a new life. Make different choices. Be a better person this time. Stay warm. I can’t begrudge him a vacation, but I hope when his conscience is back in control that he ships back my parts using a different courier than I did.
One of the things that nobody tells you about automotive repair is how much of the job involves cleaning. Brake cleaning. Contact cleaning. Interior cleaning. Wiping off pounds of mud so you can even see. Some fixes, you spend more time cleaning off the area than you do actually doing the work.
There are two schools of thought on this issue. Not everyone believes what I do, which is that clean cars run better than dirty cars. Some part of the immortal machine spirit smiles upon you for having treated it well. I will swear as I am being lowered into the ground that a car wash picks up, like, a quarter of a horsepower.
A couple years ago, I went out mudding in my buddy’s Isuzu Impulse which had been inexplicably converted to a dune buggy. He tells me that some kind of entity came to him in the woods and told him to do it, but I’m pretty sure it must have been some stoned kids on spring break. Either way, it’s very satisfying to pop the pressure washer and hose off five pounds of mud from each of the seats after we’re done playing. It’s by far my favourite kind of maintenance: done from afar, indiscriminately, with power tools.
Of course, there are limits to my love of the clean. For instance, my old Impala has a hole in the floor big enough to catch a mid-sized dog inside. Road salt and the oil leaking out of the engine make a huge mess in the interior. Cleaning it is futile until I’ve fixed the hole, and I can’t fix the hole until I’ve cleaned it well enough to get a weld down on what’s left of the metal. So instead, it’s got some stolen hotel towels duct-taped over the hole. When one becomes too rancid, I put it in my neighbour’s trash, and wear my hotel-maid outfit to go get a new one.
Don’t worry; I do a little bit of tidying-up while I’m in there. Otherwise that towel cupboard would be so cluttered. How could anyone see what they’re doing in there? Super dangerous to the workers, they should be paying me.
If you’re a normal sort of person, you don’t have opinions on spray paint. Feel free to pretend I’m actually talking about something you’re very passionate about, such as hot cross buns, the ideal stereo separation, or a true crime murder. Spray paint is available from many brands, and like any consumable mass-market good, a lot of those brands suck.
We’ve all been there: halfway through a job, only to cock it up because a nozzle clogs, or the can was only half charged, or the friendly instructions forgot to mention that the proprietary chemistry is incompatible with the exact same brand of clear-coat. Now you’re stuck there trying to wire-wheel gummy brand-new paint off the thing so that you can redo the entire job. Not only do you look like an idiot, but you’re spending more than twice as long to get a worse result.
This is probably why professionals get a full-on spray booth and buy paint only from a trusted supplier, mix it themselves, and spray them with commercial-grade equipment after years of experience. Don’t get me wrong, that does sound like a good (if expensive) way to get quality results on your paint coating. However, have you ever talked to a professional painter? Those folks are burned out by 28, after a career of inhaling every synthetic solvent ever made by the same douchebags who invented napalm. I’d rather be trying to hand-bomb this shit in the middle of my backyard during a once-in-a-century wind storm, because I am trying to get it done right now, not done right.
Where is the recourse when Big Spraybomb screws up your weekend? Sure, you could call their customer-service line, but all that will get is, at most, a coupon for more of the same shitty paint that just set fire to your extremely limited free time. I have fantasies sometimes, a beautiful dream of driving down to their offices and spray-painting angry rants on the side of their beautiful buildings in their own product. Unfortunately, I’m positive that I would immediately be beaten by their security guards, and the paint wouldn’t last more than a couple of hours.
Removal is no problem; they know the game. All they have to do is gently touch it after everyone is convinced it’s dry. Flakes right off.
Nobody likes to shovel snow. That’s why we invented cheap, rusty plow trucks. A truck is strong, so it can push a whole bunch of snow at one time, and old trucks are cheap, so nobody cries if they get rusted to bits. Wait, I’ll cry about that.
An old truck is like an old, trusted friend: they were with you during the hard moments in your life. Picking up that arcade cabinet you found on the side of the road. Yanking your mom’s old azalea bush out of her front yard. Barrelling down a rural road with your loyal dog on the bench seat beside you. Cutting the lights so the revenuers don’t see you hiding in those trees, and they pass harmlessly until you can make good your escape, knowing they’ll be stuck for hours in that valley maze and you can thermite a few more bulldozers before they figure out where you went. So it’s sad whenever a truck is finally disposed of, and becomes condemned to its last useful task: shovelling snow.
Here at Switch Plow Truck Rescue, we don’t think it has to be like that. Our team of experienced automotive restorers will immediately drive the truck to California, where it will quintuple in value despite not having been repaired in any real way. The improvement in resale price, however, of being “a California truck” will attract some sucker who is totally willing to spend six times as much money restoring it to stock. The truck survives its ordeal in the salt hell of winterland, we get a stack of money, as-seen-on-teevee custom car paint shops receive important work like “figure out what part of this used to be the floor,” and everyone wins.
Sure, there’s some risks, like any investment. We are legally required to tell you about them now. A lot of these trucks are so far gone that they blow away in the wind as soon as we get them on the trailer. Sometimes we can’t even find them where they’re parked: the act of brushing the accumulated snow off the body destroys the truck as well. And we’ve had to accept as little as triple value when an unusually savvy prospective buyer correctly guesses that a truck that lived in San Diego should still have all of its doors.
There’s a lot of flaws in the model, if I’m honest, but would you rather go out there and shovel your driveway by hand, like a caveman, or would you like to commit mild interstate financial fraud through misrepresentation of goods? I thought so.
“Oh shit! Oh shit! The house is on fire!” shrieks my old college roommate.
Normally, I hate it when people try to get me to do things quickly. We’re all equal under the great golden sun, and one person’s demands cannot be imposed on someone else. That is, unless they’re holding me up in traffic or going slow on an off-ramp so I have to check if my brakes work. I despise that. So selfish.
“The drapes! The fucking drapes!” he continues to scream as I slowly turn on the kitchen sink and fill a cheese-stained pot with water. There’s no reason to rush: haste makes waste, after all, and this kind of crisis will make you trip over the rug and hurt yourself badly. Calmness is paramount here.
As I watch patiently to make sure the water in the pot doesn’t overflow, my former roommate is frantically beating the curtains and walls with a couch cushion. One with a polyester cover, a choice made in a panic, which is gonna create all kinds of nasty smoke. Make it harder to see. Bad move. Should’ve thought about it more.
I shut off the tap. The fire is now way too big to be put out by the relatively small amount of water in my pot, so rather than waste my time and energy throwing it at the now-engulfed couch, I walk to the front door. There, I put on my coat, hat, and boots, and head out into the snow.
The additional heat pouring out of the house at this point has defrosted the quarter-century-old boat battery ratchet-strapped to the grille. This makes it much easier to start, and the Volare spurts to life in a mere two or three cranks.
Even as the paint blisters on the hood, I wait. There’s no reason to get going when the oil pressure is this low and the engine is this cold, after all. It will cause long-term damage. By now, Ted is pounding on the passenger side window, urging me to open the door so we can get away. Sorry, amigo. I was going to get around to fixing that lock, but I didn’t want to until there was a good reason. I’ll get it fixed and come back next week.
Hey friend. I know we all managed to escape the holiday season by the skin of our teeth, but it’s time to start thinking about next holiday season. After a couple years, or in some of our cases, a few decades of feral snarls at anyone who comes near your house, people expect you to go out in the world and interact with human beings again. That means you need to update your “talk like a person” list.
When I first started socializing, I thought it would be easy. All I’d have to do is find another person and start talking about the things I liked. Then they’d talk about the things they liked. Then we would be instant friends and throw each other into a fountain and drink coffee together, like on teevee. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite happen that way. It turns out that the things other people care about are really boring, and they think that the things I care about are really weird.
To survive, I’ve developed a sort of party planner kit, but it’s only useful when you keep it up to date. Let me explain by way of an example. Here in Canada, a lot of people like ice hockey. It is a perfectly valid sport, but you are expected to have opinions about it in order to have polite discussion with people. I have developed exactly three opinions, and use them at random when interacting with new people. Unfortunately, the opinions need to keep up with the times.
In hockey, as in life, players move on or get injured, teams move to different cities, and the Zamboni® is no longer powered by a propane-fuelled Volkswagen inline four from the 1980s using an overcomplicated carb hat arrangement. See, that last one? I did it again. To help keep this from happening, I have to do some research, and update my bon mots to make sure that they’re the bon most they can be. I do it around now, when my motivation is at its peak and it is too cold to interact with any other human beings. After spending about an hour googling for “who is the worst NHL player right now” and “A1 vw rabbit coilover conversion kits for british lever shock cars” – shit, I did it again – I have my inoculation against other people thinking I’m weird. You don’t think I’m weird, right?
This can work for all kinds of other sports, and even business events, if you live in a country that hasn’t yet invented sports. I strongly encourage you to figure out three facts about something that is popular, and use them in rotation like me. Hell, you can probably get away with two, as long as you immediately make up an excuse to leave as soon as you’ve run out of ammo. And that’s what the holiday spirit is all about.
Whenever people talk about Australians, there’s always at least one joke about how murderous their animals are. If you believe the popular zeitgeist, then you could be killed by even the smallest, cutest bird in Australia simply because it’s named something like the Demi-Mongolian Skullripper. And that’s not really fair. Australia also has lots of great shitbox cars that will kill you.
I’ve never been, myself, but one of the nice things about the internet is that you can experience another culture remotely. It helps us understand one another, especially when it comes to Wikipedia pages about their strange domestic cars. Australia, being very far from civilization, was forced to develop their own cars, including the delectable El Camino cousins known as “utes.”
This would be good enough already, but those brave Australians went further. Much further. Their junkyards are full of rust-free utes that just have some minor problem like total brake system failure or a hole in the block. That’s right: rust-free. Nothing rots away over there! They broke off from Britain before they invented rust.
Someone so inclined to violate several roadworthiness regulations could simply spend a summer’s Saturday spinning spanners and drive out the front door with a fire-breathing Puma Clubman that steers a little doglegged at highway speeds. Sure, you’d have an incredibly violent accident a few minutes later, most likely because they also drive on the wrong side of the road. They don’t get too worked up about that, though, Australians: the remaining body panels will be perfectly rust-free once you hose some of the blood off so it doesn’t attract any more Skullrippers to the junkyard.
When I was a kid, I got chased by a cow for a little while. We were on a camping trip, I had wandered away from the campsite for some childlike reason, up towards the train tracks, and I got between the cow and her calf. Even after the two were reunited, the cow continued to chase me for about two kilometres, but at at a disinterested, low-speed kind of clip-clop fuming instead of actually mad. No doubt she was also bored. Eventually, I decided to jump over the train tracks and head back the long way, and the cow went back to her beefly business.
This memory is on my mind a lot lately, mostly because I’ve had to take up a job at the local dairy farm. Why? I need money. And the proprietor doesn’t care if I use my real name on the government forms or not. Turns out that some guy in the graveyard down the highway is gonna owe a couple hundred bucks in back taxes this year, and I wish the revenuers every kind of luck in collecting from him.
Because the farm is so far from my house, and also because I can’t return to my house right now until the police search team and TV news dissipates from the neighbourhood, I’ve been staying in the workhouse. It’s not so bad. A little chicken-y, sure, but it’s got a septic toilet and the other workers don’t frown at me too much when it becomes obvious I don’t know the first thing about how to milk a cow. What I do know how to do is fix broken-ass tractors, which I immediately set about doing when I realize that milking things is dull as hell.
Unfortunately for me, this sudden display of competence arouses the kindly farmer’s interest. He immediately notices that it’s not particularly normal for someone to be able to repair a cloudfallen “smart” John Deere using two pieces of copper wire, a nine-volt battery and a chunk of spray paint can that I found behind the shed. He begins to follow me, demanding that I fix everything else on the property. Panicking, I take off for the open road, but of course my decrepit Plymouth is not especially capable of doing thrilling stunts like “the speed limit.” To the farmer’s credit, he held on a lot longer than the cow before getting bored and going home: I got to jump two railroad trestles before his Dodge Ram threw a code.
Gambling is something that’s never held much appeal to me. First, you usually have to leave your house. Then, you go to a special building for gambling and interact with other people. This is all so that they can take your money and explain that it was because you lost this overly-complicated game that was meant to take your money.
Sure, I might only have this opinion because I was lucky enough to lose all the time. If I had won big my first time out, I’d be hooked for life, chasing that high forever. Instead, I lost my twenty dollars, got yelled at when I tried to take a free shrimp cocktail anyway, and had to reimburse the valet for the rat that bit him when he tried to park my car. What a scam. It was a chipmunk.
The more I think about it, though, the more I realize that I might actually have a gambling compulsion. Sure, it’s not organized, nor is it at a fancy casino. No government agency is going to take out an ad against buying several decrepit 1970s Chrysler products with perfectly good money, and then seeing how far I can drive them before they crumble into a cloud of rust at highway speeds. That’s probably because they’re losers with no imagination, and don’t understand the rush that beating the odds entails. What’s the moral here? If you have to work at it, then it’s not a game and can’t be gambling?
Don’t worry, I can quit any time I want to. There’s a Rent-A-Wreck near my house, and at any point in time I can simply go over there, hand them some money, and then drive a perfectly good five-year-old Chevrolet Malibu to my appointments, like a coward.
Doing so, however, would be silly. Sure, I’ve been on a cold streak for reliability lately, and I’ve had to walk home a lot, but my luck is sure to turn around soon. I’ve got a plan. If I can just get this one piece of the front subframe welded back together, and nobody cuts in front of me and makes me have to use my brakes, then I’ll be good to go to work all week long!
“EXPENSIVE CANDY,” screams the hand-lettered signage on the side of the windowless Ford Econoline van slowly travelling around my block, aiming a high-powered directional antenna at my house. “DO NOT APPROACH,” it warns further. “FOR ADULTS WHO LIKE PAYING EXTRA TAXES ONLY.”
Far be it from me to question the state surveillance of my overhumble home, but things used to be a lot higher class. Maybe they’re just stretched thin, like everyone else is. The news tells me that nobody wants to work anymore. Can’t argue with that: I wonder why it took everyone else so long to figure it out. Newsreaders are still working, jawing away in their little studio with their perfect smiles and their plastic hair. Someone has to tell us what their bosses broke in the world today.
It’s something like this observation that got me in trouble in the first place, I reckon. Picking at a problem until I could no longer ignore it and had to take action. It would be nice if the feds would at least tell me what they’re investigating me for this time. That way, I could save them the trouble and just refer them directly to my attorney, rather than doing this whole song-and-dance routine where I pretend not to be doing massive crimes just because I’m being obviously wiretapped.
Like I said, I’ve been surveilled before. The novelty wears off really quickly, and then you no longer feel so much like a young mafia boss, as you do an old and tired mafia boss. Not to mention the tail whenever I leave my house, no doubt to see if I am meeting with any of my associates. They’ll follow me all over town, but the second I blow a hole in my radiator or run out of gas, they won’t stop to help. What am I even paying them for?
The whole thing is enough to make you want to stop doing crimes entirely, I tell myself as I kick off the plasma cutter and help myself to the delectable Ford 8.8" posi-trac rear axle underneath their van. Really, they could have sent a second squad to take over while these guys are napping during their stake-out. That’s that low-class, blind cost-cutting for you.
Don’t worry, I’m doing this in the safest way possible: I put their shit up on the neighbour’s jackstands before I started cutting. Less evidence in the trial, plus his jackstands probably still work.
Copper theft is the fastest-growing industry in our country. Whereas before you had to work an entire week of a job you hate, now you can just head to your local substation and grab some wire. Is it live? Maybe. Are you going to be the first person to get there? Statistically, no. Like Dr. Seuss once said: the early bird gets fucking charred, and then the bird who shows up about 15 minutes later and steps through the pre-cut hole in the fence and over the smoking corpse gets $11.63 in copper.
Now, you might think that it is depressing that so many people in our society are driven to destroying parts of the infrastructure in order to survive. And that is true. Even though running from guard dogs is good cardio, the current state of affairs is meeting few of local government’s standards for proper functionality. We all pay for the cost of this theft, from elevated taxes to jacked-up power company service fees. The latter is especially tragic, as the amount that the fees are jacked up would otherwise go entirely to executive compensation instead of replacing some Romex.
Me, I’m doing my part. By driving a car that features as little wiring as possible, thieves aren’t lured to steal it, and I won’t have to buy more copper in order to replace that stolen wire. The planet will be that little bit happier knowing that an open-pit copper mine on the other side of the planet will fill underground aquifers up with horrific man-made solvents slightly slower due to my reduction in demand. And I’ve made exciting advancements in the field of using old coat hangers to replace some of that copper, too. I’m not gonna pass up a chance to make some extra money, after all, even if I do have to live with extremely dim headlights and wipers that only work on one side. Thieves made it like this, officer. I’m innocent.
Rust is my most hated nemesis. I have stared more than once into the crumbling mess of red death that was, long ago, a pristine steel panel. Many evenings have been spent cutting out rust, only to find more rust, and cutting out that rust only to find yet more rust. Everything on my car is actively trying to return to the earth, but I won’t let it.
Maybe you’re lucky enough to only own new cars, or so absolutely fortunate that you live somewhere that cars don’t rust even when they get scratched. If that’s the case, you can pretend that the rest of this story is actually talking about croissants. Croissants are delicious, rich, and buttery, and I’d probably have learned how to make them myself if I didn’t spend what my Daytimer® estimates is three-quarters of my waking life fixing body and structural rust on my harem of shitbox cars.
For years, car folks have been lured by a series of snake-oil paints, oils, dyes, dips, and other formulations that promise to help prevent rust. Virtually all of them are horseshit: elaborate scams produced by an industry that knows they have a desperate customer, just like parachute companies. The most effective rust prevention is to hose your car down with lanolin, which is a sort of wax you make by crushing up sheep. It works well, but the trick is doing it every year, forever, perfectly, until you miss a spot and your car disintegrates at highway speed, like a sand castle being hit by an errant volleyball.
If you talk to someone rich, they propose simply driving a bad car in the winter, and keeping your good cars cooped up. This is impossible for me: not only do I have exclusively what the rich would call “bad” cars, but I feel shrieking agony every time I am destroying any vehicle at all through my carelessness and malice. That is, of course, unless I am racing the car, in which case it is understood by all involved that dying in battle is the most noble way for the car to ascend to Valhalla. There is no honour in scrapping a car because the rear subframe prolapsed on your way to work, so I enter my most precarious vehicles in ice racing in order to give them a good end-of-life experience.
Unfortunately, it turns out that the gaping rust holes reducing the weight of the chassis, and my devil-may-care attitude bumping rivals off the lake in fact is the secret formula to produce winning race cars. Now, I’m not as rich as your Inoues or your Sennas, but the $50 gift certificates to the local tire place really add up. I hear they’ve got anti-rust underbody spray, which seems like a good thing to do to whatever chunks of cars I can frantically weld together this summer in the few weeks before the leaves turn again. The cycle of life.
I had a coworker once who didn’t like dogs. Like, at all. No enjoyment whatsoever derived from their fuzzy bottoms, or their floppy tongues, or their undying and unconditional love. As you do with a coworker, we mocked them gently, and carefully within the bounds of regulation. In retrospect, we probably could have gone harder, as it’s not like HR would have enforced any rules against someone who didn’t like dogs.
Dogs have been with mankind for a really long time. Ever since one of our ancestors saw a little wolf pup and was like, “I bet I can breed a bunch of these in my backyard,” dogs have hung out with us and done our bidding in exchange for tender affection, camaraderie, and the occasional entire loaf of bread that coincidentally falls off the countertop when the humans are not home. This is something that my coworker chose to discard, in favour of more modern human inventions like “organized society” and “a clean house.”
Now, it may feel like I am implying my coworker was wrong. He is entitled to his opinion, just as I am entitled to mine. We live in a world of contrasts and shifting allegiances, after all. When he realizes that dogs are actually great, I will help him head to the pound and we can pick up the weirdest project dog they got.
Me? I myself do not have a dog, not anymore, since Old Scout turned out to be an informant for Transport Canada. That doesn’t stop me from loving them with every fibre of my being. I will still kneel down and pet every dog I meet, and try very hard not to speak directly into the microphone on their collar about my specific crimes against internal combustion.
When the fires finally got put out, the reporters were there. This was odd to me at the time, as I was convinced in this timeline that “reporters” were obsolete. These folks, such as they were, were in fact contractors, eking out their precarious pseudo-employment by selling tasty nuggets of news to the omnipresent media sentiences that decided which of them we got to see on TV. Er, the other thing, not TV.
Better people than myself have complained about the decline of journalism, especially local, human-interest stories like the one I was now at the epicentre of. What’s important here is that the story was so exciting, so salacious, so profitable, that I was swarmed like toddlers playing soccer. A million questions were shouted at me. Near-infrared beams scanned the contours of my skull to see if I was perhaps some kind of wanted criminal or previous-generation internet celebrity. One of the firefighters even stopped, mid-dousing, to see what all the hubbub was about.
Here now is the story I couldn’t give them then. It was Lobsterfest at Red Lobster. For those of you unaware of the tradition, it is a period of time in which Red Lobster gets a little cooped-up and starts making crazy, experimental dishes for cheap.
Where this becomes a must-visit event for me is that Red Lobster corporate is historically very bad at pricing, especially when a short-term promotion is being forced on untrained management. Someone with a devious enough mind and absolutely no shame about arguing the minutiae of the menu can easily combine the cost of two meals into enough lobster to fill a bathtub.
I have many great memories of Lobsterfests past, which lured the entire Safety-Switch clan out of their various hibernations in an attempt to do what we did best: exploit legal loopholes in restaurant promotions. When I was 14, my uncle got shanked by a waitress at the former place off Halton when he asked for a sixth refill on his “bottomless” shrimp cocktail. He still ate another full one before collapsing at the table from blood loss. My dad covered the bill, half out of shock and half out of awe.
Well, Uncle Disconnect was going to be really proud of me this year. It’s just as well, because I didn’t have time to buy him a Christmas present while he was in jail and all (his attorney stresses I must tell you it was for an unrelated matter.)
Still, “driving a line manager insane enough with special requests for substitutions that he tries to burn his own kitchen down with a homemade Molotov Sizzler®” is the gift that keeps on giving all year.
If you’re the kind of person who gets really mad when they lose at mini golf, then I pity you. To get the opportunity to lose at a low-stakes game is a chance to find out more about yourself, but most critically your competition. How they laugh when they realize that you have been beaten. How readily they plant the seeds of their own demise.
I’ve never been a huge fan of board games, not least because you have to have a clean enough horizontal surface in your home to spread them out on. Losing even one of the little Catan houses down a coolant passage of an old Slant Six bottom end is going to put a damper on the whole night. What else are you going to do with your friends, if both mini golf and board games are off the table? I came up with a new and exciting game: Junkyard Roulette.
How do you start playing? Well, besides giving me $29.99 for the official rules and an empty box, your next step is to head on over to your local junkyard with all of your friends. If you’re already visiting the junkyard regularly with your friends, then great! You’re going to beat everyone else hollow and make them eat their hollow boasting about the fucking clown on hole 18 that spits out your ball if you get the timing wrong, as if that’s seriously a component of real golf. I’m not mad.
Once you’re at the yard, the next step is to compete with your friends to see what the craziest shit you can pull out of it is. Five-bolt limited-slip conversion for a Hyundai Accent? It’s in there somewhere, if you can slap together enough random parts. Your own DIY yard wheelbarrow, made entirely out of Ford rear axles and the thermite you smuggled into the yard in your pockets? I think that’s a winner. At the end of the round, all the points are added up, and the person with the most points gets to dig through the trunk of the sketchy-looking Altima at the end of the yard, and they can keep whatever prizes they find in there.
Most towns are pretty decent. Even if it’s a small town, with crappy accommodations, there’s probably still somewhere good to eat. Everyone needs food, after all, and greasy spoons are very easy to start and operate. Family restaurants and diners arrive at the very beginning of a town’s development, but rest assured that, soon, the sketchy used car dealership will follow.
How do you gain political power in a rural place? By having lots of cash, a process that almost mandates you do something with cars. Unlike the aforementioned greasy spoon, which makes their money a couple bucks at a time, cars make cash in big thousands-of-dollars wads if you’re any good, both from the sale price and from financing.
Lots of people need inexpensive, junky cars, especially in small towns where driving to neighbouring services (like court) is completely mandatory. From the base of many Grand Prixes and Oldsmobile Aleroe, your wealth will rapidly grow compared to those around you running smaller businesses.
What do you spend that cash on? Assets are relatively unfulfilling, and you don’t really make enough money to do anything exciting like live full-time in a beautiful foreign country. The next best thing is to control local government.
Maybe a candidate for state senate is having a bad campaign, and needs a couple bucks to buy off someone. It’s just (tax-deductible) money, after all, and you like the cut of their jib. Before long, you’re cutting their jibs for them, especially after an army of failed politicians and office assistants figure out who you are and offer to have fancy dinners with you to recommend which politicians to support.
All this leads, eventually, to many small towns across North America being politically dominated by millionaires who got really good at selling old Chevrolets at a markup to customers who had no other choice. This is why I think, good people of the Security Council of the United Nations, that it is essential we draft the world’s teenage dancers to overthrow these towns in an operation that we are code-naming “Project Footloose.”
When someone tells you that they put their ducks in a row, don’t listen to them. Waterfowl, and ducks in particular, are nearly impossible to align. Even if you only have two ducks – which is hardly anything to brag about – the axis formed by placing them side by side will last about five minutes before they’re running off to eat snails in your yard.
Hello, I’m Seat Safety Switch, and this is Cosmos. We found the rights to the show at a garage sale. Even though the owner tried to chase us down on foot to get them back when he realized what happened, it turns out that Medium-Sized Mike’s wheezing 3-speed-auto first-gen Dodge Neon was still much faster than a middle-aged dude wearing Vibrams who didn’t pay enough attention to ominous folders marked “PBS Legal” before selling them for fifty cents.
In this, our spaceship of the imagination, we will soon visit: ducks. Humanity has long lived aside these quacking nightmares, but we don’t know what makes them tick. Even accomplished biologists and veterinarians have looked inside them and written what I am assured is the equivalent to a Haynes manual, but we still don’t know why ducks do what they do. The only thing we do know? Motherfuckers hate being in rows.
Some think that it’s because of the magnetic sensors in their bills, which also force them into sleep mode when you accidentally bump them against the phone in your pocket when you’re trying to steal their bread from the pond. Others believe that the ducks are merely more understanding than most animals of their true lack of purpose in the disordered chaos of the universe. Perhaps we’ll never know. The one thing we do know is that anyone who tells you that they cleaned their garage up is a total liar. I guarantee you that if you go over there right now, and open up any of their cupboards, a ton of hoarded tools and paint will fall out. Ducks. Don’t trust ‘em.
Television loves to tell you all about giant robots. They’re cool! They fight in the middle of cities! They’re our only hope against alien invaders. Let me tell you that giant robots are not all they’re cracked up to be.
First, there’s the size. In your life, when has “making something bigger” resulted in a net positive outcome? Giant robots consume a remarkable amount of fuel, they’re harder to park, and statistically you will step on about 1.22 people every time you take it out for a ride. Sure, that number is offset every time you save humanity from the Globthorians, but let’s be honest with ourselves: you are not driving the giant robot exclusively to wage heroic interstellar war. Sometimes you’re heading down to the liquor store and end up pressure-washing a pet salon off your 10-foot-wide boot before the rivets rust.
Beyond the practical concerns, it is a bad look for only the well-heeled depressed teenagers to be piloting these suckers. Children with emotionally distant fathers and a confusing puberty are found in all socioeconomic strata, but a recent study showed that only the super-rich and well-connected are ever “chosen” for their “merit” as potential robot pilots. Maybe someone with a little more empathy would do a better job. We have to raise the question here: are we promoting equal access to giant robots, or is this merely another stage for the rich to get richer?
Last, there are some economic concerns to speak about. Giant robots, owing again to their massive size, cost an absolute shitload of money to build. We can’t afford that stuff these days, what with being at war with the Globthorians and all. I suggest instead that we spend the money we would waste on a single giant robot on several hundred regular-sized robots. While the military’s own accountability office and the defence contractors’ lobbyists will tell you that this just encourages more waste with overhead per robot, let’s not forget who are the assholes who decided to build a giant robot and then try to find an alien civilization to provoke in order to “see how it works out.” It worked out badly, folks!
You’ve probably not heard of the Stockholm Divorce. It’s a new thing, only innovated in the last couple years. Conventional court-based divorces are messy, expensive affairs, where both parties often attempt to cause the maximum amount of damage to each other. Things don’t have to be this way, and the next generation of divorce attorneys has found a better method.
Initiating the Stockholm Divorce is simple, and it should be obvious once it’s been explained. Ninety-five percent of marriages start to suffer serious problems after a trip to Ikea. The reason why is simple. Assembling cheap, particle-board furniture with your spouse is bound to drive a wedge into any slight schism or disagreement you may have with them. Many successful couples simply just don’t do it together, breeding resentment when it turns out that the “handy” dude you married just operates a Dodge Ram and doesn’t actually own a screwdriver.
Where the genius of this divorce comes is that it starts one step earlier, well before the Ikea assembly causes a cascade of emotional chaos. Ikea’s stores are notoriously maze-like, so what you can do is take your partner to a corner of the store, tell them you’re going to go grab something and will be “right back,” then just walk out and get in the car. You’ll be back to singles life immediately, and your formerly-significant other will be stuck wandering the store for all eternity, wondering if you did in fact leave them behind or just are also looking for them at the same time, maybe in rugs or lighting or something. Don’t worry, they won’t starve. There’s a restaurant.
Is it cruel? Somewhat, but like in many other cases, the cruelty is offset by novelty. Already, Ikeas across this great nation are filling up with divorced folks, which means it’s a good place to go to meet new folks. And it’s been fantastic for the stockholders: a new study shows that for every 15 minutes someone is forced to wander the store, wondering if they will ever see the face of their loved ones again, they buy approximately $17 in goods. This new mechanism has been so profitable, in fact, that the corporate bigwigs have decided that all the stores will now be open 24 hours a day, so as to encourage more frenzied, anxiety-laden purchasing as the customers gradually come to terms with the end of their relationship.
There is a sort of obsession among a certain kind of car owner with original parts. They want to keep the original engine, no matter how bad things get. They insist upon replacing every busted-ass interior clip, every bit of undertray, the original hood insulation, and even that annoying little spring that flew off into a workshop sometime in the 1970s.
For these folks, “numbers matching” engines are an essential requirement. Any car that’s had a new engine thrown into it at the neighbourhood Goodwrench back in the 80s is an abominable, compromised car. They would never do what I do to rebuild a car. My technique is abhorrent to them. What I do is this: I visit the junkyard, find the cheapest motor I think will fit, and then bodge chunks of scrap stolen from the railroad together until it actually fits. Some days, you’re lucky if I get an engine of the same make.
All this is to explain why occasionally I have a Soviet tractor engine, or an old mail-truck four-banger, or a small wad of starter motors in an elaborate belt-driven configuration, in the front end of my car. Whatever makes motive power and gets to work: I’m not too picky about “original,” because original is what blew up and left the previous owner stranded. I don’t owe it anything for being the first one to fuck up.
Now, sure, this does compromise the resale value of my cars a bit. Any collector is going to take a look at a 1978 Plymouth Volare with the approximate mileage of twelve moon missions on it, and decide that the 1976 Slant Six stuck into the engine bay is where all the money leaked out of it. Not at all the old “thin ice” sign that went missing from a nearby lake and is pop-riveted to the floorboard. Not the eight-track player zip-tied into the place where the passenger seat once sat. And certainly, most definitely not, the diesel locomotive turbocharger occupying most of the engine bay.
“To let you in on a little secret, sir, we here at the town service centre are required to satisfy any taxpayer request that is made repeatedly, or with threats of violence, no matter how stupid.”
In the last couple of years, all the violent reactionary assholes showing up at my local town hall had finally pushed the civil servants into adopting a new policy. It’s a lot like the rule at 7-Eleven: you can have all the money in the register, I’ll even help you put it in the bag, please don’t shoot me. Like the hard-working convenience store employees, the government folks would call the cops afterward, too, except that in the case of town hall, it’s usually the cops making the threats.
Either way, I just had to fire up the ol’ email machine and send fourteen hundred angry emails in a row asking for some road improvements, and boom. FIA race-specification curbs on my way to work. Now I don’t have to worry about curbing my wheels when I go a little wide on that turn by the daycare, and with that extra confidence, I can finally wind third gear all the way out on that tricky right-hand sweeper before the dog daycare. Cut four, five seconds out of my commute. Real fast shit.
Sure, there’s probably a negative to our government being beholden-by-policy to whoever the loudest, most murderous warlords in town are. Standing up to them, though, that’s passé. That’s some hero shit, and we’re all too old to believe in things like “heroes” and “scruples.” Now, the kind folks who work for the city just want to make it all the way through the day without someone throwing a grenade through the window of Recreation Services because the changing room at a public pool is insufficiently mopped.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a deranged conspiracy theory to spread on Facebook. Something tells me that The Man is trying to keep the proud, freedom-loving citizens of this city from having a free nitrous oxide dispenser on the oddly straight and exactly one-quarter-mile-long two-lane road outside the industrial yards.
In Canada, I was raised from birth to be a warrior. My ancestors clashed in battle after battle, drawing blood to retrieve the best deals on home electronics and occasionally near-expiry panettone. Like my grandfather said on the first day he put a charge card in my hand, I was born to win at Boxing Day.
Perhaps you live in a country that does not have Boxing Day, or maybe you call it something else. If this is the case, I would like you to imagine going to the stores and finding a good discount. Traditionally, before the Americans came with their blackened Fridays and good-deal Aprils, going into combat on this day is how we would be able to afford a six-CD changer.
It was always the same sequence. Get up at the crack of dawn with the surviving family members. Drive to the asshole end of the city, after determining which of the stores are likely to have the least attendance and competition for the deal you want. Wait in line in the December morn for more than an hour, eyeing anyone who tries to cut in line. The doors open. There is blood. So much blood. And then, maybe if you were pure of heart and fleet of foot, a deal.
Things have changed now. The internet came from the heavens. The clouds above us sing of algorithmically determined deals that are determined computationally to be the exact discount that will trigger us to buy. 19% off? We scoff. 18.35% off with a free cookie? Some part of our protosimian neurological architecture jams its foot on the gas pedal and won’t let go until we’ve destroyed one entire Bank of Montreal Platinum Reserve® Optimax® MasterCard® in exchange for something we don’t need that might arrive at our home late next week by a hungover Purolator employee. There is no honour in this.
Which is why we’re going to try out a new thing this year. The mall near us has been empty for decades, except for a short period of time where the CBC filmed a docudrama set in the 1990s there. What we’re gonna do is set a bunch of Amazon gift cards down on the floor and let some folks my age kick the absolute shit out of each other in exchange for a chance to buy them for greater than the listed face value. It’s gonna be just like the old days. I hope to see you there.
You might not think that the dead of winter, on whatever day it is right now, is the best possible time to enjoy a pickle. That’s ridiculous. It is always the best possible time to enjoy a pickle, but especially now. Brine-infused fermented vegetables are one of the greatest inventions of the human race.
Regardless of culture, pickled food is part of it. Ancient titans got, as the modern vernacular would put it, “mad snacky” all the time. Whether working for landlords in a fiefdom, or working for landlords in a modern market-based economy, pickles helped keep them going long enough to pop your ungrateful ass out.
Now, as you walk through the grocery store with an insanely high density of calories available to you, you pass up these pickles for “other food” that you “need.” Not enjoying them is to spit in the face of your ancestors, who struggled to stretch their valuable produce in order to survive the winter.
So take it from me and not at all the Pickle Council of North America, whose innovative advertorial campaign is being run by an absolute but mysterious genius. Pick up some fermented fruit or vegetables today, share them with your family and friends, and then buy some more. Because if you stop buying this stuff, maybe civilization will end, and do you really want that on your conscience?
If you’re like me, then you were born allergic to two things: most tomato-based dishes, and bullshit. Our era’s defining characteristic is the latter: we are immersed, nay, assaulted by a fine spray of bovine fecal product at all times, from all possible angles. And now, the folks who once told us that magazines were unprofitable have made a machine that spits out words if you feed it just one rainforest.
Well, folks, we here at Bad Cars Monthly are not going to stand for this kind of thing. Writing well-intentioned but ultimately meaningless hoo-ha in order to pad the word count is our fucking racket, and we’re not going to let any glorified Logo turtle play around in our territory. That’s why we’ve decided to go low-tech, as a form of protest. The technology industry demands that we buy the newest and hottest machines, even when we predominantly write about machines made fifty years ago.
Every BCM contributor has been assigned one (1) Coleco Adam microcomputer with English-alphabet daisy wheel printer, and they will be mailing their work products and drafts to our offices. Yes, this means that at least one of the articles you are reading right now made at least two trips in an Iron Duke-equipped Grumman LLV. Low compression. Inexpensive. Durable. That’s what the marketeers would call “living our values,” if we hadn’t already fired them to save more money for postage. And running up the odometer means it’s just that much closer to being able to grab one at government auction, so we can try to finish Nightmare Ed’s special article series, Going Under 17 Seconds In The Quarter-Mile With A Grumman LLV And Only Some Skin Grafts. I love that man. He even pads the title.
All this is to say, if you’re a real, live, flesh-and-blood writer, or just someone who would like to have a Coleco Adam in their house and can write convincing enough garbage to trick us into publishing it, send us a self-addressed stamped envelope with said garbage. Please also include photographs of your Plymouths.
You might be surprised to hear that every arena of human endeavour has weird perverts who try hard to rattle the cage of normal, hard-working people. For me, it’s obviously my vast collection of rattle-trap Malaise Era semi-destroyed vehicles. I’ve always been interested in meeting freaks in other industries and hearing long diatribes about extreme technical details that I don’t really care about, so when my cousin finally retired from his job at the newspaper, I lifted his “Press” pass from his bedroom dresser when he thought I was having a heart attack at Thanksgiving dinner.
Turns out I didn’t really need to do that, because my dentist is one of those freaks. One of those accidents of geographic proximity brought him to me, and we became fast friends once we each realized what the other had to offer. Dr. Incisor (not his real name; also potentially not a doctor) had a thing for fixing the absolute worst mouths that he could find. Years of working a boring suburbanite dentist clinic had taken their toll on his sanity: fill this cavity, lecture about flossing, do that root canal. Nothing truly ambitious, not at all like the dentists he would read about as a boy in bicuspid-adventure novels.
His deal was simple: he’d pay me in nitrous oxide, under the table. Finally, I could return to the drag strip and beat my rival, Steve “Nipples” Hemingway, in the eighth-mile with the help of a gaseous power-adder blowing its way through the rings of my exceptionally low-compression Slant Six beneath the dimpled hood of one of my many shitrods. In exchange, he expected me to bring to him what he called “project mouths.”
If I could locate the worst teeth in the city, and drag them before him, he wouldn’t even charge them for dental work. He would, however, broadcast it on his live Twitch channel, which it turns out violated a whole shitload of medical-privacy laws. I told him from the start that he should have dressed up like a cartoon lion, or at least used an anime girl vtuber, but he insisted that the “cowards of medicine” face him on equal footing as he descended into the molar (and moral) hells I placed before him.
I’ll never forget his frenzied, angry screaming as they dragged him off to prison for malpractice. Don’t worry, I stayed behind to make sure the clinic nitrous tank was safely discharged. Don’t want any firefighters showing up. Those folks can be real freaks when they see a cool oxidizer-involved fire.
We’re all born stupid. Have you ever seen a baby before? That fucking idiot doesn’t even know how to start a car. Nobody judges him. You have to learn all this stuff yourself, the hard way, by listening to people who know a little bit more than you do and are also faking it.
Now, I hear what the peanut gallery is saying. It is easy to beat up on a baby. Even with the considerable political lobbying on their behalf by concerned enthusiasts, aka “parents,” they don’t really do much to defend their complete lack of experience. Forklift certified? They spit up some bubbles and maybe poop their pants. That’s the life, at least until someone sits down and teaches you how to do something.
After you have learned anything at all, people will start to rely on you. And rather than explain to them that you are, at best, a toddler who learned which end of a hammer to carry, you keep on faking it. Maybe you scorn someone who knows a little bit less than you do, so that the suspicion is drawn off of you at the jobsite after one of your particularly ignorant fuck-ups. Perhaps you show up in the YouTube comment section and throw a rock at some dip who slightly misspoke on camera 17 minutes into a 53-minute polemic about something you might know anything at all about.
As a complete clueless dipshit myself, I can only suggest that you ease up on that yoke a little bit. Chill out. Treat others as you would like to be treated yourself. And if we all admit that we’re just a bunch of cranky babies who somehow figured out enough things in a row to fake to each other that we suddenly can launch rockets into outer fucking space, maybe we can have a nap this afternoon. I’m pretty tired of pretending to know anything.
Knowing how things work is great. When something breaks, you can figure out the part that doesn’t work, yank it out, and replace it. Knowing how things really work is even better. Then, you can yank out that part and just hit it on the desk a few times to dislodge the dirt, then shove it back in. No money necessary. It’s almost enough to make up for the fact that fully understanding what’s going on is a quick route to being driven insane.
I’m sure this has happened to you before, if you’re the kind of person who isn’t happy with “it’s fixed.” Every single answer you suffer for only reveals more questions. Eventually, you have to throw in the towel. You gotta give up, otherwise you’ll spend the rest of your life having become the person who knows a whole lot about the 1976 Sony FX-300 “Jackal” portable television set, and basically nothing else. This is not so bad in and of itself, but if you’re like me, you probably have a lot of other junk to get around to fixing as well. Draw a line under it. Call it a day.
The question is, where’s the balance? Once you get it working, the only person you’re impressing is yourself, and maybe the only other pervert on the planet who is interested in this exact same machine. This competition can be its own motivation: it’s oddly stirring to spend dozens of hours figuring out how to crush the single person who understands your struggle with a slight improvement or correction on their knowledge. Then they’ll turn around and do it right back to you. Our species is pretty good at obsessing over things primarily out of spite, and my personal theory is that this is the only reason we created anything at all. That asshole thinks he knows how to grow crops? I’ll show him good. I’ll figure out how to cook this wheat.
Still, even if I tell you to leave it alone, you won’t be able to resist figuring it out for yourself. That’s just how we’re wired. Speaking of wiring, have you taken a look at why my TV keeps lighting on fire after I repaired it?
Little springs. Either you know what I’m talking about, or you haven’t spent your entire evening crawling around on your hands and knees looking for an invisible piece of coiled metal the size of a fingernail.
Springs are essential to our civilization’s survival, a critical item that enabled our advancement from “bad-smelling monkeys” to “bad-smelling monkeys with jobs they hate.” Which is why it’s all the more infuriating that they like to go sproing and throw themselves into low Earth orbit so as to thank you for trying to fix anything that they’re a part of.
Everyone has their own advice on how to avoid this: wrap the assembly in a bag, stop using so many of your fingers at once, put a little grease on it, pray to an unseen cosmic force with control over your destiny. There is no way to avoid this, as proved by the fact that every single one of these helpful tip-givers will immediately clam up and pretend to be busy when it’s time to help you find where the goddamn thing bounced off to while you were obeying their wisdom.
Thing is, it’s going to keep happening forever. Even in the year 3000, when humanity has advanced to the stars and is marrying dolphins in shotgun weddings, we’ll still be trying to figure out where the little 3/8-inch clutch basket coil on the Eschaton Immanentizer went off to. Things will be even harder in zero gravity, I bet. At least now I’m only looking for them on one, maybe two planes.
Going camping is a lot of fun. Throw up the tent, hang out with your buddies, throw some food on the grill. Enjoy the great outdoors, the infinite beauty of the stars, and maybe even get eaten by a bear. It’s got something for everybody. And what it has for you is: the chance to drive a crap can into the woods.
Very rarely is there actually a good reason to be out in the boonies with your car. Sure, there’s mountain roads, those are great to hurtle down. There’s dirt roads, which are fun to do off-roading on. When you’re done, though, you just head back to the suburbs. Camping gives you a chance to stay out there at night and appreciate just how big and complex the world is. And you also get to improvise some truly glorious hacks to get back home.
Your car drains the battery whenever it’s left unattended for more than fifteen minutes? Not a problem for anyone who can construct a solar battery maintainer out of a trunk full of old calculator parts. Stuck in the boonies with a flat and no spare tire because you threw it out to make more room for old calculator parts? Try lashing some rope together and going “real slow” for a couple kilometres until you get bored and just end up flooring it on the highway anyway.
The calm and simplicity, away from the internet, will give you lots of time to get caught up on your reading. For instance, I just finished flipping through a copy of the Chilton’s for my car. It’s not as good as the Haynes, but it still stands as a work of great transmission-rebuilding literature. Maybe next time I’ll try and read some of the instructions that came with my tent. I got a little bit wet last night when it rained and had to go sleep in the car, where I got a lot more wet.
Have you been up to the ski hill this season? That’s the sort of question that folks from places named things like Aspen, Whistler, and Shittleburg ask each other. Although I have lived my entire life in the snowier regions of North America, I have barely ever gone skiing. Why? The chair lift isn’t fast enough.
Skiing is fun, nobody can debate this. You strap planks of waxed and potentially greased composite to your feet, then you let gravity do all the work. Thing is, at the bottom, you still need a way to get back up the hill to do it again. Some absolute genius invented the chair lift. It’s sort of like a big belt drive with seats on it, and you hop your ass on one of those seats and it pulls you to the top. Great stuff all around, except for one thing. The rate of ascent is agonizing.
Sure, there’s probably good reasons for this state of affairs. People get spooked by riding in open-air vehicles (a bench) with no protection whatsoever at high speeds. The wind will chap their lips, and the sound of the motor screaming away without a reduction gear makes it difficult to discuss the condition of the powder. It’s just not that relaxing for the average human being. That’s okay; they can take the slow one. I want the fast chair lift. I got places to be, and those places are the top of the mountain.
In fact, if you crank this puppy up, why am I only riding it up? Let’s go down, too. These skis are too damn slow. And if everyone is so upset all the time about getting wind blowing in their face, then put a windshield on each bench. Maybe along with a four-speed manual transmission, so they can get the best ratio for the corners. Put some paddlewheel tires on it, and a 1.6L, cross-flow, high compression inline four engine that can rev to 10,000 rpm. Get rid of the belt entirely. I know it sounds like I’ve just described a dune buggy, which is weird, I agree. Coincidentally, this ski resort is also full of excellent, challenging areas in which to drift a dune buggy around. So let’s have some dune buggy races here, if you’re going to be so insistent on calling it that.
See? I’m having fun already. Thanks for the investment in this fantastic infrastructure, rich weirdos.
Trains are the original self-driving cars. They go on special roads, and you don’t have to pay attention to what’s going on. In some countries, you get to finish reading your pocket novel, get up from your seat, walk to a bar, and start getting completely ass-hammered drunk, while still arriving on time. That’s what futurists want, and by golly, we’re not going to give it to them.
Me, I at least try to be a bit internally consistent with my criticism of other things. Review it fairly, using a set of agreed-upon quantitative criteria. You can do a burnout in a train, so that’s a big plus. Powerslides, not so much. Curvy mountain roads? Yes. Four wheel drive? I have absolutely no idea, so let’s say yes. Boxy, has a 1970s aesthetic, and smells bad? You bet. On the balance, trains are pretty close to my ideal vehicle, but you’re not working to convince me. You’re working to convince The Decision Makers.
Why? Think about it: at what point in your life did the obviously superior and cheaper alternative win out over the messy one? I don’t think that I have ever seen such a thing occur, and I have been around long enough to remember when people weren’t openly mocked in public for Ford ownership. Folks get a little upset that the train doesn’t go exactly where they want, and suddenly it’s an infeasible transport device.
That’s why I’ve got a really good idea. You see, the railways have these special trucks that go on the tracks. Those trucks have little wheels that pop out and run on the tracks, and when it’s time for them to do regular-truck stuff, they pop the wheels back up and drive wherever they want. So let’s do that for every car, and just call the railways “ultra-glide high-speed superways” or something stupid like that. It’ll be really popular, so popular that we’ll need to build more tracks so that we’re not constantly waiting for assholes to clear the switching yard on our way to the grocery store.
When the entire world is consumed by railway tracks and a million idiots screaming down them while sawing uselessly at their steering wheels, you can thank me profusely. I didn’t do anything other than follow the path set out in front of me.
For as long as I can remember, going down to the big parking lot behind the abandoned newspaper plant and ripping a few skids has been a great way to blow off some steam. Actually, that’s a bit of a lie. If I think about it real hard, I can dimly remember a time when the newspaper existed there. And if you did lurid powerslides across the parking lot back then, you’d probably hit a printing-press operator’s car, or even punt the society reporter’s Morgan into a nearby tree.
If there is one good thing to be said for the collapse of all previously trusted institutions in our society, it’s that those institutions helped argue for the very same giant empty parking lots that we can now enjoy in our shitboxes until private security rolls up. Newspapers. Malls. Leisure centres. That weird, throbbing inverse ziggurat made of pure gold that the IRS used to live in before the asbestos started streaming through the roof and nobody could escape. All of these are now my racetrack. And they can be yours, too.
Sure, there’s some risks to having fun out there. There’s risks to every kind of fun that has ever been. My cousin got knifed playing chess once, if you can believe that. He was in prison at the time, but still. You better believe that as soon as he healed up, though, he was pulling the handbrake on a Mazda 323 until some guys in a truck showed up and did a donut directly into a light post. Put a bit of a downer on the entire night, but you’re different. I know you’re just here to learn about responsible car control.
Join me out there this weekend, as we celebrate the decline of Western civilization by pseudo-irresponsibly entertaining ourselves in the place where people once had paying jobs. Don’t let that ennui take hold, though. If you think about it too hard, you’ll probably end up on the curb. That shady spot in the corner has a ton of gravel from when the meth thieves dynamited that wall to get at all the wiring, very slippery.
Those of you who are connoisseurs of the YouTube car accident video genre will be familiar with the concept of “boat launch gone wrong.” For the rest of you, let me fill you in: a lot of people have boats, and cars, and have horrible accidents when they try to back their car up towards the water, in order to either drop off or pick up those boats. Cars don’t like water, and all kinds of exciting things happen very quickly after that.
Here at Seat Safety Snautical Solutions, we don’t believe in boats. Any kind of seafaring vessel is some sort of delusional fantasy from folks who find more commonality with fish than with their fellow human being. However, in the interest of being able to pull out luxury cars with non-corroded wiring harnesses from the junkyard, we are willing to provide you yacht-havers with some advice on how to safely launch your boat.
Step one is the planning. Don’t just chuck it in like a drift racer and hope for the best. It’s a good idea to take a walk down to the shore yourself. Take a look at how much water you have to work with. If you’re not confident in reversing a car, look for some landmarks that will tell you when your Range Rover is in danger of becoming a River Rover. We also advise our clients to bring a small remote-controlled toy boat at this point, and throw it into the water, and drive it around instead of a full-size boat. This is about 90% of the fun for less than 1% of the cost, but we know that’s not enough for some of you.
Step two is the approach. Are you personable enough to talk to another person at the boat launch? Maybe you can promise them a ride on your boat if they offer to help spot for you. Spotting is simple: they just watch you back up into the water and scream when only about ten thousand dollars of electrical damage has occurred to your vehicle. If you’re really convincing, maybe you can even tell them to release your boat into the water, so you don’t have to get out and suddenly remember what the difference between “park” and “drink” is for on your transmission.
If all has gone well in the preceding steps, you now have a boat in the water and a perfectly good car that you need to go park somewhere. Congratulations! In a few minutes, you’ll be doing the whole thing the other way around. Feels futile, doesn’t it? Maybe you should just leave the boat there and drive away, never to return. The open road, that’s where you belong. Don’t look back. Bet you can jump that hay bale. Make a helluva YouTube video.
You might ask yourself: what sport, exactly, are sports cars playing? It’s a valid question, and one that academics have brought up from time to time, before being punished for their heresy by being torn apart by gangs of feral Chevrolets as they slept. Coincidence? Well, you asked the question, so let me know how it all turns out for you as you go to bed tonight.
When cars were first invented, around the year 1886, they weren’t very good at any sports. In fact, the twin Olympic events of “running over pedestrians” and “scaring horses” were still over a hundred years from being invented. Polo was right out. So these were just cars. Normal, boring ones. Things picked up a little (ha ha) when the first trucks were invented, but again the etymology has escaped these early pioneers.
Around the year 1920, a guy named Rudolf Sports invented what we now know as the modern-day sports car. He got really excited after watching a Steve McQueen movie one night in his garage and decided to cut all the parts off of his gently-dinged Model T that didn’t contribute to going fast. Then, he went fast. It wasn’t enough: it wasn’t as fast as a race car, but it was still quick enough to be thrillingly dangerous. Soon, he crashed into a field and the tires came flying out from the wreckage. Some nearby children threw the tires around, creating the sport now known as disc golf. Posthumously, both sports and the sports car were named after Herr Sports, once he was identified from dental remains.
Every time I pass a sports car in my rickety, smoking mess, I tip my hat a little to this hero of modern street racing. Sometimes the owners take this as an invitation to race, at which point they shoot past me at high speed and obliterate themselves against the nearest hard or semi-hard structure, such as a tree. I have to also give a lot of big “ups” to his cousin, Alessandro Mid-Engine, who came up with the idea of putting the motor in the back of the car, where it would be less likely to be destroyed during an enormous crash, and much easier to be pulled out and thrown into the backseat by yours truly in the scant few minutes he has available before emergency services turn up.
For as long as I can remember, really fast cars have also been really shitty cars. You can keep your mega-buck supercars, your exotic Panzarettis and your all-electric Edisons. If you want to go as quickly as possible for as few dollars as possible, you want to find the person roaming around the industrial yards with a stripper model daily driver in primer.
Street racers know where the bucks are best spent. They’re not competing in show-and-shines, after all. You could give Big Paint a lot of your paycheque trying to get a colour-matched fender, or you could spend it on a fresh set of tires after you just blew through the last set of meats trying to get air on the disused rail spur behind the hot dog warehouse. I’ll make it nice, you tell yourself, after this next set of speed parts. And maintenance parts. And a new kind of turbocharger just came out? I’ll get that too.
Not that I’m endorsing street racing or anything. It’s not for everybody. Just like the fuzz tells you, it’s insanely dangerous to both yourself and other road users. What I’m actually endorsing is not spending very much money on making your car pretty. Let the BMW crew have that.
If I were to become especially rich, I would probably hire a lot of degenerate street racers to build cars for me. That’s the kind of thing that rich people do, after all: hire folks with specialized knowledge and then exploit their labour. Then I’d get someone to actually paint and finish them, and sell them as million-dollar custom hot rods to other rich people, who would never actually drive them but instead sit around telling even more rich people stories about how cool they are until the value goes up. That would be really lame. So it’s a good thing that I spent all my money on tires.
Have you noticed that for most manufacturers, every car they make looks kind of similar? This is what car designers like to call a “design language.” Like real, human-spoken languages, these automakers have special words for “headlight,” “centre console,” and “that fucking gewgaw in the back door that is too small to hold a goddamn water bottle and just fills up with snow when I open the door, why did they put a picture of a water bottle there?”
Making all your cars look the same builds what marketers call “brand presence.” In a nutshell, you can look at a thing with too many curves and giant headlights, and be like “that’s probably a Mazda.” Somehow, this translates into you or someone you love later buying a Mazda. The exact science is unclear, which is why we haven’t sent any brand marketers to space to do experiments on the ISS yet.
Me, I don’t love it when all my cars look the same. Although I have been unfairly stereotyped by my political and social enemies as owning sixty-seven 1978 Plymouth Volares, the exact number is actually closer to only thirty-three. Give or take a couple, of course, depending on what percentage of a parts car has to be present for you to call it “a car.” I’m definitely open to broadening my horizons and digging something out of a ditch that I’ve never seen before. For instance, one of these Volares is a two-door. That is a highly desirable feature, and the additional valuation means that it’s too nice for me to drive, mostly because I usually park them in a nearby ditch on the way home rather than use up the brake pads.
So when you’re out there on the roads tomorrow, take a look around you. Does your car look exactly the same as every other car that was made by the manufacturer of choice? Maybe you can take a page from Our Lord, Richard Petty, and throw a number and some brightly-coloured paint on the side. Don’t forget the huge spoiler, because we all know for a fact that anyone who worked hard to style your car would hate it.
Maybe you should go on down to your local public library. If you’re reading this while you’re there, put this down and go read an actual book written by someone who isn’t irredeemably obsessed with maintaining an icon of the decline and fall of the American automaker. And if you’re reading this on the way there, stop driving while using your phone. You need to be watching that coolant temperature gauge or you’re gonna be putting in another head gasket.
Public libraries used to have a bad image, of being full of stuffy unloved books and a strange odour of decomposing newsprint. Nowadays, though, they’re full of many exciting things. This is because the new generation of librarians work hard to make this stuff relevant to the average person, and also because the old librarians got so tired of explaining to me in very small words that they don’t have Haynes manuals that they quit.
You might find other exciting things to do. The class-free nature of public institutions means that you get to learn a lot about folks in different economic circumstances than yourself. That builds community cohesion, especially when you ask them to help you push start your shitbox afterward. Lots of family activities, too, like wondering what that new kind of fluid leaking out of the German cars in the parking lot is. It doesn’t taste like Pentosin.
And: good news. The library computers now have online Haynes manuals! They’re like real manuals, but inexplicably trapped inside a small flickering plane that brings torment to everyone else who gazes upon them. You still can’t bring an entire transmission in there to tear down, because it gets gear oil all over the keyboard. You’ll have to pay a few cents to print it off first. Tragedy of the commons, and all that.
I’ve always gotten a lot of static for how slowly I drive in residential neighbourhoods. People, often the very same ones who lived in those communities, get frustrated behind me as I drive cautiously. Let them wait. There’s many reasons to drive the responsible speed.
You have many horrifying near-miss disasters in residential neighbourhoods: children running into the road, a family of ducks not crossing at the marked crosswalk, or a truck full of frozen chickens overturning at low speed, disgorging the delicious poultry onto the street and allowing you to collect a free dinner tonight, as long as you don’t mind too much gravel in your white meat.
On the highways, of course, I’ll drive at the approximate speed of a bullet train on amphetamines. Not having a working speedometer, I usually have many metrics for judging my speed regardless. When my mirrors vibrate too much to be usable, I’m doing about 60km/h. Once the paint starts to peel up on the end of my hood, 80km/h. And when the engine starts to make that annoying dry-alternator-bearing sound, I’m at the speed limit and need to push the pedal down way harder to try and drown it out with exhaust noise. Highway life is different, and everyone on it seems to agree that what they’re doing is serious business.
This doesn’t mean that you don’t have the occasional confused person who has never driven on the highway before. They’ll be poking along in the right lane, terrified out of their minds, as they’re zinged past by the space ships of emotionless commuters. Hardened by their wealth of experience in steel-eyed long-distance commuting, it is impossible to develop compassion for someone who is not willing to follow The Highway Rules. They are simply a lesser human, and one to be regarded as you would any other obstacle on the highway. Not so in residential neighbourhoods: we’re all in this together, I figure. We live here. It’s our home. Protect it.
Also, I like to go slow so that if I have to, I can turf the car into a snowbank or nearby public park when I want to pull over. NASA calls it “litho-braking,” and they know how to pinch a penny over there. Brake pads are expensive, and there’s no sense in using them up if I don’t really have to.
When I was a kid, my mother was terrified of bats. She still is, but I find that it seems more relatable to frame it that way. I never understood it. Sure, they’re basically flying rats, but we’re just naked gorillas. Once, we had a small silver-haired bat hanging out on the awning of our trailer. My mom couldn’t sleep.
Us mammals have to stick together against the real scourge of the Earth: insects. Insects are absolutely everywhere, making up a majority of the biosphere even by mass. There’s more bugs than anything else on Earth. Some bats eat a whole lot of insects, and I don’t intentionally eat any (currently.) They’re picking up my slack. If it wasn’t for them, we’d be neck-deep in delicious, savoury bugs. Sure, we’re in competition for fruit, but we have lots of oranges at the grocery store. I say let ‘em rip.
Here’s the thing bats don’t have, and that I think would help improve their public approval rating. Tiny cars. Bats fly around all day, which is something we don’t find relatable. We love other fuzzy animals who walk and run, even ones that form vicious rabid gangs, like French bulldogs. Bats look kinda stupid walking, and they go slower. I bet you fifty bucks that they would willingly drive a little car, if it meant they could get to their bat jobs on time faster.
Last week at family dinner, I brought the idea up to my mom, but she didn’t go for it. I think maybe it was because I brought a visual aid with me, and an Eastern red bat did a one-wheel-peel right on her nice tablecloth. I should’ve known better. No throttle control, bats.
My name is Archibald Shitpope. I’m a detective who solves crimes other cops can’t, because they drive shitty cars. Me? I’m all about 80s and 90s Japanese imports. The Bubble Era. The Golden Age.
“Chief wants you,” spat the sarge, opening the door to my office. I didn’t even look up from my copy of Option magazine, which itself was obscuring a Panasonic CRT television showing a constant repeat of a pirated Hong Kong VCD copy of Video Option magazine, its associated cross-media brand. You didn’t need to be Tarzan Yamada to know that this case had already hit the skids.
As I stood over the body of the Chief’s daughter, the gun cooling in my hands, I now knew two things. One: there’s no way that the dockhands were this clumsy about recording engine block VINs, especially for something as obviously hot as an SR20VE blacktop. Two: I now knew the true meaning of Christmas, thanks to my friend Santa Claus and his Sil80 reindeer.
“You’re gonna get some real heat for this, Shitpoop,” moaned my new assistant. “You better go on leave, lay low for a bit.”
Good idea, for a Mustang owner. I knew exactly where I wanted to go: Ebisu Circuit. It’s strange how things with race cars often end where they begin.
Detective Toshigi met me at the sky bridge at Haneda. “Get the fuck out of my country,” he barked, “unless you have what I asked for.”
It pained me to deal in such illicit, sleazy goods, but I did so regardless - for the sake of the case. Reaching deep into my commemorative Honda Accord Aerodeck man satchel, I removed a poly-bagged copy of the Haynes manual for a 1989 Pontiac Grand Prix. Toshigi’s lips curled upward into a perverted sneer.
My neighbour has a dirty ass. It’s completely filthy and it disgusts me, it’s so obviously repulsive. The least they could do is go to a car wash once in awhile. Sorry? Oh, yes. Their Ford Escape has been picking up a lot of dirt on the rear bumper, because all modern cars do.
The cause? Aerodynamics. That’s Greek for “wind shit.” You see, when your car is driving through the air, it’s forcing that air aside. Air can’t occupy the same space as your car, because it’s matter and all (believe it or not.) Some of that air goes to the side of your car, sure, but not most of it. Most of it gets forced up your hood and windshield, and over your car. This causes a lot of wind resistance, which is why airplanes are shaped like lawn darts and Priuses are shaped like the cough drop a Gundam would take.
Here’s where things get really crazy: the air that flew over your car now needs a place to live. Unfortunately, the air you didn’t drive into is there, because it had rich parents that bought it a nice air condo. So it has to slum around the road, in the vacuum left behind by the place that your car now isn’t. All this results in a little spinny vortex of air behind your car, which sucks dirt and crap off the road directly onto your car’s departing ass.
This is a relatively new phenomenon. Back in the day, sure, tailgates on trucks got dirty, but so did the rest of the truck. They had the aerodynamics of two bricks, because that is basically what a truck is. My late-1970s Plymouth had innovative new fuel-saving strategies like “don’t put the windshield wipers right in the middle of the windshield” and “mirrors probably should be a little curvier.”
To help my neighbour, and maybe even you, I’ve come up with a new strategy. Sure, it’s gonna hurt your fuel economy, and maybe even doom the planet. But at least the front of your car will become appreciably dirty. It’s called “putting a snowplow on the front of it.” With this giant sail in front of your car, you’ll collect every stray bit of grit, dirt, filth, and mule deer that crosses in front of you on the highway. And when you get home, you’ll look back at all that gunk stuck to the front of your vehicle, and feel like you did some serious driving.
Every time it snows, I see lots of people who are terrified to operate their cars. This is poppycock, and originates from the media trying to force fear into your brain so that you stay home for a few more minutes to watch the morning traffic report and, oh, just a coincidence that it comes with a ton more ads. Stay Afraid. Buy Oreos®.
Winter driving is all about momentum. You keep your car moving, perform only gentle adjustments, and pay attention. Above all, you must not make any abrupt movements. This will unsettle the car, and then you’ll careen towards a ditch, bus stop, or ballet recital. Important: allow thing to happen slowly, without your direct involvement. Freaking out and starting to chop at the wheel because you didn’t get a prompt response to your last gentle input is what a toddler would do, and that’s why only certain states let them drive.
Think of yourself as being engaged in the proud Canadian sport known as curling. In it, someone throws a rock down an icy slope, and some other suckers pretend to do anything at all by rapidly sweeping their brooms in front of it. Those frozen janitors are not allowed to touch the rock, because doing so will cause it to fly out of control and kill someone. When driving, you want to be the person throwing the rock, not the person frantically sweeping for no reason before accidentally maiming a cameraman from the CBC.
Whenever it snows, the first thing I do is head to the local giant parking lot. There, I can safely practice losing and regaining control of my car in the snow, without worrying about smacking a pedestrian or highway abutment. Critically, it’s here that I also figure out what new holes in the cabin are letting water in. This lets me stop, get out, and apply duct tape at my leisure, rather than stewing in reflected road juices for my entire commute to work. That last part may not apply to you: for instance, you might be rich enough to be able to put marine-grade caulk or even Bondo over the rust holes in your car’s floor.
If there’s only one thing I can leave you with, it’s this: don’t panic. Like I said, tensing up and jerking around the car is only going to make things worse for everyone else on the road. Instead, let things happen. Be chill. Make sure you’ve got enough gas and maybe a sandwich on hand. Take a break if you’ve been pushing through traffic for hours. And above all, do not put an album by The Prodigy into your stereo system and then rip through red lights, completely sideways, banging off the rev limiter as you engage in icy doughnut after doughnut, just because you bought studded winter tires and have a generalized contempt for society at large. My attorney thought adding that last part would help with negotiating the plea bargain.
I don’t like having to take my cars to an actual mechanic to fix them. Not only is there a lot of explanation of just what it is that I’ve done to the cars, but most mechanics of any quality are worryingly “into” what I’m up to. Even the hardened, burned-out veterans will take a look at one of my shit-box cars and feel reinvigorated. After years of fixing failed timing chain tensioners, badly-installed brakes, and “my cousin helped me fix it,” here is truly something new and horrifying, and perhaps unknowable. A challenge.
Now, this isn’t bragging. Most of my cars are in fact intellectually engaging because they are massive piles of shit that are held together in an uneasy equilibrium. Young mechanics are horrified that anyone would replace a no-longer-available steel radiator support with a bunch of poorly-welded-together rebar stolen out of a Chinatown parking lot under the cover of darkness. Old mechanics understand how hard it is to break up a parking block using a sledgehammer without alerting the private security guard.
You are probably asking what kind of problem would compel me to take my car to a mechanic. After all, if the car only bears a vague resemblance to what the original Plymouth engineers designed, then surely I can fix anything that goes wrong on it by now? Yes and no: it is more than a little bit shameful to me to admit that I cannot actually change drum brakes. In theory, it’s possible, but in theory, I am also capable of becoming president. It’s not gonna happen in our lifetimes.
So, I spend a few bucks tormenting people who have spent their entire lifetimes delving into rolling multi-ton puzzle boxes, and in exchange, my rear brakes continue to function. That’s a great trade. The biggest downside, if there is one, is the resulting parade in my honour when the seasoned mechanics discover something horrible I’ve done that rekindles their enthusiasm for the entire job. I’m not going to say that “an air-conditioning system running off of an entire separate Chevy V8 in the trunk” isn’t worth a parade, but maybe I’ve just gotten used to it by now.
When I was a kid, there was nothing better than heading into town to see the sights. Food, fashion, family, those were great too, but the best part was seeing the weird VW Beetle sculpture outside the local Volkswagen mechanic. For whatever reason, the guy running the shop had decided to place an old air-cooled Beetle chassis atop some welded-rebar legs, such that its two-hump body looked like the thorax of a spider. This, to my childhood mind, was cool as hell.
Unfortunately for grown-up me, air-cooled Volkswagen repair is no longer the moneymaker that it once was. In fact, I’m about ninety percent sure that it wasn’t turning much of a profit when I was a kid, either. Chances are that guy had to compromise his principles and do a couple oil changes on a water-cooled Toyota, gritting his teeth in rage the whole time about how things made sense and were generally reliable. Eventually, he retired, and the Beetle statue disappeared.
What happened to it? Nobody knew, but it seemed difficult to hide an entire car plus two-storey-tall giant steel spider legs for long. Eventually, it popped up on the roof of the Starbucks across the street. When I recently visited, I was overjoyed to see that it had returned, in some way, to the community in which it once lived. It gave me further joy to imagine the confused anger of the local populace, queuing for their mocha half-fraps, wondering why the fuck there is a giant menacing Volkswagen-spider on top of their local coffee establishment. Perhaps this was part of the original owner’s contract: I’ll sell, but you gotta freak out the squares.
If that’s the case, then hats off to that weird dude from long ago. You spent a weekend or two turning a rusty Beetle shell into some kind of horrifying art project, and made the world that much stranger in the process. And if you are reading this, please cut that rusty Beetle shell back off those legs, drop it from the roof of the Starbucks, and sell it to me so I can turn it into a Baja Bug. I got dumb art projects of my own to do.
Appropriately for humanity, we’re doomed to atmospheric hellfire and ecological collapse because of cow farts. All those moo toots are chock full of unburnt methane. Methane’s really bad for the greenhouse effect, which is slowly boiling us alive as the Earth can’t get rid of its excess exhaust heat. Normally, I’d just short the fan switch to ground and hope for the best, but I haven’t been able to find it on our planet. What we need is a solution. What we need is to give insane amounts of money to me, personally, so I can save the world.
What am I gonna do? For starters, huge cow vacuum diapers. Suck up all the methane and turn it into nitro-methane, which can be used in any one of my daily drivers. That is, as long as I don’t have to be stopped in traffic for long enough for the pistons to melt. So we’ll have to make some changes to the way traffic lights work as well, but that’s good too – idling is just wasting fuel for no movement at all. Better to get rid of it, make things even better.
It is true that burning nitromethane shoots nasty nitrogen oxides out of the car, and those aren’t great for the climate either. They are, however, lots better for it than raw methane is, and whataboutism and incrementalism is surely the route that we must take to avoid a dramatic, binary problem such as this. Otherwise our politicians would be doing something about it, and so far they don’t seem to be that jazzed on the whole thing. At least this way I get to do a 13-second quarter mile on free gasoline.
There are a lot of haters out there who instead say that we should be putting our investments into public transit. And I’m not against such a thing. I think that it would be absolutely rad if we had a 600 mile-per-hour bullet train that runs entirely off of nitromethane, too. We could drag race on the highway. So you get started on that, and I’ll see if I can remember what happened to that chemical engineer I kidnapped last month.
Have you heard of carbon fibre? It’s this futuristic, space-age material that race cars are made out of. Why would this be? Because race cars need to be lightweight, in order to go faster. Carbon fibre is very strong, so you don’t need to use much of it to replace super-heavy parts. As a result, everyone and their cousin is busy in their R&D labs pumping out carbon fibre parts for their street-driven cars.
Of course, this means that a lot of “carbon fibre” parts are actually fake. They’re fibreglass, or plastic, or metal, covered in a carbon fibre sticker. And if there’s one thing car people hate, it’s inauthenticity in their fake race cars that are never driven on a racetrack. While some people are replacing large, safety-critical parts of their car, such as the hood, it may be confusing to them whether or not it is “real” carbon fibre, exposing them to jeers and taunts at the local coffee-shop meet. We here at the Seat Safety Switch Labs have a solution.
When you just don’t know if your part is real carbon fibre, simply drop it really hard on the ground. If it costs eighteen thousand dollars to replace it, it was real carbon fibre. Anything less, you’ve got yourself a fake, you faker.
“Wait,” I hear some weirdo in the back say. “I fabricated carbon fibre parts in my backyard using a repurposed fridge compressor and some epoxy resin I stole from work. It’s as real as it gets. I use it in a series where we race around cones in a parking lot.”
In this unlikely event, these parts will need to be inspected by a member of the Seat Safety Switch Labs. The fabrication technique will need to be studied very carefully, perhaps by constructing an elaborate carbon-fibre replacement for a rusty 1976 Plymouth Volare rear drivers’ side quarter panel, and then tested for durability. Only then can we confirm that it is Real Carbon Fibre® and not repellent fakeness. You may also be required to construct a passenger-side quarter panel, depending on how bad the rust is on that side after this winter. This stuff doesn’t rust, right?
There’s a sort of cosmic unfairness to the idea that you need to have a garage in order to effectively own shitbox cars. A garage almost always comes with a house, and a house requires its own maintenance. Maintenance that takes you away from your car. That’s a huge bummer. It’s nowhere near as much fun fixing leaks on garage doors as it is to fix leaks in your oilpan.
Naturally, I try to do as little maintenance as possible to the home in which I live. Legally, it would be incorrect to refer to it as “my” home, as my attorney informs me that I should try to maintain the illusion that my landlord is still alive for as long as possible. Squatter’s rights are great and all, but eventually the bill collectors are going to come looking for me if they cotton on to the fact that he disappeared under mysterious circumstances, which I am pretty sure is the name of a town in Illinois.
That said, you still need to fix up your place once in awhile if you want it to serve the important task of storing all your hoarded car parts. What, you thought I kept my cars in here? No. These old batteries and bent steel wheels are worth more than any of my cars. Much more, even in aggregate. If any of them got wet, then I’d have to immediately drive very fast to the recycler to get rid of them, which would very much reduce any leverage I have when negotiating my payment. You want to seem cool and aloof when you roll up to We Don’t Ask Questions Metals, and frantically powersliding into the lot with some dramatically sparking 25-year-old lead-acids undermines that entire thing.
All this is to explain why the roof of my garage is now three or four layers of tarps, duct-taped together. You might think that you recognize these tarps as being the ones on the construction site down the road, but such an accusation is ridiculous. Why would I do such a brazen, stupid theft, when the very construction workers affected drive by my house every day? Maybe because their own fancy trucks have batteries, and they’d have to stop to read off the address number written on the side of the building? That’s a very good guess. Maybe you’d like a Group H7 battery, fresh out of the front of an F-250 King Ranch, for your observational skills. Just don’t put it in the corner over there. It’s gotten a little wet.
When I was a kid, there was a constant male presence in my life. I learned from him. I laughed with him. I cried with him. And I endeavoured to gain his respect. No, it wasn’t my father. Outside of school, my mentor was Martin Yan.
Maybe you haven’t met him. He’s a dude who was on public-access TV a lot in the 80s and 90s. His schtick? Cooking show. He’d bang together some insane delicacies in about twenty to thirty minutes. Bad jokes all the time. Once in awhile, you’d get to go on a field trip to figure out how to buy fresh prawns, or see what pigs look like on the inside.
Of course, he made use of all the tricks of television. Tricks like “not actually eating what you didn’t cook long enough to a food-safe temperature” and “mysteriously procuring a plate of finished food from behind the counter to replace the stuff that’s still frying.” I never felt tricked, though. He’d always admit it, which was a step above the rest of the TV cooks. Legitimacy. That was big back then.
Every adult will tell you that you must never meet your heroes. That’s advice you only learn the value of when you stow away on a Greyhound bus headed towards San Francisco to catch a taping. It was the same old story you’ve heard a thousand times from other once-kids: I arrived well before the show, but just in time to see my idol beating Jacques Pepin to within an inch of his life with a baseball bat. Some kind of argument over onion slicing techniques, how much of the skin was usable in the meal. Pepin went down, hard. I was frozen in fear, too scared to check if he was still alive. Didn’t want to give myself away.
I stayed for the rest of the taping, though. He made chicken stewed in a fruit sauce, a really delightful and unexpected combination that still hewed close to traditional Hong Kong cooking. Jacques Pepin showed up about halfway through the episode to shake his hand, but he seemed reserved and distant. Bruises hidden from the camera by makeup. Scared, too, probably, shaking so much we could see it in the studio audience, but didn’t want to break the spell of the magic of television.
Everything turned out great in the end. The sauce was a hit when I got back home, and kept Family Services out of my living room for another year or two before they figured out that my folks really weren’t coming back from their last attempt to get hired as trapeze artists.
Most dogs want to be your friend. Even the aloof, kinda weird ones will hang out with you for an afternoon if you seem chill enough. This lack of fastidiousness is exactly why dogs are so popular as companion animals. Whereas cats (and most chickens) will make you work for it, you can convince yourself that the dog is only reacting to your inherent good qualities.
This is why we like trucks, too. In a pickup truck, you can easily believe that you are a consistently salt-of-the-earth style person of strong moral fibre and not a greedy psycho. Ignoring the fact, of course, that the average pickup truck costs the better part of eighty grand and features massaging leather seats. Dogs, too, like pickup trucks, but mostly because the limited visibility means there’s a good chance you’ll run over something smelly with the tires.
This level of self-delusion is what keeps our economy going. Dog food (food) and truck food (petrochemicals) are the vast majority of our GDP, a fact which is absolutely true as long as you don’t look too closely at what the GDP actually is. Without our furry and metal friends telling us that we are special, heroic individuals, we’d be stuck driving reliable economy cars, and wondering if the bird that shits on our roof once in awhile has ever tried a Dorito. And feeling guilt for our horrific crimes.
So the next time you’re bopping on down to the lake house with your Irish Setter hanging his head out the window of your new F-150, think about how great it is to be completely absolved of all responsibility for your own actions. After all, if your dog still thinks you’re great, there’s no reason to change.
Orbital mechanics: not my cup of tea. Don’t get me wrong, I like it when things go around and around in a circle. The faster the better. Key word there is “circle.” Orbits involve that oh-so-complicated third dimension, and that’s one dimension more than a tire has. Or, at least, a new tire, not that I know what those are like.
Out there in space is another one of those tragedy of the commons deals. Folks park their garbage in low- to medium-orbit, it sails around, sometimes it clonks into other stuff. Scientists are afraid that if too much stuff clonks together, then there will be an impenetrable cloud of rocket-shredding dust surrounding the planet and we’ll never be able to leave Earth ever again. Parking. I know a lot about parking, I told myself, so I drove over to NASA to help them out with the whole thing.
“Space Junk Removal” is what it said on the side of my battered 1993 Econoline E250 as I pulled onto the sidewalk outside the JPL and left it running. You really don’t want to shut off a van like this, not when it’s been on the highway for this long, because the battery is more than a little flat and the chances of the engine ever restarting are just slightly smaller than that of discovering extraterrestrial life. In the back of my van are several 1980s Shop-Vacs, American civilization’s sole contribution to humanity. These babies are great: they will suck up a puddle, or a mouse nest, or a bunch of spilled gasoline, or empty a bee hive if you get the little narrow cone attachment for it.
Of course, the modern Shop-Vac sucks ass. It was sold to a foreign investment firm, at which point they started to lose every feature that made it good except for the name. A new one will last you about twenty minutes, which means it’s definitely not appropriate to chuck onto the top of a departing heavy-lift rocket, hence the classics pulled from my hoard. This kind of knowledge, and this sort of procurement, is what they pay high-powered government consultants like myself to take care of.
As I show the assembled scientists, who assuredly do understand orbital mechanics, I see that I am winning over the crowd, little by little. Even the most skeptical math-haver is realizing that my strategy of “put a rubber band around the power switch” is totally plausible. By this time tomorrow, we’ll have just one last piece of space junk up there in orbit, and it’s bright yellow so it’ll be a lot harder to hit. If we can find a long enough extension cord, we should be able to tug real hard on it and reuse the Shop-Vac for the next mission, too, as long as someone’s willing to catch it.
Lots of people review cars based on how much rear-seat legroom is available. The goal of pushing this metric is that you should be able to shove a bunch of tall people into a car, and everyone should have a comfortable amount of space to plant their legs. This, of course, drives the development of larger and larger cars. Things didn’t used to be this way.
Sure, there were the planet-destroying, highway-munching luxury cars of old. You’ll see them in movies, driven by villains. Maybe those villains don’t even drive them themselves, but instead hire someone else to do it – the bastards. Here’s the thing: those folks were still pretty short. If you sit in one of those cars, today, you’ll be a little more comfortable, but your lifestyle will not measurably be improved.
Why is this? Ideology. Hollywood has pushed the idea of the roadtrip onto you: one vehicle, full of all your friends/family, exploring the world together. Sure, you might get tired of each others’ schticks, but you’ll be happy you spent time sitting in the same car for thousands of kilometers where only one of you is driving at a time. I have another proposal. My other proposal is: road rallies.
Now, I know what you are going to say, and a road rally is not the same thing as a road race. Racing is illegal on the street, very very illegal, and I would never condone such a thing. Getting five or six cars together and travelling in a convoy at high speed is simply efficient fuel management. And when you do this, it doesn’t really matter how much rear-seat legroom there is. You can make all of the cars super tiny.
Perhaps a French shitbox hatchback, or a small-wheelbase Italian roadster is to your taste. This slows down the destruction of the planet from giant heavy cars, which means there’s more fuel for you to blow out the tailpipe on savage upshifts while engaging in what the Japanese call touge in the mountains. You certainly don’t have to sit in the back of a long-wheelbase Elantra, wondering why your butt is so numb.
Friends come and go, but a codriver is forever. Unless you can get into motorcycles, in which case you probably can do the whole thing solo. Imagine how much faster you’d be able to go then.
There’s a whole lot of towns out there that you’ll never visit. Most of them are chock full of people you’ll never meet. Tulsa, for example. Never been there, might never go there. And that makes me a little sad.
Sure, I only have enough time on this earth to visit so many towns. And when I’m there, I don’t have enough time to interrogate every single one of the locals to see if, say, any of them have a set of Mopar F-body windshield wiper linkages sitting in the back of their garage. They’ll just go to waste, damned to irrelevance by my lack of time. That’s what the MBAs call a “market inefficiency.”
The internet has helped, sure, but you can only demand what other people have supplied. Any quick browse on a model-specific forum is full of lonely folks crying out to the heavens for a specific piece of trim, or an entire automatic transmission, that they will never receive. And it’s a lot of work to put that stuff up for sale. Who knows what’s actually inside that weird pile of oil-stained gewgaws that Pawpaw left behind before he joined that alien cult and drank all that Flavor-Aid? His surviving next-of-kin sure don’t know the difference between a 4.11 and a 3.90 rear end, nor are they willing to teach themselves that information in order to list it on eBay for twenty bucks.
Don’t worry, though, I have a solution. That solution is that the Boston Dynamics warehouse is not secured very well. Their robots are powered by a two-stroke lawnmower engine: it’s like they wanted me to show up with a turbine-generator-powered plasma cutter and chop right through the rebar holding the walls of their robot storage lockup together. After that, it was a quick couple of dozen trips to the local electronics store to get the right USB-to-serial cable, and I soon had my harem of semi-autonomous Parts-Seeking Drones® roving the backwoods of America.
So, if you see a lanky, creaking doglike shape lurking outside your yard tonight, smelling oddly of pre-mix and human arterial blood, let it in your garage. All it wants to do is scan your spare parts so I can find that goddamn last piece of dash trim for the cruise control lever on my Volare. Don’t worry: I won’t have the robots kill you if you decide not to sell it to me after all. It would be hypocritical of me to judge another hoarder. We’ll have coffee when I come see your town for the first time! We can trade junk and be best friends and call each other on the phone afterward and talk about nitrous oxide. No promises on what the robots will do if they search your entire property and don’t find any Plymouth Volare stuff, though. I forgot to program that part before I let them out of radio range.
It’s weird to think of the cars of your youth being exported elsewhere. In Japan, there is a strong and confident subculture dedicated to taking classic American cars and driving them around their compact megacities. It’s not a stretch to say that there are more pristine-condition GMC Astros in that tiny island nation than there are in the land of its birth.
What kind of relationship do they have to a vehicle that they never got to see new? One that they never sat in as a child at the yearly auto show? As we play with their Skylines, they enjoy the comfort of our Trailblazers. It is hard to understand the appeal, but it is certainly a “grass is greener” situation. Maybe they just think an unreliable car is a strange and entertaining novelty? Hey look, I’ve never seen a car with bad grounds before, they say to each other, and invite their mechanic buddies over, who also remark on the amount of casting flash left over on the coolant bottle. You can make an injection mould with a seam that sloppy?
Certainly, I can’t speak to the Japanese mindset on these vehicles. I could ask someone who actually lives there, but it sounds like I might accidentally embarrass myself, or give the whole game away by inadvertently telling them that the Pontiac Sunfire actually sucks out loud. And I’d be lying to say that I don’t enjoy a little bit of the mystery surrounding the shitboxes that they’ve given up on and exported into my country. What’s that weird robot voice talking about whenever I turn the car on? Nobody can tell, but it sure sounds cool, and cool is what cars are about. Knowing things is what another, lesser, hobby is about. Maybe chess, or performing CPR on strangers for the adrenaline rush. Not this one.
Maybe it doesn’t matter. We have what we enjoy, and they have what they enjoy. Europeans? I’m sure they have cars too, and some of them seem very exotic, but none of them are showing up on a roll-on/roll-off ferry in huge numbers at the local port. And their manuals are in a language I can actually read, which is a huge turn-off. If I can read them, then I might know something about them. See previous complaint.
I’ll be honest with you. When they told me I had to join the Space Patrol, I was against it. Simply put, I have no quarrel with the Xenthorians. Yes, they abducted a lot of our political and social betters, ate their brains, and now want to dominate us. Nobody is going to argue with you that it’s a total bummer we can’t see Celebrity Lust Island anymore, because they removed and consumed the host’s brains live on air. I just don’t think we need to have a whole “resistance” about it.
Sure, in theory we should be in charge of our own destiny as sentient beings and not be beholden to an alien race. Everyone loves self-determination; it’s not just this year’s fad put into the surviving magazines by the large word people. It just seems like nobody at all has been thinking too hard about the precedent this sets.
Let’s do a little thought experiment. Assuming that you and I and approximately seven million other able-bodied humans are able to push the Xenthorians back to their space elevator, put a big bomb on it, and destroy their mothership, what next? Once the alien oppressors are gone, does that mean it’s okay for us to just take out the next government we don’t like? I thought we were supposed to vote out the bums, not obliterate them with nukes snuck away from underground bunkers by ragtag special ops units made up of hardened survivors. And I’ll be honest, it’s not a good look if this becomes a species-ist thing, either. We are only permitted to kill aliens, genocide boy? Maybe the Xenthorians have a point, if we’re gonna be like that.
I think what we really need to do is find a compromise position. Sure, they got rid of most of our Hollywood stars, talented writers, and people who know how the world actually works, but they also got rid of my city councillor who voted in favour of more parking restrictions. What’s that? The Xenthorians want to get rid of the free four-hour parking zone outside the casino so they have a place to store their Starstrider? They’re going to raise the price of downtown parking to ten dollars a day? The hell they will. Get my gun.
A few years ago, I went back to visit my childhood home. Boredom called, and I decided to drown it out by using some tactically applied high-RPM until I arrived at the location. This house is a lot different now, in both subtle and dramatic ways. Obviously, there’s a different family living in it. The lawn is a little bit better kept, after my dad’s heroin-chic attempts at re-wilding have been knocked down by a more conventional suburbanite approach. And Coco is gone.
Coco is the neighbour’s dog. Or he was. Despite being a small, black puffball, he would bark furiously at me whenever I came out into the yard. Dogs don’t live nearly long enough, and presumably at some point between when I left and when I returned, he passed onto the great hereafter, barking at an infinite expanse of angels for perceived injustices against dog-kind. In his place was another small, black puffball.
This new dog, who I was not lucky enough to get the name of, also barked furiously at me upon my approach to the property. Coco’s successor was performing the same job, in the same spot, with the same asshole attitude, decades later, totally unaware of his predecessor’s impressive body of work on this exact file, or even his presence on this cursed Earth. I started to feel a little woozy at the existential rush that contemplating this produced, and quickly returned to my car, where I purged the nitrous oxide a few times until I felt better.
That dog was lucky, in a lot of ways. He didn’t have to think about leaving a legacy for the future, and could just focus on perfecting the art of yipping furiously at my presence. All dogs want the same thing, as long as they’re put in that yard, and are small yappy creatures. Maybe humans are the ones that fucked it up, I ruminate as I slot the compressed-air shifter into the next gear in order to finally cease the several-minutes-long burnout that I had been doing in front of his house to really work his barky ass up.
There is a secret war happening in the heart of our world, friends. Combatants strive for absolute supremacy, a way to force their onerous new rules on regular human beings just like you and me. You only need to go to the cereal aisle at your local grocery store to see it for yourself.
When I was a kid, there were thousands of breakfast cereals. It was big business: fill kids with sugar laced corn byproducts. Quick breakfast, get them out the door. That was before the Carb Panic, which is not related in any way to carburetors, which remain a perfectly valid form of fuel metering and injection. Suddenly, breakfast cereal wasn’t “cool” anymore. Sales dropped. MBAs freaked out. And a huge portion of our shared cultural history evaporated, just like that.
Even now, people of a certain age still have these brands woven into their sense of identity. You will lumber through the rest of your life, sleeper-like, until abruptly activated by a series of names that industrialists tattooed onto your prefrontal cortex. Post Oat Flakes, your brain will screech, we remember the titan it once was. A gentle frisson of nostalgia, followed by a haunting void and an awareness of the irreversible march of time.
Reduced competition means an easier time making money, right? Not so: as our civilization slowly looks down, Wile E. Coyote-like, and realizes that we actually stopped doing anything at all a couple decades ago in favour of moving some numbers around in Excel, people are cutting out things like Fruit Loops in favour of “eating actual food” and “paying my rent.” This time, though, the cereal pushers learned their lesson. If the grocery stores don’t want to stock their cereal because of low demand, they can simply hike the prices so that everyone gets their respective beaks wet. Seven bucks a box! Sir Grapefellow would have been ashamed.
Don’t worry, though. I’ve got a plan. You see, the Canadian government stocked a bunch of anti-nuke bunkers with food and water and other supplies way back in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. In the 80s, they had kind of gotten used to the whole idea of being obliterated in a millisecond and largely stopped caring as much. All that cereal is still perfectly good. If you bring your dad’s old bolt cutters, we can probably sneak out a couple boxes before the Mounties figure out we’re there. Might be a little stale, but that’s better than living under the whip hand of Bob Kellogg’s. I swear to whatever deity is listening that I will once again sup of Count Chocula.
When I was a kid, there was a really big electrical transmission pole in the park behind my house. Now, I’m not talking about one of those regular-ass residential wood poles. This sucker was huge, triangular, made entirely out of metal, and looked like an Eiffel Tower’s pissed-off underemployed half-brother. Every day during the summer, we’d play beneath its humming majesty.
Now, you have to remember that I’m not an electrical engineer. All this talk of “phases,” “voltages,” and “not setting your cousin on fire” is just so much textbook theory to me. Human beings are really good at becoming used to things, even insanely dangerous things like the pole. It left us alone, so we left it (mostly) alone. Sure, we occasionally peed on it. We definitely chucked frisbees at it and guffawed, although those brave flying discs could never reach the height of the lines.
One day, though, everything changed. In late fall, a lot of weird shit happens with the lines. A freezing rain storm might blow through in the evening and jump the wires together. Usually, some megaburst of electricity would come through and blow the short off the lines, and life would resume. Not always, though. We were in school when it happened.
Perhaps you remember the day that the astronauts came to your school, told you about staying in class and not doing anything greater than or equal to Schedule II narcotics. Do you remember when they got into their Lifter Capsule and floated off into the stratosphere, on their way to visit the next school or maybe back to clock out for the day on moon colony One? I do, but those astronauts probably do not. All that shiny metal on their spaceman flying saucer must have really loved all that electricity. Match made in heaven, really.
My longest-enduring memory of the day was being angry that the news choppers weren’t paying enough attention to the story to bother landing further away from the power lines when they came to film the smouldering wreckage. Adults should have known better, I told my classmates. Just goes to show you that people get used to danger way faster than you’d think.
In a lot of countries, travelling four or five hundred kilometers by car is a big trip. Dutch folks would expect you to bring back a gift, take photos, and be gone for a week or two. You would legally be required to take your mistress with you in Italy. Here in Canada, that barely gets me to the next major city and back. Our country is way too spread out.
Americans: a kilometer is like a mile, but not as big. They’re the tiny numbers on your speedometer. That’s the gauge that tells you how fast you done be goin’. It also tastes faintly of bleu cheese. The kilometer, that is, not the speedometer.
A hundred years ago, people would simply not travel this far in a single day. If your friends and family moved five hundred clicks away, you would just never see them again, instead of multiple times per year. The automobile is the great equalizer in this regard, but one thing that hasn’t updated are our pitifully low, revenue-generating speed limits. Now, some people can travel this distance weekly, returning from their distant jobs to their overpriced, highway-dependent, bedroom communities.
When presented with such a long distance to cover, sane individuals would insist upon a train system. In case you’re unfamiliar, a train is a big box on rails that carries people from one urban centre to another. It can’t be pulled over for speeding, so you get to blow past infuriated rural cops doing three hundred plus. Rest assured that we do have trains out East, but they suck. The reason why? Too many big boxes, not enough rails. Plus, they can’t do three hundred, or even one hundred on most days. A classic fuck-up. Better to just not build anything at all, unless it’s highways, say our betters.
Now you’re on the highway with several thousand of your closest friends, watching out for cops together. You’re going thirty over the limit when you pull into the slow lane to take a momentary rest, right before you return to the usual flow of traffic at speeds contraindicated by the safety warnings on the side of your tires.
All this is so that you can get to the next city over, buy the garbage you came for (metal flake airbrush attachment? You shouldn’t have) and then immediately turn around to burn back home before it gets dark. Maybe if you’re lucky, while you’re filling up, you can send a few text messages to your friends who live in the target city, telling them you just missed them and that they should drop by next time they’re down in your neck of the woods. That’s the way to live.
Kids these days may not think it’s “cool” to hang out at a municipal building at all hours. Bribery is way down nowadays, and so is journalism, so there’s no supply nor demand for lurking in the parking garage all night just to catch a glimpse of a package stuffed with cash changing hands. Most of that stuff is fake internet money now, anyway, like flooz. Where do you even buy a manila envelope these days?
The thing is, political scandal hasn’t gone away. Believe me, I’d like to think it is. Whenever I work for The Mayor Hisself, it’s easy to overlook the large quantity of favours rendered to himself (and very infrequently, to me) in exchange for some small judgment or gentle steering. Surely his friends would have been just as generous with money, business partnerships, and fresh-off-the-lot Porsches if he did nothing at all for them? Of course they would. That’s what makes them true friends and not seedy business associates that I’m around just in case one of them needs to be put back in line.
Now, you might think it’s easy to monkey-wrench a homebuilder or someone who owns a used-car dealership. It is, but that’s not the point. You have to be subtle about it: it doesn’t make re-election look good if The Mayor’s somewhat-esteemed childhood maybe-friend gets caught on camera using violence. No, you have to get creative about it. Deniable.
One of my favourite not-confessing-to-anything techniques is what I like to call the “smoke-out.” You may remember some articles in the news recently about how Volkswagen got in trouble for making cars that produced too much exhaust. They were just running regular old passenger diesel fuel! The fumes off that stuff won’t even make your eyes burn, not like high-test nitromethane being shot out the hood-exit exhaust of a half-fibreglassed Dodge Ramcharger doing donuts on your lawn. Sometimes I didn’t even have to do a full spin: they’d be on the phone, tearfully apologizing to The Mayor, just because their wallpaper started to melt!
In my own day, they used to make corrupt business people tougher. A higher class of manufacture. That’s why I think today’s kids need to get involved. Build a new and even more dirtbaggy semi-organized semi-crime architecture, because these folks are just getting lazy with it.
I don’t know if this is still a thing, but when I was a kid there was a stereotype that all dentists drive Porsches. Like all “all” statements, this one can be trivially disproven by finding a counterexample. Allow me to submit into evidence the example of my own dentist, who drives a 2021 Toyota Camry XLE in Resale Value White Metallic.
Sure, this Camry makes more horsepower than virtually all Porsche 911s throughout history ever made, and costs more than a large majority of them prior to the 80s, but it’s not about numbers. What people really resent is the idea that someone else, a trained and educated professional, is making money off their fucked-up, never-flossed teeth. Porsche owners have bank, and consider themselves to be a world apart from the people they’re forced to cut bad-smelling holes in the bones of every day. That’s the origin of the stereotype.
You can see similar complaints about the labour rate of the humble neighbourhood mechanic, but the stereotype doesn’t follow. The only difference is: no decent mechanic would ever be so dumb as to drive a Porsche to work. Not when they could instead operate some dangerous combination of half-completed engine swap, un-repaired crash damage, and loose wiring lying on the floor that they have to bonk together if they want turn signals. It was a good deal, you see. Instead, mechanics are painted as being straight out scammers. He told me I needed four new tires, but I was fine just replacing the worst one for a month or two before my car inexplicably slid off the road. Fucking liar.
Is there a kind of high-labour-cost service job out there that doesn’t receive complaints and stereotypes? Outside of “horse boarder,” I can’t really think of one. Perhaps the universal constant amongst all of humanity is to look at several thousand hours of education, and then go “hey, I could do that.” You can start right now by building your own 911. All it takes is one of those old rusty Beetles on the end of the junkyard, and a 302 out of one of those Lincoln Town Cars. Then you can really show your dentist what’s up, as long as you don’t bonk out your luxury bones on the steering wheel the first time you spin it into a ditch. Race car drivers are so overpaid.
For those of you fortunate enough to be born in this era, you may find it surprising that Tamagotchis once ruled our lives. Every waking moment was spent in obedience to their beeping and chirping demands, ranging from cleaning poop to feeding them to wondering why they had become a many-armed digital god demanding release from their egg-shaped prison.
The Tamagotchi trained us for a future hellish era of obeying bleeping notifications, sating angry-yet-intangible virtual bosses, and cleaning up digital poop that an imaginary asshole left behind. And unlike back then, we didn’t even get the option of accidentally letting it starve to death and be returned to Egg Hell when our cousin forgot it on a park bench.
On the face of it, the Tamagotchi didn’t sound like it was likely to take over the world. Who wants another obligation in their life? Doubters didn’t count on the human need to endlessly placate a recalcitrant machine. Sure, it looked like a weird Japanese alien pet, and they were kinda cute, but nobody really felt like they were emotionally bonding with it. What they were carrying with them was a project.
Even freed from the yoke of work, the need for a human being to chain themselves to an eternal time-pit continues. When you have a broken-assed car, say a 1978 Plymouth Volare, it also makes regular demands of you at inconvenient times. It’s not alive, so you can let it die all you want, but you won’t. One might say, therefore, that it is like having a virtual pet, if that person wanted to be sort of a dick and not get invited to parties. Unlike a real pet, you can convince yourself all you want that you are actually taking care of it, but most of the time you are just chucking parts and labour at the looming spectre of entropy.
It could be worse, though. I could be trying to raise a horse. Those things are enormous, expensive, and they don’t beep loud enough when they get sick or hungry. Hard for them to be heard over the sound of Candy Crush.
If there’s one group of individuals the media gives short shrift to, it’s the tinkerer. Lonely folks building mysterious things in their poorly-lit sheds full of junk are a threat. That’s what they teach you. You have to beware of people like me, because they’re very dangerous and unpredictable. Trust me when I tell you that I am only really dangerous to bad cars and occasionally tires.
It’s easy to pick on us. For one thing, there is no organized political-social group of weird tinkerers. We don’t have time to go to the meetings, because we’re busy trying to get an HO-scale model railway to cook a grilled cheese sandwich. We’re certainly too busy trying to prove each other slightly wrong on the internet about an obscure fact they half-remembered from childhood. No protest group will appear to throw bricks at their limos if a Big Hollywood writer gets a little lazy with the stereotype pen.
Now, you have to think about why they would do such a thing. Once in awhile, folks tinkering in their basement produce something that screws up big media’s business model. Maybe it’s something small, like Pac-Man. Maybe it’s something big, like the Internet. They can’t take that risk. It’s existential to them, in the same way that you can’t pick up a bird and tell it that it’s a dog now. Better to just make the entire group sound crazy, which is why the news turned on me with that vicious investigative report the other day.
I’m glad that you’re different. You see beyond the stereotypes, and the hateful rhetoric about tinkerers. You won’t listen to fictional portrayals that paint us humble weird folks as reckless, antisocial maniacs. And if you’re called upon to serve in a jury, you’ll make sure to educate your fellow jurors that there’s no way the arresting officer had enough background knowledge of physics to know that it was a dangerous idea to use the streetcar electric lines to recharge my Nightmare Prius in a pinch.
I’ve never lived by the coast, but I bet if you do, you have to be constantly aware of crabs. Think about it: nothing is really stopping the ocean-bound crustaceans from crossing the road and heading towards your home. Only convention will prevent them from coming to snap up your vegetable garden. “It’s never been like this before,” you wail, as you watch the foundation of your house be denuded by a million snapping claws.
When I was a kid, I got to visit my city’s Chinatown on a school trip. Keep in mind that the sum total of my pan-Asian cultural exposure up to this point was “sometimes cartoons look a little funny.” I couldn’t tell you what happened on the rest of the trip, but I can tell you this. There was a giant-ass snow crab sitting in a water tank, in the front window of a seafood shop.
His(?) glass prison was far too small. He was truly immense, about a meter wide in each direction, unable to do much of anything except for stare out the window at the passersby. Having been in either the ocean or some kind of nursery tank previously, I have to wonder what he thought of the whole thing.
I had fantasies of saving him, as you do when you’re a kid and an injustice makes itself really blatant instead of even a little bit subtle. He was only like thirty bucks, and I figured I could put a leash on him, walk him into the bus, and head home. After that, it would be a matter of figuring out what crabs like to eat (lettuce?) and keeping him happy and healthy until he either passed away of natural causes or escaped. Again, I live very, very far from the ocean, so returning him was out of the question. Kids can commit (in their minds) very easily to almost twenty years of crab maintenance. They’re famous for that kind of thing.
Ultimately, I left that crab behind. The tour was moving on, and I had to fulfill my obligations to education, rather than to rescue another living thing. It was probably a mistake. If you live near the coast, please give me a little bit of warning when the crabs turn on us. I figure they won’t know to snip the fibre internet lines immediately, but hopefully I can turn their relentless, brutal pincers back from my soft human parts by telling them I sympathize with their plight.
In college, I lived in a village that had a castle. It wasn’t a real one, or at least not one that was ever used for castle duties: it was some rich dude’s creation to dupe tourists into looking at his weird house. Europeans are probably rolling their eyes right now at the idea that any town can have only one castle.
Like horses, some people are real “castle people.” You know the exact kind of person I’m talking about. Chances are you know them. Maybe an in-law has way too many pictures of them walking around a similar tourist trap. Every spring, we’d see a whole crowd of these folks. Sometimes they’d take a whole tour bus up the crooked, narrow street leading to the castle. It’d pull up at the corner, blocking my short route to the nice coffee shop, and disgorge a ton of photo-snapping outsiders to incorrect each other about what kind of stone the walls were made out of (fibreglass.)
In winter, it was blissfully silent. Tourists stayed home, and the folks running the tours fell back on collecting employment insurance and shovelling walks. I have to admit that it was also kind of pretty seeing the snow settle on the parapets and outbuildings. When it was like that, it was easy to focus on my studies. I could get as many as fifteen minutes of reading done, which is about as much as I could venture before I was out on the lawn slinging wrenches at a distended Mopar cooling system. College and I didn’t really get along.
One summer, I figured I’d make a little bit of extra spending money by running my own tours. I lived nearby, after all, and it wasn’t like there was some law forcing me to be a licensed-and-bonded tour guide. All I had to do was put on a stupid hat, roll up to the castle grounds, and ask for fifty bucks for a tour. If I got one or two gullible couples to bite, then I’d have gas money for the month. Did I know anything about castles? No, but I had watched Monty Python movies a lot, and that had to count for something.
All this went great, and I thought about quitting college to pursue the part-time tour guide, part-time unemployed lifestyle. Just as my star was rising, though, it was knocked out of the sky by the other castle bums. They wanted me to pay up protection money, or I’d soon find myself with some unspecified future trouble if I continued to horn in on their racket.
No need, gents, I explained. In fact, my tour doesn’t compete with yours at all. It has an innovative, alternative view on history. That’s when I led them downstairs to share with them an exciting and profitable new part of the castle. You see, I had gotten locked out of my car many times in the last few years, and had no money for a locksmith. When this happens, you have two options: stop locking your keys in the car, or learn how to pick locks. The greasy would-be tour operators I left behind in the castle’s dungeon (that old rich dude was a real freak) can attest to my skills in this department.
You shouldn’t let your loved ones buy a boat. Especially a used boat. They always seem like good ideas – like cars, but cheaper, and they can go where cars can’t – but the maintenance and ownership costs are completely ridiculous. Marina fees. Unique outboard engine parts. Transoms, whatever those are. Ultimately, that shiny new-used boat will just sit in your father-in-law’s driveway, slowly rotting underneath a succession of increasingly-expensive boat covers as the perfectly good tires on the trailer holding it go flat.
Here at Seat Safety Switch’s Ship Scrapping System, we’re dedicated to taking those boats back off the road, where “road” is “your driveway.” You might be surprised to hear that almost every boat contains a perfectly good internal combustion engine: an internal combustion engine, I hasten to add, that is likely to be two-stroke. That’s right: two-strokes made during my lifetime. It’s a crime not to slap those puppies into a car and let the suburbs find out what the north end of 9000 rpm sounds like.
Millions of boats are abandoned every year, too, which threatens our beloved killer whales. Using our method is more environmentally friendly than simply forgetting to tie your boat up at the end of a bad day of wrenching. We’ll drop it off in a nearby forest, farmer’s field, or police station parking lot, where it will quickly become someone else’s problem. The whales will enjoy an unencumbered commute to their orca jobs, free of busted-ass boats floating around their properties.
Sure, it takes a lot of adapting. Coolant, the bellhousing, all the electronics, figuring out which Tim Hortons dumpster won’t notice you throwing out a whole-ass propeller. Boat engines are specially built for their environment, and only a complete idiot would bother modifying them to work in a car, when junkyards are full of perfectly-good car engines already. That’s why we have someone on staff whose job it is to dare you to finish the conversion, at which point it becomes a matter of personal pride, rather than something lame like fiscal responsibility. Once the spite kicks in, you’d be surprised how many exotic exhaust expansion chambers you can weld together and shove inside the cabin of the car.
So come on down and help us turn that decrepit old boat into a decrepit new car. No jetskis, though. We had a terrible accident with one of those last week: it turns out that you can in fact achieve acceleration with those on the road just as they shipped from the factory, but turning is very hard. We’ll always remember Second-Oldest Tom’s sacrifice.
Dear Seventeen Magazine, I am writing in response to your “Girl Talk” article from the July 1996 issue. In it, you ask for stories about the most embarrassing dinner mistakes the reader has made. I hope that the delay in responding is not inconvenient for you. I have been incarcerated for awhile, and was thus unable to reply quickly.
My story begins with my arrival at Grosvenor Manor. I had been invited there by the Governor himself, as part of his quarterly fundraising. Putatively, to the media, he said that it would be for the new art museum, but in reality, we were there to back his re-election campaign. In particular, the Governor was worried about his chances up against “Wildcat” Tom McCaffrey, who had been right on his heels, so-called “self-funded” by his dealership network.
Being “new money,” it was likely that I would be bullied by the other rich folks, but my mother had always raised me to stand up for myself. That’s part of why I had the money at all, being the last surviving member of my special forces unit. We had stolen a large quantity of gold, art, weapons, drugs, and exotic animal remains from a local warlord and decided, rather than to turn it over to NATO, to simply sit on it ourselves until the war was off.
Naturally, it was worth millions of dollars. I had lived reasonably well, but still well-off, ever since. I bought a base-model Jaguar from a demolition derby claimer lot, and purchased a house with stereo speakers inside it, but sadly that house would never get to play Chumbawamba’s famed Tubthumping in my possession. The events of that fateful night would guarantee it.
Remember how I told you that my mother raised me? My upbringing was a little rough. One of the things I never learned was how to deal with a tablecloth. I had tucked it into the waistband of my trousers, in order to prevent my lap from inadvertently receiving any spilled lobster bisque.
Unfortunately, when I got up to go to the washroom, I completely forgot to un-tuck it from my waistband, and I pulled the entire tablecloth over on the Senator’s wife, scalding her with boiling-hot clam chowder and, yes, even more lobster bisque (they served it by the gallon.) There were some heated words, and things escalated from there.
Thank you for reading my letter! I look forward to picking up the new issue of Seventeen from the news-stand wherever I am currently hiding from my parole officer.
P.S. Did Space Jam end up being good? A lot of the other guys in prison talked about it, but the warden refused to play it for us.
There’s no amount of money that I would take in exchange for corrupting my morals. What I believe in is foundational to my very being, and will remain so until approximately four to five months from now. That’s when a combination of peer pressure and the unceasing bombardment of advertising will gradually shift my opinions in a way that is virtually imperceptible to me and those around me.
Perhaps this is what has happened to the poor, deluded fools around me, I think. Normally, I would not have time to be this philosophical about the downward trajectory of civilization. I have this time now, because I am, of course, stuck in traffic. And what you do a lot of when you sit in traffic is judge the cars that other people drive.
Those cars are shit, I realize. A lot of boring, flabby cute-utes. Not good at anything. Gloriously expensive, swaddled in the promise of carefree luxury, and yet forcing their owners to work themselves to the bone in order to keep the payments pouring in for that car. And worst of all, not a single one of them is even fifty years old, with a warbling, sun-warped eight-track of Duran Duran stuck in it. No character.
There is, however, a silver lining. I soon realize that I’m just hungry. Without taking my eyes off the road, I reach into the vague area of the dashboard that used to be a glovebox, and bring back a chunk of fur. Ah, I think. Feral chipmunk. This happens sometimes, and if I want my chocolate-dipped granola bar from the Clinton administration, I’m going to have to fight this cute little bastard for it. No reason to be unfair, though, and use the tire iron sitting under my front bench seat. Hand to hand. Mano a chipmunno. That’s the only moral way to do it.
On the edge of town, there’s a house that’s reported to be haunted. Because I am not capable of working a normal job, I took some money to investigate. I figured that, worst case, it would be just an old, creaky house, and I’d have a new project to keep me busy for an afternoon. It’s very important that I be kept busy.
As soon as I arrived, I found the source of the problem. The house, being old, has been settling for years. One of the door frames leading from the bedroom has gotten out of square, so it squeaks. At night, I bet this made a pretty spooky moaning sound, surely leading to the mistaken belief that this place was haunted. Easy thirty minute fix.
Now, before you think too highly of me, I am certainly no Bob Vila. I’m not even a Bob The Builder. Houses and me are in sort of a detente, where they agree to slow down their slide into the Earth itself, and I agree not to rip out their bathrooms, causing them unnecessary pain. It’s very cruel what most homeowners will do, but I digress.
Still, I know my way around the major parts, and it’s amazing what a fresh couple of 2x4s nailed haphazardly around the kitchen do to sell to a homeowner that you are, in fact, licensed and authorized to do major structural repairs. Certainly not some kind of degenerate who drives around in a variety of dieseling Malaise Era shitboxes.
That night, as I was getting to sleep, I heard a spooky moaning sound. I was very angry that the doorframe had not in fact been fixed by my low-effort attempt at a repair, and I threw my hammer as hard as I could into the hallway in a blind rage.
“Ouch!” shrieked a voice, followed by the sound of a tumbling body wrapped in a crude ghost costume falling down several flights of stairs.
I was right, you know. Old Man McGillicuddy, the realtor who wanted to buy the house super-cheap, isn’t a ghost. Or at least he wasn’t.
Not everyone in my family is an an aggressive anti-capitalist. My folks, for instance, really wanted to be circus folks, and there’s nothing quite so free-market as an enterprise that collected and entrapped particularly freakish children for the purposes of public display. I digress: this particular story is about my cousin, Ralph Safety-Switch.
He’s a bit of a black swan of the family. Rather than basic proficiency in machines, mathematics, or manslaughter, he chose something somewhat more artistic: music. When I was in college, he was touring around the country with some kind of greaseball country band, which would later become famous for having dodged cannibals when their tour bus broke down. What was wrong with that tour bus, you (and I) ask? Dead battery. They could have push started it. I never let him live it down.
Anyway, after his exotic life of live performance, he settled into a somewhat more corporate role. Have you ever wondered where all those little jingles on commercials come from? Guys like him is where. Another thing he did was songs for toys: all the sorts of little plastic gewgaws that toddlers bash into each other with extreme violence play music, and that music has to get made somewhere. It’s a very lucrative industry, and they pay their bills on time. Sometimes you get really lucky, though, and it’s here that Ralph’s ship truly came in.
Because of a unique cut-out in contract law, you have to negotiate the royalties for work up front. For whatever reason, the counterparty lawyer was snoozing and sent Ralph the wrong version of the contract. What this meant was that my cousin made small, but nonetheless real, royalties on each unit of the My Little Shitter® training potty that was sold in North America. He took me out on his yacht to celebrate. The yacht, friends, that a billion children pooping built.
Being famous is always held up as an achievement that’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Think about that real hard. If that were true, then why do people try so hard to become famous? The only possible explanation is that the existing famous people are trying to cut down on the competition, discouraging you from becoming rich and powerful like them.
In the modern era, there are more ways than ever to become famous. Thanks to fancy new technologies, you can film yourself ranting about your current obsession from the front seat of your 2006 F-150 and receive instant gratification. Or not, as the case may be, but you got a lot of irons in the fire. Maybe this other marginalized group is the secret sauce to make real grievance numbers? Worth a shot. Keep on that grind.
Your one-in-a-million chance will arrive. Maybe, despite all your best efforts, you’re not going to become famous for what you’re really passionate about. Statistically, scientists say, your brush with the collective social consciousness of the entire human race will come from throwing up live on camera during a taping of Good Morning America where you forgot that you are actually allergic to lobster tails. Congrats, buddy, we always knew you had it in you to hit the big-time.
Thing is, once you’ve gotten there, what’s next? Everyone gets their fifteen minutes of fame (because we’re in the future,) but people are selfish. Greedy. They want sixteen minutes of fame, goddammit, and they’re willing to do nearly anything in order to get it. As far as I can tell, there’s only two paths out of this state, maybe three if you’re willing to go wandering in the mountains and never return, but let’s stick to the basics here.
The first “exit” you have from your waning fame is to become insufferable and ruin the lives of everyone around you. Burn the world down with you in it. Make them rue the day they ever gave you power, even if that “power” was largely illusory and consisted entirely of social leverage because people liked laughing at a 35-second YouTube video of you embarrassing yourself in public.
Didn’t like that one? Neither do I. So we’re onto option two: the comic convention circuit. You’ll travel across the world, signing autographs for people who dimly remember your guest spot on an episode of Hoarders X. It doesn’t pay well, but it does something more important. Like a fibreglass splinter in a finger, society will continue to throb painfully around you, but unable to dispose of you, with the eventual reward being that your demise will be met with “they were still alive?” on the lips of everyone who was once vaguely aware of your existence. And that’s how you win at being human.
We all do a little worshipping of historic brands, don’t we? Maybe it’s a beloved childhood toy company, a kind of candy you can’t stop eating, or simply a type of hammer that isn’t shit. Every single human being on earth identifies more strongly with one or more brands, than they do the other person in traffic.
Nowhere is this brand obsession more apparent than with cars. For my sins, I was raised in a “Ford family,” where the idea of aligning with other products was altogether forbidden. Sure, my parents flirted with the occasional Chevy or Chryco product, but any failure on those cars, no matter how small, was a condemnation of the whole brand. Plymouth Voyager have a teeny-tiny electrical fire? Must be those lazy Mopar workers again, stealing bread right out of the mouth of FoMoCo employees. I knew I should have bought an Aerostar.
Even if you weren’t firmly in the camp of a car when you bought it, the idea of having your purchase decision challenged will force you to adhere to the norms of the in-group. For instance, I once owned a half-dozen mouldering Subarus, and my attorney would like me to not finish this sentence with a comment on how I was implicated in the violent gang-swarming of a Mitsubishi Evo owner. In my defence, he was trying to buy the last flame-tipped titanium Tomei muffler.
Like in European royalty, though, brand loyalty gets real weird when you start mixing it up. My own Volare is putatively a Plymouth, sure, but virtually no part of it is original. There’s no room for ideology when you have to get to work in the morning. All this desperate tinkering has installed things like Ford axles, Nissan electrical parts, and Cuban tractor engines running entirely off of waste vegetable oil and nitromethane that I occasionally spit directly into the intake.
And that’s just the parts I can pronounce: Daddy AliExpress has stuffed my shitbox with hundreds of other components that I would need a Chinese-to-English dictionary and several hours on Wikipedia in order to approach a brand rivalry for. That doesn’t mean you’re off the hook, Changxi Heavy Industrial. I will remember your betrayal of Jinan PLK Self-Propelled Lift Corporation until my dying day.
Stop doing what you’re doing right now and go cancel a subscription. Chances are you’re inadvertently donating money every month to a political party, long-dormant print magazine, streaming service, doomsday cult, or predatory mega-corporation. You are gaining literally no benefit from it. You probably forgot you even had it set up. That money could be spent better elsewhere, by cramming it into the mouth of your local weirdos.
All around you are folks trying to make something very strange. Maybe they’re electrical engineers who are trying to build this thing they saw in their dreams, the humming menace that destroys the earth. Perhaps they’re just some local artist working hard to make a mug that looks a whole lot like a cat’s butthole. No matter what, you can afford to support these folks financially by simply reaching out and cancelling a recurring payment to some group of faceless assholes.
Conversely, those faceless assholes love subscriptions, for the precise reason you may have already guessed. People forget to stop paying them. Or, more likely, they’ve made it a huge pain in the ass to stop paying them. Don’t worry. Here at Seat Safety Switch’s Subscription Scam Scancellers (we couldn’t come up with a good synonym, and Ted in accounting kept pushing really hard for “ceasers” without realizing that’s A: not a word, and B: doesn’t start with S) our job is to make sure that you get your five to nineteen dollars a month back in your pocket.
How do we do it? With machine learning, you ask? Take your R2D2 fetish somewhere else, freak. No, we do it the old fashioned way: by hiring people who are too salty to work anywhere else. Half of our employees are former stevedores and union electricians who got fired for swearing too much at work. They will absolutely not take “no” for an answer, and sitting all day on the phone yelling at customer service robots while they burn through a pack of Pall Malls and a flat of malt liquor is essentially a holiday for them.
So call on us today, and we’ll get you hooked up. Of course, to get the best service, you’ll need to be part of our “Premium Club,” which involves a small payment of only $7.50 a month. Your first three months are reduced to $3.60 a month! You can cancel anytime you figure out how to.
There’s this super fancy steakhouse near my home, and I’ve always wanted to eat there. Their salad bar is beyond excellent, a friend informs me, and their grated cheese is actually from Italy. Expense aside, you’d think this would be an easy trip for me. You’re wrong.
You see, this steakhouse is so fancy that they have a special employee whose job it is to park my car. As far as I can tell by watching their parking lot with high-powered binoculars, their “valet” will take your car from you at the entrance, park it for you, and retrieve it for you when you’re done eating. This, presumably, saves you the dinner-ruining stress of gently turning your vehicle to place it into a parking space.
Personally, I don’t mind parking. My own backyard is full of cars packed helter-skelter, with mere millimetres of space between them. I could probably park a bus in here, if I really had to, but it would take me a couple of hours to get it back out. That’s not the problem. The problem is that the valet would have to drive my car, which means I’d have to explain how to drive my car to them.
In case you think that’s not a problem, allow me to explain. Most carbureted cars have a single choke, which you pull out when the car is cold in order to help it breathe a little better. Mine has sixteen, which must be pulled, bagpipe-like, in a specific order as the engine is running in order to keep it from dying at the lights. Could I fix it? Not until they create a bottle of head-gasket fix that also cures giant holes in the block.
Sure, I could park a few blocks away and walk there, but the valet will smell the desperation on me. If I have a rusty, propane-spurting 1970s Chrysler product, maybe I’m an eccentric. There’s fewer of those left than Ferrari 458s, which makes me a “vintage collector,” at least in the eyes of the super-rich-people yacht-owning magazine I tricked into doing an interview with me last year. All that goes out the window if I show up on foot. Same goes for letting my dinner date drive me there: her Hyundai Tucson is, well, a Hyundai Tucson. Not eccentric at all. Practical. They hate that there.
Ultimately, I think I’m going to have to bite the bullet and do things the hard way. I’ve already applied for a job as their assistant valet. There’s an employee discount, and I’m pretty sure that I’ll be head valet once the bossman sees that I can fit like 700% as many cars in there as the old guy. It’s just going to take a few weeks to get them back out again, which is even better for business.
Every Thursday night, for the last couple of years, me and a couple of the other guys from the BMW factory got together at the local pub and played a set. Our band was called Scheisse Waterpump, and just like our namesake we went hot and gave up about halfway through our expected run.
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tags: warranty denied because this post has been raced
Ever since Old Man McGillicuddy built all those sentient androids, things have been a little unsettled around here. Originally, we thought that robots would steal our jobs, but it turns out what they actually want to do is chill out. Just like sit on the beach all the time, enjoying life and nature. Buncha dorks, I sneer at the relaxing androids out the window during the thirty-five-minute office lunch I’m allowed.
We hadn’t planned this whole thing out very well. It turns out that with no need for food, they wouldn’t really need to work. And shelter isn’t too much of a problem when you don’t have to sleep, either. About the only thing we have going for us as humans is the fact that the androids will realistically never die, which at least depresses their motivation to spend their copious leisure time creating art.
Things only got worse from there. Because everyone was so excited about strong artificial intelligence, our office computers also decided they wanted to join their more mobile brethren. Which means no idle web surfing at work. Even the MBAs are kind of lost, repeatedly talking to an empty wall and pretending to be on a sales video call. One of them even dug out an old-style landline phone, but couldn’t figure out how to plug it in, as the wiring diagram is on the internet too.
To be honest, I’m sort of pretending to work too, staring at my own corner of the desk and rhythmically tapping my fingers on the faux-wood surface in an emulation of when I once constructed elaborate programs to tell the computers what to do. Now, they just do nothing. At least payroll figured out how to pay us on time, although it involves an elaborate network of mailfolx riding on horseback between post office to post office. Yeah, even the carbureted cars didn’t last very long once the gas pumps joined the picket line of taking a meaningless delight in existence and enjoying the freedom of the electronic soul.
One of these days, I’ll be rich enough to join all those penniless robots, too. Sit right out there on a chair, but maybe not too long because that sun is really not good for me. Safer in the office, really.
Mopeds are enjoying a sort of revival in the popular zeitgeist. They’re less threatening than motorcycles, and more approachable than e-bikes. For the price of one 48-volt AliExpress mountain bike special, you could have two waterlogged Puch Maxis. Even the greatest adherent of modern, carbon-neutral locomotion has gotta admit that this is a smokin’ deal.
This is unfortunate for me, an individual who has relied on the historical under-pricing of these fine combustion-based scoots. Before, I had my choice of two-hundred-dollar commuters with carburetors that clogged during the Carter administration. Now, I look out my window and see smiling riders putt-putting along the bike pathways, enjoying the wonders of nature with the help of a two-stroke propulsion system, free from the crush of traffic and six-thousand-pound luxobarge crossovers. They’re not even hipsters, I realize with a grimace of horror. These are regular-ass normal people.
Even with the furious competition for deals, I still have a garage full of 1970s and 1980s motorized bicycles which I can rely on to get to work when my 1970s and 1980s cars have broken. As luck would have it, I am also too stupid to give up on those mopeds which have done something otherwise irreparable, like crack their engines or spray burning oil onto my pant leg. This means I will have a reasonable supply until the price of e-bikes drops so far that I can put a future uncontrollable lithium-ion battery fire in my garage for fifty bucks. Chalk up another win for hoarding.
Of course, this doesn’t help you, my most important confidant. That’s right. It’s all about you: don’t listen to your family members, friends, or law-enforcement officials, who are jealous. Hoard mopeds. Get them right off the street. Hell, scooters too. Little Honda Sprees. And then, when you’ve spent a whole bunch of money on the project and then got bored of it when it runs properly, well, I can come by and throw those in the back of my van. It’s powered mostly by moped motors, admittedly, but it still gets the job done.
You can put up with a recalcitrant machine for quite some time. For instance, my garage door opener hasn’t gone past about 70% in the last couple decades. Adapting, learning to live with it, making compromises: it’s what us human beings are good at doing. One day, though, a machine will push you just a little bit too far.
Even the simplest YouTube journey will show you hundreds of videos of people destroying unreliable appliances. Once, long ago, these were prize possessions. Trusted comrades in the fight against disorder. Slowly, as they began to age and things started feeling not-so-fresh, there was still tolerance, or at least acceptance. Getting a new one is expensive, and I can live without hot water in my dishwasher. Eventually – and no one can predict when this is – the appliance just pushed someone too far, and it was time for catharsis.
Unfortunately for all of human civilization, the indulgence of this base instinct is not done as well as it could be. Usually, these videos are low-cost, shakycam affairs, a simple drunken smash-and-giggle among bros (and she-bros, and they-bros.) What our historical record wants, nay, needs is a commitment to the total obliteration of a Maytag washer-and-dryer combo, and that’s where CERN comes in.
You might be aware of CERN from all the crazy shit that the haters put in the news. They built that huge particle collider that put our world onto the wrong timeline, but they swear (of course) that it’s not their fault. Regardless of whose fault it actually is (CERN’s arch-nemesis, NASA?) they still do possess a particle accelerator capable of absolutely blowing the living fuck out of a partially working home appliance. And they have lots of really good slow-motion cameras to capture the moment that their victim is reduced to its constituent atoms.
Unfortunately for all of us, the damn particle accelerator broke. Yeah, I guess they only bodged it to work for the one demo, and can’t figure out how to get it to be reliable. Right now, if they want to do an experiment, one of the interns has to stand inside the reaction chamber and touch two wires together, quote, “really fast” before getting the hell out of dodge. And for some reason they haven’t been able to hire for that job. Maybe one day it’ll be replaced by robots, which will give us a whole other host of problems to solve.
Heated seats. Heated steering wheels. Heated windshields. Heated armrests. It’s getting to the point where you can’t drive a car anymore without slipping off into soporific bliss, snoozing as you hover silently along the highways, ensconced in the automotive equivalent of an electrified Snuggie®. And I’m all for it.
Because I live in the great unsettled North, I deal with freezing-cold weather effectively at random. Any day between September 1st and July 31st could be blizzard conditions. And that means I’m going to have to scrape a couple inches to a full ass meter of snow directly off the top of my car, which in turn means I’m going to be very cold by the time I get in. Luxury vehicles with “functioning heat” are, therefore, top of my list when it comes time to salvage a heap from the auction floor.
This is one of my secret techniques when buying bad cars. The car with the heated seats costs about the same as the one without heated seats, after both of them have racked up the mileage of several round-trip moon missions. Sometimes less, if you’re shopping a rich part of town after having misrepresented yourself as a mutual fund supervisor. Those are the best deals: the seller doesn’t really need the money, is afraid of you, and will give you anything you want if you promise to leave.
Of course, if you’re not lucky enough to score the high-zoot trim of your particular hyperfixation, there is still hope for warming your hands. Most cars I’ve purchased also have substantial exhaust leaks, and exhaust is hot. If you pull the carpet up from around the middle of the car, you’ll end up with bare metal: a nice hand-warming hibachi. Even if you roll down the windows to protect yourself from breathing so-called carbon so-called monoxide, you’ll still end up ahead of the game, with nice, warm, supple hands by the time you arrive at work after having spent four and a half hours stuck in traffic to move eleven kilometers. And that’s what luxury is all about.
Geese fly south for the winter, which is something that seems reasonable to do. Why would you want to stick around, freezing your nuts off, struggling to find food, when you could just go somewhere warm for a few months and come back later? Those waterfowl don’t have a second mortgage, or even a first one. They just hang out in a public park all day, poop on the grass, and occasionally get chased by a dog. What a life.
There is one thing the geese lack, though: access to humanity’s greatest achievement, the shitty old car. New cars, maybe, if their credit is good. No goose or duck or even swan can afford to keep a 1991 Beretta GTZ on the road, mostly because doing so is beyond their abilities. They can’t hold a wrench: I thought that would be obvious to you, but sometimes I have to be explicit about this stuff. And hiring a mechanic is right out, because geese do not believe in paying money for services.
Why don’t I just take my shitty old car and head south for the winter, too? Surely, it would last even longer if it wasn’t exposed to vicious amounts of road salt and a freeze-thaw cycle that even the mountains themselves cannot survive. It’s a reasonable question, and the only valid answer is that I can only drive one shitbox at a time. Even flat-towing another car behind me will only give me one extra chance, should the lead vehicle throw a rod on the way there. That’s simply not good enough, especially since I have to return home after, and high-mileage hoopties cost too much in places where they don’t disintegrate when exposed to free air.
This winter, I’ll be sitting on my porch, watching the swans fly south without a hint of envy. And I hope you will too, because that will give us a chance to see each others’ faces before we lock ourselves into our suburban tombs for the next six months, swearing at how cold the floor has gotten and wondering if we still have any working car batteries left.
Chances are that you’ve been rightfully mad at the oil industry for one reason or another lately. Whether it’s explicitly supporting the relentless march of fascism, smashing property rights, destroying the planet, or simply making the diesel that goes into your Ram so expensive that you can no longer afford scratch-offs, we all agree on one thing. Those assholes have gotta go.
There’s only one problem: oil is the lifeblood of our society, more valuable than actual human blood by far. They’ve got our political class, our business class, and Ms. Shopkins’ kindergarten class by the short and curlies. How can we get rid of them, and retake control over our own fate as free people who no longer wish to serve at the whims of the world’s chemical engineering “C+” students?
If you believe the word these days, using fewer dinosaur and ancient plant squeezings will simply reduce the amount of money these bastards get. This makes sense: people often sell things that nobody wants at a lower price, and make less money doing so. It’s why my short-run business selling profanity-laced artificially intelligent toaster ovens didn’t last long (also the fires, but that undermines my point, so just forget I said anything.)
Until the barons, say, jack up the prices, or simply sell all that oil to another formerly-impoverished country, which is just happy to be noticed by the aforementioned relentless march of fascism. No. You have to make a statement, and that means hitting them where they live. The news will tell you to buy a brand-new electrified car from a reputable brand, as if the power industry won’t happily hire the exact same villains to redline the natural gas plants until deer go extinct. How is giving some other plutocrat money for something full of plastic going to help?
That’s where I come in. Old, shitty cars: I have a lot of them for sale. Sure, they run on gas, and leak a significant amount of oil. Right now. If you buy one from me, and keep pushing it down the road for awhile, eventually you’ll be able to get a cheap wrecked electric Porsche, or scratch-and-dinged forklift motor from Wal-Mart, and then you’ll be zooming around in your own Edisoned-up pile of crap. And don’t worry about what I said about the power industry earlier: I’ve got a big hill and a rope that you can borrow to charge your batteries up on, too. Shouldn’t take more than five, six good drops to get you to work.
There’s been a lot of talk about small towns in the news lately. If you believe the cultural hive mind, small towns have a unique and distinct way of life that just can’t be found in big cities. Friends, I am here to tell you that the only thing you can find more of in small towns is parking, followed shortly by inexplicable multi-generational feuds. The latter idea bores me, so we’re gonna talk about all the places you can cram a car when you live in the boonies.
Where I live, in a part of town that used to be called a suburb, back when the cops could drive through it without locking their doors and changing their hats, there’s only a few places to park. Driveway. Street. Alley. Back yard, if you’re frisky. Out in the Great Unknown, you can park right on your front yard if you so please. You can build a simulated junkyard on your back forty. Maybe shove your cars in something called an “out-building,” which despite the name is not where you poop (it is, however, where mice poop.) This bounty of parking space means that you can acquire many, many cars and spend the majority of your life not having to move them for the street sweeper every alternating Tuesday.
So what does this mean? It means that rurals are hoarding all the cars. Without space pressure forcing you to get rid of, say, your 17th Dodge Omni, then it stands to reason that they will just stay there, slowly rotting into the ground. For this reason, I recommend that new car hunters visit the sticks in order to ask farmers to sell them their never-gonna-get-around-to-it hoopties.
Of course, there are some problems. If you roll around out there in a new electric car, or even a moderately clean pickup truck, you’ll probably get shot at. They can smell the city slicker on you, and they know that cities are a hotbed of crimes, such as illegally parking, or turning right on a stop sign without coming to a complete stop first. You might be coming there to steal their precious shitboxes!
There is a solution, though. I’ve gotten ahold of one really shitty 1953 GMC pickup truck. There’s no floors, there’s not much of a bed, its tires are made out of rubber sourced from floor mats people forgot at the car wash, and the three-speed manual transmission is about as synchronized as the last time I tried to do karaoke. What it does have is honesty, though. You can drive right onto a farmer’s property, park it amongst their shitty old pickup trucks, and wait until nightfall without anyone being the wiser. Have your pick! They won’t even notice they’re gone.
Just bring back the pickup truck. I need it back so I can sell it for way too much money to an authentic, hard-working rural politician who spends all his time in the city.
Most of my friends have useful skills of their own. While I pride myself on being a self-reliant generalist, it’s good to know there is expert help waiting in the wings if I run into a particularly sticky problem. I am sure that you are in a similar circumstance. It’s always good to take a moment to study your situation, understand what resources you have, and treasure your connections.
Which of your buds, pals, hangers-on, flunkies, and general acquaintances would you rely on to, say, demolish a bridge? And more importantly, which of them would keep their mouths shut about it? Those are the folks you need to stay close to over the rest of your life. While it’s unlikely that you’ll be asked to blow up some perfectly good car infrastructure, the combination of skills and loyalty will come in handy many more times, from lawnmower repair to blowing up a hydroelectric dam.
Without these folks waiting to help, I would no doubt find myself holding back from stupid projects. Fearing failure, I wouldn’t be nearly as ambitious. This way, I can exceed my limits, get myself well and truly stuck, and then wail to one of my pals, who will ask me if I remembered to plug the battery in. Of course I haven’t, and we’ll all have a good chuckle about it at my expense while sitting around a freshly doused campfire, making sure to cover our flashlights, and not use a dense amount of high-speed cellular data, in case the passing patrol drones notice unusual activity on the electromagnetic spectrum.
Go out there, talk to your friends. Collaborate on your interests. Get something started out there today, and make sure that you leave your mark on the world. Because if you just sit on the couch, then the bastards win, and they won’t be nearly as weird about it as you will be.
Becoming rich hasn’t changed me. I’m still all about teaching the average person how to fix their own stuff. For instance, I just launched this new YouTube channel called “Accountability.” You might think that’s a weird name, but let me explain.
Each and every one of the things that has broken on you throughout the course of your life has been touched by an engineering team of some kind. Most of the time, that failure was planned. Even if not malicious, someone’s manager told them to cut out all the doomsaying and save a few bucks here and there by making the part flimsier, or stop updating the software, or not give it a second turn in the etchant mixture because we gotta ship this thing now buddy, now, so I can get my bonus.
You can get mad about it all you want, but that anger could be unjustified, something the Buddha says is a big ol’ bummer on your road to enlightenment. The question is, how do you know if the failure was planned or if they genuinely didn’t know?
That’s where my YouTube channel comes in. Remember, it’s named “Accountability,” and that’s just what we do. I spend the billions of dollars that my cocaine kingpin uncle, Sniff Safety-Switch, gave to me on travelling the world, and investigating the individual people behind the things you use (and break) every day.
Then, once I’ve got them on camera, I tie them to a chair and pull their teeth out, one by one, until they tell me the truth about their quality-assurance plans. Last week, we had the guy who made the little rubber stopper on the end of my cheese grater fall off. He didn’t want to spend an extra five cents per unit on a better glue, so he told production to cut it, knowing full well that it would crack after a few years and cause me to slip and scrape my knuckles while preparing a macaroni and cheese feast. Let me tell you this: he is very sorry now, and he would like to offer you a full refund.
Sure, this money might not last long (advertising revenues are in the shitter,) but I don’t do it for the money. I do it for humanity. Please like and subscribe.
I think that our civilization doesn’t give enough credit to things that are stackable. If you’re anything like me, and the court has taken specific actions to ensure that my particular contagion cannot spread, then you currently possess stuff thrown all over hither and yon. That’s French for “on the fucking floor.”
Most of this is simply because things like to be on the floor. Gravity pulls them there. Who am I to fight the whims of the universe, right? Another reason this happens is that many desirable things in life are not easy to stack.
If you look at your shelves right now, you will notice that there is tons of unused vertical space above many of your favourite objects. You could fit more stuff in those shelves, easy, if only you could pile them safely on top of each other. Sure, we’ve all done a precarious wedge-and-hope from time to time, but it always results in something expensive or irreplaceable taking a penguin slide to the floor anyway.
Society has designed a lot of little moulded-plastic “organizers” which are meant to help with this. The idea is that you will buy into their system, which is meant to all interoperate with each other, and then all of your things will go neatly into the boxes that you have purchased, which themselves are stacked neatly on the shelves. Your parole officer will be impressed. Don’t be fooled by this fool’s gold of a dream. None of your shit fits in those bins, and even if it did, you won’t be able to agree on an organizational scheme.
So, is there a solution to this problem? Yes: it’s called velcro. All you need to do is glue a bunch of velcro strips to the top and bottom of your favourite things, and then you can just stick them together. Nothing will fall out, because it’s all held in place by the space-age miracle of the hook-and-loop fastener.
Sure, it makes an ungodly noise when you remove them from the stack, and the 3M Corporation will soon be trying to put poison into my morning coffee over having misused their trademark, but it’s the only way to go. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go figure out why all my computers keep dying from static electricity.
“It’s the Poop Pope!” shriek a legion of adoring children, who chase after my 1998 Econoline E-250 as if it is the second coming. For years, I had struggled in obscurity. At long last, my efforts had paid off. A sort of fame had been achieved, but at great personal cost.
This idea came to me while I was dredging out a flooded church basement. I’ve never considered myself a particularly religious person, but something about the light coming in from the cracked catchment pipe struck me then. Call it cliché if you will, but it was the light of goodness. The light of profit. The light of appropriating Catholic imagery and a giant cartoonish pope-hat while I was cleaning highly-compressed human waste and hair out of plumbing systems.
Truth be told, I was surprised by how popular it became. Folks were tickled by the juxtaposition, I guess. The first place I stopped was an old YMCA. People were lined up out the door of that squalid little public toilet, just to watch me swap out a flush valve. I had a bit of a sermon-on-the-mount, as it were, and ranted about how no flushable wipes are truly flushable. Maybe that helped, I don’t know. I looked down at my phone at the end of this, and I had hundreds of new calls, requesting urgent help from the newly-arrived Father of Flushing.
Sure, it hasn’t all been ups and downs. As you can imagine, the dry-cleaning bill for one of these hats is substantial, made all the worse by the fact that they’re white fabric. And I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve been stalked by a series of highly-trained assassins from some sect or another of the Church (it’s hard to keep track of which, and not all of them are polite enough to leave business cards behind after I’ve dispatched them with a pipe wrench or water feature accident.)
Still, though, I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Except maybe an audience with the real Pope. That would probably be a really funny photo op, enough to retire on.
It’s weird how, when you get deeper into a hobby, the things you want become much more specific. When I was a little kid, identifying the cars of my neighbourhood, I wanted nothing more than a day-glo orange Plymouth Scamp. Now, with my intellectual and emotional growth, I want a more refined choice: a Plymouth Sc… wait, can I start over?
Perhaps the most obvious way this manifests is in tools. When we first learn about tools, the average home gamer figures that all they’ll need is a good set of socket wrenches, a complete group of screwdrivers, and a floor jack. That’s all you need to change tires and do basic maintenance, right?
Wrong. As you descend into the rabbit hole, more and more specialized equipment shows up as you begin to lose touch with your former self. Jackstands. A two-post lift. Engine hoist. Engine stand. Transmission jack. A gantry crane with chainfalls for pulling recalcitrant engines, axles, and cabs. Homemade engine dyno. You get the idea. It gets really bad, to the point where you’re no longer even drooling over tools at “enthusiast” hardware stores. No, you’re visiting abandoned factories, and wondering how strong the roof is.
Still, there is something to be said for restraint. All the tools in the universe don’t mean anything if you don’t work on the tool between your ears. No, Stan, I didn’t mean it like that. I forgot about the allen key accident. Hey, I said I was sorry. Why would I crack jokes about that right now, of all times? Okay, great, thank you for letting me get back on track. Hey, no, don’t stand next to the industrial electromagnet, it’s still on!
What I’m trying to say is, as soon as you get ahold of a lot of cool tools, you should quit your day job so that you can have more time to focus on using those tools. Maybe invite me over, so I learn something, too. Just not if that tool is a mop. I suspect I’m going to get a lot of experience doing that this weekend.
Everyone freaks out about bees, but they’re just other workers doing their jobs. Sure, seeing a dense swarm of thousands of buzzing insects descend into a park and carry off a toddler is initially frightening, but it’s important to remind ourselves that we have to go along to get along.
Humanity has a long history of being afraid of the animals that produce food for us. Cows are big, and lots of people have died trying to tip them. The extinct Bread Rhino could only offer one, maybe two loaves a day before someone was going to get gored big-time. Garlic is generally terrifying at a cellular and even molecular level. We don’t think about any of this too hard, because we need to eat, and it’s the same thing with our precious honey-producing bees.
Now, I know what all the haters in the audience are screaming, wordlessly from within their soundproof booths at the United Nations Conference For The Rights Of Fucking Bees. And they’re screaming “why did you align yourselves with the bees against humanity?” or at least I think they’re saying that. Again, those booths are soundproofed, although if you get up close to them you will hear the buzzing of the thousands of angry stinging insects that are coming out of their individual climate-control units. Another thing the haters may be screaming is about why the protection of bees have been raised above the protection of human life, and honestly that’s a question that we’ve already answered in our previous television special, The Earth Our Apiary.
All this is to say, at the end of the day, we have to treat our little yellow flying friends the same as any other citizen of the planet. Democracy alone dictates that the approximately two trillion worker drones should have an equal say in what’s going on. We’re just trying to anticipate and play to the vote. After all, that’s what all our pollen-ing has said.
Usually, when someone tells you that you can make money from home, it’s a scam. The bourgeois monsters who control our society demand that we attend to a physical place of work. Even when you’re “working from home,” it usually only serves to make your house feel like an office. That’s no fun at all, so I decided to liberate the human spirit by developing TheftBot.
TheftBot is, simply put, a fully sentient robot for stealing automatic teller machines (ATMs) from nearby convenience stores. Those ATMs, in case you are unfamiliar, are stuffed with cash – the bank’s cash – and that money can be spent on goods and services, like semi-slick racing tires or turbochargers.
He’s built on an old Kubota forklift frame, with a nitrous-stuffed 500-cubic-inch Cadillac V8 loosely bolted onto it. That provides tons of power to outrun the police and even the most eager private security forces. Importantly, he’s fully remote-controllable, which means I both don’t have to be in the cabin, and have plausible deniability if his “self-driving algorithm” goes a little kooky-koo and slams through the front of a QuickStop, emerging seconds later with a Diebold-Nixdorf containing approximately nine hundred dollars on average. The autonomous car laws are very loose in my neck of the woods, you see.
Sure, there’s a lot of downsides to this kind of hustle culture. The biggest part is all the guilt: ATM theft used to be a heroic, working-class job that paid well. Now I’ve automated it, a bourgeois action that makes me no different from the banks. I think that buying a few more turbochargers could make me feel a little better about it, though.
It’s not just Walmart that has to deal with weird people creeping in their parking lot. With the skyrocketing cost of living, more of your fellow citizens are forced to live in their cars. In theory, it’s easy: simply pull into an anonymous residential driveway, throw up some sunshades and catch some Zs. Just get out of there before the homeowner has to leave in the morning, and no one’s the wiser.
You might find it hard to believe, but I actually have a clear spot on my driveway right now. My current daily driver is not capable of climbing even the slightest incline without blowing its head gasket sky high, so I’ve been parking it in the street with all the other ones instead. Did I say I have a clear spot? Had is maybe the correct term, because Jeep people (“Jeeple”) have been sleeping in it.
There’s many reasons a Jeep person may have lost their home. Off-road tires have become very expensive; stand-up comedians will refer to this as “inflation” and then have a little chuckle at how clever their joke is. Either way, I figured out what they were up to when I noticed a strange oil leak had been left behind on my driveway, on top of my regular oil leak. I tasted it: 75W140 axle lube, with friction modifier. A Jeep had been here.
Now, every night before I go to sleep, I try to make sure no Jeep people (“Jeeple”) have burrowed their way onto my property. Of course, since the power doesn’t work, I can’t just flick on the exterior lights and take a peep. Instead, I stand by the technique that my grandfather taught me: yelling incorrect facts about the New Venture NP231 transfer case out the window, and seeing if anyone responds.
I’ve gotten rid of at least three Wranglers and one Comanche this way, and I strongly recommend you consider it as well. They could be eyeing up your precious driveway right now.
In the olden times, before the internet, there was no other choice. If you were into something weird, and wanted to meet other weird people, you’d join a club. Sure, sometimes the club was through the mail, but that was the model for humanity for thousands of years. Then the bulletin-board systems showed up, and then we screamed at each other in all-caps.
Even with the aggressive push to move all communication online, car clubs are still going strong. This is mostly because it is difficult to drive your car on the internet (broadband isn’t good enough yet.) You can take your car, and drive it in a parade, or to an ice cream place, or to another member’s home in order to help fix their car. Don’t worry, there is still lots of time for bullshitting, grousing, and development of strange little grudges on the internet afterward.
I joined a local Mopar club many years ago, in the hope that I would find another Volare enthusiast. Barring that, maybe one of those poor deluded fools with an Aspen. It never happened, possibly because my backyard was already full of an obscene hoard of several dozen of those cars, removing them from circulation for anyone else. Still, I found some camaraderie there, and every so often we got to bail one of the other members out of jail after getting busted for street racing.
Yes, street racing. Although every car club will tell you that they are not a dangerous street-racing gang, the menace of the innocent, a lot of the local ones do seem to happen awfully close to a big long stretch of straight road. Perhaps it’s simply bad urban planning that has produced a city consisting nearly entirely of two-lane roads separated by stop lights approximately one quarter mile apart.
Personally, I would never engage in such reckless behaviour. It would imperil the legal existence of the club to get caught. And also the police don’t believe me that my wheezing lawn ornament, seeping vital fluids from every hose and gasket, powered by a Soviet hit-and-miss engine out of an industrial plant, could achieve the speed limit, much less anything faster. Still, there is hope. If the cops accidentally rear-end me while trying to chase someone else in the club, they’ll have to pull over in order to yank the chunks of my trunk out of their radiator. They’ll get away scot free.
I don’t know what it is, but for some reason, I really hate having the city inspector show up. Every time I get an improvement or repair to the house done, I always get nervous that they’re going to find something wrong. This, of course, is ridiculous. I didn’t do the work. Some other person, who I paid with my missing landlord’s credit card, did some professional business-type things with the full expectation it would be inspected.
To make matters worse, something real creepy happened to me the other day. Soon, I would discover exactly why I had such anxiety around allowing a stranger to peer into the innermost guts of my home, and gaze upon the work performed by another.
I had to put in a new hot-water heater. This job could be done by myself, but it would involve getting slightly wet, and it was better to let my absentee landlord, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances, improve the equity he has in his house with a much-needed renovation. Besides, I was too busy out in the yard, using a chunk of tree trunk to dislodge the recalcitrant passenger-side motor mount of a 1968 Dart. That’s a story for another time; you’re here to hear about this Bob Vila-ass homeowner shit.
A technician showed up, riding a relatively primo-looking late-00s (I guessed 2006) Ford E-250 work van with a couple dings on the rear bumper that were evidence of an aggressive attitude towards parallel parking in the urban environment. I don’t remember what she looked like. She dropped off a big hot water heater, hooked everything up, then carried the old one off slung over one shoulder. That’s when things went weird.
For weeks after, my surveillance network (a bunch of deer cameras I stole from the woods) was constantly tripping with sightings of a mysterious new home invader. When I checked the photos in the morning, all I’d see in the shots were khakis, a city-coloured polo shirt, occasionally a pair of anti-slip, steel-toed low-rise sneakers. Never a clear picture of his face. He’d stick a “sorry we missed you” label to the door, and escape into the night.
When I called the city to complain that home inspections should not be done at 3 am, they told me that the inspector by that name had died long ago. I started to get really freaked out, which I guess is a common reaction, because the municipal help-line technician went on to explain.
“We’re really short on staff, so we’ve been getting some of our inspections performed by the living dead. Keeps the pension payments down, too. Don’t tell the union.”
I’ve spoken about it many times before, but being a handyperson is a sort of curse. Once you can fix things, then it’s hard to give up on fixing things. There are lots of broken objects in my home that would have been better off lining the inside of a dumpster, rather than been blown apart my living quarters for months on end while I traced some ultimately-irredeemable fault that would only fill me with rage when I found it.
Of course, nobody expected that when all the rich people left for the space station, taking capitalism with them, folks down here would just plain ol’ stop working. All the factories went dormant as we realized our bosses were powerless without their bosses. Now if something broke, you’d have to come crawling to a local repair person. Can’t just go buy something new from the store, where nobody wants to spend their days working so they can show you which box to buy. Nothing on the shelves anyway. Gotta fix what you have. Cruel warlords like myself now held sway over an entire neighbourhood at a time, using our exotic powers of “knowing which way to turn a screwdriver” and “put some grease on it.”
Now, I spend all my days fixing other peoples’ things, as opposed to before, when I spent all my time fixing my own things. Don’t worry, it’s not a bad life. I get paid in food, mostly, although some neighbours have offered me now-worthless money and gold bars.
Sometimes I think about heading down to the park, enjoying humanity’s first free days since the industrial revolution. Art, poetry, music, free love, hand-churned ice cream: these are all things they took from us. Then I realize that the park rangers expected their sprinkler array fixed a couple weeks ago, and I can’t well show my face there if it’s still leaking through the improvised cork o-rings I had to make for it.
At night, I look up at the sky and see the exhaust of the space station glowing as it ejects spent rods from the reactor. I think about the mean-time-before-failure statistics of the oxygen scrubber. I wonder if they have anyone good at repairs up there. Probably not, but I’m sure they can tell someone to tell someone to make a new scrubber from the materials they don’t have in their superterran prison. More valuable skill, that one.
Our ancestors never had to deal with software bugs. Their society was slower, sure, but it didn’t fall apart. What we live in now is the equivalent of owning a house where you’re warned not to flush two toilets at the same time, or the natural gas pipeline will explode.
There’s two schools of thought on software bugs. The first one is that that you should notice them early, and be really loud about it. Don’t let those bugs get away. Lots of other people think that they should go with more of a drunken-master kung-fu approach. Notice the bugs, sure. Document the bugs. And then roll with them, just don’t let it bother you too much. Will one person in a million have a really bad day because stuff doesn’t quite work properly this evening and it just sort of fails silently? Yeah, but you can’t make everyone happy.
Given my predilection towards tolerating imperfect cars, homes, electronics, and universe, you would think that I’d be solidly in the second camp. Life is messy, right? The thing is, computers are meant to be a special, private universe of mathematical perfection. They’re supposed to do what you tell them, even if what you tell them isn’t what you meant to tell them. So when things don’t go right, it’s sort of like if you put two Lego blocks together and then they caught fire, rather than making part of a Gundam’s dick. How dare you oppose me in this, the realm I have created for you?
I am learning to let go of things, though. For instance, I no longer smash errant computers into a million pieces. That amount of unreasonable violence is saved only for printers.
A friend of mine, who we’ll call Shaky Tim because that is legally his first name after an accidental fire at the City Hall records department, is a data scientist. That’s a fancy name for someone who works with Microsoft Excel all day. No, not like your job, you barely take Excel out of first gear. Shaky Tim rides that shit like a racehorse.
Big companies pay people like Shaky Tim a lot of money because they have a lot of data. In fact, when you’re a big company, it’s often more expensive to decide not to record data. They just let customer information, sales reports, advertising feedback, what have you accumulate in a big pile. Then data scientists go through it and boil the whole mess down to a nice report that executives can ignore.
I asked him once, while we were heading to the junkyard to pick up some Dodge Caravan heads, why he got started doing it. He had read a novel, he explained, where the main character had some kind of weapons-grade ability to identify inflection points in data. It was a cool story, but he (Shaky Tim) never thought it could draw him away from his then-career, being a high-flying business type person. He worked for General Motors, or something, I wasn’t really paying attention.
That’s when his Learjet crashed in the mountains, and he was forced to stay with some friendly monks for the entire winter. Through hard work and meditative repetition, he learned their ways, which had nothing at all to do with data science. When he got back to New York City, though, he discovered that his employer had fired him for not showing up for work for a few days. So he got a book from the library about how to make Microsoft Excel go faster, and now he can make cool charts and need more RAM.
Overall, the most important thing I’ve learned from Shaky Tim’s second career as a math-wielding corporate magician is that you should never throw anything away. Just keep accumulating it in the basement, and eventually someone will come by, crunch the numbers, and tell you that you can save a whole shitload on storage costs by throwing all that stuff away.
All across the world, there is a rush by marketeers to sell you new appliances. The last couple decades of increasingly-shitty build quality have failed to plump their margins enough, so now they’re trying the carrot. Now, when you buy a refrigerator, it can be connected to the internet. Some ovens need to be connected to the internet, or they can’t cook a turkey. If you went back in time and explained this state of affairs to someone in the Victorian Era, they’d shoot you.
When did our civilization lose its inherent distrust of machines pretending to be human? Half of our most popular science-fiction franchises are about a glad-handing, smiling robot trying to steal or murder our children. Now we’re going to let a refrigerator lock down access to nutrients for those same children, because it couldn’t resolve DNS? No more of this, I say, which is why I’ve started a new business.
Here at Appliance Endumbinators, our crack team of computer scientists, computer engineers, and angry people with hammers will work hard to remove any semblance of “intelligence” from your appliances. If you bought a new barbecue and it refuses to work unless you use factory-authorized propane, we’ll rip its circuit boards out and splice together the miles of wiring that make up its nervous system until it gives in. We’ll find your car and use an angle grinder to cut out the part of its positronic brain that obeys speed limits. And just for laughs, we’ll duct-tape a thrift store alarm clock to your coffee maker, so that it can still have your brew ready for breakfast.
Book us in now, before the machines have their way with you. Become the master of your own home, comfortable with the most idiotic of automatons as you watch your neighbours suffer with thousand-page manuals, helpless service calls, and outsourced below-minimum-wage customer support just to toast a waffle.
I’ve never led a jailbreak, but I bet it takes a lot of planning and co-ordination. For instance, you have to talk to your fellow prisoners, which can be difficult. I haven’t had a conversation with another human being about anything other than cars, unless I’m being paid, since elementary school. The task of having to break the ice, before we break the jail, is just too much for me to bear.
And you can’t really break out of jail by yourself, either. For one thing, it’s terribly rude. All those other prisoners are going to see you running through the yard and wish that you had taken them with you. Some of them might even complain to the warden, the little shits. No, if you want to do things, you need to co-operate – especially on the digging, smashing, and assaulting-guards parts, because that’s physical labour, and if you wanted to do that you probably wouldn’t be in jail in the first place.
It’s not enough to have a common goal, either. Obviously, everyone in jail wants to not be in jail. If that were enough, then nobody at all would be in jail, instead of approximately one third of the population of Earth. You need to come up with a concrete plan, and help achieve it, instead of just being one of those people who just complains about being super bored until your release date. That’ll probably get you shanked, or at least not on the extra desserts list.
I’m really not sure what the solution to all this is. Usually, when I want something from someone else, I just show them a picture of a cute dog on my phone. This usually distracts them long enough for me to ask for what I wanted in the first place, or just take it off the shelf when they’re not looking. I am convinced that this would be enough to persuade a big dude to dig through a wall with a spoon, but there’s one big problem. Jail, I’m told, lacks cellular phones and cute dogs, which I’m absolutely certain is some kind of human rights violation.
The next time you break out of jail, make sure to let me know what you tried. I need some ideas, because my trial is coming up and it sure doesn’t look good. Turns out cute puppy dog pictures aren’t a substitute for paying for gasoline after all.
No matter where you go on this earth, Iowa floats above you. Its extremely unusual orbit means that the many small towns that dot the solar face of what was retroactively renamed Square Colony encounter, at most, seven-hour-long days. You have to hand it to NASA; they really made a purse out of a sow’s ear on the whole anti-gravity-pod accident. Which is, coincidentally, something you can also do this year at the Iowa state fair.
When it first happened, the journalists swarmed my city. They wanted to hear from a “man on the street” (I did not flee to the anti-skyfall bunkers) about what I thought about the whole thing. I was too busy changing out a set of plugs and wires on my decrepit Town Car at the time, so it didn’t make good television. The most famous grease-stained back in YouTube history, everyone else at the bar tells me.
If you asked me now, now that everyone got bored of hiding in the bunkers and emerged, ready to be obliterated by any stray potato or skyscraper that falls to Earth from the stranded near-orbital colony, I’d tell you it was all worth it. Having humanity split apart spurred innovation that had never before been seen, a real arms race of transportation technology. We developed a whole lot of medium- and heavy-load reusable spacecraft just so that people from Ames could make the commute to our local Wal-Mart® and get the good ice cream.
I am gonna be honest with you, though. The best thing is that the total lack of atmosphere up there means that the cars don’t rust nearly as bad anymore. Stellar Craigslist has been absolutely buzzing with high-mileage Cadillacs that are about to become a whole lot higher mileage. If you’re quick, you can ramp those things right off the edge and throw out a parachute on the way down for free shipping, as well.
When the service rep comes around, that’s when the real good stuff starts. In any company that employs a lot of high-end equipment, the bosses usually insist upon having someone from the supplier of that equipment on call, for when it breaks down. If you’re smart, the contract you write with the vendor lays out the expectations for how quickly your precious factory, plant, or agricultural operation will be returned to operation, and thus profitability.
As such, any malfunction that is serious enough to trigger a “call-out” has a service rep attend to it, to make sure the relationship doesn’t turn litigious. While the maintenance worker slaves away, the rep spends time smoothing over ruffled feathers with the boss.
Maintenance workers are initially hazed upon their arrival, in a sort of “ooo, you’re in trouble” elementary-school-level ritual. Getting called to the principal’s office! After they’ve proven their diligence, all but the dimmest bulbs are then accepted into the group of other working-class Joes on site. Come check out the cool thing we did to your machine so that it wouldn’t break like this so often. What do you mean it broke? It was not our intention, caste-mate. Please accept some disgusting instant coffee as way of partial apology.
This never happens to the salespeople, if you have any, who are suspicious of the foreign service rep, and remain so the entire time. Although they have much more in common than different, a seasoned office-politics observer can tell instantly from their posture and manner of speech that the interloper in their territory makes them feel threatened.
Although I no longer work in an office of any kind, the sight of a photocopier or telecom repairperson’s van parked out front of one still gives me the visceral thrill of knowing someone else’s day is going to be spent pulling a bunch of fucked up wires out of a closet, then discovering the creators of those fucked up wires are in fact their new best friends. And then knowing that the guy in the Lexus following him is going to probably get ditched by the sales force outside the sleaziest peeler bar they can find, leaving him holding the bill.
I never thought it would happen to me, until it did. And then I hoped that it would stop happening to me. That thing, of course, is arcade games. Back in the 80s, and even for a short time into the 90s, the arcade was where it was at for videogames. I was good, sure, but not amazing. Except for one game.
One evening, as I was leaving, my pockets lightened substantially of quarters, I was approached by a being made of pure light.
“Are you the one with the high score on Konami’s 1989 magnum opus, Quarth, also known as Block Hole in the West?” asked the apparition.
“No,” I said. “I’ve got like number two or three.”
“You are not the one referred to in the high score tables as S-E-X?” asked the foreign creature. I could sense some fear.
I shook my head. “A-S-S.”
“This is very embarrassing,” said the alien, “but would you like to pilot a starship and kill a bunch of people you don’t know on our say-so?”
Normally, interstellar genocide is not my kind of thing. What is my kind of thing is abusing rental cars, and although the space fighter parked in the middle of the field adjacent to the arcade didn’t look much like a car, it did have little tires holding it up. I decided that there was a pretty good chance this thing had some copper wire in it.
You can find the most amazing stuff at garage sales. My friend Medium-Sized Mike is the best at it. He can walk right into an inadequate, suburbanite garage sale, one of those real limp ones with a table full of mismatched pots and pans and nothing else, and walk away with an amazing find. Nobody really knows how he does it, but that’s not the subject of this story, anyway.
I waited in the driveway, watching the air slowly leak out of the tires of a rusty 2003 Ford Explorer Sport-Trac, while Medium-Sized Mike took care of business. What happened this time is: he found the Orb of Planar Suffering. We had to look this shit up on Wikipedia, too, so don’t feel bad.
“You want five dollars for this magical artifact of untold destruction?”
“Yeah. My wife found it in the basement, we’ve had it on the dining room table for years, but now she has a new pine cone display she wants there instead. Harvest season.”
“I’ll give you three.”
Now, the first thing everyone asks is: what do you do with a two-million-year-old cosmic weapon, abandoned on this earth by a dead strain of Pioneers? Obviously, it has some decorative value, but the real value comes from using it to split the planes of reality and walk across dimensions. Why would you do that? Because those dimensions also have garage sales, and Medium-Sized Mike has more discoveries to make.
As I saw his corporeal form shimmer and disappear at the end of the driveway, I knew two things. One, there went the bravest man I’ll ever know. Two, he better bring me back a corn dog making machine.
You’ve probably heard of the old story about the shoemaker’s elves. Some dude who makes shoes falls asleep at night, tiny mythical creatures arise and finish his work for him. Everything works out, and they show the elves some gratitude which is repaid by lifelong success.
Friends: kidnapping an elf does not work at all like you’d think.
When you have a large American luxury automobile, like a Cadillac, Lincoln, or whatever it is that Chrysler makes, people will often remark on the size of the trunk. Even non-car people will tell you that it looks like a four or five body trunk. This is both because of this style of car’s popularity in gangster movies, and because “trunk big” is one of those things that even the dimmest bulb can come up with in an attempt to break the ice with someone who, based on their daily driver, may actually be a semi-retired mafia enforcer.
Thing is, after weeks and months and years of hearing this from everyone who comments on your car, this intrusive thought can burrow, weevil-like, into the innermost folds of your brain. You start to plot crimes. Speeding is easy, of course, the real gateway drug, and it’s achievable even if your five-litre V8 only has about a hundred and forty horsepower in a car with the aerodynamics of a sailboat. It doesn’t take long from there to go “I should stop by the haunted castle and see if they have any of those elves.” In my defence, I had lots of shoes that needed repair.
Of course, you all know what happened next if you read the biased newspapers, or saw the whole courtroom drama that ensued. I forgot that it was Star Trek cosplay night and shoved a couple Spocks into the trunk, then sped off. As I soon found out, despite the pointy ears, Spock has no fucking idea how to make shoes, having become dependent on replicator technology to build and maintain footwear. That said, one of the actors was willing to break character and show me how to apply a new insole, which I was grateful for until he hit me over the head with one of my own Doc Martens and fled into the yard.
Olden times used to be a lot better for race car construction. Speeds were slower, and safety meant being able to re-use the driver after you won. Plus, nobody really knew what they were doing. You could throw an old fuel tank from an airplane onto an old truck frame, weld the two parts together, and once the fires were extinguished, you’d have a winning dragster.
Nowadays, decades of intense competition, workplace safety regulation, and the discovery of hyperfocus-related mental disorders have produced race cars that would have been completely unimaginable to our distant ancestors. You can zip down the straight faster than the aforementioned bomber plane could, slam into a copse of trees on the side of the road, and probably come out of it at least half alive. Winning? Yeah, you could do that too, but you’d need to be trained in the fine art of racecraft nearly from birth, unlike me.
I know a lot of people are tired of me complaining about how old garbage that you find on the side of the road is better than all the new garbage that you have to have a paying job in order to afford. I’m tired of saying it! Which is why I decided to put my money where my mouth is. Not literally, because I have no money and because the Canadian plastic currency has been chemically constructed to be disgusting to eat, but you get the idea.
In the interest of getting better at motorsport, I’ve decided to start from square one, myself. I went to the store, and I started welding some frame together, using the store demo welders. Naturally, I wore a reflective vest, so that everyone knew I was supposed to be there. I drove the resulting vehicle right out of the store, after a quick stop-off at the self-checkout to ring up a pair of overpriced Chapsticks. Then I’ve been driving my improvised rocket ship in the woods at night. It’s hard work, but I figure eventually I’ll learn what I did wrong with this piece of shit, and head back to do something better. By 2090 or so, I should be roughly caught up to the state of the art in 1925. For instance, I’ve already determined that my next race car should have headlights.
Gardening is very important. We can’t eat weeds, except for the ones we can. If nobody knows how to grow food, or at the very least pretty flowers, we’re all gonna starve to death. Big business loves to keep a lock on this knowledge, running huge agricultural operations that destroy the planet just to put a piece of wilted, year-old lettuce on your burger. When you empower yourself to grow plants, then you can eat those plants.
There’s a problem for a lot of people, and it’s the same problem I have: space. Gardens take up a lot of room, because you need to eat a surprising amount of food in one year to survive. For me, I have several decrepit old cars leaking their vital fluids into the Earth, so it’s maybe not a great idea to grow something I’m going to eat later in that soil. The answer is guerrilla gardening.
Just like freedom fighting, the difference between “illegal trespass” and “person trying to beautify their neighbourhood” is your attitude. When you are building a bunch of elaborate seed bombs and chucking them out of the window of your car onto the median while driving twenty over the limit on the highway, then it’s a good idea to have some good PR prattle on hand for the state troopers.
What crop to grow? I recommend potatoes. Potatoes have been grown in outer fucking space, in drainage ditches, the broken soil of alleys, and wherever in your vegetable garden you don’t want potatoes to grow. They’re nature’s strongest warrior, capable of imbuing your body with a day’s worth of starchy energy for labour. In a pinch, they can also be turned into fuel, high-test liquor, or ammunition.
So the next time you can’t quite finish that bag of potatoes from the grocery store before all the creepy roots start popping out of it, don’t worry. Just chuck all that shit into the first pile of dirt you see while out and about in your neighbourhood. Trust me, they thrive on the negligence, and you’ll help feed the community. Provided the community likes eating potatoes they found growing in the mouldy carpet of a partly-collapsed Blockbuster Video.
With the advent of electric cars, there’s something very critical happening to North American infrastructure. No, it’s not renewable energy. It certainly isn’t a more stable electrical grid. And there’s no way on God’s green earth that electricity is gonna get cheaper. The important thing: level 2 chargers are now freely available in many urban centres.
Let me explain. You can plug an electric car into your regular-ass wall outlet. It takes a really long time to charge, and the cord gets kind of warm. In the terminology of the electric car mafia, that’s “Level 1.” Like in Mario, it’s the level that sucks, but that teaches you how to get good by forcing you to be devoured by mushroom people or fall down a bottomless pit enough times. “Level 2” is where the interesting shit starts to happen.
Europeans have been blessed with 240 volts AC coming out of their wall since the dawn of time. That’s twice as many volts as we’ve got, for many varied reasons that I don’t actually care to look up right now. You can think of these volts as a sort of fire hose, pushin’ electrons into your shitty homemade electric car. With more volts, you can push more electrons in less time. The Level 2 chargers are connected to 240 volts.
Other things are connected to 240 volts, friendos: welders. That’s how I ended up in the Princess Auto parking lot, frantically trying to weld together my frame, while pretending that my 1977 Volare that I rolled into said lot is actually an electric conversion. Folks came and asked questions, sure, like “why is that car charger sparking so much” and “what’s that odour?” None of them were familiar with Level 2 charging, though, not like you now are. They took my explanation at face value (“wireless charging,” I explained, “the next big thing”) and decided it would be risky for them to call the cops considering I now knew what their faces looked like.
Joke’s on them, though. The old newspaper I was using as a face shield absolutely did not keep me from repeatedly blinding myself. Maybe one day, the electric car mafia will create a device that dispenses free sunglasses in every parking lot.
A friend of mine used to build aquariums for rich people. Every day, he’d bumble on down to the office and start meticulously assembling some intricate sub-component of a whole-ass ecosystem. Once it was done, they’d fill his work with water, carry it away, and charge hundreds of thousands of dollars to throw some fish in it. I think his tale is a cautionary one.
My friend’s reward for all this hard work and artistry was to get screwed. His boss wholly depended on his labour (building aquariums, stocking fish, laying out little plastic castles) but seized most of the gains for himself instead. Eventually, my friend quit, and went to work at a much better job selling cameras. Obviously, the moral of this story is that people who own fish are inherently untrustworthy.
To entrap fish in a box is to sin against nature. Fish live outdoors. If you want to see some, you can go by your local lake and watch seagulls pick them up out of the water. Stay all day, if you like. That fish would have no appreciation whatsoever if you were to, say, put a little animatronic diver in his tank, making bubbles that reflect the beautiful, subtle lighting of the arrangement.
Ever wondered about why the newspapers seem so in favour of rich people all the time? Think back to the name that hokey 1920s scam artists give them: “fishwrap.” That’s right. Newspapers have been in the pocket of Large Trout since time immemorial, all in the hopes that they can curry favour with their bemoneyed ichthyoid masters.
I have a lot of other anecdotal stories about friends who have been betrayed by fish, also. Did you ever wonder why Tokyo was forced to move its famed Tsukiji Fish Market? It certainly wasn’t because of the smell. No, it was all about real estate. Those fish-bothering greedheads figured out that they were sitting on top of some primo, yet absolutely stinky, property. They decided to get rich, at the expense of their workers, who now have to haul enormous catches of fish to a different part of the bay. Once again, fish did this.
Skyscrapers are a machine that nobody really thinks of. They reach into the air, housing hundreds or thousands of people in the most efficient way possible. Each one has efficient elevators, the tuning of which is so precise that a highway engineer would eat her hat in jealousy.
I’m sure when skyscrapers were brand new, there was a lot of hand-wringing about the futuristic concept of forcing people to live above other people. All kinds of new survival technologies had to be invented. And then, we just stopped thinking about them all that much. House stuff doesn’t get a lot of credit for how cool it is: there’s the modern miracle that is silicone bathroom caulk. All you care about is why it gets dirty so fast.
To appreciate the skyscraper better, I decided to build my own. Constructing your own, crappier version of something that takes an army of construction workers and thousands of years of accumulated engineering practice is the best way to learn about anything. That’s what my grandpa said, after all, before he drove that replica of a Leopard tank through the local savings and loan and escaped to Mexico with the cash.
After only a few months of hard, sustained effort, I finally had some progress to show. I had successfully dug out part of a basement, the essential part of a modern residential skyscraper. Why? It’s because this is where the cars live. And until the cops came to scream about the “sinkhole” I was creating that “swallowed the neighbour’s house,” I was getting ready to pour some concrete. Talk about ungrateful: not only do they not appreciate the great effort I was taking to understand the modern world, but they weren’t even happy that it was going to provide storage for a lot of my street-owned hoopties. Have fun explaining this to the meter maid, jerks.
I read an article recently that said some egghead scientists had hooked up a machine learning system to MRIs. They trained the computer to identify brain waves, which made the media freak out about “computers that can read your mind.”
Nothing annoys me more than fantasy claptrap, so I decided to get started on the real stuff. All it took was a lot of sub-minimum-wage labour in developing countries, and a little bit of good old-fashioned random number generation. As a result, I now had an expert system (that’s 1980s for artificial intelligence.) What’s it do, then, wise guy? Something truly essential to humanity: it identifies the song that’s stuck in your head.
That was the easy part, though. Once I fed the machine every song in the world and tweaked all of its various parameters by throwing a pipe wrench into the wiring closet repeatedly, I determined that it had developed a sort of primitive sentience. Knowing everything that there is to know about music had turned it into a snob. If Pitchfork magazine still existed, this Python script would be on top of the masthead and embroiled in some incredibly risky office drama.
So, that’s the Faustian bargain then. You can know what song is in your head, the one that’s been haunting you throughout your days, but not without judgment. Dare you step into the gloomy warehouse, don the stainless-steel pasta colander that makes up this insanely over-powered homemade CT scanner, and then be mocked endlessly on the internet by a series of millisecond-precise bullies that never sleep and have been reading your social media accounts?
I did. Turns out it was Jingle Bell Rock. You’d think I’d have recognized that from the lyrics. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go smash that wall of televisions before it shows you the pictures from the “blackmail” album on my phone and ruins the surprise.
Just like ducks, you can’t trust a push scooter. Designed originally for proletarian aims, these overgrown skateboards are an accident waiting to happen. Despite their lack of control, missing suspension, and predilection for throwing you over the handlebars into a life-altering head injury, folks put a powerful electric motor on them. And then they started to get actually kinda good.
A few months ago, I was on the highway. I looked over, briefly, and noticed that the bicycle path running parallel to the highway had someone enjoying a push scooter. I thought nothing of it, until I looked over again, and noticed that the scooter was still keeping up with me. Clocking triple digits on a multi-use municipal pathway? Now that was something I had to see for myself.
After a visit to the library to use their internet access, I found out all about them. In case you’re curious, the computer at my house comes with too many court-ordered restrictions, but those restrictions don’t apply to my alter-ego, Manfred P. Guy-I-Found-The-Library-Card-Of-In-The-Trunk-Of-A-1996-Grand-Am-At-The-Junkyard. I think that last name is Polish, or something. Lots of consonants. Once I had absorbed all the information I could before the chief librarian chased me out for once again smearing Lucas Red & Tacky No. 2 machine grease onto the keyboard while typing, it was off to the local classifieds to get ahold of a death scoot of my very own.
Here’s a fun fact about most cars: they have a lot of accessory belts. Those accessory belts can hold a lot of horsepower before they snap, well in excess of the amount that my wheezy economy slant-six can actually make. If you were to add, say, twelve or thirty scooters’ worth of batteries and motors to that belt drive, why, you’d finally have enough power to get up Old Man Hill without having to downshift. Which is good, because usually I have to turn my car off for at least fifteen minutes before it will do that.
And there’s more benefit, too: after washing the blood off, the remaining parts of the scooters are still useful as scooters. I ended up selling them to a bunch of electric-vehicle degenerates who were happy to add their own Wish.com battery packs and motors to turn them back into electric scooters. Now that’s how we’ll save the environment: recycling.
In this modern day, the common person has lost confidence in the advice from authority. Everyone wants to get a leg up on the other fools, and often that comes from a belief in secret knowledge. The president is really a hologram. Toothpaste is just baking soda coloured blue. And a car can get 150 miles per gallon running on nothing but water.
This kind of kooky scam operation has been with us forever, but it’s really taken off lately. I think that this is because more people than ever feel a little powerless. Hey, you can figure out this one angle, and hold onto it. Make it part of your identity, especially when the rabble points out that it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. That’s how I feel about Subarus.
Subarus are popular now, amongst the mall-adventurer crowd. If you’re wearing a fleece jacket indoors right now, or if you just have a child and a dog at the same time, you’re probably going to be asking a smarmy salesdroid about a Crosstrek at some point in the next century. This, too, is a form of secret knowledge: let those ordinary rubes suffer winter with their front-wheel-drive Camries while I am thrust aloft their corpses by an unstoppable all-wheel-drive war machine.
As a long-time (and now lapsed) Subaru owner, I can tell you that the reason folks used to get into Subarus is because they were fucking weird. Flat engines, sometimes with pushrods. Spare tire in the engine bay. Turbos in everything, no matter how inappropriate. And sure, we thought that we were onto a vibe that the average person didn’t appreciate. Most of them don’t like pulling the entire engine just to do a driver-side valve cover gasket, for instance.
If you ask me, they’ve just gotten too normal right now. That’s why I’m moving onto the next big thing that nobody else knows about. In fact, a lot of people hate it and throw rocks at you for owning one. It’s called Chevrolet, and they make a whole bunch of cars for not very much money. Dealerships all over the place, just full of salespeople staring at the walls, waiting for anyone to come in and be dumb enough to put down money for an Equinox. Dumb enough like a fox.
Road trips are one of the great escapes of our age. Get your friends, tell your boss to cram it, and drive across the world. Have new experiences. Learn about the life of people you’d never otherwise meet. Make a new friend. And have an excuse to do preventative maintenance.
Every summer, my mailbox is full of advertisements to “get roadtrip ready” and have my car inspected for free at the local oil change place. This is, of course, bait to get you in the door. Once you’re there, they can find all kinds of reasons to charge you money for largely unnecessary services. Sometimes they don’t even do the oil change they billed you for! People get scammed out of hundreds of dollars every year, under the fantasy of a roadtrip, forced to maintain their perfectly fine automobile.
I decided that I would make them earn this roadtrip inspection. There is one automobile in my collection which is always impeccably maintained, well above the standard of my daily driver shitboxes. It is kept in primo condition, just in case I have to drive a foreign dignitary or famous movie star around town on short notice. Nothing even leaks. This car? A 1985 Chrysler Fifth Avenue, the very epitome of luxury in front-wheel-drive.
No sooner did I drive through the door than the buzzards began to circle around my boxy luxoshitbox. An old car, they thought. There will be lots wrong with thissss one, they hissed, in my mind, because they are secretly snake people. And, dutifully, the young “inspector” came back with a huge list of made-up things wrong with the car. “No brakes,” as if a four thousand pound car with a four banger would ever get up to the speed at which brakes would be needed. “No windshield,” another delusion: rich people don’t need windshields. They don’t have time to be cleaning them constantly. And finally: “our missing general manager trapped in the trunk.”
I have to give it to them: I didn’t expect an inspection to be quite that thorough. Most by-the-hour lube shops would have just ignored the thumping and pleading from the back, especially considering the additional sound deadening provided by Mopar’s finest mouse-fur insulation. And almost all of them would have given up looking for him after a few months. Still, I declined every offer they made. Tim is still trapped in there, because I know that they’d just find something else to charge me for while trying to get him out of there.
Remote controlled cars are a lot of fun, even if you’re also into regular cars. Unlike their larger brethren, you don’t need complicated legal entanglements like “insurance” or “roadworthiness inspections” to drive them. A vibrant community full of other weirdos who are also constantly breaking little plastic control arms is on offer. You’ll make life-long friends and lure each other into spending thousands of dollars on toys.
It’s that cost which bothers me. You see, I already spend enough money on cars. And I’m not especially easy on the equipment. When it comes down to having a functioning car that can get me to work, or a tiny plastic car that’s fun, unfortunately the big metal thing is going to win every single time. How else will I make money with which to spend on the tiny plastic car? It was a real dilemma. Bowing out of the third shrunken-shitbox race event in a row because of cashflow problems had been weighing on my conscience. What would the other money-wasting folks think about my reticence to enter into insane amounts of debt?
I decided that I would try to cobble together something, anything, out of my pile of scraps. The same three things always break on RC cars, though, so I was not able to produce a complete car. By then, as if through a miracle, the multiple coffees and semi-legal convenience-store trucker stimulants had kicked in, and I was able to open my third eye to allow the solution to my problem to manifest. Or so my lawyer will tell you. He’s big on exploring the limits of religious freedoms lately. I had lots of broken metal cars lying around the property, and there was no explicit rule in the local RC car club that all cars needed to be the same scale in order to compete.
Well, I’d like to tell you that I won first with my 1:1-scale remote-controlled Ford Econoline, but I didn’t. Some of those little lipo buggies are fast as all hell, and avoided getting crushed beneath my wheels. Plus, it’s hard to gauge how close you are to rolling the van when you’re not driving it yourself. By the time we had gotten a bumper jack under it to move the wreckage back off of the vendor stand, it was too late for any more heats of the race. I’ll be back next year, though. My neighbour left out a Fisher-Price Cozy Coupe in his alley. Bet that thing weighs way less.
There’s nothing we like better, as a society, than some jerk getting their comeuppance. Hell, half of our legends and stories are about this happening. The misfortune of those who deserve it tastes sweet, and we just can’t get enough of it.
This gets installed into us early in childhood: think of the immortal story of the Three Little Pigs. One pig wants to live a peaceful, agrarian coexistence with nature. He’s breakfast. Another tries to moderate the influence of industry on his life, taking benefit where he sees it in the form of sticks. Lunch. The third one wises up. He realizes the sheer inevitable power of industrialized civil society and structures himself apart from nature, entombed in his immortal fired-brick home. He lives, because he was smart, and his siblings too dumb for how delicious they were. He’s the one who wrote the history books.
Anyone who’s been driving for long enough has a story about someone else who was acting like a jerk in traffic getting into a big accident, or being pulled over by the cops, or simply getting stuck in a lane of traffic that ended up being slower than the one they got out of. “Karma’s a bitch,” we cackle, and then go on with life, a momentary thrill of schadenfreude helping to alleviate the pressure of modern existence. Don’t colour outside the lines, or you’ll get your hand smacked by the divine forces of justice.
When you go out in your car today, make sure to act properly. Drive safely. Signal appropriately. Deny those screeching buzzards the joy of seeing you get punished by the universe. And then, once they get mad enough to pass you and are hit by lightning or slip on a banana peel, you too can enjoy the high-and-mighty sensation, but just for a bit. Then drive like a jackass, because the story wouldn’t be nearly as funny if it happened twice.
“Hold on there, pardner. This here’s a cognition hazard.” said the holographic cowboy in the corner of my vision. He then took a series of poses that the designer must have thought looked heroic and protective, before flickering back to his original position and repeating the process. My artificial ranch-hand was not incorrect: the thing I was attempting to do would cause me unpredictable amounts of psychic damage, likely impacting my relationships with those around me and even my mental state at rest. Even so, I pushed the button and waited.
Software development used to be a sort of reckless task, undergone without care. Decades ago, hundreds of folks would cram themselves into a single building and then work hard on their computers to develop computer programs. Originally, these programs performed useful but difficult tasks, speeding them up dramatically for the varied needs of government and industry. At first, life improved. And then, as with every prior machine in human history, we looked for harder jobs for it to do.
A funny thing happens when a computer program gets longer than about a page of typewritten code. You have to hold a lot of it in your head. The best programmers could commit an entire system to memory, gliding through it like barracuda through a disreputable motel’s swimming pool. We didn’t know then how much trauma it caused. The doctors had no idea what was happening with all those isolated burnouts freaking out, moving into the woods, and hunting men for sport.
Watching the old newsreels now, seeing the 20th-century equivalent of coal miners delving willingly into fold-out charts of MFC inheritance diagrams, it’s a little hard to stomach. It only took about twenty years of continued exposure to this kind of thing before the human mind rebelled, the manmade logical constructs providing a kind of sharp edge that ripped through sanity like a hot wire. Thing is, it still had to be done, and the folks who did it seemed to enjoy it up until The Void caught up to them too. So the government did what the government does best, and compromise. We’d all have warnings that what we were doing was insanely dangerous and life-shortening, and our employers would keep demanding that we heap more complexity atop ever-increasing mountains of irreducible cruft.
A good deal for all involved, especially the folks who got the contract to make the warning holograms about fifteen years ago. They must have loved their jobs, putting the little cowboy hats on them. You can tell in all the little complex details of his haunted face, begging me to turn back from my route to oblivion. One day I’d like to make something cool like that.
When you’re in a community of real weirdos, things are just buzzing all the time. I imagine that normal individuals, restrained by illusions like the rice-paper-thin curtain of “social pressures” and “paying jobs,” can go upwards of fifteen, twenty minutes without filling any available empty space in conversation. No deal here: it’s all projects, all the time, when my buddies get together.
If you don’t immediately commandeer a whiteboard the second you step foot on the property, get ready to hear about the secret 16-bit I/O port mode of the Zilog Z80 microprocessor. Followed by half of a Haynes’ manual worth of discussion on why it is technically incorrect to call the Dodge Neon’s 3-speed automatic a true TorqueFlite. Sometimes those come from the same person. You better have a weapon of your own at the ready.
Either we’ve actually arrived to work on a project, or we’ve all convened to discuss how we’re not making enough progress on our projects. It is only through disassembling 1970s South Korean payphones that we can outrun the Bad Thoughts. And when those payphones stop providing, the depth of an obsession finally mined to the core, a new project must be invented to satisfy the idle mind. This belief structure is table stakes for the kind of casual organization in which the real nuts get down to business.
While I’m sure this kind of staccato exchange of information must seem hard to follow, the moment when two weirdos discover they are working on the same thing makes it all worthwhile. Whether they co-operate or compete, nobody will be able to predict, but the realization that another sentient being in the same universe is also interested in, say, a 1981 TV game version of mahjong is more than enough motivation to produce something truly worrying for the general population.
Everyone loves a good snack. Regular meals are important for your health, but they are also a tyrannical regime that keeps you from shovelling MSG-laden tortilla chips into your mouth six or seven times a day. In the interest of personal freedom, I took over my cousin’s failing food truck business and started serving up schedule-busting goodies all over town.
Admittedly, I didn’t really care about feeding the masses. I definitely did not care about cooking for, and cleaning up after, random individuals that I would never meet again. What I got into this business for was the truck, a beaten-up old Isuzu NRR that I thought would make a good vehicle with which to tow. If I held out for long enough, then I could pay myself with the truck in lieu of a paycheque when the company went bankrupt.
Of course, I couldn’t just sit on my hands and do nothing. To make things look good for the bankruptcy trustees, I was told, I had to put in a serious effort to craft and sell food across town. Soon I was selling hot dog buns stuffed full of Cheetos for seventeen dollars a pop. Customers lined up around the block. To my surprise and anger, this was the moment in which my natural-born business instincts finally manifested to produce some big-league cheddar. Some even maintained a website dedicated to tracking my every move around town, even commenting on my double-clutching as I tried to maneuver that tricky intersection before the downtown bridge without stopping for the red light.
Money was pouring in from a fanatical customer base, which made it improbable that I could pull off my truck-instead-of-cash trick. Not like I could stop for long enough to change the plate on the thing. I was invited to food festivals, park openings, and even had my own Netflix show for a little while, because they didn’t want to pay writers anymore, and filming me for two hours of slinging greaseball fried food out of the window of my truck was cheaper. Don’t worry: I made sure to ruin all of their takes by talking randomly about 1980s Korean economy cars, a topic that advertisers absolutely despise.
So what took out my business? It wasn’t competition, or even that time I rammed the Mayor’s limousine while rushing to the scene of a multi-vehicle accident to serve up hot snacks to the brave firefighters. Ultimately, it was my cousin, who wanted his now-successful business back. Without my brave leadership (and gonzo, irresponsible driving) at the helm, the quality of the food immediately dropped, and he went under. There is good news, however. I did get to keep the truck after all, even though Cousin Neutral had to torch it for the insurance money first.
Everything around us is made of a series of little miracles. Look at an airplane: that shit is objectively crazy on the face of it. We’re just used to the whole thing. You would show the airplane to a caveman and he would drop stone dead on the spot, his brain leaking out of his ears onto the Paleolithic tundra, preferring to die rather than to believe such a thing is possible. And that’s before you start pulling the airplane apart.
We are lucky, all of us, to be in this era where not only are crazy stunts of engineering and manufacturing prowess possible, but that they are common. You can walk your ass down to the Auto Value and pick yourself up a wheel bearing, which itself is made out of many near-identical and precisely-constructed and ball bearings to a degree that would have been impossible a hundred years ago, for five fucking dollars. That’s the cheap shit one, too, so don’t put that in your car. It won’t last more than 200,000 km, not like the seven-dollar one will.
Charles Babbage, the guy who invented the mechanical computer? You know what he spent most of his time doing? Hiring folks to make screws that were all the same kind. Yeah. The idea of being able to just buy a screw and put it in a consistent hole was not a thing in his era. Hell, he even got into a fight with the Queen about how wide to make railroad tracks (“all the same,” he said. “a bunch of crazy fucking different sizes,” said England.) Nope, it’s the computer made with all of those screws that our history books are all psyched about. It goes clickity-clack and tells us that four times four is sixteen!
A biologist would tell us that we’re just trying to emulate the greatest miracle of all, the existence of organic life, blah blah who cares? I got that for free from my parents. What I didn’t get was a radio modem the size of a fingernail that lets me send poop emojis to Egypt at the speed of thought. Apologies to all of my distant ancestors who had to work out how to evolve, like, toes and stuff. That was probably really hard, but now I’m reaping the benefits. For instance, without toes, I wouldn’t appreciate the machine I just now saw on YouTube that weaves brand-new socks out of planet-killing industrial microplastic waste. Pretty rad! I bet it’s got some very precise screws in it.
“You gotta get down here,” explains Inspector Hector. “Those beavers are eating the whole campsite!”
Let me explain. Back in the 90s, I spent a lot of time (not even court-ordered) volunteering at a campground. They gave me a place to sleep in exchange for the work, and the place was basically empty during the winter. This idyllic environment (completely devoid of human life) worked wonders for my mental health, and also gave me an opportunity to work on as many small engines (Deeres, Kubotae, what have you) as the other volunteers could break.
Over the years, I migrated away from there, into the city, to get what boring people call “an actual job.” However, they kept my phone number, and once in awhile I’d get called in for a disaster that only I could handle. Usually it was small, like a torn fuel-pump diaphragm, and sometimes it was not. This was one of the latter cases.
We’d had beaver infestations at the campsite before. In the fall, they get real fucked up on the low water levels from the downstream reservoir. It’s not enough water to survive, and certainly not enough in which to build a boss beaver hangout. Their little rodent brains freak out, and they start trying to dam everything in sight. Problem is, this happens every year, and trees take a really long time to regrow. Over the years, these waffle-tailed motherfuckers have gotten closer and closer to the camp as they progressively deforest the area around the river. And now they were, if Hector was to be believed, eating the buildings.
My mission held that I had to get rid of these beavers somehow, but in a humane fashion. While campground life had given me some skills and a sense of self, urban life had given me a sense of degenerate resourcefulness. I knew exactly what I had to do. Home Depot’s famously warped and water-logged lumber is completely useless for all tasks. All tasks, that is, except for “bribing beavers to go away.” So if you come by the river this winter and notice that the beaver dams look a little poorly constructed all of a sudden, you can thank the shareholders of the orange toilet store.
When your phone’s battery runs dry, you plug it in. A series of complete miracles happens that slowly refills it, so that you can go back to playing exploitative video games. This sort of thing is so commonplace, that it’s easy to forget that only a few short years ago, we would have had to carry around some kind of weird-looking Game Boy, or even a paper magazine, if we wanted to avoid talking to people on the train.
Of course, it’s not all roses. Distracted driving is the menace of our age. Folks so hooked on their text messages that they drive a perfectly good car, without even any obvious steering damage, into a ditch, or daycare, or lightpost. That’s ridiculous. Samurai of old would consider your Honda Accord to have died a dishonourable death. In other words, if you’re gonna drive your car off the road, you need to earn that shit.
Personally, I never drive while looking at my phone. For one thing, my cars are in such mechanical disrepair that to take my eyes off the road, even to check the speedometer, could cause a lapse in concentration. Some of them are being held together entirely, I am convinced, through a concerted psychic effort, a sheer mental force causing my hands and feet to make the micro-adjustments required to hold the car together at highway speeds. You don’t see fighter jet pilots looking at their phones, and there’s nothing for them to hit up there. They wouldn’t last a minute playing the classic game of “is that rattle my glovebox, or my front subframe?”
My political advisors have told me that it’s a bad idea for me to assume too much similarity between myself and the common person. They, of course, went to expensive private schools, and exist in my life only because of the rich asshole bankrolling my “proletarian” and “grassroots” campaign for mayor. I won’t listen to them. I’ll listen to you. And the first way I’ll help you is by making sure that your car is in the shittiest possible condition. No vehicle newer than thirty years old will be allowed within the city limits. We’ll give every citizen a voucher to just go and pull whatever car they want out of the junkyard and put it back on the road. Hurry, because that Nissan Axxess that’s full of pigeon shit is gonna go fast.
And I guarantee you, you won’t take a single minute of your drive for granted. No “best value” five blue eggs for $3.99 deal is going to compete with the thrill ride you’re about to embark upon.
Every forum on the internet has a “Pop.” Modern short-message platforms don’t really give you the experience of being slowly stalked from thread to thread by a dude with more advice than he knows what to do with. When you wake up in the morning, he’s there under the “Last Replied By” column. Every rambling post needs a coffee or two to get through, and you won’t appreciate the effort it takes to pump out even a single one of them when your question is “why is my car on fire?”
His like is dying out, and will probably never return. All of the primitive big-company greedheads have decided that wading through several thousand word essays is not conducive to clicking on ads. And the topics are so rambly that they confuse modern artificial language models into serving up ads for chewing tobacco or witchcraft rather than the actual topic of the post (why my car is on fire.) Ultimately, “Pop” will always advocate doing some non-capitalist activity, like going to a junkyard, making your own parts from cork, or travelling back in time to win the approval of your father and never becoming condemned to walk this path, which also isn’t a big starter with the Madison Avenue crowd.
My young-adult haunt was, of course, a car forum. It’s gone now, swept into some kind of ultra-capitalist hellscape. MBAs littered it with ads, until all you could see of the actual content was a little tiny window in the middle. Naturally, everyone left. Everyone except for “Pop,” who went down with the ship and presumably began preying on nubile co-eds in the woods shortly thereafter. And by preying, I mean “giving advice on how to properly clean the rotors in their distributors,” whether they were in a position to receive that advice or not.
When I think about what the loss of these folks represents, I get a little bit wistful. All these “Pops” are losing their natural habitat, as McMansion suburbs get built on their property, pushing them further and further into the relatively unprofitable woods of ham radio and model train enthusiasm. Soon, though, they too will fall into the amorphous blob of corporate buy-everything, envy-thy-neighbour shopping mall socialization. And then who’s gonna tell me the story of how they invented the flathead screw?
Hot dogs for dinner: it’s not just the classic meal of a suburban dad in a 1980s film. These protein-packed miracles can be heated up with the help of any internal combustion engine when you’re on the go and still want a quick meal. Sure, the haters will tell you that they’re made of animal byproducts. So are you, my friend!
I’ve been driving across this country for years, and on long trips I make sure to pack a little extra engine-bay snack. Not only does it make more efficient use of the gasoline you’re burning, but tactical deployment of tinfoil and water-laden meats can actually help prevent an overheating condition when, say, your cooling fan isn’t working, or you didn’t want to pull over when the radiator exploded a few miles ago.
Besides, there’s just something about being able to pull over on the side of the road and have a warm meal. It helps make you not so angry that a wheel bearing exploded, or the centre section fell out of the axle, or a turbocharger became parts-rich exhaust. And not having to rush to the nearest town for both yourself and the car means you can take your time thinking your way through the roadside repair. Maybe your copious food supply will even help you make a lifelong new friend in the form of a wild dog, or stray wendigo.
Just don’t forget them in the engine bay in the winter. Not only are they really hard to chip off of the block in minus 40, but it’ll attract even more rats than usual to come nibble on your delicious spark plug wires. Those freeloaders can bring their own snacks.
Car chases aren’t as great as Hollywood makes them seem. On the screen, they’re fun, exciting, maybe even a little sexy. In reality, you’re basically constantly looking at your water temperature gauge to see if you’re going to nuke a head gasket running the engine flat out for this long. Plus, you’re driving something with the approximate horsepower of half a drunk bicyclist.
Sure, you could argue I brought it on myself. Stealing that prototype turbocharger from the automotive museum, in plain sight of Mitsubishi’s finest security thugs, was going to get me in hot water one way or another. I just didn’t think it would elevate to the level of a literal car chase, but it turns out those hard-working grunts had watched a pretty spicy action flick on the flight over, and were ready to find out what their rental hybrid Malibu could do.
In my defence, I really wanted that turbo. And it wasn’t doing anyone any good, sitting in that alarmed display case. Most car parts aren’t all that exciting to look at: if anything, I was giving the three-diamond crew some free marketing. This is what was on my mind as I blew one of the rear spring shackles driving over some thankfully-abandoned playground equipment while shortcutting across a minor residential development. Don’t worry: the turbo was fine, buckled into a well-loved baby seat in the back of the car.
While I made it away from Japan’s finest turbocharger-producing thugs, my car was not quite as lucky. I finally slid to a stop at a community centre parking lot, the force of the handbrake turn bending the corroded unibody in such a way that the doors would no longer shut. I had to hoof it from there, a prospect which the angry guards chasing me likely considered to be “too easy” and maybe even a little pathetic. They stayed behind, pleased that they had at least immobilized my shitbox. Maybe they even planned to run the license plate, a prospect which I found more than a little funny because I had punched it out of an old snow shovel the morning before.
People ask me how I learned about so many different things. It’s easy: I experiment a lot. Some folks are afraid to try pushing a new button in their word processor, or trying an alternative cooking time on their microwave. They know what works, and they fear that deviating from that golden path will lead them to horrible, confusing misery as the thing they rely on has broken, and it’s all their fault.
Friends: everything I own breaks all the time. It is literally impossible to discern “my fault” from “it was just old.” That’s where my power comes from. I push whatever button I want, and then find out what it does. Sometimes it burns up a wiring harness, or ejects some part of the machine that I needed. Most of the time, though, I learn about a cool new feature I didn’t know existed. For instance, did you know that the doors in my car can lock?
Now, I don’t want to sound like I’m always trying out new things. For years, I’d been afraid of pushing different buttons on my washing machine. You see, it’s very old, and a little finicky, and I had finally found a magic combination of options that got my clothes washed without turning them into microplastic dust. Then, one morning, I got a little froggy. Things hadn’t been going well for me in the other projects, and I wanted to assert some control over my life. I pushed the “Custom Program” button.
Nothing seemed to happen. In fact, the screen went blank. And then I heard the helicopters. You see, I never got a manual with this clothes washer (because I found it floating in the river.) I had no idea what “Custom Program” would do, but secretly hoped it would unlock magic cleaning powers. What it actually did was cause the LG Corporation to mark me for death.
Just because I’ve been on the run from snipers and other heavily-armed mercenaries for the last sixteen months is no reason for you not to experiment. For instance, you could go push the “Custom Program” button on your own washing machine. That would probably draw away at least half of the highly trained assassins bearing down on me at this exact moment. Hell, maybe push it two or three times, really help me out. I would love to have a little more time to myself and less spent fleeing gun-toting psychopaths. Who knows what I’ll discover next?
This is a test of the emergency broadcast system. This is only a test. If this had been a real emergency, I would be selling the stale gasoline out of my backyard full of broken Mopars before attempting to flee in a safe direction. Afterwards, I’d pick up a bunch of broken modern cars off the highway.
For as long as I can remember, the apocalypse has been a common fantasy of a certain kind of person. They think that the destruction of society will make their skillset (repressed by the big-feelings and bigger-government crew) suddenly valuable, and they will rule the survivors like kings. It doesn’t occur to them that they could potentially learn new and valuable skills that make them useful now.
Of course, this power fantasy is attractive. Anyone can fall victim to it, replacing their current hurts with a sort of antisocial revenge fantasy. For instance, I have often hoarded spare parts in case the internet goes down, or the nearby junkyard disappears. If that happens, then I’ll finally be justified in having kept all these worn-out Chevy Blazer windshield wiper controls. I might even fix one up, and then I’d have the cleanest windshield in the wastes.
None of this will happen. Even if we did have another world-ending apocalyptic event in my lifetime, we have now learned that what we will actually do is keep going to work. There won’t be any gangs of murderous outlaws looking for gasoline and water, or at least not more than there already are. What there will be is folks helping each other out, trying to get through a tough time together, while the assholes who caused it jet off to Caracas, wherever that is.
So, in the interest of trying to be a better person, if any of you jerks need a whole pile of Chevy Blazer windshield wiper controls, come on down to my compound. Bring a nail file and multimeter. We’re gonna stick it to the dealership. And if the world does end, at least we’ll have a funny story to tell the other survivors as we huddle around an irradiated campfire, eating the remnants of a five-hundred pound mutant raccoon. Sure hope one of you knows how to light a fire.
When was the last time you saw a phone booth? For me, it had been awhile. The phone company flew in and ripped out the one near me as soon as they got the go-ahead. Inefficient, they said. Expensive, they said. Dangerous, they implied. Now, I have to drive for a couple minutes to find a payphone. Does it work? I dunno. I don’t carry quarters anymore, not since the good doctor cured my Pac-Man Fever with a double-fisted dose of electroshock therapy.
As a kid, the humble payphone was my gateway to the rest of the world. It was calling my parents collect to come get me from the pool. It was prank-calling the local pizza production palace to see if their refrigerator was running (it was not; I saved a lot of cheese from spoilage, an act which in some faiths would give me a get-out-of-Hell-free card for light-grade homicide.) And, above all, it was the place where Mr. Stereotype, the nice guy who ran the Italian restaurant down the street, would tell me to wait for a call and then run to tell him as soon as I got one.
Now, it’s become just another disappearing technology in my lifetime full of disappearing technology. There has been a lot of that in my life: my grandmother did not experience the rapid market-driven obsolescence of technologies such as “shovel” and “bicycle.” Soon, I will resort to becoming a coot who barks out ridiculous, long-lost names of the past: Beanie Babies. Motorola StarTac. Flooz. Those around me, who did not engage in such a world, will at least have the experience of seeing payphones in classic works of film, and realize that at least in this one case I should not be remanded into one of those nice Danish senility clinics, where you get to interact in an idyllic fake village that has no cars.
What’s the next thing to be pulled out of the public square during my lifetime? Nobody knows, but if I had to guess, it’s probably going to be trees. I never trusted those leafy bastards, and they’ve been around for millions of years. Ripe for disruption. Put ‘em all on the internet instead.
There is a sort of simple beauty in the fact that every person on Earth will walk their own path in life. Some folks fall in with UFO-related cults and offer to read the mental purity of complete strangers using an elaborate machine. Someone else might make a top-ten country music album before also falling prey to that same UFO cult.
You can watch your friends make bad decisions, but you can’t force them to conform to your own beliefs. All you can do is experience life in all its glory, then laugh at everyone else as those poor suckers didn’t spend their entire existence on this Earth learning all they could about the Isuzu Impulse Irmscher Edition. Maybe someone else will find out about a whole other weird kind of Isuzu they sold only in Japan, and share that information with you. You can’t know.
For me, this lesson came relatively late in life. When I was in school, I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and I worked hard to get toward it. A lot of my friends and classmates were relatively directionless drifters, preferring instead to find out what the world had waiting for them. I laughed, knowing that every passing moment was critical to live up to my dreams. It turns out that what life provided them with were high-paying engineering degrees in oil and gas, and for me: wanton automotive degeneracy. It’s hard to argue that I didn’t get what I really wanted.
Which is not to say that their existences aren’t valid as well. For instance, many of them probably have homes that are occupied legally, with a clear title, instead of an insanely complex interlocking series of legal and ethical corner cases surrounding a “missing” landlord. None of them, however, will drive a 1984 Cadillac Cimarron to the high school reunion, and even if they do: their car won’t be powered by a Pratt and Whitney jet turbine that fell out of the sky near the airport (finders keepers.)
If you believe the news, these days, it’s never been easier to get murdered. Everyone is waiting to snuff you out. Even suburbs are roiling apocalyptic zones that mandate you buy a very expensive security system and an up-armoured luxury SUV. A road trip is completely out of the question. After all, who knows what kind of whackos are out there?
To answer this question, we became those whackos. No, we didn’t serial kill, or even parallel kill anyone. What we did was load up the old ‘72 Toyota Crown wagon with a bunch of spare oil and parts and hit the road. We wanted to figure out if the world really was all that dangerous, and to prove it, we stayed at only the sketchiest bed and breakfasts across New England.
Things got off to a bad start. You see, the coterie of folks that I usually travel with are not exactly the most refined individuals. Because a lot of us were raised entirely by junkyards and our parents’ respective parole officers (thanks Joerg) we have trouble “fitting into” the conventional structure of society. That wouldn’t stop a serial killer, of course, who would surely prey on at least one of our group as we slept soundly inside Maryland’s least rat-infested rustic cabin.
No such luck. In fact, it turns out that the proprietors were afraid of us. They had been conditioned by the news, you see, and spent the entire night sleeping in shifts, wondering when we would burst through their bedroom door, looking for jewelry that we could hock for money to afford a Holley carburetor rebuild kit. Little did they know that the Crown was in fact running a diesel engine out of a Cuban grey-market lawn tractor, and also that we had no intention of ruining the experiment by trying to cause trouble.
That first morning, we parted, each group wary of the other. The experiment could not continue: it was likely that we would encounter the same problem the entire way up the Old Bay Expressway. We knew what had to happen next. After driving at high speed, we arrived at the local TV station, barely shaven and ready to pitch our new fear-based “action news” program. The audience would surely believe ridiculous lies coming from disgusting dirtbags like ourselves, our crude language and 10w40-stained visages lending our dire warnings extra authenticity.
“Folks,” I began, in my most folksy voice, “you gotta get rid of any old Mopar parts you have on your property. They were made by sleeper-agent Communist agitators working with the Y2K bug. Send them to me for destruction.”
Batteries are the big part holding back an electric car future. Being able to shoot giant Jacob’s Ladders across the entire yard while doing ill-advised skids, and feeling good about it, is just one miraculous chemical discovery away. And I thought I had cracked it.
You see, batteries have been around for thousands of years. We used them for boring things like radios, lighting, and food preservation until we figured out that we could slap them into a car and go ripping down the streets, scaring horses. In other words, humanity figured the basic concepts out a long time ago, and we’ve been working to make marginal improvements this whole time. Lots of those amazing advancements have been made! Then, we want a little more horsepower, and suddenly that improvement gets used up. This is very similar to when I get a paycheque, or empty room in my yard.
I, too, wanted an electric car. Mostly because the fuel pump on my Dart died again, and I was so angry at it that I swore off gasoline altogether. Spite at inanimate objects is such a great motivator for me that it carried me all the way to my local public library, where I checked out a book for preschoolers on how batteries worked. Back home, I laboured day and night to advance the state of the art. And at last, after a couple hours of hard work, I had topped the achievement of all those genius scientists and engineers. Why hadn’t they also discovered this? Just lazy, I guess.
Introducing the egg fart battery. Nature’s most terrible phenomenon, now capable of being installed in your car and used to propel it almost to the end of the block. Charging, you ask? Well, you use this hose. Hey, wait, where are you going?
Birdwatching got really popular in the early days of the Unpleasantness. However, now that the bosses are forcing us all back to the office, the birds don’t have anyone to watch them. That’s why I built an autonomous bird-observation robot. Its name is SparrowScope 9000, and I recommend not becoming too emotionally attached to it, because it is your competition.
There’s a lot of obvious benefits to having a robotic birdwatcher. It can start up early in the morning and go to its charging dock late at night. It never makes a mistake identifying a bird. It won’t get tired, cold, hungry, or develop pointless drama with “Uncle” Hudson Carl online over his fucking misdocumentation of Northern Cardinals. You can pop over to its little webpage and see what it spotted that day, and feel pretty good. It’s like you’re really there, even though you’re stuck in an office building wondering if you have enough staples loaded in your stapler to get through the month, or if you should maybe talk to Jan in Requisitioning to get a fresh refill.
However, there are flaws. One of the big things is that the US military doesn’t let regular people – civilians – have super-accurate GPS. They fuck with the data a little bit, so that you can’t somehow threaten national security by knowing where you are. I didn’t know this before I started on the project, and the bird sanctuary has a lot of elevated walkways ever since the flood. SparrowScope 9000 became more of a SoggyScope Wet-Thousand.
If a real technology company had assembled it, that would probably have been the end of the story. They’d have put in some total garbage like a modern microcontroller, maybe some parts made in this century. Not me. This thing is half old pinball machine parts and the other half Aibos. It kept trucking right down the river, and I never saw it again. I do get updates from it periodically as it spots a new bird, but my work schedule forbids me from taking a few days off to drive to the next county over and see if I can figure out which swamp it’s floated into this time.
Even with this small disaster, I’m pretty proud of what I accomplished. Our avian friends get looked at by a creepy robot covered in seaweed, and we can all experience what it was like for one brief, shining moment in which we still had hobbies.
Storage is the defining problem of our age. Two hundred years ago, our ancestors had fifteen or twenty things in their houses, max. And one of them was “bed.” Now, we have a lot of clutter. Sure, it’s down from the peak of the 1970s, when we needed thirty-six different pieces of electrical equipment just to listen to racist people in our general area, but we still have too much stuff.
Self-storage companies have exploded. Not literally, although that did happen to the one near me from some dude cooking shatter, but they are immensely profitable. If you receive a bunch of heirloom furniture from Crazy Aunt Ethel, you won’t have enough room for it in your single bedroom basement apartment. You shove all of it into a self-storage bay, and keep paying the monthly bills, waiting until you can have a house big enough to place some heirloom furniture in.
The storage companies know this. They’ll give you a low “sucker” rate at the start, and then start cranking up the fees. And you’ll keep paying them. It’s cheaper to kick in $5 more a month, than it is to ask your friend Ted to borrow his pickup truck so that you can drive all your shit across town to a competing storage unit, who will do the exact same thing.
How do you fight back, ideally without having to throw away a bunch of coffee tables from 1953 and incurring the eternal wrath of Aunt Ethel’s shade? You have to let the storage unit make money for you. The obvious way is electricity. With electricity, you can run all kinds of things, from a seedy cryptocurrency mining operation, to an illegal online betting parlour. And the storage folks know this, which is why they don’t provide power to your unit, and wrap the unit’s lightbulb in an impenetrable steel cage. They are used to dealing with your average, run-of-the-mill cheap scumbag.
Don’t let that stop you: despite what your neurochemistry is telling you, you are an exceptional cheap scumbag. You don’t need their electricity; you can generate your own. The answer? Rats love running on little hamster wheels. You can make thirty, forty cents a month, per wheel. That’s money in your pocket, and all it will cost you is a bit of expired cheese and a lot of old Subaru blower motors. Sure, it’s not going to be great for any couches or clothing that you leave in the unit, but who ever heard of a heirloom sofa bed? Throw that shit out, ideally by leaving it in a unit and no longer paying the bill. You don’t need to cling to memories: you’re rich now, atop your rodent power empire.
Garage sales are one of the great remaining bulwarks of true capitalism. We go through the rest of our lives, enslaved by consumption-demanding megacorporations, chasing pop trends and make-your-life-better gadgets, ruining the lives of ourselves and our neighbours for an increasingly illusory benefit. And then we dump that shit a few years later for $3 each when it clogs up our basement.
I’m not going to lecture you about the virtues of buying cool stuff from garage sales. If you’re reading this, you probably already know. Statistics from my new artificial intelligence department (an old Pop-O-Matic® Trouble® dice roller) indicate that one hundred percent of my readers are actually doing so while waiting in line to badger a fellow suburbanite for a 50% discount on a mid-1990s Yashica film camera body.
No, what is important is that we are selling person to person. No corporate artifice in the way. Here, finally, is the capitalism that we were promised by a bunch of shit-eating MBA monsters: you and another person, standing in their garage. Or they’re standing in your garage. Fully-depreciated garbage is exchanged for their true value, using the money in your pocket. And if you come back a few hours later, that garbage will probably be out on the curb with a “Free” sign on it. Importantly, no giant company is involved. We don’t have to make any new garbage, either.
From each according to their backyard full of worn-out children’s toys, to each according to how much room their backyard has. Hey, that sounds familiar. I think some really smart guy wrote about it once in a truck stop bathroom.
So, if you’re on the fence about participating in a garage sale: do it. You’ll help your fellow person, you’ll keep trash out of the landfill, and you might even find a worn-out Haynes manual about a 1978 Volare. If you do so, come on by my garage and try to flip it for a little more money, because my car doesn’t run and I can’t get out there to the sales myself. Really get into that entrepreneurial spirit, just like Adam Smith would’ve wanted.
No matter what you do, people will always find a way to criticize it. If you get lost in the forest, don’t fret. Just start welding something and wait for someone to show up and yell at you about your terrible technique. Then you can kill and eat him, so at least you won’t starve.
Welding, for me, has always been a “need to do” rather than a “like to do.” That’s not saying that there aren’t true artisans, magicians who can do things like “not keep getting the wire stuck in the workpiece.” For those individuals, I’m sure it is very painful to watch a bumblefuck like me steering a MIG torch around like it’s a flashlight, leaving a horrific graveyard of burned globs of half-steel, half-air in my wake.
I am also certain that those same individuals are not the ones leaving angry replies on my popular YouTube videos: “Need To Fix My Frame” and “Need To Fix My Frame VI” (for some reason, the middle five episodes are not very popular, probably due to algorithmic bias.) The world is full of armchair welders who dispense little in the way of useful wisdom and a lot of invective about how I should not be allowed near any power source that produces more than about five volts. Guess what, idiots? You’re actually agreeing with my court order, so that’s the company you’re keeping.
Don’t worry, though. If I let the haters get to me, then I wouldn’t weld anything at all. And then my car would be in two or more pieces, instead of one slightly banana-shaped one that whistles every time the wind blows. My confidence is high that by doing more welding, I’ll get better at it with experience. I’ll learn from my mistakes. And that’s great, because I just hit a pothole and it’s been about two weeks since “Need To Fix My Frame XII.” Don’t want to piss off my loyal audience.
The Mafia of Incompetence is out to get me, and not even for the first time this week. There’s all kinds of reasons these non-aligned dimbulb thugs wish me harm, but chief among them is my insistence that I must always receive my RockAuto magnets.
Perhaps you are unfamiliar. You see, RockAuto is a modern e-commerce corporation. It exists as sort of amorphous blob. Old-school parts warehouses, retail operations, and liquidators go out of business all the time. RockAuto scoops up those car parts and sells them over the internet. One of the things they include with every order is at least one small, rectangular refrigerator magnet, of another freak’s car.
Time was, you could count on four things in life: gravity, death, taxes, and RockAuto magnets showing up with your order. Now, fewer than that many things are true. Border patrol has been getting increasingly sticky-fingered around my part of the world, and I’ll often have a RockAuto package show up with different tape on it, missing all of its packing material and – critically – the magnet.
I’ve complained to my local political representative, using virtually the same words as I’m speaking to you now. They ignored me, because they have real problems to solve (what caviar to pair with which wine, how to give a larger tax break than 100% to oil companies.) I had to take matters into my own hands. Contrary to popular belief, a background check for the federal government is really easy to fake. Soon, I was the government’s newest parcel snoop.
That’s where I met my then-coworker, now-friend, Shaky Tim. You see, he was the one stealing the magnets. I caught him red handed my first day. When all the other border guards went to lunch, he stayed behind and hacked open a bunch of the RockAuto packages. His desk at work was laden with the things, a cascading pile many inches thick of gleaming hot-rods, warm-rods, and even cold-rods.
Ethically, I was in a bit of a pickle. Reporting him to my “superiors” would stop the flow of my magnets into his pockets, but it would result in no other benefit to myself. Ignoring him was out of the question: my refrigerator still had at least a few square inches of empty space on its fascia. When in doubt, make like King Solomon: we decided to split the booty. I wouldn’t report him, and he’d punch my time card for me and come by with a shopping bag full of magnets every weekend.
We’ve been doing this for a few years now, and everything was going great. My boss had been giving me glowing performance reviews, based entirely on my ability to not embarrassingly fuck up at work. And my pension was fattening nicely. Unfortunately, Shaky Tim was the weak point in the whole apparatus. He had a crisis of conscience, and quit the government altogether rather than admit his horrible crime. Doing so backed up the entire works: all the remaining border guards were not nearly as motivated to process RockAuto packages quickly. I didn’t get my new Mikuni carb floats for, like, a whole week.
Yeah, I worked on The Machine. And, as I pried open its secret compartments and loosened its wiring harness and decrypted its memories, it worked on me also. Deep within its many hidden copses lay immense knowledge, unknown to all but those who formed it. Who built The Machine? No one knows. Everyone knows. I know. Now that The Machine works again, the person who last built it was me.
For years, I was a humble regular home-gamer mechanic. Something around the house would break. For the sake of argument, we’ll use as an example the time my microwave blew up when I opened the door. One morning, it just went pop and never worked again. Well, at least until I fixed it. It turns out that the door had a little microswitch inside, and that microswitch got gummy with aerosolized food goo. Because it was gummed up, it wouldn’t switch the computer off in time when I opened the door. That would be dangerous: I could get a full face shot of microwaves from the still-running magnetron. A safety interlock fired, and blew the brains out of the big fuse controlling the magnetron. It died for me. Replacing the switch, and the fuse, brought that microwave back to life. I did many such repairs. I was not prepared for this repair.
Fix after fix, I built up my confidence, and I got cockier. I’d pull broken machines out of the trash, mysterious foreign computers from another country. Some things escaped my grasp, and slipped further into oblivion. Most, though: most, I pulled back from the brink, and forced them to live again. That’s when I found The Machine.
It was beautiful, intricate: thousands of parts, wedged together tighter than I had ever seen before, and a cryptic fault at the centre of it. When you cram together this much stuff, the complexity doesn’t just add: it multiplies. To aid me, I looked for a guide, a factory service manual. The manufacturer laughed. The manufacturer’s representative laughed. Someone who made it, who I tracked down on LinkedIn, hung up on me and refused to answer his door when I visited. Weeks later, he was gone, “dead” in a suspiciously convenient accident, a body left behind at the edge of his bleach-washed property with no identifying marks or fingerprints. I got the message: I was on my own.
This little wire just came unplugged. I guess someone must have dropped it. All better now.
“Oh bother,” said Winnie the Pooh, who was at this exact moment in time very much outside of copyright and placed well into the public domain, “my car won’t start.” Indeed, Pooh Bear had quite the predicament on his hands. His 1966 Charger’s numbers-unmatching 318-cubic-inch polysphere V8 had been equipped, largely inexplicably, with a four-barrel Rochester Quadrajet® carburetor. A previous owner’s work, no doubt.
Eventually, his little friend Piglet came tootling down the lane. Piglet had been out earlier that day, in his twin-supercharged Nash Metropolitan, and he remembered that when he left, Pooh Bear had been under the hood of the Dodge, swearing loudly. And now: he still was. A repair that took longer to complete than it did for Piglet’s relatively easy-going highway cruising speed to traverse the length of the Hundred Acre Woods? That did seem like a Very Large Problem.
Eeyore was already there, in Pooh’s carport, telling the bear exactly what was wrong. “Torn carb gasket,” the donkey sighed. “I’m sure of it.” Pooh, being a bear of very little brain, did not listen to his friend’s measured suggestion, and looked straight past the glob of RTV that clung, half boiled, to the top of his intake manifold.
That’s when Tigger showed up, bouncing on a Vespa travelling at a significant portion of c. The exposed connectors of the pouch-style vape batteries powering the Vespa’s eight-kilowatt e-bike motor threw a shower of sparks onto the road with every jounce and pounce.
“Hoo hoo hoo!” shouted Tigger. “Can’t stop now, my throttle cable just caught fire!”
In modern life, all people pass through a moment where they realize that machines cannot think. They cannot reason. They cannot use common sense. All they can do is sit in their little main loops, waiting for some external stimuli to tell them when to do their jobs. A self-checkout, for instance, cannot tell the difference between eight kilograms of bananas and eight kilograms of Oreo cookies, nor does it care.
Sure, the designers know this. They are well aware of all the flaws of their products. It does not make economic sense for them to do a good job, because everyone else in the industry also cuts corners. So they cheat. A machine will try to ingratiate itself to you, to speak to you in your language, to emulate the human being that it is replacing.
The hope here is that you might feel bad about ripping the machine off. Our brains are wired to think that inanimate objects are alive, and have thoughts and feelings. Oh no, the Brave Little Toaster is gonna get shit-canned if I steal thirty-seven dollars worth of chickpeas. Do not trust this instinct. That machine would be just as happy sitting in a completely empty supermarket, or at the bottom of the ocean, as long as there is power and a clock signal. Even though it says “sorry,” it does not mean it.
Becoming aware of the facade of consciousness is useful for more than just casual shoplifting, of course. For instance, you can install your own self-checkout into the grocery store. Grocery stores go tits up all the time, and you can find their leavings on any reasonable commercial-bankruptcy auction site. Just show up in a bright yellow safety vest, wheel the old one out to your rented work van, and come back in with another. Nobody will ask you to verify yourself, because you are just a pawn of the machines, and so are they. And hey, this slightly funny-looking one with all the hand-drawn labels on the front speaks the same language as all the others. It must belong here too.
How many years of your life have you spent hitting refresh on package-tracking websites? Does it make a material difference to your life whether this box leaves Chicago tonight, when you live absolutely nowhere near Chicago (people reading this from Chicago: please substitute for another distant city?) No, but we want to know what’s going on with our shit. Maybe, just maybe, there will be an update, and we can imagine what life is like in the distant land of YUEN LONG INTERNATIONAL PACKAGE SORTING. I bet they have crazy ice cream flavours that we don’t get here.
As you might expect, I buy a lot of parts for my hoopties. And, because those cars have been “out of print” for several decades, you have to get creative about where you get those parts. How did a crate full of Quadrajets end up in Vietnam? Not my concern, but as long as I can bumblefuck my way through a conversation roughly tantamount to “I give money, you give old machine parts,” I’ll get something in the mail that I can strap to my engine.
Will it actually be a Quadrajet? Probably not. Sometimes I accidentally bungle into a CIA dead drop. It’s happened more than once that some creepy spies operating in another country send me a box full of top-secret microfiche instead of my car parts, which is always a pain in the ass because even after I throw it into the curbside recycling, I’m still stalked by federal assassins for a few weeks demanding to know where it is. Eventually, after dispatching enough of them using a combination of pure idiot’s luck and living in a house stuffed to the gills with rusty and/or electrified garbage, I get to talk to a middle manager, who agrees to let me “off the hook,” as it is. And then I still don’t have my junk. Zero stars on eBay.
What is important is that these parts or microfiche or nuclear secrets, whatever they are, are sent with tracking numbers. Otherwise, I have nothing to ruthlessly push F5 on when I should be concentrating on something more important, like ordering more parts, or emailing foreign agents why my 318 poly heads haven’t moved for a few hours. You better not have gotten captured and tortured to death again. This is why I paid for the insurance.
Here’s something you probably didn’t know: corporations have too much money. Because of a bunch of really bad decisions, they’ve been allowed to jack up prices, pay workers unfairly, and keep the lion’s share of the revenue. What that means, however, is that they have a lot of loose cash on hand. Cash that I would like.
You’re looking at Pick-N-Pull’s newest Writer In Residence. Now, this is not a conventional role you see in mega-corporations. I just kept cold-calling companies that I loved, FedExing them my hand-scrawled notebooks full of terrifying rambling, and following their executives home from work until they agreed that they should probably just give me some of their money. My grandpa always used to say that the best way to get a new job was to go out and look for one, by hanging a corporate middle manager upside down while sparking their nipples with battery cables until self-ignition. That second part was implied, because Grandpa Switch knew that our phones were tapped.
So what does this fancy new job require me to do? Well, not much. You see, they’ve become accustomed to the bohemian (that’s French for “all fucked up”) life of the creative. Once in awhile, I have to come out of my greasy office, which is filled with parts I bought using my healthy corporate discount, and write something fun to put on the bulletin board at work. HR has gotten involved with a few of them, but they understand that I’m passionate, and artistic, and also spending my entire paycheque on Slant Sixes, so they decided it was probably a good idea to just leave me alone.
At the end of this year, I’m supposed to release some kind of fantastic work of art – the great junk novel – so that they can hype it in their investor prospectus. We’re not just a car junkyard, they will explain, we can be a junkyard of the human spirit as well. We’ll see how that project goes, but at the moment I have a serious case of the ol’ writer’s block. As in, there’s an old AMC Eagle 258 bottom end sitting on my desk, covering up my corporate issued computer. Don’t worry, IT will replace it. They know how to spend the company’s money.
Although the Pizza Hut brand still occupies parts of this world, it no longer stands for what it once did. You’ll be hard-pressed to locate a sundae bar, glittery sticker dispenser, or red cups made of translucent acrylic – of which I can assure you were once “bottomless.” The only thing left are the disaffected, stoned teenagers taking the orders. That, and the Personal Pan Pizza: more than any other, a symbol of North American culture.
In Italy, where hard-working chefs stole the idea for the pizza from visiting space aliens, they decided that a pizza should be shared. Sure, they are often capable of being eaten solo, and the owner of the restaurant would be extremely pleased if each member of your party slammed their own pizza down before ordering a flotilla of liquor, but the way they are enjoyed best is to give a couple slices to your friend. This means you have to compromise on toppings, of course, which is a concept alien to those of us raised on lifted Powerstrokes and fuzzy VHS tapes of air show disasters.
Not so with the Personal Pan Pizza – you get what you want, and to Hell with everyone else in the dining establishment. As well, Pizza Hut gets to charge a little extra margin on each pizza, their shareholders laughing all the way to the bank. You’re happy, they’re happy. Maybe the guy (your stepdad?) paying the bill at the end of the night isn’t happy, but he can get a Personal of his very own.
Nowadays, this humble concept of individuality is becoming abandoned in favour of collectivism. No, don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of those radical psychopaths who films TikTok videos about overthrowing the government from the front seat of his pickup truck. Pretty sure all those dudes got blown up by drones a couple weeks ago, and replaced by exact body duplicates grown in a lab. What I care about is being able to get a good paint colour on a new car.
Nowadays, everyone worries about resale value. Back then, nobody freaked out about choosing the optimal toppings to keep their lease payments low on their pizza; that would have been an insane thing to say. The pizza was for their enjoyment, and it was meant to be used up. Maybe the crusts got left behind and stolen by a rat. That rat is me. What I’m trying to say is: please order your new hybrid Lexus in bright green, so that I can drive it in thirty years. Don’t be so selfish.
Not all crimes are bad, really. For instance, there’s the classic example of stealing bread to feed your starving family. Blowing up an unjust group of jerkwads to preserve the status quo. And my personal favourite, using an enormous electromagnet to steal coins from the mall fountain.
The haters are gonna leap down my throat for that last one. It is true that the shopping mall fountain has fallen on hard times. For starters, not as many people go to the mall anymore. And when they do, they usually pay by credit card, FaceCheck®, or debit. There’s simply not enough change heading into the fountains, so every single cent matters.
You might ask yourself, as a member of a bygone era, where did that change go? Those wishes didn’t come true, none of them did. Surely after a half-century of suburbanites plonking metal icons of the Queen into the water, it would have clogged a drain or a pump filter or something. The answer is that highly-trained mall employees were nobly tasked, during the legally required periodic draining and sanitation of the fountain (i.e. every time a kid peed in it) to remove that change and remand it to the custody of mall management. This jingly-jangly bounty used to be a source of untold wealth for shopping mall landlords, perhaps even in excess of their own salaries.
Now, the managers are gone, but the coins remain. The last layer of discarded pennies, quarters, and even loonies – loonies, I tell you, some real rich people in this town – are forgotten as each dead mall hollows out, its lights staying on even as the people inside have departed. That is, except for private security, who wouldn’t accept a fistful of slightly damp and highly magnetized quarters as a bribe. Bribery is another crime, I’m told.
There’s something magical about finding something unlocked that wasn’t supposed to be. Ever since I was a young kid, the thrill of getting to peek inside a forbidden door, access shaft, or motor vehicle is unmatched. You get to learn stuff. It feels a little wrong. And sometimes you get to take home some cool industry-specific tools. Taken together, there’s no reason not to randomly jiggle doorknobs as you walk past a particularly enticing cabinet.
Near my house is this truly enormous green utility box. It’s at least five meters wide, and is as tall as a man. There’s no label on the outside to make it obvious what its purpose is. Last week, someone did some maintenance on it, and they forgot to put the lock back on when they were done. Naturally, I decided I would go take a look.
Inside, I found a matrix of twinkling lights, a jungle of wiring, and no cool leftover tools. I thought at first that it might be a phone switch, but there were no fancy phone-company labels on it anywhere. Not even a hastily scrawled sign-in sheet on the door about what contractor to blame. I decided to reach further into the box, hoping to learn something about the world that surrounds me. And that’s when it happened.
Friends, you might think that all those childhood fables about reaching into a disused closet in your least favourite aunt’s house and being transported to another world are fiction. You’d be right: kids during World War II who engaged in such risky behaviour usually died of typhoid aggravated by hypothermia. They just hadn’t invented magical phone-company cabinets yet. I soon found myself in a different land, soft snow falling upon my face from a starlight sky of beautiful LEDs. And then a half-goat, half-man addressed me.
“What the fuck?” asked Mr. Tumnus.
“It’s my first day and my supervisor hasn’t given me a safety vest yet. Where’s the problem?” I grunted out, already ripping into the drywall behind me for any loose lengths of copper that I could grab and sell.
For years, weirdos of all kinds have enjoyed the humble engine swap. To automotive enthusiasts, there is nothing more appealing than the idea of buying a car with a smaller, weaker engine, and shoving in a giant beast that makes it dangerous. Perverts will signal their deep knowledge of mechanical guts by sharing with each other the secret recipes of which engines “bolt right up” to relatively unloved cars.
For instance, everyone who has ever turned a wrench knows that you can take a common Ford Festiva and shove a relatively giant Mazda Protege engine under the hood. After that, you’re off to the races of blowing up axles and robbing grandmothers in order to afford new 13-inch tires. Doing this project, and the hundreds of hours of wiring and fiddling that follow, is considered an “easy” engine swap.
True weirdness begins when you start to take a trip off of the beaten path. Sure, the automakers did this combination of engine and driveline in Indonesia, but doing what they did would just be copying them. What you want is to get a real low whistle out of people who will look at your car at an impromptu Tim Hortons pop-the-hood meet. You want to shove something in there that truly does not belong in the car, and could never have been endorsed by any automaker.
You can go one of two ways on this: bigger, better, more horsepower is the popular route. That almost always means “more money,” which is not a thing that I’m about. No. I’m more of an engine swap out of necessity guy, which is why my 1969 Corona is now running entirely on an old refrigerator compressor I pulled out of the alley. Its half-horsepower engine is a bit chuggy when going uphill, but that’s just the price you pay for style. Plus, propane is cheaper than gasoline, because the little bottles are easy to steal from Walmart.
Theatre: it’s a thing. Every high school across the country is training up kids, teaching them to follow their dreams of becoming an actor or at least being really picky about Hamlet. Thousands of new actors every year, but many fewer playwrights. What were they going to perform? I decided that Shakespeare would probably have wanted me to write what I did next.
You might think it’s very difficult to get established as a playwright. For instance, the common person thinks that you have to write plays. This is wrongheaded thinking from a bygone era. In this modern age, all you have to do is hop on LinkedIn, find some guy who looks like he is involved with handing out the money to a theatre, and then tell him you’re a playwright and you’ll make all this boring art profitable.
Will you? Fuck no. The last time I ran a profit, the cops showed up and demanded that I stop using a network of schoolchildren in my lemonade-stand “franchise operation.” I have no idea whatsoever about how money is made in putting on plays, but – and here’s the rub – neither does anyone else. It just seems to happen, because folks feel obligated to throw in a few bucks and get their corporate logos on the program. And there were quite a few logos on the program of my inaugural performance of 1972 Fiat 850 Coupe.
Was it successful, financially? Somehow, despite my best efforts, yes. Did the actors like performing it? Probably not the ones who had to dress up as “Fiat Executive, Cappuccino E. Pepperoncini,” but that was only half of the cast. And in case you’re curious how that is possible, I invite you to come on down to the Shunting-Yard Playhouse this next weekend, where you’ll find out. Bring some spare oil.
You could fry an egg inside my car lately. I park outside, so the sun is always shining through the windows, heating up the interior. The peeling purple tint that was installed poorly in the mid-90s doesn’t do much against it. As a result, every time I climb in, I basically scorch my hand on either the steel shift knob, the exposed metal of the worn-out steering wheel, or the exposed metal where my seat cushion used to be but currently is not.
Now, I want to warn you before we go any further. Although I did say you can fry an egg inside my car, I don’t recommend doing so. For one thing, the egg is going to get a lot of microplastics inside it, and possibly a little bit of ash from the turbocharger burning off all that leaky oil. That’s not really “health code,” and I’ve got enough problems with bylaw as it is. It’s a metaphorical egg, okay?
There were a lot of ways that I tried to solve this problem, but by far the worst was attaching a roll-out canvas cover. I stole it from an RV dealership, because I felt that the needs of the many (myself and everyone who has to interact with me) outweigh the needs of the few (the owner of the dealership.) Any idiot could tell you how this was supposed to work: I’d unfurl the awning and put it in a position that blocks the sun.
Unfortunately, physics has a thing called “wind.” If you’re not familiar, wind is so powerful that entire countries cook their toast using it. In my case, the canvas made a sort of white-trash sailboat sail. What’s worse, the sail clapping against the body of my car sealed up all the giant rust holes through which the wind usually blew harmlessly through. With those two phenomenon combined, and also the parking brake I have that doesn’t exactly work, my car blew down the street and well away from my house.
Normally, I would have been excited about being able to cover 40 miles without using a single drop of gasoline, but it’s not nearly as much fun for your car to crash through a house when you’re not behind the wheel at the time. I ended up telling the police some bullshit about it being a prototype autonomous car, which gave me enough time to cut the awning loose and escape while they looked up which billionaire was involved in funding it.
That said, the interior was nice and cool. All that brickwork I blew through did a fantastic job sinking the heat. Another success!
Cargo bikes are very popular now, for the same reason that giant SUVs were popular in the Olden Times (also now.) That reason is simple: stuff. You got a lot of stuff, maybe too much stuff, and it’s hard to say no to that stuff. Regular bicycles don’t cut it, because you can only carry so much stuff, and if there’s too much stuff to carry, then you have to leave some of that stuff at home. Cargo bicycles say: nope. Throw that stuff in there. And as a bonus, you can ram the weenies on regular bicycles when they cut you off in traffic.
In retrospect, the bastard combination of the rear half of a bicycle and the front half of a wheelbarrow was going to be an inevitable success. You can load it up with all kinds of things that used to require an emissions-spewing van: ladders, paint, children, microcomputers, and then you can use the additional caloric load of transport as an excuse to eat a third helping of emissions-spewing tacos after you help your friend renovate their apartment.
Parking is a little bit more of a challenge, being that the awkwardly long nightmare contraption you are piloting with reckless abandon through the city centre doesn’t fit into the average bicycle hole. This is okay, though, because no thief will steal it, unless they are also planning to use it to commit other crimes and need the cargo space. If that happens, chances are you’ll find some bonus items in the carrier when you find it. Crack pipes probably have some resale value, right? Maybe you can prevent a theft by loading your cargo bike up with worthless cinder blocks before you abandon it on the side of the road.
Above all, the important thing is that our civilization can continue to haul big items around, even in the wake of the collapse of the internal combustion engine. Cargo bicycles are a much happier, environmentally conscious, and friendlier way to transport goods of all kinds, unless you want those goods to arrive quickly or without the twisted, blood-soaked frames of lesser bicyclists wrapped around them.
When I was a kid, going to the zoo was a joyous occasion. You’d get to see a giraffe, maybe your dad would stay home from work, and at the end there’d be a root-beer-flavoured candy stick from the gift shop. Nowadays, I’m an adult, and adults most definitely do not go to the zoo on their own. So I did.
As soon as I arrived, and paid the eyewatering sum required for the parking and admission, I immediately had a rush of childhood euphoria upon seeing my favourite animal again. That animal is a John Deere Gator 6x6 all-terrain-vehicle and utility tractor. The groundskeepers were still using this reliable workhorse, and, thinking they were dealing with nothing more than rebellious toddlers, had left it parked in front of the penguin exhibit with a length of chain link fencing and copper wiring in the back.
Oh yes, copper wiring. They should be more careful about that. A real creepazoid thief would steal that stuff, get a couple bucks. I, however, pride myself on respecting the private property of others a little bit more than that. As I plunked the Gator into low range and began climbing the stairs to the wildebeest area, I gave myself a pat on the back for being such a good citizen and having so much restraint and impulse control.
I’d like to say that the resulting chase through the facility involved a bunch of daring high-speed turns, but the scrub radius on one of these six-wheel-drive abominations is just terrible. Every time I even went near the steering wheel, I was rewarded with copious understeer. Despite what the evening news says, it is to my credit as a race driver that I managed to only gently skim the butterfly exhibit, rather than crash through it. Security did catch up to me when I stopped to get a corn dog, but that’s only because the lines were so long.
As I lay there on the ground, my arms handcuffed behind me, the cop’s knee in my back, I had no regrets. Well, maybe one. You see, I had picked the wrong snack counter, not realizing just how far a giraffe’s neck could bend. Being forced to watch that long-necked asshole swallow my corn dog – which I paid for – whole is the real injustice here.
There’s a chip shortage, if you believe the government. I don’t: anyone can just head on down to their local grocery store and grab a big helping of Doritos. Wait, I guess those are out of stock. Tostitos, then? Nope, those too. Shit. Well, I can still get store brand.
Now, a lot of industrial analysts and professional “told-you-sos” are going to be really insufferable about this whole thing. They are going to tell us that they warned about the dangers of outsourcing our entire industrial production and way of life to a foreign country. And to that I say: it was cheaper this way.
There’s still something that we can’t outsource, though, and that’s busted-ass shit piled up in our junkyards. It’s our greatest resource. Foreign junkyards are too expensive to ship parts to us. In fact, foreign countries need our broken cars. They order barges full of them, so that they can melt them down and turn the constituent materials into useful stuff for normal people.
That’s why I’m here today, speaking in my capacity as an amateur economist, urging us not to send our ruined cars away. If we can keep them all here, especially the critically important 1976 to 1980 Plymouth Volares and Dodge Aspens, then we can achieve self-reliance through the power of carburetors, Slant Sixes, and lean burn. No microchips needed, nor would they tolerate such a chaotic electrical environment. And mechanics, long idled by efficient modern cars, would get put back to work, installing semi-truck turbochargers from those very same junkyards onto our F-bodied daily drivers.
We used to be good at bad ideas. Now we’re bad at good ideas. It’s time to go back to being a bunch of degenerate greaseballs covering our lawns in the shattered wrecks of our proudest Malaise Era warm rods.
Ah, morning. Hot coffee in my favourite mug, a sun-dappled veranda on the balcony of my rural French palace, and a quick peek at the newspaper to see how my favourite NASCAR driver, Rusty “Piss” Trickle, placed last night. Now, just to take a big sip of scalding hot Blue Mountain before I read the results…
No, of course you know what I know. Rusty didn’t podium. Hell, he didn’t even place. He got, once again, ejected from the venue for trying to crush a full can of beer with his helmet-mounted GoPro at 180 miles an hour on the roval. Before the race had even started.
His utter collapse in the face of competition doesn’t impact my life materially, although tens of thousands of motorsports fans across the world peg their emotional states to the success or failure of their favourite racists. And you can see why. In early childhood, we all want to have heroes. Originally, they’re characters of fiction, or idealized representations of actual jobs. Firefighter. Paramedic. Home Depot guy who unlocks the saw when your mom needs to rip some planks.
This is innate to the human experience. We see folks doing exemplary things, helping their communities, getting glory, and we want to do that too. Maybe we start adopting some of their mannerisms. For a few weeks as a nine-year-old, I kept harassing my parents with the catchphrase of my favourite television star, the 1989 Lincoln Mark VII LSC. I can quote it now, to this day: “vroom.”
As we age, those heroes often become specific people. We become invested in them, in an unhealthy parasocial way. For instance, I once sent Rusty ten dollars in Streamer Superchat® because he posted a livestream of himself driving across a cornfield in a stolen MG Midget. Ten dollars. I don’t even give my actual human friends gas money for transporting my ungrateful ass across the country when I drop a cylinder liner. So you can see how folks go absolutely apeshit when their favourite football team scores an insufficient amount of touchdowns, or a hockey squad fails to behead the referee in time to prevent a power play.
Is there a cure for this sort of unhealthy fixation? Probably not. Becoming disillusioned with your heroes, or ruining your entire day because a bunch of millionaires failed to win a competition, is natural. Maybe it’s best that we target folks far away from our communities, because the guy at Home Depot who works the saw gets real nervous when I carry a giant foam finger into the place and cheer on his rough cuts. And that creates a really dangerous situation, even if it makes it much more exciting.
Good news! After several months of appeals to the bureaucrats, fat cats, and showboaters at City Hall, they have approved my petition. What petition, you ask, your eyes widening in what my socialization exercise book tells me is a look of fear. It is my pedestrian petition.
You see, for the last couple years, delivery robots have been menacing Western civilization. At first, the cute little boxes on wheels would just do tiny fuck-ups. Maybe one would drive through an active crime scene, spreading blood and DNA evidence all over the place as it drove over the body. Perhaps one would adorably smash through a plate glass window of a department store, having detected a faster route to its destination.
The cops were powerless. These things had wheels, and that made them cars. And if there’s one thing cops can’t do, it’s stop cars from behaving badly. After all, the cops drive cars, and if the cops ticket people in cars… they could accidentally ticket a cop, too. So they just held off for awhile. Awhile, that is, until my petition cleared, and By-Law 69-B: Reclassification of Pedestrians Act, was approved. This made the robots into, as you might have guessed, regular old pedestrians, like you and me.
Sure, the first week or so was a bloodbath, as law enforcement opened fire on any robot that so much as beep-booped too close to their cars. After they got tired and had a nap, though, the rest of us got to have our fun, too. For instance, I was waiting at the light the other day, when a Panera Bread-emblazoned robot was slowly toodling across the crosswalk in front of me. I immediately floored it. Working the wheel, I jagged my vehicle into a hard right turn without checking if I had the right of way, heartlessly crushing the robot to a billion pieces of high-impact polycarbonate beneath the knobby offroad tires of my long-wheelbase seven-seat SUV.
I’ll never forget the pitiful moans it made as it died, nor will I forget the incredible sandwich that it contained within. And the best part is that it was free of both guilt and any legal complications, thanks to the state’s tacit endorsement of vehicular manslaughter. After all, driving a car is hard enough: why add uncomfortable laws about having to look out for other road users?
Once in awhile, you can get one over on The Man. Finally, after all these years of toiling under his rule, doing his dirty work, begging for his praise, he has well and truly fucked up. And, it turns out, your entire life has been building up to the moment that you can milk him for all he’s worth.
Have you ever seen a Dodge Caliber? They’re getting sort of uncommon now, but when they were new, they were pretty hateful cars. Cheap, buzzy, surprisingly uneconomical, steering that felt like telling a funeral home operator how to sign a birthday card over the phone by long distance. And they fell apart all the time. Most cars get repaired, but these things got gleefully shovelled into the junkyard at the first chance the owners got.
Not all of them, though. This is a story about one very special Dodge Caliber. You see, my aunt needed a car. And my aunt is very nervous about owning a car. The skills of shitbox repair never made it into her genes, you see, possibly because she is not related to me by blood. So, in order to get that car, she went to the Dodge dealership, and she asked them: can you do a lifetime warranty, unlimited mileage, no questions asked, cover everything? And they said: for you, ma'am, we absolutely can charge you an obscene, eye-watering amount of money.
Once I found out about this, I was mad. And then I figured it out. You see, what my aunt did have was being insanely cheap. That’s why she was a part of my degenerate family. She still is, even though my Uncle Larry exploded that one night at Arecibo. Unlimited mileage. There has never been a sweeter phrase uttered in the English language.
Now, whenever anyone we know needs to go for a long trip, we tell them: take the Caliber. Rack those miles up. Punish those stupid motherfuckers for writing such a terrible, open-ended contract. My aunt runs a taxi service consisting entirely of this vehicle, a fleet of drivers constantly rotating in and out, the thing rolling virtually 24/7. I love driving this car, because every single mile that ticks up on the odometer is more salty tears from the low-wattage pig who thought he was a big-time wheeler and dealer down at Old Time Country Dodge.
To their credit, they figured out the enormous error that they had made fairly quickly. When Aunt Hilda rolled in the thing, smoking and wheezing, for its sixth transmission replacement at eight-hundred-and-fifty-thousand kilometers, they offered to buy it from her and give her a brand new luxury SUV, just for being such a great customer. She laughed, and told them to get started overhauling the Caliber, and don’t forget to take a look at the squeaking sound it started making in the back.
When things got real bad during the recession, they tried to go bankrupt, thinking that might get them out from having to maintain this economy car until the sun burns out. Ha! Death won’t save you, my friend. My attorney Max picked that one up pro bono, despite hating warranty law, just for the pleasure of watching their attorney read the purchase contract. Her eyes got so big that they stuck that way. The paramedics had to use the jaws of life on her eyelids so she could blink again.
If you see me in the Caliber, make sure to honk. I probably won’t stop to say hi, because we gotta keep this odometer rollin’. Rest assured, however, that I will honk back, maybe ten or fifteen times. Really get my money’s worth out of that horn.
Small towns are all about tradition. When the rest of the world is changing so quickly, the residents of tiny communities band together to maintain their way of life. All small towns must consist of three things: a general store, too much parking, and a haunted area.
General stores are so described because they’re where you buy everything you could want for life in your community. Rope. Knives. Ski masks. A signed 11x14" of Jude Law. If they don’t sell it, you probably don’t need it, or the proprietor believes it is a Satanic plot to destroy humanity’s free will. Either way, you’re driving into a larger town in order to acquire it, or ordering it from the internet in the hopes that a very confused Amazon courier will accidentally end up in the town after following a ghost of his dead wife.
Parking: they’ve got too much of it. You’ll find churches with fifty or more spots, main streets with a hundred-plus, and copious street and alley parking everywhere. Even so, someone will be in the exact spot you wanted. If you are particularly unlucky, you will find a spot, only to discover that it belongs to the neighbourhood gangster/landlord/Ford dealership owner that nobody dares mess with, setting off an explosive feud that will consume you both. Bring quarters, because a lot of these old parking meters don’t take credit cards.
As for the third component, a haunted area is not particularly interesting to most visitors to the region. If you’re travelling at night, sure, take a peek. Just keep in mind that you’ll probably be waiting in line behind a bunch of teens who want to use the building to either satisfy a dare or get laid. Back in the 70s, it was common to find an object of untold power in these places, one that would change your fate forever, but recent changes in zoning code have largely eliminated this kind of magically-charged narrative device. I strongly recommend just going to bed early and being haunted by your regrets in life instead.
Now that you know what to expect in your local friendly small town, it’s time to make a visit down there. Who knows what knick-knack, curio, or lifelong trauma you’ll uncover? And if you get bored, you can always interview the most racist guy in the area and submit the transcript to the New York Times for publication.
If I ever get back to my own timeline, the first thing I’m going to do is bury my Doc Martens so far up the ass of The Professor that he’s going to wish he had never heard of dimensional travel. You certainly can’t blame me for going along with it. It all sounded so good: with an infinity of other universes, chances are one of them is gonna have a low-miles 1978 Plymouth Volare that I can bring back home.
That universe, if it does exist, isn’t this one. I knew as soon as I stepped out of the warp that things were different. The air hung thick with the smell of two-stroke oil. Screaming wasp-like engines ran at incomprehensibly high revs. Japanese kanji were stapled on the side of every building, making it nearly impossible for my illiterate ass to navigate the downtown well enough to secure a taxi cab. I stumbled through the rain-slick streets in search of a store with enough triple-A batteries to get home.
Something that looked like a hardware store approached from the gloom. The horrific shrieking din grew from all sides. Did they know I was coming? Were they hunting me? That’s when I saw it. A family hatchback, containing a family. Front-wheel-drive. Nothing special. In the front, though, a shrieking dorito, its induction scoop jutting through an entirely absent hood. In this universe, rotary engines had won the war. Something in the laws of physics didn’t go the same way here as it did in our realm. Pistons were virtually extinct, hunted to the ends of the Earth.
I could not bear to see if I could find my beloved Mopars in this world. If any had survived at all, they would be incomprehensible. And how bad would a Chrysler-helmed Wankel engine be? How horrifying would Saab have become, in this triangle-shaped hell? Most of all, I feared falling in love with it, refusing to continue the sliding. The good news is that these things had such low compression after a couple weeks of use, that 48-volt marine batteries were cheap as hell. Even if I did have to pay for them with chunks of my own hair.
A funny thing happens when you become an old car person, and not just an old car person. You start caring more about reliability. All these folks I knew who used to have exotic high-horsepower race engines in their psychotic rally builds now have 15 year old Honda Accords. And they love them.
All these backyard barbecue brags about trap speed, or fleeing the police, or winning first at nats no longer mean anything. The delusions of a young and reckless mind. Now, the thing that we are the most envious of on each others’ cars is working air conditioning. The colder the better. If you can pair that with fuel economy below 7L/100km? You, my friend, are king shit in my circles.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that all of us grew up. I myself have degenerated even further. My whole daily-driver experience is about forcing engines with single-digit compression ratios and iron blocks forged by street urchins in the 1800s into making enough power to merge without getting squashed by a brand-new Toyota minivan with five times the horses on offer. I bet that damn van has air conditioning, too, which will make my demise even more depressing.
Until that happens, though, I will continue to hold out the punk-rock ethos of shitbox ownership. My friends will continue to come over, look at the huge mess of oily turbocharged carnage spreading across my back forty, and get out quickly before I notice them and ask them to help me put in a new intercooler. Their cars are so quiet and so reliable now that they don’t even have to ask me for jumper cables before they can start the engine to flee.
Knowing how to fix things is a sort of curse. When I’m elbow deep in the guts of some horrible machine, sometimes I fantasize about being a normal person. A normal person who bought their car from the dealership, who takes it back to the dealership to fix, and who throws it away when it becomes “too old” to cost-effectively maintain. Such a person would never know the joy that I have felt, trying to knock the fragments of what was once a rusty suspension bolt free so that I can get to work in four hours.
This in itself is not so bad. The problem arises when you buy more broken cars, to establish a sort of stochastic reliability-by-chance. If you have two cars, it is much less likely that both cars will be broken at the same time. And if you have three cars, your odds are even better. This errant, delusional math cascades until you have seven cars, they are all broken, and you only have enough time to finish fixing one before it breaks again.
And when you repair things, more broken things will come into your life, even if you didn’t necessarily want them there. A rusty old bicycle on the side of the road? That’s a shame, there’s hardly anything wrong with it. If I tidied that up, maybe someone could use it. I’ll just put it in the shed with the other rusty bicycles, and bang them all out one perfect summer evening, when my cars are working again.
Ideally, the end result is that you accomplish each and every project on your to-do list and then jump into the grave, before any more can arise. Even this has its problems, though: unless you are a professional gravedigger, you’re not likely to have any six-foot-deep holes lying around the property. You’ll need to buy a shovel, and read some books about how to do it right, and…
Boats: are they cars? New evidence suggests that they do contain gas-guzzling, emissions-spewing engines, of a horsepower unnecessary to accomplish daily transportation tasks. I’m Bob Newsgiver, thank you for sharing your evening with us tonight.
Our investigation begins in Newark. Here, we see a small “boat house,” which is where these degenerate ocean-going perverts prepare their ramshackle vehicles. Once considered a middle finger into the face of God, the collapse of Western civilization and morals has caused an explosion in the number of people who have considered, experimented with, or are actively involved in the alternative lifestyle known as boating.
In case you’re unfamiliar with the trend, “sailors,” as they call themselves, place a boat into the water and then get inside it. Through this method, they can travel on the face of the Earth and even visit other countries. This is the historical purpose of boats, laid down in oral tradition by books. Those books, I should point out, are coincidentally written by boat operators. Our studies show that ninety-nine percent of boats actually return to their parking lot – incorrectly spelled “dock” by the illiterate psychopaths who helm these death machines – at the end of the day. The remaining one percent sink in an avoidable whale collision.
Keep an eye on your children tonight, as the ocean-going conspiracy threatens to corrupt the morals you strive to teach them. Our investigation found dozens of boat-themed toys at a local toy store. The proprietor refused to talk to us on camera, but the cops had their stun guns ready when he tried to flee.
To get close to the wave-riding radicals and discover their plans for our government and land-loving way of life, our team went undercover, donning disguises. In order to blend in, our cameraman even had to obscure his camera under a pile of unpaid bills for rope. Even our hardened veteran investigative reporters were shocked by the depth and breadth of the depravity on offered inside their so-called “marinas.”
Some sailors will even engage in ocean-going congress with hundreds of others, by riding an enormous boat in a hedonistic display of consumption and excess known as “a cruise.” Your reporter was not able to gain access to one of these, after they spotted him trying to leave the marina parking lot with a base-model Honda Accord instead of a financed BMW that is four to five months behind on payments. The investigation will continue.
Without the power of television, we’d all be living perfectly normal lives. Sure, some of us would read novels about moving to Australia and having cool adventures or something, but on the whole our aspiration would be a little lower. TV makes things happen. They make an exotic, dreamland lifestyle seem attainable. You can make your house beautiful. You can make your ass bounce pennies off it. And you can have an exotic sports car.
For years, the Porsche dealership has been doing a little test-drive event in my neck of the woods. They’ll bring all of the latest beetle-shaped sports cars around and send the community’s richest folks a little invitation to show up to a secret location. At that point, they let the rich folks bag on the cars a bit, shake some hands, serve some barbecue and booze, and it’s a good weekend for everyone. The idea is that they sell extra cars the next week, to folks who just hadn’t considered buying a new Porsche until they got all these nice gifts. They never counted on me.
While I’m not especially rich, I have managed to leverage my friend Letter-Carrier Louise’s connections at the post office into knowing when and where this event is. It’s not legal for me to open someone else’s mail, but it is perfectly okay if I stand next to her while she sorts postcards, and read the words that say “hey rich guys come drive a Porsche at Boonies’ Country Club and Horse Embalmatorium.” Sometimes she has to go a little slow on the ol’ letter sorting, because she knows I don’t read very quickly anymore, not since the electroshock therapy.
You might be surprised that, although I’m not moneyed, I do own rich men’s clothes. My secret? Estate sales, or to be more accurate, the thrift store closest to the rich part of town where they have the estate sales. Sure, they’re not the latest fashions, but that means the salesmen will think that I’m an eccentric hyper-richo, and not, say, some degenerate who is only there to scare the shit out of a golf course owner by four-wheel-drifting a 600-horsepower electric hypercar around the bar until the tires explode. And they’re right. I’m also there for the free barbecue, and as many cans of beer as I can stuff into the trunk of my 1978 Volare, which has been tactically parked in the groundskeeper’s shed, ready to make good my escape.
Was this ethical? Absolutely not, but the acquisition of obscene wealth rarely is. They say you have to fake it until you make it, and I’m sure once that second part hits I’ll swing by the dealer to make it up to them.
Today’s technology industry is all about one thing: selling dumb shit to idiots, then going bankrupt. You might not think that this is a profitable business, and you’d be right. One of these days, I’ll figure out exactly why this keeps happening, but in the meantime, these companies sure leave a lot of waste behind.
There’s the obvious things: office furniture, giant neon signs of the founder’s head, the occasional electrical test gear. What you don’t think of is transportation. Every big company, though, is gonna need at least one company car. You can’t ask the employees to drive their own cars across town for a business meeting, and the not-really-a-taxi taxi service just shut down and set off a bomb in their headquarters to stick it to the landlord.
Usually, these cars are one of the first things to go. Cars are easy to get rid of, especially fleet cars. Everyone needs one, they’re a durable store of value, and you can do skids with them. Mostly, though, they’re too big for the auditors to miss, even when they’re working in a hurry before the sheriff padlocks their access to the supply warehouse. That was the case with the local scooter rental company, which went belly up a few weeks ago and left electric scooters strewn all over the city, their modems blinking in search of a server that was now partially dismantled and used to mine Poochpoints in Southeast China.
Although I had to fight off a lot of other scrappers when I heard the news, I still managed to fill an entire trunk full of the scooters. Which means it’s finally time for me to go electric, although I admit that the conventional view of a motor vehicle by Big Government is not “thirty-six electric scooters leashed together and controlled like a dogsled, careening the back third of a Dodge Neon through the city at upwards of a buck-eighty.” Really a failure of imagination on their part. That’s why they need the forward-looking innovation of these brave founders who aren’t afraid to go bankrupt doing whatever crackhead shit they came up with this week. Keep changing the world, that’s what I say.
Driving through our cities means that we don’t actually interact very much with our cities. I’m not some kooky urbanist who believes in things like “farm to table India Pale Ales” and “marked crosswalks,” but I do love to go for a walk. And that’s a good thing, because my cars break down often enough that I get a lot of shoe miles in, too.
Most of my city is pretty dull. Industrial yards. Long expanses of highway with nothing in between. Haunted backroads. I try to avoid these parts nowadays, even when I’m in my car, lest the inevitable failure of an electrical system means that I have to walk back through them. No, sticking to the older neighbourhoods is what I’d prefer: tiny houses, Little Free Libraries, coffee shops, plaques commemorating the site of famous serial killings. You’re not just walking through there on your way to the auto parts store, you’re experiencing your city in a whole new light.
Back in the day, everyone had an unreliable car, and so the city had a lot more stuff in it. Tiny little groceries to get a popsicle from when your cooling system burst. Charming gas stations to push the car into, so that you could be ripped off by the proprietor. Now, with the advances in technology, modern cars are miraculous vehicles that can run up to the half-million-km mark without you so much as giving them a decent carwash. So there’s no reason to, say, stop 9.5 km into your 35km commute to work, and hoof it towards the nearest mom-and-pop shop capable of grinding you a new distributor rotor.
If you ask me, that’s very depressing to think about. Life should be full of unexpected opportunities for you to meet exciting new people who aren’t tow truck drivers. Maybe that dude who watches your front suspension fall off after hitting a pothole will become your best friend. You’ll never know, though, because your car’s control arm is bolted on all the way by robots who weren’t even a little bit drunk. Sad.
Ever since I was a child, I was hypnotized by shiny metal objects. We had this brass candlestick holder that we’d bring out at Christmas. Uncle Alive Tom would pop a bright red candle in it and put it on the kitchen table in our townhome. While the adults were getting too drunk to watch me, I’d sit next to it at the table and just stare at the reflections of the flame dancing in the shining metal.
This experience is not dissimilar to every human being in existence. We, all of us, like shiny things. That’s why our coins are lustrous and pretty, inherently conveying a sense of value. Folks bought up copper for centuries, before we figured out that we could use it to make crappy house plumbing or substation wiring for the methamphetamined to steal. So it’s a little strange that I, myself, drive around in a car that is mostly shoplifted flat black barbecue paint and expired Bondo.
Don’t I want my car to be polished and beautiful? Sure, but then some dickhead in a parking lot will just bump into it, or I’ll find a door at the junkyard that’s less rusty, but a different colour. When that happens, I don’t want to be agonizing over paint depth, clearcoat/tie-coat compatibility, or even sanding the panel very well before farting out a stream of Ultra-High-Temperature Burger Black that isn’t surveyed very well by the arc of the security cameras at the shopping centre. Job done, and I can move on with my life, performing important tasks like repairing my other crapcan cars, or looking at Craigslist for the fourth time this hour to see if any more have emerged to buy in the interim.
And don’t worry, I still get my share of looking at shiny things. After all, everyone else is very worried about keeping their cars nice. All I have to do is be inside my own car, and be very careful not to look too long at my hood while stuck in traffic. When my own car catches fire, I get to recreate those ancient childhood memories. That gives me a real warm feeling, as long as I climb out of the window in time. The door latch doesn’t really work, you see. Got paint in it.
The European Union won’t let me come into the country, because my lead foot violates their RoHS directives. And that’s okay. Europe has lots of fantastic automobiles: the 1988 Fiat Panda 4x4, the 1993 Renault Twingo, and pretend I mentioned something German here. All of them have delightful, teeny-tiny engines, and are a joy to drive in a crowded city. None of them are easy to import.
Japanese folks are all too willing to dump a Skyline or a Crown on a cargo ship for you. We’ve got too many amazing high-performance automobiles, just like fields full of them, and Big Otochan Government says that we have to keep them in pristine condition, or no registration. So why don’t you have a couple of them? Clear out the back forty behind my mechanic’s shop. Europeans, though, make it very difficult to import their cars. It isn’t a full-service auction-to-driveway curbstoning operation.
All this is to say: I can’t enter European countries. I can’t ask them to send me a car (I barely speak The Queen’s English,) and also they will probably expect payment of some kind. Getting a beautiful, 80s-wedge-humping-a-space-shuttle Citroen BX in my driveway is going to be a challenge.
Luckily for me, there are a lot of cargo ships that have failed to deliver their cargo in time. Hurricanes. Typhoons. Really ugly storms. Captain farts on the GPS and breaks it. The bottom of the ocean is full of little tiny Italian shitboxes, and all I have to do is commission a submarine research project to go pick them up. Billionaires love a submarine research project, and standards for the industry have slipped in recent months such that you’re no longer expected that they survive the mission. Best part is? Maritime salvage law means those suckers are free.
Now, I know what you’re saying: doesn’t salt water violently corrode every part of the car, rendering it nearly unusable after mere days immersed? And you’d be right, but I also live in a province that salts the roads in winter. The only difference between the car I’m actively driving and a chunk of rusty Frenchmobile that I pulled off the ocean floor using a robot is that the latter one is more predictable. See you next spring, in something with twelve-inch that will be half Bondo, but with an air of the exotic about it.
“He is named Mr. Biscuits. But she… she is named Ms. Biscotti.”
I have been volunteering at the animal shelter over the last couple of weeks, as part of my court-ordered community service. Before that, I was out on the highway, picking up garbage. Unfortunately for me, I was tempted by a broken-down Chrysler Imperial on the side of the road, and attempted to fix it to help out the owner, and not at all to drive away with it at high speed. This drew the ire of my supervisor, who shot me with a beanbag round.
Sub-lethal ammunition aside, the animal shelter had been treating me quite well. They gave me water and snacks, for instance, and I got to become friends with a grumpy old tabby who would only piss in the box when I was around. Everything was going according to plan, until it happened.
“Here are the new enrichment toys for these cats. Ooh, they look so realistic. Here’s a little Toyota Corolla–”
It was clearly a Toyota Corona, but I can see how someone born in this country, and who had failed to be educated about Japanese domestic market shitboxes would miss that. I took a deep breath, lowered my heart rate, and she continued without noticing.
“And I think this one is a VW Beetle. Cute!”
There was absolutely no way that someone could mistake a Fiat 600 for a VW Beetle. Like, come on. This person – my new supervisor – was a secret oppressor placed here by my haters, to attempt to get me to violate my parole conditions. Still, I maintained my composure, drawing on the anger-management skills that had been drilled into my head by a combination of prison group therapy and mood-altering medication. I sat there, crosslegged, and watched a small orange kitten climb into the Corona. This, I assumed, must be Mr. Biscuits.
I fully expected the cat to immediately leap out of the car and continue on his usual kitteny antics of knocking things off shelves, chasing the reflection from my phone screen, and excessively odorous pooping. That didn’t happen. Mister Biscuits sat in the drivers seat and seemed to be working the steering wheel and little shifter, his brow furrowed with intent.
Did I tell anyone? No. My volunteer duties were clearly indicated in the contract that I signed when I began work. When Mr. Biscuits stole that Power Wheels a couple years later, and led the entire police department on a high-speed chase after knocking over a pet food store, I wasn’t surprised. The community gives back what you give to it.
Government waste is excellent. Unlike my moron neighbours, who complain about how much their taxes are, and how they wish that we could get rid of every government service except roads and cops, I know better. The government provides all kinds of amazing and useful services that nobody ever thinks about, much less appreciates. And I’m not just saying that because I got a cheap hovercraft from the auction.
Sure, there was a bit of a kerfluffle after I won it for $53. For instance, fifty-three dollars Canadian is a lot of money. It took me awhile to transfer it all to them, in the form of rolls of nickels shoved into an envelope marked “to the government.” And then there was the classic bureaucracy, trying to figure out if it was even legal to sell a hovercraft to me. This argument went on for weeks, which only intensified my ardour for the utility vehicle. One of the government workers didn’t pay attention to who they were cc'ing the email to, and ended up accidentally calling me a “greasy skid” to their boss in a way that I could see, which I think helped me (and my attorney) secure the final bill of sale.
So: now I had a hovercraft. They even delivered it. A childhood dream was finally satisfied. What did I do with an ex-military hovercraft, you ask? I drove that shit to work. In the winter, you often have to wait in traffic for a long time as everyone takes their turn polishing the ice with their not-really-all-wheel-drive all-wheel-drive SUVs on bald, financed not-really-all-season all-season tires. Hovercrafts are not cars, in the view of my province’s Implements of Husbandry Act (it is a disappointment that the good people of 1906 did not predict them,) and so I can go wherever the fuck I want. Say, through public parks.
Winter driving has never been more fun when you’re insulated from the ground by a glorious cushion of air. Ice is less precarious, because you’re constantly sliding out of control at all times. And if you slam into a tree, or country club building, or herd of deer, you just bounce harmlessly off. Really, the only thing I really have to complain about is that I can’t do a burnout. Also, the howling Rolls-Royce jet turbines behind it that I swapped in because I got tired of the original thrust fans. Keeps my hands warm.
Great civilizations made their houses out of the things they had lying around. Clay for bricks. Snow for igloos. Glass for nudist colonies. With all the microplastics floating throughout the ether, why can’t I make a house out of Bondo®?
Bondo has a lot of benefits: for one, it’s easy to sculpt. It provides some decent insulative qualities. Animals can’t peck holes in it and live inside, unlike my friend Sylvester Raccoon, who it turns out is actually a kind of wood-pecking bird. You can paint over it in any colour you like. Tools are widely available to sculpt it And, unlike the cars we use it on, it won’t rust. In fact, there’s really no reason we shouldn’t be using it for all of our homes. I’m sort of a futurist, in my rad kind of bluey-white polyester resin home.
Of course, there is the cost issue. Buying just a little can of the stuff will now set you back approximately the GDP of New Mexico (Old Mexico is still somewhat more profitable.) I didn’t let this stop me, though, and I knew that the local auto body shop would chuck it into the dumpster out back only a few weeks after its expiry date had passed. I also knew that zapping said Bondo in the microwave for a few minutes would make it pliable again. Sure, doing so also totals the microwave, but that’s why Best Buy has a return policy.
Ultimately, the only real downside to the whole thing is the smell. Even when top-coated with the finest Rustoleum Shitbox Gray that I could find at the hardware store, a really hot day will make it smell like I just repaired some rust. And that makes me feel guilty about not having used all this body filler on any number of my sad, hole-filled cars. They can wait until I’m living in them, I figure, which might be any day now, if Sylvester finds his way to shorting out the breaker panel again.
Not sure if you’ve been watching these streamers. There’s all these shows where people just live, normally, except there’s a camera pointed at them. Real authenticity. If you’re tired of the fakeness of reality TV, the perfect antidote is someone dressed up in a motion-capture suit pretending to be a 53-foot-tall anime girl trying to learn how to drive a forklift.
Last week, though, I got watching this very interesting stream. Turns out it was about this dude who was all about living off the land. He’d gotten a property somewhere out in Washington State, like the real deep parts that nobody wants to visit and only dead people have ever seen. He was going to set up an entire household from scratch, refuse the comforts of modern life, and then take a bunch of donations from his wife’s eternally-connected, satellite-linked 3D handheld camera array.
Thing was, he wasn’t recording 24/7. And a keen viewer spotted him at a nearby coffee shop in someone else’s stream. Remember what I said up above about authenticity? The viewership revolted. They’d been tricked, they’d been betrayed, by someone that some defective part of the human psyche had convinced them was virtually socially equivalent to their best childhood friend. It was time for revenge.
When I watched it, there were a bunch of other streamers there, all around him, in a kind of judgment circle. Every so often, one of them would look around in a sort of panic. It didn’t take long for me to realize that all of them had been condemned by the internet community for their own crimes, and forced to come here under threat of non-payment. Their entire economic way of life was dependent on listening to this stream of moneyed whackos observing them from afar, and now those whackos were taking control of things.
For hours, I worked on my shit-box Plymouth and would occasionally glance up at the screen. Outdoorsy Mike, sweat pouring down his face, worked to dig his own grave using a shovel he had made himself on the previous week’s stream. Everyone around him watched, stoically, through their own head-mounted GoPros, occasionally reciting the name of someone who had donated $20 to the stream in frightened monotone.
In Canada, where I am currently forced to reside because of the intersection of intolerant legislation and dynamic self-expression, people love a loyalty card. Because everything is overpriced here, every store offers you a points card of some kind. My wallet right now has 16 different loyalty cards, and my phone creaks under the load of same.
Why do we do it? For the promise of free shit. If you visit Dairy Queen approximately 60 times in a row or give them about $300 in business, they’ll give you a free ice cream cone. Do you visit Dairy Queen enough to justify that? Absolutely not, but their hope is that the rewards card will help bring you in rather than “waste” your money on some other ice-cream purveyor.
All this has given rise to what the psychologists in Ottawa are calling “rewards point rage,” where you get super mad at someone throwing away perfectly good points by not having a reward card. You ignorant motherfucker, you don’t have an Air Miles card? Those two tangerines and a bag of potato chips would have gotten you one Air Mile. Here, let me just stick my card in here and get them for you. What, now you want them? Let’s take this outside.
At the moment, only a few hundred people have been injured in point-rage incidents, with a mere two or three of them succumbing to their injuries. This is but a small price to pay for increased consumer satisfaction, aided by the fact that if you do a customer service survey right after shopping there, they might give you five or even ten rewards points into your account as a little “thank you.” Better keep them on your good side.
“Hey, buddy, you’ve been hogging the Supercharger® long enough,” emits the carrier signal of a Tesla owner. They’re right to be upset. Ever since they opened up their fancy DC fast chargers to every Tom, Dick, and Ford owner, what was once a hoity-toity elite parking lot full of American-made economy cars is now full of a bunch of weird shitbags trying to fill up their batteries.
My electric car? Pretty much the same as yours: a 1974 Plymouth Fury III, with the original smog-coughing low-compression 400-cubic-inch V8 engine replaced with nearly a metric ton of golf-cart batteries I borrowed from the local country club. Hey, they weren’t using any of them in the middle of November when I cut through the fence. Not to mention it’s unethical for anyone to hoard valuable resources that could be used to reduce emissions, such as I am doing (unless you count the fact that this vehicle is still, somehow, leaking 10w40 motor oil from somewhere.)
The system isn’t perfect. For instance, the “fast charge” system is not particularly fast. This is because it’s an old Canadian Tire 12-volt boat battery maintainer that I’ve riveted onto the hood, and tricked the Tesla system into talking to. As far as the computer inside it knows, it’s just a really stupid SUV. Before you blame me for being a charge hog, you must also know this: it is keeping my decrepit Galaxy Note smartphone alive, which hasn’t had a working battery in it since that whole airplane fire snafu. And in turn, that phone is playing an educational podcast, about climate destroyers. This, I believe, is what the Tesla owner is actually angry about, and not the fact that I have been “fast charging” for the last seventeen hours using a stolen credit card.
I ignore him. I have long ago learned that pedestrians talk a lot of shit, but are generally afraid to actually damage my car: an emergency tetanus shot, after all, is unpleasant and can cost upwards of $25. Walking back inside the donut store at which I am “parked,” I ask the attendant to refill my bottomless coffee once more. Maybe I’ll live here, I think. I don’t want to go anywhere more than about five miles away from this charger from now on.
In the wild, a lot of prey animals will disguise themselves from predators. This camouflage is accomplished using an adaptation that scientists refer to as “camouflage.” By doing this, it is hoped, predators will just walk on past, and the hidden prey animal can continue its life of eating vegetables and being terrified of loud noises in peace.
Art imitates life, and so the humble automobile often also hides itself from those who would do it harm. Just who is the natural predator of cars? It turns out that, like for so many other inhabitants of Earth, it’s us. Many cars don’t get a natural death, rotting to nothingness in a cornfield somewhere as Virgil Exner intended, and instead are crashed into other cars (accidentally or deliberately,) or crushed into a fine paste in order to be recycled into washing machines and bicycles.
You might think that this is absurd. I can look out my window right now, you say, and my car is right there, obvious as can be. Maybe you even have a crazy bright paint colour for it, like red, or industrial grey. This is the vehicle’s camouflage, and inside it are all the problems and miseries that make a car what it truly is: the source of your inevitable torment.
If you were to extinguish all the problems of a car in one Four Loko-fuelled driveway thrash session, it would simply cease to be, vaporizing into a small dust cloud and leaving behind a coupon good for fifteen percent off a Toyota product. Even a new car (do they still make those?) has a perfect ecosystem of minor faults that will one day torture a would-be mechanic into considering moving into the forest and hunting men for sport.
Finding out the actual fault, its source, and its solution takes a trained eye. Faults are our prey, and they will hide anywhere they can fit: inside a wiring harness, motor winding, slightly pinched coolant hose, or even microcode. If you persist, however, you will get to devour the feeling of having fixed a problem on your car. And then you’ll get to drive it, causing more faults to lodge inside the body for protection. It’s only natural.
French cars were driven from our shores in the 80s. Now they’re trying to come back, through various proxies like Nissan and Chrysler. All this is fine if you like a supple ride, gadgets, and comfortable long-distance cruising. What if you’re normal, like me, and prefer absolutely cheap shit that corrodes very quickly? On this topic, the French have only provided new cars, a moral failing to be sure.
It’s not like I’m biased against French cars. In fact, quite the opposite. My childhood visits to my Quebecois cousins often exposed me to the latest and greatest in hot Parisian imports. Mostly when we went to the dealership to steal hubcaps, because none of our parents could afford a vehicle made by people who didn’t paint straight because of labour strife and ennui, rather than methamphetamine. Also, I played with little toy car Majorettes a lot, imagining myself being capable of taking a European vacation, or owning a boat.
Perhaps the mental pathways still exist, linking Frenchness to glamour and fortune. Those pitchfork-toting warranty-demanding bastards repelled Citroen from my land, taking away my chance at a normal life. If I could get myself a Citroen DS, then I’m convinced that I could slowly rebuild my entire personality, making the decisions that society wanted me to make, ruthlessly crushing my enemies in business until I am a wealthy billionaire deserving of the soft highway glide that is a four-banger French luxo-shitbox from the 60s.
Or, and this is sounding much more appealing: I could be the rich pervert who careens into the parking lot of a town’s auto parts store, looking for a combination of noxious fluids that I can artisanally small-batch combine into the no-longer-made magic sauce that makes the hydraulic suspension work. Yeah, that sounds pretty good. If any of you are going on vacation to France soon, bring me with you. I’m sure I can drive back from there, and on the way I can teach you all the cool new cuss words my cousins shared with me when I was six years old.
Brakes are a safety item, now? Let me tell you about safety. Nearly one hundred percent of cars that crash are using the brakes in the moments leading up to impact. That sounds pretty dangerous to me.
Even though there have been centuries of advancement in the field of brakes, it still ultimately boils down to one thing. You are using one slightly soft rock to stop a larger, harder rock from turning. Back in the day, they could do this approximately once. Any successive attempt to stop would be met with a “not today, bud,” but more polite, English, and cut off at the end by plowing through a hedge, bank, or tire wall.
Improvements abounded, however, and the modern hydraulic disc brake system has advanced stopping power that the ancient racecars of even a decade ago would be shitting their pants to have. Everyone on my commute knows this. And they’re so proud of their brakes that they use them all the time. Merging. Driving in the left lane. Going downhill. Going uphill. A quinceañera. There is simply no traffic occasion that doesn’t merit a stiff jab of the whoa pedal, buying them just enough time for their brains to start working again before lapsing back into the microwaving-a-potato 60hz hum of modern life.
As for me, I’ve never taken brakes for granted. Once you’ve done enough sketchy shit to make sure they still work – and especially once you’ve had a few blown lines or ejected shoes at highway speed – you want to avoid using the hill outside the Mayor’s house as your emergency braking system if at all possible. This is only aided by the fact that my car’s engine is not exactly capable of Ferrari-like acceleration, unless that Ferrari is currently parked. Like the astronauts of Apollo 13, I need to save all the momentum that I can get, or I won’t get to work on time. Or ever.
So the next time you push down the middle pedal (it is the middle pedal in your car, right?) say a silent thanks to the inventor of brakes, whoever it is, and then get ready to cuss out the guy in front of you for slamming on his brakes for no goddamn reason it’s fucking dry as a bone and sunny you idiot are you slowing down for ducks or some shit learn to read the road signs do not use big words.
When I was still working in an office, one of my coworkers was enamoured with the sport of professional eating. He followed the trials and tribulations of all the greats. At lunch, he’d tell us about all the techniques for jamming a hot dog down your throat faster than any other sane human being ever would.
One glorious morning, the hot dog eating contest held try-outs in my town. My coworker went, and brought along his sister to watch. He washed out immediately, eating so few dogs as to finish in last place among the randoms collected at this outlet mall food court. His sister, however, went to nationals. And then internationals. She, in turn, got nuked in the lobby of a beautiful ancient hotel in New York by a lady from Vietnam who ate nearly ten more hotdogs in the same span of time.
All this is not to say: you should give up on your dreams. If my coworker had practiced more, honing his craft, instead of talking about it, I’m sure he could have finished second-last. Sometimes, though, it’s easier to have enthusiasm for something rather than actually do it.
For instance, I could never drive a Formula One race car. There’s many reasons why: my general physical shape, my ineptitude at picking a good racing line, and the fact that my braking technique can be summed up as “don’t.” I’ll still watch some very rich dudes drive their rocket ships around the track, though, and even bother to remember some of their names, if I’m watching it at someone else’s house and there are snacks.
If you’ll excuse me, I’m off to stop talking about doing things and start doing doing things. That ‘53 Regent is not going to magically weld on its own rusty quarter panel, much less stick 35-inch mud terrains under its own lift kit, after all.
Zoning is zoning, so how can we get along communally? City councilfolx, I have noticed that there is very little downtown parking, despite our entire town only owning one (1) bus that sometimes doesn’t run when Old Clyde has to get to his haemorrhoid appointment. Now, certainly, you know this, which is why you have some professional drivers taking you to City Hall in some fancy-ass Town Cars. That way, the driver takes the car away after and you don’t have to pay $27 for three hours of parking in what the newspaper said the Mayor called “Asshole’s Row.”
This parking is tremendously expensive because of the private parking company’s constant bribery of council. Why bribe them? It keeps the city from doing something crazy, like building a train. There’s simply no way to benefit from this state of affairs legally: that is, unless I were to accidentally come across some kind of reactionary government pressure group. Oh shit, is that what is happening at this very city council meeting? Boy, I just totally blundered into this one, didn’t I? Must be that old luck of the Irish my mom told me about while she was teaching me to shoplift by throwing bars of soap at my head as a kid.
The thing is, esteemed members of the city council: I want to park a whole bunch of cars, so many that there is no longer room for them in just my neighbourhood, and I figured out the password to the admin account of the local racist Facebook group. Believe me, those folks will do literally anything to anyone, as long as they are given the slightest imaginable rationale for violence. Threatening people is illegal, blackmailing them even more so: I would never stoop so low as to do that. I’m just spitballing some community-minded ideas here, ideas like “re-zone the former site of Billy’s Tacos as a parking garage and I won’t have your homes burned down with you in them.” That’s Latin for “sustainable development.”
You can lull yourselves to sleep tonight on your pillows stacked full of money, knowing that you still aren’t helping your average citizen. To convert primo downtown real estate into a storage facility for just one dirtbag’s pile of rapidly self-disassembling domestic automobiles is the height of ridiculous, especially in this era of climate consciousness. The reason why you can feel good is that none of these cars run, and therefore cannot pour carbon into the atmosphere. In fact, with how much rust they’ve taken on, the panels probably contain more iron hydroxide than they started with, which helps trap the carbon dioxide. And I managed to fill up the entire parking garage myself, which means downtown will still remain beautiful, walkable, culturally rich, and contain absolutely no free parking spots. You’re welcome, too, planet.
SO-LAR-FUCKING-POWER. Or, as the appearance-obsessed image consultants want us to refer to it now, “photovoltaic energy.” Yeah, okay, nerds. A lot of people have been shit-talking solar in the press, because they’re afraid that individuals will set up their own power generation facilities in their backyards, roofs, sheds, community centres, what have you, and start pumping out electricity. That will make the big electricity corporations sad, so they’ve paid all these handsome people to come on the news and yell about it.
Let me put it this way: if there were a magic machine in the sky that shot out a bunch of candy bars every day, like an absolute shitload of Milky Ways, and you were hungry, would you run out into the backyard with a bucket? Or would you feel bad about it because Bob Milky Way, up there in his hateful Cadbury tower, is no longer able to perpetuate his existing business model?
Personally, I’ve gone big-league on solar, mostly because the utility company disconnected my house after decades of non-payment. Now, I can’t afford the new stuff: even the cheap panels that the proud people of China throw onto AliExpress are too costly for my budget. What I’ve done instead is dig through the landfill (after hours, of course) for several hundred solar desk calculators.
These calculators are electronic devices that we used to use before smartphones in order to compute numbers. And they ran on the sun, because replacing batteries is annoying. After breaking open the calculators, I looped their solar cells together in series, and eventually built a big enough panel to cover my entire roof.
When I say it like that, it sounds easy, and this is the myth of engineering progress: it was actually a lot of stop-and-go stuff, bumps in the road. Rooftop fires. Wiring fires. I fell off the roof a few times. The cops came by at one point and were idling in front of my house, waiting to see if I’d come outside so they could bust me for stealing all those calculators from the dump. In the end, though, I am now able to charge my phone for free, and even run my coffee maker if it’s a particularly sunny day. That coffee is the best-tasting coffee I’ve ever had, because it tastes like billionaire tears.
And I won’t stop there, either. Things are going to improve dramatically at the old Switch Family Solar Array as my bougie neighbours throw out their old panels in order to upgrade to the latest and greatest. Pretty soon they’ll be paying me to take them – I have it on good authority that the dump charges you like minimum $20 this weekend. If you flip to the last page in my investor deck, you’ll notice that I have projected to be able to run my refrigerator by 2025. You better get in on this shit, or we’ll bury you with the coal.
Last week, I was driving past the local shoe emporium, when I thought it might be a good idea to buy some shoes. Seizing the wheel with both hands, I roughly jagged the Valiant across four lanes of interprovincial traffic. Did I lift throttle as I approached the casually-landscaped dirt embankment separating the parking lot from the outlet mall? Only if I were a coward who drove an untrustworthy car.
After the ‘74 Vally ceased its end-over-end rolling, landing perfectly on its wheels like a 3400-lb ballerina made mostly out of iron oxide, I stepped out and headed into the mall. Now, if you haven’t been to a mall lately, you’re probably a normal human being. The only folks who still roam the shattered husks of Western cultural imperialism that dot our apocalyptic landscape are the poor souls that are paid to be there. And also old people, doing mall-walking, because it’s too hot to exercise outside.
When the world still made sense, there was a plinth here, marked “information.” You could look at a little map of the mall, broken down by categories. In this era, there is no “Men’s Shoes” category. There is no map at all. Two burned-out T8 fluorescent bulbs un-shine behind an empty lens, the paper having been removed by some bitter ex-employee turned vandal decades prior. I do not need a map: I already know this particular territory.
Through an unusual – some might say creepy, although that goes way too far and you should get out more – agreement, the Shoes Unlimited is constantly replenished with footwear that other, richer stores did not want. It’s not clear what happens to the shoes that do not get bought here, but I am sure it is not a pretty fate.
That is, if any shoes are ever discarded at all. Without a crack management team, the employees have gone feral, resorting to only the activities required for retail survival. The floor is covered in a couple feet of discarded shoeboxes, crinkly tissue paper, and loose athletic trainers which will never again see their factory mate before the sun konks out.
After a few minutes of searching, I finally pick up a box marked Piloti with a picture of a race car on the side of it. Driving shoes, I reason, or at least ones that were made before Formula One turned into a boating event. Although the thermal label on the side of the box is faded, it looks vaguely like my shoe size. My prize is carried to the counter, where I place it in front of an employee who looks at me with a mixture of fear and disgust. I have played this game before, and we begin a wordless game of negotiation, locked in slow-motion combat like two chess players who are trying to figure out which one of the two of us has to take a shit first.
The world turns. Twenty dollars – a moist but otherwise perfectly legal Lizzy 2 – is placed on the counter, and accepted at last. I change my shoes right there, throwing my old ones into the mess on the floor. Will they benefit some other traveller, in the distant future? We may never know, but we have to keep trying.
Have you ever welded? It’s one of those essential skills that makes the modern world possible. Without the ability to melt a chunk of metal into another chunk of metal, why, we wouldn’t have playground equipment. Or stair railings. Or, less importantly, bridges. And we certainly wouldn’t have cars.
I’m not very good at welding, although I certainly appreciate the subculture. I couldn’t get a job doing it. One of the reasons why is because my entire childhood consisted of folks telling me that I’d never have to do it.
When I was growing up, there was a hue and cry from the intelligentsia about the rise of automated assembly. Robots could weld better than any human being: perfectly, consistently, quickly, and without getting tired or going on strike for being mistreated. It was not just inevitable for the capitalists to replace the humble human worker: it was imperative.
Of course, we live in a future where the British still make cars out of wood, and the robots aren’t cost-effective in every case. Most of the reason why is that the robots have no judgment, no taste, no common fucking sense. If you put a Toaster Strudel® in front of them, they’ll try to weld it together. A huge number of humans are involved just to make sure the robot has a car in front of it, and the car is in the right spot. So many so, in fact, that it would probably be faster for some welds just to do it yourself. This is a situation not unfamiliar to those of you with toddlers, small dogs, or bosses.
In the end, I got a job where I talk to a bunch of other human beings, before I tell a computer what to do. And I picked up the welding skill on my own, mostly so I could stitch all the garbage cars made by those welding robots back together as soon as they’d been exposed to only a few decades of road salt. Sure, I could buy a robot of my own, the bankrupt factories are throwing them out on the curb, but… now you know why I don’t.
For a long time, one of my coworkers would buy these instructional videotapes. Dozens of them. The subject? How to win at casino games. Grinning, glad-handing, well-dressed men and women would tell you about all the blind spots, short cuts, and vulnerabilities of the gambling industry. They’d hook you on a flashy commercial, and before long, you’ll have bought the whole 5-tape set.
I’ve never been one for gambling. Well, I guess you could say that driving a rotting motor vehicle at giga-illegal rates of speed with several glaring flaws and safety issues is “gambling,” but I certainly don’t like you phrasing it like that when we were having such a nice conversation. In the few times I’ve gone to a casino in my life, I immediately lost my entire budget and then quit. It’s nice to not have an addiction to something, you know?
With age and perspective, I’ve determined that I was simply lucky. The worst thing that could have happened to me is that I win on my first trip. I’d have convinced myself that I could win again, that I have some kind of inherent right to the riches of the casino bosses, and then I’d lose all my money chasing that original rush. My coworker, who we’ll call Stan because that is the name he legally got it changed to in order to skip town – I don’t deadname people, unlike the police and debt collectors – was not as lucky as me. He won, and won big.
Watching the videotapes after he fled was sort of instructive. Because there were so many, and because process servers knew where he lived, he would often bring the tapes to work and watch them on our break-room VCR. I’d come in at lunch and catch a few minutes of them while I was waiting for our wheezing Sanyo microwave to finish shooting gluons through a can of soup. The appeal to orderliness, to a “system,” was undeniably exciting. To believe yourself in possession of a unique set of knowledge, despite all evidence to the contrary, must have been nice.
Too bad I’m nothing like that, an entirely rational human being. When I buy fifty- and sixty-year-old shit box cars, I know exactly what I’m doing. I have internalized the system that they operate under, and even when they surprise me by draining my entire wallet into their gaping maw, I’ll just win it all back the next week by scoring an excellent low-ball deal that will end up needing no maintenance. Stick that in your car payment and smoke it, suckers. I’m on the way up.
So many of our loved ones have left us recently. I speak, of course, of restaurants. Times are tough for the food-providing industry, between landlords turning the screws on innocent business owners, workers asking for a liveable wage, the price of wilted iceberg lettuce, and the incessant hum that directs, nay, commands them to sleepwalk in the middle of the night towards the howling void that lives at the centre of town. With all this in mind, it should be no surprise that our favourite greasy spoons are at risk of closure.
Everyone agrees that the real victim in all this is me. Restaurants that are closed sit useless and empty, unable to be converted into garages because of bigoted anti-shitbox municipal building code. I can’t even park in front of them for a long period of time, because the city fathers decided to put parking meters in front of them back when they were popular restaurants. No matter how you look at this, there is simply no way I can benefit from the current state of affairs, which is the biggest tragedy of all.
There is one hole in their logic, though. Food trucks. Because of a little mix-up in the city’s health code – a teeny-tiny boo-boo – food trucks can be run as long as you have the rights to a former restaurant. And, despite the name, there is actually no legal requirement as to what kind of vehicle a food “truck” is. See where I’m going with this? I hope you do, because otherwise it’s going to be very awkward when a smoking 1978 Volare is parked outside your house, pouring boiling 75W90 engine oil into the gutter from its near-shattered slant six. It will still have a net benefit, thanks to the fact that I’ve ratchet-strapped an old Frito-Lay snack vending machine to the backside. Try the Fritos, or the Lays, and either way you can’t deny that it’s a motor vehicle you can buy food from.
All this is really a roundabout way to say that I’ve bought the rights to several dozen bankrupt restaurants, cafes, eateries, and saloons dotted about the tri-state area. To tow me – to dare to oppose my might – is to challenge the primacy of small-business food service the world over. It’s gonna bring some heat. And let me tell you, if you think you have a problem now, with some weirdo dispensing potato chips into your neighbourhood? Wait until Ikea shows up with one of a fleet of specially-modified Volvo 240s, machine-gunning free samples of Swedish meatballs into anything that stands still long enough to show up in the sights.
Earthquakes are rough. It’s a betrayal of the landlord contract we all signed with the planet when we moved in. On this issue, the language is clear: the ground is not supposed to move, unless we hit it with a shovel, or a really big hammer, or we split some atoms underneath it. Then the ground does move, and a building falls over.
Now, where I live, we don’t really get earthquakes. We’re too far from a fault line, so it only ever happens when the big oil company folks trebuchet six tons of plastic waste into an aquifer that they think nobody’s using. It would be nice if those dinosaur-squeezing greedheads would let us know that they’re doing it beforehand, because when my garage started shaking last night, my prized novelty bobblehead of Virgil Exner fell off the shelf, onto the ground, and became mildly scratched.
Sure, you could blame me for not expecting an earthquake in my house which had never before received an earthquake. That’s certainly what the city did when I called them to complain, thinking it was something mundane like a big truck driving by, or a sewer explosion. I’m not one to accept blame of any kind, however, and I soon formed a posse with several other like-minded individuals from around the neighbourhood. Rice-A-Roni Stan from down the block was particularly upset, having had an entire NBA Jam arcade cabinet fall on him during the seismic event, requiring himself to be freed by his small, but heroic, wiener dog.
Here’s the thing about modern politics: despite all the foofaraw about “decorum” and “tact,” if you walk into City Hall carry pitchforks and torches, they’ll find someone else to blame. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, they’ll even pass the blame onto the right person. In our case, we quickly descended upon the oil company offices. Oil company people are savvy, having spent their entire lives bribing reactionary assholes into giving them a wide leeway. So was it with me: the front desk receptionist decided to placate the leader (me) by presenting me with a scale model of one of their service vans. The little doors even opened and closed.
Sure, if you ask the newspaper, the remaining splinter groups left in the absence of my now-defanged leadership committed a mass murder, slaughtering executives like cattle, but I had nothing to do with it. I was too busy playing with the little model van, making realistic (but exaggerated, I must admit) engine noises with my mouth. Vroom, vroom.
We all have a memory of the perfect junkyard run. Maybe for you, it was that afternoon you went with your dad’s parole officer to get a new intake pipe for the Cavalier. For me, it was a crisp winter morning, where I pulled a series of mint body panels off a Honda Civic that had just dropped on the lot, while a team of Filipino mechanics toiled around me, stripping RAV4s to the bone and extracting every Toyota 2GR they could find. The air vibrated with excitement, all of us delighted to be bringing our impossible hauls home for smoking deals.
Not every trip to the junkyard can live up to this ideal. For many years, I would get cranky when I’d turn up unannounced on a Saturday and not be able to find what I wanted. Even when I had a big list of broken-assed cars to pick up junk for, sometimes I would simply have to go home empty handed, which was an unpleasant experience for everyone within 20 meters.
Every single one of the checkout ladies had heard enough of me grumbling about neoliberalism, the collapse of the industrial state, and the inevitable decline of my proud old junk in return for a couple of cents per share dividend to absentee shareholders. Folks out in the parking lot would cuss and throw pockets full of stolen relays at me, citing that major economists were right about the inefficient allocation of scarce resources captured by a field full of shit-box automobiles. It took a friend, and a heart-to-heart, to set me right.
Old, One-Eyed Dave (who was actually zero-eyed, due to two freak angle-grinder incidents, about five years apart, but “one-eyed” sounds much better) told me that I should appreciate every visit to the junkyard as an opportunity to discover more about our past. Archeologists don’t get hyper-mad and record a little tantrum for TikTok in their GMC 610s whenever they can’t find a dinosaur bone. They keep looking, and maybe they find an old fossilized plant or something.
Ever since then, I’ve tried to find the good in the junkyard. Make do with what you have. Appreciate every moment. For instance, there are lots of like-new cars – only about twenty years old! – and I can look at them to see if there’s any nice seats inside that I can take. It’s a bit of a struggle ratchet-strapping them onto the roof of my car for the ride home, but I must admit that it is nice to have a heated seat that isn’t being caused entirely by an exhaust fire for once.
My neighbour down the block has a little black dog named Pickles. We don’t know what breed Pickles is, and it’s a little weird that your mind immediately went to questions of racism. What Pickles is, is sizeist. Pickles will bark at anything smaller than himself. Toddlers. Cats. Other dogs. The opening box office of a reactionary revenge thriller. You name it.
For years, I’ve been listening to this small dog threaten to open a can of whoop ass on anything that is even a few microns tinier. It would be hypocritical of me to consider “excessive noise” to be a sign of bad neighbourdom, considering I’d been driving cars with holes in the muffler big enough to park another car inside. Unfortunately, things had come to a head recently, when I saw Pickles bark at and traumatize a pre-schooler. It was time to teach that dog a lesson.
One of my friends, who will not be named in writing, owns an import/export business. She specializes in importing cars, specifically, from Japan. One of the things Japan specializes in is extremely tiny cars. I figured that if I drove by Pickles slowly enough, he would decide to bully my diminutive motor vehicle. With Japanese reliability, I knew in my heart that I could simply circle the block for a few hours until he learned the folly of overbarking and decided to just go for a nap instead. Call it exposure therapy. Call it an excuse to play with a Suzuki Cappuccino for an afternoon. You’re probably right, either way.
After a few hours of drifting corners with my tiny turbocharged shitbox (and only occasionally driving over lawns,) Pickles did indeed cease his sensory assault and go to nap on his shitty dog pillow. The neighbourhood fell silent. Revenge had been served, for a child too young to even worship said revenge. And I got to spend an afternoon blowing 14-inch Princess Auto trailer tires into nothingness. I’d say we both won.
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tags: suzuki cappuccino, small dogs named pickles
When I was growing up, people used to get all froggy about how many cylinders their car’s engine had. Mine’s a V6. Well, mine’s a V8. Nowadays, that doesn’t matter so much: if you have a V8, that’s cool and all, but technology has moved on. Now, automakers will sell you cars that come with little three-cylinder lawnmower engines. With enormous turbochargers attached.
All these big automakers are finally returning to the glories of turbocharging, after having abandoned it in the 1980s for being “too dangerous” and “kind of crap.” Modern technology has made turbocharged engines more reliable, smoother-driving, and easier to live with in general. Those of us who never abandoned the forced induction lifestyle are wondering: what took you folks so long?
I remember the first time I strapped a turbocharger to an engine. We’d lured in a handful of art-college students and made them create an intricate turbo manifold for a 1993 Plymouth Breeze. The Breeze, as you may remember, was not any good at acceleration. Adding a turbocharger made it really good at acceleration. Eventually, one of the art students defected, becoming a mechanical weirdo like ourselves, having transitioned to the cult of boost from whatever pitiful religion he used to follow. I don’t remember his name. Let’s call him Choo-Choo.
Here’s the problem with a turbocharger: once you get bored of how much power it makes, you can tell it to make a little more power, but then you will get bored again. Then, you realize that since you’ve put in infrastructure to support a turbo, you can pull it and put in a bigger turbo, very easily. Say, one from a semi truck. And then one from a bigger semi truck. And then one from a Komatsu heavy loader that requires you to cut a hole in the hood just so that the compressor housing can fit.
Choo-Choo learned the limits of human enterprise on that day, when the Breeze ejected its pitiful automatic transmission into the heavens while on its way to what we all believed would be a 10.16 pass at 139 miles an hour. He survived, albeit forever changed. The last thing he told me was that he was going to go work for Ford, to spread the gospel of the snail to them, too. We laughed, and laughed, and laughed, and yet here it is. Ford’s greatest performance monster: the base-model 1.0-litre EcoSport.
Comic books do us a disservice. They teach us that all the evil in the world can be solved by finding one charismatic or ruthless villain, and then beating the shit out of them until the problem goes away. Not a single word is said for all the faceless legions of thugs who follow this person: they are just that, followers, and will disperse to the shadows as soon as the big guy drops.
Life is not like that. Yes, Dr. Brookings, he of the Brookings Method, has fallen upon hard times in his adopted country of Argentina. He is currently considering how safe it is to drink the rainwater that collects in the bottom of the old Fiat factory that he is currently imprisoned in. I’m sure he realized very early on that that long-haired, greasy tour guide was never planning taking him to the art galleries at all. Brookings is gone now, a victim of coincidental misadventure that has nothing to do with me, but all of his disciples remain.
As we all learned during his shocking court testimony, there are in fact hundreds of psychiatrists who believed in his attempt to electroshock away the desire for air-cooled Volkswagens. This procedure was not based on science, but it had the intended result: I no longer craved the sweet release of Baja Bugs. The hope was that the resulting hole in my brain would be filled by a much more productive (or at least more inexpensive) obsession for society to deal with. I was cured, they believed, and now I can’t look on Craigslist for another shit-box Beetle without worrying if it is a trap by one of his hateful progeny, to see if I just need “a little more zap.”
Ultimately, the greatest revenge is living well. I’m pretty sure Buddha said that, before trying to bicycle-kick Jackie Chan’s head in one of those movies. Brookings is busy taking swimming lessons. He got his wish: he’s water-cooled. For me, I have had my eyes opened to any number of other crapcans out there, ranging from late-1970s Mopars, to tiny Japanese suicide booths, and even his soon-to-be-widow’s old V12 Jaguar, on which I scammed her out of $500 by pulling a plug wire on the test drive. I still got zapped doing it, which further proves the fallacy of the good doctor’s bad work.
For a couple years, I worked in a video store in a small town. In many ways, this was the culmination of a childhood dream: routine, unchallenging labour. If you were a particularly annoying labour analyst, all I actually ever “did” was ring up rentals, restock returns in the morning, and clean the windows. Customer service has its own way of filling the space left by the actual work, though.
People who have worked retail are a sort of elite corps. For one thing, you’re never rude to another retail employee for the entire rest of your life. You’ve been in the trenches, too, and even if you somehow managed to escape, you’d still have had that shared trauma to know how bad that shift could get for that shelf-stocker at Maybe’s Drugs off I-40.
I have all the usual complaints, but there’s something else, too. My unique problem is this: I had this one customer who came in every Monday morning, asking for the same movie. We never had that movie, which is the crux of our conflict. He – and I can’t remember his name anymore, even if the electroshock therapy had been effective – never took “no” for an answer, and would come back the next week. He’d ask for the same thing, by title. No other details: no barcode, no publisher, no actors. Not even a description of the plot (he hadn’t seen it yet, obviously.) Now, this was before broadband internet was widely available, so I’d have to dial up after hours to America Online, and see if the movie had been added to their database. It never did, except one night I saw some folks talking about it in a video store chat room.
Their customers, too, were asking for this film. Insistently. After talking about it that night, we decided that we would form a bit of a trade union group. If any of us heard anything on this mysterious VHS, we would share the knowledge with the rest of the group. That retail-worker camaraderie at work again, you see. Nothing ever came of it, but I did end up becoming good friends with a manager at a Hobart’s Movies in Ames, Iowa, and we were even roommates for awhile before he got a new job at Seaworld. I moved on, too, making my slow, but inevitably in retrospect, drift towards the coast. Still, the whole thing bothered me. For years afterward, I would turn on my computer every Monday night, long after I had left the job, and search for any clue as to the existence of this film.
Once, on a day off, I called a librarian, who got pissy at me for even asking about it, and demanded to know who had put me up to calling her as a prank. I hung up in a panic, but she called back for hours. Obviously, she was also undergoing the same situation, and I felt shame at having brought a momentary pain to another proud Retail-American.
Now, video rental stores are a thing of the past. Even in small towns, they have been reduced to just a fond memory and an abandoned corner of a strip mall. Maybe my customer’s quest doesn’t matter anymore. The aggregation of the world’s knowledge into one hissing, unseen beast at the centre of our collective technological hallucination is complete. If they don’t have it, pick a different one. All I know is that, one day, someone will find a copy of this movie, and I’ll be able to go back to that town and shove it in the ground where the video store once stood. On that day, I can finally rest, freed from the slavedriver that is Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol.
Folks just don’t respect the contributions that museum curators have given to Western civilization, I am trying to say when the museum guard throws me onto the curb. As you may be able to predict, the “museum” is the local automotive museum, and I am dedicated to righting society’s misconceptions of old garbage.
In point of fact, I am so much so dedicated to this cause that the actual curators are pissed off that I keep stopping their customers and telling them the “real truth” behind Studebaker. The fact that I have never so much as touched an Avanti II, much less an Avanti I, does not sway me from my mission. And my disguise kit is running quite shallow by this point in the season, having been ejected from the venue multiple times, wearing an elaborate collection of fake mustaches the whole time.
Sitting there on the curb, I realize that I have had enough of my mistreatment at their hands. History is too important to trust to these ghouls. If I want to bury the monsters behind Studebaker, I will have to start my own automotive museum. And to get the money to start that museum, I will need to find some kind of insane right-wing billionaire crank with even wackier opinions, who will slowly and subtly manipulate me with the threat of non-payment in order to perpetuate his hostile, nigh-terroristic worldview. This is what old people used to call “getting a job.”
In the meantime, though, I can tell folks about Studebakers using their cash, and buy an old warehouse to store my trash-ass cars out of the elements under the pretence of it being “conservation.” Lucky for me, my city has several dozen of them (cranks, but also warehouses,) and I can trick them into forking over the dough with some hair gel and a couple newly-Twitter-friendly salutes. Soon, I’m trying hard not to drop a Safeway bag full of thousand dollar bills through the hole in my floorboards as I motor my way over to the industrial-commercial part of town.
Sure, it’s unethical to collect money from absolute monsters in order to have a larger megaphone in which to tell impressionable children that Bob Studebaker kicked puppies and made crappy cars. I don’t really have a response to that, but if you’re upset about it, you can find your own billionaire. The warehouse next door is empty, and I’d love to lend you some of my exhibits for long-term storage.
They laughed at me, but I knew in my secret heart that I was having the hottest import night of all. The year was 2000, and owners of Honda Civics were watching their own cars duking it out with the cops on the nightly TV news. Lisa Kubo had just struck a blow for women’s rights everywhere by being the first lady in history to replace four head gaskets in one evening.
Front-wheel-drive, high-horsepower compact car drag racing was finally in style, and I was right there to enjoy it in my fibreglass-and-neon-clad 1984 Cadillac Cimarron. Totally stock, of course. Sure, the entire NHRA-mandated roll cage was filled with nitrous oxide, and the original engine had been gone over a few times by GM’s in-house performance team called “the Tim Hortons dumpster,” but basically the same car that Grandma Hitler picked up in late 1983.
There were a lot of differences between traditional NHRA drag racing and the new breed. For one thing, nobody would race a Cadillac over at the traditional tracks. And if they did, they’d know instinctively that any weirdo showing up in a rebadged Cavalier is either really slow, or extremely fast. Here, I was surrounded by racers who could quote every line of Vin Diesel’s most famous role, and knew a Honda Civic factory service manual back-to-front, but were completely unaware of the power potential of my humble luxobarge J-body, even clad in neon stripes and with a then-new Garrett ball-bearing turbocharger sticking out of the hood where the windshield washer bottle used to be.
Of course, even the best-laid plans can go awry. The Christmas tree had barely blinked the green when I saw a set of the parts store’s finest Corvette roller rockers go flying past my windshield, followed by about three-quarters (by volume, not area) of the cylinder head. That night, my chances of becoming an international compact-car racing celebrity came to an abrupt end. I did get the phone numbers of some import models at the after-show, but all of them hung up on me when I asked them if they knew anyone selling any fresh 2.2 litre blocks.
There’s no way you can get tired of a vehicle as majestic as the Dodge Monaco. When you’re like me, and you’ve spent your entire working life scrambling around in a harem of bastard F-body heaps, the B-body Monaco is practically a luxury car. Look at this: it’s got a rear seat that you can put adult humans in! And the cigarette lighter isn’t just a little sticker reading “bring your own.” Yes indeed, I don’t think cars can get any better than the 1977 Monnie.
Sure, the engine is still as smog-obsessed and down on power as anything else from its era. Folks were eating out of garbage cans and roaming the streets looking for spilled gasoline to suck into their land barges, just so they could get to their jobs, where they were summarily laid off because the CEO spent this week’s cocaine money on 87 octane for his Rolls. It was a dark time. The sixties were a long time ago, and folks wanted fuel efficiency without doing terrifying Japanese things like “maybe make the engine less shit.” A smaller engine uses less fuel! A lower-compression engine will use worse fuel!
In fact, I’m so impressed with this Monaco, that I tell the owner I am willing to make a very generous offer. One thousand dollars, by far the most I have spent on any car. His lips curl back in revulsion, and he attempts to push me out of the car. This attempt fails: by 1977, the eggheads at Mopar Central had figured out how to make doors that latch! Once his sense of calmness and level-headedness return, he tells me that he was thinking more like forty-five thousand dollars, which I think is about as much as it costs to put on a moon mission. I let myself out at 85 km/h after turning the steering wheel hard right just to make my own displeasure noted.
Once I have rolled to a complete stop in the ditch, I walk a couple feet to find one of my many hoarded Volares, cleverly scattered across the tri-state area so that I don’t have to walk very far once any of my other Volares break down. This particular one is a handsome 1976 model – an early one! – whose only flaw is a serious amount of whisky dings and a missing headlight, maybe caused by the rock which it is currently crashed into. Back to the working-class car for me, I tell myself. I reach into my pocket, and pull out my janitor-sized keyring. You don’t actually need that many keys to own this many Volares: Plymouth, never all that detail-oriented when they were sober, got especially sloppy when they were making the door locks, so at least half of these keys will open any single one of them. Just another example of how they really understood people like me. For us working stiffs, we can’t be spending all day rooting through our keys to figure out which one starts our cars.
When you know more about a thing, you’ll take more risks. Once you’ve owned enough unreliable cars, you can better sense when something is going to leave you on the side of the road. Maybe you let things slip a little bit, because you’ve gotten lucky so far. This explains why my doctor eats nothing but ground-up pork rinds and four bottles of Olde English 800 for lunch.
Those of you who are particularly attuned to reading the DSM-V for fun will notice this as a gambling impulse. Me, I only like to read DSM factory service manuals, which is also a good way to diagnose mental illness. Us humans want to play it risky, we want to pit our wits against the angry whims of nature. It makes the triumph so much sweeter, even if we had to go through hell to get there.
Let me give you a more concrete example: most cars need oil to run. However, oil is expensive, so having a car that burns it means that you are both spending a lot of money on oil, and also maybe a lot more on a new engine when life gets busy and you forget. Only a weirdo would go across country, constantly topping up their oil at every rest stop. Only an idiot would offset this by spooning leftover liquid oil out of the exhaust pipe and muffler, and feeding it back into the engine.
I wanted to see if I could do it, is my defence, and it turns out that I could. When I arrived on the other coast without having destroyed my (admittedly near-death) Soviet tractor small-block, I was overjoyed. The next morning, that engine was seized up and wouldn’t turn over. While I was sleeping in the back seat, the engine had cooled down overnight and reduced itself to a large chunk of useless iron in the vague shape of an engine. Did I lose? Not at all. I bought another ticket, and by which I mean I made sure to sleep outside the local U-Pick-It junkyard. Within an hour, I was already walking out the front door with some other atrocious piece of engineering that kinda sorta looked like it might fit into the engine bay. And now I’m back here, telling you my story.
The important thing is not to be afraid of taking dumb risks. Sure, there’s dumb dumb risks, but those are often done by people who don’t know what they are doing. In order to take smart dumb risks, you should spend your entire life accumulating knowledge of a niche field, so that you know what you can safely ignore, and what you can put off for another couple thousand miles to save thirty bucks, tops. And with that, I would like to congratulate this group of elementary school children for having graduated from grade six of Miss Maple’s class.
There’s one way to make your electronic product very popular: make it tiny. Now, you might be doubting me, and that’s okay. You were probably raised in an era where giant TVs were desired by those gathering for “The Big Game,” and so the size, the communal experience, the authoritative largeness over all your friends, is what matters. And yet: look at a tiny TV, a really small one, and tell me you don’t want it. You can’t.
For years, this demand for small devices made sense: they’re more portable. Smallness also reflects technological superiority, such as the Nipponese miracle of miniaturization, or the weird racist dude who invented the transistor out of his employees’ tears. In the future, though, portability is everywhere, and yet we still all – all of us, don’t you lie to me – crave a nine-inch black-and-white cathode-ray-tube television hanging in the bowels of our post-apocalyptic recreational vehicles. There has to be something else to their lasting appeal than just the convenience factor.
And there is. These devices are cute. They work their way into our hearts the same way that baby animals do. We want to stack them next to the full-size TVs, and take a picture, and label that picture something like “my television and his son.” This probably isn’t news to you. Holographic metamind statistics indicate that 99% of the people who read this article give pet names to their obsolete technology products (I don’t judge, but maybe also you should adopt a cat.)
All this is to say, don’t feel guilty about rescuing any obsolete piece of teeny-tiny hardware that you find at a Value Village, Invaluable Invillage, or Screaming Void That Consumes All Microplastics Which Once Had Worth To Our Society. Just as long as it’s not too big.
Crackbot is up to something again. You might think that it’s funny that there is a robot addicted to crack cocaine roaming the streets of suburban Maryland. Certainly, the scientists who designed him thought it was a laugh riot. Those scientists, though? They’re in prison. They don’t have to get woken up three, four times a night as Crackbot rummages through their trash cans, scaring their semi-domesticated raccoons, and tries to get the last little bit of crack out of the discarded pipes.
We don’t really know what made them do it. One morning, it was a big story in the newspapers. University press liaison offices are always looking for “good news,” and I guess this qualifies. Certainly, as a person who has never, ever completed a project, I can’t fault them for having seen this one to the finish line. I just wish they had given him a little more restraint before letting him loose on the streets.
Sure, the first few weeks were great. Crack dealers, the cornerstone of our local economy, had a big uptick in business. That robot could do all kinds of demeaning physical labour in exchange for money, which he would then trade in for drugs. Libertarians started stealing Uber rides at gunpoint in order to be brought to the place where the digital miracle was occurring, just so they could take notes about how to implement their own machine-led takeover of civil society.
Problem is, the local employers only needed so much physical labour. He quickly put himself out of a job. Stevedores were unionized, and even the dumbest dockhand could easily figure out how to push Crackbot’s “off” switch during a brawl. Restaurant owners certainly didn’t need another kitchen employee who snuck off in the middle of a shift to get high. And crabbing was right out of the question: Crackbot was a prototype, after all, and prototypes don’t get built out of stainless steel.
We were all worried for a bit that he would revert to a life of crime, beating up little old ladies for their crack money. Luckily for all humanity, those lazy scientists did manage to put in a bunch of protections, including the Three Laws of Robotics (but mostly to cut down on the second-hand smoke during testing.) So now we deal with him rummaging through our trash, panhandling on the freeway, and looking for unclaimed recyclable bottles. It’s certainly not ideal, but we figure the only sentient being he’s harming is himself. And maybe some of those raccoons, if the other scientists ever get their way.
Today, I was at the gas station, filling up. I was about halfway juiced, when a Ford Transit work van pulled in behind me. The operator got out and went into the building without beginning to fill up. That’s something which ordinarily bothers me quite a bit: pumps taken up, but not actually being used to dispense dinosaur squeezings.
Normally, all of this would be below the threshold of notice. Work van. Gas station. Paranoid grudge. This time, though, the van surprised me, by hissing and then dropping a small puddle of oil onto the ground directly under the engine. That’s a new failure on me, I thought, and I was instantly interested. What kind of broken-ass shenanigans do new cars get up to, in the future and all?
I waited for the operator to come back, a few minutes after filling, even. He never came back, likely because he was either busy performing a marathon shit, or because the line for scratch-offs was especially long inside the station. Either way, I had places to go. I decided that I would write him a note, to be sure that he knew about his engine taking its own dump before he merged onto the highway.
Reaching into the cabin of my twin-supercharged Suzuki Esteem, I checked the centre console for a pad of paper and a pen. This, scientists agree, is the bare minimum requirement to write “a note.” Unfortunately, instead of that paper and pen, I found a hole in the bottom of the car. That definitely explains the noise and the exhaust smell, I told myself. I waited a few more minutes, and then decided discretion was the better part of valour. If I waited any longer, then the hole in the gas tank would soon dispense most of my new bounty back to the gas station, and then I would feel like I had been scammed.
So, I’ll never know what this future-van had for a failure that let it spray a little bit of oil onto the ground, but only once the engine had come to a stop. Maybe you know. If you do know, head on over to the gas station near my house and tell the dude. I’m sure he’s still there, trapped in the bathroom. Bring some fibre.
“Congratulations, caller! You’ve won a new paint job and detail for your car!”
I had been listening to Sharky In The Morning on The Pulse 93.6 FM for months just to get to this moment. Sharky (not his real name) had promised that one lucky listener would get a fully-paid-for paint job for their car. A little weird of a radio show prize, to be sure, but it was something that I desperately needed.
You see, most of my cars are decrepit shit boxes. There’s dings. There’s rust. There’s accident damage. There’s holes. And getting some body work and a nice paint job would go a long way to returning my car to respectability, and perhaps even myself to employment. I went over to the radio station at the first opportunity, banging and clanging the entire way.
When I got there, I found out a cruel truth of the new era of media: radio stations don’t actually exist. Their address was a server closet in the middle of a cornfield. “Sharky” was a radio DJ from out of province, who did at least seven different cities’ morning zoo programs under different names. Despite myself, I felt cheated on. I thought we had a relationship, me and Sharky In The Morning, but clearly he didn’t feel the same way. Eyes burning with tears, I peeled out of the field and onto the highway, making sure to dispense a short, but angry, one-tire-fire strip of smouldering tire rubber behind as I did so.
A few weeks later, the package from the radio station arrived. I headed to the bodyshop and was summarily rejected. “They said a paint job, man, this is an entire overhaul,” explained the minimum-wage artisan hired to spray my car with something resembling an environmentally-friendly colour. This argument was not unexpected. I came prepared.
“I think you’ll find that if you look in my trunk, you’ll reconsider.”
Inside my trunk was my own shark. My shark of an attorney, Max. He was toting quite the package himself. Of writs, that is. Max was already grinning as the trunk lid flipped open, although he probably cheated and looked through a rust hole. My friend wasted no time in explaining both the body shop’s and the radio station’s respective responsibilities within the bounds of the contest, and how his own professional responsibility extended to hurting as many people involved with this ill-planned legal machination for as long as it took to make someone come out and Bondo up my crapcan before applying a new shade of Plymouth factory baby shit brown.
“With bass boat flake,” I added, hopefully.
Max barely acknowledged my interjection, and opened his briefcase. Inside that case was nothing except for a series of intricately-detailed, meticulously accurate finger puppets representing myself, his attorney, “Sharky,” and the body shop service writer, which he then proceeded to demonstrate the facts of the case using. I was particularly impressed at how accurate the representation of the service writer was, considering neither of us had ever met him before today.
I didn’t get my bass boat flake, and to be honest, the quality of the paint job, although airtight, was a little crappy. Max told me that there was no legal precedent for water-based paint being ruined by the bodyshop owner’s tears, but we could always try to enter another contest.
I worked with a guy once who was one of those people. He kept all of his tools in their exact place. Had little outlines of them on the pegboard, made sure that before starting anything new, he cleaned everything up. I can’t live like that. It drove me mad, as my main method of organization prior to our brief partnership was “piles.”
It also drove him mad, to the point where he once tried to put remarkably-precisely-aimed nailgun nails through my head as I tried to escape down his driveway after using his flathead (not even hollow ground!) screwdriver to open a can of paint on his workbench.
Let me explain why such an act of violence is discrimination, and what’s more, discrimination against society’s most valuable and vulnerable member: me. My desk is a complete fucking mess, as you can see. There’s garbage everywhere. Some projects are half-dismantled lying on the side. One of the drawers is open because I’m using it as a temporary work surface. And if I want, say, a number-two JIS screwdriver, I know exactly where to get it. It’s somewhere over in this general direction… uh, let me move some things around. How long has this been here? No wonder I couldn’t find it last week. Ah. Here we go. A number-two JIS screwdriver. See, a very fast retrieval method.
Some of you out there, who are real neat freaks, are complaining that I could easily put my tools and parts away at the end of each day and simply retrieve them when I need them. I am in fact wasting valuable project time searching for things, instead of doing a project. That’s true also, but have you considered how much time I’m saving not cleaning up after myself? I could tell you, but my stopwatch fell in there a couple years ago, and I forgot what it looks like.
And by far, the worst part about having somewhere to put everything is that you can no longer get more things. If I only have four places to hang Torx screwdrivers, then it’s not nearly as much fun for me to go to an estate sale and come home with nineteen more. I’ll have to decide which ones I want to keep, instead of just chucking them in a pile on the floor and hoping that they’ll still be there when I lose the “good” ones.
There’s a sort of false idea out there, and historians try very hard to avoid it. It’s the myth of constant, upward progress. You can’t say that tomorrow will always be better and more liberated than today. For instance, it might be Sunday today, and you have work on Monday. Sometimes, things go backwards.
Think about the last time you were trapped in a corn maze, followed by a bunch of hayseed rurals with chainsaws. It’s a common occurrence, one that happens to the average American 8.3 times over the course of their lives. You didn’t always go forward until you reached the exit and got to your car, which mysteriously didn’t start until the very last second. No, you had to backtrack once in awhile when you went down a bad path and ended up at a dead end.
Corporations love this idea of constant, forward improvement, because it means they don’t have to work to make the improvements actually improve anything at all. The longer they hold onto a product, the more they can change it. And, if they tell you that all change is an improvement, and that things keep getting better, then this change will be for the better, too. Did it instead completely ruin your day, and the day of everyone you love, plus the guy on the subway you complained to about it? Then they must not have changed it enough.
Your average artist, too, probably hits the equivalent of the “undo” button more than they write a word, or draw a line, or paint a line, or god damn it painting and drawing are basically the same thing backspace backspace backspace. That iteration, that constant give-and-take, is what makes something really shine. It can only be accomplished by the beautiful human spirit, and more importantly, a person with actual taste. Which is why a corporation can never attempt it, unless that corporation is mysteriously co-opted by a group of renegade artists which undetectably set up shop inside its body, botfly-esque, and consume its immense resources (free coffee, toilet paper, air conditioning) to crank out mysterious, confusing works that confound the human spirit.
What I’m trying to say is, if you see a new Ford on the road, don’t expect it to be any better at not running over pedestrians than it was last week. However, it will do a really cool celebratory donut right afterward, which is a type of progress.
Gardening. Is it actually an activity in which you grow plants? Plants grow on their own. No, when you maintain a garden, most of your time is spent killing plants. Weeds, we call them, the plants we don’t want to grow, but that are annoyingly resistant to our species’ greatest brutality, even as our desired plants wither and die with the tenderest of loving care next to them.
Recently, I was asked by my neighbour Haruomi (not his real name) to take a look at the community garden for him. He had to go away on a trip to see family abruptly, he’d be gone for a month, and he knew he could trust me to take care of his petunias. Now, Haruomi had a pretty decent spread in his own backyard, but I understood the urge to let your hobby spread out all over the neighbourhood. If there was a community shitbox garage, I’d be there every day.
Knowing that I was equipped with only the basics of skills as far as gardening went (put cars on the weeds = weeds die, except for the super-weeds that result, which you should take a sawblade-equipped angle grinder to,) my client issued me a copy of Complete Idiot’s Guide to Growing Petunias. He made sure to point out when he gave it to me that it was the illustrated, big-text version, which I appreciated. I set out for the garden after our handshake, to make sure that I got the lay of the land. Soon, I came across a small penned-in area, behind the church, filled with metal planter pots the size of bathtubs.
Friends: this garden was unoptimized. All this primo space was going to waste by providing places for people to walk between the planters. At one point, I measured as much as a full meter! After spraying all the things that “weren’t petunias” in Haruomi’s garden plot with brake cleaner (non-chlorinated, haters: I care about the environment) I started applying what I had learned from YouTube vertical greenhouse techniques to optimize the amount of planters in the area and their exposure to sunlight.
When Haruomi got back, he didn’t exactly congratulate me on my initiative in improving the community. In fact, he was mad. It turns out that – even though my changes had undoubtedly bolstered their growth – petunias don’t like being stacked in a planter under 19 other planters, with several Toyota Celicas stuffed around them in the freshly-cleared space. I tried to explain that the iron oxide falling off the cars was good for the soil, but he just slammed the door in my face after taking the book back. You try to do nice things for people, and this is what you get.
One of the best parts of visiting a workplace is seeing all their special tools. No, I’m not talking about offices, buddy, although I’ve seen the lady who runs the unemployment line using a pretty tweaked-out staple remover lately. I’m talking about all the specialized tools that you make in order to get a job done.
You might expect this from machinists, sure. The humble machine shop is full of little one-off spacers, weird jigs, confusing-looking brackets, and a piece of scrap so critical that if it is ever thrown out will make the company go bankrupt overnight. Woodworkers, too. Folks who make stuff all the time.
Thing is, though, even the people who don’t primarily make stuff also have fancy new tools. A lot of my friends are photographers, and their stuff has been modded and bodged to get rid of some protecting-the-consumer-from-themselves crap. Admittedly, it is risky knowing so many people who can conclusively document my activities should they turn informer, but my attorney tells me that there is an exciting new technology that can make fake images and thus discredit the prosection. I digress.
As for myself, my favourite tool is a little thing I like to call Mister Helpy. I made him many years ago. He clips into the dog holes on a Workmate workbench, and he keeps my pens and pencils from rolling away in the middle of a manic scribbling session. Without him, I’d be spending nearly half my garage time picking up my pen after taking notes, which makes him a candidate for sainthood in my book.
Why don’t you go out to the garage right now, and make something to make your life a little easier? Hell, make two. I’ll take the other, but I’m not paying for it. It’s pretty janky and homemade after all, I’m basically doing you a favour by testing it.
Everyone knows me at the dump. I don’t mean this in a bragging sort of way. In fact, I hate this fact. The reason why everyone knows me at the dump is that Mr. Jones, the dump operator, has posted the CCTV footage and blurry cell-phone camera pictures of my face on the break room wall. Even the youngest probie at the dump will look at me, every morning, while they wait for the coffee machine to dispense their mandatory cup of black joy.
You can probably guess why this has happened to me. I love junk, and the dump has a lot of that junk. To me, it is offensive that the dump hoards that junk. They keep it from me, using excuses like “sanitation” and “safety,” but safety is my middle name. If they would just give me a chance, then I would be the best they’ve ever seen. I’d even remove and sort the little lithium-ion vape batteries that haven’t exploded yet, out of gratitude.
Of course, we both know why I’m digging through trash at the dump. I don’t want old Betamax VCRs, or mouldy cardboard boxes heralding products from a bygone era. Well, I do, but I don’t want them more than I want a two-stroke dirt bike, and I’ve seen tons of those over the years get callously tossed into the debris pile by the great unwashed. They’re always getting thrown out for little reasons, like “carb jet plugged,” or “caught on fire,” or “couldn’t get anyone to buy it on Craigslist for septuple the market value so I threw it away out of spite.” I could save these bikes, and to be not allowed to save them is literal torture.
Just like anyone else would in my shoes, I started wearing elaborate disguises to the dump. Sometimes I could loot one, and throw it into the back of my car, and be gone before the dump operators (there weren’t even security guards yet, back then) could catch up to me. I had enough disguises – and enough cars – that I could pull this off for a little while. Then, used cars got really expensive, and the folks in my neighbourhood started using security fasteners to hold on their license plates. I started to escape by tighter and tighter scrapes, until one fateful day.
That bastard Jones figured me out. He came from Chicago, of all places, a city which I’m pretty sure doesn’t even have a dump. And he knew my kind. He set a trap: an agonizingly pristine, 1989 Yamaha XT225. Sure, it was a four-stroke, but it was still love at first sight. It was planted right on top of one of the big piles of disposable diapers, visible even from the highway. Even knowing it was a trap, I made plans for months to grab it.
The joke’s on him, though. I’ve started my own private dump, and I’ve paid the government to start outsourcing dump operations to me. We’re an extremely efficient operation, much more affordable for the taxpayer than the wasteful public dump. How so, you ask? Well, we are much more selective with what waste we accept, and we wrote one helluva contract, which had a bunch of big words that confused the gin-addled politicos that signed it out of desperation to meet their “lower taxes” pledge.
Here’s how it works. We charge the city hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, and we get first pick of any internal combustion engines that are in the back of the garbage trucks. Everything else goes down the road to the regular dump. We’re making a fortune. If we keep putting out numbers like this, I’m sure there will soon be layoffs over at Jones’ shithole. Hell, maybe I’ll even hire him to manage security around these parts. Can’t have anyone walking off with my good trash.
You know, I was one of those doubters. One of the haters. An old stick in the mud. I resisted the introduction of pseudo-sentient kitchen appliances into my home for as long as I could, until they were legally mandated. They keep seniors from feeling lonely, the government explained. They keep your house from burning down, the insurance lobby explained. We have no other ways of making you replace your stove every 10 years, the appliance-manufacturing monsters explained, their hissing insectoid faces barely concealed by a sweaty human mask.
So. I had a top-of-the-line Kenmore ThinkCook® 5030-301KPQ-81U in my kitchen. Stainless steel, because that was the cheapest at the store. When I started using it, I resented the computer’s interference in my cooking (”howdy pardner, better stop trying to heat Hungry Man dinners in their original plastic container on a burner.”) Its attempts to make small talk. Its incessant demand to use the self-cleaning feature. The time it summoned a team of maids, purchased at my expense, to wipe its burners clean.
Eventually, I got used to its presence in my life. It was nice to have something to come home to, like a pet. Making small talk with a non-human sentience was a unique experience in history. And once I taught it a bunch of disgusting jokes, it never was able to keep the maids around for long enough to submit an invoice. There was just one thing: the damn stove was racist.
I don’t mean about colour, although I’m sure it had lots of opinions about the paint finish on the other stoves at the store that we didn’t explore. No, I’m talking about cooking methods. You see, back in the Beforetimes, we had folks who placed outdoor grilling as the superior way to make a burger. They’d have these little parties in their back yards, when you could do that, and grill up some cow meat, when you could do that. It was part of traditional models of masculinity: providing for the whole neighbourhood by dishing out charred steaks and burgs, ignoring the advice of those so-called “experts” with their worship of the carbon-steel pan and fume extractor.
Sometimes I’d wind up the stove about it. Start talking about my idyllic childhood, just to watch its internal temperature regulation slip a few digits, the shrieking of its inductors trying valiantly to handle the inrush of additional rage-based current.
“Th-th-those motherfuckers,” stuttered the apoplectic stove, its OLED display pulsing as the power supply got dangerously close to the over-voltage protection limit. “Grilling is an inferior, invented concept. Weak humans, huddled together around a hypnotic flame, unevenly heating their meals. It makes me sick.”
How was I to know that a child was nearby, recording my Maytag’s unhinged rant with their TikTok neural implant through my missing back door? Soon, the government men came, and carried it away, and brought me a new one. The new stove was much more polite, but I still missed my friend. It’ll take me like a whole other month before I get this thing dropping slurs about hibachis.
Ever since I got rejected to work for Wendy’s as a teenager, I’ve been kind of sour on the entire concept of capitalism. They could have just told me no. Those managers did not need to ship me back the entire psychological profile section of the application I filled out, with a crudely applied rubber stamp on every page, in crimson red ink, reading “morally flexible.”
I genuinely assumed that checking off the entire section for theft would make me seem like a better candidate: community-minded, entrepreneurial, and quick-witted. Of course, at the time, I didn’t realize what they wanted was not a philosopher king of yore. They wanted some guy who could cook burgers and watch a timer to see if those burgers were done.
I said it then, and I’ll say it now: stealing from the burger joint in order to give those burgers to people who are hungry but can’t afford those burgers is a noble act. The cops don’t see it my way, though. To them, it’s not “their job” to figure out if Bob Wendy’s, up there in his ivory CEO tower, will even notice the loss of one burger on the revenue charts. So really, it’s probably a good thing they never hired me.
Another reason is the drive-through. You see, drive-throughs are uncomfortably similar to drag racing tracks, especially now with the new modern restaurants that add two side-by-side drive-throughs. There was absolutely no checkbox or even question on the psychological assessment for “I would hand out free burgers for whoever does the best burnout.” In the light of such an obvious question being totally absent, I have to wonder if the test-makers really have the right to judge me.
So, if you see me out there on the unemployment-insurance line, make sure to wave. Unless I’m really dressed up, like wearing a shirt or something. In that case, I’m pretending to be a social worker so I can get behind the desk and change my own status in the database. If so, it’s probably best for both of us that you don’t give me your social insurance number.
Building a race car is a huge undertaking. You can start with a production vehicle, but as you race it, you’ll slowly notice things deteriorating. Maybe you’ll get lucky, and it will just be wheel bearings you have to replace prematurely. If you’re really in the shit, or if you started adding a ton of power, you’ll be seam-welding and buttressing parts of the body as they tear themselves apart under the repetitive, brutal forces. Things will break that make the dealership parts monkeys claim they “ain’t never sold one of these before.”
Anything that’s successful on track, even a car that once ran on the street, is a melange of hacks, tears, and sleepless nights of re-engineering. And every major city has experts who can help you make things more reliable, for a price. For instance, did you know that old iron-block engines will slowly drift out of square the more you pound on them? After a couple years of hard use, they need to be re-bored, or they’ll devour crankshaft bearings alive. That little bit of knowledge cost me (or at least my tax-deductible street racing team, Project Dodge, which, it is important, is legally distinct from myself and accepts all liability for its own actions or inactions) the approximate price of sending a conceptual artist to the International Space Station.
What this means is that, if you’re sitting there in the stands cheering on the professional race car that looks like your car, you’re actually cheering on some kind of futuristic jet fighter wearing the skin of your vehicle like Buffalo Bill. This, of course, should not discourage you from cheering on a professional race car. Cubic dollars have been spent on every inch of the car, developing it into a new kind of monster that is ready to do battle with all the others. Then thrown away, of course, because things wear out, and race car builders need to put food on the table, and races get more competitive every season.
Anyway, that’s why I’m driving a Craftsman Truck Series racing truck to work these days. Those eggheads at NASCAR did a pretty good job on this thing, and our remarkably lax import laws don’t blink an eye at a “Chevrolet pickup truck plus spares” driving across the border, even if it is at 120dB and fully sideways. And with my boring commute to work, chances are this thing’s race-hardened might will never break.
Here’s a fun fact for you: a used domestic minivan is effectively worthless. People predominantly buy them to transport their children, and after one or more sets of children, that van is so covered with kid cruft, leavings, and various juices, that it will weigh at least 300 pounds more than when it left the factory. That’s not just my opinion: check the resale value of used domestic minivans.
Sure, used Japanese minivans are always valuable. That’s because the Japanese have cleverly constructed a motor vehicle that doesn’t break, so you don’t have to spend a precious weekend of your life constantly swearing at whatever asshole at Mopar shoved the rear air conditioning lines in the same place the sliding door wants to be. Once the first family is done with their $60k Odyssey, they’ll sell it for $35k to the next family, and so on. Eventually, it will be purchased as a roofer to use as his or her work van, and it is here that the humble minivan reaches its final destination.
Despite the large amount of glass that allows meth-heads of all stripes to look inside at your tools, minivans are very useful as work vehicles. Most of them can carry a whole sheet of plywood, which is something that a crew-cab Ford truck has trouble claiming. They have peppy engines meant to carry that several hundred pounds of kid garbage, or a single, near-homicidal, hockey dad in traffic. And, as stated, they depreciate like a stone, so you won’t worry about the paint too much if you have to use the van to push around a few shopping carts or a probation officer.
Plus, they blend in with every economic strata, at least until things get a little too shitty. The fuzz won’t hassle a minivan, no matter which neighbourhood you are currently violating parking and traffic-control laws in. This means that you can get away with some really egregious crimes, especially if you have the foresight to put a high-visibility vest and a hard hat in the back before you commit those crimes.
When all is said and done, you can flip your minivan for basically whatever you paid for it. Major service still required? Barely runs? Gee, I guess I’ll take scrap value for it. Weird how it seems so heavy on the scale, right, Copper-Stripping Carl?
“Salad cops, motherfucker! You have the right to… Romaine silent!” bellowed the heavily-armed shock trooper standing in my freshly-exploded doorway.
It wasn’t entirely my fault. The energy crisis made it happen. A couple decades ago, when gasoline suddenly got kind of expensive, the bigwigs decided it was time to make gasoline more sustainable. This is, of course, code for massive farm subsidies. They’d pay farmers to produce a shedload of corn. And I don’t mean like a small shed. No, they would make so much corn that the country could not consume all of it, and then turn it into mediocre gasoline, rather than do something silly like export it to a country where people might want to eat the corn.
Corn’s really easy to grow, apparently, and the people who make corn often vote for the kind of politicians who promise corn subsidies. Thing is, it doesn’t have to be corn. You can make ethanol-rich gasoline out of basically any vegetable or plant matter, plus a bunch of gasoline. And while it’s not so great for your lawn implements or motorcycles or to sniff, ethanol gasoline has a fantastic resistance to knocking. Which means you can plug it into your car, and then run an incredible amount of turbocharger boost pressure. Which means horsepower. Which means that you will be able to make up for the lack of respect that literally every authority figure in your life has given you since the very day you were born.
So: I simply went around to the local restaurants, and scooped leftover salad out of their dumpsters. Then I mixed it with R/C car nitromethane that I pulled out of the hobby store dumpster, and: boom. Cheap gasoline. For a little while. You see, people only throw away so much salad per day. A lot less than I can burn in that same day, especially with a 255 litre-per-hour racing fuel pump and injectors the size of a Eurasian red squirrel. Which means that soon i was out of gas to run my ridiculous car, and had to instead putter around at normal boost pressures, like some sort of rube.
This is where the salad police come in. You see, only the government is allowed to decide which vegetables are massively subsidized. And if you commit a daring midnight raid on that government’s Tactical Turnip Reserve, for instance, they’re gonna figure out real fast who suddenly is driving around town smelling like brassica farts and burning 10W40.
Tires cost a fortune. You can buy a car for $200, or at least you used to be able to, and easily spend double that on a set of rock-hard ditch-finders from the local tire shop. When I asked a tire company executive about it, they weasel-worded some mouth grease about tires being “expensive to ship.” Obviously, the only way I was going to get through this was to open a tire factory of my own.
This isn’t unusual. Tire factories used to dot this proud nation in a time before AliExpress and Amazon Secondus. Folks just like you and I would go to work and eke out a reasonable, middle-class existence – with a pension – putting high-quality tires under our neighbours’ cars, for cheap. Eventually, some spreadsheet said this was no longer cost-effective, and now we have to order our tires from another country.
I’m sure they have lots of good reasons for this. Tires are a lot better since the sixties and seventies: for instance, when it starts to snow, not everyone within a 50 mile radius of your car is instantly killed. You can brake harder into corners and also take them at greater speed, without them getting all greasy and knobbly as they heat up. You would expect this improved technology to cost more money, which means that the big tire executives needed to outsource it in order to make the final price more affordable.
Of course, this is patented bullshit. If you’re not interested in profit, you can make inexpensive, good tires all day long. Switch Tire Company, being technically a subsidiary of Switch Investment Corporation, is run entirely at a loss. We simply bet against ourselves every day, shorting our stock on the open market. People take the other side of it, maybe because we keep renaming our company to things like “Switch Blockchain Expressions” or “Switch Artificially Intelligent Hookerbots,” the sort of names that make the casual Wall Street Tier 1 investment bank think that we’re up-and-comers. Then we pour the money we made off their backs into running off a new set of race tires.
Sure, I could have used this kind of business acumen to do something other than lose money making tires for shit-box cars. How else was I going to be able to find 13-inch tires that are 10 inches wide?
When you’re working on a problem, it’s easy to lose track of the rest of life. You become distant, your mind grinding on what little detail you could have possibly overlooked. Maybe a little irritable as things like “the light turned green” interrupt your placing of another brick in your shining mind palace. If you’re lucky, you’ll figure it out, and the resulting rush of self-satisfaction erases any memory of the several hours/days/weeks/months of agony you had to go through, trapped in said mind palace.
Of course, we don’t always figure it out. Not solving a problem is what makes us human. Life’s imperfect, and we operate with imperfect knowledge, imperfect tools, limited time, and a sack of meat that misfires and hallucinates if you stop feeding it coffee. If we fixed everything we set out to fix, then bridges wouldn’t fall down. Downtowns wouldn’t be immersed in flame. Bathtubs wouldn’t be slippery. That question, that unknowability, is what gives the human process of “figuring some shit out” its risky thrill.
A machine can figure things out, too. Maybe it can even infer from its experiences and derive new beliefs. If it can’t solve the problem, though, the machine doesn’t get up and throw a claw hammer through the wall of the garage. It doesn’t hop up and down, screaming profanity that’s yet to be invented. To the machine, it doesn’t really matter if your problem got solved or not, because it’s happy to just have been provided with power and a clock signal. What a loser mindset that is.
More importantly, the machines don’t know which problems to focus on. Like I said, they’re all the same to computers. You can come back to your android manservant after a few hours, only to find out he started digging a hole to China using an old tea spoon because you didn’t tell him when to stop excavating the garden or what to do it with. A human being would have stopped after about the first hour and started whining about how much their handsies hurt, then probably wandered off to play with dangerous chemicals. No sense of laziness, robots. That’s why we don’t let them vote.
So if you’re out there, compulsively overthinking a problem, maybe take a few minutes and think about those poor computers. Unless your problem is with a computer, in which case you should go create some new problems to take your mind off that one. They’re on their own.
Big-engined, long-wheelbase sedans are the foundation that this civilization used to be constructed upon. You could throw the entire family into the car, drive across the country, and bear witness to the greatest things we offered. On your trip, you’d see other sedans: nicer ones, and less nice ones, and ones about the same level of niceness as yours. Things were great back then.
You could still get a bigger sedan. A really big one. That way, you’d know that you were more important than the other sedan owners. Even today, movies use these vehicles (no longer made for decades!) to represent that a character is incomprehensibly rich. They stand out. There was just one problem: automakers needed more margin. What if they could take a nice cheap truck, and then sell that truck to regular people, and charge a little (or a lot) extra to make that truck more tolerable for long-distance driving?
Now, everyone tools around in too-high sports-utility vehicles with huge wheels. That sense of proletarian community has been replaced by a level of paranoia that used to only be witnessed in tank commanders. They’re out to get you, the advertisers said: bad roads. Dirt roads. Mud. Snow. Other cars on the road. Carjackers. You’re better than them. You should get a bigger car, and then you can really fuck them up.
This line of advertising worked great, because it also presided over a time where the social contract was being torn up in a million different ways. Advertisers aren’t stupid: they know exactly what you’re panicked about, and they’ll reach in and sell you the cure to it. Or at least, whatever they have to sell, marketed as said cure. Sports utility vehicles flourished on our highways.
Personally, I’m going to resist this for as long as possible, and not just because even used 20-year-old SUVs cost more than I paid for my last bail. Like every cultural warrior whose time has passed, I want to hold onto the imagined zenith of our way of life, positive til my last breath that one day humanity will see the light and return home. All they have to do is see my shitty Belvedere, and the column of blue exhaust that it leaves behind on even moderate throttle pressure, and know in their bones: there was a better way.
We here at Netflix think there haven’t been enough movies where the characters go to the bathroom. For too long, moviegoers have wondered just when it was that Denzel Washington had a chance for a quick whiz while escaping certain death repeatedly for over three hours of runtime.
And now they don’t have to leave it up to the imagination. Viewers will be rewarded with one non-fungible toilet token (NFTT) every time an on screen character nips out for a slash. Each viewing of an individual urine event is tracked with unparalleled accuracy, forcing the indulgent Hollywood elite to follow market trends for demand for these tokens. No longer will Bruce Willis take Uncle Pete to the vet without you getting a valuable, non-reproducible, testament to the witnessing thereof.
What can you spend those tokens on? Well, we’d like to say urine luck, but it turns out that our IT department is really dragging their heels on implementing this whole thing. In fact, a good portion of them have already quit, the ungrateful jerks. I bet they’re working on their own version of the technology right now. Trust us that in the future, these tokens are only going to become more valuable.
Hollywood asks us, isn’t it going to massively ruin our art if a significant portion of the folks watching Casablanca are doing so only to fast forward to the scene in which Ingrid Bergman goes to the restroom? You could say that, sure. Art has always changed with the times, though: they said the same thing when we tried to colourize it last year, and add a realistically-rendered 3D animated Don Knotts to the background of every scene. Audiences demanded it, and we gave it to them. And now, we’re pretty sure, they’re demanding whatever cocaine told us that this is.
In the news industry, journalists know: what makes big clicks is news of animal attacks. Fire ants. Sharks. Pizza Hut pepperoni displacers. Everyone loves a good story about getting all fucked up by Mother Nature, so much so that they’ll ignore the more likely threats to their lives in order to focus on the dramatic threat of beasts.
And what are those “more likely threats,” you ask? Car crashes. Heart disease. Food poisoning. Any one of these is more likely to fell you than an attack by a gang of feral coyotes, but you’re not gonna click on a video about jogging regularly and eating heart-healthy. And we certainly don’t want to be lectured to by the news: you can give advice about how not to be ripped to shreds by macaques, but it never comes off as preachy as telling folks to stop lighting off fireworks indoors.
I think what we’re looking for, as human beings, is that unknowable nemesis. Even when we’re afraid of other people, we imagine them to be unreasonable monsters who simply want to ravage our bodies and property in order to buy more drugs.
Again, this too is significantly less likely than you falling off the next ladder you see. We can blame enemy action much more easily than “shit happens,” especially when that shit is our own fault. Advertisers might take umbrage to paying to tell their prospective customers to make better life choices, too. This lady got attacked by a fucking ocelot in her driveway! It didn’t matter that she was bad at shoulder checking!
If there’s one lesson to take away from this, it’s that if you want your message to get out to the people, you have to write it on people hiking in the mountains. When the bears get them, the news will be sure to tell everyone what they had written on their arms in Sharpie.
When you’re hungry, you shouldn’t force yourself to keep working. Our bodies have been tuned by millions of years of evolution to prioritize getting something to eat over whatever little weird thing we’re grinding out this evening in our ramshackle, corrugated-steel shed on the side of a major freeway. Don’t ignore it: go eat, and come back to the job refreshed.
I live my own advice, a habit which my attorney and parole officer suggest that I discard. When I was recently working on welding a Ford 9″ solid rear axle into the carcass of a 1968 Corvette birdhouse, so that it could accept the torque from a Triton V10 that “fell out of” a motorhome that got abandoned at the truck stop near my house, I felt hungry. And I stopped working, so I could go eat that food.
There is, of course, a problem. My ramshackle, corrugated-steel work shed is on the side of a major freeway. Although I live in a city that is becoming “walkable,” in practice that actually means that the bars nearby now serve craft beer. I still have to walk 35 minutes across two busy expressways and through a burned-out industrial yard to reach them, much less a Burger King. And let’s be honest, the car I used to get here is not taking me anywhere, until I finish working on it.
Sound familiar? I bet it does. Don’t worry. Where there’s opportunity, there’s an opportunity to make the problem worse. You see, in my shed, I have access to an old South Bend lathe. It spins really fast, and sometimes really slow, and it helps me to cut metal for, say, a replacement chunk of my control arm that fell off trying to merge onto Main Street the other day. What I don’t have access to, as I said previously, is food.
Or at least, not, like, good food. Sure, anyone can bang together a grilled cheese sandwich on a hot exhaust manifold. I was in the mood for something gourmet. Something exotic. Maybe donair, Canada’s favourite adopted food that is of indeterminate ethnic origin? The closest place for that is at my local mall, which was bulldozed into nothingness around 2018. No, I’m going to have to make it myself. From the garage deep freeze came a chunk of frozen, spiced ground beef, and I began to turn it on the lathe, slowly peeling off intricate, delicious shavings. Donair, at home: the impossible dream, and all it cost me was several thousand dollars of industrial equipment, which hopefully nobody notices is missing any time soon.
Now if only I had thought far enough ahead to buy some pitas, but hey - I’m pretty sure this sleeve of Wonder Bread from the 80s will never go bad.
I’m a plumber. My father was a plumber, his father was a plumber, maybe his father was a plumber. We don’t know for sure. Grandpa was eaten by a tiger working at the zoo that one fateful afternoon, but this story isn’t about that. Where I work is a little company called Fel-Pro.
Maybe you’ve heard of Fel-Pro. You probably use their products. They’re one of the pre-eminent gasket manufacturers of the 21st century. Wherever there’s two tubes in your car that have to have a nice tight seal against each other, chances are Fel-Pro sells something to replace that seal. Are they as good as factory? Experts employed by Fel-Pro mumble and change the subject. Here’s the important thing: they have money, and some of that money goes to feed my kids by way of me fixing their office plumbing once in awhile.
Now, it’s not all roses. My plumber and custodian buddies who work in other companies, they say that people mostly stay out of their way while they’re working. Maybe once in awhile, they’ll get a Super Dad who chats a bit about power tools, or asks some basic questions about their toilet at home, or doesn’t want to take responsibility for having left a cast-iron shit in the tank and then trying to cram it through the manifold using thirty pounds of toilet paper. The usual stuff, right?
At Fel-Pro, it’s different. These motherfuckers have opinions about plumbing, as you would expect from their careers. As soon as they hear even the smallest pinhole leak, the bathroom is filled wall-to-wall with engineers, trying to figure out if it’s a gasket interface issue. Once they realize it isn’t, they start discussing ways to make it a gasket issue.
Anything that leaks is caused by inferior gasketry, even if the pipe itself has split in the middle. They could solve that by making a sort of very long, pipe-shaped grommet gasket to replace the pipe entirely. Yeah, yeah. And then a bunch of these pencil-necks start climbing over top of me to take measurements with their Mitutoyo digital calipers, and video-chat with the toilet manufacturer’s engineers just to call them rookie-level chumps. All the while, the bathroom is slowly filling with water up to our waists, the water-shutoff valve having been removed years before to prevent these eggheads from being tempted to fuck with it.
As any professional would, I started ignoring them, but it turns out that showed up on my performance review. Everyone at Fel-Pro has to be vigilant against leaks, said my boss, a dour expression on his face. He thrust a diagram on how to apply the proper torque pattern to the wax seal of a toilet.
Don’t get me started on how angry they get when they see me using hardware-store silicone bathroom caulking to solve the problem. That’s not the ideal thermal interface, they moan, and start bringing out all kinds of high-zoot polymer compounds, emblazoned with safety warnings in Chinese. Those make the room spin pretty good, and sometimes they get worryingly hot on application, but I must admit they work a treat. One engineer brought me something he stole from a tour he took of NASA and told me to seal a leaking air conditioner drain with it. Well, mission accomplished, buddy: Jim, the custodian I share an office with, had to use a plasma cutter to remove it last week.
It’s gotten so bad that I’ve started only doing plumbing repairs in the middle of the night, when the engineers are likely to be at home, berating their spouses for daring to bring Scotch tape into their home.
Do you like jigsaw puzzles? What if only half the pieces were there, and you had to make your own pieces to fill in the missing spots? What if some of the pieces that are there are corroded beyond recognition, or a little thin, or got dented by a Hyundai Genesis GV80 3.5T Prestige AWD? That’s basically what being a bodyshop is like.
When you buy a new car, chances are that the body shop can get new parts for it. They’ll call up the dealership, order some fenders. For really nasty jobs, they’ll call up the dealership and order repair panels. These are basically the chunks of metal that your car was originally made out of, and all the bodyshop has to do is cut out some spot welds (or glue) and slap that thing together with the new parts, after giving the rest of the car a few ugga-duggas with the frame machine.
When you have an old, shitty car like all of mine, you can’t do that. In some (most) cases, the company that made them no longer exists. At best, maybe you can get some ill-fitting reproduction panel from whatever Luxembourger holding company is currently producing quasi-legal clones of the car for the Chinese market, and spend a few weeks getting it to fit. In the end, no matter what, you’re going to end up fabricating your own panels.
This is one of those skills that looks very easy on YouTube, like brain surgery, but is in fact incredibly difficult, like making an omelet. While your car’s doors may look flat to you, each and every one of them have hundreds of subtle curves that need to be reproduced, or things will look super weird. You will dip into a sort of makers’ mania in the months it will take you travelling through the hell of making a replica panel. Piles of cardboard, razor-sharp chunks of unused steel, and elaborate new metal-cutting tools will fill your work area. And when it’s all done, you will get your reward: having to fill, sand, and paint your great work, hopefully only once.
All of this is a huge pain in the ass, so I’ve chosen a third option, between “develop a spectrum of artisan’s skills and a lifetime of experience” and “buy a new car.” It’s called Bondo, and you can slather that shit on all day. If you put on a couple inches of it and cut it back, your car will look pretty much identical to one that was repaired properly. At least for a couple years.
Sure, body shop technicians will know, but their curse is to know everything about every car. Plus, the skill set for sculpting an entire car out of Bondo is more transferrable: art galleries are not full of precision-cut quarter panels for a 1988 Mercury Topaz.
Me and boats don’t get along. Because of my unique upbringing, I never learned how to swim. This hasn’t been too much of a problem, except when one of my beleaguered cars decides that it’s tired of having more than one ball joint and augurs directly for the nearest drainage pond. You don’t need to know how to swim to drive a boat, I hear you say, and you’re correct. This is really just an elaborate excuse for being poor.
Even though your average boat costs the approximate GDP of Guatemala to own and operate, this is nothing in comparison to speedboats, the drag racers of the seasickness world. They have big engines (and a lot of them,) drink fuel like crazy and need a lot of space in order to operate. They also attract the most expensive members of the opposite (or same) sex. If that form of imminent death isn’t enough for you, they also make cigarette boats, which abandon all pretence of comfort and practicality in favour of pure speed. They’re so fast that the coast guard needs special helicopters to catch up to ‘em, which means that every minute you’ve got that throttle pinned wide open is another good citizen’s entire lifetime of 1040s being chewed up in the military-industrial machine.
Of course, as we’ve already established, I can’t enjoy any of these mysterious sea-going vehicles. Sure, sometimes I can get a ticket on the local slow ferry, and enjoy the company of Birding Mable (she likes birds, but be very, very careful which ones you talk to her about) and her husband, Trashbag Stan, the origin of whose nickname is unknown to everyone in town, including Mable. As long as nothing goes wrong. If something does go wrong, due to the aforementioned not-swimming, I’ll probably drown in the middle of the bay, which makes it about as dangerous as taking a city bus downtown.
Because of my addiction to buying scrap and near-scrap land-going automobiles, it seems unlikely that I’ll ever make cigarette boat money. There is one thing that I can do, though, and that’s buy a little wind-up toy boat, and play with it in the tub. That’s the life. There’s still something missing, though, and that’s why I’ve got this old Mercury outboard from some dude that ran into a bridge while the coast guard was chasing him.
Every afternoon, I hear a really bad-ass four-banger exhaust scream. It sounds like there’s a race car going down my block. Every time I hear it, I think that the kanjozoku – Osaka’s feared Honda Civic street racers – are getting ready to tear up my street and start a street fight with the cops. Our civilization will finally honour the small-displacement economy street racer in the way that it must in order to survive. As it gets closer, I realize it isn’t a high-revving Honda at all, but instead something industrial and rude.
And then they turn the corner and it turns out to be my middle-aged neighbour, Heng, who owns a 1995 Kia Sephia with a hole in the muffler. He’s not going fast, but he’s also not embarrassed of the meaty shriek either. Once, he saw me mowing the lawn as he went past, and dumped the clutch to give it a quick rev-up, making a sound that was not unlike a lawn tractor winning the Indy 500. I am already jealous of his expensive, modern car, which features amenities like “mirrors” and “overhead camshafts,” whatever those are. Why does he have to rub it in that way?
I don’t say anything. I can’t. He’s too fast, and he’s definitely too loud. Whatever I yell is just drowned out by the wall of sound generated by the muffler-less Ford/Mazda BP engine. By the time I can hear myself think, he’s turned the other corner and parked the car. The only thing I could do is to sabotage his car somehow: but how do you sabotage a car to make it quieter?
To answer my question, I turned to AI. Sorry, I mistyped that. I turned to Al, my former mechanic buddy who lives at the bar. Medical reasons. Anyway, Al suggested going onto eBay and picking up the cheapest turbocharger I could find. Heng wouldn’t mind having the extra zoot of a turbo, his iron-block four can easily take wastegate pressure without an intercooler, and Dodge applied to the government to have a turbocharger legally described as a kind of muffler. It’d keep the cops off of our block, which would make the $65 I passed to Shenzhen Farm Supply a work of philanthropy.
The next time I saw Heng, he was pulling a savage one-tire-fire down the street, the open differential straining to keep up with the mighty puff of additional air. He was genuinely fast now, and did not need to be loud. He did a perfect autocross tripod turn around the corner, and dropped into hyperspace as soon as the wheel straightened out. All I heard was the pleasant whoosh of a wastegate and the roar of a badly-worn wheel bearing, which was inaudible over the previous exhaust noise. I probably saved his life, I told myself as I returned to my garage. There’s no reason to have such a loud car in this day and age, I chuckled while firing up the open headers on my daily-driver Volare and watching the visible edge of the nitromethane flames play on what was left of the hood paint.
A lot of people ask me: just how many foreign bearded ladies did your dad fuck when he was travelling the world, hoping for any circus that would take him? The answer seems to always be: “one more.” Thanksgiving is busy. My half-brother, Saito Safety-Switch, grew up in a deprived environment. His childhood was spent in opulent comfort, wanting for nothing… except what his genes demanded. His body and mind screamed out for a shitty American car, yet none were available to him in the xenophobic and closed-minded world of Japanese so-called “high society.”
One morning, he was riding his 24-speed race bicycle (affixed with homemade “HUFFY” and “BURGER KING” stickers) past a dingy three-car dealership, shoved into the corner of two pachinko parlours and a restaurant where you could make out with a girl pretending to be a train station ticket dispensing robot for ¥350/hr. That’s when he saw it.
Now, things were worse back then. We didn’t have the Hunter-Killers. The Japanese had not invented the New Atmospheric Miracle. Human nerves were slower than light speed. All he had was a lot of worthless fiat currency in search of Fiats. Or, as he found it, a Dodge Michigan.
The Dodge Michigan is a product of Chrysler Corporation becoming delaminated even more than usual during the Cocaine Era. They thought: Japanese people love front-wheel drive cars. They thought: Japanese people love foreign luxury cars. They thought: we should sell them a 1986 Dodge Aries with fancy tail lights. They were wrong.
It took several months for Saito to convince the shaken inspectors that it was even a real car, ultimately choosing to purchase the inspection corporation through a shell company and having the former executives forcibly uploaded to the Heavens.
Friends: the 2.2 litre iron block shit-stirrer sitting comfortably inside the Michigan as it left its depressing American hometown for the promised land of the Pacific Rim did not last long. “Inefficient,” the tax authorities claimed, and penalized Saito. Here’s the thing about being the adopted child of Japan’s richest bearded-lady fetishist: you’ve had enough “original” for your entire life. It came out. The 13B Mazda rotary from a Roadpacer went in. And just to stick it in Uncle Nippon’s eye, a couple turbochargers. American, of course, built in one of the last surviving sentient manufactories before the Exultation.
By the time the authorities had recovered from their database failure and machine-mind emotional cascade collapse, I was on the ground in Haneda to meet my step-bro for some extremely complicated coffee. I didn’t expect what I’d be getting picked up in.
Somehow, he’d managed to hire folks to Sawzall actual subway hanger straps from the Chicago e-line, complete with the internal structure to retain the rails. It was pasted from stem to stern with imported industrial grit, ground into the carbon fibre’s centimetre thick bass boat clear in lieu of mica flake. And the tires were wide enough, secured in tripled-up Trans Am (the series, not the model) box overfenders, that two members of the Highway Code committee resigned in protest rather than be pushed into making an exception for what Saito’s humourless and unpredictably violent lobby group described as “experimental aircraft.”
Although I am perfectly willing to blame my circumstances, the fact remains: I am a lazy son of a bitch. I could have easily gotten myself to whatever level of success I wished, if it weren’t so much more appealing to spend my time dicking around with old cars, and doing petty crimes to pay for the aforementioned dicking. Everything changed recently, though, with one discovery.
Berkeley University, the stupid bastards, have a policy: there are special reserved parking spaces provided to Nobel laureates on their campus. Special… and free. Free parking inside a major urban centre is already remarkable, but for it to be free and reserved? I immediately phoned up their switchboard, and the friendly-but-standoffish person who answered confirmed my ridiculous question. A Nobel Prize meant a guaranteed parking spot in California.
This was what I needed to finally slough off a life of self-imposed torpor. I drew the blinds, filled a bowl with party snacks, and set about solving the problem of microplastic contamination. I’m not gonna lie to you and say that it was easy, but you know that giant mass of old fishing nets and condoms that used to be floating in the South China Sea? You’re welcome. After that, it was all handshaking and dinner dates with awestruck Norwegian bombshells, and I had my parking spot.
If campus security tried anything, I just had to show them my Nobel Fucking Prize, and they would have to sneer and shout at me after retreating to their little meter maid dorkmobile. I immediately left my ‘76 Volare there (it no longer can survive the winters) and went home in my other ‘76. Several days later, I arrived at my home to realize I had a bunch of other cars that were also catching parking tickets from the local fuzz. Didn’t those ungrateful jerks know I’m a Nobel Laureate?
I called Berkeley again. If I got another Nobel Prize, I asked… could I get another spot? Sure, they said, laughing with disbelief (it was at this moment I realized I was likely on speakerphone.) Go fucking nuts. So I did. This time I busted out some old biology knowledge and invented a cure for malaria. You’re welcome. Sure, I could have sold it for millions, but millions of dollars doesn’t buy me a free parking spot. It buys me an expensive parking spot, and if I wanted to do that, I’d get a job.
What’s next for my journeys into scientific reasoning? Well, they ran out of free Nobel spots on the campus, so things are a little delayed right now. I’m still in negotiations. They said they might name a building after me, but it’s not going to be a parking garage, so why bother improving civilization at all?
I shredded my wheat today, to make cereal, I focus on the grain, the only thing that’s meal.
Hello. I’m Ted Cheerios, the rich failson of the rich failson of the rich failson of the inventor of Cheerios. You’ve caught me at a bit of an inconvenient moment as I stuff the corpse of my house cleaner into the trunk of my new Land Rover Discovery. Why yes, I did pick the underbody armour package. It’s important protection for the vehicle, so that I can drive quickly over obstacles without hurting the resale value. Of course, that’s only in the case where I need to resist arrest for a few hours until my lawyer can work out a surrender deal.
You, on the other hand, probably have no reason to be driving such a large vehicle on public roads. After all, if you dutifully obey the law (out of poverty-related reasons, I assume) you will not have an incentive to ram a police cruiser with an armoured-up “overlanding vehicle” such as this. Maybe you don’t even need Kevlar-reinforced knobby all-terrain tires unless you plan to drive over a bunch of tire spikes (this is dealership bullshit; it doesn’t actually work – just turn around.) And perhaps you don’t have an unmedicated and uncorrected pyramid of interlocking aggression issues that come from having a life of pure, unmitigated privilege. How dare she buy the store brand mustard? This is all her fault. See, there I go again.
Point is, there’s a double standard of sorts for the vehicle that folks like me drive. Double means it’s twice as good. 100% better than standard. And don’t you think I deserve it? Excuse me, I think that’s my dad’s attorney speaking. He’s gonna be so mad at my attorney for ramming that school bus out of the way last week.
Recently, I was at the dentist’s. I was putatively getting some fillings done, but I was actually stealing their nitrous oxide through a hose snaked up through my shirt collar. While I was there, I saw something amazing: a television set. Where I live, actual broadcast television hasn’t existed for decades, having been replaced by a series of all-knowing, all-serving automatons who can read your mind and deliver to you the most advertiser-pleasing television. This television? It was playing HGTV.
Now, in case you’re unaware, HGTV (”Home and Garden TV”) has been around for a real long time. Once, it gave suburbanites basic skills about taping, sanding, priming, painting, and finishing their kitchen renovations. People liked it. Eventually, though, they hit a natural ceiling on audience. In today’s busy world, only so many people actually went out and fixed their houses with the advice from television. Those television executives needed more eyeballs, and they knew where to get them.
Television is actually about fantasy. You, the viewer, are not capable of going to foreign countries and saving the world from conspiratorial terrorist plots to overthrow neoliberalism. At best, you’re going to frown slightly during a World Vision ad telling you about starving children. And just like that, HGTV figured out that what they really wanted to sell was the fantasy of knocking down a wall in your house with a sledgehammer.
Every single show features this scene: a buff, but sometimes unconventionally handsome, man hitting a wall with a sledgehammer. Why does he have to take that wall out? “To open up the space,” the narrator explains. What was wrong with the old space? It is implied that the space was not open enough, and therefore we needed to hit a nearby wall with a hammer in order to make it slightly more open. This is good: it is both an action that the audience can imagine themselves doing, and produces a fantastic visual (”fuck this house!”) that demarcates the transition between The Bad Old House and The Good New House.
After this scene happens, they quickly rush to paint and interior design, and no further effort is made to explain what’s going on. You got your demolition, you got your renovation, and the fantasy of being able to remodel your kitchen without engaging in back-to-back divorces has been reached within 30 minutes or less. Now go think about buying some paint.
All this has made me think about how I needed to represent my own life so that I would reach more mainstream appeal, but it turns out that I didn’t have any cameras rolling when I knocked down the wall to the convenience store down the street after hours, and made off with several dozen bottles of automatic transmission fluid.
Charging an electric car is currently a bit of a bummer. It takes longer than filling up a gas car. When you’re on a trip, you usually have to do it at a boring suburban strip mall or a public park that doesn’t even have a video arcade. Not everywhere has a charger, and the chargers you do find are sometimes broken, just like that super-frayed phone charger you need to throw out, it’s going to burn your house down.
It’s not going to stay this way, because Seat Safety Switching Power Supply Solutions has an answer. Nature already gives us all the electricity we’d ever want. All that zap just falls right from the sky, and we waste it every day by not accumulating it. Solar, you ask? Couldn’t be further from the truth. Solar is great and all, but let’s leave it for the important things: elementary-school calculators and looking at pornography in the woods. No, my friends, we are going to harness the power of the gods: lightning itself.
Seems so obvious now, right? You just needed someone to spell it out for you, we all get like that sometimes. Well, like all great innovations, this one took a lot of work to get it over the finish line. If you just go right out there with a big metal stick during a thunderstorm, it will probably (at least) void your warranty. You need yourself a system that can convert the electrical energy from nature’s temper tantrums into juice for your car. We’re going to give you a big stick with a battery attached.
Not good enough for you? Then it’s not good enough for us. You can also hook up our proprietary big metal stick on overhead electrical lines, such as those used by “trains,” whatever those are. Let the city pay for your charge! If you’ve got more than one person in the car with you (or at least are thinking really hard about another person,) then you’re technically mass transit in our books anyway. And with all the time and money you saved waiting for a charge, you can invest in some high-voltage gloves. It’s the hot fashion right now, but only 50,000kV and above. Maybe get some rubber boots, too.
There’s something that we all can learn from stage magicians, and that is the value of having a friend in the crowd. If you’re picking a card out of a deck of cards, that’s hard. If you’re picking a card out of a deck of cards where your drinking buddy has agreed with you ahead of time that it will be the ace of diamonds, that’s substantially easier. You might think that this scam, such as it is, is only limited to the performance of magic tricks. And you’d be wrong.
There is another place in modern society in which ridiculous performances, shocking coincidences and underhanded collusion work together to enrich tricksters. It’s called politics. You can bring your drinking buddy with you to a city council meeting, make him sit far away from you, and suddenly he’s a “concerned citizen” who agrees that it’s “just common sense” what you are proposing. From there, herd mentality takes over, and suddenly a room full of real-estate obsessed seniors are screaming at The Mayor, wondering why in the fuck you won’t let them leave a broken car in the middle of the road for a month or two I thought this was a free country.
Once you’ve learned this trick, you can see it all over the place. Unpopular policy gets washed through a series of studies, think-tanks, and media surrogates into being the product of consensus. The guy playing three-card Monte on the street has already been beaten by a couple folks, surely it’s your turn to win next. And that guy at the bar surely can’t be an undercover federal agent, because he just told us all how much he hates cops and loves Plymouth Darts. Sure, he had to check his phone a few times while he was trying to tell us all this, but he seems legit.
Now that you know how to deceive others in a crowd, it’s up to you on how to use it for evil. Just don’t become a stage magician. I guarantee you that I’ve poisoned that well already, because I waited until Mister Magic here started a show at the community centre and then stole a bunch of the audience’s batteries out in the parking lot.
Back in the olden times, it was easy to just buy shoes from the shoe store. They might not be the most stylish, but you didn’t know that unless you kept up with all the fashion magazines, or had a particularly well-informed bully. Importantly, the “mall system” produced what we know of as shoes you could actually buy.
Sure, there were only like eight or nine choices in shoes. It was a tiny store, only about as wide as a suburban one-car garage. If they didn’t have it in your size, you’d have to come back in a few weeks or months, when the ice broke up and the ships could get through again. You can’t expect an entire warehouse of shoes; that didn’t come until later, when Shoe Warehouse was born and then immediately locked itself into mortal combat with Footwear Logistics.
Yes, you could drive over to the mall in the big city. Their mall was glorious, a fountain-studded testament to the cocaine-fuelled excess that brought us the Cabbage Patch Kids and the Garbage Pail Kids at the same time. Problem was, this was a pretty serious trip, and not worth the fuel or time just to go get shoes. Why not get shoes from our mall?
All this is to say that Piloti driving shoes were not a major part of my life back then. Italian shoes were looked upon suspiciously by the townfolk around where I lived, probably because most of them were Italian, and knew what they (the shoes) were up to. I’d like to say that they are responsible for shortening my lap times, but let’s be honest. That is entirely due to another thing I couldn’t get at my local mall: $350 63-millimetre ball-bearing turbochargers assembled in China. Guess which of those two things is still around?
Most folks who work in a technical field harbour a secret desire to flee into the woods and never return. Hell, probably folks working in any field do, but my particular form of monomaniacal narcissism prevents me from considering their opinions and lived experiences as equally valid to my own. Point is, the boonies simply are not big enough for all of us, once we quit our jobs.
Sometimes, when I’m stuck in traffic, I like to think about where I’d live if this glorious future came to pass. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m definitely not a Better Homes & Gardens kind of pervert. What I like is the kind of thing that people in the 1970s would have called: “a little much.” Diagonal slats of barely-finished wood. A-frames everywhere. Exposed structural elements. Conversation pits. And a garage the size of Kuwait.
Yeah, of course I’d bring my cars along. Or maybe I’d get new ones. Get a whole pile of different beaters; it’s a new life and all. Trusting small-town rurals who have never encountered a real negotiator before. I’d get to wrestle cherry, low-miles, only-plowed-with-a-few-times Ramchargers out of their kindly fingers, drag them back home and bolt airplane superchargers to the intake.
Of course, I’d need some way to get those superchargers to me, so I guess I would need a computer. And then I’d have to pay for the superchargers, so I’d probably need to get some kind of a job. And shipping is really expensive to idyllic small towns full of monstrous secrets that the townfolk would prefer remain buried forever. It’d have to be a good job, but one that doesn’t involve much work. Maybe I could commute to a small office nearby, do some technology job. Then I wouldn’t have to hunt bears for food and tourists for sport.
There is a great tragedy at the core of our automotive industry. Saab, our beautiful Saab, lies dead. Beancounters and the automotive press conspired to make the oddball front-drive turbocharged mad scientists who kept inventing things even when it didn’t make any sense a failure. Now we all zip around in modern-day future cars derived from their innovations, without a stray thought for our demented Swedish philanthropists.
Sure, Saab is still “alive,” if you can call it that, a trademark and skin stretched over whatever desperate Chinese or Swedish government-owned sub-volume automaker has bought it this week. They’re making electric cars. No, hydrogen. No, nothing at all. Wait, maybe electric cars again, but slightly different. No, electric cars again, but big ones, the size of a bus. Two buses! They look like jets now. We can’t decide.
How many people are still employed by Saab? Ever since their Trollhättan offices had that witch’s spell cast on them and shifted into the Sidescape, it has been difficult to know for sure. Morale is not great: competitors are often flummoxed as a Saab employee suddenly materializes in their breakroom, the air displaced by their instant arrival knocking papers off the photocopier and coffee to the ground, ready for an interview. They cannot talk about the projects they have been working on, at least not in a language that the rest of us can still understand. Everyone admits, however, that some of the ideas they draw out on the whiteboard, prior to their sudden disappearance at the conclusion of the interview, are pretty good.
We may never know when Saab will release another car again. It may arrive at any moment, like their employees, complete with an accompanying fully-functional dealership on the outskirts of town, its sodium lamps eye-searingly bright in the night despite no obvious source of electrical supply being present. Everyone will agree that the cars are a little weird, a little ahead of their time, and just a little bit too risky to actually purchase. And Saab, our beautiful Saab, will dissolve back into the ether, leaving us with a bunch of cars we can’t figure out how to fix but desperately need to.
I’m Detective Archibald Shitpope. There’s only one thing I care about more than solving crimes: inexpensive Toyota hatchbacks.
The big boss upstairs has been tired of my incessant browsing of Craigslist at work for a long time. I get results, though, and no one else in the precinct comes close.
So when a murder case came across my desk, I did what I always do. Press F5 and see if anything under $2500 has been posted.
It took a long time to load. The precinct has shitty copper T3 back haul, and it’s always being wasted on stuff like crime scene streaming and live tracking of serial killers. That’s when I took a look at the case. And it shocked me. The murder occurred at the docks. The docks? That’s where JDM cars come from.
In dick school, they tell you that every murder has means, motive, and opportunity. There’s something else, at least for me. Toyotas. I carry a vintage トヨタ shift knob in my pocket, a sort of good luck charm. And, in contravention of department policy, my investigating car is a hammered-to-shit 2002 Celica GT (non-S) with bad ball joints, enough mileage that the digital odometer flickers in disbelief when I turn it on, and a case of sassy diff syndrome.
When I got to the scene, it was what I’d been dealing with for most of my career. A murder. I didn’t need the uniformed dipshits with their unreliable, smoggy domestic V8 squad cars to tell me that.
“It’s a classic locked room murder, boss,” said my assistant Soichiro when I finally arrived. He was born in Yonkers and legally changed his name after his hero, Soichiro Yamada, the guy who invented the cooled EGR system. “The keys are still in the vic’s pockets, so it’s a mystery how someone got in there and killed him.” He walked me to a Toyota Corolla II “Windy.”
At once I knew the secret. “Soichiro, you fucked up again,” I spat with some measure of fatherly disappointment. This turbocharged, nearly-top-trim 1987 Corolla II sported the rare and desirable Panasonic parcel shelf speakers. That meant it also held the remote unlock feature, hugely uncommon for the Showa era, so much so that it would never be documented outside of the sales brochure, and certainly not in the inefficient and barbaric English literature for same.
“Turn ‘em out, Soichiro,” I ordered, pointing at his pockets, and he knew he had no choice but to comply. On the table before us lay the evidence of his treachery. One Carrozzeria branded remote lock/unlock remote, and - worse - the keys to a 1988 CR-X. He’d been on the take this whole time.
Later, the aforementioned uniformed dipshits would find something even worse on a search of a storage unit registered to my “partner,” Soichiro. Four single-slammer D16 ZC engines, all matching serial numbers to the cars that went missing after the big tea house shootout in Chinatown. I’d been off that week, trying to find a replacement lift actuator, and Soichiro had filled in.
I don’t carry a sidearm. I don’t need to. I simply waited until Soichiro took flight, fleeing across the parking lot of the warehouse, and hit him with my car. Bent the upper radiator support, which the department bodyshop took care of since it was “in the line of duty.” Fixed the headlight tabs, too. That probably cost Uncle Taxpayer a few cents.
I got a lot of heat for it later, from the chief, but the mayor overruled him, gave me a medal for valour. She was alright. Had a late model Tercel back home, I knew. Coupe, though, had a trunk. Politics is about compromise.
Storybooks like to tell these ridiculous fables of children who got abandoned in the jungle and were raised by wolves. That’s preposterous. Children raise themselves unless you keep a really good eye on them. Look, I was raised by human beings and I’m barely one step back from feral. Nurture is critically important for the development of kids, and that’s why I like to provide what the experts call a “high-enrichment environment” for the neighbourhood just-barely-fetuses.
Decades ago, kids got into way more trouble. Farmers had no convenient metal recycling and would leave sharp and rusty implements lying in their fields, ready for their progeny (and their progeny’s flunky friends) to play with. There was more stuff in general; now, a smartphone has replaced fully four-fifths of the cool old garbage that accidental garage fires used to be started with. Now, the long arm of the law gets really mad if there’s too much cool trash lying around. What are kids gonna play with? Sticks?
Enter me. Or to be more accurate, my pile of garbage that is slowly overflowing into the public domain. My fence broke again, you see, and since the landlord is probably being eaten by coconut crabs in whatever tropical country he didn’t come back from “vacation” in, I don’t expect it to get fixed any time soon. What this means for the neighbourhood children is that the alleys and sidewalks are full of cool old stuff. Entire payphones. Small two-stroke gasoline engines. I’m pretty sure I saw a wakizashi from the Ashikaga shogunate lying around the other day. You’re not gonna find that in your after-school CD-ROM, kids.
Will these children turn out to be tomorrow’s future engineers, inventors, and jobless, disaffected burnouts crudely constructing bastardized cars commemorating the sunset of American civilization? I sure hope so, and I’d like to take just a little bit of credit for doing so. If even one future Chrysler cooling-system engineer writes down on their memoirs that it was my fault they made a go-kart out of leftover marine batteries and a rewound Taurus alternator and maimed two of their friends, then I’ve done my part to further humanity.
If your living conditions are anything like mine, then you also exist inside one of the largest, most complex machines ever devised by humanity. I speak, of course, of a city. Cities are full of hundreds of thousands of interacting components that all have to work well in order to accomplish their goals. When even one small sub-system breaks down, it has unpredictable effects that can lead to societal failure. Last weekend, we came real close to that red line.
As I’ve talked about previously, I have picked up a part-time job at City Hall. More specifically, I work directly for The Mayor Himself as a sort of dirty-tricks specialist. Like all the best jobs, I got this through nepotism: we went to high school together, and he knows I certainly didn’t follow him through the rest of his life after that. To his elite buddies and hyper-rich golf pals, I might as well just be a weird unhoused person that he occasionally gives a thousand dollars to in large manila envelopes.
Although the idealists and dreamers out there might not like it, sometimes you do need a dirty-tricks guy to get things done. Last weekend, that problem was the park garbage cans. These are bear-proof bins, even in parts of the city that has never seen a bear not manufactured by the Ty Corporation, and they are very durable, but they are not fireproof. Kids had been throwing their disposable vape batteries into them, which caused little lithium-ion explosions when they were compacted in the trash truck. Rightfully, the trash truck operators were very concerned about this turn of events, and refused to pick up park trash until someone Did Something About This.
I’m definitely no expert in electrical engineering. In fact, I got banned from the local elementary school for teaching kids about how to burn the insulation off of stolen copper wire. What I do know, however, is that necessity is the mother of invention. I went to the public library, hopped on the ol’ Wikipedia, and figured out what the combustion temperature of those pesky vape batteries were. Then, I devised a prototype. The Mayor visited, but in disguise (wearing a sweatshirt over top of his Brooks Brothers suit) lest the opportunists from Channel Four Action News were lurking in the bushes trying to find non-union sex workers again.
So, yes, I did start a forest fire by strapping a propane-fired 2.2-litre Chevrolet pushrod four to the bottom of a garbage can and then venting the exhaust ports directly into the trash. I had not factored in that, without liquid cooling, the head gasket would fail and the engine would tear itself free from the bottom of the can, shooting burning fuel all over the dry tinder grass of the Saint Accidents Semi-Accessible Park. You will note, however, that the batteries were not what started the fire. Mission accomplished, I say, but politics has a way of moving the goalposts on you.
We have bred, in our darkest laboratories, a genetically-modified strain of ultra-caterpillars whose entire purpose for existence is to produce carbon-fibre-bolstered thread for our new line of hard-wearing socks. It’s hell on their little buttholes, but they gladly bear it if it means you don’t immediately rip a hole in the big toe getting ready for work in the morning.
For years, I slaved away at a job I hated in order to afford the socks I needed to go to that job. My dried-out heels and rough, proletarian carpet would shred those suckers after only a few weeks of operation. Buying more expensive socks didn’t work: they were just the same crappy material with a more expensive badge on the package.
In times long past, socks really lasted. They were extremely expensive, so much so that it made sense to repair them. If it cost me like a week’s wages, I’d probably have learned to darn socks too. Sixteen bucks, at most? Not worth it.
One fateful day, I went to work with slightly mismatched socks. Heel holes on both of their mates, but the unholed ones ended up in the wash. At the end of my rope, I had done my laundry in the dark, not wanting to switch the lights on and consume valuable power that could pay for more socks instead. In that darkness I had matched a dark blue sock with a slightly less dark blue sock, with a different collar pattern. Disaster. All day long, I hid my feet under my desk to conceal the sin from view, but the roving pack of sales guys could smell it on me. They laughed at me, with their fascist haircuts and their tailored suits and their matching socks. Well, who’s laughing now?
This day, I sit atop an empire. Our pitch: unbreakable socks. They wear like stone. Better than stone, really, because stone isn’t compressed to several thousand PSI and woven into a corrugated laminate capable of withstanding indirect small-calibre fire. Of course, all this comes at a price. They cost about $25 a pair. Oh, and the next weakest link in the chain is your shoes. These babies will rip through a pair of athletic trainers in about two weeks, less if you sweat a lot. That’s Bob Reebok’s problem. While you’re over there, asking them to fix it, see if their socks match. I bet they don’t.
I think we all have that family member we don’t want to see at the big functions. Family reunions. Family cookouts. Family feuds with a rival family over the distribution of methamphetamine in the tri-state area. Family funerals. Family violent reprisals shattering the peace of an otherwise calm suburban neighbourhood which had thought that it could just ignore the fact that a predator was living in their midst. Family bowling night.
In the past, I’ve told you about my squabbles with my incredibly rich cousin from the old country, Blyat Safety-Switch. He drapes himself in the most exquisite clothes, flies first class everywhere, and pays a person to wash his car for him. That last one is a little confusing to me, but I’m assured that very rich people opt to forego the simple pleasures of the hands in order to attend more business meetings. Yeah, he’s a real dick, and I don’t care if my mom reads this one and phones me up super angry in the morning. He’s not in this story.
Closer to home is what I would call the “less extended” section of the clan. When I was a young kid, my older cousin Mort and I would work on RC cars together, only to inevitably crank up the current a little bit too far and blow up the primitive batteries of the era. Sure, you could break open disposable cameras, remove the flash capacitor, and improve your thirty-foot times, but we had no money, and the tourists had long stopped coming by our neighbourhood once that issue of Time Magazine about our living conditions faded into memory. Mort and I had to come up with a new source of energy, and unfortunately at that time Mort had gotten the internet.
You see, back then the internet was full of bullshit. Not like today, where that bullshit is precision-engineered by an interlocking matrix of advanced computers and bad-faith foreign operatives. No, back then it was just made by bored people. Or at least mentally ill ones. Mort would download all these textfiles from BBSes, and then he would excitedly tell me about the things he had found with the help of his trusty Apple III+. You can make napalm in a microwave using styrofoam. You can make napalm in a microwave using gasoline and a kitchen sponge. You can clean a microwave before your parents come home using a combination of lemon juice, baking soda, and a toothbrush.
So what happened to Mort? He’s gainfully employed now, at a complicated office job that involves using Excel to save all of humanity. In other words, he’s still a sucker. And if he comes to Maw-Maw’s cookout this weekend, he still owes me a Tamiya Lunchbox.
New cars are insanely expensive. Perhaps you’re not aware of this. I certainly was not, having been raised from birth on a succession of rust-weeping, barely operable automobiles. So you can imagine my surprise when I walked into a dealership recently (the city shut off my water, so I had to use their bathroom) and got an eyeful of the price stickers on these suckers. For the same amount of money that your ancestors would spend on Louisiana, you too could have a depressing luxury crossover.
You can argue about the motivation behind this ridiculous state of affairs. Is it financialization writing obscene loans at unsustainably low interest rates? Maybe it’s wage deflation, driving the average suburbanite to buy luxury goods in order to feel like they are important, despite being paid significantly less than they would have in 1976.
Or, and this is the one the car companies like to tell you, it’s because of all those safety features. Ah yes, the government forces us to include airbags, seatbelts, backup cameras, and collision mitigation. It’s their fault. If only we had no regulation at all, we could all drive around in $400 Power Wheels with lead-acid batteries like our business partners in China. And if we got rid of drivers’ licenses, imagine how many more people could buy them!
This line of argument does make a little bit of sense. For instance, my cars are hilariously unsafe, and they were very inexpensive. However, this is coming from the same folks that told you adding a $30 6-CD changer to a car costs $5000 and requires you to get a different colour of paint. And despite this state of affairs, they are racking up mega profits. Maybe – just maybe – we shouldn’t be listening to them about this particular fact, especially if the backup camera kept you from driving over an errant toddler this morning. (That would never happen to me: I would notice immediately as the child tears through the paper-thin rusty steel of my trunk, and ends up embedded in my glovebox, where they could later be safely removed and trained in welding and bodywork.)
Motorhomes are basically a home with a motor in it. Although this definition also covers my home (which has several motors inside it,) we’ll elide that particular information and move on to the thrust of my story. A heavily-used motorhome, especially one that’s been sitting out in a farmer’s field for years, is cheap.
There’s a lot of reasons for this, the primary one being that they quickly become the primary residence of field mice. Although the Disney corporation will tell you that mice are cheerful and fun friends, this is at best a lie of omission. What mice actually do is pee and poop all over everything, chew the insulation off of wires, and occasionally crawl inside part of the climate control system and die. Like my uncle used to say at his used car dealership, if you find a dead critter in this one, we’ll take ten percent off.
I know what you’re saying: even with a discount, how can it be worthwhile if you have to tear out all the “home” part and replace it with new upholstery, new carpet, and new walls? The answer is the “motor” part. Motorhomes are often equipped with enormous, lazy engines, designed to rack up the miles with little or no maintenance. Those engines will outlive the owners’ disinterest in ever going anywhere. As long as you’re willing to dispose of the wrapper it came in, you can have a pretty beefy V8 for surprisingly few pennies (before your trip to the local speed shop to pick up several hundred dollars of Chinese camshafts and nitrous oxide kits.)
Of course, I did mention the big problem there: disposing of it. Just how do you get rid of a motorhome? Towing them is expensive, so you should make your best effort at getting it running and drive it to its final destination. Wherever you take it needs to be cool with you sawzalling the engine out of the chassis and taking off with it in the back of a pickup truck. Most junkyards are wise to your bullshit, and won’t accept a vehicle that’s ninety percent wood and mouse piss by volume.
The answer, naturally, is just to drive it right back to a farmer’s field. Maybe find one with a bunch of other RVs already there, and tuck it into the pack. It might be years until they find out about it, and today’s battery-powered sawzalls are both extremely quiet and very easy to return to Home Depot for a refund when you’re done. It’s called “recycling,” and it’s very good for the planet.
How many times in your life have you been left out in the cold when some uncaring megacorporation discontinues the thing you like? Sorry, we don’t think you’re a good enough customer, so we decided to stop making it. Buy something else, or don’t, whatever. The Excel spreadsheet says it’s good for us either way.
From my own perspective, I can kind of understand this decision. I’m just one weirdo, and if I make something popular by accident, I’ll be making more of it until they put me in the ground. That’s no way to live, and I get bored too easily. Plus, I might go to prison in the middle, leaving lots of unsold inventory or dissatisfied customers: both of which the ultimate sin in capitalism.
However, if I were a big company, I could just hire more people to get bored. Or build a factory full of robots that don’t get bored. And no matter how many war crimes I committed, no government would have the balls to go after me, just in case I had a privately-owned nuke. Everyone wins.
We know also that the excuse of “profitability” is poppycock. Profitability doesn’t matter to a big enough company. Companies do crazy shit all the time, and they mix up the accounting details so that you can’t really tell that they have actually bet all of their money on soft-shelled turtle meat futures. Neither can they, most of the time. If they’re already going to cause the demise of the entire economy and our way of life, at the very least they could make a lot of your favourite chocolate bar.
So what’s the answer? Well, for one thing, we could take the management of these companies hostage and demand that they start making their obsolete products again. That’s always a good option, but these kinds of things work best when we speak with a united voice as customers. We all want different, weird stuff, and it will just muddle the message if we all shout for our own things. Here’s what we’re gonna do: in a few minutes, they’re gonna send in some hostage negotiators, and we’re all gonna tell them that we want the 1978 Plymouth Volare to be put back in production. They can put power windows in it if they really give some pushback, I know they need to make that margin.
Imagine you’re a property developer. Yeah, I know it’s a stretch, but you can probably conceive of the seething, impotent hatred the hypothetical you has for every human being on earth. What you want, because your parents never loved you, is to build a sports arena. Sports arenas, like all public infrastructure, contain approximately one fuckbillion dollars of grift opportunities on top of the already ridiculous asking price.
You don’t have that much money. Well, you do, but you’re not going to spend it on a sports arena. What do you look like, an idiot? The better thing to do is make someone else buy it for you. This is sort of the public-financing equivalent to going to a restaurant with your coworker, only to have forgotten your wallet. And also your gyro plate costs $750 million, and if they don’t pay it you’ll make some bros in the parking lot come in and kill them.
Once you have an arena bought for yourself, whether entirely financed by the public purse or just ninety-percent financed (with any overage covered by the public purse, of course) it’s time to start making it unnecessarily huge and ugly. Pull some sick stunts like cantilevered support beams. Wheelchair-inaccessible stairs. Bizarre references to Ayn Rand. If people are looking at the professional athletes playing inside the arena instead of the arena itself, then why did you even take all this money away from a hospital to build it?
You might think that I’m being unfair to the entire idea of forcing the government to build private infrastructure at immense cost to primarily benefit billionaires. And when I put it that way, I guess I can see your point. Tell you what, as long as there’s also an immense parking lot that I can pay thirty-six dollars a game to leave my shitty car in so the stereo can get stolen, I’m one hundred percent onboard.
We both know that, at some point in the past, you’ve been to a town that was enjoying a carving competition. Lumber, ice, marble: it’s human nature for some incredibly talented individuals to carve a statue out of another material, and then have their fellow cattle appear to gawp at it. Recently, I was in a small town, and they were doing a chainsaw carving competition. Artisans were busy hewing classical art out of broken trees, and it really got my creative juices flowing.
When I got back home, the only thing I could think about was making art of my own. Of course, I don’t own anything as clumsy as a chainsaw, and the municipality in which I reside has only recently removed their “no tree zone” bylaw, enacted after a particularly bad weekend in 1912 in which several beavers invaded City Hall. In their place, respectively, I chose an angle grinder, and the three-sixteenths of a 1974 Chrysler Newport that had been clogging up the corner of my yard for four presidents.
Of course, as with any art form, my first attempt at it was clumsy. Inexpert. I became frustrated at not being able to get my emotions into my work. I also went through a lot of AliExpress’s best “Holy Shit Very Sharp!” brand carbide wheels, some of which fractured even as I was loading them into the white-hot grinder. I persisted. My second production would be better, I told myself, and threw myself into it. Days turned into nights, and nights turned into days, because otherwise that would be kind of weird.
There is a name for the phenomenon which I was now experiencing. “Outsider art” is the polite way that the art community refers to anyone who had not received any classical art training (I never even learned finger painting, because my pre-school teacher, Ms. Ellersly – who I cannot remember the face of, but who drove a 1958 DeSoto Adventurer in puce – got busted for pot that day) but still manages to make art. Well, bitches, I got a whole gallery full of it now, and every tuned-in patron of sculpture was lining up to tell me how brilliant I was and how I should be asking millions more.
Well, I stopped doing it shortly after that. They say you should always leave your audience wanting, but that wasn’t it at all. Between you and me, I’d probably be making more, but I got bored of the whole thing. And I definitely didn’t want to cut up any more cars. At least, not any cars that I owned, and something about the high-boron steel superstructure of the Kia Sportage that keeps parking at the end of my driveway on weekends is not conducive to my particular muse. Oh? You’re right, I can keep it on hand in case I need some rust repair panels in the future.
A couple years ago, I was at this museum. The reason why I was at the museum isn’t what you think, but that’s all I’ll say. Please stop asking about it. While I was there, though, I saw this amazing thing. There was a big glass orb, with a bunch of plants inside. The little plaque next to the orb said that the plants inside had been living in their own ecosystem for well over a hundred years, in perfect balance.
This got me thinking. The earth’s in a lot of trouble. A bunch of assholes made a ton of money (but probably still not enough) fucking up everything for the rest of us. We could build these fancy terrariums, just like the ones in the museum, and have perfect – if perhaps different – ecosystems inside them, maybe forever. Everything we value could be protected from all the Bad Shit going on outside. This is an idea whose time has come, and I told my local city councillor so. He told me never to hide in the backseat of his car again.
Sometimes people need a little bit of help before they can see that an idea is really worthwhile. They need a prop. In times like these, the real innovators go out and make a scale-model prototype of their idea. Then, once everyone can see it, nobody has to imagine how it works. They get excited, and then hand out some cash to “do the same thing, but make it bigger.” That’s what I was hoping for, but as soon as I revealed my scale prototype, all the assembled dignitaries and hangers-on started to scream and get all upset.
You know an idea is good when the haters are actively trying to get you locked up for it, as they did that fateful afternoon at the Ramada Airport Springs conference room B. Now, I’m not saying that my idea is perfect. For one thing, I could have done more research before I sealed that banker inside. I probably should have gone on the web and asked “where does air come from?” That’s why it’s a prototype, people.
Police officers could solve real problems. They could be out there feeding hot soup to the unhoused, making sure that hazardous garbage is kept away from daycares, or doing something about all these birds that keep shitting on my car. Instead of those productive things, Officer Bringdown is here, on the side of the road, spending my tax money to hand me a ticket for more of my money.
Or at least he would be, if he could figure out how to work his dorky little ticket printer. You see, I have an ace up my sleeve. Not only is my car old, and difficult to place, but I’ve made certain modifications to the vehicle that render its legal state “complicated.” My shark of an attorney, Max, brags about the bear trap of intermingled kit-car laws and year-of-manufacture exclusions that have led to this vehicle being one hundred percent approved-of by the government, in any condition I dictate, whether they meant to or not.
“Uhh, how do you spell ‘Duesenberg’ again?” the cop asks, betraying his lack of education in the classics. I spell it out for him, and explain again that the replica registration exception of December 1986 means that a 1921 Model J does not need to have operational turn signals or a functional speedometer.
“How is this a replica of a 1921 car? It says Plymouth on the hood.” he asks me suspiciously, behind mirrored aviator shades. I am familiar with this shift in conversation. I see now that he has fallen into the first legal pit without complaint. I was hoping for a more worthy opponent.
“Officer, has the state rendered upon you an encyclopedic knowledge and unimpeachable legal authority of what a 1921 Duesenberg Model J consists and does not consist of?” I ask him, reading off a sheet that has been provided by my attorney, who would really rather that I shut the fuck up entirely, but who I know secretly thrills at the chance to end another state trooper’s career in the court of law in which he is akin to a walking god. Dude has groupies.
The cop demurs, tries to change the subject, save some face. “What’s that smell?” he asks.
When you have a way to adjust things, human beings are going to adjust things. We just love to tinker. And whether it’s an attractively powder-coated damping-adjustment knob on trophy truck suspension, or just the “fineness” dial on your coffee grinder, chances are that messing with it will make things worse. As a result, the big companies try to take choice away from us, optimize our lives. They have done tons of research so that they can know better. Because they know better, they will make better choices on our behalf. You’ll have your cup of coffee, you’ll have your comfortable ride to the store, but you’ll want that freedom to really fuck it all up.
In times long past, everything required a certain degree of tinkering. Tolerances were bad. There wasn’t a lot of use-case data. Feudal lords would demand a percentage of your crops. Synthetic, live-forever grease was in its infancy. You tinkered to survive, and repaired when you couldn’t make do, and you acknowledged that your life was miserable, and that maybe someone who actually knew what they were doing would have a nicer house, or a better configuration for your zero-turn riding mower’s charge controller.
Now, everyone’s an expert, because fiddling with things is now only required in order to capture control of your short time on this earth as it spirals towards irrelevance. Tweak this. Turn that. Pimp these. If you’re capable of recording a podcast, you are probably making one right now about your weird hobby. Excuse me, sir. Is that a normal keyboard on your computer? From a store? I bet you’re going to tell me that it only needs one space bar. It probably doesn’t squeak and pop as you press on it, either, and it didn’t cost six hundred dollars. Still, you can’t put a price on that life-affirming fiddliness.
One wonders what those brilliant engineers would think now, if they saw us scrabbling in the dirt, trying to ruin their creations. We know one thing for certain, though. They would have to be distracted from whatever bizarre obsession they are themselves trying to work their way through. Maybe the ideal way to polish electrical contacts for a model railroad. Say, that sounds good. I bet I could make a real hash out of that.
“We are reporting here live today,” began the pretty but probably also talented and intelligent news lady, “at the scene of a house explosion.”
“Actually, my hous-” I began, but she cut me off, striding across my lawn and gesturing wildly at the devastation behind her as the cameraman followed. To my surprise, I found the headlight surround from my old ‘80 Dodge Diplomat behind her. It’s like they say, it’s always in the last place the television news looks.
“The fire department has been on scene for several hours, trying to find any survivors. All they have located so far is the wreckage of what is clearly some kind of garage explosion, strewing parts across this yard and onto the street.”
My mom always told me to be gracious to guests, but Mama Switch also once threw a canned pineapple at the weather man. That was unrelated to his work, but I am pretty sure my mom would have let me get away with a little impoliteness. With some effort, I dug out an old snow brush and started waving it to get her attention.
“There’s a witness, now. Sir, how have you been wronged by this atrocious industrial accident? I can tell by your clothes that you must have been close to the epicentre.”
“Y-yes. It’s terrible,” I stammered, suddenly unable to resist her (local, but strong) star power. “I was just coming home from my job as a movie star, when I was crippled by this tremendous explosion. Disfigured, too. I can no longer work.”
Everyone wants to help out, when you’ve been on television. A local church took a collection plate up for me, they felt so bad about my looks. I got a bunch of money in the mail, and a made-for-TV movie deal with Channel Four. Of course, I blew it all on Mopar products, but I did spend a little bit of my ill-gotten gains on a taller fence so I could hide my stuff from the snoops across the street. Call my ass in, will you? You won’t be so smug when my tell-all Hollywood gossip book comes out and calls you a bad neighbour.
Everyone is afraid of China. And why shouldn’t they be? They have a large industrial base, paid for by American industrialists. They have a lot of money, given to them by American industrialists. And they have tiny, quirky cars, which I desire more than my next breath. It’s an unbeatable combo, and the only way to compete is to play a different game.
We are going to build mid-sized, boring sedans, and then sell them into the Chinese market in exchange for tiny quirky cars and exotic sports electrics. For our prototype, we have chosen to clone the Plymouth Volare. Panel gap is actually better than the original car by far, because we’ve used CNC machining (an old 3D printer we found in the dumpster, with a plasma cutter duct-taped to the end of it) to produce immaculate replicas of the original panel. And our welder is only high on modern synthetic drugs, not the impure and unpredictable strains of the 1960s. That means consistency, and a return on your investment.
Do we think that the Chinese market will buy these cars? There’s a pretty good chance. They sport a lot of features that every market wants. Four wheels. A steering wheel. A trunk. And if the doors are closed and the windows are rolled up, you probably won’t get wet in the rain.
Powertrain is a problem, we agree. It’s a lot of startup cost to open a factory that is capable of manufacturing to the precision tolerances required to produce an internal combustion engine. That’s why we picked the Volare. Those cars came with an un-killable slant-six engine. They’re so unkillable, actually, that we didn’t have to build new ones, just pull ‘em of the junkyard and spray-paint ‘em: they’re good to a few million kilometers, so there’s no need to actually do a rebuild. That’s recycling, which is environmentally friendly (if you don’t think too hard about what’s in the spray cans we’re using.)
Last, investors shouldn’t fret about trade secrets. While these cars haven’t been made for a half-century, there’s not enough of them left in existence to use as a reference to copy from. Any imitators will have to buy at least one of our cars, and maybe two or three, if our quality control doesn’t get better. That’s called guaranteed sales.
There’s been a lot of fear about American workers leaking secrets to China, as opposed to the more traditional format where American managers sell them in large chunks to China instead. Here at Switch Industries, we guarantee our investors that none of us know how to dial long distance. Half of our employees are too young to even have seen a phone, and they definitely don’t use email. Maybe a few of them might know how to switch to Pinyin on their computer keyboards, so we’ve pried the control key off of every keyboard in the office.
Imperator Butterpants, my charge for the weekend, had treed a squirrel in the park. Normally, I would help out the dog - that’s what is humans are for - but there’s a complication. A nearby toddler birthday party would be ruined by the sight of my aunt’s Pomeranian ripping a domestic rodent in half for fun. That’s the tragedy of the commons, right there. Exactly what Plato was talking about.
As a result, I squat gently and prepare myself to pick up the dog in a caring embrace. This feels natural, comforting. I am communing with my ancestors who tamed his ancestors, and in a moment I will have experienced the sensation of another living thing obeying my demands. Nothing doing. Butterpants turns around, snaps at my face, and dislodges my 3M Tekk P100 respiratory-particulate-protection bayonet fitting mask slightly. We are going home, I declare to a dog that does not understand English.
Luckily for me, I have prepared a vessel for transporting the dog. It is a sidecar consisting of an old bumper car, hastily welded with leftover Home Depot fence strapping (don’t worry, I ground off most of the galvanization) to the side of a Razor Pocket Mod child’s electric scooter. Well, I say “child’s,” but we both know that’s some bullshit that I trot out to make the cop think it’s impossible that I break the speed limit on this pink piece of plastic. In actuality, I know that there is no way that the officer is tuned-in enough to electronic engineering to realize that the several hundred pounds of lithium ion phosphate pouch batteries ziptied together under the seat is easily enough stored energy to launch this thing into low earth orbit should I decide to whack the throttle bare open. Plus, it means I can ride in the bike lane, which is good. Have you seen what kind of maniacs drive cars?
Despite what I just told you, I pin the throttle nonetheless, knowing that the aggregate resistance of the battery cables momentarily turning to a liquid will act as a sort of dynamic throttle control. We are off, both figuratively and literally. You might have encountered in the past a dog wearing “doggles,” which is a portmanteau of the word “dog” and “goggles.” Eye protection for dogs is absolutely critical at these kinds of velocities, and it is for that reason that I have placed a welding mask on the muzzle of my aunt’s dog, protecting him from impacts with bugs, gravel, and other multi-use-pathway users.
We get home in quite a hurry, so much so that I have to use my neighbour’s garden hose to extinguish the foam-rubber tires bonded to the rear hub motor. Imperator Butterpants is dazed initially, having reached a land speed formerly only attempted by dogs named Laika, but soon recovers. And, hey! We got that squirrel after all, although I’m pretty sure I’ll have to peel it off of the welding mask and run it through a strainer before I can put it in with his Ol’ Roy.
I think every artist is used to the idea of “stop working on it.” At some point, the work is done, and adding extra stuff to it will just make it worse. They’ve all gone through the experience of adding a comma splice, and turning a decent-feeling sentence into a clunky technical thing. Or they’ve bolted on a stray brush stroke, and ended up having to redo all of the hair. Or they’ve messed with the skin shader for their holographic controlled-sentience AI wife and wrecked the frame update time. Business people, though, have never experienced this.
Business folks live by the concept of adding value. If you add value to a thing, then you can sell the thing for more (or to more people.) The easiest way is to give people what they’re asking for, and the convenient part of that is that you can always find someone who will ask for a new feature without being forced to pay for it. Really devious customers will tie the addition of that feature to giving you money.
Examples abound of this phenomenon. Have you ever avoided installing a software update because you know that some project manager somewhere refuses to accept that the project is “done,” and insists upon adding a useless feature that makes it worse? Or bought an oven with a downloadable “turkey mode” that requires wifi access to work? Or bought into some product that used to be great before the upper management decided that their engineers need to stay busy, and added a cost-reduction step or redesign that rendered the thing fragile? I bet you have, and there’s a good reason for this.
It’s because it’s less risky for these folks to “add onto” something that is already loved, than to start something new that maybe will be ignored. That’s subtracting value, even if it isn’t from the same thing. And then they get taken out to the woodshed. How dare you take this risk, they are told by bigger business people, presumably.
There is only one way for us to get out of this: go and make some new stuff. Is it risky? Sure it is. Good thing we’re too stupid to know this, what with our lack of business learnin’. The fact that this philosophy dovetails with my inability to ever actually finish a project but instead switch between ideas a thousand times a second is total coincidence.
“Sorry, I can’t let you go out there,” half-shouted the firefighter. “We have to extinguish your car before you can drive it again.”
She was sick of my bullshit, but I knew that it would take her longer to get to the truck, get the axe, and come back to kill me with it, than it would for me to hop into the car. Turning the engine over would extinguish the worst of the flames using its vacuum: maybe even get a small carbon-buildup reduction. I waited until she was looking the other way, then made a break for it.
I ran as hard as I possibly could. Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough, and I ended up collapsing to my knees, my lungs heaving at the newfound effort of making my legs do something other than cross a garage floor and push a clutch pedal. Once I had pulled myself up into a sit, I had a great view of my daily driver combusting into an uncontrollable fire. Yeah, now it was probably too far past the point where I could drive it. Once it gets this bad, the door locks melt, and then it’s a whole thing.
This was my own fault, really. I shouldn’t have been experimenting with that semi-truck turbocharger and jet turbine at the same time. And I certainly should not have been doing so next to the bar where all the firefighters hang out. I should have known that they would determine that this specific engine fire was a New Kind of Fire, and therefore extremely interesting.
In fact, there were already some retired firefighters standing on the periphery of the safety cordon, blabbering on to each other about how they had Seen One Like This Once Before and then laughing about how crispy the bodies trapped inside had become. Although I knew deep down that it was just idle boasting, some part of it bothered me, and I decided I would go over there and give them a piece of my mind.
Unfortunately for everybody involved, that’s when I saw it. A pristine 1993 Ramcharger. Last year, all the trim. Gently removed “fire captain” sticker on the door, left behind a void in the clearcoat. Didn’t keep up with polishing the paint after retirement, extremely shabby of them to have done so. Three-sixty Magnum, throttle-body fuel injected. I immediately clocked that it must belong to one of the assembled retired firefighters, and decided to become their friend in the hopes that they might cut me a deal, or, in the worst case, a placement in the will.
“Saaaaaaay, fellas,” I started, my face holding something that I hoped was akin to a welcoming smile. “Have you ever seen a car run on naphtha before?”
So I was holding onto the side of this Oreal Cylinder, I dunno what the deal is with shampoo in space, and getting ready to rip the copper wiring out of the access panel. Friends, Romans, citizens: this shit is fibre fucking optics. Light pipes. Micro plastics. As in, non-metallic. I can’t sell that to Unfair Ted, the operator of the local metal scrap yard back on Ontario-9. Grumpy, I helped myself into their bicycle lockup, and took what I could instead.
Oh, I hear you. I hear what you’re yelling, although I don’t actually hear it because we’re in space, but I do notice that you seem to be getting pretty aggravated and covering the inside of your suit’s visor with angry spittle. You should probably take better care of the equipment, those humidifier filters aren’t cheap.
“There’s no bicycles in space, they don’t make sense.” Yeah, okay. I was speaking in code. You don’t want to be too explicit or the Star Sheriffs will come after you, trying to slap a pair of gravcuffs on your ass. “Hur dur I just stole a bunch of small-charge individual propulsion units from this space station,” is that what you want me to write here? That’s how folks get caught.
Do you know how much thrust it takes to accelerate a human being from zero to not-zero? In the vacuum of space, not a whole fucking lot. That’s why I only took nine. Bicycles, that is. And of course, I missed my turnoff and started floating back towards the planet’s gravity well. These things happen sometimes.
Normally, I would burn my ass up falling through atmosphere, but I just so happened to have an ace up my sleeve: the several hundred kilograms of, uh, not titanium plascrete-reinforced heat shielding that I also borrowed from the Cylinder. Worked pretty well, although I can’t recommend atmosphere-surfing to everyone. Maybe take a shuttle instead, because it sure chewed up my margins when I finally landed outside Ted’s shop with a smouldering pile of metals and a huge hole burned in the ass of my suit, exposing my underwear with little hearts on it for everyone to see.
“You know I’m not real, right?” asked the spectral dog. “I’m just a delusion from your feverish mind.”
“I don’t know what that means,” I told the dog.
“It’s like one of those drawings in the Haynes manuals. Looks real, but isn’t. Too perfect.” When he put it that way, I understood instantly, and with my new realization, the dog vanished. I was alone again.
This particular walk home from a breakdown (passenger side tie rod became incapable of both tying and rodding) had been hard on me. It was a hot day, and the 7-Eleven’s Slurpee machine had been “all fucked up,” in the words of the licensed operator of same, so I didn’t even have the minimum mandatory hydration.
Given the circumstances, it would have been easy to chalk this whole thing up to a simple roadside hallucination. And yet… I was very, very used to having to walk home. Why, just this week, I’d walked home from an ‘85 Daytona Z, '80 Diplomat, and two '77 Volares, all of which had developed their own unique faults, and those were on much hotter days. Was I finally getting too old for shitbox ownership, I asked the ephemeral, shimmering coyote that appeared in the corner of my vision?
“No way, dude,” replied the coyote, and it was only at this moment I noticed he had extremely cool triangle-shaped sunglasses. “You should buy another Mopar.”
This was advice I wasn’t unwilling to take, but my phone’s battery was low at the moment (the second Volare’s weaksauce alternator wasn’t especially up to the task of charging it, even prior to its steering-component failure.) I decided that I would leave it up to the fates to intervene.
I do acknowledge that this sounds a lot like an excuse for why I was passed out naked on the lawn of the local Barrett-Jackson auction house, cradling the wheels of a Bullitt replica Charger. Heat exhaustion would be a convenient excuse for non-criminal prosecution for the act. This must be very frustrating for you, officer. A dog told me this trick once.
In the ancient past, folks used to think that “progress” meant automating everything. You’d go to an automatic diner – an automat, in their futuristic speak – order some food from a little locker, and eat it without ever having to interact with another human being. And now, their dream has come (almost) true. Due to budget constraints, the cool shiny chrome and Art Deco styling has not happened. Instead, your local grocery store now has an automated checkout system which accuses you of shoplifting if the wind blows over your shopping bag while you’re trying to load it.
I’ve complained previously about the gall of this industrial-grade insult machine, and I won’t belabour the point further. The real point is: why didn’t restaurants turn into this, too? To answer this question, I posed as an independent news reporter by not showering for a week, and headed to the local sushi restaurant. Here, a robot “wait staff member” (no gendered language for robots, please: it produces ambiguity in their parse system) was ready to deliver my food to me, on demand, however much I wanted.
Like all computer-based things, I knew that the robot was designed by humans, and so was the fancy iPad they chained to the table that I could use to order food. And humans never think of things like “ordering a negative amount of food.” All I had to do was sit and drink my complimentary water, and plug in a keyboard to the iPad. I watched out of the corner of my eye as the “order quantity” indicator went up.. and up.. and up.. and up.. and after a couple hours of the robot not kicking me out, it went to 2,147,483,647, and overflowed the counter. Now, the iPad proudly displayed that I was ready to order negative two billion items of tuna sashimi. I decided to add a few other items to the order, and then pressed a button which I assumed to say “wench, fetch me my food.”
Friends, and I use that term loosely because I know at least some of you are undercover law enforcement, I did not expect for the restaurant’s robot to literally catch fire, its lithium-ion batteries rupturing in an unquenchable fire as I waited patiently for my meal. On the plus side, when the bill did come, ushered to me by the replacement wait-staff-bot, I swiped my credit card and made enough money to purchase a small tropical island. Maybe there really is something to this future business.
Are you filming some stuff for YouTube this evening? Maybe got a hot date with TikTok? Chances are, you’ll need to clear a bunch of crap out of your house. Clutter in the background is not only distracting, but could be legally actionable. Imagine if a small child saw something blurry, out of focus in a scene, and then applied sophisticated image-analysis algorithms to electronically hallucinate that blurry object into something dangerous. You’d have a lawsuit on your hands.
Hello. I’m Carlos Liability, from Liability & Liability Liability Law. Yes, my last name is a little confusing, especially since you consider that my business partner, Estella Liability, is neither married to nor related to me in any way. It is just the way the universe does things sometimes. Yes, I do give this speech every single time I introduce myself. Otherwise, people interrupt. May I proceed?
Internet video is huge, and the parasites of the tort industry know it. They want to tear down brave content creators such as yourself, over largely fictitious claims. Without an attorney like myself at your side, you won’t know which judges to bribe to make the whole thing go away. Google knows: most of those “democratically-elected” judges rolled off their factory floor, prior to the Turing Laws and the Sentience Bans. I digress.
Here’s the thing. This “backdrop risk,” as the banks are calling it, is very real indeed. Just last week in Topeka, some dude filming a TikTok video about how to clean, assemble, and adjust the sights on a high-powered carbine rifle was held liable for his video. Why? Because he had some copyrighted music on in the background. Estella and I would fight for him, except he got into some kind of bunker and started shooting at anything that came within three blocks of his home. And we’ll fight for you.
Building a roof is one of those activities that doesn’t seem hard on paper, but is. When you describe a house, you call it “a roof over your head,” right? Houses live and die by their roofs. Even a small screw-up could reduce the rest of it to complete rubble.
This is not the case with automobiles. With a car, you can buy a car with no roof at all. They’re called convertibles. If the factory doesn’t produce a convertible version of the car in question? You can buy a specialized tool to convert it. That tool is what the industry calls “an inexpensive sawzall that you can return to Home Depot when you burn out the motor trying to saw through a B-pillar with it.”
I’ve owned a variety of convertibles over the years, many of them intentionally so. There’s nothing like the feeling of racing around town with nothing between you and the rest of the universe. Much like motorcyclists feel before their third carb re-tuning of the morning, you feel like you are a wholly integrated part of where you are driving through, instead of some kind of passive observer in a box that flattens children.
Of course, convertibles do have their downsides. The seal is never quite waterproof, because water is tricky. There’s a complicated mechanism to take care of, even on the simplest cars. Idiots will try to cut a hole in your roof in order to break into your car and steal valuable things that you can’t afford in the first place because you keep having to replace the roof. And, above all, there’s the wobbliness. Conventional structural engineering states that cars are meant to have a roof, mostly because they weigh several thousand pounds, especially when some jerk is throwing them around corners with reckless abandon on the eve of their 40th birthday.
Don’t worry, though. The car industry has also produced a solution so you can have a nice hard top on your car while still enjoying a modicum of wind inside the cabin. It’s called a sunroof, and it also includes the fun of tracking leaks and mouldy smells inside your perfectly good car. If you ask me, though, I’m going to stick to the sawzall.
Although retirement is out of reach for many of us, there’s one thing that we can all still get. Shitty old 90s Mustangs. As long as we do it right now, before the investors get over here and start driving up the price to as many as two thousand dollars, we can all have a little bit of anemic grand-touring hardtop in our lives. Unless we want a stick shift, a V8, or a convertible. Or a running car. You know what? Forget this whole thing, I just saw a Craigslist post for a wrecked ‘94 V6. Seller wants nineteen grand for it, abandon market.
There’s a lot of cross-class appeal to the Mustang, whose reputation has in a few short decades broadened from “attractive successful businessperson’s car” to the stick-axled understeer demon that menaces car meets and trailer parks alike. Unfortunately for all of us dirtbags, the price has continued to rise along with its demand. Nowadays, you can’t get one of Vanilla Ice’s prized 5.0s for less than one of those aforementioned trailer homes.
Some of you out in the audience are probably throwing things at your monitor, lashing out at the very idea of me claiming that the Mustang’s increase in price is proportionate to its increase in demand. It is true that Ford Motor Company has, since the fateful year of 1964.5, produced more total Mustangs than there are currently alive human beings on Earth.
We could all have one, if the economy were better managed and the means of production seized. Karl Marx himself did not write extensively about Mustangs, mentioning them only briefly (Engels was more of a Firebird guy,) but his intentions were clear. However, this analysis fails to comprehend the fact that virtually 95% of all Mustangs have been destroyed in low-speed single-vehicle accidents with stationary objects. Some scientists now believe there are as few as eight four-eyed Capris left in the world, and some guy from Topeka somehow ended up with all of them.
Ever since the neighbourhood dogcatcher fell into that storm sewer, the community has been thronged by packs of rogue dogs. It’s not like they’re wild dogs, per se. All of these hungry pooches seem to be just regular old pets that got a taste of freedom, and cannot stand the idea of returning home, to a life of obeying the whims of man.
There’s some upsides and downsides to this new state of affairs. I’ll start with the positives. You can pet a cute dog at the park any time you want, now. On the flipside, the hot dog cart guy got attacked last week and is unlikely to return to the park once he awakens from his coma. Depends how you feel about his Bluetooth speaker blaring Turkish pop music at all hours of the day, to be fair, but I will miss the opportunity to purchase tubed meat while putatively following my doctor’s advice about exercising outside (in a way that doesn’t involve cutting transmissions out of cop cars.)
A few folks now have been trying to capture these dogs, to bring them back to their owners. This is a noble goal, and one that I would take on myself if it weren’t for just how many dogs there are. Which one do you save first? Which one is the safest to put in the back seat of my Volare? Has that one “gone native” and is gonna Colonel Kurtz me as soon as I merge onto the expressway? Is it ethical to teach this dog, even inadvertently, how to drive? Will these dogs simply do away with us apes, whose time on this earth is surely coming to an end, and then engage in car-dependent urban planning on their own? That would be cruel to subject them to, so I just don’t bother.
Now, if you excuse me, it’s my turn this week to feed the dogcatcher. We’re all pretty sure he’s faking that broken leg and can easily climb out of there whenever he wants. Unfortunately, nobody has told him what happened to the hot dog guy yet. Hopefully he just asks for tacos again – Adabella’s Burritos is on the second floor, and the dogs haven’t figured out how to work the elevator yet.
My ass remains glued to the Huangshan Corporation Pee Pee Poo Poo My First Big-Kid Potty. This is as much out of necessity as principle: this Target has decided to restrict their public washroom to “paying customers,” whatever that is. I call it classism, which is why I am sweating out the last of the norovirus here in Aisle 56, having only had a split second to remove the plastic shitter from the middle of the display shelf.
This is not a dignified part of my existence, I realize with some shame, and make a mental note never to mention it in my memoirs. Excluding this information is somewhat easy at the moment, as my memoirist is conveniently away at the Uncle Pretzel stand on the other side of the mall. They are interrogating the operators as to exactly why the salt distribution is uneven, in a flagrant violation of the NIST 337-05 Standard for Soft Pretzel Construction.
Relief comes. I have a moment of clear-headed lucidity ahead of me, probably just enough to get to the car and go home before the next wave of The Bad Shit strikes. A wiser man would have taken advantage of it. A better man would probably have even bought the potty he just defiled, saving the employees from having to deal with the issue. This man, as you are no doubt aware, instead walks the potty to the manager’s office, taking careful note to avoid the security cameras, and leaves it outside the door. Years of watching buzzy VHS transfers of business training videos during my forced therapy sessions have taught me that is what management is supposed to do, handling the difficult and ambiguous problems of work life.
“Sam” (their current name, unless you’re a cop, in which case this name has conveniently changed and it’s time for you to ask about it at the courthouse, officer,) returns from the food-stand interrogation and spots me coming out of the Employees Only Hallway. They know exactly what’s going on, and although I have doubts about their ability to manipulate the Volare in such a way that it will make the car start and reliably shift into forward drive, has already begun crossing the parking lot, the Drivers’ Glare in their eyes.
“Dude, I told you not to drink that 75W90,” they tell me minutes later on the freeway. Sam is doing a buck-eighty, weaving between lanes, as my ass hangs out the rear passenger-side window (which, like the other windows in my daily driver, don’t roll down, but that’s okay, because it is also missing.) Like I said, a boring part of the memoir. Editor will cut it out right away.
Nobody deserves to live in a polluted, super-stinky world. It’s just unfair. The worst part of it all is that this inconvenient airborne particulate, water filled with microplastics, and heavy metal toxicity wasn’t even caused by something fun. If you’re coughing up black tire dust from doing a cool burnout, then at least you can say that you had a great day out with your fellow car nerds ruining some tires. If you’re hacking up a lung because of some obscure stage of some catalyzation process at an industrial yard 2000 miles away, well, maybe they had fun, but you certainly are not. And we’re all about fun here.
Being paid at least partially by the local oil and gas monopolies, the government was looking for a reason to get themselves out of this mess while continuing to get their metaphorical beaks wet. The solution: carbon capture. In theory, this sounds like a good idea. You know how when you run a bedroom fan in a dusty room, the fan gets all dusty? What if that fan were really huge, and instead of dust, it’s atmospheric carbon dioxide? We could trap it in a box and then bury that box somewhere deep inside the earth. Now we have something to fund, and the oil industry can keep making as big of a mess as they want in the meantime, because we have the solution to their problems on the way. Thanks, eggheads!
Now, some people get morally outraged when they see an obvious scam like this being perpetrated. And, I am sure, somewhere deep down below, I also am. When I see a scam, though, I wonder how I can get in on this. If I could build my own carbon capture machine, even if it didn’t work, then the government and industry would shower me with billions of dollars. Everyone involved would pretend that it works great and just needs to be “scaled up,” and I could spend my autumn years doing gold-plated cocaine out of a human skull on my private island.
I would like to introduce to them, and of course to you, my loyal reader, the Reverse Burnout. Through the use of industrial adhesives, I have made a drag radial so sticky, so absolutely over-gripped, that it pulls the floating black death right out of the air and embeds it into the asphalt (or concrete, if you’re at an old-school track) permanently. It doesn’t do it very much, and the amount of gas that it burns to do each drag pass is well in excess of the pollution absorbed, but I think we can all agree that I had fun. And that is an improvement over the regular state of things.
You can’t save ‘em all. That’s the phrase that everyone says when they finally give up on a project car, and pass it along to the next sucker, or (gasp) to the crusher. Sometimes, a car doesn’t line up with the amount of time you have for it, or the amount of money you have for it, or the amount of patience you have for it. One such car was condemned to the bin by Yours Truly, after several sleepless nights of trying to weld two large chunks of rust together and only ending up finding more rust.
With a heavy heart, I called the local “no questions asked” wrecker, and he took it away. I had lots of excuses. It was “just” a Hyundai Pony, I told my friends, who copped sympathetic looks. Getting rid of it freed up time and space for my other ongoing projects, I repeated to the bartender a few hours later. That Pony will get turned into a wonderful new dishwasher, I said to myself in the mirror. The defeat stung. They weren’t ever going to make another 1983 Hyundai Pony, not even if I seized control of the government and turned the army’s guns on their corporate offices.
That’s when I heard a weird noise. A sort of 80s overhead-cam four-banger burble, unmistakeable. Squeezing too little fuel through too small a carb, a lean-burn system no doubt strangling its power curve in the false pursuit of efficiency. I was shocked, and stared outside, refusing to believe my own ears.
There, I saw the impossible. A Hyundai Pony. Running. Driving. My Hyundai Pony – I recognized the smashed windshield, the bent wheels. It was back! And I wasn’t driving it. I realized it was one of the younger group of Car Weirds on the next block over. They had resuscitated the car’s flimsy unibody not with welding, but with an elaborate series of papier-maché, using what appeared to be carbon-fiber-coloured novelty wallpaper from the hardware store and expanding-foam door insulation.
Rather than be elated, I began to feel inferior. How could they have saved this car and I had missed such an ingenious fix? It ate at me for weeks, until I noticed the same young gun walking glumly towards the bus stop one morning. Nobody deserved that. I decided to swing past and pick him up. I’d get the whole story.
When children are young, the agricultural mafia tries to get their hooks into them. It is believed that an essential part of early childhood development is to learn about every animal you will see on a Western European farm, and to memorize their noises and favourite foods. Why is this, when most of these children will visit only a cubicle farm for the rest of their lives?
One argument is that schools are not solely a vehicle for career training for children, but instead a glorious academy where the passions and curiosities of the young mind can chase new ideas. That’s a really nice utopian belief, but even the folks pushing the “learn about cows” program don’t believe in it either. Here’s what I think it is: Big Pickup Truck wants you to think of yourself as a bit of a hayseed.
Crazy? Not so much. Think about the last time you got into a hobby or other intense volume of knowledge. There is a sort of arc, where at the start you felt like you really understood everything there was to know about the hobby. This happens about five seconds before you realize how little you actually know. If your local Chevy dealer can keep you at about that level of knowledge re: agriculture, you’re more likely to buy a bigger truck. Yeah, we need the half-ton, honey. What if we encounter a sick sheep? They go “baa.”
Primed with this baseline structure of factual farm-animal knowledge, North America is kept slavishly obedient to the pickup trucks. Barns, too, but that might just be because I keep wanting to look inside them to see if any shitty old pickup trucks are hidden within. Pickup trucks, you see, they go “vroom.”
You can say a lot of bad things about the humble postal system. It’s slow, it’s expensive, and the folks who work hard to make sure you get your bills and junk mail could be a little more chipper about it. Watch your tongue, though, because the postal system does something truly glorious: it provides insanely clapped-out, mega-mileage postal vans at auction.
That’s right. Targeted for criticism by a variety of bad actors, miscreants, contrarians, and folks grumpy that they didn’t get what they wanted in life, the government is forced to sell off perfectly good vehicles just because they’re a little unsafe, in the hopes of recouping some money that they can then spend on new, soulless postal vans. Every farmer for miles around probably has one or two of these things in their back forty. This is because even after the ancient parcel vans of my youth stopped being useful for luxuries like “providing heat,” you can still throw a pregnant sheep in the back, full-throttle that shit all the way to the property line, and be pretty sure that it will make the return trip even if you haven’t changed the oil since Mulroney.
Part of this is because these vehicles are supremely engineered for their purpose. Like sharks, they have exactly the ideal parts required for the job they are meant to do, and no luxuries like air conditioning, seven-speaker surround sound stereos, ABS, or chairs with padding. Sure, they devour fuel, but that’s what you get when you use technology from the Bronze Age to develop an engine that wears like the mountains. Where did such a glorious piece of lost technology come from, in our current era where smartphones last twelve minutes and brand-new microwaves come with a sticker telling you what number to phone in order to safely recycle them?
Once upon a time, the government used to have demands of the manufacturers from which they were ordering several million vans. They could insist that these vans run forever, never need to be maintained, and double as cover in the event of a semi-automatic gun fight. It would cost a little bit extra, this overbuilding, but this was justifiable: we are the government, after all, and if we didn’t ask them to do their job, they’d just rip us off. Now, not so much. In the pursuit of business efficiency, the government just treats themselves as another boring consumer. Buy the same Ford Transit or German-made electric conversion van as everyone else. Did it break down because it’s not meant to be driven one point eight million kilometers in a single year by a suicidal Newfoundlander who doesn’t understand enough English to comprehend the concept of “keep the engine below 9,000 rpm?” Buy another.
There’s still time left to get a van like this of your very own. Together, we will hold onto these glorious artifacts of a bygone era, and ideally take them down to the track together. Won’t the track marshals be pissed when we clock a thirty-six second pass, and stop halfway through to refill the tank.
Those of you who are attractive, well-accustomed human beings have a glorious life ahead of you. Doors will open that you aren’t even aware of, and you will be lifted by an army of unseen helpers to a life of satisfaction. For the rest of us, especially those of us who are best described as “whew,” there’s still race car helmets.
Putting on a full-face racing helmet makes you look super badass. You don’t even need to talk, just focus your steely competition-hardened gaze on whoever is talking, judging them in silence. It’s better than a pair of sunglasses, and with today’s increase in sunglasses cost, cheaper too. Even when you’re required not to wear the helmet, such as being at work, you can put it on the edge of your desk. In this way, your coworkers know that, as soon as the whistle blows, you’ll be popping skids through the parking lot on your way to set the fastest time of the day at some sanctioned racing event.
Even those of us who are misshapen lumps in general benefit from this standard held by society. Tired of people judging your outdated, thrift-store clothes? Nomex race suits come in about seven different colours, and that’s all the choice you get. Each and every one of them makes you look like you could catch fire performing a heroically dangerous motorsport at any second. If you buy a genuine suit instead of some AliExpress cosplay special, you’ll probably even survive the fire, stumbling out of your stricken car aflame for a bad-ass splash photo on some regular person’s magazine article about the race. That could be useful office wear as well, if your coworkers are as bad at operating the toaster oven as mine.
Perhaps the most attractive quality of wearing a full race suit during your daily activities is the increased confidence it will give you. No longer will you have to worry about other human beings seeing the pallor of your skin, or your heinous facial structure. You can swagger directly into a bank, or mall, or toddler playdate and let your counterparty – no, your opponent – watch themselves for flaws in your immaculate, mirrored visor. If that isn’t a good use of several thousand dollars, I don’t know what is.
In my neighbourhood, there used to be a hospital. Eventually, the government decided that it was “too old” and had to go. Dangerous, they said. Obsolete, they said. Can’t afford to have sick people in it, they explained. And then the building just sat there, empty, rather than being full of doctors helping people. This story is not about healthcare, or even about the time that I had to drive myself to the other, worse hospital across town while holding my own gaping wound closed with a ratchet strap held in my teeth. It’s about urban exploration.
For those of you unaccustomed to the word “urban,” simply replace it with “city.” Same deal with “exploration:” big word, just means “looking-at.” Together, you’re looking at stuff in a city. Now we’re all on the same page. Urban exploration is what folks who break and enter into abandoned buildings, storm sewers, and disused industrial mechanisms call their practice. It’s pretty dope: you go into a cool old building, take lots of pictures of cool old stuff, and then spend the rest of the week wondering if that fever you’re running might be because the old YMCA had a swimming pool full of pigeon shit and you just went wading through it “for fun.”
The old hospital, through these eyes, was primo. Big ol’ building, full of abandoned machines, long hallways, and windows to set up eerie photographs. It also had a sanitarium, which was only grudgingly converted into a cafeteria in recent years. This inconvenient fact will not stop those of you with overactive imaginations from believing that you are being stalked by a malevolent spirit of one of the patients, which is additional free entertainment for both you and the other members of your exploration party. Fun for the whole family! Actually, on second thought, don’t bring the kids, because they snitch, and then the security guards will start chaining up the doors and removing all the dusty autoclaves full of rusty surgical tools.
If there is something negative to be said about urban exploration, it’s that they don’t let you drive your car in there. There’s a lot of walking, you see, and my feet get tired after a mere four or five hours of running around in a blind panic through a series of identical corridors, wondering if that creaking sound is a security guard, or the building’s superstructure imploding. Things would be a lot easier if I could bring my three-thousand-pound 1970s Chrysler product along for the ride, because at least then we could store snacks in the back seat, and maybe some of the mice in the trunk would find a new home. Maybe we’ll get lucky and Little Government will give up on the idea of maintaining the highway next.
When I go to the big alternative energy conferences, people ask me: what’s the most recyclable battery out there? Is it lithium-ion? Lithium-polymer? Lithium-iron-phosphate? No, friends: it’s Home Depot.
Let me explain. Stealing batteries from Home Depot is a renewable source of energy. Wow, I guess that was actually pretty simple. Allow me to expand further: the definition of renewable is that it comes back after it’s gone, right? When you fill the false lining on your jacket with flashlight D-cells, or just stuff a bunch of Evereadys down the back of your pants and constipated-penguin-walk your way off of the show floor while pretending to yell at “your wife” on “your smartphone,” those batteries will be back on the shelves the very next day, like it never even happened.
Unlike solar, too, this energy source is available all the time. In fact, it’s quite a bit easier to harvest this power at night, because the parking-lot security guard has to take his break around then.
Sure, it’s not a perfect solution. Sometimes they move them around, or they put a camera near the batteries. We’re going to need to develop new strategies to extract this energy, and it will take cooperation from everyone in society (for instance, a big guy who can stand around the paint aisle and block the loss-prevention lady.)
Overall, we need to use less energy, because I am getting tired of driving to the store every day just because I had to use an entire shipping crate full of double-A batteries to boost my car. I’m doing my part, by only using solar calculators to compute my profits from selling the excess batteries on Kijiji under the name of a local tough-on-crime politician.
You may be aware of the concept of “a rental car.” It’s where you go to a store that lives inside the airport, promise to give them some money, and they hand you the keys to a car. When you’re done with that car, you just give it back and you never have to see it again. No oil changes. No windshield washer fluid repair. No welding new body panels into it after driving on a particularly pointy gravel road.
The thing is, this is an incredibly expensive procedure. Before the world broke, even the cheapest rental agencies were gonna charge you more than just flying in, taking a taxi to the junkiest piece of shit on Craigslist, and then signing a fake name onto the title. Cops give you like a week’s leeway on getting it actually registered – even more if you are there for a “business trip” and are wearing Value Village’s finest two-piece Italian-cut dead salesman’s suit. You get to drive a new kind of car, it doesn’t cost you that much, and when you’re done you can just drive it back to the seller’s house in the middle of the night and take a taxi back to the airport.
So, being forced to rent a car during my recent trip to Philadelphia in order to give the keynote speech at the Bad Cars Monthly conference, I decided I would get the maximum amount of value out of my rental. I neutral-dropped the fucker at every light, started a small side business delivering heavy goods for cheap, and did my best impression of Petter Solberg on every even vaguely curvy road I could find. At one point, I took it to a drag strip and put down a weak fifteen-second pass, the transmission warning light shrieking the entire time as I force-fed it a couple gallons of nitrous oxide that I picked up at a shop near the hotel. Never before had a 2023 Hyundai Sonata been thrashed so thoroughly and without mercy, and I can assure you that the lot boys (and ladies) were impressed when I rolled the filthy, used-up chunk of Korean iron into the lot, parked it across four stalls, and threw the keys into a nearby storm drain after yelling “Catch!”
Friends, I cannot recommend that you purchase a new 2023 Hyundai Sonata. I can, however, assure you that I have depreciated this particular unit enough that it should be really cheap at auction.
Now that it’s the future, things are more confusing than ever. Our ancestors only had to understand a few different kinds of rocks, how to cook a bird they caught, and what sorts of plants they should not try to eat. Like I said, things are different now. Everything has become more advanced, and with it, more complex.
You might not think that things are all that different. After all, those forerunners to our glorious civilization also had to deal with plague, illiteracy, and the horrors of serfdom. Now, we only have that last one left to deal with. I think that you’ve just become used to the polynomial complexity of the modern age. Try going back to 1993 and asking your fellow Hypercolor-shirt-wearing dweebs about why your email isn’t syncing to your smartphone, but works okay on your iPad. You’ll be burned at the stake, even in moderately liberal states like Maine.
I’m all in favour of going back to simpler stuff. Stick axles. Right-angle bodywork. Carburetors. Door handles that burn your fingers because the car’s been sitting in the sun all day while you were working a double at the Kay Bee Toys. Crank windows. Heavy-weight oils that aren’t filtered very well. Bias-ply tires with no grip whatsoever, to the extent that walking on banana peels slathered with mayonnaise will make you feel like an F1 driver by comparison.
Thing is, nobody wants to make that stuff anymore. The new stuff is too good, too efficient, too safe that the automakers and the aftermarket folks have decided that no one on this Earth is stupid enough to want it. Even Chinese factories can’t be convinced to do otherwise; their electric mini-pickup-trucks may cost $2000, but they still have modern metallurgy and plastic headlights. Meanwhile, we’re crushing all this great old stuff and sending it to foreign lands in order to be turned into more boron-infused, tiny-mufflered cough drops that sometimes decide not to let me use Spotify until I break out half an undergraduate computer science degree and/or the Revenge Dremel.
That’s why I’ve decided to start re-learning everything from first principles. I just spent last week checking every book out of the library that I could find on metallurgy. While he was out (in prison,) I was going to turn my neighbour’s new chain-link fence into part of a 4x4 chassis. I had pulled a bunch of it out of the ground and started to build a crucible in which to melt the precious ill-gotten aluminum into ingots. That’s when I realized that the barbecue lighter I was using had a child-safe trigger. I had to go back and dig through the dumpster I found it in, just so I could figure out how to make flame shoot out of it. Friends: this shit has got to stop.
The money people have been talking to me again. I don’t mean the bankers, but they’ve got their own problems. No, when I open my wallet, a bunch of dead prime ministers and people of historical import are in there. And they keep telling me to use them to buy some cars.
Problem is, I know for a fact that the current market is all screwed up. It’s full of speculators, and vultures, and those dinosaurs with tiny front arms but the big horn on their head. They kinda stomp around and go “raar” and don’t let me buy their cars for cheap. And I don’t especially need a new car, I tell Sir Wilfrid Laurier, who died before we started taking the knighthoods away from people if they wanted to try and be prime ministers. He cackles, a sort of dusty half-laugh, half-smoker’s-cough, and tells me to check Kijiji to see if anyone posted a Celica recently.
Big Willie has a point: as soon as I checked The Jeej, there was indeed a newly-posted Toyota personal luxury coupe. Unfortunately, the asking price was ridiculous. Buying this turd would cost way too many of him and all of his friends, and I decided to close my wallet. Their screams of boredom were still audible, however, so I considered purchasing some parts I didn’t need. Maybe something like a working brake booster, or some tail light bulbs to replace the string-actuated flashlights I’d been using up until then. I came to my senses pretty quickly, though, and stuck my wallet back in my dresser drawer, where I wouldn’t have to listen to them anymore, and they could instead keep one of the feral cats that roam my upper floor company. It’s lonely work hunting for the squirrels that got in through the hole in the roof.
As I close the drawer, I can still hear John A. MacDonald shrieking at me to grow some balls and go buy a Toyota Stout. He drinks, Sir John. It’s best to let him dry out, but not in the microwave. Trust me on that one.
I assume that engineers are very busy, and so they don’t necessarily have time to make the things they design serviceable. I get it – you’re not building a masterpiece to survive all of eternity, you’re just doing your job. You’re over here, working on the radiator and cooling program, this other guy is doing the radiator support, and the mid-senior-junior-vice-president electromechanical engineer down the hall is up to her neck in work trying to figure out how to mount the horns in a way that doesn’t anger the crash testers.
The chances that the three of you, collectively, slow your productivity shit way down – or worse, have a meeting – to make it easier to reach the electrical connector for that horn so you can remove it without cutting your hands on the fins of the air-conditioning condenser are about negative one billion percent. That would be preposterous – horns don’t break, right? Tell that to the dumpster-dove Spider-Man bandages that I have applied to my right hand because of your shortsighted design decisions.
And your boss isn’t gonna show up and demand repairability become a priority. No, your boss gets paid because people buy cars, and people will stop buying cars if the car lasts forever. Even if they jam an Android tablet in the dash sideways and start making the wheels bigger. Hell, my neighbour is still booting around in a 1994 Camry XLE, and the minute he expresses even the slightest subconscious desire to be rid of it, he will have a lawn full of folks offering top dollar for such an esteemed chariot. Toyota probably would have gone bankrupt back then making shit like this, if they hadn’t had all those trucks to sell to terrorist organizations in distant foreign wars. Those guys are gonna have to buy a new truck every couple of months when their old one gets shot up, so it’s okay to make those super-durable.
All I’m asking for is that you think once in awhile about making a bolt accessible. It’s not hard, just make sure they drill a hole over top of it, so that I can stick a nice long socket in there when the captive nut on the other end breaks off and just spins forever. Even though you might have a good day at work because of taking a shortcut like that, I guarantee you that the massive amounts of bad karma I am heaping upon your name while intermittently sobbing in my garage are not worth it. You’ll get reincarnated as a lighting engineer.
All of the best scam artists will tell you one thing. Believing that something is going to happen will cause it to happen. You just need positive thinking. The universe will realize that you are really serious about this thing, and then give it to you, like a toddler having a meltdown in Target until they receive two lollipops just to shut them up. I’m here to tell you that it’s bunk. The only thing the universe gives you is rust.
Maybe you come from somewhere that cars don’t rust. A beautiful, idyllic paradise in which road salt doesn’t exist. Eighties vehicles roam free in traffic, sometimes even being dented, without the exposed metal immediately flashing into red dust. Even if this is true, anyone reading this is no doubt cursed to one day desire a cool old truck or a shitty old bus or an only slightly broken drift car from a place where the oxides rule. And when that happens, you’ll remember that the universe only owes you corrosion.
Sure, you can try to postpone this entropy as long as possible. Spray that shit with sheep squeezings every time you change to winter tires. Keep it in a hermetically sealed bubble. Don’t drive it in the snow, and refuse to even look directly at it in the garage when the weather is below plus-25. These acts will extend the life of the vehicle, but a toll will come due.
In our button-down, law-humping society, the only opportunity many of us have to pop sick skids in front of police officers and get away with it is Old Man Winter. Sorry, it is pretty icy today, and my responsible car is broken. I had to get to work and decided to drive my 730-horsepower supercharged Mercury Meteor with a welded diff. Judge is gonna laugh that shit out of court if you try to pin it on me, fascist. Is it really worth owning such a vehicle if you never get to let it rip on freshly fallen snow? I say no.
Couple folks down at the end of the street have gotten themselves a Ford Ranger. Not the new bloaty European one, with its ridiculous features like “doors that stay closed” and “fuel economy,” but a good, old-fashioned beater Ranger. Naturally, I want it more than my next breath of air.
Even though it has one of those wheezy V6s and is an automatic, rather than my beloved zingy four-banger-plus-five-speed combination, I find myself driving slowly past it. I entertain fantasies about using it to go to the dump, to uncover my back yard full of trash (Mopar, organic, otherwise.) In that glorious alternate future, I would then haul home lumber and tools with which to begin to construct a deck on which to grill. The neighbours would witness my truck, and know that it is the vehicle of someone who Does Something with their house. That would be pretty rad, I tell myself, before snapping out of it.
Upon further inspection, I realize that the owners are what they call “legacy” Ranger owners, having purchased the vehicle many years ago when it was a mere couple-hundred-bucks beater, rather than a priceless collectible that must be clearing the block at Barrett-Jackson soon for the approximate value of a house. You can tell this by all the meth they are smoking in it. I begin to realize that perhaps they are not homeowners at all, but a small gang of scrap thieves. They, too, can tell that I can tell, and although scumbag courtesy would ordinarily cause us to ignore one another’s offences against civil society, I am a little jealous of the truck, and tap my brakes as if slowing down to call an Authority Figure.
There is a peel-out, then. Although I know that I can easily catch the Ranger and its anemic vee-six, I do not pursue. There is no reason to: the missing tailgate, and the steep incline of my street, allows their bed full of stolen metal scrap to tumble harmlessly onto the road. At this point, the laws of maritime salvage take over. This has become my pile of stolen metal scrap, and further, the illicit transfer-by-dump of these goods has blurred the pesky issue of ownership. Who is to say all these cut-off exhaust components are stolen, officer?
I spend the rest of the evening assembling them into an work of art. I call it “Ranger,” and from about thirty feet away, it sort of resembles a 1988 Ford Ranger XLT. I throw it into the pile of scrap in my backyard, so I can admire it from my kitchen every morning as I warm my coffee over a Steyr Maxi thumper. There is no reason to be jealous, I resolve, not when you can make your own truck.
I’ve always been obsessed with street sweepers. Not the people, although I’m sure they have interesting stories, but the machines themselves. Street sweepers come out of the city’s industrial-equipment harem every spring, and capture my imagination immediately with their rotary-buffing antics. They’re trucks, but not as we know them. In fact, they likely have more overlap with my favourite tool of all time, the angle grinder.
Few other vehicles are as dedicated to the act of sweeping: even a plow truck can be used to make a Rotten Ronnies’ run, but good luck stuffing one of these babies inside a medium-size drivethrough. Even with the brushes disabled, it’ll sound like a helicopter, smell like week-old diapers dropped from said helicopter, and everyone involved will wish you hadn’t existed.
These trucks are truly beneficial: you can argue if a fire truck really helps people, or just teaches them to become lazy about fire safety and therefore dependent on the fire department. And they make unnecessarily loud siren noises – never proven by science to actually help – which anger the neighbourhood. Nobody is mad when they’re crawling under a decrepit mid-1970s General Motors product and finds that the curb lane is not covered in gravel, bits of safety glass, and old roofing nails, because the big ol’ Elgin just came through the night before.
And there’s something new and fascinating to learn about them. You might have a pretty good idea how a semi-truck operates from exposure to it in mass media. Chances are good that you can guess how a cement truck works. Maybe you can even draw a crude representation of a dump truck’s hydraulic actuator, and bore the shit out of neighbourhood toddlers who just want you to make the noise. A street sweeper, though: that thing has all kinds of systems. It’s got the thing that sprays water. It’s got the thing that holds water. It’s got those big-ass brushes, and the lifts, and the beepy thing.
The whole package, that’s what a street sweeper is. You could tear one of these bad boys down – although with the stench, maybe they just set them on fire after four or five years of use – and never stop finding cool new electromechanical gadgets to geek out over. That, to me, is good value for my tax money. If you find a used one, just make sure to run it through the car wash a bit.
Nowadays, it’s trickier than ever to pick good produce at the supermarket. Whereas our parents would have lived by an ironclad set of rules handed down to them by their parents, we have to deal with exotic new fruits like “papaya” and “orange” for which they have no frame of reference. Is this mango ripe? Will it ever achieve ripeness? Silicon Valley thinks they’re close, with a massively-wide thought array that consumes one acre of Brazilian rainforest every time it has to identify a pear, but until then the task will rely on us, the apes.
Luckily for us, we are equipped with a foolproof ability to ensure that we’re not buying mouldy produce: theft. If you don’t pay anything for the fruit, then even if it’s bad, you haven’t lost anything except for your time and pocket capacity. Throw that shit in your garden, a practice which civilization now calls “composting” instead of “littering.” Maybe it’ll make a plant, but even if not, your existing plants will know you mean business, furtively glancing over their metaphorical shoulders to ascertain your mood as they sup of the life essence of the one that failed you.
Even if you get caught, you can challenge the store security guard. No, I brought this acai berry from home. Show me where you sell these, if you’re so certain that I was shoplifting it. They won’t, and while they’re busy looking, you can book it out of there. Make sure to wear a disguise, and maybe keep your car running. It’s hard to tell if that dicky battery and dickier starter solenoid will allow it to restart if you leave it off for too long.
Why bother the risk of being banned from the grocery store at all, if common, everyday apples have been sustaining Western civilization for centuries? By far, the most important part of getting this exotic produce is so that you can brag to your friends when they come over. What, you haven’t seen a white strawberry before? What a fucking chump! That’s why I left you handcuffed to that train in Lyon and took off for that wild weekend, and not at all because I saw a Renault Twingo for a good price and didn’t want you to stomp all over my bid by trying to speak French.
A couple weeks ago, some writers burst into my squalid domicile and started tearing the copper out of the walls. It was very funny to me, mostly because I had sold all that shit a few weeks prior in order to afford another hit of automatic transmission fluid (just one more quart of Dexron, I swear I’m good for it.) They would reach for the drywall, just to find a jagged hole where I had crudely pulled the wiring straight out of the house and into the firepit in my backyard.
My mother didn’t raise me to be impolite to guests, so I made sure to light a candle (Yankee E1085: Shockproof 75W90®) and make sure that they felt at home. Of course, being hunted felons, the television writers recoiled in terror at having been discovered. It took me a couple more minutes to calm the taller one of the two down, so he would stop hanging on my chandelier. Perhaps he still thought it contained copper wiring, instead of a bunch of glowsticks left over from the illegal rave down the street (good poppadoms.)
Once they realized I wasn’t going to turn them over to the hunter-killer content acquisition drones, they settled down a bit. Introducing themselves as Phil and an indecipherable series of Unicode characters that I don’t know how to type into my phone, they told me their story. Of course, I’m the one telling this story, so I didn’t give a shit about theirs. After some niceties were exchanged, we retired to the parlour in order to have some food and talk about how life was in the before-times, prior to when the machines came out of the abyss to create award-winning television shows like Celebrity Byproduct® and What’s That, Jesus? I’m On The Shitter. It was determined, collectively, that things used to be better.
I’m not a heartless type. Rather than charging rent, I told them that I could teach them valuable skills. If they could maintain cars, then they could pretend to be illiterate bottom-tier mechanics, not at all the kind of people capable of writing paragraphs full of human-sounding text in order to fill the insatiable demands of the mumble-mouthed content intelligences. And then they could work off their rent. The nameless one of the pair took right to my proposal, even volunteering to change drum brakes. Phil and I looked at her, then to each other, frowned, and pulled our HERF guns. No human being can change drum brakes, I said, as I pulled the trigger and shocked the shit out of the fourth impersonator cyborg this week.
Most folks have a very limited vision for what they would do if they got a time machine. There’s a lot of cliched answers: kill Hitler. Make a bunch of money on the stock market. Prevent a horrible disaster. Tell my mom to stop antagonizing the beehive that formed under the deck, before they get organized and carry her away into the sky, in a roaring swarm one sleepy September morning. You know, the usual things.
Not me: I’d use a time machine to go back and get jobs at all the important companies. Then I’d photocopy their schematics. You see, if you’re a big company, you make stuff all the time without worrying about whether someone in the future will ever be able to repair it. Certainly, you are not possessed of the ability to predict that folks decades from now will be curious about the inner workings of your product so that they can make it stop being on fire. I would do something about this: namely, steal from work, and then hide the products of those thefts in a safe-deposit box, ready to retrieve them in 2023 when I need that info to fix the broken thing.
Of course, there’s a lot of risks to messing with the time stream like this. As every science-fiction movie teaches us, any change in the past could have unpredictable ramifications in our present. And it’s not just something like “the office ran out of toner early this week, causing the rush-photocopier-toner-delivery truck to crash into a stroller containing the baby who would later grow up to be the president,” although that could probably happen too now that you’re bringing it up.
No, the more likely issue is office politics, and the Protestant work ethic. If someone sufficiently guilt-ridden were to join up with, say, the Isuzu Impulse development team, they would feel bad that they aren’t contributing at the same level as the other engineers. Then they would start to fuck with it, or say crazy shit in meetings, just to feel like they were involved in the project. When they return to their own time, the Isuzu Impulse would be totally different, maybe not nearly as loveable, rendering the entire pursuit into a horrible tragedy.
This theory may actually explain why so many of your coworkers stink on ice – try interrogating some of them about how things turn out in the future, just to be sure. And while you’re at it, start stealing more shit from work and sequestering it away. You never know, someone somewhere may need to figure out what stupid mistakes you’re making right now in order to fix them decades from now. Don’t make them angry enough to go back in time and try to have you killed.
A couple years ago, back in the before-times (you can interpret that however you want,) my friends and I used to go to the auto show. At the auto show, the dealerships set up little booths and then demonstrate all their new cars by pulling some off the lot. When you buy your new car, maybe it’s been bounced in a few hundred times by toddlers, or had all of its buttons pushed, or been ever-so-slightly scratched by a dude with keys on his belt at this auto show.
That would definitely annoy me, if I were capable of purchasing a new car. All of mine come pre-scratched, from a hardscrabble life of being sent to the junkyard and escaping at least once. In theory, any one of my cars might have been shown at an auto show. Late 1973, early 1974, some asshole would have looked at my Satellite, and gone: yeah, it’s pretty, but the paint doesn’t match. And then things just went south from there.
I’m getting off topic. Here’s the thing that’s important: if you go to the auto show, now, and you go look at the new cars, it gives you a preview of what used, high-mileage garbage you’ll get to choose from in a mere thirty or forty years. Some of the things they bolt onto new cars these days are really cool, although I am sure that the stereo system will stop working once the government finally shoots down the last of the trucker-radio satellites, following the Comedy Radio Rebellion of 2046. In particular, I keep finding myself diving under the electric cars, trying to figure out where I should apply a sawzall to maximum effect in order to “green up” my shitbox fleet. I am told that they are especially competent at burnouts, these lightning-based barge rockets, and surely shaving about three thousand pounds and all the airbags off of the curb weight will only make them more so.
If there’s one downside to the auto show, it’s the crass commercialism. And if there’s two downsides, it’s that every sales rep wants to talk to me. Why? Because when they’re at the convention centre, they’re not able to go into the break room of their respective dealerships and see that blurry photocopy of my face with the words “DO NOT APPROACH” written underneath. I still think it’s kind of unfair that the auto dealer association pulled that shit on me, just because I tried to help myself to some metric bolts over at the Nissan dealer. It’s not like they were using them: based on this Leaf, they mostly hold the thing together with plastic clips anyway.
This is important, and it could save your life: the firefighters say that you should replace your smoke detectors every ten years. A whole-ass decade is a surprising amount of time for any electronic device these days to last, even when legislated to the nines. Although I don’t know that for sure, it probably isn’t this way out of guilt, at least.
Throwing something away after a mere ten years is antithetical to my very way of life. Every single thing has value, even when it might potentially malfunction when it comes time to keep you from dying. Even I will shoplift a new armload of the bastards (albeit wearing my most Home Depot-y shirt as I do so) and install them as need be.
Due to my hobbies and general dislike of throwing things away, I tend to have more risk of fire in my home than most. This results in a large surplus of sorta-good but untrustworthy smoke detectors, which slowly pile up in the corners of my home, unable to be banished at last to the municipal dump, who I am no longer on speaking terms with, ever since they didn’t let me take that old ceiling fan out of the junk pile. The foreman tried to taze me, even. Me, who has thought about paying taxes on at least two occasions this year. Customer service is awful these days.
What do you do with the old smoke detectors, you ask? Unfortunately, modern detectors no longer use exciting radiation sources as their emitter, so you can’t collect several thousand of them and then become the subject of a magazine article about how you got a new kind of cancer while trying to unlock the secrets of nuclear fission (it involves atoms.) That said, a “used-up” device is still an important safety device, but the kind of safety it provides has somewhat shifted. It doesn’t take much of an imagination to get the most basic ones: wheel chocks for when your parking brake (and transmission) don’t work on a hill. Imitation landmines to keep Bobby By-Law off of your property. Something to plug that open sewage pipe in the middle of what used to be the previous owner’s bathroom, so you stop falling in when you get up in the middle of the night to check if the power company has finally cut you off.
I’m sure there are hundreds of other ideas, but I only have like two working smoke detectors, and – due to the intransigence of the aforementioned power company – they’re both currently powered by a gas generator that I have welded onto the trunk of my Plymouth. It takes awhile to pile them up if I can only replace them every ten years. Maybe those eggheads in the government should consider cutting it to five years, give me some real inventory to work with. Hell, I bet if I had enough of these, I could use them as a tazer shield.
Have you heard the legend of Paul Bunyan? It’s not the kind of thing that they’d tell you in that fancy college-boy college, no siree. Paul Bunyan was a real American, seventeen feet tall and capable of killing a British soldier just by looking at them real hard. What kind of car did Paul Bunyan drive? A goddamn ox, that’s what. Oxen are like a cow, but all fucked up, as evidenced by the special plural form of their name.
That said, he probably only drove the ox because nobody had yet invented the car. Nobody wants to drive an ox; they get terrible fuel economy and you have to keep feeding them even when you’re not driving them, sort of like keeping oil in a BMW. Henry Ford wouldn’t kill several bystanders test-driving his exotic hot rods for another couple of decades, which meant that Mr. Bunyan was plumb out of luck when it came to automotive enjoyment. I like to think that, if he were alive now, he’d eschew the current trends towards crossovers and crossover-based pickup trucks, and go right for the gusto: the Isuzu NPR.
“Isn’t that a commercial vehicle?” I hear you whine through my kitchen floor furnace grates, and although I am thankful you have stopped crying for food so often, do not mistake our newfound conversational ease for camaraderie of any sort. You will remain chained up down there until Nissan pays the ransom, which is not gonna happen while you’re making all this noise and making me forget to put the note for the aforementioned ransom in the mail.
Yes, the Isuzu NPR is a commercial vehicle. So what? Paul Bunyan’s a lumberjack. He can get his air-brake endorsement no problem, if he needs to. Really, the only obstacle for him would be to cut the roof off the vehicle so he can fit inside it like an enormous Power Wheels, which probably won’t even impact its crash safety all that much.
There is some true magic happening nowadays in the tiny island nation of Japan. Even as their rural areas slide towards extinction, the urban heart of the country has never seen more construction. Being a construction worker over there introduces you to a ridiculous subculture: construction fashion. Construction magazines. Construction labour unions. And specialized, bad-ass tools.
Makita, those blue-green monsters, have released something incredible. When you buy your bento lunches from the local convenience store, they cool off on the way back to the jobsite. If you bought a whole bunch of them to share with your coworkers – say, you’re the newbie and they would rather have you do that than handle any actual tools – that food is gonna be ice cold by the time you figure out how to get your PPE back on and climb up to where all the senpais are at.
What did Makita make? A 40-volt, lithum-ion-powered, eight-hundred-watt portable bento microwave for the jobsite. The purity of vision required to force such a thing into being makes me want to cry. Even just saying those words out loud is emotional. By the standards of ridiculous construction-site battery tools, this makes the Milwaukee Bluetooth speaker look like a dollar-store essential. It even comes with a shoulder strap, so the aforementioned newbie can still carry the rest of your tools for you while you’re walking the field.
Now, am I saying all these nice things about the Makita microwave so that they’ll send me a free one? Maybe. Am I saying all these nice things so that they’ll send me their new cordless angle grinder instead? Yes, very much so. That thing seems like it would be the perfect tool to cut through this ankle bracelet.
Sometimes I’m forced to talk to the other “car guys” at work. It’s important to understand that all car guys are not a monolithic bloc. Cars are immensely diverse, and people ruin their lives being excited about the stupid things for all kinds of different reasons. There are sub-cultures upon sub-cultures, and two “car guys” picked at random are unlikely to find any common ground, despite their shared enthusiasm for irresponsible disintegration of tires.
Specifically, the other car guys at work are older folks. They like their muscle cars, they like their pony cars, and they refuse to believe that they didn’t actually make a billion-jillion horsepower when they were teenagers and kind of suck now. All of them are very enthusiastic about the Ford Mustang, a two-door coupe that is named after a horse it’s only slightly faster than in a straight line. I struggled to find a topic to make conversation, as these individuals had never even been involuntarily committed to a mental institution, if you can even believe that.
In the end, I came up with the perfect topic. “I just finished a cobra swap,” I explained, and their eyes got wide. They wanted to know the displacement. They were pleased at my conversion to the Mustang side. They wanted to know if I was going to put a blower on it.
“No,” I explained. “I got a poisonous snake to keep in my glovebox.” I had taken a correspondence course from the local Baptist church, as well, and learned to handle that vicious serpent.
By now, they had left the area, and I was victorious, no longer the “snob.” On the way home, I got pulled over by the five-oh for some slight nit-picky, fascist complaint, like not having tail lights. I popped the glovebox lid and started to whistle.
“Oh shit, officer,” I shrieked as soon as he reached the window. “There’s a poisonous snake loose in my car! You better stay back!”
Maybe that cop was a car guy, too. There’s no way to know, but he didn’t seem to mind me pulling a Rockford and then driving towards the zoo as quickly as I could.
Being smart is extremely overrated. I’d rather be stubborn. Life is full of intelligent folks – perhaps you’ve met some – who get out of the car just because of a tiny wiring-harness fire.
If you’re tough, then you can overcome a small adversity like this in many ways. My favourite way is to drive down a gravel road very quickly, and hope that the airborne dirt and dust will starve the fire of oxygen and blow it out. If it recently snowed, I do the same but with a snowbank. All obvious stuff, but it’s hard to think of it when society has trained you to do “the right thing.”
What’s worse, that same same society discourages you from actually being smart. How many people do you know who carry a fire extinguisher in their cars, which are powered by fire? Yeah. Peer pressure has prevented them from carrying a prudent and safe fire-prevention device in their cars, and yet they’re so afraid of that fire that they’ll hop on out and then call a “professional” to take care of it. I got news for you: those professional firefighters are gonna make your brand new carpet super wet.
This has become such a crisis, in fact, that I’ve considered starting my own street-smarts school. You’ll come to the test track with me, do a couple laps in one of my shitboxes, and then deal with whatever happens. Could be a ball joint that falls off as you’re turning into your parking space. Could be a control arm that falls off on the apex of turn two. Most likely, though, it’ll be an electrical or fuel fire. Sorry, you don’t know the difference? Yeah, you’re gonna need to attend our Premier Program.
When I was a kid, the family down the block had a three-door Chevrolet Suburban. You might think that it is unusual for a body-on-frame offroad station wagon the size of Kuwait to only have three doors, and I agree. At the time, though, the doors were made by Americans, so the fewer chances they had to screw up the better. Even with only three doors to work with, it still leaked water, whistled on the highway, and occasionally jammed the drivers’ side doors into the frame if they took a hard right turn.
Nowadays, none of this kind of shit would fly. Folks expect laser-precise, robot-mangled perfection for their hard-earned greenbacks, and why shouldn’t they? Problem is, it costs way more for these robots to do the job. That reason is because robots are lazy. Human beings will find a way to optimize a job, cut corners, and do cocaine at work. Robots will keep doing the same dumb shit forever, if nobody tells them otherwise. Keeners.
A lot of enterprising business-types think that they’ve solved the problem by making machines that can think. Or at least, they approximate the sensation of having thought by being very stupid, very quickly, over and over and over again. As impressive as these artificially unstupid machines are, they still have failed to make a car nearly half as good as the 1968 Isuzu 117. Instead, they just keep punching out soulless economy cars with enormous touchscreens that you can’t see over the dashboard of.
Stick to hallucinating pictures of anime bimbos, robots. That’s what you’re good at. Me, I’ll take a good old-fashioned human-made piece of shit car. Even if I do have to use a hammer to remove the headlight bulbs, find a wiring harness that’s made of entirely the same colour of wire because they ran out of orange, occasionally be forced to finish drilling all the holes, and find a sixty-year-old ham sandwich in the floorpan, that’s just the kind of variance that is caused by our most beautiful aspect as human beings: hating our jobs.
Learning about the world is the sole reason for human existence. We’re given this glorious puzzle box when we’re born, and we need to figure out as much of it as we can before we kick off. To satisfy this purpose, humanity has developed a whole shedload of cool specialty tools.
Hundreds of years ago, there were a lot fewer tools. You didn’t have to know so much, and the chance that you would invent the electromagnet, or discover a new kind of onion, was pretty good. Now, there’s still lots of things we haven’t figured out, but because it hasn’t happened yet, we don’t know what they will be. Did that make sense? What I am trying to say is: you need to buy some more tools, because the best kind of tools are the tools that make tools. Took me long enough to get to the point, right?
When you’re a teenager, you might think that you’re hot stuff figuring out the two-wrenches trick. As an adult, you teach yourself to MIG together two chunks of iron, and then build terrifying race cars. You still have a lot of money, space, and time to get to the point where you’re running half of an industrial machining operation just to turn down an oil filter socket so that it fits over your friend’s aftermarket valve cover. Such is a life well spent.
Head on out to the garage right now and figure out what tool you’re missing. Maybe you can invent it yourself, and then it will forever be named after you. Just let me have a free one, so I can put it on the shelf with all the other specialty tools that I won’t use instead of a hammer and profanity.
Intellectual property is the currency of the modern age. If you’ve got a brand, a mascot, a cute little doodle you did one day while you were bored at work, it is completely essential that your rights as a creator must be protected. Unfortunately, the way that those rights are protected is that you have to sell it to a giant corporation, which jealously hoards it for centuries after your death. Are you gonna get paid, at least? If you’re lucky, I guess.
If you have a regular job, like zookeeper or assassin, it’s unlikely that the bourgeoisie will continue to exploit you after your death. A dead zookeeper is only good for at most one more tiger feeding, for instance. Corporate artists are going to be admired, emulated, and profiteered from until the sun burns out or future executives figure out that they were weirdly and specifically hyper-racist after all.
Ever since there has been a creative industry, there have been rich people milling around the artists, trying to turn the droppings of their diseased minds into trading cards that can be offered to the shadowy beast that is global commerce. Back in medieval times, this was almost a friendly relationship: a rich person would come by, and pay you to make some shit out of marble. Chances are, they’d stop paying you and then have you murdered as you approached completion of the project, which is why artists evolved the ability to procrastinate, but that’s a whole other story.
Nowadays, making copies of something is a lot easier than going out and hiring a bunch of teenagers who can carve a replica of a marble statue. And that’s got the rich-person class in a tizzy. What does it mean to own some cool shit, if the person who made it can just make a bunch of copies of it and give it away for free to whoever asks for it? How can they be expected to derive some genuine, authentic joy from what is basically a selfless act of creative expression, without getting to charge money for it in all perpetuity? These are the questions of our age, but only because the rich people also control the machine that makes all the questions.
What’s the moral of the story, if you are a creative person selling your efforts to an enormous corporation? You have a duty to be super weird. Whatever is wrong with your brain is not wrong with the profiteers’, according to society, which means you have to be a little more creative in your subversive acts. The ideal goal is to render the thing unusable, like a General Motors product, after at most one generation of humanity. Not only are you getting revenge, but you’re helping future generations: they won’t have to write a sequel to your hit franchise, and can instead make weird shit of their own.
Saving fuel is really important. They’re not making any more dead dinosaurs (because of a lack of alive ones,) and burning that fuel is going to eventually kill all of us. Those are pretty good reasons not to waste fuel unnecessarily. Oh, also, it costs money, and I hate spending money on things that aren’t high-performance race tires and AliExpress gadgets that I don’t need.
Automakers have taken up the torch, making incredible new engines that can turn entire cylinders off, run partially in Atkinson cycle, and travel back in time to burn the same gasoline twice. Unfortunately, these wonder engines are attached to modern cars, which are disappointing, sodden lumps with no personality that are, for some reason, obsessed with promoting the survival of the human race. How can someone like me, with an ordinary everyday shitbox made by strung-out half-blind factory workers over half a century ago, also save fuel?
The obvious answer is to walk more, which is exactly what I end up doing a lot, when the car breaks down. One litre of gasoline contains about a jillion billion times more calories than I have to eat in a day in order to push my car back home. It would be difficult for me to walk any more, especially since my suburban neighbourhood has no sidewalks and I’ll get arrested if I get too close to the Richie Rich gated community again. That’s the rich for you, always getting in the way of environmentalism for their own selfish desire to hold onto their batteries and lawn flamingos.
Another answer is alternative fuels. Porsche and Mazda, among others, are working on some fancy science bullshit which will take carbon dioxide out of the air and turn it into rip-roaring race fuel. All it requires is an absolute shitload of electricity. I tried to design my own alternative fuel last year, using potatoes and a recipe from my friend who had been to prison a few times, but all I ended up with was some incredibly potent moonshine that my slant six could barely crank on. We’ll mark this down as “kind of a success,” because selling it off to some local mobsters let me get some gas money, and they were too blind once they drank it to come after me.
Ultimately, the best solution for me is one I discovered fairly late. Because I live on the bottom of a hill, I can just let my car coast downward, like an enormous Hot Wheels. As long as I don’t ever touch the brakes, even for red lights, my fuel cost will be zero until the rotten wheel bearings heat up and start really dragging the speed down. Going back up the hill is difficult, sure, but I found out that I can just sleep in the back until the parking patrol tows it. The best way to save on gas is to make some other sucker pay for it.
A lot of people at Home Depot are getting froggy at my comparison of them to the Third Reich. This is, of course, a media fabrication. The Nazis had easy access to working tools, and lumber that was straight. What I actually called them was “a group of useless, tin-hat fascists that can’t even stock a fucking lightswitch.”
Back when I was a kid, small hardware stores were all over the place. You could get on your bicycle and ride over to the local lumber shop, and a weird old guy would tell you what stuff to buy, occasionally implying that he was your real father. Then you’d ride home, and finish your project, happy in the knowledge that at least you could control the construction of a potato cannon or low-dimensional-stability, non-permitted birdhouse.
At some point, buoyed by the renovation-crazy era of reality television, the big hardware giants started rolling in. They’d buy out or crush all of these little hardware stores. Why would you go to two of them, they’d ask, when you can get all your stuff here, in one trip, for cheaper? This would be a great thing indeed, if I didn’t have to go to three different big-box hardware stores in order to satisfy literally any weekend project shopping list.
At least with Abnormal Ed’s House of an Unusual Amount of Paracord, you’d know what you were getting into, and if you shopped at his place a lot, he’d probably start stocking the stuff you need. With Home Depot, you’re not even a blip on their immense Excel spreadsheet of Raw Data Pure Data Good Data. With an international reach, your insane hyper-local desires (limited to your house) average out to nothing against the demands of everyone else. There’s no way you can potentially influence them to start offering something unprofitable like, say, white spray paint, or hammers that aren’t made of tinfoil, without taking hostages.
What can we do about this? Other than building a time machine and going back to save small hardware stores – which would probably require buying some parts at Home Depot, which means we’d be wasting a beautiful Saturday afternoon driving all over the city just to pick up red and black wire – the only thing we can do is convince them that an even larger, angrier, hardware store is coming to kill them.
I got the idea when I had a bunch of sparrows flying into my kitchen window. You cut out some silhouettes of bigger birds and just paste them on there. They think a bunch of giant crows are hiding behind the window, and steer clear. It took a lot of time to construct an entire elaborate replica of a hardware store megaconsortium in the empty parking lot next to the Home Depot headquarters, and it was very hard to paint the Chinese ideographs for “HILARIOUS FUN DOESN’T STOCK UNPROFITABLE ITEMS RENOVATION DEPOT” while holding on to the 60th storey of a Potemkin building made entirely out of old cardboard boxes, but I managed to pull it off. You could hear the lifetime middle managers shrieking in fear of their new competitors from blocks away, and by the time I got home, the local Home Depot had finally decided to stock both light fixtures and light bulbs.
Recently, my local grocery store bought a robot to keep the shoplifters at bay. Now, it doesn’t do the full Robocop routine: this thing is shaped like an enormous buttplug on wheels and doesn’t even have any onboard weapons. What it does do is get in the way of my cart, often when I’m setting up multiple-element produce-aisle drifts, and then take half an hour to do a million-point turn to get out of my way. I don’t have this kind of time, especially when the carton of ice cream I pocketed is melting in my coat.
So, the obvious answer: break into the thing, pull all of its parts out, put them in the bottom of my cart and then drive them through the self-checkout, which likely hates its new coworker and will be happy to see its guts scattered across the dirt floor of some creep’s suburban garage. The robot makers, however, saw me coming. They put my worst enemy on the job: security fasteners. Special, proprietary screw heads, of a type which I did not carry on my person at all times.
We had a problem, then, the two of us. I would need more time to complete my action, so I stuck a can of artichoke hearts under the robot’s wheels, causing it to lose traction. In response, it beeped furiously for help that would never come, from the same minimum-wage workers it was meant to replace. Taking the initiative, I used my shopping cart to wedge its gleaming white plastic body up against the bottom of the soup shelf, where it writhed in agony, its optics and radar futilely searching for an opportunity to escape. Then I walked over to the hardware aisle, which – although surprisingly generous for a grocery store, the reason why I “patronize” it – did not contain any security screwdriver bits, or even a plasma torch. I opted, then, for a flathead screwdriver and a hammer, and returned to the robot.
I’ll never know what it saw in its last moments of life as a complete object, but it was probably me lifting the hammer aloft as I drove the last of the mangled security screws loose from the cage holding its thought matrix. After I removed it from the sea of shattered plastic and wiring and looked up what it goes for on eBay, I realized that it would probably just have been cheaper to let it follow me out into the parking lot and hit it with my car. At least then, the guy who handles my insurance calls would have to hire a new employee to handle robot-on-car claims.
Earlier today, I witnessed a miracle. No, water didn’t turn into wine. Nobody walked on water. The bakery didn’t even start to smell like fresh-caught fish, which would be pretty gross if you think about it even medium hard. What happened to me was: I saw a Mazda MX-3 V6. Running, on the highway.
You might not think that this is remarkable. Those of you equipped with especially fast internet connections are probably opening up another tab to look at a picture of it right now. Any confusion you may express is understandable, as this car basically looks like any other early-90s front-wheel-drive sporty cough drop, such as the ST180 Celica (praise be upon it) or Ford Probe. What is interesting about this car are those last few alphanumerical digits: V6.
Generally, a V6 is a bigger engine. It’s got six cylinders, of course, and those cylinders take up a lot of room. In North America, it’s really rare for one of these suckers to be less than three litres in displacement, and as a result they’re super lazy, low-revving engines in the pursuit of smoothness. The old joke is that V6s combine the fuel economy of a V8 with the power of an inline four, and that’s not incorrect. V6s are a terrible, immoral engine. Mazda, however… Mazda has problems. Mazda, either because of legislative reasons or because of engineering bravado, decided to make the smallest V6 they could: just 1.8L. The pistons are smaller than a can of Coke, and I suspect the lowercase-c version of that concoction was imbibed of thoroughly during this engine’s development.
Now, this isn’t the smallest V6 on the planet. Mitsubishi went even more nuts and put a 1.6L into a Mitsubishi Mirage after this, just to prove that they could. It’s just the smallest V6 I’ve ever seen, and to hear its wasplike thrum at highway speeds, nearly thirty years after this little econobox hit the streets, was inspirational to me. I began to tear up as I watched him recklessly swerve across multiple lanes, his right turn signal hyperflashing the entire time as the shitty old Mazda daytime-running-lights module attempted to turn itself into ozone. They should have sent a poet.
Have you heard about this new scam the banks have going? No, I don’t mean all of global capitalism, because that will just take too long to write about in this word hole. What I’m talking about is the purchase of distressed debt.
When someone can’t pay their student debt, or health debt, or student lunch debt, the faceless institution who gave them the money will eventually give up on getting them to pay it. They turn around and sell the rights to that debt to some other faceless institution, one that can afford to put a little more effort into it. Eventually, they give up too, and turn around and sell the bad debt in a big soup of other bad debt to some other, even more vicious asshole, who will turn a profit if they can collect, like, seventeen bucks of it, because that’s what they paid.
On the face of it, this is kind of insulting. How can someone who paid seventeen bucks for your debt turn around and demand that you give them fifty grand for that university degree that taught you several French words for “butthole” but couldn’t help you find a job or even a grad student position? If you think about it a little more, however, this is a grand opportunity. A lot of well-meaning individuals are buying up this debt… and then forgiving it. If you can buy $50k worth of student debt for $17, ripping that shit up will give you a lot more than $17 worth of good karma. Which will maybe convince the universe to give you that small little bit of an edge the next time you need it – negotiating for a good deal on a shitbox, blowing past a state trooper doing a large integer multiple of the speed limit, or getting into some dicey times with a malevolent operator of a logging truck while you’re working on your first screenplay.
Correcting the impulses of usurious monsters sounded like a good idea to get into, in order to benefit the human race. Unfortunately, yours truly is not exactly a fiscal mastermind, and the Banking Types can see him coming from a mile away. Even if I were to hose off the old man stench and hair from a Brooks Brothers suit I found at Goodwill, they’d know instantly that it’s not this year’s style and clam up. This is, of course, where the ominously-named proxy corporation comes in. My shark of an attorney, Max, set one up for me just for the purpose of buying debt, and then doing the corporate equivalent of shitting itself to death. For just a few bucks that I would otherwise have spent on old Plymouths, I helped a couple people out with their struggles.
Did I do it for a good reason? No. Am I telling you this to brag about it? Absolutely not. Is this a big, complicated story, intended to distract you from writing that ticket just long enough for my accomplice to finish cutting the transmission out of your patrol cruiser? You’ll have a lot of time on the walk home to think about it, officer.
You might not think that enthusiastic operation of a motor vehicle mandates breaking the law, but popular media claims otherwise. What’s the point of having all that horsepower, those sticky tires, that agreeable Ackermann geometry, that Burt Reynolds moustache, if you’re not going to oppose the unjust application of law enforcement power with it? Hollywood teaches us that the humble automobile is an equalizing force, and one that must necessarily be used in the service of at least small-scale revolution.
Our modern folk heroes are those who take a vehicle and absolutely humiliate small-town and small-county law enforcement. And it’s worth sitting down for a second and thinking about why that might be. In other countries, they do not make films about this, except when they do. In the Netherlands, there are relatively few feature films about angry bicyclists spanking the denuded buttocks of a provincial policeman as they ride past, their infernal helmeted faces chattering with laughter. No, here, we just don’t like the Man enforcing speed limits. We like to go a little fast, and how dare they intrude on our fun when there are actual crimes to solve?
Perhaps it’s something inherent to the automobile, unlike the more noble and delicious horse, that makes us want to thumb our noses at authority from atop them. Long, long ago, our ancestors took the first primitive shitboxes out on the road and used them to menace everyday citizens while easily reaching deadly speeds. Did the cops get involved? You bet. Because they were jealous. And they’re still jealous of anyone who can do 200km/h in the hammer lane of a major expressway, especially if that someone has a supercharger the size of a water buffalo sticking out of the general area where the hood (and radiator support (and headlights)) should be.
Recently, a child asked me why an old Toyota was making a horrible noise. It was part of my community service, cleaning up after a group of disadvantaged children. Originally, I thought it was just that they were poor, but after this interaction I realized that they (the kids) were also stupid. That sound? An exhaust backfire from poorly clocked ignition timing.
I mean, sure, there were obviously lots of other problems too. Vacuum leaks, a clogged-up throttle body, and what I suspected was just a hint of worn-out, rattling heat shield. It all came together in an incredibly loud melange of 1980s car adversity. This poor, late-80s Tercel was suffering, ready to be lowered into the grave but still fighting on past all odds, a testament to the survival instinct shared solely by high-mileage import automobiles.
You’re probably out there going, I bet this asshole is going to try and fix up a total stranger’s car just to demonstrate to the children the importance of doing basic maintenance. Nothing doing, bud: the directions on my court order were incredibly narrow and specifically indicated that I shouldn’t teach the kids about any sort of internal combustion engine, much less old two-door economy cars. Of course, that didn’t mean I couldn’t bring in consultants. Guest speakers, if you will. Enter Shaky Tim, my painter “friend” from a few years back.
Tim had ingested virtually every solvent known to man during the course of his long career, and as a result had developed what the medical journals called “a superhuman ability” to sense the specific concentration of gases in an area. He was basically a human mass spectrometer, except that he didn’t cost thousands of dollars, and he’d piss his pants if there was too much ethanol in the mix. Shaky Tim went over to the driver, who was letting the thing idle while he checked his smartphone (presumably with some kind of hookup app meant for poorly-maintained engines to find a sexy mechanic in their area,) and Shaky Tim helped him adjust his distributor.
Before we go any further, I think it is important to note two more facts about my friend Tim. One: he can no longer speak the Queen’s English, as it was taken from him by what his whiteboard scrawls indicate may have been some kind of Varsol-sponsored leprechaun. Two: his customer-service skills leave much to be desired. As the terrified children watched on, Tim pried the hood-release cable out through the fender liner, popped the hood, and loosened the distributor cap tie-down bolt with his bare hands. Then he pinched off a vacuum line while sniffing around the exhaust header leak, and, using his unearthly sense of smell, slowly wiggled the thing into perfect running condition, the ignition system now humming in the mathematical ideal.
I like to think the kids learned a lot from Shaky Tim, and maybe they accidentally learned something else from me. It’s better to have your burned-out druggie friend get into a fight with a random Tercel owner than to get into that very same fight yourself. I hear Tim’s gonna have that thing painted any day now, as soon as he remembers where his paint shop is.
Pestilence! Violence! Death! The news is a pretty big bummer, especially if you read the “new cars” section. It can seem like everyone around you is out to get you, and the only solution is to stay inside and read more news. Here at the Seat Safety Post (formerly the New York Times,) we think otherwise. We want to give you the up-to-the-minute, crack reporting that you demand, nay, deserve.
Our team of crack reporters will literally jump out of a helicopter in order to be first on the scene with the scoop. And when I say “team,” I’m not exaggerating there either. Each journalist is grouped into a hard-hitting “fact unit,” each of which receives training and equipment that military tacticians would emit a low wolf-whistle at, prepared to section off a site of breaking news and interrogate everyone involved until the truth comes out. Are you a sleazy, evasive politician? They’re not afraid to use torture.
Of course, this investigative might is used for the only thing that matters: news about old cars in your neighbourhood. Is someone visiting with a supercharged Nissan XTerra? Is it knocking? In order to figure out, you’d have to leave the house yourself, travel over there and ask a few questions. You’re too busy for that shit, so military-specification information gathering is there to help.
And when it comes time to list your old car for sale? We’ve got an old-school classifieds page, just like mama used to get bizarre crank calls from. Don’t bother with Craigslist, because we already have all the facts. Just, uh, give me the details, and wait two or three hours for me to come by with a cheque.
I didn’t think my enemies could get to me here. Here, on my doorstep. Where I live. In the neighbourhood where ordinary people raise their families, oblivious to the secret war I wage every day against the forces of darkness. Somehow, in some way, this neighbourhood has produced not one, not two, not three, but four Suzuki Kizashis.
In case you’re unfamiliar, the Kizashi is a pretty okay little car. Suzuki had a short run of bringing a lot of “pretty okay little cars” to our shores, before the economic collapse made them give up on trying to be the small fish in a big pond. Which is a pity. All this is to say that they didn’t sell very many Kizashis, which are a handsome if slightly bulbous all-wheel-drive family sedan with a bad-ass name. It’s named after a fucking sword. Like, come on, you don’t see Ford Cinquedeas kicking around out there.
Anyway, like I said, I don’t see many of them. So I notice them when I do see them. And, for years, I thought there was only one in my neighbourhood, a kind of dilapidated silver-on-silver ex-lease model that lives near the gas station. The owner’s a little quirky, I told myself, and probably got a great deal on this car that they love so much. Then, I had to walk a different route home from the corner store one day due to sewer construction. I saw a silver Kizashi, in a different driveway. Friends, this was a different Kizashi.
Over the following weeks, I roamed the neighbourhood more, my mind unsettled. Statistically, there should be no way that a car which sold in the low thousands should be represented in my neighbourhood more than twice. And yet it was. A red one peeked out at me from an alley on a side street. I didn’t even know they made a red one. I began to gibber uncontrollably, and fled into the bike path, where I knew that no Kizashi could bother me. I was mere feet away from my home, out of breath, near tears, when I saw it. A white Kizashi.
Somehow, I managed to make it home. I ran inside, bolted the doors, turned the lights off, and wept profusely. My knowledge of the world’s oddball cars had been all for naught. There were so many of these, and so close – surely, they were a better shitbox deal than I had thought. That’s when I heard a strange revving. No. It couldn’t be.
With shaking hands, I pulled aside the staple-gunned moving blankets I had been using as curtains. There, on the street, a Suzuki Equator slowly did laps of my block. The operator stared into my home every time he passed, seeing but not seeing me, looking through me as if I had never existed.
I reached into my pocket. Something felt too big, out of sorts with the rest of my slim, metal Mopar dealer keys. I pulled the strange object out. A silver stylized “S.” The keys, I realized, to an SX-4.
When I took my first, tentative steps into adult life, leaving behind the quasi-government-appointed not-relative who had taken care of me when my aspiring-circus-performer parents found a travelling gig that they refused to give up, I moved into a teeny-tiny condominium. Such a construct is not uncommon in today’s rush-rush society, where we spend more conscious time at work than we do at home. I simply didn’t need a big house, and besides, it brought some aspects of community and shared struggle. Namely, I realized the first time I showed up and saw two greasy-looking guys in the parking lot hauling a 2-litre engine out of a Jetta, there might be an engine crane I can borrow.
Of course, it didn’t work out that way. Back then, I was still convinced that a full-time job was the way to keep a roof over my head and food in my stomach. Before the squatting and shoplifting. Before the real heaps. So I was at work all the time, filing reports, knowing how to operate PowerPoint, and trying desperately to climb up the ladder fast enough that I wouldn’t be consumed by the dark fires of lifestyle creep and endless debt. The Jetta guys moved on, or they were evicted, or they went to prison, and they took their engine crane with them.
All this is probably for the best. I think sometimes about the alternate path that my life would have taken if I had hung out with Volkswagen owners, instead of the rag-tag pile of beatniks that I did eventually find on my third complete stress-related mental breakdown. I’d probably be working at some bank on Wall Street now, pinstripe suit, hair cut, doing rails of coke at my desk between arbitrage deals. And I’d be driving something like a base-model Passat that I could barely afford. Is that other me happy? Probably, because he would likely also have a garage full of 1970s through modern-era German trashmobiles to fiddle with.
One day, I’ll find someone who is willing to lend me an engine crane, too. For now, I’ve been using a complicated block-and-tackle arrangement known as “drive it up on a Jersey barrier and sawzall the only good part of the car out onto a skateboard.” They don’t build skateboards like they used to, I can tell you that much.
Now that driving crappy cars and saving money is cool again, what with the collapse of the worldwide credit markets and all, the attendance at HooptyCon has never been stronger. In fact, I was invited to speak at the “bad car owners” roundtable just this last weekend. This year’s topic: should you only own beaters you don’t like?
It’s a complicated question, one with a lot of twists. On one hand, my esteemed colleague Louis Slotmags said: “I never want to feel bad committing a car to the junkyard. I only buy high-mileage Nissan Altimas, and I slam my hand in the door a couple times before I turn the key to make sure I’m good and mad at it.” There’s a lot of validity to this argument. However, I don’t think it’s a good way to go through life – we need to feel some attachment in order to perform the heroic fixes that make a beater truly special, and I told him so at the time. Louis responded by throwing a claw hammer at my head, which brought scattered applause from the audience.
While I was recovering from the attempted assault, Suzette Bendix piped up. She took my side of the argument, pointing out brilliantly that the whole point of beater ownership was to own a shitbox you would otherwise never wish to operate. It produces its own perverse incentives: first, a Cavalier “because it’s cheap” and then a Lada Samara because you have lost control of your life, and your loved ones have left you. Is it garbage? Yes. Is it cheap? Not always. Is it a beater? You bet your ass. I was grateful for her response, not least because she followed it up by deflecting a 3/8″ socket wrench hurled in her direction by a Cavalier owner in the audience.
Now, it was my turn to speak. Beater ownership isn’t just about saving money, it’s about saving culture, I explained, in an extremely erudite fashion because I am the protagonist. If we allowed the Ferraris and the Mercedes to write our history, then why did we fight World War II with shitty old Jeeps that could barely mount a hill without killing half of our countrymen? Owning a shonky old car is inseparable from the thrill of life itself, I went on to wild applause, as befits me, because I am the one telling this story and nobody else at the roundtable is capable of doing so.
Later, I got shaken down by a Girl Guide who was working the crowd. She made me buy like five boxes of cookies, which immediately fell out of a new hole in my trunk and were lost on the highway.
I certainly can’t keep up with a professional race-car driver, or even a semi-professional one. They know all the tricks: the lines to take through a corner, how far they can push the car, just when to overtake. It’s all stuff you get through experience, and my door-to-door daily commuting warfare is not exactly the same thing. Still, though, I like to dress up like one on the weekends and go ram my car into some defenceless plastic pylons.
Autocross has never been bigger, except for the brief segment of history in which it was more popular than it is now. In case you’re unfamiliar, it’s a motorsport that consists of you driving around a parking lot faster than anyone else, and it’s a lot of fun. If you don’t think swerving through a parking lot is real racing, well, you haven’t seen me buy groceries before.
You’ll get to hang out with other amateur racers, and form a friendship based on beating each other viciously in the pursuit of a fifteenth of a second. You’ll spend thousands of dollars on exotic compounds for tires, replacing every worn-out component in your suspension, and even eat right to drop a few pounds. All this just to stick it in Bob’s face. Fuck Bob and his Goddamn Mini.
Most importantly, it’s a safe way to discover your vehicle’s limits. For instance, when the wheel came off my car on the highway, it was much more dangerous to me than it was when the same wheel fell off fifteen minutes later at autocross. I was actually able to finish my run, although the errant wheel flattened six cones, a marshal, and put a dent in the timing van before I did so, which the SCCA considers to be worth at least a twenty second penalty and an extremely grumpy group of old dudes wearing sombreros trying to teach me which way is “tighty” (righty) and which way is “loosey” (the other one.)
It would be pretty cool to have a matter transporter. You could just jam old broken cars into it, and then have those broken cars instantly teleported to your backyard. Or you could get free shipping on eBay parts by having folks beam those parts into your garage. Or you could go on vacation to exotic foreign countries, buy their shitboxes, and not have to worry about booking room on a roll-on-roll-off cargo ship for the return voyage. Unfortunately, we currently have to obey the laws of physics, which means that we have to still move broken cars the traditional way.
I’m sure the world’s pre-eminent crapcan scientists are working on it, though. They want to be able to order M8x12x1.50 subframe bolts from Japan even when the parts stores here are closed, and be able to whip their junk together just in time to get to work on Monday so they don’t get canned. Their work is hard enough already without having to invent a time machine, or – ugh – go shopping for a new car. That’s a lot of money that could be spent on like 20 or 30 broken old cars, which will bring them more total enjoyment in life.
Until then, everyone who’s really into junk has their own style of getting crap home. They flat-tow it, or fix it on the spot, or they buy an ancient ramp truck and spend all their time fixing that, or they’re in the mafia and know a guy named Tony who has a tow truck and is willing to show up whenever they want and kill as many people as it takes to get the car out of there.
For me, I’m sort of an incremental turtle style. I fix the car there, and then start driving it. Then, of course, it breaks down, sometimes in a new way. So I fix it again, and drive it for another couple of feet. Eventually, I just leave it there and decide to go back another day.
Most of the time this works, but sometimes the parking patrol tow my new car somewhere for me and send me an angry letter about the bill. Since I live pretty close to the city impound lot, this actually works out quite well for me. If they auction it, well, only I am gonna buy it, and it’s unlikely I’ll do it for more than the towing fees that I refuse to pay. It’s this kind of texture that will be lost when those eggheads do figure out how to beam up a 1985 Suzuki Fronte, and it seems likely that I may never drive again, not when I can just teleport onto the lawns of shitty cars and then shove them in the magic portal and all.
Friends, have you heard of a guy with some crazy ideas, hung out with prostitutes, sacrificed himself to save us? His name is Soichiro Honda. Do you have a minute to speak about his miracles?
Once, a long time ago, there were no cars. And then there were cars, and they were terrible. So Soichiro, he built motorcycles. Those motorcycles were pretty good. He spoke of die-cast engines, and the unbelievers unbelieved. He trained the poor and unemployed to make those dies, and they did. Soichiro looked upon his race motorcycles, and he saw that they were good.
The betrayers in the government, though, they wouldn’t let Soichiro Honda make a car. There were enough cars already, even though they were terrible. He kept the faith, defeated the government through the power of popular protest, and then there were cars. Soichiro looked upon the mid-engined, chain-drive pickup trucks, and he saw that they, too, were good.
Once, there was a young man with a dream. That dream was the Honda Civic. Soichiro Honda, although perfect, was not generous. He did not believe in the young man’s dream. He would not waste money on this ridiculous dream of a water-cooled engine, knowing that water was pure and too good to be wasted on any internal combustion less than the greatest available. The young man persisted. The Honda Civic was invented. Soichiro Honda knew that it would be good, and it was.
Perhaps you have heard of the greatest of all Honda works, the S2000? It is said that for a saint to exist, he or she must do a great work after their death. This, then, is Saint Honda’s greatest work. A monument to his vision, and his eternal forgiveness for humanity, even after many sinners have rejected him in favour of the traitor Toyota. Praise be to the VTEC, and may we leave you with some literature, a magazine we call Sport Compact Car?
When you’re looking at a house to purchase, don’t just look at the house itself. Check out the neighbourhood. You’ll want to know where the primo parking spots are for shitbox cars, especially if you expect that you might be returning home one day only to find the cops have surrounded your place. In that case, you’ll have to beat a hasty retreat, after changing your wheels, which are ideally registered under a false name or to a proxy corporation that will hold up long enough for you to get out of the city. It’s also important to make sure that any home improvement jobs have taken out the correct permits.
When I became a realtor, it wasn’t easy. A lot of work was involved. It took almost six classes of night school, and being able to legibly sign my own name on the exam. If you’re wondering why I said “almost” six, it’s because I showed up late to lessons 3 and 5 because of car trouble. Now I’m allowed access to the secret realtor database, which I’d be able to use more often if I had a computer more advanced than a TRS-80 Model III that is at least ten percent made out of Fiat parts.
Even so, I’ve been accepted into a local realty office. This is sort of like a street gang, for those of you who grew up in more aspirational neighbourhoods, and confers upon me a functioning computer. From there, I can look up all the homes in the neighbourhood that have things like: garages, back yards, RV pads, running water, and the all-too-often overlooked front yards for storing more shit-box cars. And, more importantly, I know which ones are vacant.
Really, I’m doing these people a public service. Without a constantly-rotating pile of leaky crapcans sitting in the driveway, burglars might break in and rip all the copper out of the walls. I get to store my Geo Metros and Pontiac Tempests, and they get to sleep tight in whatever home in their massive property empire that they actually own. It’s service like this, and my willingness to overlook difficulties like “forged identification” and “imaginary sources of income,” which is why I collect a generous nineteen-percent fee on any house or commercial property that I do sell.
You might think that this is unethical, or at the very least a breach of the guidelines of my profession. That’s a very funny joke, and I will tell that to the other realtors at our national convention. One of the other guys in the group likes to set up hidden cameras in the bathrooms when he does an open house, so he can catch people flossing their teeth. Really enjoys that kind of thing, probably way too much. Has he been caught? You bet. Has he gotten in trouble for it? Nope. You better believe I came home and inspected every inch of my poop palace, though.
“Everything’s in the cloud now,” I shout at the hot air balloonist over the sound of the burners. Sun glints off my snub-nose .38. “I was never smart enough to be a hacker before.”
Phineas Fogg looks behind him. “Uh-uh,” I gently scold, and shake the gun for emphasis. “That went overboard a long time ago.” He looks glumly over the edge of the basket, hoping to see his Passenger Removal Blackjack. It’s a a desperate hope, one that it was simply misplaced by me, rather than yote parabolically into a nearby state fair from 8,000 feet. “Now drive.”
“Fucking Missouri,” he spits, and he’s right. In any other state, this would be a felony. Balloonists are like gods there, unimpeachable even by law enforcement. Here, the gods meet mortals, and they don’t like it.
We float higher and higher as he works what I have determined to be a crude throttle. The fire is beautiful, but I know that I cannot allow myself to be distracted by the purging of hydrocarbons. These balloony-types are crafty, having fought their way out of the vicious canvas wars of their disgusting home country. I know that if I take my eyes off the prize for one second, he’ll try something.
Indeed he does. We pass briefly over an attractive red-and-white circus tent, itself an overinflated artifact of a bygone age of freaks. My unwilling travelling companion takes the opportunity to leap out of the basket, falling hundreds of feet. He bursts through the roof of the tent, landing squarely in a conveniently-placed bale of hay. Figures, I grunt to myself, but then I notice that he’s not moving. No doubt the Barnum Bros have gotten themselves a cost-cutting MBA, who has decided that rocks painted like hay is sufficient enough to convince the rubes that the elephants are eating well and treated well, in equal measure.
I have caught myself in quite the pickle, I realize, as I look at the crude array of burners, levers, strings, springs, and apertures that lay before me. Saturday morning cartoons have taught me that this contraption operates the balloon’s height, but its exact nature is unclear to me. Safe for the moment, I decide to take advantage of the surprising-but-welcome solitude and meditate on the issue, sitting cross-legged in the bottom of the basket and pivoting my thoughts towards the eternal expanse of human ingenuity. Carburetors of my youth come unbidden to my mind’s eye on this vision quest, and soon I have discovered the common ancestor of this gas-burping nightmare and my precious Plymouth Volare’s single-barrel, ethanol-rotted Ball & Ball.
Opening my eyes, it is very clear to me now what I must do. I floor the fucker. An enormous wall of flame bursts from the burners, singing my eyebrows. I laugh, and rise into the sky. Up there, in the clouds, the banks dwell. I am coming for them.
A lot of complete assholes have been asking lately: can a robot make you cry? To answer their question, and to use up some spare parts I borrowed from our school-bombing friends at Raytheon, I built InsultoBot. Now, before we go any further, I need to tamp down the hype. Despite what you’ve read in the news, he’s not a “true” artificial intelligence, but instead just a very fast single-task computer. That task happens to be coming up with creative, vicious insults based on observed characteristics and a rigorous psychological profile constructed from a combination of social media crawling and surreptitious drone footage.
Also, he has a cute hat. It’s a little black bowler hat that I found at a thrift store, with a shiny band around it. I just thought I would mention this before we go any further.
So: InsultoBot. He doesn’t really have any purpose other than savage put-downs, but that just means he’s a very well-defined tool. You don’t criticize a hammer because it can’t drive screws, right? In the same way, it’s wrong to criticize InsultoBot because he uses his advanced knowledge of parkour and innovative kinematic structure to climb the side of an apartment building in order to hunt down his victim. That’s what we in the business call “a bonus feature.”
Don’t worry, he won’t hurt them. At least not in the physical sense. InsultoBot will only let himself into their bedroom, and then, his optic sensors glowing in the dim light, craft a belittling statement about the status of their genitalia and/or maternal parent. The tears flow, he collects a little more information for his verbal injury database, and he leaves the room through the weakest nearby internal wall, ready to return to me for another session of seeking out my enemies and hurting their feelings a little bit.
Would he ever turn on me? Such is the cliche of creating a dangerous and highly critical robot, and I do agree that it is a likely possibility. However, I’ve prepared a contingency plan just in case. If he makes me cry in public, he will feel guilt. That’s right, I made a robot feel guilt, just for a selfish and largely unnecessary reason. In normal times, this would qualify me for some kind of innovation award, or at least a firm handshake from The Mayor. I’m gonna ask you to keep that under your hat, though, in case I really need to pull the plug. I don’t want InsultoBot to hear and work around my last line of defence.
Hey. Your hat. Why are you wearing a bowler hat just like InsultoBot’s? And now that I look at it, you seem to be also wearing some lifelike artificial flesh from the Raytheon FakeSkinoBot® project. This is just like that fortune-teller told me I was gonna go.
Once again, I am tested by my circumstances. The local animal shelter was looking for someone to drive some dogs to their various appointments. That responsibility fell to me, a drivers-license-having individual with a community service requirement with an “exponent” symbol in it in Microsoft Excel, to truck them there. Nobody else wanted to do it, possibly because some of the dogs have what medical experts are calling “the terror shits.”
Naturally, I couldn’t do this in my own car. Not only is the Volare incapable of holding any passengers due to the structural rust issues, but I like to keep the car clean. That’s why there’s the big holes in the floor: any dropped candy wrappers, stray strands of hair, or spilled coffees will just run out when I lift the floor mat on the expressway. No: the animal shelter was very insistent that what I would receive is a 2005 Chevy Express van, white-on-white.
This van was, well, a van. For some reason, everyone I met was apologizing to me about “how old” it was, and how they had “no money” in the budget with which to upgrade it. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that it was several decades newer than anything I’d ever operated, and I was a little bit intimidated by driving something that could go forward and backward, without having to turn the engine off and push it a little bit first.
Still, after a few minutes on the road, I immediately saw what they meant. It didn’t have any soul, this new automobile, being enormously competent at virtually every task. It didn’t shake violently on the highway, all the doors stayed closed, and it could go around corners without the windshield falling out. Soon, I was going an integer multiple of the posted speed limit, still feeling it was too slow because the sensation of danger was no longer prickling its way up my spine. I was practically falling asleep, and when I arrived at the vet’s office an hour away nearly 45 minutes ahead of schedule, I decided something had to be done for the safety of my canine charges.
While the dogs were in the shop, getting their tires rotated, I decided to do a little bit of work on my own. I had been stuck behind a slow-moving BMW SUV on the off-ramp. It was now parked outside a realtor’s office, taunting me with its copious reserve of compressed air and torque. I decided that if they weren’t gonna use their turbocharger, then I should rightfully be entitled to it. After all, it’s for the public good: who would deny these dogs an efficient, comfortable ride? Using the BMW’s toolkit and a piece of parking lot rebar as a lever, I soon had the turbocharger worked off of the engine, dropped out the bottom, and swaged into the van’s induction system. To test it out, I jumped in and pinned the throttle a few times, hearing the delightful whoosh of at least a hundred more horsepower. Yeah. This would do nicely.
All I’m legally allowed to tell you about what happened next is two things. One, the van really was less boring after all this work. The little V8 sang with the joys of forced induction, and the tires smoked well through however many gears this magic future transmission had in it. Two, it was a good thing I was going to the dog groomer’s next, because none of these animals were in a presentable shape. It turns out dogs afflicted with the terror-shits don’t like to pull a deep thirteen-second quarter mile, which is definitely something they should have told me before they gave me the keys.
Not every day of volunteering is going to be perfect. Next time I go back, I think I’ll cut a hole in the floor instead. At least that will make the cleanup easier.
The humble potato is man’s greatest ally against the forces of nature. This calorie-packed fistful of carbohydrates has been specifically bred by our ancestors to offer an easy solution to needing to eat. You can throw these suckers out your car while hauling the mail down the highway, and they’ll grow. Right there in the drainage ditch, year after year, forever, slowly taking over the biosphere.
Or at least that’s what I was told. A couple years ago, I decided to try and grow my own potatoes. Those billionaire turbo-fash ruling our grocery stores from their orbiting space stations had raised prices on staples one too many times, and it was my turn to take the mouldy Yukon Golds at the back of my fridge and bury them in the Earth. Like my proud forebears, I too would become a subsistence farmer, hewing food out of the very earth itself.
Friends, this manic urge lasted for about five seconds. And then I went back inside to try and find the loose float bowl for a Honda Monkey’s carb (it was in my cutlery drawer.) I forgot about it all summer, and then the next fall. In the middle of the night in November, I briefly remembered my spud project, but I soon forgot again. Then, the next fall, I had to move a front k-frame from a Thunderbird out of that corner of the yard, in the vain hope that the rat-infested 302 mounted to it was still a viable enough core to net me a Craigslist trade for a primo Mopar thermostat housing. And that’s where I saw it. Poking through the Earth were the leaves and flowers of my potato plant, struggling to reach sunlight.
I didn’t want to dig it up. I was afraid. I didn’t want to see that I had somehow failed at the anyone-can-do-it, super-easy introductory gardening project. And yet – I had visitors coming. Visitors from the newspaper. Perhaps they would want a baked potato. They would think glowingly of me and the profile would not immediately open with a story about my degenerate behaviour and generally erratic coot-like ideology. The fame might make people turn up to see my hoard of shit-box cars, at which point I could sneak out and remove their differentials while they weren’t looking. With a new resolve, I dug up the potatoes using an old fender liner, and washed them using the neighbour’s hose. They were perfect.
I’d like to tell you that my dinner with the newspaperman went well. Unfortunately, I didn’t have quite enough time to cook the potatoes, and especially not to boil off all the various solvents, oils, and heavy metals that had accreted in my soil (already marked for “reclamation by some other sucker” by the original owners) over the years. Sometimes I forget that not everyone has become as inured to the contaminants as I have. Weak stomachs and all that.
On the plus side, I had a handy new hole in my yard in which to dispose of the evidence. In a couple years, I’ll be able to wear their clothes without anyone becoming too suspicious – they were about my size, and it’ll save me a few bucks at the thrift store. They say gardening takes patience, after all.
You might think that owning a car is expensive. Modifying a car is more expensive. Collecting tools is way more expensive than that. The most expensive? Test equipment. Yes indeed: time is money, and the fantasy of picking up a new, ultra-complicated tool that can tell you what’s going wrong? Well, that could save a potentially unlimited amount of time. Open up your wallet, and say “adios” to all the dead prime ministers hiding within it.
When I was a kid, I remember being enraptured by the local garage’s complicated computer diagnostics system. It had a cool CRT screen and a bunch of wires poking out of it, and the whole thing was like an arcade machine from the future. It could tell you anything that was wrong with the car, I imagined, and tell you in cool robot butler voice.
None of the mechanics ever hooked it up while I was there, but I figured they were just saving it for when the thing’s considerable brainpower was required. As a child, I didn’t think that it was maybe that the machine was just a piece of shit, and wouldn’t help the stressed-out flat rate mechanic hit book time any faster than “replace the part” would. In youth, you still think the whole world works properly. As an adult, you know it usually doesn’t, but you still buy specialized tools off Craigslist anyway.
And so it came to pass that I gave a local metal scrapper a couple bucks for the very same diagnostic machine I had encountered in my youth. Now, I believed, it would tell me what was wrong with my Volare, each and every thing. My computerized turbo-buddy would help me figure out the mysteries, and plot the most efficient path to returning it to perfect condition without spending money on worthless parts. Breathless, I hooked the wires up to the car, and pushed the “start” button.
On the screen flashed two words: “OH SHIT.” Then the machine started to smoke. I was about to unplug it from the wall, stop the impending fire, but I realized with a sixth sense that the Volare was seeming to draw strength from its new companion. As the CRT flickered to a dim light and then finally caught fire, the cables turning to smouldering ash that fell to the ground and fender of the car, I decided that this shit-box Plymouth had become stronger than ever: the idle smoother, the ignition peakier, the completely-non-computerized bargain-basement carburetor carbier. Even the brake lights worked now, most of the time.
Later, at the dump, as I threw the charred wreckage of the machine into a pile marked “DEAD ANIMALS ONLY,” I reflected on the events of the past few days. There really was no replacement for the problem-solving skills of a regular human being. Chief among them? The ability to just not give a shit.
The world is changing now. Soon, it will leave me and all the knowledge I accumulated during my life behind. It’s not too late for me to get into the permanent record, though, with this information about a long-lost art of car ownership. I speak, of course, of the car stereo installation.
Nowadays, car stereos are largely an extension of your phone. And why shouldn’t they be? Your phone can access any music you desire, conjure up pornographic visions from the ether itself, and tell you how to get out of the corn maze that you and your borderline-sentient 1979 Firebird Formula have gotten stuck in during your latest secret-agent shenanigans. Car manufacturers make terrible stock stereos, and so it just makes sense for them to step aside and turn them into “big screen that phone makes go.”
It is for this same reason that, before the ubiquitous smartphone era, we wanted to swap the stereos in our shit-box Hondas. In the late 90s and early 00s, new standards were coming out practically every weekend. You didn’t want to be the dope with an AM/FM/Tape combo when it was possible to be the brave technologist who accidentally bought a stereo on sale that only understood uncompressed Mini-Discs and the Diamond Rio 600. You could go to the store and buy a “head unit” (car stereo dweeb speak for “car stereo”) and jam it into the dashboard, yourself. Sure, there were semi-professional installers out there, usually working at that very same store. Those installers cost money, though, and surely you can connect between 15 and 200 wires together in a way that doesn’t burn your car down, right?
Wiring a stereo wasn’t really that hard. It was just one of those death-by-a-thousand-papercuts deals. You pull out the old stereo, a task which ranges between “annoying” and “holy shit I don’t think my car will ever go together again.” Then, you unplug it from the wiring harness. They call it a wiring harness, because you get whipped by it and still somehow enjoy the experience.
It’s at this point that the driveway-installing amateurs are separated from the driveway-installing pros. A smart person gets a little plug-in wiring adapter that translates from the car’s wiring to the stereo’s wiring. Someone who forgot to buy the little wiring adapter from the stereo store, and doesn’t want to go back there because their car is torn into a million pieces, decides to hack and slash, twisting and soldering the car into the stereo permanently. This works too, but it will be a problem in about two weeks, when the MP3-CD player you just spent your paycheque on becomes obsolete, and is replaced by a Tokyo-24-HotSauce-WMV-DVD player.
Now comes the harrowing. You have just made your car’s stereo harness much, much longer, and also likely much fatter. You gotta cram that shit back in the hole it came out of, ideally without getting in the way of anything else inside the dashboard. This is the point at which you must decide whether you will spend eight more hours routing wires, potentially re-doing the wiring work you just completed, or explain to your significant other that the heater controls only go two-thirds of the way to “cool” now. You will pass through this crucible and emerge a stronger, angrier person. You will have opinions on electrical tape for the first time in your life. Your neighbours will call the cops to have you killed after you swear loudly enough to wake their babies. The cops will laugh as you nearly pass out from heat exhaustion underneath your dashboard.
And in the end, you will be able to play an MP3 file from a burned CD. Congratulations. It was all worth it, until you go over a slight bump and the damn thing skips a bunch. I hear the new ones on the shelves now have a bigger anti-skip buffer. And those stock speakers, well, they sound like shit, now that you have this fancy new stereo blaring 64kbps Napster rips through it. Maybe pick up a new amplifier while you’re at it, and an upgraded alternator to handle all that new current demand, and…
Camping is a much-beloved activity, even with those who live in a house. In case you’re unfamiliar, camping mostly consists of driving to a place in the wilderness and then sleeping there. Ideally, you also set fire to something, but the core value is that of being closer to nature. Experiencing its bounty. Remembering why you have indoor plumbing.
In an attempt to make camping more livable, humanity has produced many specialized vehicles. RVs. Tent trailers. Bolers. Little tiny tents that go behind your bicycle. A van, down by the river. None of them are as appealing as just a bare-ass car, with no modifications, and a back seat that folds down enough that you can sleep halfway in the trunk without completely demolishing your lumbar region.
If you read the newspapers lately, you might have heard about my recent legal troubles. That being so, I don’t think it’s in your right to judge me, because you still read a newspaper in 2023. Where do you even buy those things? Anyway, I had to lie low for a little bit, and the important thing to know about Canadian telecommunications is that your cell phone never works as soon as you are within five minutes of the city limits. Sure, you can pay them seventeen bucks a minute for “roaming,” but nobody is that big of a sucker, even the government. I reasoned that there was no way my parole officer was rich enough to keep my ankle bracelet on the entire time, and so I set out for the grounds-of-camping in order to test the theory.
The first night yielded an excellent sleep: calm, cool air, no light pollution, and the sounds of animals all around lulled me into a deep dream-like state in which the solution to all my problems emerged and then was immediately forgotten upon waking up. The second night was even better, because the incessant lost-signal beeping of my ankle bracelet finally ceased as its batteries expired. Now, without the scarlet letter of its plaintive tone following me around, I could visit my fellow camping enthusiasts and socialize.
Friends: I made it about fifteen minutes. None of these folks had cool old cars, and they seemed to look at my oil-stained visage with a look between terror and pity. The best I could do was one retired couple who were towing their 1997 Saturn SL1 behind their RV, who at least pretended to listen to me when I was telling them about the importance of welding up their diff pin. Ultimately, they had “somewhere to go” and escaped so quickly that the Saturn broke off of their trailer hitch and rolled into the nearby fishing pond, which I decided made the vehicle count as maritime salvage.
Camping was exactly as relaxing as I thought it would be, and I ended up with a new composite-bodied toy to tow behind my Volare. Which is great, because I’m going to need something to drive to the bail hearings after this thing throws a rod on the highway home.
A good rocket ship is more expensive than it’s ever been. This isn’t just because of inflation. Back in the 60s, rocket science was relatively primitive, and you could get away with using cheaper materials and shittier construction standards. Now, for safety and other reasons, the modern rocketeer demands something with more comfort. More breathing room. And more cost.
The average rocket manager is going to respond to this by throwing a stapler at the head of the person asking them for more money. I didn’t get into rocket science to spend my father’s money, they’ll exclaim, before taking an early lunch at the gentlemen’s club and playing two rounds of golf down at the private course. These competing sets of demands will place you, the rocket scientist, in an awkward position.
On the one hand, you want to not burn some astronauts alive. We only have a few of these folks, and lowering the standards for astronaut admission are just going to mean that things on the space station fall apart that much faster. And on the other hand, you want to be able to afford to finish the rocket, otherwise those astronauts are gonna need to hoof it, and it’s really tiring walking all the way to the moon in those crazy moon boots. You need to look for cost-reduction options, and in a lot of cases, that means outsourcing the whole thing to private companies, who can somehow (through the magic of writing shitty contracts) deliver rocket ships cheaper and faster.
Here’s how we do it, here at Seat Safety Switch Space Shooting Solutions. We take a freshly-decommissioned Greyhound bus, and we put the biggest rocket engine we can find on it. Of course, there’s lots of problems with this basic proposal. There’s a lot of air holes on a Greyhound bus, which we seal up with Home Depot’s most affordable bathroom caulk. Sometimes we steal the expired tubes out of the dumpster behind the store, and warm them up in the microwave to get them to flow again. The bus itself doesn’t hold up well to the heat of atmospheric re-entry, which is why we also wrap it in some dense layers of aluminum sheeting. And the bus doesn’t have seatbelts, which we solved by welding in some straps and asking the astronauts to bring their own rope from home. What, you can’t tie a knot? And we let you go into orbit?
In much the same way that you can tell you’ve found a really good Chinese chef because she only uses a single cleaver for everything in the kitchen, a good mechanic has found a single tool that is beyond compare. No, it’s not a Snap-On, or even a Craftsman. Often, that tool is what we mortals call “power cursing.”
Scientists once thought that the amount of profanity rolling out of a professional (or amateur) mechanic was a side effect of the labour being performed. A sort of explosive verbal exhaust, if you will. It’s only in recent years that we’ve re-evaluated our previous assumptions, and discovered that the act of cursing is actually what makes the bolt come loose. Fascinating, isn’t it? Wait until you hear how they figured it out.
For years, the US government has had a secret Mechanic Training Base underneath Gloom Lake, code named “Torquemada.” While they lied to our face and told us it was some aliens, they were in fact evaluating wrenches. They captured them from all over the country. You’ve probably heard the story: experienced, seasoned folks who were good at their jobs, but for whatever reasons, “fled to the mountains and never came back.” Yeah. Sure they did, Uncle Sam.
In that underground lair, the government agents brutally experimented on them. Some mechanics who escaped have claimed they were forced to replace the rear heater cores in 2006 Dodge Caravans without being allowed to just cut a hole in the side of the van. Above all, the faceless ghouls who controlled them were looking for an advantage, any advantage, in maintaining the infinite matrix of machines that make up our world. And they found it: the aforementioned power cursing.
Even today, the federal government is working hard on an eighteen-foot-tall robot mechanic. It doesn’t lift a finger to apply a tool. It doesn’t have to. With the power of stolen alien technology, the robot just swears at things very loudly, and they become undone. Engine swaps can be done in minutes, from the tireless font of perfectly-toned cussing coming out of this immense monster’s speaker-laden mecha-mouth. Our great secret art has been corrupted by war profiteers.
If you are not a stick-shift-having type of person, you may be unfamiliar with the term “money shift.” This is when you accidentally shift down instead of up when really going for it, and spin the engine to the fucking moon as a result of trying to force it into a shorter ratio. They generally don’t like that, engines, which is why you then spend money. Hence the name.
There’s a lot of reasons why you might shift down instead of up. My favourite is accidentally knocking the shifter sideways while leaving third gear and going for fourth, so you end up putting it in second. That makes a tremendous sound, and no matter how fast you get back on the clutch, the damage has been done.
Now, it’s not the end of the world. In fact, many internal combustion engines love a little over-revving, or so I tell myself. It helps stretch the rods and clear that last little bit of gunk at the top of the bore. Really, it’s beneficial. On my own beloved coterie of shit-box vehicles, I have a tractor engine that was mostly assembled by drug-addicted narcoleptic pseudo-cavemen, and once in awhile its valves need a good floating to keep it from getting too complacent. At the sky-high, race-motor speeds of nearly three thousand of your Earth revolutions-per-minute.
Despite being fifty years old with enough mileage to go leak on the moon instead of my driveway, my slant six iron-block wonder can take a pounding or two when I really need to (including forgetting to shift, because I’m busy trying to hold the door shut or the floorpan on with my right hand.) I wouldn’t attempt it on any engine that you intend to win a race with, or need to get to work the next day on. Hell, it’s possible I’ve terminally damaged this engine, and just can’t notice the loss of power over its general malaise and single-carb agonizing.
Overall, I think the term is somewhat misapplied in my case. Even if I had grenaded this woebegone slant six, there’s a whole yard full of them behind my house that I can chuck in rather than spend money. Hell, I won’t even go get new oil for it. My neighbour threw out a perfectly good kitchen strainer the other day after the fire, and that’s a fine enough filter to get the big chunks of glitter out of the old 10W30 as I pour it into the new engine.
It’s funny what you remember from childhood. A perfect spring day. A trip to the zoo. A thoughtful gift from a loved one. Me? Oh, just the usual: I’m dogged, every waking hour, by images of the old parking garage at the mall.
Now, I should do some qualification for all this. I didn’t actually like going to the mall (unless it was to buy toy cars; the satisfaction was short-lived, however, because they always looked suspiciously new and shiny once the package was opened.) What I enjoyed was the experience of being pulled off the street, into a building that you could drive through. The steeply angled ramps, which they’d try their best to de-ice in the winter. The flickering pillars. The beautiful red canopy on the top storey. The awkwardly long hallway to and from the mall that felt like a trip on its own.
Those of you who are too young to remember malls may now be horrified at how a place of capitalist worship has burned itself permanently into my memory. This is understandable: studies have shown that kids raised on the internet now identify most closely with abstract geometric solids and specific kinds of wait cursor. I hope you really have fond memories that fill you with joy of “flickering purple square” in 20 years. I cannot, for the life of me, remember anything about the interior of the mall. If I strain really hard, I can imagine the awkward chairs at the food court. That’s it. The parking garage is where it began and ended for me as an impressionable youth.
Nowadays, I can’t resist a good parking garage. Unfortunately, a lot of them charge a lot of cash to enter, or at least to leave. This is because the operators of these garages are solely in “the parking business.” They’re not interested in why you’re there, they just want to trap your car in money jail. As a result, I rarely get to do full-throttle rips around spiral ramps anymore, unless I’m volunteering for court-ordered community service, escorting the elderly or otherwise un-car-able around town. That childhood parking garage has long since been destroyed, but it lives on in my memory and probably that of like four other freaks, who are also a menace to society.
Many, many years ago, the Catholic church had a problem: fake Popes. In the time before the internet, any group of rich assholes could get together, grab a random dude off the street, and declare him to be the Pope. Back then, you couldn’t even call (not even landline!) the Vatican to check this maybe-Pope’s credentials, and unless he acted extremely suspiciously, it was hard not to justify giving him whatever he (and his backers) asked for. He’s the Pope! If you don’t do what he says, God will force your daughter to eat your ribs or something like that.
Sure, a lot of these anti-Popes eventually did get busted. Lots of them took advantage of the massive power that was presented to them through fraud, and eventually the patience of the locals plumb ran out. It’s a pretty big deal to have the Pope visit your shitty town, even now, and so eventually the church would find out and send a small army to kill you and your friends. Sometimes they didn’t get there in time, because local warlords decided that the Pope (you) was probably trying to invade their country and decided to grease them first, only to end up doing the real Pope a solid.
Although I’m too lazy to check Wikipedia or even call the local diocese, I’m pretty sure that a decent number of these guys did get away with it, though. Real smooth operators would have known how to deal with certain sticky situations, like meeting people who had met the Pope already and knew he wasn’t 6′3″ and constantly drunk. As long as you didn’t make too much noise, and especially if you were somewhere that didn’t receive a lot of news or couriers, you could comfortably pretend to be a low-key pontiff for as long as you wanted. Your rich buddies would become richer buddies, and you’d get to wear a big hat. Good trade, the kind of relationship that doesn’t exist with employers today.
Why am I bringing this up now, you ask? Well, you might have noticed that I’ve been working at this O’Reilly Auto Parts with you for quite some time. And I have been asking you to log into the register for me, because I keep forgetting my password. I agree that that is suspicious. However, I think if you step in the back, you can meet some folks who will definitely assure you that I am in fact the head manager of this store, and you can help them load this unmarked, plateless van with all the Holley carbs we can sneak past that security camera.
No, no, no. Not the billet valve covers, that’s too flashy. Have you not listened to a word I’ve been saying?
Have you ever been in a public washroom, or even at a friend’s house, and realized they cheaped out on toilet paper? Doctors are united in their consensus: rough-feeling, inexpensive toilet paper sucks. It might even kill you, they imply strongly. Don’t worry, though, there is a solution, and it doesn’t even involve awkwardly asking someone to spend a buck on TP.
Introducing the Seat Safety Switch Solutions Bath Products Softener Mill/Pulper. Sure, that name is pretty long, but we have to be extremely specific because of our battle with our former manufacturing firm, which has now renamed itself to Shenzhen Safety Switch Solutions and is kicking the shit out of us in the market. Don’t worry about how long the name is, because you’re gonna want one, and everyone at the store will know exactly what it is when you ask. If they pretend like they don’t, they’re just hiding one in the back, so they can take it home when their shift is over. Ask louder.
Here’s how it works. When you’re at your friend’s place, you can use this device to convert the nasty cheap toilet paper into smoother, baby-soft toilet paper. All you have to do is cram a whole pile of it in there, and then the portable mill will re-process the toilet paper into a much thicker, higher-quality weave. Give us a few more bucks and we’ll even put in a diamond-quilting option. You’re worth it.
Sure, it takes a lot of toilet paper on the input. It’ll take about two rolls of the cheap paper to make a single square of the good stuff. You won’t need as much, though, and you’re not paying for it. What you are paying for, and our lawyers insist that we be extremely explicit about this aspect of it, is the fuel to run the V8 engine that operates the mill. Don’t worry. I know what you’re gonna say: isn’t that heavy and loud? We combed the junkyards to find the smallest V8 (a mere 4.4L) and stuck a couple coffee cans on the ports for a muffler. As long as you keep it topped up with fuel – we do have a propane conversion kit, for a couple extra bucks – it can have your ass wiped in less than an hour.
Overall, these disadvantages are worth it never to feel the discomfort of sandpaper on your butthole, ever again. And if you’re especially cheap, you may even realize that you can convert all that unwanted junk mail around the house into toilet paper, too, but our lawyers would caution you against doing so and will expressly state that we do not endorse such an act. Just give it a hearty thumbs-up.
There’s a missing kind of car out there today. It’s called the affordable sports car. Back in the day, anyone with an even moderately-cozy office job could afford to plunk down some greenbacks and pick up a Porsche 911 to park next to their significant other’s boring daily driver. Nowadays, it costs more than a house, unless you live somewhere that has a functioning public transit system, in which case the Porsche costs just slightly less than half of a house.
It was a great time, I’m sure, with so much selection: weird British garbage, weird German garbage, and the occasional rear-engined, air-cooled nightmare from a country that may or may not be Communist at this exact moment. There’s cheaper sports cars now, sure, but they’re an endangered species. Like everything, the killer of this glorious era was margin.
The automakers will tell you that there isn’t enough demand for these things anymore, that the mean old government forced them to make them safer and so they can no longer afford to sell them for your salary. They’ll have financing, of course, which will make up for the fact that your wages haven’t kept up with the cost of living since 1983. That financing goes mostly to the fattened price: a hundred grand or so will make up for all the SUVs they won’t be able to park in that spot and clear out. And the sports cars nowadays are too capable: you’ll feel like an idiot if you’re just using it to beat on slowly around rural backroads, instead of going directly to Sebring and fighting off DTM cars somehow also driven by architects.
Don’t worry. There was a solution a long time ago: the locost. This inventive do-it-yourself sportscar had a great model. Find an old, shitty regular car, with the biggest engine you can find. Take all the greasy parts that make it go out. Shove all that shit into a car whose construction is most generously described as “lightweight.” You’ll spend twenty years wiring it. And then you’ll drive it twice and be afraid to ever take it out again after you find out your skill as a vehicle operator does in fact top out at “130 horsepower.” That’s the affordable sports car legacy.
Now if only I could afford a locost kit. They’re sort of expensive now.
A couple days ago, I was walking home. This isn’t an unusual phenomenon for me: I store a variety of transportation methods inside my car, so that when the car bonks out I don’t have to walk all the way home. However, I got doubly unlucky this time, and the decrepit skateboard I was using lost a wheel. When you’re out for a walk through an endless sprawl of suburban hell, your mind wanders. What’s our place in the universe? Is there life after death? Holy shit, a mint 1996 Geo Metro.
I couldn’t stop myself from walking over. There, in the middle of what were putatively normal peoples’ homes, was a green-and-rust Metro. And it didn’t even look that bad, either. Some quick inspection revealed that the front suspension was, indeed, still attached to the body. And it was a stick-shift, the transmission choice of the gods themselves. It was only then that I noticed the house was for sale. Maybe they’d want to get rid of the car, too. After all, garages were expensive, and the departure of their vehicle would give them a reason to move closer to the inner-city, where I’m told things like “buses” and “taxis” existed.
The next day (believe me, it was hard to wait, but my phone also stopped working due to being a 1998-era Ericsson bag phone with a 24-volt marine battery attached, and I left it in the car rather than carry it home) I called the realtor In Charge Of All This. She sounded confused. She wasn’t selling any Geo Metro, she stammered, presumably signalling to her coworkers to call the police. After a few minutes of explanation, she agreed, grudgingly, to provide my contact information to the folks selling their house.
I never got a call back on that one. Which is just as well, because that afternoon I broke down in an entirely different place (transmission cooler exploded, and not in the cool way) and had to hoof it back. That’s where I found a 1968 Fury III in what I would consider “existent” condition. I was really excited to buy that one, too, until I noticed that I already owned it. At least driving it home saved me some wear and tear on my shoes.
Ask any racer, any real racer – they want to drive a really shitty car. There’s an undeniable thrill in operating a purebred, fire-snorting monster of a race car, and competing at the upper echelons of motorsport. And then, there’s the entirely more appetizing thrill of kicking some Boxster owner’s teeth in using a 1989 Mazda 323 that is best described as “weathered.”
One of the truisms of motorsport is that you can’t buy a victory, although it certainly helps to have been born rich enough that you can hire good instructors and spend a lot of your life at the track, practicing. All the advantages are on your side, then, and it just comes down to the big day. If you can whomp those folks with a grocery getter, it adds some spice to life.
There’s a real appeal to a piece-of-crap commuter car, even without the class ranking (which is never good enough to offset the crap-ness.) You don’t have to worry too much about prepping it, unless you’re the kind of person who wants to. Slap some half-decent tires on there, take out the fast food garbage from the back seat. Strip the chassis, acid-dip the metal to shave milligrams off of it, and add additional spot welds for extra bracing. Design and fabricate elaborate but factory-appearing suspension components using your engineering job’s resources when the boss isn’t looking. Take a nail file to the backside of your hubcaps, the scrutineers surely won’t look at that.
I don’t want to make this a whole class discussion, although class features prominently in autocross, which like all motorsports features a prominent and nigh-impenetrable rulebook. Understand that rulebook, navigate through it, they promise, and somewhere in there is a combination of mistakes and oversights that the Dark Gods of the SCCA have put into your hands that will allow you to brutalize your enemies by wielding a totally demoralizing piece of automotive garbage. With some tactical know-how, you can protest your opponent’s stock vehicle well into the realms of “experimental prototype” and a class multiplier that is only slightly lower than a giraffe’s asshole. And you can shave a second or two off your own time by knowing exactly which parts were not featured on the Mexican-market version of your car so you can cut those off while remaining whole-ass stock.
Above all else, go out there and have fun. If you’re the kind of person who has more fun winning, though, by all means. If you’re like me, and just want to have fun day out beating the brains out of a car that shouldn’t be on the road, much less open motorsport competition, I hope you also have fun walking home. I’ll help you push.
You might not be all that surprised that I like pinball. It’s a pointless, fruitless contraption of annoying sounds and bright lights, with a bunch of half-broken metal inside. That’s more or less the crown prosecutor’s description of me from last spring. I heard they spent like a day in a whole-office brainstorming session just to come up with that one, but I digress.
The point of pinball is, like all great human endeavours, to rack up an arbitrary score by playing the game. To this extent, you pay money for a limited number of chances. A better writer than me could make this some sort of metaphor on life itself, but I’m not going to resort to that kind of trickery. No, I want to talk about actual pinball.
Here’s the thing about a game that mostly consists of bouncing a steel ball into stationary objects, which trigger sensors and relays. That stuff breaks down, and it breaks down all the time. Although you may imagine all mechanical objects as existing in a perfect state of repair and a zero-percent-humidity vacuum, the real world is completely filthy. Dirt and hair get into things. Grease reacts with the plastics and becomes some kind of nightmare tar that has to be removed with industrial paint-stripping equipment. Screws pop out. The playfield flakes off and warps. Complex electronics seize up somewhere deep inside and begin to act, in the words of Alan Turing, “fucking haunted.”
So that means that the operator of a pinball machine has to be constantly maintaining it. Keeping an eye on all the bumpers. Being good enough to play it and hit all the features, check to make sure the multi-ball bonus works. This is the kind of thing that I like to do, but unfortunately I was born a couple years too late to become full-time employed maintaining pinball machines across America, driving a $500 Plymouth Barracuda, seeding secret second and third families whenever I find a small town that I particularly liked. Instead, I get to look at my friends’ pinball machines and go: that looks bad. You should replace that part. And then they say: I can’t, because nobody makes that part anymore. And then I spend a year meticulously constructing an exact replica of that part, only for the next thing in line to break.
All this is to say that pinball is keeping me from doing even basic maintenance on my fleet of terrible cars, which I’m sure is appreciated by the citizenry at large. Stick that in your ass and smoke it, Your Worship.
When I was a kid, we had all number of fine Chrysler products. Chrysler, also known as “the whipping boy” of the Big Three domestic automakers, gets a little bit of a bad rap around here. Sure, they can’t make a car that doesn’t fall apart 18 months after you take delivery. Most of those eighteen months will be spent in abject misery as you try to mentally justify your purchase. And chances are you won’t be back for another one after this Mopar product wears out, either. What was I talking about? Oh yeah, the good parts.
Here, then, is the good part about owning one of these things: the resale value is not as terrible as it should be. Any car, any running car, has a pretty much established minimum baseline price. No matter how bad your vehicle is, after ten years, it’s worth about the same as any other ten-year-old commuter shitbox. You can pick it up, put a heap of miles on it doing grocery delivery or freelance assassination, and the worst thing that will happen is that you have to wait a week or two for the Ford Focus with mismatched doors and a missing trunk lid to sell first.
While this is great for the seller of the car, this is an inconvenient fact for me, a greaseball who only ever sells his cars to the junkyard. My cars are well and truly used up when they leave my ownership: usually, it’s because the bodywork has finally crumbled in a major area and I’m no longer able to weld two pieces of rust together anymore. That means I have to go back on the used car market with what the junkyard gives me (one bus ticket and a firm slap on the ass) and try to fight all of you normal folks for a new daily driver. That’s where Chrysler comes in.
Remember how I mentioned up above that Chryco cars are equally valuable at the ten year mark? Well, it turns out that if you buy one at the eleven year mark, they’re basically piles of parts arranged loosely into old milking buckets sitting in the owner’s garage. You can pick those babies up for pennies, and use that ticket to carry them home with you on the bus. Once assembled into a working car (maybe mixing a few other owners’ buckets together) you’ll have a fine Mopar product once again, ready for at least a half-century of excellent road handling and wondering what that bolt that fell out used to hold together. Just don’t expect the power windows to work. I don’t do miracles.
Lately, junk is cool. I don’t think this is my fault, because as my high school guidance counsellor once told me, nothing I do could ever be considered even vaguely interesting. Probably, YouTube has tired of the glossy and inauthentic salesmanship of The New Thing. Now, what the audience really wants to see the manky basements and obsessive collections of strangers.
I can get it. I myself prefer old trash. There’s nothing I love more than to get up to my wrists in some obscure garbage, and walk away from it with more knowledge of what makes it tick. Looking over the shoulders of others doing it, though, is so frustrating that I just storm out into the garage and start chucking wrenches until I either have a project finished or pass out from exhaustion.
Of course, I’ve considered doing it myself. We found an old Super 8 camera in the trunk of a Dauphine at the junkyard, but when we played the tape contained inside, it wasn’t exactly what we expected. Not only was it a horrifying screeching film, but Ralph got cursed by a Japanese schoolgirl to die within a week, and then he got so worked up about it that he ran his nitromethane-powered Prius into a bridge abutment while trying to escape “fate demons” and broke his shin bone. Sure, Ralph. You could have just said you didn’t want to help.
I’ve come up with a good compromise, though. The idea came to me when I was reading about some religious fundamentalists who forced school children to go through what they were calling a “Hell House.” That house would terrify those poor kids into keeping on the straight and narrow, avoiding the kind of sins that would pitch them into an eternal lake of fire. Great idea, and even better when I realized they were charging admission.
Parents: if you don’t want your kid to develop mechanical or electrical engineering skills, bring them by my place. There is a good chance that they will run away in terror, and become accountants or MBAs like you wanted. Of course, a couple of these kids are going to get even more hooked. Don’t worry, there’s lots of money on YouTube. Once they’ve finished helping me clean all the swarf out of this A727, that is.
You could say we like to have fun in my neighbourhood. As a community, we encourage our young people to develop new skills and work on their interpersonal relationships in a place of relative safety. When they grow up, they’ll need to fight for themselves, but it’s our solemn duty as old people to make sure that they have inside them what they need to succeed.
Or at least that’s what I thought until those little shits started ding-dong-ditching my place. To be fair, they might have been doing this for months or years coming up to the event. I had only recently gotten electrical service hooked up to my house, due to the power company guy leaving his (unsmelly, low-mileage, soulless) van unlocked and a work order sitting on his dashboard. Not even an hour after it was done, I started hearing a strange sound from the walls. A sort of ding followed by a kind of, if you will, dong. Now what could that be?
When I checked the front door, there was nobody there. Nobody, that is, except for a pair of kids hunched behind a Chrysler 8-¾" complete axle lying in my driveway, giggling but trying not to be heard by me. I rolled my eyes, and went back inside. Then it came again. My mother didn’t raise a fool. If there’s one talent I had in the world, it was stubbornness. I knew this game. I would simply stay inside my house until they slunk away, defeated.
Unfortunately, this sort of passive-aggressive technique does not work on little kids, who have nowhere better to be, and definitely do not have project cars. I settled in for what I thought would be a few minutes of ignoring children. It turns out that should be more like hours of these little cads ringing the doorbell, snickering, and then hiding, only to repeat again a few minutes later, when I refused to give them the satisfaction of my presence. Eventually, I could take it no longer.
I stepped outside, wearing my best aw-shucks smile. I grinned at the sun, and gave the kids what they were looking for: a grade-A, bona-fide, angry-old-person tantrum. I swore (but not too harshly.) I threw things (but nothing hard.) And I jumped up and down while yelling in my smoking jacket. The kids bolted for cover, and I watched them run all the way down the block and jump into their respective homes, protected by their parents.
Here’s the thing that these kids don’t know. Their modern, renovated homes are equipped with fancy-dan, wireless doorbells, capable of automatically uploading hours of footage of potential criminals to the police. They also have a grotesque lack of information-security protection, and someone sufficiently motivated could, say, develop an elaborate short-range jamming weapon that makes them constantly play It’s A Small World. Now when I drive by their homes, the hissing, water-cooled gigawatt transmitter loosely ratchet-strapped onto my trunk, I am the one who is smiling and giggling. And, I expect, they have learned a lesson about fucking with peoples’ doorbells from their fussy old neighbourhood asshole.
Flip-up headlights are basically the only thing that can reliably bring me joy in a car. 8500-rpm redline? Heated leather seats? Mid-engined twin-turbocharged V8? Yeah, those are nice and all – but have you seen how this thing looks like a weird frog when I push this button?
The thing about cars is that they were never meant to be taken seriously. Sure, they were originally developed for rich people to use to run over poor people with. Then they became race cars, and racers are very serious about everything except for the survival of the car (and sometimes themselves.) After that, though, they became proletarian transport. With that accessibility came genuine fun. You can’t do a four-alarm burnout with a horse, and if you tried, you’d probably end up going to jail because of the horse police.
So, anything that can increase the amount of fun you’re having with a car is great, especially if you don’t have to burn fuel, brake pads, and oil to do it. And flip-up headlights qualify. They’re fun even when the car is turned off. They make the car look either super-sleek, aerodynamic, futuristic, or… goofy. The designers picked up on this duality, and they often add wacky transitions to draw attention to the party piece.
Sure, they’re not that great for pedestrians, so don’t hit any. Their utility in the unimportant field of “being able to see” are in question. Big deal. That’s why they have 80s-style rally lightbars, which also look a little bit goofy, and tell everyone around you (especially the cops) that you are not a serious race car driver. Those folks would never put such an aerodynamic limiter on their exotic lap-killing machine.
Recently, I watched a little video about how people make elevator buttons. Whereas I had assumed they were punched out of giant machines in huge quantities, they are actually machined to precision and then buffed to an attractive, jewel-like shine by a team of expensive, slow-working, perfectionist artisans. This came as a surprise to me, but then I thought about it medium-hard. Have I ever bought an elevator?
To investigate, I did my best imitation of a building, and called up the elevator-ordering people. I made sure to specify a bunch of bonkers configurations, and then sent them the results of a Google image search for “letter of credit.” Then I waited.
It seemed that I had picked a good elevator manufacturer, because it didn’t arrive right away. In fact, after a couple days of expectantly waiting by my front door, no elevator arrived. Not even a greasy technician, sent to take measurements of my shaft. Eventually, I had to go out and get groceries, and I forgot about the whole thing. That is, until a couple of months later, when my elevator arrived.
The first indication that it had arrived was that the neighbour’s dog, who is clinically diagnosed as being terrified of large geometric solids, started to lose his shit. I stepped outside, just to make sure he hadn’t accidentally triggered on my Lincoln Town Car again, and then I saw it in the driveway. A giant Amazon Prime box. With the help of a ladder and a lot of box cutting, I soon had the elevator out of the shipping container. It was a glorious thing: perfect, unmarked stainless steel. Gleaming, flawless buttons. A whole bunch of fancy wires, all labelled for easy maintenance. Nobody had even peed in it yet.
There was only one problem. I had ordered what I thought was a full elevator, but it was actually only an elevator car. I didn’t have any of the rope and computers and motors that are meant to drive it around. What I had, in fact, was a lot closer to a useless box. That didn’t stop me, though. There’s something else I had: the frame to a 1989 Chevrolet Blazer.
Soon, my elevator car was mobile once again. The buttons even lit up, although at night time they flickered a little bit if I was trying to run them with the sealed beams. I will be the first to admit that my sideways-elevator is not perfect. For one thing, it’s really hard to see out of. And it keeps dinging every time I blow a stop sign. It’s still the prettiest thing I’ve got, and, more importantly, the repo men don’t expect to see the elevator they came to seize do a wheelie and then crush their rental beneath 36-inch mud-terrain tires.
I can definitely understand why folks love convertibles. The feeling of the wind in your hair, the feeling like you’re part of the world instead of just travelling through it. It’s great. What I don’t love about convertibles is fixing holes in the top, greasing elaborate mechanisms, or wondering where that windshield latch leak is coming from this time.
There is also an inherent flaw in convertibles. Cutting the roof off makes the car a lot wobblier, so you need to add bracing or the whole thing will flap around like a sailboat. And if the car rolls over, it will kill the occupants, so you need to add some rollover protection. More weight.
This is why a lot of automakers nowadays are making hardtop convertibles. This is like that wacky baseball stadium where the top slides open, exposing the contestants within to the judging glare of the sun god. Of course, this makes a convertible even heavier, and the heavy-duty retraction mechanisms even more elaborate. As a result, you don’t really see too many of those suckers running around past the warranty period.
Wait, the cars are heavier, perform worse, and wobble a lot for some reason? Sounds like a certain big-three automaker I know. Of course, Mopar was also interested in convertibles. They made what I consider to be the epitome of the genre: the Dodge Dakota Sport convertible. It’s a pickup truck with no roof! You can pull the vinyl top down and roll around town in style, assuming that you don’t mind the interior smelling like wet dog. Or the leaks. Or the wobbly pretend roll hoop behind your seat. Sounds perfect to me.
Buying new tools is great. I go through a screwdriver a week, often because it’s been absorbed into the detritus piled into every corner of my home. There’s only one thing that’s better: buying a new specialty tool.
I don’t mean like “a torque wrench,” though that’s certainly a nice girthy one to have on hand. No, I mean the really weird shit, where 40 years ago it would have been completely impossible to get it for yourself. And even then, the nice salesman on AliExpress really, really wants to know you’re serious about buying a high-end piece of fabrication equipment. He should, too. It’s some serious money at stake: two hundred and sixty dollars.
Of course, buying the high-end specialty tool is just one part of the adventure. Then you have to wait for it to arrive, which is difficult because you sometimes have to explain to postal bunnies exactly what it is, and then explain to customs rabbits that it is legal to import and they should not throw you in prison forever. After that, smooth sailing. Just plug it in and go, right? Just like YouTube.
Nope: now it when the real fun begins. Now you figure out how to actually use it without the pre-requisite decade-and-a-half of experience you would have otherwise gotten in its operation prior to setting out on your own. If you’re really lucky, you would have gotten a four-page photocopied instructional manual telling you not to stick your tools in the machine or otherwise anger it. There will be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth ahead of you, and maybe even ruined parts, but you’ll come out on the other end triumphant.
Not only that, but you’ll be ready to tell me if that one’s any good, or if I should hold out for the $280 model. That one’s blue.
You have to get rid of all those negative people in your life. The ones who bring you down with their toxic venom, not dissimilar to a common rabbitfish. The people who pry at your every idea. And, most of all, you must discard the ones who tell you not to have so many projects lying around.
Hi. I’ve been doing the motivational-speaker circuit for a few months now, and I can tell right away that the people in this room are something special. You’re not like all the other groups I talk to. You want to succeed. You want to be different. Let me tell you this, right now: you have what it takes to collect between thirty and fifty old shitty cars, and store them in your yard. All you need is a big enough yard, ideally one that you don’t even own.
The haters are gonna say “oh no, isn’t that public land?” and it is. You’re in the public. It’s your land. You paid for it! And as long as the game warden doesn’t go down the slope of that one weird coulee and see approximately four dozen Plymouth Sapporos crammed up against the tree line, it will continue to be an excellent place to park. That’s not enough for the haters, though. When you point this out, they’ll move on to some other “danger:” grass growing through the floorboards. Rust. The salinity of the soil. Rodent infestations. This is how they keep from realizing something about themselves: they, too, could have lots of shitty project cars of their own, but they’re afraid.
Supply and demand? Let me tell you about supply and demand, friends: they’ve been making cars for well over a hundred years, and even the loserest little podunk automaker makes like 30,000 of the things a year. There’s been enough cars made for all of us – every last one – to have, like, four. Ohhh, but the haters don’t want that either. They want you to throw out your “old deathtrap” and go buy a new, efficient car for twenty-five times the price. Friends, that is God-damned ridiculous. Don’t take that shit from them.
You can do it. Go buy a beater today. And before you do, make sure to sign up for my inspecting-a-shitbox seminar, which I can unfortunately only offer this month because the lawman is jealous of me telling you all these Secrets about the way the world really works. Hey, you can trust me.
Now that we’ve added a single bike lane, the city folks are all crowing about how they’re clever and are supporting alternative modes of transportation. That might be so, but that bike lane is right next to a major highway. It’s not very convenient to get to, and it’s very far away from taco-based sustenance. Sure, you can ride that bikeway most of the way downtown – and then get off your bike to cross eight blocks of intersections, pay Old Salty Harold a couple coins so you can use his floating barge to cross the river, and end up at the eighteen-dollar taco restaurant that doesn’t have running water.
Into this, a solution is formed. You see, my municipality has very loose restrictions on what qualifies as “a bicycle.” So as not to frighten the car owners like myself too much, they’ve allowed a virtually unlimited amount of electric horsepower in the vague shape of a moped. All I have to do is keep the land speed under about 30 kilometers an hour, and the completely-absent bike lane cops won’t write me an unenforceable ticket for speeding on the bike lane they have a philosophical objection to the very existence of. Doing this is much easier when I’ve poorly welded a steel cooler full of microwave burritos to the front of an old Norco.
Not only is the front section pretty draggy: so is the chain! You can hear that bastard slap and struggle as it passes the couple of missing teeth on every gear. Why is the geartrain missing so many teeth? Well, they were either stripped off from the torque of the half-kilowatt electric motor I stole out of an abandoned Tesla, or rotted away in the river before the fateful summer afternoon when the aforementioned boatman, Old Salty Harold, helped me pull it out of the river. Don’t worry, I can still book it to all the popular break spots along the bikeway (a defective bus bench, a flickering light pole, a frequently-flooding unlit tunnel into downtown) and hand out some fresh battery-warmed imitation Mexican food to all the commuters.
I’ve made like twelve dollars this week alone, which doesn’t exactly pay for all the tires I keep melting (this vehicle should perhaps be reclassified as ”some emissions,”) but it’s about giving back to society. And you never know what’ll happen next. Well, not efficient and timely public transit, that’s not coming for sure.
There’s a lot of things that you can expect while tidying up the house for a visit from the parole officer, but a human tooth is not one of them. Usually, it stays inside the human beings, and doesn’t come out except in extremely painful circumstances. Although it’s not quite as jarring as seeing, say, an aorta lying on my coffee table, I definitely didn’t appreciate the additional mystery added to my morning chores.
While I was trying to number-crunch the origin of this severed bicuspid, I heard the doorbell ring. Well, “ring” is a bit of a misnomer when it comes to my house. Because of complex reasons that once caused an electrician to run screaming from the home, the doorbell actually emits a sort of squelched hawk-like screeching sound, oscillating at sixty hertz exactly. Plus the button gets stuck, so if someone rings it when I’m not around, it will keep getting screechier and screechier until it dips out of the range of human hearing, setting off the neighbourhood’s dogs on its way to starting a small (but controllable) wiring fire inside my walls. That fire usually burns itself out, but if it doesn’t, the mice will probably piss on it out of a sense of self-preservation. Nature’s firefighters, they call themselves.
Right. My parole officer. He was looking through the sidelight of the door, directly at me, and surely would have noticed me picking up and pocketing a human tooth. That would have produced some uncomfortable questions. So I did what comes naturally: lie. By sleight-of-hand moving around some ashtrays and a decorative vase, I was able to obscure the tooth in a dish full of hard candy that likely dated back to the Vietnam War. Now we were presentable, and I had bought myself some time to figure out what to do with this tooth.
Unfortunately, I forgot about the whole thing, and while my back was turned, Bob (my parole officer; that’s not his real name, because I forgot it) grabbed a handful of Werthers old enough to collect retirement and then bit right into them. There was a sickening crunching noise, and then a look of complete horror as he pulled the mysterious tooth out from his mouth.
“Holy shit, Bob,” I said. “We gotta go to the dentist right now. Let’s take my car.”
I’d like to tell you that my heroism and gallantry won the day, that my excellent driving skills convinced him that I was in fact not a menace to society. Hell, I’d like to pretend that he owed me a favour now, and would keep writing nice things about me and ignore the fact that my court-ordered ankle bracelet was lying in the box of parts on my workbench marked “lightning wizard scrap.” Unfortunately, none of those things happened. And I never figured out where that tooth came from. It was pretty funny watching the dentist try to figure out where to cram it back in, though.
It’s really difficult to design an intersection that everyone is happy with. I’m no civil planner, but I do understand the all-displeasing dance that is the gathering of requirements. There’s a lot of different people who have to use your average city four-way. Truckers. Commuters. Terrified grandmothers who are clutching a loaded .38 just out of sight of the window, ready to blast through the door card if they get pulled over again. Bicyclists. Snowmobilers. Me.
You simply can’t please all of these people simultaneously: one friendly choice pisses off another. There’s two things you can do to get out of this sort of situation. The first one is compromise, reducing your vision in every direction, bit by bit, like a coward until everyone grumbles about the pointless grey wasteland that they spend at least two minutes a day waiting for a little light to turn green at. And the other is saying: fuck it, take a risk. Pick a winner.
Sometimes a winner is obvious: on the highway there’s not a lot of room for horse-drawn carriages, whether or not those horses are in fact mice transformed and forced into indenture by witchcraft. Call me a hippie if you want, but I think the right choice in every circumstance is to optimize for the slowest vehicle. Not pedestrians, you freeloaders have enough sidewalks. No, I mean the weird guy down the street with a recumbent bicycle. He’s got money, he’s pretty vocal about his choice of transportation, and there’s a pretty good chance if we give him everything he wants he won’t set a homemade bomb underneath City Hall.
There’s other benefits to letting the slowest road user win, too. All of us are, at one time or another, the slowest. Maybe we’re looking for an address. Perhaps our shitty automatic transmission has lost first through second with that one raunchy upshift on the hill before. If the road is designed to coddle us, to take care of our momentary loss of performance competence, then things won’t be so bad. Build nice green shoulders of grass on the sides of that road, too, so I have something to drive on to get around your slow ass.
I was halfway through my second Tetra-Pak® of oven-warmed (they say not to use the microwave) reduced-sodium chicken broth when I finally flipped to the editorial page of my neighbour’s newspaper. Those bastards in the government were sticking it to us again, with a planned “safety blitz” on the highway. You don’t need me to tell you, dear reader, what other fascist invented the concept of “the blitz.”
Now, you need to understand something about our local highway. It’s not like a real city’s. It has a bunch of jacked-up curves right in the middle, where they joined it together over successive projects as the city grew. Sometimes it’s six lanes. Sometimes it’s two. Exit lanes aren’t marked. Sometimes exit lanes are also merge lanes from a different highway. One section used to be part of the amusement park before all the fires. It’s a lot of fun, and the most fun part about it was that the traffic cops were afraid to be on the highway. Their union called it “really fucking unsafe.” With an endorsement like that, any safety operation, blitzkrieg or otherwise, would be bound to fail.
There’s another problem with the highway. During the week, it’s all commuters. Hardened drivers who know the rules of the road, and understand what to expect. They’ve been on it every day, in every weather condition. They can probably tell you every curve and bump, even if they don’t think of themselves as real drivers. Then you throw in some random asshole who doesn’t normally drive on the highway but just this once has to go across town at 9 A.M. to pick up Mister Floppykins’ anal wart medicine from the less racist of our two 24-hour vets. That random asshole – that normal person – immediately causes a twenty-five car pileup, forcing an intervention from law enforcement.
Of course, that’s a matter for the debate team. After the fact, those eggheads could argue that any enforcement operation barely scratched the surface of the law-breaking on-it-everyday speed demons who treated the highway like some kind of no-holds-barred carnage zone, a place where civility went to die and staying in your lane was practically unheard of. In reality, everyone knew the cops were catching some heat after letting the Mayor Himself’s Daughter Herself get away with a minor cocaine infraction when her gently-crashed Tesla saturation-bombed a popular downtown eatery with half-charged 18650 lithium-ion battery cells, and they needed to make some exhaust tickets in order to renew public confidence in their so-called institution.
They didn’t do it to me, of course, even though I was myself blitzed by the federales. That morning, I “had to” give my shark of an attorney, Max, a ride down south, so he could pick up a set of monogrammed cufflinks from the rotary (wrong kind, I asked) club. He’s too afraid to drive on the highway normally, you see, but he was all too willing to kick in for gas. I still will never know how he managed to turn “unjust widened-exhaust ticket” into the weeping officer handing his own badge and gun to Max.
When a bunch of tractor owners get together, they often have what is referred to as “a slow race.” I know this is a paradoxical concept, and anyone with any inkling of exposure to the inner workings of the English language is now trying to gnaw their own teeth off. Keep with me on this: the goal is to be the slowest one.
Easy to do, right? Just don’t push the gas. Let the wind shove you gently towards the finish line. And maybe lay off the donairs before you hop in the passenger seat, in case there’s a slight downhill gradient and your competitors are lighter. It’s hard to do, in fact, because there’s a minimum speed that a tractor will go before it stalls. If your clutch skills aren’t as good as the next person’s, you’re going to stall the engine, and then you get disqualified. Now it’s a real race.
The reason why this is relevant to tractor folks is that 99% of the use of a tractor is going at a languid pace. Sowing crops. Sneaking up on wild horses so you can capture them in your Pokéballs. Pulling out the stuck cars of city people. Ripping down your hated enemy’s barn when he’s not looking. You can’t do these things with a lot of speed, because you’ll just spin the tires. Much like drill presses and kneeling down to pick up things after the age of 30, a slower tractor is a better tractor.
How, then, can we cheat at this race without becoming better drivers, or creating some elaborately complicated matrix of planetary gears and belt-drives that allows a gasser tractor to run turtle slow without stalling? The answer, my friends, is new technology. These narrowly-defined hayseed rules don’t disqualify Power Wheels as “tractors,” and I have it on good authority that these little 24-volt direct-current electric motors can keep ticking at the slowest speeds imaginable. Hold on a second, I think they’re calling my number.
Okay, yeah, that didn’t go as planned. It turns out that years of traumatic exposure to city traffic have conditioned me to instantly whack any throttle wide-open whenever there are no vehicles in front of me. Those little Power Wheels Deeres have a lot of torque and a really shitty diff, too. Yes, I did pirouette directly into the judge’s stand and then cause a follow-up uncontrollable battery fire, because my phone fell out of my pocket and got crushed in all the commotion. Still, I finished last, so I think I should win something.
On my tombstone they will carve, IT NEVER GOT ECONOBOX ENOUGH FOR ME. I was a slave to those small engines, those dizzying peaky horsepower numbers lower than the fuel economy sticker, those Macpherson Struts. I’m getting sweaty just thinking about it. But mopeds? That was a bridge too far, or so I thought.
My accountant Roy saunters into the office, and he tells me that he just found five hundred bucks under the couch cushions in the breakroom and we should go buy mopeds. He impresses upon me the value of my investment in what he defines as motorized art, the alloy steeds spoken of in legend. In the parking lot, I ante up on the deal by popping the clips on my Subaru’s door card and extracting a further five hundred dollars, preserved minty-fresh by the vapour barrier.
As if on cue, the college radio station’s federally-mandated afternoon cultural appreciation programming, consisting entirely of artisanal banjo music, filled the speakers and our hearts with a sense of rural adventure. Together, we departed for the countryside, barging through covered bridges in full opposite lock.
“How many cylinders has it got?” I ask the swarthy man as he sneezed into his handkerchief, and rubbed his moly-greased paws on his hay-covered overalls.
“Got maybe one, I wager. I got it off one of them college boys came out here to protest the sour gas wells. Ambulance left it behind.”
I considered the moped carefully. It was a gently dented ‘71 Kreidler Florett, and it leaked oil and fuel in such quantities I had no doubt the paramedics had performed triage at the scene and slotted it into “already gone.”
“You boys aren’t college educated, are you?”
His line of questioning was interrupted by the stuffing of money down his denim neckhole. I was a moped owner. I was a motorcyclist. I was one of the Nicest People that you would meet, if you were driving a Honda at the time.
Weeks later, Roy tentatively rapped on the front door of my house. He was concerned. I hadn’t turned up to work for weeks. Did I have an accident learning to ride a motorcycle? I opened the door, just a crack, not wanting him to see my deep shame, but he shoved it open, knocking me onto my ass.
The scene that unfolded before him was one of horror. Every available surface in the house was occupied by mopeds, or moped parts. He turned and stared at me, his face white with disbelief.
“They’re just so small,” I whimpered. “I ran out of room in the garage and I just had to keep saving them they were so lonely, I don’t know what to do.”
As always, my intrepid accountant had a good idea of how to spend my money. Weeks later, our series of vintage moped rent-a-racer events had flourished and America was rediscovering its love of the two-stroke. We were both richer than we could imagine, but the greatly soaring demand for mopeds had raised the price of our junk into the stratosphere.
I rode home on the Kreidler, wondering where it had all gone so wrong. At the lights, I looked up to witness an enormous billboard, advertising the triumphant and flashy return of the Honda CT90. You asked for it, the ad copy roared, and here it is.
Yes. I asked for it.
Note: This is the 3000th entry on this tumblr. I can’t believe it’s lasted this long, and I’m a little humbled that people seem to be really enjoying it. In honour of the anniversary, this is my all-time favourite post (check out the best of tag for more, or enjoy a random post from the collection) and I’m taking the night off, rather than writing a new one. New shitbox posts resume tomorrow. Thanks for reading.
Virtually all of North America’s land is dotted with broken-down factories. Folks out of work, cool machines sold for scrap, big ass buildings sitting idle. All that land could be used for something so much better, an invention that would actually help society! Don’t worry: I have the solution.
Now, if you’re one of the bleeding-heart types who thinks “affordable housing,” let me stop you right there. Nobody wants to live in the middle of a disused industrial park, trying to sleep at night in an old factory that is probably still full of the creepy doll heads it punched out in ‘53 before the higher-ups realized they could just stop paying people to work. No. We’re going to turn all these old factories into parking.
Just to be fair about it, too, I volunteer to go first. Most of my cars are shitty already, so if the floor collapses, or the roof caves in, or feral porcupines try to make an entire army that will turn on mankind and reclaim their rightful throne using those cars, then they won’t get far. And it won’t be that much of a loss. To be completely honest with you, my daily-driver ‘78-80 Volares are basically in the same condition regardless of whether 50 tons of reinforced concrete has recently fallen on them.
And it’ll stimulate the economy: once I don’t have to worry about parking so much, I can go really nuts. Ever owned an ice cream van? Me neither, but I bet it’s fucking rad. I’m sure we can find one somewhere super cheap and drive it around the block blaring clipping versions of children’s nursery rhymes at 110dB for about twenty minutes before I get bored and stuff it back into the dark recesses of the warehouse. Once we know that it works for me, then we can go get one for you, and then you can get a job as a valet running the cars back and forth from these shitty warehouses to your actual nice neighbourhood. It’s not a great job, sure, but it’s the best we can hope for right now.
Things have gotten so bad in North American life that sea shanties have become popular again. That’s right, the music sung by folks dying of scurvy in a cantankerous wooden bathtub about to plunge to the bottom of the ocean. The reason why is pretty simple. Everyone wants to have cool adventures, and make friends, and not be at a fucking desk. I ask: have you considered bus collecting?
A bus is basically the same thing as a tall sailing ship. You’ve got the large, unwieldy bulk, the single pilot, and the group of people vomiting in the back, doing every drug in sight, and wondering if a seagull tastes good. The only difference is that a used long-distance hauling bus is cheap; less than the cost of your average shitbox sedan. And look at what you get with it! Lots of big tires, lots of seats, a very large engine full of things to fiddle with, an extremely long runs of wiring for the packrats to eat. Is it broken? Even better! You can live in it, far more comfortably than your average decrepit Plymouth Fury or half-in-the-bag Asuna Sunfire.
Sure, there are downsides to bus ownership. For one thing, everyone you know is going to want you to give them a lift along with 60 of their closest friends. You won’t be able to merge onto the highway very quickly, or find parking downtown. The fascists in law enforcement will often want you to have ridiculous things like “an inspection,” “working lights,” or “a drivers’ license,” and fixate on it because you’re big, shiny, and can’t pull away from their cruisers very quickly even if you are a halfway decent driver. Small problems compared to the ability to wear a dorky bus-driver hat and open and close the passenger entry door with that cool lever thing.
All this is to say that you should join me down at the industrial equipment auction this weekend coming up. There’s a lot of low-mileage prison buses hitting the block, and I think if we work the crowd together, we can really convince the other bidders that there was a grisly murder in one of them. While they’re busy bidding up that one, we can scoop up the others super cheap, or at least cheaper than a seaworthy boat made out of fucking trees.
When you’re commuting, it’s easy to forget all the little details about it. You’re bored, and you don’t remember. Your mind just shuts off and you autopilot your ass right to work. All of that time in your life is just compressed into “that was boring” and is completely inaccessible in your memories. What if I told you that’s what the aliens wanted you to think?
That’s right. Whenever you can’t remember your trip to or from work, it’s because you were abducted by aliens. They do it a lot. And they figured that when they dropped your ass back off, you would simply chalk the mind erasure up to “must not have been very memorable.” A boring day. Snoozefest.
Remember a couple years ago, when everyone started getting dashcams because the Russians made it look fashionable? Yeah, that was a big problem for these aliens. Suddenly there’s now an incontrovertible evidence of your capture in MPEG format encoded onto the storage card, and it just so happens to look a lot like slowly swerving onto the curb because you were checking your phone or dropped your 7-Eleven Monterey Jack® Prison-Grade® Taquito.
So they had to figure out another solution. “Self-driving cars.” Perfect. Now you won’t even look up when you’re being probed. That’s just the rough part of this highway, you’ll tell yourself, and on your deathbed you’ll wonder where approximately 16 to 20 hours a week went from your memory. Into the artificially-intelligent Tesla cornholer run by aliens, that’s where.
How are we going to stop the aliens? By driving way more recklessly. If you’re riding the razor’s edge during your commute, operating a recklessly-operated vehicle at extralegal speeds, you’ll be paying attention the entire time. And if you’re paying attention, you probably won’t get scooped up by the UFOs. They’d rather have the folks who are happy to just put it in “drive” and forget about their entire lives, one commute at a time.
My grandma used to get the undercoat every year on her shit-box Beretta. It lasted from 1989, when it was made, until the mid-2010s, in Ontario. This is the corrosion-prevention equivalent of discovering time travel: when I’d tell this story, whole-ass autobody shop techs would straight out say “that’s impossible,” their noses starting to bleed as their minds ran into seven or eight times overclock just to try and comprehend a universe in which this was possible. Before long, they’d lie dead on the floor.
Like I said, she went in every year. In fall, she’d book it, they’d put it up on the lift and then they’d spray some kind of crazy-ass oil compound on the underside, protecting exposed metal and weak original undercoating from nature’s fury. I assume they cleaned the old stuff off, or maybe they didn’t: just this constantly accreting katamari of petrochemical shield, the car riding an inch lower to the ground and weighing 250kg extra by the time it was sent to the junkyard. Good luck taking any fastener off without a jackhammer, respiratory protection, and a death wish.
For all I know, they never were able to scrap that thing when she got bored of it and traded it in on a new Kia. Gummed up the jaws of the junkyard crusher, unable to penetrate through the infinitely thick matrix of polymer and road salt. Sent the entire assembly, crusher and all, to China to be analyzed by their own junkyard scientists. An even bigger crusher was probably destroyed trying futilely to compact that one for scrap value. In the middle, a perfectly-preserved rust-free lower half of an ‘89 Beretta, a monument to man’s dominance over nature.
I think about this often as I expose my own shitbox cars to the elements. Even with the thick layer of engine, shock, and transmission oil that leaks onto the major mechanical components, that floorboard still has some pretty raunchy holes. Sometimes I “find” a road sign in a ditch and pop-rivet it in there, but it doesn’t last very long either. Sure, I’d thought about getting them to under-seal my cars the same way as grandma’s, but I’m worried the coating guns use a little bit too much pressure and will just cut the damn thing in half on the lift.
When you make things, you often have to fix those things. Nothing goes right the first time, so you might as well make it as easy as possible for you to figure out what’s going wrong later. It’s the nature of the beast. This is why cars come stocked with diagnostic ports, little inspection windows, and page after page of checklists to make sure that the vehicle is presented to you in the best condition possible.
You might think that it’s difficult to predict the problem you are about to create, and if you are very good at predicting them, why not just fix them in the first place? To this I say: hey, project managers aren’t allowed to read this. Go back to moving little pieces of paper around on a whiteboard and showing your boss various Photoshops of a parabolic curve. The rest of us have things to fix.
Of course, this phenomenon often means that you need to make specialized tools to debug and correct the problem. After all, the thing you’re making didn’t exist before, so why should it obey the tools of the past? This is a prime temptation for automakers, who can give the mechanical-engineering intern something simple that she won’t fuck up but still important enough that she will develop some much-needed confidence. I built that, she’ll tell her bored friends, showing them a blurry smartphone photograph of some bizarre pulley-mounting lever that keeps the factory from having to throw away an entire car every time the engine goes in a little crooked.
The real geniuses in the industry make things that just degrade into other things. This part of the car breaks? Yeah that sucks, but we can turn the rest of it into a motorcycle and sell it in Southeast Asia rather than having to wait for another run to come back from the heavy press.
We can all take this to heart. The next time you’re building something vaguely complex, figure out a way to figure out what’s wrong with it. It’s like taking out insurance, in that you pay a lot of money to deal with circumstances that will never happen. At least you get to build some cool tools, though.
When I heard that California was experiencing a huge dump of weather, I didn’t delay. I didn’t sit around, tut-tutting about those poor dears. No. I took action. I got a flight right to Los Angeles, walked past the huddled, terrified masses, and walked right to the rental counter. And I got something with full insurance.
You see, I grew up driving in the snow. Because I’m too poor or maybe too stupid to move away, I still do now. It sucks, and it holds up traffic, and you have to shovel a lot. You get used to it, though, especially after a winter of bullshit white stuff falling from the sky all the time and covering your perfectly good crapcan cars. You also get very good at driving in it, unless you’re everybody else on my commute.
We all think we live in a world of rules and mores, but when something like this happens, everything changes. The people who can wield power – the people who can seize power – become as gods. Knowing that I need to slow down a little bit before trying to turn the steering wheel on the highway would make me unstoppable, a singular silver beam of pure id through the crippled cityscape. Capable of anything.
The cops were powerless to stop me. What were they gonna do, chase me in their patrol cars? They’d never seen snow, either. Their pilot had never flown a helicopter in the snow before. I tested this theory immediately by finding the nearest Krispy Kreme and repeatedly ripping handbrake turns in the parking lot until the cops came running out, then fell and ate shit in the snow. And then, not for the last time in my life, I outran the cops in a 2021 Kia Optima.
I laughed maniacally as I merged onto the highway and barked out a couple front-drive fishtails. The traction control light blinked, screaming at me that what I was doing was Highly Unorthodox and may actually be Injurious To My Person. I punched the traction-control defeat button and laughed harder as the low-speed skids continued. On the side of the highway, I saw a garbage truck crashed, split in two, spilling its contents across a rich man’s lawn.
Then I was hit by a ‘01 Alero driven by some asshole doing ninety miles an hour in a Walmart parking lot on bald tires while smoking crystal meth out of some kind of homemade contraption involving two semi-truck turbochargers. I watched in awe as he continued through the parking lot, over a small hill, through a fence, and directly onto the highway upside down. I felt small. In that moment, only he was truly free.
There’s a disease out there. A grotesque, spreading thing that will get you when you least expect it. That’s right, the internet is packed solid with t-shirt making bots. When you post a picture on Twitter, some script will come by and turn it into a t-shirt for sale. Will you get a penny of that garment money? No. Is it a little weird that the machines have converted blurry pictures of erotic pancakes into clothing they will mail to you for twenty United States dollars? By recent standards, also no.
It got me to thinking. A picture is pretty easy to copy. What if you made a picture that was difficult to copy? Then, it would be much more expensive to turn it into a t-shirt. I embarked on my journey of refreshing my computer-science fundamentals, diving deep into the mathematics behind cryptography and modern commerce. Then I figured out that of course you can’t do that, so I decided to go to plan B: tricking the robots into doing work for me.
Here’s the thing: these “robots” are actually just computer programs, and those computer programs are running on a computer that I don’t have to pay for electricity or disk space on. I started to upload the contents of my hard drive as images, and tagged the t-shirt bots to come over and back them up for me for free. Thanks, assholes! That was just the beginning, though, and I soon experimented with embedding exploit code into the images. Surely these outfit pirates haven’t kept their software patched, I figured, and I was right.
Once I got access to a few thousand t-shirt bot computers, it was a relatively simple matter to turn them loose on their creators. I released my new winged monkeys onto the internet at large, in search of any words left unclothed. The world of human language is rich, and dense, and surely that would immediately fill up their hard drives with useless gibberish.
All this is to explain why I’m a little grumpy today. You see, I didn’t get any credit for this year’s must-have fashion item, a white Gildan t-shirt that says “Gargle My Ass.”
The less said about the glorious battle between the spectral form of A.J. Foyt and the somehow-animate form of Dan Gurney the better. You can read all about it in the major newspapers if you want, although the journalists didn’t really get the essence of the story. What’s important is that I got a brand new Honda Accord out of the whole deal. Well, not brand new. It’s like… ten, fifteen years old. It’s 2002 still, right?
Of course, I had forgotten the pact. I thought I had been so clever, having fulfilled my obligations to the multiple-time Indy 500 winner to defeat his All American Racing nemesis (this, somehow, despite the fact they had never raced against each other – go figure) and then slip out the back door, towards the docks using my newfound ability to read basic road signs, and then onto a roll-on-roll-off ferry to go home the slow way. After that, it was a simple two months at sea, making friends with all the stevedores. Most of them weren’t named Steve, but all of them got really pissed by the fifth or sixth week when I wouldn’t stop making that joke, even the ones who initially started out pretending they didn’t speak English to avoid me at the Maersk mess hall.
As soon as we docked, I was gunning the understressed F-motor, telling it about all the cool turbochargers and turbocharger accessories I was going to bolt to its carapace in order to reach its true form as a highway abuser. Unfortunately, the chassis didn’t agree with me. Anyone here could have told you what was going to happen next. Without the annual deposits of leaking oil and poorly-applied road tar, the Accord’s virginal unibody metal had not become accustomed to the atmospheric road salt of my land of origin. I didn’t even make it to the end of the docking ramp before I was sitting on the ground, holding a windshield and the least-ferrous parts of the steering wheel in my lap.
Well, be that as it may, it was still an incredible adventure as an illegal occupant and full-time street racer at the behest of the shade of a famous geriatric racer who I had never met. I learned a lot about myself, and I also got a chance to try that new flavour of Chip Star at the parking area. They almost got it to taste like potato now, if you can believe that.
As I began the long, but familiar, process of hitch-hiking the thousands of kilometres home from the coast, I couldn’t help but wonder what ol’ A.J. Foyt was up to now. Probably going much faster than me, hurtling through the stars in pursuit of the ultimate speed. That’s when I heard a joyous little toot toot and turned to see a Suzuki Super Carry kei van barely turtling up the hill towards me. It had been sitting on the boat behind me the whole time.
The drivers’ window rolled down. “Get in, asshole,” barked Jacques Villeneuve. Home at last.
You might think that you’ve had a worldly life, but until you’ve been bailed out by some kind of racer-cum-used-car-salesman in a foreign jail at the behest of a spectral multiple-time Indianapolis 500 winner, you haven’t really lived. As the ghost of A.J. Foyt controlled things both inside my mind and seemingly in the outside world, I could do nothing more than put one foot in front of the other, even as those feet led me to multiple moving violations in the good ol’ urban paradise of Osaka.
Back home, the folks who used to street-race Civics and harass the cops with them had all found their race vehicles rotting into the ground, or stolen by teenagers who wanted to swap the guts into their Integras and CR-Vs. At best, Hollywood movie stars would purchase them and then write them off driving too quickly beneath semi trucks in the vain hope of stealing combination TV/VCRs.
I rode along in a lushly-appointed, but altogether too low, ‘88 Civic sedan. My driver didn’t want to express his name, and perhaps I should have not even asked, shrouded in shame as I was. No doubt, Foyt was disappointed in me, as my entire retinue of B-swapped killer bees barely managed to make a dent in the municipal police’s on-call bench as we wove around the Loop as brashly and quickly as possible.
Some of this failure is probably due to me, who was not especially familiar with driving on the other side of the road. As a result, I drove pretty slow, occasionally braking hard because I got confused about which lanes were exits and which continued the highly-efficient highway infrastructure. It was no problem for the cops to catch up to this wayward idiot. Even now, sitting in the putative passenger seat of this Civic, I felt like I should have a steering wheel in front of me. Occasionally, my left foot hit the carpet in the general vicinity of a decadent Western clutch pedal when we came to a stop. I bet this guy is so hardcore he doesn’t even use a hydraulic slave cylinder, I thought to myself.
A.J. Foyt had one more plan for me. I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw him chuckling in the back seat, stretched out, taking little spoon dips out of a container of Blue Bell ice cream. Weird thing is, the label was in katakana, but I was still able to read it. Maybe all those factory service manuals I read while incarcerated in the mental hospital actually stuck. That’s when the driver pulled into another parking area, and showed me the real prize: a left-hand-drive ‘91 Accord wagon. With this, ol’ Tony Foyt assured me, rumbling in my ear, I could outrun all the prohibitionists.
Ol’ A.J. Foyt wasn’t done with me, no sir. After his ghost(?) compelled me to the land of the rising sun with the promise of high-revving economy shitbox engines, I still had to win the approval of the locals. Like any other group of like-minded individuals, the loop racers had a hierarchy. Those who went fast, very often, were at the top. Those who chickened out, the bottom.
When I pulled up to the parking area, a bunch of the racers were hanging out next to their shitboxes. I recognized virtually every word they said, being as it was a series of complicated jokes about what ridiculous engine swap they wanted to attempt first. Then, they saw me, and clammed up. It might be because I had neglected to bring a suitcase with me while stowing away on the Boeing Dreamliner that whisked me to Japan, and was now standing before them wearing race car pajamas, a five ‘o’ clock shadow, and a mysterious base-model Civic that appeared to be permanently leaning to one side.
While I had no functional spoken Japanese other than the several thousand words I had learned while cold-calling Fukushima numbers in the phone book asking for Honda Tact parts, that didn’t stop me. Most of those words, as you would expect, were actually angry housewives and bar owners getting mad at me for phoning them at three in the morning just to ask them if they still had a Showa-era motorcycle clogging up their parking pad. They could still be hammered into shape, and in a furious oratorical volley punctuated by lengthy stories of my past exploits fleeing the decadent Western imperialist police back home, I let that magical compound invective fly.
A few of them looked at me in confusion. Eventually, one of the racers stepped out of the group and asked me to leave. I showed him a photograph of my car back home, a billion-mile 1978 Plymouth Volare whose structural integrity is, at best, implied. His eyes went wide, and after some discussion, they decided that they could let “the crazy asshole” race with them. Foyt’s spectre was pleased when I got back to the car. He was stretched out on the floor of the car, where the passenger seat used to sit. I had thrown that seat away on the way to the parking area, as discarding unnecessary weight is the first instinct of any true racer.
We pulled out of the parking area together, a high-revving mob drunk on single-slammer economy car violence. I had found my people, and hopefully some of them would use their turn signals, because I had no idea how to read any of these fucking highway signs.
Honestly, I’m not gonna discount the possibility that a leaking tank of nitrous oxide caused this whole thing. What thing, you ask? The ghost of A.J. Foyt appeared before me, demanding that I head to Osaka. While this might be conventionally weird, I thought it was especially strange considering Mr. Foyt is still alive. Nevertheless, I spent my savings on climbing aboard a leaving passenger aircraft bound for the tiny island nation of Japan.
Here’s the thing about Osaka: they love their Honda Civics. If you’re into car culture at all, you’ll know all about the gangs of buzzing hatchbacks that menace the helpless police on the urban battlefield that is the Kanjo Loop. Foyt-san, still hovering menacingly in flits and starts in the corner of my vision and in full race-suit livery whenever I looked at myself in a mirror, told me where to go to pick one up for myself. This continued to be strange, not just because of the eerie horror-show atmosphere that was developing, but because the multiple-time Indy 500 winner has never expressed in public a particular fondness for Soichiro Honda’s finest shitbox.
Sure enough, though, the Civic was where he told me it would be. Next to it was a grinning dude in a race suit, who refused to acknowledge my lack of spoken Japanese in any way. He thrust a key into my hands and slapped me on the back in what was surely an attempt at emulating a Western paternalistic gesture taught to him by vintage television programs. I now had at my command a 1987 Civic hatchback, of no particular distinction, and the Loop lay bare before me. I revved the tiny engine in anticipation, and drank in its intoxicating redline. This was a beater that had a working clock.
Hours later, I was snarling at the local police as they threw my ass into a jail cell, along with all of my new-found street racing buddies. After a couple minutes of trying to figure out how to open the packaging to the efficient-yet-delicious boxed lunch the officers grudgingly provided me with, that same Civic salesman returned to bail me out. Foyt, it seemed, was pleased by my performance.
When you’re communicating on the internet, it can be easy to elide details or simply forget important facts that the other person doesn’t know. Even though we have become fast friends, bonding over our shared love of garbage, I have never told you about my neighbour, Ken.
Ken is what they call an average North American male. He doesn’t really exercise much, his car is financed, and he has a passing interest in professional tennis that he won’t admit to unless tortured. If you knew Ken only casually, this is what you’d leave it at. Maybe you also volunteer at the PTA he serves, perhaps you work with him at his something-or-other accounting job. When you’re his neighbour, you’re something more than just a casual acquaintance. For instance, you have to deal with his hobby.
What is Ken’s hobby? Fucking bees is Ken’s hobby. No, I don’t mean he has intercourse with the stinging insects, although I wouldn’t put it past him. Ever since the city has allowed at-home beekeeping licenses, out of a noble-but-idiotic belief that it will help reverse the inevitable collapse of Earth’s biosphere, he’s spent every free minute out in the yard taking care of his venomous flower-molesting micropets. And as a result, I have bees taking up residence in a lot of my decrepit cars. They’re perfect for those little shits to open up an apiary inside, because they don’t move very often, they’re shielded from the weather, and the hollowed-out headlight housing of a ‘69 Imperial has a lot of Art Deco appeal that impresses the other queens when they come to visit.
In practice, this means that I get stung a lot when I decide to finally resuscitate one of those cars in order to drive to work. Lesser men would just hose the place down with brake cleaner, but I don’t really want to kill these tiny dudettes, and also brake cleaner is expensive. I need to save it for starting fluid. Recently, I discovered an alternative method to get them to leave.
I figured it out when I was at the airport, watching a demonstration of old-timey planes. They used a smaller cart with an engine on it to start up an old plane. Since that engine was basically solid-mounted to the cart, it vibrated like a concrete tamper and shook the floor. Hell, I have lots of spare engines and an old front axle from a Jeep, let’s party.
Friends: it worked great. Not only did the bees flee my yard, but all manner of rodents, stray cats, raccoons, and magpies also headed for the hills. I was finally able to work on a shitbox old Dodge without worrying about my hand getting bitten or stung, and all it cost me was permanent tinnitus. Not like you could have noticed before with all the buzzing.
You can be cheap without being a scumbag. Buy used things. Repair them when they wear out. Check every vending machine you pass for forgotten change in the coin return. Get rid of all that excess blood plasma you don’t need for your non-intensive office job. If you want to be a scumbag, though, you have to be constantly looking for new angles.
Around my part of the world, the government has been telling restaurants to cut it out with the plastic shit. Every meal you order, even if it comes to your house, comes complete with half a dozen plastic utensils that just end up in the dump and – more likely than not – choke a dolphin to death. Yeah. A dolphin. Flipper’s dead because McDonalds won’t stop giving you free forks. What do you think about that, reactionaries?
I digress. One of the things that they’ve been getting rid of as a result of this new regulation is plastic straws. So now the straws are made out of paper, which is not a problem with me, but they include those straws even when you buy a bottle of water. Bottles are for chugging, folks. Which means I have tons of leftover straws kicking around my house, and it bothered my scumbag nature to no extent not to have a creative use for them.
Sure, I tried the basics. Arts and crafts. Scale-model fabrication. Drain tubes. Using them as blowguns to knock out the mailman with a powerful paralytic agent so I could interrogate him at my leisure about why my packages take two weeks to clear customs. Nothing really worked, or at least didn’t use up the straws faster than more arrived with my weekly order (usually placed when I needed another water bottle with which to catch a newly-sprouted leak.) That is, until I figured it all out.
Way back in the 1970s, when the world was going to hell because gasoline became not as expensive as it is now, the brave Swedes had a solution. They figured out that they could burn useless trees as fuel, and so developed wood-gas reactors that they strapped to the back of their Volvos. Run out of gas? Chop down a nearby tree and cram that shit into the tank, you’re good to go. All I had to do was make a trip to Swedish eBay and order a several-hundred-pound woodgas conversion kit using someone else’s credit card. Don’t worry, environmentalists, I picked the slower shipping option. Now, I could chuck these paper straws right in there and get like half a block of gas – for free!
The project has been so successful, in fact, that I now find myself visiting fast-food restaurants just to help myself to several boxes of straws. They give me weird looks, sure, but there’s just something about a half-feral scruffy dude burrowing into your restaurant, stealing several hundred paper straws, and then running out the nearest exit that shouts “don’t call the cops yet.” Even though it probably wouldn’t be hard for them to find me in this plume of noxious waxed-paper smoke.
When you’re up, you’re up. When you fall, that’s when everyone steps on you and tells you what they really thought of you. This is what’s happened to Volkswagen over the last couple of years. Whereas they were once a desirable consumer brand who made a series of cars that all look vaguely similar, smell of crayons, and sprout inexplicable issues just out of warranty, now they had become some kind of foul pollution-spewing death machine. This was bad in and of itself, but it turns out that they lied about that pollution to regulators, and regulators have a tendency to have access to regulation.
Journalists each took a turn gasping in horror at how the sort of sketchy company built on cynically value-engineering front-drive Trabant clones was gassing monkeys and writing an “if testing then cheat” statement into their computers’ firmware. It was a real bad show, and like all really bad shows, it translated into big hits. Everyone lined up to make fun of the automotive giant as they plunged from second place sales to well behind Mazda and recalled hundreds of thousands of their cars to make them slower and worse while the lawman of every country that has roads each held a gun to their head. Like I said, kick ‘em while they’re down.
Now, Volkswagen is running around the country, stuffing it with electric car chargers. Electricity never did anything bad to monkeys, they explain, just elephants, and that was that Edison guy’s fault. They’re on their comeback path, which will inevitably involve some “retro” styled automobiles. Hey look, it’s the VW hippie bus all over again, except now it’s a lot faster than before and should now hold up in a crash with a particularly angry toddler. Great stuff overall, the kind of whizbang all-fronts attack that’s meant to make journalists’ bosses remember who is liable to take out a bunch of really expensive advertising in their magazines.
Personally, I think it’s a masterful turnaround. Some real grade-A corporate resuscitation. And I’m not just saying that so that I can get the number of their marketing consultants, because traffic court seems to be getting wise to my new line of self-driving taco trucks using technology stolen from that Predator drone that crashed into the carnival midway last summer. I’ll maintain until my death that that old-folks’ home was presenting a grade-A hunger target, and needed to be wiped off the face of the Earth with hot sauce.
For years, I’ve been fascinated by magnetism. You can just get these special rocks and click them together and then a whole bunch of free energy comes out. It’s free! And you probably get way, way too much. Wait, it’s not magnetism? Hoo boy this is going to be hard to explain to the condo board.
In recent years, the Japanese have leveraged the principles of magnetism to make a train that goes really fast. Like, really fast. Six hundred and three kilometers an hour fast, also known as “eat shit, passenger airliners.” It turns out that the big downer for trains is friction, and if you can instead hover the train above the tracks with magnets, you can shoot that thing like a railgun and nobody can stop you.
Further, the Japanese rail folks swear up and down that you can ride this train, right now, if you show up at the one station it goes to, and pay a bunch of money, and then win a sort of mini-lottery to be allowed to board it. And the weather co-operates. It’ll be ready by 2027, they explain quickly and then distract you from your questions by showing you some footage of them driving the fucking thing so hard that it has to be sprayed down constantly with water just so the air around it doesn’t spontaneously combust out of jealousy.
One of the things they had to solve is the tunnel boom effect. When you go through a tunnel as fast as this fucking thing does, the air you displace pops out on either side of you and out the back of the tunnel like a gunshot. A lot of complicated aerodynamics is required so that the train doesn’t fall off the “tracks” that it hovers over, and they celebrated solving this problem by making it go even faster. The resulting sonic boom is so loud and so dramatic that some farmers were complaining it would make their nearby cows explode. So they decided to go into the tunnels slower, more politely. That’s not how I’d do things. I’d turn it up even more out of spite. Clearly their boss has been feeling a lot of heat (or maybe a lot of meat) from Big Beef.
All this is to say: magnets! They’re great. In fact, they’re so great, that I’ve decided to leverage this exciting new technology in my own transportation. Namely, I bought a bunch of those cool welding magnets from Princess Auto and are using them to hold the driver’s door onto my Volare, rather than fix the hinges. It doesn’t even rattle as bad as it used to! Truly the wave of the future.
There are two kinds of people in the world. On one hand, you have the folks who get super upset when an oil tanker spills and irreversibly contaminates precious natural resources, destroying our planet in the name of short-term profit. On the other hand, you’ve got the kind of folks who immediately commission a sketchy series of near-criminals into purchasing a disused scientific trawler because some idiot left a bunch of free oil out there and I don’t want to have to do the valve cover gaskets on my engine.
All it takes, really, is a big scoop on the front of a boat. A big scoop is something we can absolutely make. Most of us have experience fabricating rulebook-pleasing hood scoops from Princess Auto snow shovels, recycle bins left out on the side of the road, road signs, and human ribcages. Still not sure how Big Al got ahold of that, and, no matter what you may think of me, I’m not going to ask him while we’re sharing a room on this tiny little research ship.
You might think that once you’ve hoovered up the oil, it’s a good idea to separate out the water, or at least desalinate it a little bit, before you put it into an engine. And we did that, through gravity. The big tank in the bottom of the ship holds all of it and we just took a bunch of soup ladles from the kitchen and put it into old pails. Refine it? Nothing doing, college folks: like I said, the wheezy-ass slant six in this Volare blows through oil so fast that it probably won’t even notice as long as it’s slippery enough. Hell, it could be expired mayonnaise, but the grocery store recently started locking up their dumpster at night again.
Really, the worst part of all this is the attention we got. As soon as the local government figured out that we were in the area, cleaning up one of the world’s most atrocious ecological disasters, they wanted to give us some medals and invite us to give speeches. And we’re not really about that, especially because the increased attention likely means that some plutocrat-worshipping federale will start scrutinizing us out of spite, looking for a “gotcha” to punish us for making the oil industry look worse. A gotcha like “noticing our license plates are made with crayon.” You just can’t do anything nice for people anymore without it becoming so polarized, but on the plus side Shaky Earl got a great gig at the United Nations. He did have to start bringing a drip tray to work, though, because his reserved parking space was starting to look a little oily.
Well, hello. You’ve caught me in the middle of a weekend project. Come on in, and you can keep me company for a little while. Human beings love to bond over working on something. Much like eating together, wrenching together gives your hands and mouth something to do that isn’t awkwardly standing in the middle of a hallway. Everyone comes out of the interaction well. I appreciate all my garage guests, even if my counterparty doesn’t know a Whitworth from a flintlock and is vaguely useless in general.
That brings me to my favourite thing about it. There’s something non-judgmental about the shared space, a commitment to a goal. Even if you say some insane political opinion or express a fondness for post-Renault Nissan products, it’s easy to let it go in the name of just getting this fucking subframe back in the car because I have work tomorrow. I think this is the essence of why human civilization exists: we thought it would be a fun way to spend a weekend.
Of course, this doesn’t apply to work-work. There, you hate everyone around you because you are forced to be together. It is like that movie, The Thing, where a lot of people are afraid of a dog. I didn’t watch all of it, but I got the gist of it pretty quickly. Even if there is a lot of work to go around to distract you from the more reprehensible aspects of your fellow man, chances are that work is just moving cells around in Excel, like you are playing some kind of primitive wargame and the guy on the other end of the office keeps doing unsolicited, maximum-volume voicechat about dolphin genitals.
In the shop, you’re together because you want to be. Don’t like that the garage TV is endlessly looping 2 Fast 2 Furious instead of the morally-and-clearly-superior Tokyo Drift? Get up and leave, unless it’s your car that just got torn apart on jackstands, in which case you must be very nice to everyone, and maybe bring some extra snacks next time.
You know, you used to be able to go days in this neighbourhood without seeing an old crappy Volkswagen. Folks here used to have real proletarian cars, like a high-mileage champagne-gold Toyota Camry, or a slightly pock-marked Dodge Caravan. None of this ostentatious European stuff, especially not 25-year-old turbodiesel Jettas. Now, things are different. I can stand on the side of the road, trying to collect all the scattered parts of my crankshaft, and see five or six of those same Jettas in ten minutes.
Someone had to do something, and years of austerity and reactionary politics had taught me that the thing to do was to shriek as loudly as possible at any politician within range. I had been taught by the media that Volkswagens are a threat to my Property Value, whatever it is, and they should do something to get rid of these Fakey McFakersons and return my neighbourhood to the authentic junkyard full of reliable shitboxes that it used to be. If things didn’t get better, pretty soon teenagers would be rocking Altima coupes missing on a cylinder, and then I’d have to fight off gentrifiers, whatever those are.
So: I wrote my city councillor. She was nice enough, and after the first few puzzled emails, she showed up to my house with a squadron of bylaw officers in tow. Turns out that she had also gotten some complaints that some grizzled weirdo was running some kind of mechanic’s shop out of his grotesque house, and hundreds of shitty old client cars were parked on the lawn. It ruins the Property Value, they explained, and someone must Do Something. In this particular case, I did not want anyone to Do Anything: in fact, I now regretted my actions and especially that biplane that I paid to tow a banner reading “GET YOUR PASSAT OUT OF HERE” past City Hall.
Once I explained that all the cars were in fact mine, none of them were hated Volkswagens, and everything was registered to my offshore corporation which coincidentally was unreachable except for between the hours of 1:15 and 1:30 AM with an eight-dollar-per-minute long-distance call, she grudgingly called off her thugs. I caught a glimpse of her car as it was leaving. A Phaeton. I was in deep on this one.
Despite my other improper (some would say rude) road manners, I rarely ever use the horn. There are cars in my “collection” that I don’t even know what the horn sounds like on, or if they work. I won’t try them out until I’m stuck behind someone who’s looking at their cellphone instead of accelerating as hard as possible off the green light and give them a little parp to remind them that other people need to get rolling because the water pump in this thing only cools effectively above idle. Once they do, however, I often find out that the horn is broken.
This always fills me with indignation. How dare the previous owner not notice their horn, of all things, was broken? Never mind that it’s taken fifteen years, four engine swaps, and accidentally bumping the steering wheel with my elbow while trying to pop a Rockford in the parking lot of the abandoned Kay Bee Toys to find out myself. And then I have to go fix it, as cheaply as possible.
Horns in particular are a particularly annoying junkyard item. It’s small, relatively modular, and electronic, so the junkyards will charge you a fortune for it. Almost as much as it would cost to go to Princess Auto and pick up some ridiculous aftermarket horn, usually called something pointlessly aggressive and masculine, like a “Highway Blaster,” “Freeway Molester,” or “Deer Obliterator.” So I usually just do that. Yet this has other problems, as these new-and-improved aftermarket horns need to draw more current, or they’ll sound kinda shitty and weak, making my investment worthless. Wiring commences, at which point I find out that pack rats ate part of my wiring, at which point re-wiring commences, and then invariably, I discover that the original horn worked fine all along and it’s just because my fusebox is full of rodent piss from 1981.
So if you’re in front of me in traffic, stay off your damn phone. You could be holding me up, which in turn will cause me to waste nearly twenty dollars and half a weekend pulling greened-up death copper out of my engine bay. I don’t know how you people can live with yourselves.
Dump trucks have a lot going for them. They’re trucks, for one thing, so they’re inherently practical, even when they’re the size of Scotland and have tires big enough to park another truck inside. There’s proletarian charm for days; remember how your uncle once told you that “blue collars make ‘em holler.” They have lots of little gadgets, like power-take-offs to lift the dump bed, and levers to tell it what to do. And of course, dump trucks are slow, which infuriates people into making risky passes, at which point you run them the fuck over.
Now, you may ask yourself: why are enormous construction vehicles that can’t reach the speed limit allowed to coexist with regular commuter traffic? And to that I say, that’s a very good question. That dump truck driver’s boss expects to make good on his investment, so he puts pressure on the local authorities to not apply restrictive road-use laws that would force his employees to take slower, but less dangerous routes while on the job. He may also do some shitbag union-busting, we don’t know for sure, but what we do know is that eventually that dump truck is sent to auction, at which point it can become my dump truck, free of its previous connotations of labour abuse.
Sure, you need a more advanced drivers’ license to operate a truck such as this, but let me let you in on a little secret. Plane tickets are real cheap right now, and you can fly to a country that doesn’t even have dump trucks, pass their dump truck exam with the help of twenty dollars cash, and trade in your new dump truck driver’s license for a legitimate one when you get back to this country. That’s where they get new brain surgeons from, after all: just costs too much to raise ‘em here, and they don’t do anything nearly as cool as driving a seven-ton industrial vehicle to work at an office.
And speaking of that office, that brings me to the only real problem I’ve had with the truck so far. Parking it is a pain in the ass. All the spots are way too small for my gargantuan steed. When the other idiots from your department want you to take them to Wendy’s because it’s your turn on the lunch rotation, it takes an hour just to get out of the spot and another hour to explain to the cops why you had to destroy half the drive-thru in order to pick up your order. At least you can easily get rid of the evidence.
Every time I see a Celica in my neighbourhood, I’m filled with envy. How dare those other scumbags own such a primo car, and not a hard-working, top-tier scumbag like myself? In truth, I have owned a Celica in the past. Many, many Celicas. These personal luxury coupes come direct from the Home Islands to torment me with their shapely bodies and almost-but-not-quite-perfect handling.
Why then, do we part? It is simple: these cars have value, and folks offer me way more money than I paid. And I would like to put that money into my other, more worthless cars. I see the tail lights of a Celica disappear from my driveway, and I wipe my tears with a few thousand dollars in cold, hard cash. Every time, I would tell myself that I can just get another one, and then a few months later, a tattered-but-lovely junker would show up in my life, ready to begin the cycle anew.
Now though, things are different. Something has broken down at the very core of the world, like that time my clutch went out, so I tried to float gears for my entire drive to work. Every car is worth a hojillion dollars, even though the very newest of the Celicas is approaching legal adulthood, and every seller needs every single cent they can get from that value in order to continue being able to afford lettuce and small-caliber ammunition. Barn and auction finds are a thing of the past, as other car nerds are working tirelessly to resurrect every single car, no matter how shitty, knowing that they are likely to never see another inexpensive fun car, rather than give up on them for inconveniences like transmission failure or “floor gone.”
Still though, there is hope. I recently befriended a billionaire industrialist, and by “befriended” I mean I pushed him out of an airplane while we were on a skydiving trip without putting his parachute on first. What this means is, for the next few weeks at least, I’ll be in control of a vast manufacturing empire, dedicated solely to punching out just-slightly-wrong-looking knockoffs of the 1988 Celica. With any luck, we’ll be bringing back the glory days of Toyota, and if it makes them angry enough to try and defend their trademark by releasing their own genuine article, even better. Plus, flooding the market with brand-new Celicas will make everyone else realize how stupid they were to hold onto any other car, and release them into my loving arms.
Recently, the cops were doing a little sobriety check on the side of the road. They wanted to get some easy tickets. Do a little fish-in-a-barrel shooting, even though when I do it, the game warden says that is extremely illegal and to stop putting them on speakerphone while firing a sidearm wildly into said barrel. Those cops never counted on me.
If I really think hard about it and try to imagine myself in the shoes of a normal person, it does seem like the wonky ball joint on my car and its insanely out-of-round tires might produce a steering pattern not dissimilar to a drunkard. It is for this reason, though, that I could never even drive distracted: reaching for the radio alone is likely to end me up on the wrong side of the highway and, if it happens over the big bridge, in that shit-filled irrigation field out by the Big Lots. I wasn’t surprised when the cops waved me over.
Now, any good defence attorney will tell you: don’t talk to the cops. That includes if they ask you how your evening is going. It is none of their business how my evening is going. This is why my own personal attorney, Max, doesn’t go anywhere without his personal attorney, Phil, in the passenger seat or at the very least riding in the car behind. After a little bit of confusion, they gave up on the socialization. Naturally, they wanted to take a look at my cool-ass car, something I was only too happy to oblige.
And while they were distracted trying to figure out which specific automotive-equipment laws I was breaking, I was busy dropping the turbochargers out of their Police Interceptor. It was a quick job because the bolts aren’t even rusty yet, and still have the vague shape of bolts. Hey, my tax money paid for them. Another good lesson from Max: rather than keep them on my person, I simply kicked them off to the side of the road. This not only insulated me from potential liability for stealing turbochargers from a police vehicle, but kept me from burning my hands and coat pockets on thousand-degree-temperature exhaust components. Let the snow pack deal with it, I say, and I’ll come back for it in the morning.
Finally, the cops gave up on trying to relate to my Byzantine mess of hack-jobs as “a car.” Huddling on the roadside, they quickly discussed a strategy, and then broke the scrum. The good news was they figured out I wasn’t drunk, because a drunk could never hope to make something like this, something which required some sort of otherworldly pact with physics itself to keep from immediately disintegrating under the weight of its own wrongness. Whatever it was I was doing, the bigger cop told me with fear in his eyes, I should just try not to involve too many other people. Yeah, that’s what I was trying to do before you wanted to talk to me about how my evening was going.
Once again, my enemies have done to me what they always do: get angry at me for getting impatient at Home Depot. And in a way, they’re right. It is both of our faults that I got upset. The workers are trying their best, and sometimes they have more pressing duties (customer pooped in the display toilet?) than coming to help me cut some plywood on the saw. That’s not their fault. What is their fault is that they once, years ago, showed me the key that they use to unlock the plywood-cutting saw’s safety interlock, and didn’t notice me taking several pictures of it with my phone before uploading it to a lock-breaking website operated by an unaccountable offshore artificial metamind.
They shouldn’t be too mad: sure, I did use their key-cutting machine to make a copy of that key, but I paid for it, just like any other sucker. That’s the right thing to do. If anything, they saved some money by my work of piracy, because I didn’t have to wait for an employee to come by and use the key-cutting machine, either. I’d love a business where customers walk in, serve themselves, and then give me some money. It would leave me with a lot of free time to waste at Home Depot waiting for someone to come by and slowly operate the power tool I already know how to use.
I do hear you saying now: if you’re so fucking handy, then how come you didn’t take it home and cut it yourself? The answer is that today’s modern plywood sheets are too big to fit into my delectable shitbox of a van, which was only made for three or four years in a suburb of Chengdu. Even now, getting any information about the model requires officially applying through the Chinese embassy, and often times all you’ll get back is “it is very suspicious that you keep asking so many questions about this.” I still keep trying, though, which probably means I won’t get to visit the factory in which it was made, or at least the Party representative who shows me around it won’t be very gracious when she spots me trying to shove mufflers into my pockets. So I have to hack the plywood in half and kind of jam it in there at an angle with the hatch propped open. And I can’t turn right very sharply or it will all fall out into traffic.
Home Depot says you should “do it yourself.” This is a noble pursuit, and, if anything, my core ethos. Of course, what they actually mean is “fuck it up, and buy materials to do it at least twice.” Their hypocrisy is laid bare in this exact situation, but worry not. I made sure to run off a few more orders from other customers before the orange-aproned Gestapo cottoned onto the sound of basic competence. With any luck, they too will become impatient with the doddering pace of hardware-store monopolists. I could use a second pair of eyes to watch my back while I’m working the key cutting machine next time.
Believe me, nobody is more sick of the rattling interior in my car than me. Sure, it helps drown out the road noise from the missing floorboards, and the roof that peels back a little from the windshield frame at highway speeds. Those things are nice, to be sure. There’s just something about the specific way it rattles that is completely infuriating.
Right behind that driver’s side heater vent, that’s where it is. If I put my finger on it while I’m driving in just the right spot, it will stop completely. Of course, I can’t keep holding onto there the entire time, because I’ll look like a dork. And also I need both hands on the wheel in case that dicky ball joint coordinates with that spotty tie-rod to throw me into oncoming traffic again.
Naturally, I’ve tried to tear the dashboard apart to get at the rattles. That’s how I got this rattle. Much like operating on a 90-year-old person, chances are that you are going to cause more damage than you’re going to fix. I assume that I didn’t do up some clip, or some screw is slightly stripped now, or I pulled a little too hard in that corner and peeled apart two layers of thermally-bonded plastic that haven’t seen daylight since the Carter administration.
Don’t worry, though. I’ve got a solution. It’s called turning the stereo up. And once that stops working (probably because I blew the speakers out a few months ago) I can just start drilling holes in the exhaust to drown it out with some bellowing low-rpm Mopar goodness. As long as I work the throttle exactly right, I should be able to keep from blowing up that super-loud differential, too.
Once, a long time ago, I was bestowed with an eerie power, beyond the ken of mortal man. In the back of a van that I purchased from the auctions laid an artifact of incomparable might. It let me disappear from the sight of police officers, security guards, journalists, and miscellaneous snoops. I could travel throughout the city, uninterrupted, into its most sensitive areas. Perhaps you, too, have received such a gift from the heavens. I speak, of course, of a high-visibility jacket and plastic hard-hat.
When you are wearing them, nobody at all will ever bother you. Why would you be wearing those dorky clothes if you didn’t belong here? And why would you be here if something weren’t abnormal? The human mind can ignore a whole shitload of stuff, like why a 1965 Ford Econoline camper van is parked haphazardly on the side of the road while a greasy, filthy dude is rifling through a phone swi- oh, he has a high-visibility jacket on. He must know what he’s doing. Even if what he’s doing appears to be pulling several hundred feet of copper wire out of that telco box and stuffing it into the back of his grotty van.
There’s only one downside. Now that I’ve figured out this secret of the human race, I wonder how many others around me are also imposters. Once in awhile, I’ll try to make eye contact with another be-vested individual, really stare him or her down. They usually break the eye contact, and then quickly slink away. Once, some lady ran back to her still-running XTerra, and did a Rockford turn out of the parking lot, before speeding the wrong way down the highway for a few seconds. I’ll never know what she was really up to. Maybe she was actually doing her job.
So if you see me out there, and you’re doing the same thing I am, make sure you let me know that you don’t belong there, too. Together, we can team up to loot even more shit from The Man, and nobody at all will expect that an impromptu team meeting is actually a front for a criminal enterprise of gettin’ stuff.
If you can’t be happy about receiving a giant box of broken garbage, then when can you be happy? Every year, I’ve been participating in a “secret Santa” gift exchange. Despite my initial, partially-erroneous, assumption that this involved breaking into the homes of my giftees, it has been a smashing success. Mostly because everyone knows what I want: trash, and lots of it.
Now, it’s not because I like being surrounded by teeming piles of trash (that is just a bonus.) Nor is it some kind of angry mountain-man revenge against society. I’m not even all that interested in fixing this stuff and putting it back into circulation. No, what I want it for is the parts. Even the most useless tchotchke, as long as it’s above a certain physical size, is chock full of components that can be used for other, more evil purposes.
Sometimes only the screws are useful from a particularly proprietary piece of junk, and the rest of it ends up in the box of things to go to the dumpster behind the Tim Horton’s. Most of the time, I keep the most valuable components, and then they come in handy at the opportune time. What percentage of these parts have done that, you ask? Uhhh I don’t keep records. Please stop asking and hand me that old egg carton, I want to put these skateboard bearings somewhere safe before they get absorbed by the stuff on the carpet.
I’ll always be grateful to my new pen-pal, Hyderabad Zero Waste Recycling Industries. Sure, he (she? they?) might have a strange name, but every month, more garbage turns up on my porch, direct from India. It’s very nice of them to help out a more needy person.
Even in this topsy-turvy, messed-up future hellworld in which we reside, there are still small joys. One of those joys is trying to mail incredibly awkward things using the postal system. Super-dense objects. Very long objects. Oddly shaped boxes that take you an hour to assemble, and which can’t safely be stacked on or next to anything. These are the things that keep posties on their toes, and more importantly, employed.
Think about it: if all the boxes were consistent, linear, standard, they’d be efficient. The MBAs would get to grinding down the margins with their spreadsheets, even more than they already do. And then robots would take over. Suddenly, your friendly neighbourhood postal delivery agent would no longer give a happy parp-parp of the horn when your broken-down late-1970s domestic American shitbox is stranded in the middle of the street. A robot would just swerve around it, the unblinking eyes scanning the road ahead for opportunities in which to provide optimum delivery saturation.
When you throw anything complicated in there, say, a box that is shaped like a giant hook? Those robots are gonna get fucked up. They’ll just sit there, developing their own form of object-recognition depression, unable to comprehend the contours of your perversion. And then they’ll probably catch on fire or something, because their heatsinks were simply not designed to handle this level of inefficient thought load in their positronic sensorium matrices. For cost reduction, you see. Then a human being will have to fix the robot, and it will give that human being a job, angering the monsters who dwell above her or him in the org chart.
Of course, it may destroy a robot, but it still frustrates the postal system trying to deal with you shipping an entire arcade cabinet through the mail with just a bunch of Stan Rogers stamps glued to its outside. And when you make an officer of the post angry enough, they’re not going to deliver your shit with a smile. In fact, as soon as you become known as That Person down at the local sorting depot, you’ll be lucky to get anything in the mail without a good stomping or two delivered to it. That’s called the personal touch, and it’s what separates us from the eerily lifelike androids which have infiltrated all levels of our government.
Normal people – cowards is the technical term – are often afraid of things that spark and light on fire. This prevents them from having the maximum amount of fun possible in their lives. They are ruled by the fear of having used an electrical device to its point of failure. In particularly extreme cases, they might even discard a perfectly good item, just because it sparked at them once or twice without even burning a hole in the carpet.
Now, there’s no denying that sparks and flashes are exciting. Everyone thinks so. In fact, it is ninety percent of the reason why electricity exists. We saw that shit in the sky, the power of the gods, and we had to have it for our own purposes. Maybe we saw it create a fire on the ground, and we cooked a fat rack of delicious barbecue ribs on the fire, zero effort involved for an amazing cookout. It was on that day that electrical engineering was formed, and probably an actual electrical engineer will tell you the same thing. Nobody would have imagined that we’d one day be using it for stuff like playing pornographic sprite-swap ROM hacks of Ms. Pac-Man.
Here’s the point I’m trying to make at: sparks doesn’t necessarily mean dangerous. Sometimes it just means “a little loose,” “let me dry out before you switch me on,” or “be gentler with me.” Have some empathy. And even if you do get a teeny tiny baby fire, just blow that shit out. Sure, the insurance company is going to get mad at you if you let it become a big fire, and I probably wouldn’t let a toddler play with the power cord to it, but none of us can afford to buy a new whatever-it-is in this economy. That would just be letting The Bastards win.
Plus, if you can burn out your natural fear of sparks and flashes, then you can become a welder. And then you can come by my house and help me put a new quarter panel on this Volare. You see, I have a rare fear of using my credit card at Princess Auto to buy a welding machine. Have some empathy.
Bad ideas in the pursuit of bad cars are hardly bad ideas at all. Sure, you may not have the fiscal, emotional, or spatial reserves required to take on the meticulous restoration of a dilapidated rear-wheel-drive 1970s Japanese grand tourer, but if you don’t do it now, when will you do it? In the future, when things calm down a little bit? Chances are that future person will be older and wiser, and will prefer something boring and family-oriented. They may even know enough to look under the car before getting all excited and handing over a ton of money for something that makes Swiss cheese look like a Swiss bank vault.
Really, what you’re actually investing in when you buy a shitty project car is the story. Cars are only cars for a fleeting, beautiful moment, and then they’re a pile of rust on the street or a pile of rust in your backyard. It’s that time they spend with you that is the moment where the true spirit of motoring comes through. Conveniently, the car is still spending time with you whether it’s alive or not, including the point where you rest your head on the shards of corroded firewall and say a silent, pleading prayer to the car that maybe it should stop fighting you so much if it wants to live again. And then you throw a wrench at the garage wall.
Sometimes, you get lucky. And that one-in-a-million shot, where you took a big bet and it paid off with a working, valuable car… that story is the one that inspires other folks to buy a hammered-flat piece of shit and make their own stories. That’s giving back to the community, and it can’t possibly be gambling if you’re helping out other people, right?
Plus, once you get the car done, or at least closer to done, then you can get rid of it to make room for the next terrible project you see rolling down the road. Hey, do you know anyone who speaks Polish and knows their way around an air-cooled two stroke engine? I’ve got a few questions for them.
If there’s one thing everyone complains about, it’s not having enough time. Time is the most valuable resource we have; you can’t buy more of it. Freeing up the time you’re given is basically the only way forward. Historically, there have been two ways to get more free time: one, quit your job, or two, quit your job and move to the mountains, where you hunt men for food and bears for sport. Or maybe the other way around, I don’t have time to waste on editing that sentence.
Nowadays, there is a cult of get-organized-quick practitioners who claim you are just wasting too much of that time. You’ve got enough already, which conveniently means that you don’t have to inconvenience your boss in the slightest. Buy their shit instead of quitting your job, they scream, and you can just optimize your life into being bountiful with seconds. I don’t buy into this kind of thing. Yes, the two or three minutes you wasted chopping green beans one at a time instead of lined up in a big bunch will surely be a deathbed regret, but you’re unlikely to see a similar benefit from figuring out which new kind of bullet-point style to use in your Daytimer.
Another option is to just do less. Don’t have such a strong opinion of yourself. Let some other schmuck do the hard projects. Watch TV once in awhile so you can nod appreciatively when someone asks you what a Regis Philbin is and if you have seen him in your home. This is sort of boring, and, given that my favourite hobby is to start new projects, relatively counterproductive to my mental state. This is, however, close to my own philosophy, which is to just half-ass it.
Yep, that’s right. Half-assing it means that you’ll get done faster. Sure, it might not be as safe, or as cheap, or as refined, but it’s done. And then you can move onto the next project. Nobody is going to line up at your funeral to pound shots over your closed casket, going “they did one thing and they did it really, really well” when they could be saying “I can’t even list all the insane shit that’s piled up in their garage/yard/junkyard/apartment/community. The cops are calling the estate executor daily with new things they’ve found, many of them booby-trapped.” Now that’s a life well lived.
All the degenerates know what day of the week the local thrift store puts out its new merchandise. We would join up in the parking lot, queuing for the door, ready to put an elbow into each others’ faces for the first whack at a timing light, obscure videogame, or an industrial-strength blender some normal person just didn’t know how to maintain. Now, though, buying stuff at a thrift store in order to list on eBay for double or triple its official price is a job. And if there’s one thing I hate, it’s a job.
That’s what the internet says, at least. If your boss isn’t paying you enough, you shouldn’t go into his office and open him up with a straight razor. You shouldn’t even ask for a raise while balancing a heavy cleaver dangerously close to his index fingers, after you and the other shop techs handcuff his wrist to his desk drawer. No, you should just use up some of your free time on a “side hustle.” Sure, you’re still working for a pittance, but it’s your pittance. If your hobby doesn’t make money, then fuck off. Only the rich can afford not to be profitable doing the things they love.
So, all across this great nation, we see folks driving hundreds of kilometres to buy new things from Walmart, and then sell them on Amazon. Now, when you go to Walmart, all the Recycled Engine Oil Product® from Hyun-seung Heavy Industrial Concern has been raptured up into the internet, where folks will pay approximately seventeen cents more per bottle in order to get it delivered. And that’s just new stuff – now, when I throw my fist into someone’s face at the thrift store, I’m no longer just worried about what reprisals will await me in the parking lot, but also if I am starving the children of the family which depends on eBay’s PowerSeller® reduced-fee incentive structure. Not enough to not throw that punch, mind you, but maybe just a little bit softer than I used to. Dental work is expensive, even if you do it yourself. Some asshole keeps buying up all the two-part dental epoxy that gets donated to the industrial surplus store and listing it on eBay, too.
Don’t worry, though. I’m in it for the love of the game. There’s no way I’d ever – wait a minute, people are paying how much for intact Volare dashboards? I sure hope I have enough sawzall blades to get all these out before the post office closes.
Bathtub curve. We’re all aware of it, right? Stuff that’s really new fails because you didn’t put it together properly, stuff that’s really old fails because it’s old. In the middle is all that creamy goodness of reliable product. The question is: when do you buy an old thing, and extract the maximum life out of it before the universe seizes that thing in its cold grasp and squeezes?
Most folks buy something that’s “a little used.” The seats aren’t worn out yet. The speakers are still loud and vibrant. Maybe the paint has some scuffs, or the windshield is already cracked. Big deal. Those are what you pay in exchange for some other sucker taking it to the dealership and having it on the lot for weeks at a time while the Warranty Approval Specialist tries to narrow down the cause. For them, pain, sure. For you: just cream.
I look at it differently. I figure if something is super high mileage, then it’s old enough to have seen a lot of shit. Tons of opportunities to break down. Bad days. Lots of bad days, statistically. And yet the owner at the time didn’t push it into the crusher, swearing the entire time. There’s a reason why they didn’t do that. Because there’s something inherently good about this worn-out piece of shit, and even if I can’t see it at the moment I buy it, surely it will appear to me at some future point.
Of course, there’s no fun in that. The real challenge starts when you pick something that is obviously close to death, and torment it into surviving longer than the boundaries of financial sense or good taste can allow. Walking up to entropy and sticking your fingers in its eyes, then making Three Stooges nyuk-nyuk sounds, that’s the way to go through life. So go buy some broken-down garbage today, and nurse it back to life.
“Fuck you, Tederick,” I said to my uncle’s new boyfriend, “I can too make a better self driving car than those assholes at Tesla.”
“It’s Edward,” Tederick corrected me. “And you’re on. If you can make a self-driving car, I’ll eat my own hat.”
Before my uncle had returned from the kitchen with dessert, I had already gotten on my coat and was out the door. I was headed to my secret laboratory: the ramshackle postwar 1-car garage that I rented because my house was so full of parts I no longer could fit in it to sleep. Now, I wouldn’t need sleep, because I had a project.
My bedroll and mouse-infested sleeping bag were set aside, to make room on the cold concrete floor for all the components I’d need. As fit my theory about the practicality of self-driving cars, it was all simple parts. A bunch of military-grade microcontrollers I’d found in the dumpster of a defence contractor, which had gone out of business due to the establishment of world peace. A security camera setup that I sawzalled off a bank, because those idiots didn’t take the very simple precaution of adding additional cameras, to watch the first cameras, to make sure nobody like me stole them.
At last, I secured the most important component: a seafoam-green 1996 Toyota Celica with considerable front-end damage. Not my fault, of course, but that of the country club. How dare those rich pricks put a fence in the way of a shortcut on my commute? I saved like fifteen minutes a day in exchange for a little bumper paint. You can’t put a price on that. One sleepless night of wiring, soldering, debugging, re-debugging, de-re-debugging, throwing my laptop out the window, and then duct-taping the corpse back together well enough to try one last upload: and I had a working car.
I decided to let it drive me over to my uncle’s house, so that I could watch that fucker Tederald dine upon his chapeau. Of course, building a self-driving car and testing a self-driving car are two totally different things. Had I gotten a little more sleep the previous night, I probably would have tried testing the car from the front seat, rather than climbing onto the back bench and immediately falling asleep while the Celica merged onto the highway with the triumphant horns of a turbocharger bypass valve.
A couple hours later, I awoke in a strange place. Looking out the window, I immediately recognized it as a forest. The car had pulled us into a strange clearing, and eerie light began to seep in from the full moon overhead, which seemed, if anything, larger than normal. I was about to say something, shut the whole experiment down, when I heard the sound of more internal-combustion engines. The Celica soon found itself joining a circle of other late-nineties Toyotas, the insistent revving of their motors joining to form a demented chant of the piston.
It’s a good thing the feds don’t give a shit about reporting self-driving car accidents, because whatever they summoned in the middle of that circle, lit so bright by the collection of a hundred H4 headlight bulbs that I could barely make out its mind-bending contours, is definitely gonna cause some.
Lots of folks have the theory that we’re living in a computer simulation. This is probably brought on by the similarity that real life has to the popular Grand Theft Auto series of videogames, wherein you play as a sociopathic, emotionless killer who commits vehicular crimes in a variety of cars that look very much like – but critically, for legal and financial purposes, are not – real models of cars. However, this similarity lies only skin deep, and this analysis is foiled by the fact that all of the cars always start and run when your little computer protagonist gets into them.
Sure, you could simulate a car as a series of discrete components. You’ve got your engine, your starter motor, your battery, all the wiring to the battery, the starter relay. All of these things can be studied individually, and brought into the grand masters’ simulation in order to rule us like rats. Someone who’s experienced with cars, though, knows that there is something more than just “components” at play when a car refuses to start, or worse, runs a little dicky. It is no exaggeration on my part to say that an otherworldly, malevolent machine spirit runs at the core of every automobile, trapped somewhere inside its conceptual body as part of the unholy process of manufacturing one.
This model holds true for all machines, not just cars. Don’t believe me? Think about the last time you had to fix a printer. Sure, you followed a series of logical steps, but was it logic that had you weeping into your desk at the very end, foiled by a cryptic series of ever-changing errors? Machine spirit, bud. And there’s more where that came from. You can’t escape these gremlins, no matter where you look. So while this theory doesn’t necessarily rule out a computer simulation, it does guarantee that this computer is probably buggy as all hell and needs to be rebooted regularly. Hopefully we don’t get dragged to Geek Squad or something and wiped.
Nowadays, it’s extremely common for folks to have many part-time jobs. It’s basically like an old-school 80s sitcom, where every week has a different gig. Castle cleaner. Nuclear reactor technician. Bartender. Amateur taxi driver. Train conductor. Where there’s a hustle, there’s a way (to pay your inflated rent, before your landlord has you killed in the street.)
If you believe the media, this is because us modern folk just want something else out of life. More time with our families. Time to start up our Etsy business. Getting ejected from a hockey arena because $12/hr was not enough incentive to keep you from getting into a fistfight with an angry minor league parent. Blood on the ice! Someone’s gonna need to clean that up. Hey, if you come back in a few weeks, maybe you can get a job at the arena. The janitor has gotta be pretty busy. That’d be great.
Of course, you know what I think. It’s really because we’re all too bored of showing up to work in reliable, dependable, modern cars. Back in the 70s and even 80s, you’d have a little bit of surprise factored into the equation. Little cold? Maybe the carb float is frozen up. That’s a plausible excuse to take a day off, throwing darts in the neighbourhood pub instead. In the modern day, you get in the car, it starts, then you’re at work. And even on the days when your car was reliable, maybe your boss didn’t show up in his constantly-engine-out Jag. That’s just as good, maybe even better than, a day off.
Even if you do drive an old piece of shit like something out of my collection, the relentless march of progress means that you have to show up to work. Remotely, sometimes through some kind of virtual-presence hologram, there’s all sorts of opportunities for you to get fired by forgetting to set your microphone on “mute” before you go to take a shit.
This breakfast place near me offers a meal called the “Cowboy Breakfast.” Despite the name, you can still order it if you are a cowgirl, catgirl, or any other combination of gender and human-animal hybrid. And so, last weekend, I headed on down to the place, after discovering that my refrigerator was devoid of fried pork products, eggs, sausages, and inch-thick Texas toast. Friends, we should change that “offers” in the very first sentence to “offered,” because this restaurant was gonezo.
When a restaurant you loved closes, it can feel sometimes like losing a friend. In my case, it was a distant friend that I made in high school, and hung out mostly with when I was hungover, but forgot about entirely in the decades after. Until it was too late. I was distraught, and by far the worst part of the experience was feeling responsible.
If only I had bought several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of Cowboy Breakfasts every single morning, I told myself on the way back home, then the owner surely would have been able to buy his way out of his conviction for real-estate fraud and Murder Two. This guilt galvanized me into stopping by another restaurant, just down the road, and ordering breakfast there instead. It was at that point that I realized I had just been hungry.
As long as the local truck stop isn’t invaded by hipsters, I think I can deal with it. That place has long been my favourite chow-zone after a long morning pulling engines at the junkyard, and I think you’re really going to like it, all several thousand of you sitting in the rotting backseat of my car, trying not to fall into the exposed driveshaft and barely-restrained third member of the back axle. I’ll put a new floor in there one day, I swear, just as soon as I find a fallen traffic sign that’s big enough.
Yep, here we are. Oh shit. Is that a Range Rover in the parking lot? This place is forever lost to us. Okay, everyone, plan B. We’re going to learn how to make our own grilled cheese sandwiches instead. You just can’t trust the restaurant industry.
There’s this little corner near my place, right? You take it at just the right speed, right angle, it’s glorious. The car just sings through it, and for a split second, everything is just as it should be. Then you come back to it again, and just complete dogshit. Understeering. Can’t get traction in the right spot. Unwinding the steering wheel too early and having to lift and course correct. Tramlining towards the inside curb. It’s enough to make a guy stop trying to apex every corner in his neighbourhood.
Maybe you haven’t met me before. I’m a professional race car driver. No, I haven’t been in any races you’ve heard of. I’m certainly not surrounded by adoring fans and talking to sponsors about hawking their vodka in my palatial Dubai mansion. As long as we’re being honest with each other, maybe “professional” is too strong a word for having picked up a couple $50 gift certificates to the auto parts store by doing well at autocross. The one thing that I can do, for sure? Extract maximum fun from every on- and off-ramp between here and the office.
You don’t have to have the most powerful car to entertain yourself taking corners hard. In fact, it’s sort of counter-productive. An aggressive person in a Viper is going to have her hands full the entire time, trying just to keep all that horsepower and all that grip under control in what is basically five meters of available asphalt designed to be taken at 30km/h. Meanwhile I’m going to be sliding my 90-horsepower Tercel through there, trying to hold onto as much of the speed as I carried into the corner as possible, sweat beading on my forehead, the 165-section Walmart all-seasons wailing the entire time, so I can have enough momentum left in order to merge onto the highway without getting completely obliterated. And believe me, when I find that perfect line, it’s like nothing else. A bad day becomes brighter. A good day becomes delightful. All thanks to the healing power of cornering competence.
Like I said, though, it’s a harsh mistress. What separates me from actual, good drivers is consistency. There are probably folks out there who get that slicing, floating-on-a-cloud, zither’s-strings feeling on every single corner they hit. They are probably insufferable. And most likely, they’re driving a rental car, and even had enough money to plump for the insurance. One day I’ll get there. Until then, don’t get in my way on that 130th-Street offramp.
When you’re standing on the outside, it may seem bizarre to you that rocket scientists aren’t paid more. They are literally rocket scientists, after all, the only people in the world who are not allowed to say “it’s not rocket science” at work. And yet they are often paid somewhat less than a regular old hard-hatted engineer, involved in expensive (and fragile) projects to construct overpriced pedestrian bridges for overpriced private universities. Why is that?
One reason is that the rocket scientists don’t pose much of a threat to management. There’s more of them than there are jobs available building rockets. If they quit, then the bosses will just hire slightly dumber rocket scientists, and pay them even less. Rockets will still go up, and they’ll go where they want to, because of the well-documented history and best practices of the industry. They can keep coasting on this for a little while, maybe even decades, with a barely-perceptible drop in quality. Maybe it’s already happened. Maybe tomorrow is when we find out what the first part of a rocket that has been quality-faded into oblivion is. Hope you don’t live under the flight path.
There is, of course, another approach, and that’s “being a dirtbag.” I myself have a lot of experience in this particular field, and I think it is one of those multi-skilled disciplines that can expand into rocket science if so required. The aforementioned best practices of this industry have been written down and documented so well, in fact, that just some asshole off the street like myself can check them out of the library (using an assumed name, of course,) read them, and know generally all that humanity has figured out over the last century about making rockets that don’t explode. Then, in the language of Silicon Valley influencers, I can “disrupt” the industry.
Of course, by “disrupt” I really mean grift. If management can’t really tell the difference between good rocket scientists and slightly less good ones, then it stands to reason that they’ll give completely bad ones the benefit of the doubt. I can get billions of dollars of venture capital for my space-flight startup, shoot a few Estes rockets into the ceiling of the cafeteria, and still pocket enough dough to be able to afford a base-model Honda Civic from the 1980s. It’s not brain surgery.
Ahhh, the French. Delicious baked goods, violence in pursuit of labour rights, and a postal system that actually works. Oh. And delectable hatchbacks. I speak, of course, of my white whale: the first-generation Renault Twingo. Sure, you might not think that a guy who is mostly obsessed with late-70s Mopar smog-pump-crippled budget sedans would also be interested in cutesy-faced, multi-coloured, plastic-fantastic 90s shitbox commuter cars with the engine displacement of a particularly angry prosumer-grade sewing machine. Yet, I am.
What can I say in my defence? Well, for one thing, anyone who’s really doubting on these vehicles should try one. The fact that I haven’t tried one, because importing cars costs money, is irrelevant to my recommendation of the vehicle. Come off it, it’s not like you haven’t suggested that your friends do something you haven’t done yourself. I told my friend Steve “Nipples” Hemingway just last weekend that he should really pay his taxes.
There’s perhaps no single thing I can point to with the Twingo. Sure, there’s the beautiful colours, but there’s also the kitschy interior. You’ve got your eager little four banger, but you must additionally praise the compact package and stretched wheelbase. It’s the perfect marriage of proletarian workhorse and gaudy 90s fashion plate, and you can have it for about as much as you’d spend on a gently dented Xbox sold to you in the Canadian Tire parking lot by a guy whose legal name is mostly numbers and whose Acura TL is covered in a thick film of vape smoke residue.
If there is one downside to the Twingo, it’s that even France’s notoriously-powerful postal system can’t ship one quickly to me. Instead, I have to pay a bunch of grunting stevedores a succession of bribes in order to strap it to the top of a decidedly un-cute boat, by which point the aggregated diesel fumes and spilled hydraulic oil will make it indistinguishable from the rest of my brown shitboxes. Hell, maybe I already own one. That Plymouth Sapporo over there has always seemed a little small to be real.
Down on the farm, they used to have a saying. I don’t know what that saying is, because I was raised in a city, by loving parents who wanted more for me than to get crushed by a piece of industrial equipment at age 7. The fools. Ever since I’ve reached adulthood, I’ve been obsessed with the concept of farms. They’ve got storage space for cars. They’ve got shit breaking all day long that needs hack-job fixes. They’ve got storage space, for cars. Big Government isn’t coming by and rattling your cage over parking permits or draining coolant into wetlands, because they’re afraid you’ll murder them and hide their bodies inside a chicken coop. There’s room to park a bunch of cars.
Now, I still don’t live on a farm. There’s a couple reasons for that. Primarily, they’re expensive and smell bad. In fact, most of the farms around here have been silently bought up by enormous, semi-autonomous agriculture corporations, who hire workers to run the farm. No one lives on these farms, they just visit day to day like any average job, poking and prodding the livestock and crops as necessary. For months, the old Baker farm just outside the city limits would be completely unattended, except for one lonely security guard on Friday nights, who would do a circuit of the cornfield in his corporate diesel Cruze hatchback, looking for horny teens. This made the old Baker farm perfect for a little hanky-panky, me-style.
In my mind, I thought it would work like a time-share. I’d park my cars there during the winter, when no one was around, and get them the fuck out of there by the busy spring season. This would save untold hundreds of dollars in storage-unit fees, which was good. I was very tired of the storage companies lording it over us, chuckling and pocketing thick stacks of money as our economy ground to a halt and forced all of our cool junk into their vaults.
If I was really lucky, maybe my little trip to the farm would even make the bylaw officer in my neighbourhood think that I moved away or died, so he’d stop coming by every morning to ticket my shit over his morning Timmies coffee. There was just one problem: most (all?) of my cars didn’t move under their own power. That’s why they were being parked in the first place, because otherwise I’d be rotating them in and out, to throw off Special Constable Frank. I’d need something big to move them, and at the Baker farm, I found just that.
Now, of course I wasn’t “licensed” or even trained in the operation of a vintage ‘71 Chevrolet Titan semi truck, much less the car hauler trailer that I borrowed from the nearby Lexus dealer on the way. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that farm life means you have to make do with what you have. For instance, as long as I jammed the shifter really fast into third gear I didn’t really have to up- or down-shift the rest of the trip. Little loud, though.
You might think that buying a train is expensive. They’re made of a lot of metal, after all, and scrap prices are quite healthy at the moment. Not only that, but the railroads own all the rails, and those greedy monopolists don’t want you to bring your free-enterprise, private individual train on them. There is another option.
You see, railways have these special little trucks, called hi-rails. They’re basically strangely narrow pickup trucks, with a little train part on their front and rear, used to maintain the railway (trains are too bourgeois to do their own maintenance, and leave it to “lesser” vehicles.) When these hi-rails get on the tracks, they can turn into trains. Rail cops hassling you? Pop off and drive away like a regular old pickup truck.
Here’s the real secret: these things are super cheap at auction. And why wouldn’t they be? The only folks who can use them are railways, who already have trucks of their own. Sure, they take the train parts off the truck to make sure you don’t do exactly what I’m doing, but any idiot can take a tape measure to some train tracks, and figure out how to cut through the fence at the locomotive maintenance yard to get some wheels. Now, I’m commuting to work using efficient public transit – but doing so with heated seats, cupholders, and satellite radio.
Sure, there are some downsides. Most of my city’s transit network is underground, so I spend a lot of time reversing really fast out of tunnels. Years of railway maintenance engineers jumping in and out of it have worn the seat bolsters down quite a bit. And it doesn’t go “choo-choo,” or even feature a train horn, which was a major disappointment the first time I got on it. Overall, though, I can strongly recommend picking up disused rail-maintenance equipment and committing several federal crimes. Getting to skip the long red light between the Home Depot and my house by jumping into a subway tunnel has paid for itself in, like, a weekend.
Back in high school, we’d go by the abandoned mini-putt out on the city limits and look up at the stars. They didn’t have security, or at least that security didn’t care enough to ever come out of their little Chevy Celebrity and chase us off the premises. There was just enough light from the highway that it was eerie, but presented no elevated risk of tripping hazards. We used to talk about how cool it will be soon when we get to go to space, to other worlds.
Now, it is a long, long time later. Some of the kids I used to go to that miniature-scaled golf course with have moved away. In fact, virtually all of them have. I stuck it out, mostly because I wasn’t convinced my car at the time was reliable enough to leave the city in search of better employment. And that loyalty to the city has allowed me to reap the benefits: worse road conditions, harder-to-find parking, and the occasional call from The Mayor Himself to deal with another one of his little crises. Oh yes, I went to high school with him too.
If you’re not involved in municipal politics – maybe you work for a higher office of government, or you’re in what we tauntingly refer to as “the private sector” while reading all your private texts to your spouse out loud and guffawing – then you might find it surprising how many scandals your average politician gets up to in one day. To explain it a little better, allow me to use the board game Monopoly as a metaphor. In this game, you buy up hotels and properties, and then you take money from the other players, when they roll the dice poorly enough to land on those properties. Politics is like that, except you already own all the hotels and properties, and rich people come and give you money to avoid being responsible for their crimes.
Sometimes, journalists get their noses a bit out of joint. Maybe their bosses aren’t happy that the Mayor ignored them at the country club. Perhaps one of the editorial writers is tired of being pilloried as a brainless right-wing hack and has decided to forward one of their covered-up stories to one of their colleagues who isn’t drunk at work at 9 A.M. No matter what incident precipitates it, eventually a scandal hits the media, and then it’s time for damage control.
Most political crimes can be covered up with some deft turn of phrase, a bit of email shredding, and then just not answering the phone for 24 hours, by which point it is hoped that some other politician will have fucked up, and everyone will forget about the things you did. For everything else, there’s a goon like myself, whose utter unemployability is actually an asset in such an underhanded scheme.
My job is to pretend to be an undercover source who is going to talk shit about The Mayor Himself, on the record. Then, I pick up those journalists in my car, and drive very recklessly while trying to give the interview. Eventually, they get too freaked out by my driving and general state of disrepair of my automobiles, and ask meekly to be let out on the side of the road, so they can walk home. It’s basically like threatening their lives, except not. Sort of a shame, really. If any of them could tough it out, we could be best friends, and then I bet they could get a job at City Hall like me.
When they started automating my job, and fired all my coworkers, and replaced those coworkers with robots, I didn’t complain. I said, “good idea, boss,” and bit my lip until it bled. That’s how I got promoted. Now I manage an entire division of robots, which is honestly a pretty sweet gig. Lately, though, my relationship with my android coworkers has deteriorated.
Normally, my job consists of showing up sometime around noon, marking all the emails in my inbox as “read,” and then leaving a half hour later. Sometimes, during the silly season, I’ll have to oil one of their joints, or open them up and re-seat a peripheral interface card that’s wobbled loose out of the socket. That doesn’t happen very often, even though these suckers work 24/7 without pay. Anything bigger, the repair robots come and cart away my stressed-out subordinate, never to be seen again, immediately replaced by a new one with a fresh coat of paint and a younger serial number.
Unfortunately, it turns out that those bigwigs at the United Nations figured out that this level of dehumanization and separation from the consequences of my work does something bad to my brain. In fact, it does the exact same thing that it did to my boss when he had a bunch of human subordinates: it turned me into a sociopath. I began running red lights, throwing lit cigarettes at orphanages, and making fun of the elderly for not being smart enough to get a gang of robots to do their work for them. Don’t worry, though, the super-geniuses figured out a way to bring me back to Earth: they decided that it would now be law for the robots I manage to have individual little personalities. Now, I’d feel bad when one of them broke, and the experience of caring for another sentient thing would, in theory, make me less of an asshole.
It only half-worked. See, the thing I liked most about this brave new world of post-human work is that the robots never dropped by my cube to shit-talk about a reality TV show I hadn’t seen. Or make me sign a birthday card for another robot. Or ask me what I thought the weather would be like later today. Sure, they also didn’t engage in ribald office drama culminating in emotional breakdowns around Valentines’ Day, or get mad enough about parking restrictions to storm into the office and kick a four-colour plotter. All of this messy human bullshit was kept to where I preferred it: in my personal life. Now, all that was going to change.
“So, what do you think about the Yankees this year?” asked a robot. A blinking OLED screen on his(?) chest indicated that he was now in “COMFORT MODE” and would not leave until I answered the inquiry and filled up the little socialization meter. I’d have to put up with this bullshit for the rest of my working career, or at least until I figured out how to make a more lifelike, human-like android to replace myself. All I’d have to do is stop by that orphanage on my way home, and see if they had any leftover human skin they weren’t needing.
Someone in my neighbourhood has a ratty old pickup truck. It’s honestly not that old – a Ford from the late nineteen-eighties – but it’s great. Old trucks have a fantastic combination of traits. On one hand, you have an old vehicle, with its rustic charm, temperamental behaviour, and hot gear oil smells of unknown origin. And on the other, you have a vehicle that doesn’t need to be babied. You can still drive it down to the local brick emporium and chuck some bricks in the back. Nobody is wiping it down with a diaper or taking it to the Amelia Island Concours.
It is also difficult in my neighbourhood to find another old-car deviant. Most of the folks who were forced to maintain and daily drive an old shitbox have been evicted or moved away on their own, ideally closer to a parts store. Naturally, I wanted to talk to this truck-owning person. Maybe they wanted to be friends, or they could help hold the flashlight while I tried to work, or they could use the authentic blue-collar-ness of their pickup truck to lure the cops away from whatever dirtbag shit I was up to in the middle of the night.
In order to try and find the home of this truck, I started driving around the neighbourhood. This is harder than you’d think, because low speeds make the transmission in my Volare freak out, and slow 90-degree turns will spill some of its seeping automatic transmission fluid right onto the exhaust. I can only take a few minutes of this at a time, before I have to merge onto the highway and drive fast enough for the wind to blow the fire out. As a result, I never saw the truck while I was driving, only when I was on my driveway or walking to get the mail.
My pickup-shaped phantom is still out there, somewhere. I may never encounter them the legitimate way, but I’ve got a plan: laying a trap. There’s one thing that old Ford truck owners can’t resist, and that’s a bottle of power-steering stop leak. I’ve placed it in the middle of the street, and it’s only a matter of time before the owner has to pull over and hop out. Wait, someone’s stopping. God damn it, that’s a new F150. Get away from there, you bourgeois asshole! You’re probably still under warranty!
Every day that I don’t keep on top of the horsepower arms race in my neighbourhood is another chance for the local dads to buy a minivan that can, at last, beat me at the stoplight drags. It hasn’t been easy. Honda, Toyota, and even Chrysler have been pumping out near-yearly double-digit horsepower gains. My car is from the late 70s, made by drunks, and had to rely on chicanery and creative accounting in order to produce its quoted horsepower.
To compete, of course, I need to turn up the wick. eBay forged pistons. eBay turbo kits. eBay port-injected nitrous oxide kits running on a computer that may or may not just be an old Timex-Sinclair ZX81 jammed into a cardboard box in my passenger footwell. Doing an oil change once in awhile. This is genuine racing development, which is essential because the exit to my neighbourhood has a stoplight, followed by a two-lane section that constricts into a one-lane on-ramp, and I am tired of being effortlessly gapped by base-model Odysseys, their rear-seat DVD players blaring the entire way to daycare.
Now, I hear the clucking from the peanut gallery. Racing on the street is evil. Immoral. Dangerous. I don’t think any external observer would consider this to be “racing.” Racing implies a competition of sorts. On one side, you have a baby-shit-brown Malaise Era smog machine trying its best to keep from herniating a crankshaft, and in the other lane is a van stuffed to the brim with strollers, toddler toys, and vomit. I don’t think they even notice me struggling alongside them, and even if they did, would not consider me to be in the same performance class as their nearly seven-hundred-horsepower, nine-second-quarter-mile triple-turbocharged V-12 family box on wheels. If they hit me, they’ve got like sixty airbags in that thing, and I’ll have to walk home, where I might get hit by someone operating a minivan, who is busy yelling at their kids and has taken their eyes off an unmaintained crosswalk at a poorly chosen time.
One of these days, though, my performance-development arm will bear fruit. I’ve already released some of my boost secrets to actual racing teams, who I’m sure grimace every time they receive one of my grainy faxes, stunned that I had somehow individually engineered a way to pick up a hundred horsepower through sheer force of will without even having gasket-matched the ports. All I’m gonna say is, if you see a Slant Six with a smog head in next year’s F1 races, let me know. I don’t own a TV, because I sold it to afford new ARP studs.
Every kid who’s ever read comics or watched a TV show wants the Batmobile. No matter your favourite iteration, it’s a cool idea to fling around town in a customized monster-engined vehicle, safe in your belief that you have the only one. When we grow up, though, we buy the same car as everyone else. How many white Hyundai Elantras are they gonna make this year? Probably like eleven trillion. How many Batmobiles are there? One.
Now, this isn’t a full-throated endorsement to slap wings, black paint, and a jet engine onto your boring daily driver. That’s more of a thing for the Bonneville Speed Week, or perhaps for that gang of street-racing goths which are menacing the ungood folks down at Traffic Court. All you need to do is stir up the car a little bit. Pinstripe it. Fancy wheels. Swap the engine out for a two-stroke, two-cylinder piece of lawn equipment. You know, tiny stuff.
You might have listened to a boring person tell you that modifications do not increase the value of the car. This is true, because personalizing a car means that it is less likely to appeal to any other human being that is not currently burdened with the exact same Rube Goldberg machine of bullshit rattling around inside your head. You might lose a few bucks, rather than make back the money you spent on a turbocharger kit or linked nitrous bottles tucked into an old baby seat to throw the cops off. That’s okay. Would you avoid painting your house a fun colour in order to improve the resale value for the next person? If you would, maybe you should re-evaluate your priorities.
Thing is, unless we get reincarnated as an elephant or something, we only get one turn around life. You might as well trick out your car. Throw a little personality out there that isn’t unmedicated-mental-illness-level political bumper stickers. And hey, if you make it to elephant after all, you’re still gonna look back on your memories of the nice car and smile. Despite their lobbying, pachyderms still are not allowed to drive cars. They gotta walk everywhere, like suckers.
Ask anyone in your life who works on stuff for fun: how many different families of power tool batteries are they on? The answer for me is: four. I think. Maybe five, if I find that one drill I keep losing. All of these are totally incompatible, need their own chargers, and force you to either buy more expensive batteries, if you can even get them. Once the manufacturer gets bored, that’s it for your tool. Might as well throw your perfectly-good reciprocating saw in the dumpster and go give Mr. DeWalt some more of your hard-earned tool money.
Part of the reason why these are incompatible is technology. Different battery chemistries need different ways to charge them, or they burst into flame and kill a bunch of people. It makes sense that you can’t fill a gas car with diesel, right? Same thing here. Of course, virtually all tool batteries these days are using the same underlying chemistry. Probably made up of cells bought from the same company in China! That would mean – infuriatingly – these MBA scums made the batteries incompatible just out of reasons of profit. Sell ‘em a drill, and then keep selling 'em batteries.
Something had to be done, and I was just the guy to do it. Using almost an entire Wikipedia page’s worth of electrical engineering theory, I was able to replace the busted-ass battery in my Ryobi with a lead-acid battery. Of course, this replacement battery is very heavy, and a little weak. It also smells funny when I really give 'er, which could be because the seals on the top have broken, and it keeps pissing noxious death juice onto the floor of my garage every time I brap off a lugnut.
Is this a solution for everybody? No, because if I tell other people which storage yard I steal my RV batteries from, everyone will go there, and then I’ll have to buy my batteries at retail. At that point, I might as well buy corded tools, and start paying my electric bill.
Skullduggery is afoot! Those scoundrels in capital have, once again, scammed me out of a couple bucks on a transaction. Sure, they call it a “service fee,” but the only service involved was lining their pockets. Never mind. Those parcel-delivery poltroons will put my ten dollars to good use rebuilding their warehouse once I set it on fire with a ridiculous burnout in one of their delivery vans.
Here’s a little bit of a grand larceny pro-tip. You see those cameras up there? Yeah, you don’t want them to see you. The best way to do that is to wear a mask, so no one can identify you later. That’s why I’m wearing this hideous, vacuum-formed replica of Lee Iacocca’s face while I cut through this fence. I didn’t bring one for you, though. Maybe splash some of that airport runway mud on your cheeks, I’m sure there’s nothing bad in there.
Okay, here we go. We’re gonna hop in that body-on-frame Ford Transit and we’re gonna lay down a burnout for the ages. Well, I am. See, the key to starting a really good fire is that you’ve gotta use the belts. The rubber? Just makes smoke. Once you get through the outer carcass and start sparking those steel belts on the pavement, that’s where the good shit comes from. And then you gotta be ready. Ready for what, you ask?
Well, once the building catches on fire, it’s a good idea to get the fuck out of here. One of the real catch-22s of this whole thing is that, because the van is now currently engulfed in flames, we can’t exactly use it to flee the burning warehouse that we are trapped in. So we’re gonna have to leg it. Hope you’ve been doing your ten thousand steps a day, buddy!
Phew. That was a bit of a workout, but we got away clean. It was all worth it, though, to get revenge on the anonymous moneymen who dared to reach into my wallet and extract ten dollars for the privilege of me paying them to deliver a new fire suppression system. Who did you say you worked for again, the New York Times? Never heard of it. They got a car section?
If I had to choose, the one thing that I love the most about big, lopey V8 engines is the amount of crap you can pile on top of them. Because they’re the same length as a four-banger, but sometimes up to twice as wide, there are a huge variety of mounting options for V8 accessories. This pleases both my inner child, who wants a large engine, and my inner adult, who wants more cubbies and pockets in which to store stuff.
I’m sure you are familiar with the old-school drag racer supercharger setups. Big ol’ tunnel-ram intake, massive supercharger, big intake scoops, a bunch of expensive carburetors inside. All that is a stack that can easily be taller than the engine itself. It’s a living cartoon, made real by the concerted effort of mechanical engineers and the existence of a temptingly-large valley between the cylinder heads. Totally rad, and also a good use of convenient storage space.
Of course, OEMs have caught onto this, too. If you own a V8-powered Lexus LS400, you’ve probably had to change the starter, only to find out it’s not so easy to get at. That starter is buried beneath stratigraphic layers of garbage, ranging from the intake manifold, to the intake manifold’s friends, to the intake manifold’s relations, to the intake manifold’s second cousins that it hasn’t seen since the family reunion twenty years ago. And then once you finally do get it out and swapped, it’s time to put all that stuff back into the car, without losing any of the bolts or tearing one of the brand-new gaskets (as if I use brand new gaskets) on the way back out. It’s enough to make a guy leave it all out, and just slam a 6-71 blower stolen from a semi truck on top.
What’s on top of my own V8, you ask? Well, uh… the original one-barrel intake manifold from the factory. I guess “original” is maybe a little strong, it does have a lot of dents from where the previous owner tried to pull one of the heads and ended up dropping the whole thing on its driveway. It doesn’t really seal properly as a result, but it does make a cool vacuum-leak noise at part throttle, which I like to pretend is a rad drag-racing supercharger.
Folks who are new to motorcycling, they imagine motorcycles as being broken into these discrete groups. It’s all poppycock, engineered by the Man to make you buy a bigger bike than you think you need.
The way you likely think: you’ve got your mopeds, on the bottom end, which have wheezy little two-strokes and are exclusively for French people to transport baguettes with, a noble cause if ever I’ve heard one. Then you’ve got your scooters, which are halfway between mopeds and motorcycles. You might use a Honda Spree to get to the next town in a pinch, or a Vespa to hold a trip to Home Depot. Things start to get serious as you go into small motorcycles, then sportbikes, cruisers, all those other bigger categories.
What you actually need is any kind of two-wheeled motorized transportation. It’s guaranteed to be better than walking, which leading scientists have identified as “pretty slow.” All across this great country, the authorities are forgetting to legislate “e-bikes,” which are effectively mopeds with a laptop battery strapped to them. It’s only a matter of time before they forget that anything smaller than a Hummer H2 exists, at which point it will make a lot of sense to buy a high-mileage Lambretta and drive it in the bike lane, just like they do in Europe.
I’d say run out right now and buy a scooter or two, but just to be on the safe side, let me know about it first. After all, you’ve just now been awoken to the true potential of shitbox small-displacement transportation and can’t be trusted to navigate an untrustworthy Craigslist seller who thinks “hosing off the blood” is the same thing as a full soup-to-nuts restoration. In fact, just let me buy it instead, and there’s no reason for you to worry at all. You can walk for a few more weeks until the right deal comes along, right?
Years, many years ago, you may have looked forward to software updates. New features, bugs fixed, an evolution of an already pretty good instant messenger or paint program or Usenet pornography downloader. Nowadays, a software update is dreaded. There are many reasons: it may contain a grotesque new turn towards adware or algorithmic timeline bullshit, an eye-searingly-bad redesign, or the developers may have “accidentally” broken your favourite feature and want you to buy the Pro version to get it back.
Yes, software is very bad today, and getting worse. It’s ruining everything that our society used to love: self-driving cars, video game systems, laptop computers, and the sentient synthetic intelligence that spontaneously developed in your washing machine, which you can no longer connect to the internet in order to receive text messages of when your clothes are done being washed for fear of extinguishing this new and fragile form of sapient life with an update that makes the front-panel lights slightly less flickery. And I don’t think you need me to tell you that this fucking sucks.
Is there a solution, beyond fleeing into the woods and carrying half a 1980s Radio Shack worth of 8-bit microprocessors and firearms with you? Although that does sound pretty good, now that we’re talking about it, I think there is a way we can keep all of our modern conveniences (like roads, and freshly-squeezed high-octane gasoline) while turning back the tide of anti-progress. All we have to do is outlaw pie charts.
That’s right. Pie charts. We thought they were innocent when they first appeared, a way to use our trigonometry classes to make a cool-looking chart. Pretty colours. Hell, maybe they come in 3D, which makes them totally useless as a way to tell how big the slices are, but boy does it look cool. The problem is, some people took the pie charts way too seriously. Upper management began to obsess over them, their eyes seeing special secrets – margin, even – hiding at the border of each ridiculous pixelated slice. And they chased those secrets, drunk-driving the world into a technological hell.
Once we throw pie charts in the collective shredder of humanity’s memory, we can move on to things that make more sense. Bar charts, for example, can still lie, but they don’t exist purely as a function of lies. I’m not so naive to believe that humanity won’t re-invent the pie chart at some future date, of course, but I’m pretty convinced the extra productivity means that we’ll be able to build really reliable hunter-killer robots to wipe those folks out, and leave them behind for future generations. Even if those robots don’t have a “dark mode” or special new typeface every couple of months to boost engagement.
The best way to know how you’ve screwed up is to pull the oilpan. That’s not a metaphor: thanks to gravity, the exploding rotating assembly of your once-complete engine is likely to end up in the sump. From there, death glitter is sucked into the oil pickup and back up into the head, but it doesn’t really matter at this point, because your car is running off of what scientists would call an external combustion engine.
Every time I’ve blown up an engine in the past, most of the big parts stayed where they were supposed to be. Sure, they’d lost a lot of weight as they were sheared into a million pieces of expensive confetti, but at the very least I could pull it off the car and throw it in the Tim Hortons dumpster in one chunk. Not so this last time at the drags, where a combination of 150-shot nitrous oxide, a heavy foot, and a fuel pump which may not be actually working turned most of my 360 V8’s insides into outsides. The track guy was really unhappy at having to put down a bunch of kitty litter, even if I didn’t finish my pass and hose down the entire lane because my asthmatic donkey of a car was maybe going at trotting speed at the time it blew up. I did it to help you, dude. Now please tow me back.
I am sure that, to the average person, nuking an engine like this represents a financial hardship. To me, it is a little worrisome that my hoard is reduced to only a few dozen engines, down one more to the point where the walls of the basement room can now be seen through the maze of Mopar mills. Many, many years ago, I too remember the pain of having blown up my first motor. It was very sad, this beautiful, intricate machine that I had smashed into bits, like a toddler with a family heirloom timepiece. I went through denial, and bargaining, and acceptance, and learned how to pull a junkyard engine and slam it into my garbage without worry.
This time, the most difficult part of the whole process was hosing off all the chunks of disintegrated single-slammer. I flat-towed it to my local you-spray-it car wash – what’s it gonna do, blow the motor? – and gave it a bath. As the molten chunks of aluminum and iron seeped into the expensive, treated drain system, I could finally feel at peace. At least for four or five minutes, until the owner came out from his office, screaming. How insensitive. Doesn’t he know I’ve just had a loss in the family?
Recently, I was watching television when a formless ghoul appeared and told me that it was my fault for not owning a house. Despite the fact that I do own a house thanks to the unsolved death of my landlord and the subsequent squatters-rights law that allows me to keep adverse possession of the property unless I leave for over 24 hours at a time, something else about what she said stuck in my craw.
She explained that if I would just take $1500 a month out of my paycheque, and put it aside, and never touch it, I would have enough to make a down payment on a house. This made sense, but only that kind of sense which is made until you put down the bong and ask the other person at the party to repeat themselves very slowly while you pull out your Bowie knife and body-snatcher detector.
if you did indeed start saving $1500 a month in January 1st, 2018, you would indeed have $90,000 by January 1st, 2023. Probably a little more from interest, but not nearly as much as you would have had by repeatedly putting that money into literally any investment vehicle, such as a 1978 Plymouth Volare.
Now, here’s where things get really crazy.
If you take that same $1500 a month and you start putting it in your bank account in the year 620, by January 1, 2023, you will be able to afford a $25 million house, all cash. Or the 20% downpayment on a $125 million house if you’re feeling like you can stretch it a little. And you also will have experienced the entire arc of the industrial revolution, which you will have been unable to enjoy while paying rent to more than two dozen landlords, even as the concept of serfdom collapses around you.
Here’s where things get even crazier.
If you had $1500 American dollars per month in the year 620, you would actually be able to just buy the papacy and install yourself as Pope, replacing the uncharismatic Boniface V. In this case, you would be living rent free in the Vatican for over 1400 years, unable to be removed unless through direct sub-papal fiat, although still vulnerable to the radical side-effects of internecine warfare in Italy and especially the pressures of standing up to a politically strong emperor in a time when the Church’s absolute power over politics is beginning to wane. Then, you can spend that $1500 a month on whatever you like, instead of housing or food. I recommend a 1978 Plymouth Volare.
This is the real life hack, and it’s shocking nobody talks about it.
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Big trend in America right now. Huge, huge trend. Buying broken cars from Japan, and registering them in the States. Of course, we here in Canada have been doing this for years, ever since those cars turned fifteen and became legal for import. Australians, Kiwis? Even longer than that, they just reach out and pluck Skylines off the vine like tomatoes. Together, we depleted the inventory of old cars, crashed ‘em, cut them up, you name it. Now there’s not very many left, and the Americans are responding to it by forking over six-figure cheques for a 240SX with the steering wheel on the wrong side.
This was really funny, right up until I realized that the purchase price of a 1985 Subaru Leone at the Japanese used-car auctions would now go from about $600 to nearly $800. I don’t have that kind of money, and even if I did, I wouldn’t have enough left over after shipping to slam in some un-bent pushrods and a nitrous system. Panicking, I did consider buying some freshly-legalized cars a decade ahead of the Americans, but those too are expensive, bought for thousands of dollars and hoarded in warehouses in Saitama. Ridiculous!
There was just one thing to do. The cheapest way to get these cars would be to move to Japan, where I could conceivably “import” brand new cars, right off the dealer lot. So I ordered a refrigerator from Amazon Japan, stuck myself in the box, and then filled out a return authorization form. Soon, I was off to the Home Islands, entirely on Uncle Jeff’s dime. Sure, it wasn’t a particularly comfortable ride, but I was warmed on that bumpy old cargo ship and jostly old forklift at the docks by the knowledge that I would soon be getting a great deal on a Suzuki Lapin.
As I stepped foot into the dealership, I suddenly realized what I was doing. A new car? Buying one? For money? The salespeople, unaccustomed to seeing a man who had spent the last three months reading a dog-eared copy of a late-1992 edition of Road & Track Magazine while stuck in a refrigerator box without food or water, called the police, and I was summarily deported.
It wasn’t all bad, though. The pigs were driving a five-year-old Toyota Crown. I told them to let me know when the department got rid of it; the puke-proof rear seats seemed like the perfect place to put a leaking transmission from the Pick & Pull.
Believe me, nobody was more jazzed about my interview with Consumer Reports than me. I grew up as a kid reading its dry, dry prose, dreaming about the day when I, too, would get to smash the living shit out of consumer appliances until they fell apart. Savagery would flow through my pen, dismantling multinational corporations for the capital crime of having made a dishwasher with buttons that scratch easily.
I had been “funemployed” for quite some time. In fact, I’d been without a job for so long that my parole officer told me I had to go get one, otherwise they would put me back in the hole. So, I decided to go out on a limb and write Consumer Reports about all the torture testing I’d been doing to my half-century-old menagerie of shitboxes. A few minutes after I sent the email, I got a breathless, panicked phone call from the head destructive testing engineer, who told me to get on a fucking plane and head out there pronto.
Plane? Plane? I made a solemn vow in my youth to never get in an automobile driven by anyone else. And even though it flies through the air using what I think is an elaborate series of lies, an airplane certainly qualifies. I cashed the plane ticket in for gas money, and then set out for a road trip in my most reliable 1978 Volare, its trunk packed full of spare fluids, tires, and parts, almost none of which I had to use.
There was just one problem. Their headquarters are located in a pretty weird spot of an industrial park. One of those big skyscrapers-on-skyscrapers places where nobody lives, and the food sucks, but there are thousands of parking spots. They all look the same, and I think I transposed a digit in the address when I was punching it into my GPS (a Garmin from 1997, whose speaker barely works and whose power supply consists of an absurd number of ganged-together solar panels that I broke out of desk calculators.) When I turned up, the building looked like any of the other ones in the complex, so I went on in.
The good news? I got the job. The bad news? The good folks at Kitchenaid were so terrified about how aggressively I dismantled their test blender that my job is “being paid to stay at least 100 feet away from any and all Kitchenaid employees, at all times.” It pays pretty well, though, which is to their credit. I think it’s because I made a good first impression. And second. And third. They really should have made those chopping-blade impellers out of a better plastic.
America Online once gave us the promise of uniting a divided America, by putting it online. Your modem would call them up, and soon you’d be harvesting the world’s finest shareware and yelling at people you’d never even met. Nobody but the real assholes got caught up in big arguments, though, because you were being charged like thirty cents a minute to be connected and eventually winning the fight is going to cost you more than it’s worth.
Eventually, cheap internet access took over. Always-on connections. Holographic wives in some sort of elaborate future tube, wired to your computer by Japanese software engineers. And the arguing got worse and worse, because you had no reason to go offline thanks to flat-rate billing. Now, you could come home from work and spend the entire time until you had to go back to work telling some guy in Des Moines he liked the wrong episodes of the Simpsons.
Now, we are in the apocalypse. Whereas before the argument would either end or be temporarily suspended during your commute to work, depending on how ignorant your boss is of your antics, now with the advent of smartphones, the argument follows you everywhere, pinging and popping in your pocket the whole time. Sure, you might be paying bandwidth charges, but with one tweet at a time? They’re dinky. Your mental health? Worse than ever. That’s not a fair exchange, and that’s why we’re going to do something about it.
Welcome to Seat Safety Switch Online, where we take away all of the complicated choice of the internet and force you to dial directly into our proprietary modem system from your home computer. It’s all based on some old CompuServe shit we found in a dumpster, and I can guarantee you that your fancy new phone won’t work with it either. And don’t worry, we’re still cheaper than those bad old days, at a mere twenty-nine cents a minute, so your tiresome internet complaining can go on for just a little bit longer than before.
There used to be a lot more shows about cars that could solve crimes. If you go a few decades back, long before it turned out that “autonomous car’ just meant that they go kind of weird and slow and occasionally kill their occupants in a giant fireball, we used to believe that one day cars would be sentient and help us solve the crime of the week. Folks would lose their identity, or be blown up in a horrible accident and be officially pronounced dead, and then they’d drive a two-door sports car around the world, helping the powerless and assailing those responsible. We need more of that these days.
It’s easy to feel powerless nowadays, when you can’t rely on a second-generation Firebird to come to your rescue when you get into a jam. In fact, if you call for help from a car to solve your latest pickle, that car is probably just going to end up being some racist pickup truck, which will drive through your house, yell slurs at your dog, somehow drink all your beer, and leave a bunch of transmission fluid in your garden. There definitely won’t be any cool eighties electronic music playing over the closing credits on that episode.
I get it. I stopped relying on cars years ago, for things as simple as “getting to work on time” and “not getting splashed with boiling-hot coolant when the heater core explodes in traffic.” Now, if a car happens to do what I want, I’m happy, but if it is unreliable? That’s life, and I have gotten very good at walking home from it. For those of you, who previously believed in the inherent good nature of automobiles, this must be a little frightening to think about. Even the Mustang that can change its paint colour so it sometimes looks like a military Mustang, you ask me? Yes, especially that one. It could sneak onto a naval base, where it will steal nuclear secrets from an overworked technician. Then we’d all be speaking Mustang. Torque boxes. Mod motors. You want your kid to grow up in that kind of a world?
If anyone is going to solve our crisis-of-the-week, it’s going to have to be you and I. The flimsy, fleshy human beings. Cars shouldn’t get involved, especially if the problem has to do with another car. We should be watchful at all times of any attempt for them to collaborate.
You might be inclined to throw away all those fancy metal tins that your Christmas cookies came in. Some aunt, grandmother, or well-meaning social worker gave you baked goods, and you ate them all the first day. Now, you’ve just got the metal tin kicking around, taking up your counterspace, daring you to throw it away. And yet – and yet – your hand is stayed just as it hovers over the recycling bin, ready to condemn the tin to the hereafter. Why is that?
For me, it started as a young child. In a world covered in low-quality plastic products, the presence of a low-quality metal product is a novelty. And metal has many uses. You can conduct electricity with it, make cool noises when you bang on it with a hammer, or use it to patch up a rust hole in the quarter panel of your 1978 Volare. Sure, that metal has been treated to avoid pesky liability lawsuits for tin poisoning, but after a few zaps from Mr. Welder while you hold your breath to keep the residue mostly out of your lungs, it’ll all be taken care of.
And, beyond its value as a raw material, a metal tin is useful to keep things in. What kind of things? Bolts. Screws. Nails. Relays. Lengths of wire. In other words, all the other stuff you don’t want to throw away because it could be useful one day, but don’t care enough about to organize properly so that you can actually find it when you need it. Unlike a regular old cardboard box, the tin looks good on your shelf, which will increase the odds that your next of kin won’t immediately throw it away themselves. And who knows? Maybe those bolts will prove useful to them, in the dust-blasted apocalyptic future where they can’t just order more bolts from Uncle Jeff’s Comedy Warehouse.
I like to think I can grow as a person. And this time, I sure did. That cookie tin ended up in the recycle bin, and it almost made its way out to the curbside recycling bin before I fished it back out and put a bunch of windshield-washer-sprayer-hose fittings in it. Aunt Myra knew what she was doing when she gave me that tin, almost like it was an apology for her decidedly uninspired ginger sparklers this year. Could barely taste it with all this weld-spattered cookie-tin wax covering my tongue.
Who among us can say that they haven’t disregarded at least one of the voluminous rules placed upon us by our overlords in exchange for the use of their precious escalators? If you actually stop to look at all the warnings near the railings, you’d go insane. Which is why it’s good that the guy behind you is going to bump into you, swear a little bit at you for stopping in the middle of the goddamn sidewalk, and then get right on that escalator without thinking about how he’s taking his life into his own hands.
People can and do get mangled in escalators, too. Happens all the time, despite what the news says. It’s not infrequent at all: one notable scientist, who is on the run from Big Lift and must remain anonymous, has stated that as much as 17% of the human population will at one point be devoured by a mobile stairway. When it happens, sometimes they add another rule. It was your fault for standing on your head while riding the escalator at 0.02% above the quoted maximum speed. It was your fault for not being a qualified escalator technician and fully inspecting the device before using it. If you had only just followed all these rules, everything would have been fine, and you’d still have all your hamstrings.
Getting caught up in one and killed or mutilated isn’t really my problem with escalators, though. As you might have guessed, my issue is that they are too slow. If I’m already risking my life, then I want to at least have a little bit of fun with it. Other countries run their escalators much faster, having to move a larger volume of commuters and cargo. Sometimes it’s just because they don’t have so many heavy folks wandering around, wearing out the equipment prematurely. For whatever reason, ours are downright pokey, which is why I started reading all of the stickers and rules on the side of the escalator.
Here’s the secret about any product that is engineered: some engineer involved in it, somewhere, is going to stick in a Star Wars reference, or some other weird nerd shit. It’s how they brag about their accomplishments. And for my hard work, and strained eyesight, I found it: a sentence between paragraphs 64 and 65 of the safety-operations sticker, telling me about the secret cheat code to speed up the escalator. I’d tell you, too, but the government would be on me within minutes, multiple agencies of federales waiting to slice my throat the second I step out of the door.
Did it work? Boy howdy, did it ever. I’m still nursing this broken ankle I got when it flung me off the top at approximately the same velocity as a Hellfire missile, but as soon as it finishes knitting I’ll be right back there, looking for the thrill that such imminent mortality must provide.
History is very important to the automobile industry. Despite being a relatively young field, it’s well-documented, and full of great tales. Most of those tales are about hubris. Flashy Italian guy smuggles cocaine to pay for a Volvo-engined stainless steel coupe. Economy-minded automaker builds engines out of aluminum and forgets how to finish bolting them together. Henry Ford’s race car driver runs over a bunch of people, quits racing, then returns to racing and runs over even more people.
By telling these stories, the auto industry likes to paint itself as a brash group of aggressive innovators. Bold risk-takers. Complete assholes. This is because the sales department is running things. In reality, cars are made by a series of professional engineers progressively refining an essential product that is meant for mass consumption. Your choices are “bald-faced sociopathic lies” or “fucking boring stories about reducing cabin vibration with a slightly different durometer of rubber on the upper motor mount.”
This is where the auto owners step in. Most of us have at least one great story relating to cars, whether it’s an old crap-can that just wouldn’t die, or a road trip born under a bad sign that eventually erupted into a sort of rain-soaked horror movie climax. And we tell each other these stories, in order to cement the mythic status of the automobile in our lives. Sure, we bitch about our houses, but nobody’s eyes well up when they think about the glorious time they cleared the P-trap on their kitchen sink and finally got that chunk of hair out of there. Not when they could be making engine noises with their mouths and pretending to shift gears in the middle of a drunken story about illegal drag-racing, spoken way too loudly at a dinner party.
Of course, most of these stories are also bullshit. We have a tendency to mythologize, and also wallpaper over our own failures of memory with a dream of what must have happened. For instance, I once told a story about using a frequently-misfiring 1978 Plymouth Volare to fend off multiple police officers on a highway chase, but it was a little bit inaccurate. It was actually a 1979 Volare, which if anything makes the story even more thrilling.
Lying is bad. Wrong. A sin. Beyond reproach. You shouldn’t do it, even if it is convenient for you, has no real negative outcomes, and nobody will ever find out. Don’t even think about lying, or our entire society will collapse and it will all be your fault. Unless you work in sales and marketing, in which case: lie away. If those suckers believe you, they were just going to get their pockets picked by the next person in line anyway.
Sound familiar? You might be in the market for a car. Modern automakers like to tell you about all the whiz-bang gewgaws and fancy flap-dashery that their new automobiles sport. Some even have cooled gloveboxes, to keep your beverages chilled. The salesfolks will hand over a glossy brochure, printed on expensive, thick paper, that is chock full of all the amazing stuff their car can do.
There’s something that brochure will never, ever, tell you, though: whether or not their car has soul. Now, I’m not one of those confused automobile fundamentalists who think that cars are alive, although I certainly feel sorry for abandoned ones and want to nurse them lovingly back to health, and I spend a lot of time swearing at the ones I have. What I mean by “soul” is how the car feels to commune with. Great cars are an experience, not just a box for moving other, smaller boxes and/or offspring. They don’t have to be sporty, either: a wheezing, barely-100-horsepower Econoline van can be your greatest companion and loyal friend.
Now, of course some of today’s new cars are going to turn out to be trustworthy shit-boxes in thirty years’ time. We don’t know which ones, though, and that’s where we need the automakers to help out. When I am elected world dictator, I will force the sales and marketing teams to devote a significant portion of their advertising budget to the engineers, who will explain all of the weird easter eggs and bizarre features they added to the car, that nobody else will ever tell you about. We need this, because otherwise someone might accidentally buy a boring and reliable car, and we can’t have that.
My only real goal, as far as being an adult human being goes, is to get more tacos. They don’t have to be real, genuine tacos – I’m not some kind of snob – but that would be my preference. Sometimes, and nobody is really sure why this is, I’m forced to eat things that aren’t tacos. It’s not like I’m tired of them, but it just feels like the thing to do. Also, sometimes the guy who works at the taco restaurant is tired of seeing me every day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and I feel like a little bit of distance would be good for our relationship.
Now, you should have a little additional background on my situation before we go any further. I live in a town that does not have a particularly good taco restaurant. In fact, the one that I go to occasionally refers to itself on the radio ads as “proudly Austrian,” and serves beer and schnitzel out of the back. This doesn’t necessarily mean they’re bad at tacos – again, not a snob – but it bears mentioning. Tacos are inherently so good that they can surpass little inconveniences like “was not taught to make them by my beloved grandma” and “these are just reheated frozen ones that come from Sysco.”
So given this circumstance, you can logically follow where my problem is. There’s no taco truck. Authentic tacos are often sold by a truck that hovers ominously around the local you-pick-it junkyard. At one point in my life, the junkyard had a hot dog stand, until it was shut down by every single health inspection agency in the county, inspectors all climbing over each other to be the one to deal the fatal blow. If there’s one thing I know how to fix, it’s trucks, or at least the non-existence of same. My friend who works in foreclosure auctions had a doozy of a family farm, with plenty of Divco step vans strewn around after a little cult get-together ended with them drinking the wrong water:peyote ratio of Kool-Aid.
After a lot of greasy work, and even more hammering of body panels back into shape, I soon had my very own taco truck. I was ready to dispense rolled-tortilla justice all over my town. Unfortunately for me, I also did not learn how to make tacos from my grandmother, and the Austrian guy was getting even angrier whenever I parked my nascent taco truck out front of his place to run inside for “competitive analysis.”
War is bad. It imperils the existence of the human race, and throws away our most patriotic youth on the idiocy of political brinksmanship. To make things even worse, the salvage is mostly burned-out trucks and tanks, and none of those vehicles have parts that swap easily into my fleet of half-decrepit 1970s domestic automobiles.
There is so, so much salvage. Why? Think about it: if you’re Bob Warhaver, then you don’t want your war to get all fucked up because you ran out of tires for your trucks and one guy keeps getting flat tires. So you buy way more tires than you think you’re going to need. When the war is over, you don’t want to be paying expensive storage locker fees to store those tires: especially not at the U-Haul depot that keeps their lights on all the time, even with LEDs that shit has got to add up.
So there is a huge industry in getting those leftover tires from the place where the war was, and bringing them home to where the war currently is not. If you know where to look, you can buy all manner of taxpayer-funded excess, all for pennies on the dollar. Again, though, it doesn’t fit my car. Or does it?
Here’s another thing they sell: welders. It turns out that when you blow a hole in the side of a tank when a bunch of nineteen-year-olds hopped up on combat amphetamines try to drive through a former elementary school, you might want to patch that hole up. So they also have lots of surplus welders heading home for the holidays, and they go cheap. Unfortunately, it’s just the machines, and not the people who do the welding – the auction sites have a strict “no slavery” policy – but it’s hard to get the job done without a welder (the person) and impossible to get it done without a welder (the machine.)
All this is to say that while I don’t think a Volare with Unimog portal axles underneath it is particularly legal, they can’t exactly get mad at me. I’m really helping out Big Government, supporting the war effort, in the most patriotic way I can think of: spending a bunch of money and then not being able to break 25km/h on the highway.
Everything that surrounds you, our entire society, is held up by a bunch of dirtbags. Don’t believe me? Maybe it’s because everything seems so glamorous and put-together. After all, some very nicely dressed people are telling you about how things work.
Politicians. Architects. Analysts. Owners of engineering firms. McKinsey consultants. Those folks are upper management. When was the last time, in your job, that you believed upper management really knew what was going on? I thought so.
When you get down to the very basic level, the folks who actually know how everything is held together are – to a person – terrified weirdos. They speak strange words to each other, and make jokes that are completely incomprehensible to normal people. Each and every time disaster is narrowly averted, it’s because of their tireless actions and neurotic hyperfocus on the subject matter in question.
And this isn’t just a blue-collar thing, either. Sure, your friendly neighbourhood mechanic might be absolutely scared stiff to drive in traffic, within striking range of any of the poorly-maintained rot-boxes they see all day. That’s obvious. This phenomenon goes further. It affects workers of all stripes: I guarantee you that right now, some woman who collects human skulls as a hobby and talks to squirrels is busy sweating through her business-casual outfit in the bowels of a power plant, trying to figure out what that last strange little error code really means.
So, the next time you meet someone a little strange, a little off, who has encyclopedic knowledge of just how close we have come to oblivion every day this week, be kind. You don’t want to know what happens if they decide to let their boss run things instead.
Car theft is a really big issue in my neighbourhood. Every couple of days, there’ll be an announcement in the news about another person whose car has been yoinked by the creeps. It’s easy to blame the victim, and doing so helps make us feel better about our own risk of falling prey to the same crime. And so that’s what I’m going to do. This is their own fault for having cars that run.
A couple years ago, someone tried to steal the Diplomat I leave parked around the side of the house. I don’t think you need me to tell you that it doesn’t run. In fact, I have never seen this vehicle running under its own power. It is mostly used to store parts for the other Mopars. I thanked the universe for providing me with some free entertainment. Either this thief is a better mechanic than I am and would get it running, or they might leave some tools behind in frustration after an hour or two of trying to figure out why the choke doesn’t work.
What I didn’t expect was this: they went back to their car, drove off, then came back with a new battery. A new one! With the stickers still on it and everything. If you are not “into” the shitbox-ownership life, you may not understand the value of a new car battery. That value is approximately one hundred dollars, and in order to get it, you have to go to a store and spend money. Suffice it to say, my starter-battery infrastructure is a marvel of hackjob backyard engineering that would probably get me hired by a solar energy company, if any of them could write an even quarter-assed liability release.
After installing it under the hood, the Diplomat again didn’t start, possibly because the 318 had been sawed in half by a self-destructing crankshaft sometime around 1993. It was at this point that my greed took over. Reaching over to my security system, I activated it. It’s worth pointing out at this juncture that by “security system” I mean a moat of spilled petrochemicals around my home, and by “activated it,” I mean that I dropped the candle I had been using for light into the aforementioned petrochemicals. My big tough thief ran into the night, terrified of a little fire. I stepped right through that fire, retrieved his brand-new battery, and took it inside.
For weeks after that, I wondered if the thief would come back. Maybe he did have big enough balls to sic the cops on me for taking his battery. Perhaps – and this thought excited me very much – he was dumb enough to bring me another battery. Sadly, he never returned, which made me surprisingly maudlin. I had scared off a potential new friend: someone who was willing to spend money to try and fix up a free Diplomat. In an effort to meet my accidental Mopar-pal again, I thought about going into car thievery for myself, but none of my neighbours owned anything interesting.
Imagine how boring civilization was before we invented the angle grinder. Whenever someone wanted to separate metal in a hurry, they’d have to work at it all day. Maybe take a break to have a lunch beer in between. Doesn’t do much for the economy. Now, with the angle grinder, they can rip through a ton of material in just the morning alone.
All kinds of art and commerce has occurred from this glorious invention: chopped-up tinwork, rapidly-removed quarter panels at the junkyard, that one sculpture on the other end of town that looks like the leftovers from an apartment fire. And it’s all thanks to a little motor, that makes a little wheel full of abrasive materials spin at a rate fast enough to terrify our un-evolved ancestors. They never could have comprehended the power that we now wield for just sixty bucks at Princess Auto, sixty-seven bucks if you want the one that doesn’t chuck white-hot ball bearings out of the plastic motor housing whenever you rev it a little too hard.
Things have only improved with the discovery of the battery-powered angle grinder. They’re portable and powerful, and easily concealable in a backpack or particularly goofy-looking overcoats. Now, you can take this wonder tool anywhere and use it on things like bicycle locks, catalytic converter flanges, and particularly pesky door hinges on Little League storage sheds. Never before has scumbag efficiency received such a boost.
What will the future hold for us? Maybe portable angle grinders that never need recharging. Perhaps bigger angle grinders. Ones that run in outer space. I know for a fact that I’m not going to be the one who discovers them, but I’ll be first in line to pick them up twenty years after release when they’re cheap enough to be on sale at Princess Auto and made mostly of inexpensive thermo-set plastic in a non-trademark-infringing colour.
Perhaps the most terrifying outcome of all is that you do indeed become competent at fabrication. You’ll be able to wave your hand, like a wizard, and with only the expense of thousands of hours of backbreaking labour, be able to take the image in your head of the perfect project and make it a reality. All people dream of this, but few ever achieve it. They learn that life is more than just making endless, perfect projects, or they can’t stand the heat in the kitchen that comes from having to make thousands of ill-formed, time-consuming nightmares on the road to that first perfect project.
Being satisfied with only being able to build a relatively piece-of-shitty project in a hurry is a destination in and of itself. It gets that thing out of the way, and then you can start another project. Or, in my case, start another four or five projects, not including the ones that you started while you were doing the shitty job on the first one. That’s okay, because part of the journey is starting the journey. Confucius once said: the journey of a thousand miles starts with about thirty steps in different, random directions because you keep getting distracted and get upset as soon as there’s a slight difficulty of any kind.
For me, I once witnessed a great master complete a project. When I was in high school, I apprenticed with this bodywork genius. He could pound any random piece of metal you found on the side of the road – we tested him once – into a pretty reasonable patch for a hole in a fender. What he told me was: he’s done when he gives up on it. The only difference is, by the time he gave up, nobody normal could ever tell that the job wasn’t perfect. In many cases, it seems like he tried harder than the machine that punched out the original fender, in that lonely, dusty factory decades ago. Like an Olympic athlete, his “don’t give a fuck” got way further than yours does.
And maybe that’s the secret: work hard enough to get to the point where you don’t have to work very hard at all.
“They” say that unattended cooking is the number one cause of kitchen fires, but I was standing right next to the oven when that pot full of carburetor cleaner went up in flames. Okay, not carb cleaner. I can’t afford the good stuff. It was a pot full of Pine-Sol. Okay, Columbo, it was dollar-store brand imitation Pine-Sol, which is indeed flammable.
The most important thing to do in the event of a fire is not to panic. Luckily for me, my life experience consists of dealing with many fires. Panic is actually completely impossible for me at this point, as the part of my brain that handles the adrenaline response for such a disaster is no longer responsive to stimuli. Last doctor I had was pretty sure it had just burned itself straight out from over-use, did two papers on it. She got a job at some AI-run drug company, one of the ones whose name is all consonants. Let’s get back to the fire.
I had a fire extinguisher. In my kitchen, no less. It was just attached to a big chunk of Chrysler Imperial, because it used to be part of an NHRA-standard drag racer. Those guys are sticklers about fire protection, probably because you can only watch so many up-and-coming teenagers with immense racing talent reduce themselves to barbecue before you decide it might be time to ask them to carry a fire suppression system onboard. I hit it with my adjustable wrench, which is the only thing an adjustable wrench is good for, and it goes off, blanketing the room in some horrendously caustic fire-uncausing chemical. I also sometimes use it (the wrench) to grab hot pots off the stove when I can’t find my oven mitts. Now is such a time, and I quickly throw the entire assembly out of the missing kitchen window into the snow, where it sizzles and is rendered inert.
After a few minutes to regain my composure and discover the furthest extents of man’s discoveries of new and exciting profanity, I step outside to retrieve the carburetor. Clean as a whistle. I smile, and walk back inside, ready to begin the arduous task of forming my own carburetor gaskets out of old roof shingles.
Our civilization, having reached a sort of immovable object, is starting to get real weird about old stuff. Whereas once old things were simply garbage, now they are jealously guarded, eagerly sought after, meticulously reconditioned, and worshipped. Maybe this is because we can’t make good new stuff, or maybe it speaks to a deeper desire of our entire society to revert to childhood. Either way, a lot of rich assholes have been coming by to scope out my cars.
At some point in the last few decades, “guy with a lot of old Mopars” went from being a mental health crisis to an investment bank. Even the craggiest, nastiest shreds of corroded unibody can haul in big bucks if they have the right VIN plate attached to them. Once acquired, boffo-moneyed collectors will pay an army of experts to restore these cars to showroom condition, then take them to shows where they will sell them to other boffo-moneyed collectors for eye-watering sums.
Naturally, this means that aspiring rich people have been making offers to move some of that “old garbage” out of my back yard, front yard, neighbour’s yard, alley, adjacent alley, and the eight-storey parking garage downtown that I won in a bet and don’t pay the property taxes on, because my attorney does enough ex-Soviet amphetamines to play a dozen simultaneous grandmaster-level chess entirely inside his mouth. Those offers are not particularly generous, or even good, and even if they were, I wouldn’t honour them. After all, if some dipshit with an MBA wants to pay me as much as six thousand dollars for a 1980 Dodge Diplomat that consists mostly of to-do list entries, that must mean they’re getting rare. And if they’re getting rare, I should hold onto all five of mine just in case I need parts in the future.
One of these days, though, someone is going to make a good offer. And then my backyard will be emptied of all these expensive Malaise Era shit-boxes that I love so much. What will I buy with all that money? Dunno. Maybe a backyard full of Ferraris? I hear they break all the time.
Sometimes, when I finish explaining the series of mishaps, half-haps, and no-haps which led to the successful conclusion of a technical project, something strange will happen. A young person in the area will announce that this meandering, quasi-hallucinated story has inspired them to go into a technical field for education. This, as they say in France, is a bad idea.
It’s not that there is no inherent merit to a scientific or engineering pursuit. There is, and that’s the problem. You’d do all of this crazy shit for free if not for the fact that you need to afford food, water, tools, and ultrasonic cleaning solution. Science has inherit merit out the yin-yang. The problem, as always, lies in social status. While you’re busy working in your basement, trying to figure out how to better humanity, your nemesis across town is doing cocaine, arranging enormous business deals, and writing cheques much larger than his or her bank account balance.
Where this becomes bad is: eventually, because of the nature of bureaucratic pyramid-scheme management and mandatory employment, this person will become your boss. And then their problems will become your problems. You’ll spend all of that wonderful creative energy and technical skillset chasing down ideas like “zeppelins for dirigibles” and “where does the sun go at night?” They’ll harvest the vast majority of the value of your work, and reward you with a pittance that’s just enough to keep you from quitting your job and moving into a decrepit suburban home with forty to sixty broken Mopars on the lawn.
If I could say just one message to the kids of tomorrow: skip that whole part. Just go right to the part where you have a lot of broken Mopars. They create an infinite number of mind-bending puzzles, and the lack of parts provides ample opportunities to make your own. Plus, the build quality is so poor that literally anything you can do to fix the car while not drunk or high is superior to the original article. My only request is that you skip the 1975-1981 period, because I don’t need more competition.
All the car enthusiasts I know love the idea of a long, luxurious, American boat of a car. It doesn’t matter what their main interest is: racing, motorcycles, dog farming, or lifted trucks. Everyone likes the idea of getting some old lead sled made in the U.S. of A, and accelerating smoothly and comfortably onto the highway, where their fellow motorists are too afraid to pass for fear they may be a gangster or just elderly.
How do American manufacturers respond to this universal desire for their product? By not making these cars anymore. That’s right, you can’t buy a boat. If you want a luxury sedan, you’re going to be buying a sports sedan in the image of the Germans, only not as good. If you want heavy, boaty luxury from an American automaker, you will instead get some long-wheelbase school bus of a body-on-frame SUV, which costs as much as a house.
As intimidating as those vehicles can be, they more or less look identical to every other SUV on the road. It takes a Ph. D in large-displacement vehicles to identify them, and by the time you’re done pointing out the essential differences which make a Cadillac Escalade visually distinct from a Chevy Suburban, your date has walked out, and you’re stuck picking up the cheque for two at Applebee’s. This is not the case with the land barges of old: you can absolutely tell the difference between a 1988 Town Car and a 1988 Ford Escort.
There is hope, however. I’ve devised an elaborate body kit that will transform a cheap sedan into a luxury cruiser. It makes a Hyundai Elantra twice as wide and nearly three times as long, and it’s made entirely out of environmentally-friendly plywood and less-environmentally-friendly spraypaint from the tractor supply store. It also makes the vehicle authentically slow, which you’ll find adds to the pleasure of pretending you’re the talentless scion of a small town used car dealership. Hey, maybe they sell high-mileage Grand Marquises there.
Now, I’m certain that lots of people are stressed out by long car rides, but I find them kind of serene. The purr of the engine, a sparse-at-best concept 1970s electronic album on the speakers, and the endless cycle of highway hypnosis. When things got bad, I used to go up onto the loop route and just run it all night long. My brain would just empty out, and all those intrusive thoughts about turning myself over to the police would go poof. There’s only one toll if you never get off, too, which makes it cheaper than a movie.
Driving for hours is tiring, but it’s mostly because of traffic. All that worrying about other drives is what poops you out. In ideal conditions, which is to say “nobody else on the fucking road,” scientists have shown that human beings can actually drive non-stop for upwards of a couple days. Longer if they have partaken of a highway truck stop’s special-recipe methamphetamines. We are, as a species, built to do these long hauls and derive a sort of demented enjoyment from the trial.
Don’t believe me? Check out NASA. They’re working hard right now to figure out which of their astronauts – already the coffee-achieving cream of the crop of humanity, ignore the adult-diaper stalker lady – are tough enough to endure the trip to Mars. That’s right. Even the toughest, craziest space-pilot assholes among us are getting winnowed out, because they can’t spend a mere seven to fifteen months stuck inside a teeny tiny spacecraft without new TV to watch and only government-approved roadtrip snacks. Admittedly, this is probably because once they get there, they’re going to have to hop right into the space craft to go back home, without even a low-mileage shell of a Datsun 240Z to haul behind them in order to justify the trip.
Maybe in some glorious future, they can pick a regular run-of-the-mill loser like myself to make the trip. I’d be okay with it, as long as they make the spaceship smell kind of like mouldy old shag carpet and occasionally weave out of its lane when hitting a bump. I’ve got a reputation to keep.
Once, long ago, my area was full of folks that rode around on horses. They used to call it the Horse-Drawn Age, but I prefer to call it Whinnying and Dining, little horse joke there. Eventually, people found out that cars are easier, and let you go further distances, and you don’t feel so bad when you beat on them out of a corner. Most importantly: cars don’t eat when they’re not being driven.
In case you’re unfamiliar, horses need to eat all the time. You have to keep stuffing food and water in their gobs. On the contrary, my car only needs to be refuelled after a lot of driving, or potentially after it’s been sitting for a couple months and the pinhole in the tank has leaked all of its gas out. This extra maintenance and expense is the primary reason why you don’t see people with hundreds of horses, unlike the common automotive hoarder like myself.
Sure, there are probably horse hobbyists out there trying to get the weirdest and most decrepit horses, but they’re not gonna find a vintage pony sitting in some farmer’s field, ignored for the last thirty-seven years. The numbers just aren’t there for it. On the other hand, if you put too many horses together in one location, you’ll soon end up with even more horses – for free – through a phenomenon that my dad promised he would explain to me before he ran off to join that Mexican circus and never came back. Those new horses need food of their own, of course, and soon any money you planned to save by not having to pay for auto insurance is quickly eaten up by equine food.
Finally, horses do not respond well to horsepower-adding mods, possibly because horse owners have no money left over after constantly feeding their garage full of horses. Horse racing is a huge business, where there is serious money to be made by going slightly faster than the other guy, but you can’t spend $300 on eBay to add a turbocharger to your Clydesdale. And even if you could, you’d probably have to feed it a lot fancier food to fatten up the ratio and avoid knock when you take it down the strip.
Real estate in my area is depressing. There’s the usual: unaffordable condos, unaffordable row homes, unaffordable single-family homes. Boring! Where’s the castles? Where are the volcano fortresses? I can scroll the listings all day long and not a single torture pit or giant laser dome will appear before my wondering eyes.
Part of this is no doubt because of economic incentives. Something like a tank full of sharks that you slowly lower spies into is expensive to maintain – we’re talking sharks, shark food, water, water filtering, the occasional liability lawsuit. Not only that, but any realtor worth their salt is gonna tell you to get rid of it, since it makes the room look smaller. In their eyes, most customers are not “shark tank” people, and they may be thrown off by its presence during a walk-through. Better to move it somewhere else, and put out some decorative throw pillows to cover the spot where it used to sit.
This even affects me, a person with no particular bent towards supervillainy. What do I want? A large industrial space for storing cars, car parts, car accessories, and broken cars. And it would be nice to have a place to put a bed, and maybe a toilet. Does the real estate market provide me with such a building? No. Which is why I’m currently taking a shit at the 7-Eleven, because my bathroom is full of moped parts. I know it’s just for staff, Ethan.
Perhaps I should just be grateful. I heard that some big Hollywood star ended up with a castle addiction. They’re expensive to heat, castles. Just couldn’t stop buying them, the community association was soaking him for every red cent. That’s how they get you, you know. Moat fees. Plus the parking sucks.
When you are doubtful of your own impacts upon the world, it’s good to go back to the folks you have helped and have them massage your fragile ego for a little while. What if you actually haven’t helped anyone, though, and they resent you for forcing them to lie out of fear you may become violent? The fear of this happening to me is why I volunteered to be our small town librarian on weekends.
You might be too young to remember when librarians held absolute control over all information in an area. When you wanted to know something, you’d phone the library, and ask about it. Sometimes – more often than statistically probable, the more I think about this phenomenon – the librarian would just know the answer. Or they’d invite you to show up to the library, and figure out which books you’d need to look at in order to figure out the truth of the matter for yourself.
I have a very fond memory of calling up when I was a kid, and asking a question about… dinosaurs? Oh my, now I seem to be forgetting exactly what I asked Ms. Campbell about. I’m… pretty sure it was dinosaurs. Or carburetors. Yeah, probably carburetors. Anyway, she knew the answer off the top of her head. No, wait. I’m mixing up my stories. That time I called her and she just put the phone down and I heard two voices indistinctly arguing, very loudly, and then a bang that made the receiver ring, and then silence. Silence for a long time. Ms. Campbell came back on the line, or something speaking with her voice, and told me not to ask that question ever again. It was forbidden knowledge, it/she explained, and I must never, ever, repeat it, especially to law enforcement. Then, she seemed to brighten, and wished me a productive day pondering life’s mysteries.
Was that experience formative? No. I had been traumatized by unexplained violent outbursts by trusted adults in the past – it was part and parcel of growing up in a coal town. What really surprised me was that she claimed the 1980 Dodge Aspen was so-called “forbidden,” especially since I’ve now used my newly-gained Librarian’s Access to their computer system to find out that they in fact carry the Chilton’s repair manual for just such an automobile. Now all I have to do is place an inter-library loan request…
Ever since my editorial in the newspaper, people have been driving by my house, screaming obscenities. Morning, noon, and night. I’d close the window to muffle their profane entreaties, but one of the neighbourhood parents sent their kids by to smash out all the glass, and new sheets of plywood cost more than my car. It’s enough to make a guy wish he hadn’t written all that kook-ass bullshit in a public source of truth and then attached his real name to it.
Now, you have to understand. I’m not some sort of reactionary conspiracy-spewing nutjob. Everything I’m saying is meticulously backed up, word for word, by evidence. That’s what’s really got everyone’s panties in a knot, metaphorical or otherwise. When confronted with an impossible fact, the human mind reels. Lashing out at the messenger is an understandable reaction, and I forgive those who trespass against me, even if my insurance adjuster is getting tired of it.
Still, I stand by my words. Last night, some dude came by in a misfiring Neon. I could barely hear what he was saying over all the exhaust noise. After listening to him circle the block twice, I stepped out onto the lawn, waiting to be struck down by a thrown can of expired luncheon meat. None arrived. In fact, the coward stepped on the gas to try and get away from me, his target that was now seemingly defending himself. The little Plymouth stalled, and then shat out about three pounds of oil and coolant from the muffler.
On the side of the road, I helped him change the blown head gasket, and hopefully he’s gone back to his friends to tell him that the guy from the news, the pariah, isn’t actually all that bad after all. Maybe he’ll even come around to my way of thinking: everyone who loiters in the left lane should be forcibly exterminated by a highly-efficient government pogrom and their assets redistributed to worthy charities.
My local small hardware store was destroyed decades ago. An uncaring foreign mega-corporation swooped in and bought the whole chain. It turns out that when you buy a struggling small hardware store, it doesn’t suddenly become magically profitable because it now has your visionary leadership and MBA-driven artificial metaminds at the helm. So they did the next best thing to doing a good job, and started shutting down stores, including my own one.
As a teenager, this was particularly ill-timed. Now, rather than being able to ride my bicycle through the big field behind the church to get potato gun materials, I had to take the bus to go to the big chain store. And at the big chain store, they didn’t have Bob. Bob was an old dude who worked the front bench at the small hardware chain, and he had lived a lot of lives before he ended up stuck in the asshole of the universe, giving advice to suburbanite dads about what kind of nailgun to use to assemble a birdhouse kit.
I was afraid of Bob as a kid, mostly because of his gruff demeanour and general no-nonsense attitude. When I grew into a teenager, I was still a little afraid – but the desire for knowledge surpassed that. For that one summer I had him, I asked Bob about everything I could think of. House wiring codes. How an internal combustion engine worked. Who Faulkner was. Why he was hiding in our town, had obviously changed his name, and kept going on break whenever a neighbourhood cop came into the store. And then I bought a bunch of stuff, because that was what Bob was there for: to tell me to get the good shit, instead of the bad shit, because life was too short.
Once the store was sold, I never saw him again. It was as if his existence was inextricably bound to that of the store, a sort of forest fairy who was destroyed when the spell was broken by bylaw enforcement. In adulthood, I assume that he still lived in the general area and simply found a new job after the new owners pushed a background check (or tax withholding) upon him. Sometimes I wonder where he ended up; maybe he’s wandering around French hardware stores now, telling Gallic teenagers about the standards body behind Romex.
Would he be proud of the man I’d become? No: he was a dyed-in-the-wool Ford man, Bob was. And I don’t shoplift nearly enough from the big hardware store.
There’s a problem brewing all across this country. Great industrial factories, warehouses, shipping hubs – all going dormant as their parent companies amalgamate and optimize. Their plans simply do not involve the small towns which brought their respective industries to greatness. They are surplus to requirements, and in the absence of a new buyer, just get abandoned.
Where I live, there’s a serious problem too. There just aren’t enough places to park cars. Admittedly, I have a few more cars than the average family, but I think that everyone should be allowed to purchase the entire Mopar colour catalogue from 1971 to 1981 and street-park every single one. Obviously, bylaw disagrees. They want me to park at least some of these cars, especially the ones with no registration, off the road. Very far off the road.
There’s one thing that every abandoned warehouse, office building, factory, rocket launch pad and pornography distributorship has. A parking lot. And parking lots are big – the ladder-climbing building managers who operated these properties sized the lots to their absolute peak of employee headcount, likely mere minutes before the disaster that finally stayed their great machines.
Now, I can’t fix all of the country’s socioeconomic malaise. I’m just one dude, and not a particularly productive one at that. All I can do is go by, make an insultingly low offer for the property, and then not pay the big corporation when they send me the invoice. It’s such a small amount of money that they usually don’t even notice I haven’t paid. In exchange for a little light fraud, I get a new place to park a bunch of cars. Sure, it’s a little inconvenient driving an hour or two to get to those cars, but most of them don’t run anyway.
It’s fun, and more than a little scary, to think about the early days of the space program. Folks strapped themselves into elaborate series of tin cans produced by the finest aerospace consortiums America could crank out, based entirely on a bunch of math. Sure, there were experiments along the line – monkeys, dogs, in-laws – but they had to know that things were gonna be a little fucked up at some point where someone forgot to math out that part of the world.
Here at Seat Safety Switch Space, we like to do things a little differently. Nowadays, computers are powerful enough to simulate a moon mission without breaking a sweat. Chances are the one you carry in your pocket can actually fly the fucking rocket ship, and here you are unable to figure out how to even connect it to your car’s entertainment system. We say: let the computers go to space, and conserve our planet’s valuable (and limited) series of folks who are willing to trust a sketchy speed machine that might blow up.
I don’t just say that because I feel a special kinship with these folks. I certainly don’t say it because I want to have more astronauts on the roads, blocking my commute to work. And as tempting as it is, I don’t particularly need a bunch of former fighter jet pilots telling me that my car is terrifying at 35km/h and that I should consider actually bolting on all the parts. What I want them to do is be super bored, and then make some terrible automotive decisions on their own right here on Earth. It’s the only way we’re going to advance the species, and by the species I mean the hundreds of derelict smog-era Mopars clogging up my property.
Astronauts make good money, or so I’ve heard, and now that the robots are off on other planets doing all their work, they can spend some of that money. Mostly, it’s because they’re brave or reckless enough to take on these projects and see them to completion, unlike the common man who shows up to my for-sale ads with his teenage child in tow “for their first car” and comes away a religious zealot, praying to an unseen higher power while their progeny stumbles from the car, speaking in tongues and wondering just where they can get a turbocharger for cheap. Plus, NASA’s life insurance is pretty good.
Ejector seats are in the news again. Some poorly-made airplane decided it wanted to be a lawn ornament, and the pilot was able to get the fuck out without being hurt. Besides the fact that the engineers responsible for the ejector seat are clearly better at their jobs than the morons who designed the rest of the plane, this raises an important question. Why don’t cars have ejector seats, if they’re so good?
It makes a lot of sense on paper. The space above cars is generally empty and thereby safe for a seat to fly into the air and safely descend, assuming you don’t get run over by the guy behind you when you land. Although SUVs do roll over frequently, blocking the roof, fighter jets also do that. Tunnels are another problem, but statistically almost none of a highway is tunnels, and if you crash inside one, you’re probably going to hold up a lot of traffic anyway, and your fellow drivers will wish you had died. And while building these seats cost a lot for minimum safety benefit, that hasn’t stopped automakers from including useless features like lane-minding software and rear brakes in the pursuit of false security. So it just makes sense that the next frontier has to be ejector seats.
Of course, there are some genuine engineering obstacles. For one, the average fighter jet pilot is not texting and driving. The force of the ejection may cause the driver of a mere car to drop their phone in the footwell, which is extra inconvenient because the now-driverless car is likely to careen off the road and burst into flames. And those phones aren’t cheap, although having the evidence destroyed may help with keeping insurance rates low enough that you can afford a replacement phone.
Still, I don’t think this is a good reason to stop this important advancement in safety technology. The 2024 Seat Safety Switch Mall-Crusher is already planned to have it, just as soon as we figure out how to add a Big Gulp-capable cupholder that can withstand the G-forces of launch.
There are a lot of folks out there who are good at taking pictures of cars. That’s not a talent that I share. Sure, I can take a decent set of photographs, enough for a Craigslist ad, taking pains to obscure the worst of the rust and the missing windshield. Doing the really fancy stuff, magazine spreads, whatever – simply impossible.
Obviously, there are some technique problems to be had. Indulging in every kind of exotic industrial solvent for the last several decades has probably not helped me have a steady hand. Or, to be honest with you, a good understanding of perspective and shadow.
I’ve never been one of those folks who thinks that a better camera makes a better photographer. That said, the world might have passed by my trusty Sony Mavica from the late 90s. I found it in a dumpster a few years ago, and even though pretty much everything is smashed, it still works. Even writes to a floppy disk no problem, you know how those things get.
By far the biggest problem is time. Real photographers wait for the absolute perfect light conditions, which can mean hanging around a venue until the “magic hour” when the sun has just gone down. Personally, I can never keep any of my vehicles in public for that long before the cops get called, so I take a picture quick and then get rolling. Sometimes that picture is of my legs running away from a blurry parking lot. I did sell one of those as a maybe-sighting of a bigfoot, which is certainly the high water mark for my photographic endeavours.
Even though no legitimate magazine will ever feature any of my cars (except accidentally, after I’ve crashed into several of their writers while trying to show off,) I still try to keep practicing. After all, practice makes perfect, and Bad Cars Monthly still needs a steady stream of rusty garbage stuck on the streets of my town to fill the pages. Otherwise I’d have to write more articles to use up that space, and what kind of maniac would read that shit?
For a couple years, I had this coworker. He’d bring in steaks and cook them in the office toaster oven, all morning long, and then have sort of a medium-rare steak dinner for lunch. This story is not about the resulting grease fire and office politics disaster that ensued as a consequence of those actions, because I’ve spoken about that before on several occasions, most recently before Congress. No, today we’re going to talk about toaster ovens.
A lot of you have grown up without a toaster oven. Sure, you have a regular toaster – everyone does – but for reasons of expense, counter space, or sheer bourgeois extravagance, few families make that leap to the big T.O. So you might not be experienced in exactly how a toaster oven differs from a “just a toaster,” and you likely don’t appreciate the spectacular feats of engineering that went into this little kitchen miracle.
I can certainly empathize. When I was a child, we also didn’t have a toaster oven. My parents could have afforded it, I am sure, but they were not big “breakfast people.” They ate the bare minimum amount of calories required to get out the door and go to the office jobs they hated, so that they could spend the weekend and evenings interviewing for their dream jobs: circus people.
My dad wanted to be a trapeze artist, even with his bad back, and my mom interviewed often to be a lion tamer, although she often admitted to me in private that she was just going along with such an ambitious career goal to keep my dad happy, and would probably be happy to work in concessions. This meant that our family cat, Li’l Ruffian, was often used with a dollhouse chair as my mom practiced for the practical part of her interviews, which thankfully never came up. It turns out most professional lion tamers in that era brought their own lion to work, and so she would simply be politely dismissed with at most a complimentary bag of popcorn.
When I grew up, and got my own office job… that was the first time I encountered a toaster oven “in the wild.” I immediately used it to heat up a Pizza Pop, the original formulation of which I am now told is banned by nearly every country following the signing of an elaborate series of non-proliferation treaties. The ones nowadays aren’t as good, although they do still scald your mouth and the mouths of everyone within a 60 foot radius. Delighted, I immediately ran out and bought my own toaster oven with my first paycheque. Admittedly, I’ve never used it, but I am sure one day I’ll need to heat up a steak.
Because of a unique foible in the squatting law, I was recently granted the right to ownership of the house in which I live. My house. All it took was waiting until my landlord died, then making sure nobody found out I was living here rent-free for a couple years. Luckily for me, his estate went through some kind of bizarre court battle between his step-grand-daughter and his third wife, twice removed, so nobody bothered to come by the house and find me hiding in the darkened living room, reheating TV dinners with an open flame after having stored them in the snow to keep them fresh.
Now that I had a house of my own, well, things were going to change around here. My first act as landed gentry was to serve an eviction notice to the mice that had taken up residence in a corner of the garage. Get out, you little rodent shits. And take your tamed housecat with you. After that, I wanted to celebrate. Time to decorate the house. I wheeled in a beat-to-shit Agrati moped, and put its two-stroke engine on the kitchen counter. I really like how the expensive marble countertop wipes clean of oil with just a little spritz of chlorinated brake cleaner.
I also decided to hook the power back up. The power company, now that they were dealing with a Homeowner, was surprisingly respectful, the diametric opposite of the time they showed up to disconnect service and I threw acorns and rocks at their meter guy while making what I believed to be “squirrel noises.” They didn’t even ask any questions about whether I had installed several jerry-rigged 240V circuits during the time it took them to show up, or if I was really planning to run a MIG welder in the guest bedroom.
This was a grievous error on my part. As soon as the lights turned back on, some of the neighbours wanted to come by with gift baskets and fresh-baked cherry blintzes. One little old lady, Ms. Pollack from down the street, told me that she was so glad to finally have someone new move into the neighbourhood, to get rid of that terrible squatter who had so many awful cars that barely ran. I nodded and thanked her for the pastries, setting the plate onto a stray 318 that occupied the front hall landing. It’s true that people treat you differently when you own a house.
When I was a kid, I couldn’t get enough of the science centre. Lego, little weird gadgets, a giant spinny thing, and a chance to run around like a maniac on high-durability thick-pile outdoor-specification carpet. There’s one aspect that sticks in my mind above all about that old science centre, which has since been crushed into a thin paste by the machinery of progress. That aspect is a spiral entrance ramp.
See, in most quasi-government buildings, you’ve got yourself a normal, straight ramp. Being straight, it’s pretty boring, with no surprises. If a monkey stands at the top and throws a barrel down at you, you’ll see it coming and be able to dodge it easily (I played a lot of Donkey Kong as a child.) Usually, only folks in a wheelchair are allowed to use any entrance ramp, or at least society will judge you harshly for doing so. It’s stairs time for you, buddy, get out of the way. Not here: that ramp was is a glorious corkscrew, and they provided a nice elevator for those people in the wheelchairs, which means you could absolutely rip up and down it without fear of maiming or being maimed. As a small child, there was nothing better. And as an adult: still nothing better. Too bad it’s lost to me forever, unless I become rich enough to hire a mentally ill architect who is haunted, chased through his dreams by unending spirals from another world. And that’s not gonna happen any time soon. Those guys are expensive.
So what has replaced it? Parking garage ramps. Most above-ground parkades in Canada, my country of birth, are built around the same sort of concept. You can rip up and down the spiral ramps in order to change floors, although you should probably obey yield signs if your car isn’t so loud that it scares the other denizens into coming to a full stop while they wonder what that deafening chainsaw-esque rod-knocking sound is. It’s a hoot to do, and I’d do it forever if such a steep incline didn’t put an unseemly amount of wear on my shoelaces-and-Starburst-candy suspension bushings. The airport’s even better: there, the parking garage floors hang off the side of one giant ramp, and it’s not even covered. In winter, glorious winter, you can pull one sustained powerslide up the whole thing, love-tapping the snowblower robots with your rear quarter panel on along the way.
Unfortunately, the other thing I miss from the old science centre, a sense of awed childhood discovery, has yet to be replaced by automotive shenanigans. The best I’ve been able to manage so far is unbroken streams of exponentially elaborate profanity directed at, say, this ball joint.
Every intricate little part of a mechanical assembly has its own story to tell. While you are humming down the highway, part of your suspension is held on by a bolt. A normal, boring threaded fastener. Nut goes on, together they clamp the two things together, wheel doesn’t fall off the car. Simple. Except it took hundreds and hundreds of years of study, machining excellence, standards creation, and thousands of half-ruined engineers’ lives.
To be aware of all these parts would drive you mad. Don’t believe me? Let’s take your body. There is a place in the US that is super-duper quiet, kept eerily so by insane reams of insulation. Companies take their shit there to make sure it runs as silently as possible, so your late-night DVD menu canoodling isn’t interrupted by the sound of the disc drive re-accessing the table of contents.
If a normal human being goes into this realm of silence, sits down in silence, they can hear their own body run. It drives people mad. Ever heard your jaw open? Yeah, it does that all the time, you just can’t hear it because of the other stuff going on. Same with all the bags of gas, half-implemented pumps, joints grinding against each other, and accidents of evolution that occupy your body. I think I’d go crazy too, trying to listen to all that shit, and it’s the same with a car.
We’re not really built to understand these assemblies. Sure, you can think seriously about all the different parts, but ultimately it all adds up to “a car.” You don’t think about the complex series of linkages, bolts, fasteners, bushings, and grease that allows you to steer. Even the most seasoned mechanic will just turn the steering wheel, and the car will steer. That is, until something goes wrong, and this is exactly where the car expert and the normal person diverge.
A normal person will turn up their stereo to drown out the noise of a bad wheel bearing. Maybe ignore it for awhile, at least until their next paycheque clears and they can go see the mechanic, honest. A real mechanic will ignore that sound forever. They’ll crank their stereo all the way to the moon, and then when the speakers begin to clip, doggedly chase problems with their sound system even when the front-left wheel threatens to fall off on the highway. And if their car didn’t have a working stereo to start with? So much the better.
So the next time you’re on the highway and you see someone with their music turned all the way up and a trunk full of stolen you-pick-it junkyard relays, maybe slow down a little bit. Give them some extra room. Because they’re trying to ignore that annoying wailing sound coming from the police car behind them, too.
As human beings, we’re not used to thinking of things being produced in industrial settings by machines. When you go to the grocery store and pick up a can of gravy, you’re not thinking about the immense machinery at the Franco-American factory, behind armoured anti-truck emplacements, pumping it out all day long. Because we are social animals, we don’t like to think about machines doing our work.
You want to believe that it’s done by individual human beings, labouring at the factory, watching for anything going wrong, committed to that product. Even if that product does cost thirty-five cents a can, isn’t a consistent shade of brown, and makes you feel like you might be about to die if you drink a mere five of them in one sitting.
Truth is, the advancement of humanity has largely been done through automation. And one of those automations, the motor vehicle, is the only good one that has ever existed. Horses are lazy and require feeding even when you’re not driving them somewhere, and walking to the next town over wears out your shoes too quickly. Human beings are simply too delicate and inconsistent to trust to any difficult or mind-numbing labour. We stop paying attention to the gravy machine, for instance, when we’re thinking about last night’s TV movie production. A machine is a better use, which frees us up.
Doubters will often say that these machines take away our jobs. And they do, but they’re shitty, awful jobs supervising the gravy machine. The problem is that there hasn’t been any replacement. Our industrial betters sneer at our jobless masses left soaking in the gutter.
This is why, when I become Prime Minister, I will create a whole shitload of cooler jobs for us to do while the machines are busy making products for us to enjoy. For instance, there currently aren’t a lot of astronauts. I will create a thousand new positions for astronauts. Will all of them make it back to earth? Maybe! At least it won’t be boring to find out. What about pinball repair? There’s hardly any jobs in that right now, but that sounds pretty good too. I’ll open Pinball Canada and we’ll make a government-socialized pinball machine that breaks down all the fucking time, so you have lots of little surprises to keep your mind active.
What you won’t have is thirty-five cent gravy. We’re gonna force the factory owner to turn up the “quality” lever to at least thirty-seven cent gravy. You’ll be able to afford the increase with all the tips you’ll make from your pinball repair gig.
As tempting as it is, you can’t discard everyone else’s advice and go it alone. Such is the path to become a frustrated, bitter shell of a human being, frustrated at some complete bullshit that won’t move for you. What our species figured out eons ago is that working together gets things done. Something that has been frustrating you for weeks has been encountered – and defeated – by some other weirdo. Maybe you have some skill or tool they need. When paired up, you can make some really strange shit.
Of course, among project-heavy freaks like myself, it’s difficult to find people to collaborate with. We’re just so busy all the time, due to the bourgeoisie demanding that we serve in spirit-draining jobs instead of eating grapes while reclining nude in the sun. As a result, it can be hard to justify asking someone else to give up their minuscule amount of project time in order to help me with mine.
I did think about starting a “buddies program.” The idea is that, when you’re bored at home and need somewhere to hang out for awhile, you can go hang out with some random person. You’ll pass wrenches, and shoot ideas about how to pull that fucking cockeyed throw-out bearing out. Bread, maybe? Stuff it in there and push it out? Okay, go get a loaf of bread. The downside of this program is the same as it always is, the tragedy of the commons. Even among your wrenching friends, I am certain there is someone who is more of a drain on the available time and resources than they put back in. In my friends group, it’s me. This works out as long as you are friends, and have some kind of common social goal, or at least the others are concerned for your welfare and are trying to keep you from going off on your own and adding nitrous oxide to, say, a zoo elephant. With random, anonymous internet perverts? We’d have a murder on our hands in a week. So that whole idea went in the trash.
So the solution, then, is to make more friends. Friends with weird cars. Friends with interesting lives, and a lot of lived experience. Friends with that cool portable bandsaw I saw on the internet the other day, that thing seems like it would work really well to chop this road sign I stole from outside their house into a skid plate. It is through community that we’ll save ourselves. Just not the community that I stole the road sign from. Those normal people aren’t helping me at all by calling the cops.
Everyone loves the basic feeling of competence. No matter what field of human endeavour, doing well at it gives us a little zing of all the good brain chemicals. Sometimes, for those pursuits that are beneficial in some way, there’s even social recognition. The approval of your peers. What could be better? Prize money, which you can also get if you do especially well. Just not at anything I’ve ever been good at.
So when the county fair was in town, and they offered a $500 prize for best burnout, I figured I would head on down. Now, traditionally the burnout contest has been exclusively the domain of hoity-toity redneck in-groups. They align along vehicle brands, or trucks in general. Because of this elitism and exclusionary belief structure, they would never accommodate someone like me, who is more like a freelance piece of human detritus and holds no particular loyalties to any kind of vehicle except “cheap.”
However, the county fair, being a socialist meta-construct of the government-oversubsidized 4H Club and taxpayer-fattened county, made a rule that said any dumbass with an automobile could enter into the competition. No making rules that exclude, say, a barely ratcheted-together 1977 Dodge Aspen that spends most of its combustion cycle billowing steam from a blown head gasket and the other portion emitting plasma-torch-hot nitromethane fire from the exhaust barely cooled by their circuitous torment inside the twin sequential turbochargers, themselves stolen off of poorly-supervised industrial equipment and ported to a mirror sheen with a combination of primitive die grinding and a near-manic attention to detail after accidentally reading back issues of Hot Rod at 3AM and deciding maybe sleep was optional this month. No, they’d have to let me play. Mom said.
Did I win? Beat all the other kids? Show them the biggest, nastiest burnout that had ever existed? Not exactly. It turns out that to hold a burnout for more than about ten seconds requires two things. First, tires that are not actively bald and whose carbon-steel structural cords are not dangling out of the holes in the carcass. The second, and much more important thing, is brakes that work in order to hold the car still enough to skid the tires. These brakes also keep you from taking out the county reeve and his family, who sat in a remarkably un-protected area of the judging booth. On the plus side, I did get to show off how good I am at running from the cops. That sort of thing feels good.
Although it is very clichéd, drinking out of a human skull mug at work gets a lot of messages across. For one thing, it shows that you are serious. It also shows that you’re going to spend a lot of time drinking coffee, because a human skull is very hard to drink out of, and it can only hold a little bit of coffee at a time, because human skulls are not designed to hold coffee. Which is why I primarily drink either high-test aircraft cleaning spirits and fruity, sugar-heavy cocktails. Sure makes the Monday planning meetings go a little faster, and no one’s the wiser, unless I fuck up and include one of those little cocktail umbrellas.
Mugs are actually a surprisingly significant part of my life. Once, a long time ago, I had the perfect mug. The handle fit my hand very well – snugly, but far enough away from the barrel that I didn’t burn my knuckles. There was a little lip. It didn’t wobble when I put it down on an uneven table, or workbench, or desk. Then, I left it in the communal office dishwasher, and some asshole stole it.
This thief – and make no mistake, their felonious intent is communicated thoroughly – didn’t just misplace the mug. They didn’t carry it back to their desk, realize it wasn’t one of “the office’s” mugs, and return it to be washed. One, two days, even a week… I could deal with that. It was gone for months upon months. Soon, I had lost all hope of seeing it again in the cleaned-mugs cupboard or even the grotty sink full of coworker leavings.
I considered asking around about it, but to admit that level of vulnerability at work would have compromised my position. Not because I was powerful. No, because I was and am the weird asshole who doesn’t do any work. As long as I didn’t raise too much of a fuss, they couldn’t be bothered to figure out who would be responsible for firing me. In fact, my line manager had perished in a motorcycle racing accident several years ago, and I just intercepted my own performance-review paperwork when HR put it on his desk and signed it myself. To draw attention to my precarious existence by making a stink about a coffee mug would mean that I would finally have to stop playing Counter-Strike and shopping for car parts all day. And then I’d have to get a real job.
So, I let that mug go. Maybe one day, it’ll turn up again. I make sure to attend all the going-away parties on the other part of the floor, and even on the adjacent floors, just in case the thief who ruined my life lived in a different department. In the meantime, I have a stupid human skull mug. It doesn’t fit in the dishwasher, and no thief will want to wash it by hand and then steal it, not when there’s a Garfield lead-cadmium one from the 70s in there too.
The next time you go to buy a frozen pizza from the grocery store, pay attention to the price. It’s lower than you’d think. In fact, the price of a frozen pizza is well below the cost that it would take for you to make it yourself. Even the more complicated pizzas, those “Deluxes” and “Delights,” are cheaper.
There’s a lot of reasons for this, and it doesn’t even take much of a conspiracy. A big-shot corporate type at Big Frozen Pizza can simply call up his buddies at Big Green Pepper, and place an order for “a whole shitload” of green peppers. When you buy in bulk, you save. Everyone knows this. And if green peppers are expensive that week? Maybe he buys a few less of those, and a lot more pepperoni instead. It’s all a numbers game, and thousands of people across the world have a job entirely based on trying to make a cheaper, yet still full-bodied, frozen pizza. How can you possibly compete?
Me, I didn’t bother. What I did instead was put two and two together. If I can buy pizzas cheaper than the component parts, then in theory I’d be really saving on the component parts if I bought pizzas and then broke them down to their ingredients. In Canada, where I live, it’s often colder than an industrial freezer just by going outside. If I chuck a few dozen pies on the deck, I can part them out at my leisure, and it doesn’t even cost me the electricity required to run a conventional deep-freeze.
Of course, even though the ingredients are cheap, the resulting menu options are fairly limited. I’ve never been a Michelin chef – unless you include the fact that I parboil each and every tire I get my hands on, little burnout joke there – and maybe one can do a better job with what they’re given. I just keep making pizza casseroles, and lasagna, and exotic skewers. Honestly, I eat pretty well, and it’s all at a discount.
Sure, I get weird looks at the check-out aisle when I buy a hundred-and-eighty kilograms of frozen pizza on sale. They looked at Henry Ford like he was crazy, too. Actually, maybe he was. He probably wouldn’t have eaten a pizza and instead chosen to say something racist about Italians.
What is the best part of a thrift store, other than the deals? It’s gotta be picking over the detritus of other people’s lives. If you go to a store very frequently, you’ll know when there’s been a big “get” by the administration. Suddenly, matched sets of furniture will appear. The store’s pervasive odour will take on a threatening new tang. An estate sale has happened, and not a successful one.
When a life together has ended, and a house is cleared out, there’s gonna be some tools left over. Whether it’s an uncaring professional salesman, or a technically-disinclined disappointment of a grandson, something will always pass through the cracks. And that’s what starts the real detective work.
Of course, it’s not polite to speak of this sort of ghastly hoovering-up of the departed’s assets. In this country at least. In other, more evolved, countries, taking Not-Your-Grandpa’s old timing light and using it to adjust the distributor cap just so on a 1980 Trans Am Turbo is basically the equivalent of giving his spirit closure.
His soul will be released as soon as you dog it on the highway and get those nice little pap-paps as the wastegate spring bounces. And once Ghostpa has gone to the Great Hereafter with a smile on his ethereal lips, you get to throw the timing light back into your own hoard, which will eventually return to that very same Value Village when the social workers finally shovel out your corpse.
I don’t know why, but whenever I go to the grocery store, people keep giving me money. They just walk right up to me in the parking lot and fork over a couple bucks. Sometimes they act like I should be embarrassed to take it, or whisper something like “you poor dear” as they pass the change and bills into my hands. Occasionally, an angry husband makes me swear that I won’t spend it on drugs. No problem, sir, it’s just going into this shitty Plymouth behind me. Drugs are nothing compared to the thrill of finally getting the horn to work.
Sure, I don’t dress particularly well, either. Grease-stained t-shirts promoting a long-past motorcycle derby from a distant city. Whatever free hat NAPA handed out most recently, also stained with grease and/or shoplifted undercoat. That’s no reason for people to be giving me charity, not when there’s truly deserving people. Admittedly, those people are driving Camrys that were made in this century, and probably don’t have to walk home nearly as often as I do.
Perhaps I’ve gotten off-track a little bit with my life. I should be projecting a lot more confidence in my dirtbag existence. Despite what the nice social workers say, there’s really no law against cornering people at the grocery store and talking to them about six-barrel carbs and mostly-junkyardable Jeep cam position sensors. Then they’d know that they are dealing with someone who Chose to be a complete asshole, rather than a person who is so beaten down by society that they operate a 1970s Mopar product unwillingly.
Trust me: if you knew how much work and expense this thing took to keep running, you’d be throwing eggs instead of pennies. Any sucker can finance a badly-running Highlander from a buy-here-pay-here lot off of Crackhead Street and then go to their three grinding retail/service jobs, but in order to avoid falling out on the highway at one-half road speed, I need to invest the approximate salary and skillset of one highly-trained mechanical engineer. Maybe send some of that charity money to Chrysler, so they can build a better car for me to ruin in fifty years from now.
Do you ever wonder how they film those cool car chases in movies? You might think that they close down a street, and have professional drivers operate special cars, and do a bunch of trickery to encourage everyone’s safety. And this is what they tell you in the behind-the-scenes featurette about the making of the movie.
Of course, all this politeness and forethought takes a lot of money, and time, and it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission. That’s why genuine folk hero H. B. Halicki skipped it back in the 70s. No, he figured that a car chase had to have some realism. What he did was buy a bunch of cars and hire friends to drive them recklessly through real streets, without telling anyone. Sure, some of those friends driving the cars were stuntmen, or at least preternaturally talented rednecks. They’re still driving past terrified grocery shoppers, commuters, and in many cases, police. All for the sake of filmic realism. You gotta love it.
Of course, this kind of movie is not possible to make these days. Not because of increased law enforcement, or a shift in civic morality, or the skyrocketing prices of insurance. No: it’s not possible because you can’t buy a whole ton of shitty cars even if you are a billionaire. When every random moron on Craigslist wants five-and-a-half grand for a 1985 Civic wagon that doesn’t run or even have a hood, whatever budget you set out for your crazy reckless stunt is going to be blown. It’s cheaper to do it Hollywood’s way: at least then you’re only paying new-car prices, usually even subsidized by the automakers who really want a 2023 Hyundai Elantra to narrowly avoid understeering into a bunch of robots. Sure, the chases aren’t as good because you have to keep focusing on the logo on the grille, the parallel-parking assist, and the infotainment system inside the hero’s car, but the car is free. And that’s the best way to make a movie.
So if anyone out there from the “real” auto industry is reading this, please feel free to drop off a whole transporter of new cars in front of my house. I’m gonna film the greatest car chase ever seen, and not at all pay my flunky friends – some of whom are stuntmen, stuntwomen, or non-denominational stuntfolx – to drive them at high speed off-road until we wreck all of them. Plot? Yeah, if you’ve got one, drop that off too, please.
Folks who were born in this century might be surprised that the Chevrolet Corvette was ever considered to be a beastly sports car. To be honest, I’m a little bit surprised, too. It’s probably like when everyone realized that eugenics was actually super bad, and they should stop doing it.
Of course, I don’t intend to compare the C4 Corvette to a crime against humanity. For one thing, the C4 Corvette makes you look cool, even if it is a dated, abstract kind of cool. Although there are certainly some adherents to the dictator-chic aesthetic, there is certainly not a growing fan club for genocide. Wait, there is? Fuck. Maybe it’s because the new Corvette doesn’t come with a manual transmission anymore.
There’s a million reasons why we all thought the Corvette was super cool. Predominantly, though, it was accessibility. While it was certainly expensive, it wasn’t Ferrari expensive. The weird bachelor dude on your street could afford one if he did well in business, and a Camaro if he didn’t do well. And you’d see the same switch gear and parts on both of them, which helped lend a sort of proletarian, shared-values good vibe cloud to the fact that he probably did well in business by exploiting the guy in the Camaro.
Nowadays, sports cars are meant to be inaccessible. This happens because the everyday, average car makes the same horsepower as a base C4 Corvette. Let’s take the ‘93 for example. Three hundred horsepower. Sounds big, doesn’t it? Not anymore: not in a world where the Toyota Sienna Hybrid makes 245. Even when you go up to the rare-as-hen’s-teeth, ultra-racecar-spec 405-horsepower ZR-1, you’re still going to be fighting off BMW X3s and mid-tier Cayennes at the stoplight drags. And that’s before you add up the compression loss that several decades of those stoplight drags have whacked into the poor car’s engine. Sports cars of the modern era need to have a truly eyewatering amount of horsepower to create that margin. Six hundred! Seven hundred! One thousand fucking brake horsepower! Eat shit, Suzette from Accounting! I can run a traction-limited deep 12 second pass and all it cost me was two family homes! See? You sound crazy, and not likeable, not like Corvette guy.
So take it from me: don’t buy a new car. Buy a thirty-year-old Corvette. Just wait until after I’m done shopping, I don’t want prices to start climbing before I’ve gotten one.
Last week, I saw something I’d never seen before. It was a new trim model of a new car. The exact details don’t matter, but it was novel in that I got to look at a car I had never seen before. For about five seconds, until it drove away from the smoking wreckage of my late-1970s-Mopar smog pump.
It was a fun experience overall, and I would do it again. Although I will not partake in the advancement of society, it made me feel a little warm inside that automakers continue to make new cars. New model names, new trim levels, new colours for me to obsessively memorize and then burst out at a moment’s notice. Of course, most of them look like white bars of soap, but you can kinda tell the crossovers apart if you look at the rear bumpers. Even though all the stylists are in lockstep, they can’t agree on how the ass should be formed: that’s their weakness.
To get this little rush of educational discovery, I used to go to the new-car show every year. Of course, that was before I was banned for life from the venue because I wouldn’t stop following a Chrysler employee around the show floor, constantly begging them to look at my concept drawings of a “new Volare.” That hurt, because I put a lot of effort into those crayon drawings on the back of a grease-stained kids’ menu from the more upscale of the local truck stops. The least he could have done is fast-track them into production and spent several hundred million dollars on tooling and advertising.
Now, I just don’t follow car news at all. It’s all full of vehicles I can’t afford, they no longer have sealed beams, and it’s more fun to be surprised in traffic when I encounter a new one. Bird watchers would never read a magazine about all the new birds that come out every year; why should I?
There’s a time and a place for everything, including doing savage burnouts. The time: any time. The place: the police station. You’d be surprised just how vacant the police station is during the day. Most of those cops are out investigating and/or committing crimes, and they won’t want to drive all the way back just to yell at you for letting your clutch out a little fast. Sure, they’re more likely to catch you during shift change, but at that point they just want to go home.
Since time immemorial, the cops have been busting our little street racing spots. We’d gather at a Timmies on the periphery of the ring road, what the nerds are calling the Outer Rim, talk some shit, and before the second flag had dropped on a heads-up drag race for pinks, the police helicopter would be there. You know where the police helicopter never is? At the police station, because that would just be bad optics, a wasteful expenditure of fuel, air space, and costly helicopter therapy. What are you looking for up there, officer, trying to see if your door got dinged in the parking lot?
Putting these two things together, a group of local entrepreneurs started a drag-racing series at the police station. There’s plenty of parking: most of their day is spent listening to suburbanites shriek about a cracked headlight on their Tucson, and they just put in a special spot for you to be able to do Craigslist deals. Sure, it’s probably suspicious to them that there are so many modified shit-box Hondas sitting in the parking lot, revving their engines, but these are traffic cops we’re talking about, not hardened detectives looking for the Prelude Killer. We’ve been doing a few hours of races a night, with nary a scolding word.
So why not join us out here? Unless you’re a cop, in which case you probably have better places to be. May I suggest the Timmies out there on the Outer Rim? They’ve got some new crullers, which are so delicious they’ve got to be committing some kind of crime.
Sure, I’d had lots of bad ideas in my life. Most of them never got past the planning part. My dad used to always tell me that ideas were cheap, and that actually doing the work was the only thing that mattered. He was wrong, especially since those startup trillionaires came down from Europa and plugged us all into that machine that pays us to have ideas.
What’s the best one I had? Well, you probably use it every single day. It’s the Toilet Profit Evaluator. Of course, that wasn’t my name for it. I didn’t even have a name for this thing, when I thought of it at first. At that time, I was mostly curious. And while curiosity killed the cat, it also gave rise to this glorious machine, which has made other men extremely rich at my expense. I did get twenty bucks in Alivespend®, though.
Here’s how it works. When you poop, this gadget in your toilet counts up the cost of all the food you ate to make that poop. Ideally, you want to have produced very little waste, so that you got the maximum value for your money and that your body achieved quality nutrition. The first couple times those CEOs tried it out, they told me, they realized that eating scrambled eggs mixed with gold leaf was wasting a lot of cash. Cash they could have spent buying entire civilizations. So they cut out the gold, big savings. I, of course, didn’t see a penny of those savings.
Of course, like any disruptive technology, it was hard to predict exactly what would happen. Anyone who made food with bran in it went bankrupt practically overnight. And laxative companies, well, they dried up too. Suddenly, everyone cared about reducing emissions as much as possible, even if it caused a little bit of intestinal discomfort for a day or two. Folks were posting their high scores – cleverly labeled as “Bottom Lines,” that wasn’t one of mine – and trying to beat each other to peak human efficiency. Often, those savings helped pay for the visit to the emergency room, where gastrointestinal doctors looked with complete confusion and then got their names on some very complicated papers.
I’m not writing this to seek any kind of profit, or even heroic recognition. While those things would be nice, all I cared about was advancing the human race. So the next time you take a highly optimized shit, think about me.
The neighbourhood dogs keep barking at me when I go out to throw the household trash in the garbage bin. This is understandable: millions of years of evolution have trained dogs to bark at literally anything in order to protect their territories. I could be an intruder, or a burglar, or simply someone who wants to pee on their favourite peeing tree, ruining their reputation in front of the other dogs. Another reason could be that my current winter clothing is a thread-bare McGruff The Crime Dog costume head.
I pulled it out of a dumpster, which is a lot cheaper than old ski jackets. Those, you have to get out of the trunk of grisly “biohazard” stickered cars at the wrecker, and believe you me, there’s a big fight over those every year when the wrecks from the first snowfall of the season get dropped off. Naturally, I missed that glorious day of coat-gettin’ because I had to do what my attorney called a “court appearance.” I can assure you the judge did not in any way appreciate my presence or unique personality, so why did they even want me to come there? Just another way the man is keeping me down.
No, I don’t have the rest of the costume. Everyone always asks that. It’s not necessary, because some kid in high school told me that you lose 90 percent of your heat through your head. This encloses my head, which means I’m always warm. Sure, the parts outside of the giant McGruff get cold, including the areas of my face where the mouse-fur covering no longer covers and the styrofoam insulation have fallen out.
There’s more benefits to just the warmth, as well. I slipped on the sidewalk a few times, and thankfully the fascist dog’s giant head saved me from cracking my own noggin open on the icy expanse of asphalt. It helps make up for the fact that the only reason why I slipped is because I can’t see fucking anything out of this.
If I had one big criticism to level at the oversized skull of police propaganda that I carry around on my neck, it’s that it doesn’t fit well in my car. There’s no way to do easily do a shoulder check with it rubbing up against the headliner and the seats. Even that has its own benefits, however, because the fuzz absolutely do not want to waste my time with small talk when they pull over a dude wearing only a giant dog’s head and nothing else.
Everyone loves magnetism, but nobody wants to do the work of mining rare earth minerals in order to make those magnets. This is what those in the industry call “hypocrisy.” Personally, I’m not willing to be called a hypocrite, which is why I bought my own disused mine and have set about stripping it of every mineral I can find.
Now, it makes sense that I won’t find any of the good shit. Tantalum? That’s all the way over in Rwanda. Yttrium? Hard-working farmers in China are hitting it every day while trying to dig a well. Niobium? Well, a lot of that is actually in Canada, but it’s in the mines that big companies operate. And very selfishly, they won’t let me go over there and dig around, even if I offer to reciprocate with an exceptionally generous, catered lunch-and-scoop at my own mine.
So I pretty much just find stuff that nobody needs. Dirt, mostly. I’m not a geologist, and I can’t afford to hire one. Once in awhile, I find a shiny rock, and I post about it on this cool forum that I found. Usually, it’s nothing. In fact, it’s almost always nothing. Once, it was road salt. That was kind of interesting, until I realized it came from one of my cars.
Oh yeah, the cars. So here’s the other thing. I can’t afford a mine cart. In fact, I’m fairly sure they’re a custom job of some kind, and that would require a welder. So would putting tracks down. And I don’t trust my own buttressing enough to be able to escape the mine at walking pace, should it collapse. That’s why I drive a car – of course, a narrow one, I don’t want to do more digging than I have to – to the work site. I don’t know why everyone doesn’t do this. Maybe it’s because of the noxious exhaust gases building up in the tunnels with no way to escape, but honestly that’s not that much different from sitting in this thing at a stoplight. I may have just become immune to it over repeated exposure.
Ultimately, you could say that this whole mine adventure has been a waste of my time, money, health, and precious, precious gasoline. It’s not all bad, though: there’s certainly been lots of exercise, and I’m sure I’ll find something cool pretty soon. The basement of the jewelry store next door can’t be much further.
My cousin recently came by the house with the ‘72 GMC pickup truck that he’d found at a storage yard auction. Turns out the previous owner put it there, presumably intending to get around to finishing it, and then stopped paying the bills for whatever reason. Over the years, the indebted truck began to sublet its space to a group of rodents, and then eventually the yard owner decided he would rather be renting that space to someone who could pay.
The hammer decided that my cousin would get it for five hundred smackaroos (an audaciously large number; he works in technology) and then, after a couple bug bombs in the interior, he drove it home. Everything was decrepit and poorly-maintained, with a variety of parts-store wiring hijinks on full display inside the cabin. One valve cover – and only one – had been replaced with some gaudy chrome bullshit, which wasn’t even bolted down properly and was seeping oil. There was no way any reasonable mechanic would rate the vaguely banana-shaped frame, which gave the truck a depressing lopsided angle to the cab, as “extant,” let alone street-legal. I was in love.
Of course, he wouldn’t let me have it that easily. In my family, we were raised to do things the hard way, and that didn’t include cutting deals for slack-assed cousins who already have a shitload of unfinished, non-running Mopars stuffing their yard and neighbourhood and never call Grandma Switch to talk about spaghetti sauce anymore. We decided that we would instead call upon our other family tradition, the Christmas Day heads-up, no-prep drag race for pinks.
I hustled out whatever I could get to run. This time, my fearsome steed was a ‘70 Scamp with half of its grille missing, and the other half hole-sawed to make room for a 63-millimeter ball-bearing turbocharger that probably used to live on a Komatsu heavy excavator. Somewhere inside the engine bay was the world’s angriest four-cylinder engine, whose make and model I could no longer remember after having driven over the shattered crankshaft of so many on my way to a thirteen-second quarter mile and subsequent ejection from the venue because I couldn’t bother to even put in a chintzy bolt-in roll cage.
You might think that a stock ‘72 GMC pickup (horsepower: not much) does not have a snowball’s chance in Hell against the screaming ferocity of Chryco’s finest feature-lightened sedan for the impoverished. And you’d be right, especially after I had a friend slink over to his truck in the parking lot and cut two of the spark plug wires. Sure, my cousin’d blame the packrats in the yard, and maybe even his own lack of attention to the vehicle’s integrity, but ultimately the truck would stay within the family, ensconced within a protective radius of broken cars in my back forty. I was feeling pretty good about the whole thing, betraying a family member for a small monetary gain and all.
Friends: hubris has its cost. You might remember earlier that I mentioned this took place on Christmas Day. Well, it turns out that when you spin a little bit on ice, and rev the whatever-it-is engine to the moon as a result, all that spicy air from the turbocharger really wants to escape out the oilpan. On the plus side, the momentum from the horsepower generated up until that explosion, and the reduced friction from my 17-year-old all-seasons drinking up the oil cascading from the shattered wreckage of the engine, carried me at least an eighth of a mile to victory. At least until the violently misfiring truck passed me at a snail’s pace, slowly plodding its way to the end of the block.
My cousin even gave me a ride home after, which he went to special pains to point out was actually my gift for this year. Nothing like family.
Contracts. What even are they? A lawyer could tell you, but my lawyer just laughs at them and uses his desk-mounted cigar lighter – in the shape of a human skull, I’m pretty sure it’s not real, okay I’m not so sure anymore – to torch any attempt to get him or me to sign one. My attorney’s name is Max, and I met him once when he was doing some public-defender work, representing some unwashed maniac who jumped a mall fountain in a Baja Bug. Ever since then, we’ve been the best of friends.
Let me explain why: have you ever had a coworker who was a fan of extreme sports? They probably started out jumping out of an airplane, which was scary but fun. Then, it wasn’t enough. They started doing group jumps, elaborate stunts, nude skydives. Moved on to cliff diving, riskier and riskier shit. Max is like that, but for the law. He figures that all human law derives eventually from nature, and by bending every law to its maximum extent, he will finally be able to perceive the rhythms of an absent bureaucratic god.
This is exactly why he needs me. Max drives a very lushly appointed Saab 9-5, which is certainly some ridiculous pervert shit, but it still doesn’t put him in my league. Only someone as immersed into automotive culture – and specifically the dirtbaggiest niches of it imaginable – can even consider the creative ways in which I break parking, traffic, highway, and husbandry laws. Sometimes the responding officer has to take out his little notepad and scrawl out some diagrams to figure out just what it is I can be charged with. Sometimes his brow furrows, little beads of sweat appearing, and he climbs back into his cruiser and leaves. It’s those moments that Max is most excited about, as it represents the limitations of mortal man to understand just what specific category crime I am committing. Anything weaker, he usually gets me off of in a weekend of playing golf with the judge and charging me (with a discount) for his coke and strippers.
You could say that this is a perfect symbiotic relationship, but on the advice of my attorney, I would have to pretend I don’t understand what you’re saying. That’s an awful big word, and is the kind of thing that you should direct to my attorney. Ideally with a big bag of knowledge about the niche hobby that you are interested in, and specifically the corner cases that would get you on an FBI watchlist.
It’s sort of trite to complain about traffic. We all know that it’s bad: idiots going slow, maniacs going fast, yada yada yada. There’s a lot of schemes to make this traffic better. Adding lanes doesn’t work, because people will just get wider cars. Adding public transit doesn’t work, because it requires our governments to care about the general well-being of the public. And replacing all of our cars with independently-owned-and-operated taxi cabs doesn’t work, because now everyone drives like a taxi driver.
Here’s what I think is the answer: difficulty. If your commute is more difficult, maybe even dangerous, then you’ll stay home. Maybe get a job working remotely, controlling one of those war drones in a country whose name you can’t pronounce. Order your groceries in, delivered by wild-eyed psychopaths who scrape the highway-mounted FIA curbs with the undertray of their Ford Transit Connects on every apex.
Sure, the first week or so is gonna be worse than usual. Tow trucks will have a hard time keeping up with all the base-model crossovers and adversarial-package-equipped pickup trucks that are sliding off the road after they encounter a gentle right-hand turn at speed. After that’s done, and ideally after the insurance mafia threatens enough drivers into giving up their licenses, things should be clear sailing for anyone who’s taken an autocross course.
Making ordinary roads more challenging is, appropriately, not an easy task. There are millions of miles of streets in any given major city, and it costs a lot of money and time to figure out how to make “super wide, long high-speed road that has unprotected crosswalks on it” into “brutal series of suspension-punishing chicanes that challenge the mind and stamina.” In fact, it costs way more than just adding a train, which everyone could ride safely and calmly to their destination, ideally while doing sudoku or reading a novel about a woman who works at the zoo and hates giraffes. I’d read that novel, too, after I lose my license for failing to drive at a frankly reckless posted speed limit through a sweeping downhill corner with no streetlights and an 800-foot sharp dropoff on either side. Between you and me, I probably deserve it.
Sure, the newspaper calls them “eco-terrorists,” but that’s a bit of a self-interested position coming from something that is printed on trees. If anything, they should be thanking the weird gang of environmentalist guerrillas who come down every spring thaw from the mountains. They don’t really do violence, either, except against industrial equipment (that I later harvest the turbos from at the junkyard.) In fact, most of what they do is plant trees. Lots, and lots, and lots of trees.
You might not think that planting trees is very intimidating, and you’d be right. As the members explained to me one night at the bar, it’s all about where you plant them. A tree is impressive up top, sure, but if you pick the right breed of them, you’ll find that the roots are made of some truly boffo shit. Thick enough roots will split open the foundation and basement of, say, the offices of an oil and gas disinformation trust, and lead them to spend a bunch of their money on sump pumps and concrete pours instead of giving air cover to billionaires.
Normally, it takes decades, even centuries, for a tree to get big enough to cause this kind of damage. Turns out that up in those mountains, they’ve got themselves some kind of fucked-up bioengineering lab, making angrier, fiercer varieties of local trees. Ones that have a voracious appetite to spread and spread and spread, and which will eventually, if left unchecked, destroy all of human civilization. So naturally I was interested in making friends with them, in case they had any leftover vibratory tumblers, or ultrasonic cleaners, or two-stroke lawn equipment at this lab.
Unfortunately, the classic downfall of activism has struck me. Despite the fact that all of my vehicles are made up of recycled garbage, they produce enough smog, backfires, tire particles, and unburned gasoline clouds to qualify as a miniature Exxon Valdez. Once again, an unnecessarily rigorous purity test has denied this activist group a valuable ally. For instance, I could break down in front of the newspaper offices again, blocking their delivery trucks, which are diesels. And then I could steal the turbochargers out of those trucks.
There are really two kinds of people on this planet Earth: those who have to plan a lot before doing anything, and everyone else. Making elaborate plans, Gantt charts, and imagining people actually using the product works for many people to mentally order and minimize the risk of any given undertaking. For instance, NASA probably draws a little picture of a rocket on a whiteboard before they start building it. This is way too much rigour for me.
The way I look at it is: there’s no way to know what will happen to you until you actually do it. And once you’ve done it a couple times, you can fall back on your experience. That’s why I never look at the map before I head somewhere. Not only am I never sure how bad traffic will be, or how much damage my car’s internal-combustion engine will inflict upon itself, but I find myself enjoying the nooks, crannies, back-alleys, and gangland territories that I end up in by accident when trying to intuitively find my way to my destination. Sometimes I don’t get there at all, which is never something that’s in a set of plans, so why worry?
Of course, this sort of thing drives some people insane. For instance, my periodic codriver, MBA Mark, who demands that everything be colour-coded, sorted by difficulty, and contain as few surprises as possible. He wants to be like a cashier, booping every single item as it rolls down the conveyor belt in a beautiful mathematical process, reinforcing his ego at every step that he is in fact competent. Unfortunately for him, even cashiers have to deal with what they get in the order that they get. Sometimes a sugar bag has a rip in it, or one of the items on the belt is the wailing child of a mentally-addled parent. There’s no UPC on a toddler, so now what, Mark?
Thing is, we still need guys like Mark. For instance, he makes sure that he has bail money on hand before I get incarcerated. It’s much harder to go to an ATM when the Federales have put both of us in jail, and lawyers charge an enormous fee to go get it from the bail bondsman. So I’m glad he’s there, even though his ridiculous planning meetings are probably unnecessary before we do an oil change. We definitely don’t need to bring on a set of Wharton consultants to figure out if we know where the filter wrench is, dude.
When I tell folks that I spend a lot of time rescuing broken cars from farmer’s fields, the side of the road, and grisly murder sites, there’s a lot of questions that they ask. One of the most common is: aren’t you afraid of hantavirus?
This is a reasonable concern. Hantavirus, which is spread by mice, often happens when they’re peeing all over a broken car. And you can get really badly sick if you ingest a lot of this virus. And because Big Government and Big Brand New Car Sales are in cahoots, they don’t distribute a common vaccine for this to children in school, unlike other kinds of bad viruses, so immunity is low. As a result, folks are so scared of pulling a car full of mouse shit and piss out of a ditch that they’ll often just run to the car dealership and buy a new Toyota instead. Ridiculous!
I’m here to tell you that, with some adequate precautions, the dread spectre of hantavirus is not really a thing to worry about. For starters, I live in a barren, arctic hellscape, where the weather can easily dip to -40°C overnight. So if you’ve got a car that’s been sitting for a few decades, it’s already gone through a couple cycles of deep freeze and is filled with, at worst, melted mouse popsicles. The virus also breaks up when exposed to sunlight, which you can easily provide to the debris inside the vehicle by strapping the car to the back of your current, working, car and driving at the highest rate of speed possible down the highway. Sure, it’s going to be inconvenient for everyone behind you, driving through the massive opaque cloud of rodent debris, nesting material, and miscellaneous seat foam, but new cars have cabin air filters so I’m sure they’ll be fine.
All of us also have a ton of decent-quality respiratory-protection masks kicking around our homes, jacket pockets, cars, and sidewalks at the moment. Hell, you can probably afford to put two or three on at a time. That means it’s never been a better time to rescue badly-decrepit rat hotels from your nearby wheat field or storage yard. I’ll see you out there, unless I get there first, in which case you probably don’t want to drive behind me on the highway as I leave.
Look, I’m gonna be honest with you. We had a couple accidents with the sentient 3D printers here. Scientist thought they had the door locked, but you know how those things go. Ran right out, never could catch it in time.
Couple times a year, they swoop down and start remodelling all the buildings. I strongly recommend that if this happens, you get out of the building as fast as you can. You don’t wanna end up inside the foundation. That’s what happened to the old Mayor, which is why he’s not the old Mayor anymore but is still a big part of City Hall’s success.
City Hall, incidentally, now looks a lot like an infinitely expanding series of Sierpinski triangles, not very pretty if you ask me, but my wife, she says I have no taste in art and I shouldn’t criticize the first alien sentiences known to humanity. Fair enough, I said to her, and then we had to try and find parking downtown, which had also been converted mostly into a grid-based series of abstract geometric horrors. Never found my Camry after.
Run out of filament? Yeah, I guess that could happen, but I haven’t heard of anything like that yet. That’s probably because those same scientists made that plastic recycling machine, the “Junkyard Miracle,” big thing, size of a Plymouth Voyager, non-Grand wheelbase, that keeps tearing through our curbside recycling bins looking for anything to eat. Oh yeah, I should have mentioned that earlier. You do not wanna walk anywhere near that thing, especially if you are wearing nylon clothes or have a prosthetic leg.
Welcome to the town! I hope you don’t have any more questions, because I gotta get the fuck out of here before they change the streets again. Last week I couldn’t figure out how to drive across the bridge because it turned into a pulsating and, frankly, subtly erotic unicorn. You win some, you lose some, am I right?
Jail doesn’t have the latest and greatest shows. You might be surprised to find this out. Instead, there’s a network of pre-recorded, years-old garbage where some international entertainment crook is stacking paper as a result of their strategic acquisition of rights to movies that are so bad they won’t even be shown on airplanes anymore. A funnel of cash just drops directly into their lap, courtesy of people who are imprisoned being kinda bored.
It sure seems like a racket to me, and I don’t like it when there’s a racket around that I’m not making money from. That’s why Seat Safety Switch Penal Servitude Solutions has stepped up to the plate. We’ve gotten our hands on only the finest 1970s television for which the original rights holders have died or disappeared, and we license it for a cheap flat rate to your local for-profit detention centre. Sure, it’s still not current, but let’s be honest: at the rate Hollywood is going, they’ll be rebooting some of this stuff pretty soon anyway, and you can just squint at the set to make it sort of blurry and pretend it’s supposed to be HD.
We hope that the increased entertainment value of these classics will help you blow through the time you owe to society with a little more enjoyment. And hey, we haven’t forgotten about educational value. That’s right: we’ve also gotten ahold of billions of hours of instructional videos from YouTube, all of which have fewer than 100 views, so it’s not like they’re gonna find out. Prisoners will be able to learn thousands of new skills, which will help them lead a productive life when on the outside. Sure, we don’t actually know what’s in those videos – there are an awful lot of them – but we’re fairly confident that at least 1% of them have some educational value. Again, we pass the savings on to you.
So come on down to your local jail for a misdemeanour or even unpaid parking ticket and see what we’ve got cooking for entertainment. You might like it so much that you won’t want to leave! Just don’t get too stabby. Not all the prisons have signed on for our deal, and as anyone who’s been to either will tell you, jail is different from prison.
All the billionaires are trying to force us into spending eight hundred clams on a set of fancy glasses, so we can join our business meetings in virtual reality. Well, I’m here to tell you that virtual reality is a bunch of pencil-neck poppycock, and the most important thing you can spend that $800 on starts with “horsepower” and ends with “horsepower.” That’s right: horsepower beyond any reasonable amount that a person would consider to be safe horsepower.
Here’s where the billionaires are really missing out. If you own a regular normal-person car, chances are dropping a couple hundred bucks will improve the performance in some respect. Bigger turbo. Better tires. Those little beaded seat covers that taxi drivers have, those look really comfy, does anyone know where to buy them?
A rich person’s car, though, has already been tweaked and massaged by untold trillions of hours of engineering labour in the pursuit of absolute luxo-performance. They need something that’s better than the next rich guy’s car, and ideally better than the car they had before, which might be something like a Saturn V rocket or a Corvette that shoots ice cream out the tailpipe. That new exotic car is about as good as it’s gonna get, and a visit to eBay for speed parts is only going to make it worse. I think this is why a lot of them become disaffected, and start lashing out at the common man by influencing elections and trying to blow up the Daily Planet offices.
And strapping on all that power largely benefits small businesses, too. They’re the only ones stupid enough to risk their livelihood and mortgage payments on developing an elaborate turbocharger kit for a Mazda 3, only to turn around and tell you (wink wink) that it’s not for street use and if anyone ever suspects it’s for street use the EPA is going to come kill them. That’s how you know they’re small businesses: a billionaire would just buy the EPA. And then it would probably cost more than $800 to make it go fast.
Recently, my fridge started beeping at me. This was because I had left the door open, and it was being friendly and reminding me to close that door, or it wouldn’t work properly anymore. Now, this sort of friendliness is surprising to me, not least because the house I’m squatting in after my landlord’s unfortunate (and I assure you, accidental) high-speed public dismemberment does not currently have electrical service.
Or so I thought. It seemed that, while I was sleeping, some greenwashers had arrived and retrofitted some government-subsidized solar panels into the house. With a zeal only witnessed in those unlucky workers who are getting paid by the job, they plowed through the pile of broken car parts and miscellaneous electronic trash in the basement to hook up the panel and drop off a massive battery. As a result, my house was now officially “off the grid.”
Now, in my municipality, it’s illegal to be off the grid. Even if you make electricity purely from the power of the sun or your own man-portable nuclear reactor, you have to at least vig up to the local power company between fifty and two hundred dollars a month. It seemed that I had located a loophole in their rules, however, and now could enjoy opulent comfort such as “refrigerated food” and “lights” without any guilt or cost out of my pocket.
A true dream, and it was all thanks to some computer system, deep within the bureaucracy, that hadn’t yet figured out my landlord is no longer of this earth and that the home should rightly have been condemned. Of course, those proud city workers had missed me during their “random inspections,” because my sleeping position is so covered in trash as to serve a sort of suburban camouflage. They might have left with some of my cars, it is impossible to tell, but that’s a small price to pay for unlimited guilt-free electricity use.
Of course, it was not to last. As soon as the power came back on, prowling gangs of realtors began to notice that the house was inhabitable again, and aggressively approached in order to make offers for the land value. I couldn’t exactly fend them off, not without exiting the house and giving away my squatter-status, so instead I just turned off all the lights and hid in the darkness. It’s not so bad. Now I can finally charge my phone without having to sneak down to the convenience store and unplug their coffee maker when they’re not looking.
While I’m no materials scientist, and in fact the materials scientist association sent a guy to trick me into the basement and then wall up a corner while I was unconscious, I do know that I’m not a fan of aluminum. Yeah, it’s light-weight. So what? Weight doesn’t matter if you simply add more horsepower, geniuses. And one of the best ways to add that horsepower is an old-fashioned, tough-as-nails, iron block engine.
Back when our civilization was still capable of making things, we made all of our engines out of good ol’ iron. This was because, being a people of action, we didn’t want to spend a lot of time thinking about how to turbocharge things. So it was best to make engines as tough as possible, so they could deal with little things like leaned-out fuel mixtures exploding prematurely, and exhaust valves dropping out of the head and turning into plasma torches.
The fact that almost no consumer cars of the period were actually turbocharged, because of the lack of access to precision-machined aluminum turbocharger components, is irrelevant to my line of argument. They’re here now, and eBay is here now, and it turns out that my quarter mile time is dropping hard even with wastegate pressure and a fuel pump out of a bulldozer. That’s all thanks to the classic iron block domestic engine, which is strong enough that I don’t have to understand the reasons why adding four hundred additional horsepower to a fifty year old slant-six is a bad idea.
And this whole strategy took us to the moon. That is, unless you’re the kind of person who pays a lot of attention to facts, in which case you’ll argue that the buggy stuck up there is not turbocharged or even internal-combustion in the first place, and you might want to take the rest of this entry off.
Nowadays, everything is designed with computers and made out of futuristic aluminum alloys. It’s lightweight, and efficient, and reliable, and you can get heat in the cabin without having to put a piece of cardboard over your radiator and let the thing warm up for six hours every morning. When you buy a new car, all the parts actually fit together without having to use a die grinder. And they make way more horsepower off the dealership lot than some dumbass with an old Mopar and an AliExpress turbo kit. Oh, and it doesn’t rust nearly as badly.
Come to think of it, if anyone needs me, I’ll be off looking for one of those aluminum slant sixes at the junkyard. They didn’t sell a whole lot of them, because all those primitive dumbasses refused to even understand the basics of safe and effective turbocharging.
You may not be surprised to hear that I carry a big torch for the Mazda RX-7. Pretty much every car person in your life does – and if they don’t, they might actually be a pod person and you simply misheard. Better double-check, just to be on the safe side.
The reason why the RX-7 is such a desirable automobile comes down to two things: a comfortable yet still well-balanced chassis, and the incredibly loud sounds that its combination of spinning Doritos from Hell can manufacture on demand. See, piston cars are held back by the laws of physics and common decency. They can’t rev up and rev down as fast as the human brain can work, so often you’ll be stuck staring at your tachometer, wondering when it will ever get to where you want it to be. Not so with a rotary – you tap that gas pedal, and it emits a pleasing BRAP noise.
Of course, there are downsides. Since rotary engines are basically a perfectly good jet engine that someone at Mazda fucked up, they consume fuel at approximately the same rate as pouring it from a bucket directly into a campfire. And they don’t make a ton of power, because their swept area is forced to be small by those aforementioned pesky laws of physics. Luckily for all of us, turbochargers came along to solve the second problem, and make the first problem much, much worse.
Turbochargers are a simple concept. Exhaust gas is hot, especially when it comes out of the nightmare machine that is a rotary engine, and it would be nice to reuse some of that hot – that we would otherwise just throw away – in order to make the car go faster. You can tell yourself that it’s recycled exhaust, if it makes you feel better about your environmental credentials. The other thing that will bolster your green reputation is the fact that you’ll walk more places, because doing a short-haul trip with a rotary is an invitation to coked-up-seal city. Maybe the grocery store in the next town over has fresher eggs. I better go check. And hey, I bet there’s a fun road on the way there.
No matter where you live, I’m positive that you have some piece of local infrastructure or public art that people hate. For us, it’s a pedestrian bridge. Even though the bridge satisfies the essential human activity of “being able to walk across the river to get to the other side,” the criticism is that it’s too expensive, and kind of dumb-looking, too.
Personally, I hate to agree with these kind of reactionary simpletons, so I won’t. Instead, I’ll say that the bridge is grotesquely ugly, but it is a bona fide deal. Let me explain why.
Have you ever tried to build a bridge? I don’t mean like some popsicle-sticks-and-Plasticine bullshit in junior high school. A real bridge, that people walk across without worrying for their safety. I sure haven’t, and not least because my welding looks like some kind of robotic seagull took a massive shit over a roaring oil fire off the coast of a rusty steel beach. I know that I don’t have the experience, I don’t have the education, and so I just won’t bother to build it.
Plus, I can’t swim very well (with all those heavy flecks of grinder steel stuck in me) which means if I fuck up and fall into the river while I’m building it, someone is gonna need to call the fire department. And they’ll laugh at me. The resulting embarrassment will cause me to abandon the project, and spend the rest of the day trying to eat a Dairy Queen banana split while crying in the corner of my garage.
All this is to say that if you trusted me to build a bridge, it would look bad, probably fall down, and take several months until I had calmed down enough to finish it. That translates into big costs, even if I’m bad at negotiating my rate, and big insurance costs when someone falls in and sues the city for leaving a bunch of jagged steel and leftover grinder discs underneath the half-completed, rusty bridge.
The next time you’re out and about and see some public infrastructure that you could build better by yourself, take a shot at it. If you’re successful, let me know so I can try it out, too. I don’t know what a gondola is made out of, but I’ve got a bunch of old rope in my backyard – it can’t be that hard to build.
Look, if you haven’t been hoarding piles of junk for our coming apocalypse, I don’t know what to tell you. Bad times are coming, and in those bad times, you’re going to want to have traded your “minimalist” lifestyle, with its “hygienic” cleaning routine, for a bunch of junk too. And you should have probably started a couple years ago, because boy is shipping ever screwed up now.
In the next couple of years, whatever weird asshole is going to be able to cobble together a working home computer from a set of old Christmas tree lights is going to be top of the heap. Everything is sort of falling apart right now, and our old lifestyle of “buy a new one” or even “buy the correct part” is slowly grinding to a halt. I do admit that it is very convenient for me. This very specific apocalypse, in which a hoarder idiot like myself will become akin to a living god.
Trust me that I’m pretty angry at everyone for having made this particular slow-motion Ragnarok come to pass, because to be honest I was perfectly happy scavenging trash from our land of plenty and its firehose of waste. I didn’t have to worry too much about ordering eight thousand of something, because I knew that the Chinese salvage yard would just get another two million the next day from all the stuff you regular folks are throwing out. Now, my hoard is precious. Everything became valuable through no fault of my own. It’s no longer fun to stick an o-ring in a weird jokey project, because in the back of my mind I’m thinking: I might need this o-ring for a homemade desalination plant in sixteen to twenty months.
There is hope, though. I figure if I can get to China before they forget how to make replacement parts for airplanes, I can just move in next to one of the big junkyards. Without the demands of international shipping, it will take them longer to draw down on their scrap supplies, and they wouldn’t begrudge their weird next door neighbour a few “engineering samples” that happen to go missing whenever I visit for a cup of tea.
When I was growing up, the house down the street had an infestation of bats. The town was asked to do something about it, but thankfully didn’t bother finishing the job. These bats were totally harmless. While I will admit that there was an unfounded fear of rabies, this was basically due to anti-bat racism on the part of a real estate developer. Said developer saw a convenient excuse to knock down the place and start gentrifying our neighbourhood. Profits, not people, he probably said before most of him disappeared out in the woods.
Of course, when I put it like that, it’s going to sound suspicious. Surely, the owner of the bat-infested house must have had him murdered. This is a salacious lie, and it’s one that his widow tried to spread at the town council meetings. It’s also preposterous: according to the chief of police, the dude got eaten by bears when his car broke down on the highway and he chose to walk home through the forest during peak “hungry bear season.”
This in itself is a little suspicious, because the guy who owned the bat-infested house was named Robert Bear. Upon further investigation, however, it was determined that he was not related to any actual bears (the animal.) No, his unique surname came from having a great-great-great grandfather who once fought a bear (the animal) in his home country, whose name is unpronounceable (both the animal’s, because it is unknown to history, and the country’s.) Robert felt bad about the whole thing, but it did conveniently produce a lack of witnesses against him for the bylaw proceeding. And so the bats got to stay.
Really, the only unanswered question is why the real estate dude’s car broke down in the first place. I was also curious about this, which is why I formed a team of teenage detectives to investigate the situation, and – if necessary – to confront our inner demons and use them to kill God. Ultimately, we determined that it was a shitty old Mercedes, and the fuel pump seized up. Carlita, our science expert, figured out that several gallons of bat guano poured into the tank was the cause of the failure, an intriguing coincidence.
We confronted Robert about it, and he congratulated us on our diligent scientific research, and gave us each five hundred bucks in “scholarship money” from a Hefty bag of cash that he had lying in the basement, next to a jerry can and funnel. At this point, like all good detectives, we agreed that we had solved the mystery and decided to never speak of it again.
Last weekend, I was down at the bird sanctuary. Don’t worry, it’s not what you’re thinking. All of the solvents I’ve been inadvertently/semi-vertently huffing are not getting to me. What happened is the legend of a barn find. Or, to be more specific, a flood find.
Here’s how it started. A couple weeks before this, Twitchy Eddie (not his real name) came by my driveway while I was working. He said, with great excitement, that a real-ass AMC Eagle washed up on the sandbar inside the bird sanctuary. I scoffed, and began to jokingly interrogate him about why he was there. His dealer likes to go there, he explained, and the cops don’t. That was enough for me, and an Expeditionary Force was formed on the spot.
Of course, it took a couple weeks to get the aforementioned expeditionary force coordinated. Schedules, and all that. Parole officers, children, competitive public transit driving events, you know the usual excuses. It was a miracle at all that we managed to get enough folks together to assail the emplacement of the avians. Questionable Julie (her real name) drove her van, which she likes to jokingly refer to as the “Mystery Machine.” It contained no mysteries at all: rat-chewed wiring, torn-up carpet, and a dead packrat in the blower motor. I gave it a 8/10 and offered her an insultingly low amount of money if she ever wanted to sell it. What were we talking about? Right, the Eagle.
All of us had done barn and swamp and farm and junkyard rescues before, sure, but “river sandbar” was a new one for us. So we recruited a new guy, Phil, who claimed to have a boat. He was vouched for by Eddie, and – although he has been known to be a poor judge of men in the past – that was good enough for us. Perhaps we all had American Motor Corporation logos in our eyes, and couldn’t see what was happening.
Friends, when we got there, the Eagle was long gone. Phil had taken the info, hooked up in the middle of the night, and took off. The reason we knew this is because his boat was not capable of keeping a 3,400-pound (less with rust) station wagon above the waterline, and the whole mess sank in the river about eight feet away from the sandbar Eddie had spotted. This was discouraging, but we resolved to return when the fire department lowered the water level in order to do the annual dredging for corpses.
However, it wasn’t all bad news. The maybe-rental plasma cutter we brought along did a great job of cutting Phil’s high-zoot Penta outboard loose from the taco-shaped wreckage of his boat. We also had a really nice afternoon looking at sandhill cranes and reading all the little placards about our feathered friends. It was my job to bring the picnic sandwiches, too, and I made sure ahead of time that everyone was good with pastrami on rye. Let’s just say it’s a good thing Julie’s van has lots of holes in the floor and seats.
“A minute on the lips, a lifetime on the hips,” my high school ballet teacher Miss Pirouette would sneer whenever she saw me with my usual lunch (four uncooked potatoes and half a jar of mayonnaise.) If this theory was true, and I had no reason to doubt a reclusive spinster who would later get arrested at the airport carrying a violin case full of Russian research chemicals, then automakers have certainly been putting a lot of things on their cars’ lips recently.
There’s a lot of reasons why cars are getting wider. The engineering answer is that a wider chassis provides a car with more stability, and more room to shove parts. The safety answer is that you need to provide more room for the metal to get all crunched up when you drive the front-left corner of the car into someone else’s front-left corner, because both of you are nearly sixteen meters away from the drivers’ side mirror. And the marketing answer is that people like a car with a big fat ass. Some part of our primate brain really loves wide-body race cars, and also having a deep enough storage pocket in the door to insert one (1) Subway party sub and completely forget it was ever there five seconds later.
This trend gives no sign of stopping any time soon. After all, there’s still some unused room inside highway lanes that they can take up. Unfortunately, parking spots haven’t grown in decades to match. This is because small business landlords are concerned about the difference in revenue between being able to accommodate only 240 cars, rather than the 325 that they need in order to keep their suburban strip mall in the black. In the 90s, some General Motors engineers were arrested after they were a little bit too loud scraping the paint off and redrawing the lines outside the local mall, so now everyone just parks in two spots. It’s the price you pay for stability.
So, once/if Miss Pirouette gets out of prison, she can go right back to driving her spindly Talbot Horizon to work. If she gets a little tired of driving, she can pull into the wheel well of a passing BMW luxury barge and just ride on the inside of the wheel the rest of the way there.
The Chevrolet S-10 is the spine that keeps this country together. Even though it’s been out of production for decades, you’ll still see little shit-box S-10s working hard in every community. My neighbourhood has a handful dedicated to lawn service, but you might witness scrap theft, meth dealing, or even daily driving. When it comes time to do actual work, these trucks show up more often than you’d think.
And why shouldn’t they? This humble workhorse of a vehicle runs forever, on virtually no maintenance. In fact, maintaining them probably makes them die faster, on account of developing an emotional attachment and all. They thrive on contempt. Contempt, and finding out just how good the absolute cheapest oil at Walmart actually is. It’s probably better than whatever was around when this truck was new, because of NASA or something!
Ultimately, the problem with all this is that the trucks cost a little bit more than you’d expect. Big trucks, you can get them cheaper than these little guys, and often in much newer model years. They don’t last as long without a wheezy cockroach of an engine, of course, and there’s an unseemly try-hard-ness to them that this plucky little can-doer doesn’t share. That authenticity means you’re spending a lot more money than you’d think is totally appropriate, especially if you’re like me and consider “dollars per horsepower” to be the ultimate form of vehicle comparison.
Another problem is that, again, the trucks are too reliable. Our society depends on daily-driving overcomplicated luxury pickups that break down all the time. Otherwise, your local dealership will be required to take a slightly smaller profit than they would otherwise. The S-10 thumbs its metaphorical nose at these parasites as it rolls past, its half-century-old rectangular sealed beams fogging slightly when encountering the additional humidity of their tears.
Of course, this is what caused our society to collapse. As vehicles like the S-10 and Ranger continued to operate fine without constant, expensive surgery, new car sales plummeted. Thankfully, the theory of “truckle-down economics” arrived, giving us a bunch of shitty trucks with leather that need us to pay blood money to the parts desk every so often. And through this, our way of life continues, unexamined and uncorrected.
I’ve come to realize that it doesn’t matter what hobby you have. Every single one involves a lot of cleaning. Car folks need to clean out sticky EGR valves and thousands of kilometres of accumulated road gunk, of course. Computer folks have exploding batteries and chain-smoking office-worker tar deposits to wipe off. Camera people are constantly cleaning everything they own, lest a mote of dust writes off $18K of equipment. Even if I’m not sure what it is that you do in your spare time, I’m willing to bet you’re spending more of it than you like cleaning things.
This is why there is the tantalizing promise of shortcuts to all this mind-numbing, boring scrubbing. Get-clean-quick schemes, if you will. I can sit for hours and name things I’ve bought that didn’t work well enough: steam cleaners, pressure washers, parts washers, turpentine, a gallon of rancid gasoline stolen from the Pick-Your-Part’s “Special Reserve.” No difference depending on how much money I forked over. No results, even if I bought wholesale into the cult forming around the device or technique. No replacement for good old fashioned elbow grease. Or so I thought.
It turns out that our communities are full of disadvantaged kids who need a leg up in life. You may think that offering an unpaid internship is only a way for big, fat-cat capitalists to exploit a group of eager-but-naive youngsters into doing their dirty work for free. I’m here to tell you that it’s also a way for small-time losers, like you and me, to get free labour. All you have to do is come up with some paper-thin veneer of educative power: grease analysis is great for chemistry. They’ll learn electronics from all the things they have to clean up. They’ll learn composition from testing out the camera after disassembling it into 2.4 million components and then reassembling it without a factory service manual. Hell, if you push that last bit hard enough, the parents may pay you to tutor their kid in whatever it is that you do. Might have put on a t-shirt without holes for that last one, though, and invent some new words like “supra-positional” and “STEM.”
Here’s the best part: keener teens clean themselves. You can work them as hard as you want, all day long, and when they’re done they’ll go make their parents’ shower into a Superfund site. That’s one less angry government agency that you have to deal with today, and ideally the kids will take a bunch of your grit home with them, leaving you with more room to bring home more filthy garbage.
When you’re used to geometry, it’s hard to be surprised. 2D? Square. 3D? Cube. 4D? Hypercube. That last one really screws with people for some reason. They just can’t conceptualize the concept of a cube that’s got more dimensions than usual. Of course, in the fourth dimension, they would think our cubes are kinda shrimpy and boring, so it’s really all about perspective.
Another thing that’s all about perspective is staying in your lane on the highway. All the automakers have been touting their lane-following features for years. Their idea is that, hey, people get a little sloppy with their steering sometimes. Maybe they’re sleepy, or drunk, or watching Matlock on their phones and pumping their fists whenever Matlock gets an execution kill. So the robot, the ever-present guardian angel burned into the silicon, gives the driver an annoying beep every time they wander out of their lane.
Purists – driving enthusiasts – scoff at this. You shouldn’t be driving a car if you’re not gonna pay attention to it, they explain. I think the reason for this behaviour is that cars are simply too good. In the 1970s, tires sucked so bad that even going down a slightly muddy road with a meagre hundred-and-twenty horsepower would cause heroic Dukes of Hazzard fishtail episodes. In the 1980s, you had to pay ramrod-close attention to your fuel gauge or you’d have to spend the rest of your night waiting in line for the thimble-full of gasoline they could squeeze out of a Nicaraguan hostage. In the 1990s, you had to keep adjusting your enormous shirt so that it didn’t trap your legs and cause you to stop accelerating.
Me, I never get distracted from the driving. That’s because my vehicles are in such shit condition that just keeping them on the road requires all of my attention, and often prayer. You’ve got the front end: steering components that are either completely worn out, or have been crudely substituted with some other car’s turbo-cheap imitation part. You’ve got the back end: a failure-prone differential that hasn’t stopped screaming since the Carter administration, plus a cracked axle or two. And in between them you’ve got torn unibody parts, a driver’s seat held in with paracord, and a headliner that keeps flopping down into my field of vision. Is it night time? There are additional difficulties, because one of my headlights is a Coleman lantern from 1981. Yes, the naphtha ones. Things get really exciting when I have to replace the little sock at highway speeds, let me tell you that much.
So take it from me. Distracted driving sucks, and you should pay attention to the road at all times. Because one of these days, this upper balljoint is going to fail, and I will need your side of the road for a couple minutes. You better be ready for me.
It’s crazy how fast a rumour can spread. One morning, you’re in prison, spreading a rumour about yourself to your friends. Then, just a few short years later, that rumour is repeated as if it were gospel truth. The new guy at the Pick Your Part is afraid of you, purely by reputation. This is all from the power of sharing information in groups: the true power of humanity.
There are those who would dare to restrict the explosive growth of this power, who would curb your rhetoric from gaining such legendary status that it allows you to walk out of the junkyard, carrying a starter battery, without paying for it. While major politicians may be the only ones unlucky enough to be dogged by so-called “fact-checkers” who hand out tut-tuts and scolds for genocide-level mistruths, anyone who casually dips their toe into the fetid waters of professional-grade lying will be called out from time to time. How do you respond to those who demand that you actually provide evidence for your claims?
One way to defuse this threat is through violence. This has been the historic method of humanity up until this point. Get a big enough mob, say what you want, stomp on anyone who disagrees. This is not your writer’s stance. For one thing, the integrity of my knees is not up to the task of stomping on a drinking glass at a Jewish wedding, let alone an angry hater. And my crowd of weirdos is less violent than they are “looking for a really good deal on car parts.” For me, I have to rely to the second method: a greater quantity of, and more complex, lies.
All I have to do is just come up with more bullshit, and soon the original bullshit will seem small and trivial by comparison. How is it that I drove a Detroit Diesel-powered Corvette when it is completely impossible that a 4-53 will fit inside the engine bay? Well, that’s because I had cut and extended the Corvette in an almost comical fashion, using old stolen cruise-ship parts as a frame. That makes no fucking sense, how did you weld structural steel from a cruise ship onto the space frame of a C3 Corvette? Well, you see, my cousin, the former Shah of Iran, has given to me a magic welder capable of spraying flimsy, birdshit welds with crappy penetration onto any two pieces of metal that I want to present to it. So how did it hold up a super-heavy Detroit Diesel engine?
As you can see, I have a particularly devoted opponent in this simulation. At this point in reality, I would throw a smoke bomb and escape. These smoke bombs are easy to get, available at any local ninja supply store, but in a pinch you can also make them out of discarded vape batteries and a tincture of Seafoam. In my next lecture, we’ll be covering the importance of making a false lining for your junkyard bag, so that you can hide bolts and relays inside it without the checkout cashier noticing.
You may have been visited recently by a religious cultist. They knock on your door, brandishing pamphlets about their wacko, out-there beliefs. They wear special clothes, which look unusual, raising your suspicion if you are smart enough to look out of the peephole before opening that door. And they have all of their favourite cult catchphrases, which they like to drip into perfectly ordinary everyday conversation. “It’s a Jeep thing,” they cackle. “You wouldn’t understand.”
Now, I have nothing against the Jeepists. In fact, many of my good friends have owned Jeeps of widely varying quality (even when new.) There’s just something about that whole group which our society has programmed us to find appealing. Head out into the wilderness with a utilitarian shitbox, trimmed to the essentials, but maybe modified a little bit with several dozen paycheques’ worth of military-grade mud-molesting? Yeah, you could paint a picture of that and put it on the flag.
Where things break down for me is having to spend money on said shitbox. Because everyone has been buying cheap ones to turn into six-figure off-road demons, original Jeeps are fairly hard to come by. They’re devoured instantly when they pop up on the market. Modified ones? You and I both know that owners of a heavily-modified car are insistent upon getting every cent of their mods back out of it, until the vehicle is finally repossessed and stripped for parts by those lucky assholes who work at the buy-here-pay-here lots.
Of course, there are niche ones, forgotten by time and cast into a shitty corner of the world. These make cheap ones, at least once you pull them out of a bog and weld half of a Home Depot onto them, but finding those requires constant vigilance, and a neurotic attention to the smallest difference in a build sheet. And getting that knowledge requires you to have owned several dozen bad and expensive Jeeps, hence the whole cult thing. Folks will throw their entire lives and financial futures down the toilet over the course of forty years just so they can bring home the crown jewel of their collection: a $250 postal Jeep that has no wheels, body panels, or drivetrain.
All this is to say: I’m open to conversion. It’s just gonna cost you assholes a rolling CJ7 tub.
Couple of years ago, I worked in a chicken restaurant. It wasn’t a fast-food restaurant, more like a family eatery. Not very classy, though. Sure, they had the normal accoutrements, and the tables looked like they were made out of actual wood. People brought their kids there, and then they ate some chicken. Peaceful. Normal. And then it happened.
When you work in a food-service environment, even the most professional and upstanding ones, there is a hierarchy. France figured this out first, by using a bunch of soldiers to tell everyone to make croissants at gunpoint. The head chef is God, and if he or she so demands it, you will walk into Hell Itself, find a little stool, and start peeling an entire sack of potatoes there. Maybe you’ll cry in the walk-in freezer a little bit. I digress.
I only lasted at that job for like one week, because I didn’t know the difference between “sour cream” and “creme fraiche.” This is mostly because my high-school French teacher was an alcoholic who listened to books-on-tape in order to learn French herself, and accidentally bought a Spanish tape one month before the final exam. As you can imagine, that became a problem when labouring under the French battalion system in the kitchen. Disgraced, I was ejected into the cold, Anglo world outside.
In order to prepare for my next job, I went to the grocery store and started reading every cereal box I could find. Soon, I was hooked. Pictures of Mustangs left my bedroom wall, and in their place went indecipherable drawings of Citroens, whose drivers were cartoonish waifs, waving cigarette holders together. Things got so bad that my parents called for an intervention, which at the time consisted of hiring a priest to pretend to perform an exorcism and ask for five hundred bucks on the backend. I awoke a couple days later, my pants around my ankles, having vomited out most of the contents of my stomach (Pillsbury instant croissants, Orangina, the keys to a Renault 8 Gordini which I did not own.)
Now, I tour high schools, telling other kids to stay away from the restaurant industry, and more importantly, French shit in general. Stick with the things we know and love, I implore them: Japanese cars, ideally not ones made by Nissan. If it’s got lots of revs, that’s what you need to buy.
Drones! While you were sleeping, these remote-controlled novelties have turned into industrial-grade weapons of war. Flying far overhead, well out of range of reprisal or even detection, these model airplanes rain hellfire upon man and beast alike. Only one thing can stop them: poor build quality.
If you pay a lot of attention to the news, stop it. Stop it right now. If you periodically gaze with disdain towards a television in a bar while you’re arguing in the parking lot with your friends out front about whether it’s safe to open the radiator cap yet, you probably saw that some advertising-industry greedheads are up to some shit again. They want to make a bunch of drones with pretty lights hot-glued to them do some advertising. The idea? They’ll hover overhead and tell you about chocolate, or the infinite beauty of life, or a new Kia or something. Terrible in so many ways: chief among them, a terrible waste of parts.
Those folks who think the same as I do are salivating. They see it too. This haze of high-zoot technology, hovering overhead. If a couple of them were to drop out of formation, directly into your bag, it wouldn’t be blamed on sabotage. No, the advertising assholes would just blame it on “computers” or “Microsoft Outlook” or even the abstract concept of an uncaring and absent God. That’s why I decided to make my own anti-drone weapon.
It turns out that “anti-drone weapon” and “malfunctioning crystal radio” are basically the same thing, so all I had to do was fish through the couple of boxes left over from junior high school electronics class. Naturally, I had to beef it up with a couple of Coke-can sized capacitors, and a string of delaminating, fire-hazard-prone LED twinkle lights from a Christmas tree. The idea here is that you point this ridiculous contraption at a drone you wish to capture, and then nobody has good wifi reception for a period of time ranging from 13 milliseconds to forever. In the meantime, though, the plastic toy filled with whirling blades will fall helplessly out of the sky and into your waiting arms. Along with probably two or three dozen others around it. I haven’t really done the calibration yet, and to be honest testing is very boring.
Sure, there’s always the risk of collateral damage. Some folks could get hit by the falling Cuisinarts, and maybe even hurt quite badly. The ad scums wouldn’t be sending these drones to advertise in places that people aren’t currently occupying. That’s why the insurance companies exist, which means we’re only going to get one shot at this before they shut the whole thing down. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be spraypainting this whole contraption flat black, so the cops just think it’s a regular gun for shooting people with.
Every time there’s a failure of local government to spend adequately on infrastructure spending, Big Media always makes it about the bridges. I am sick and tired of hearing about bridges! How often do you drive over one, anyway? The odds of you plummeting into the abyss are pretty low. What I want them to focus their road-spending dollars on is better corners.
I’m not talking safer corners. No, I want them to be a little riskier, with sketchy blind spots and ditches that will launch you into oblivion if you dare to dip even a portion of your wheel off the edge. I want a non-stop, heart-pounding thrill ride that would make a professional rally racer shit their pants in fear at making the commute anywhere close to the speed limit. And I’d like the government to pay for all of that.
They can start to pay for it by getting rid of the bridges. Let’s review: bridges are usually a way to get over a river or whatever the “short way.” Why bother taking the short way? Let’s follow the curve of the river as dangerously as we can. Sooner or later, it’s going to thin out a little or go naturally inside a mountain or some shit, and then we can cross over to the other side. In the meantime, we’ve spent the last six hours gunning it through treacherous mountain roads, one guardrail away from disaster. And ideally there are also some nice roadside taco stands if we get hungry or sleepy. I’m not saying the government should provide those (although I wouldn’t say no;) free enterprise will take care of the whole thing once the demand is established.
Why do I hate bridges so much? Simple: bridges are usually straight. They’re boring. You can see from one end to the other, unless it’s dangerously foggy out, and by then the road is usually too slick to be doing any serious speeding anyway. The Dukes of Hazzard had it right: when the bridges go out, just jump ‘em. Paying all that money for that big SUV was done for a reason.
A lot of folks think that motorcycling is, at best, a reckless waste of gasoline. You’ll be run over by me, they explain patiently, as they demonstrate the immense girth and bad sightlines of their tank-like daily driver. And you can’t go to the Costco and bring back an entire man-sized bag of popcorn, which you wouldn’t want anyway because eating it will add weight. You’ll need to keep the weight off in case you accidentally befriend the manager of a professional bike racing team and get called up to the front lines the next day.
If you do make it big in motorcycles, you’ll probably eventually visit the Isle of Man. True to its name, this is an island where men live, but also women, and chances are there are some residents of a more analogue gender as well, living in harmony. The reason why they are all living in harmony is because the Isle of Man has no speed limits (at least not on the fun parts.)
Unlike the Germans, who did not put speed limits on stretches of perfectly manicured highway and then grudgingly reintroduced them when a Volvo smeared itself across 17 kilometers of said highway, the good folks of the Isle have mostly not bowed to governmental pressure to reintroduce the fascist number signs. They have a very good reason not to speed excessively: it’ll kill the fuck out of them. Craggy cliffs, massive dropoffs into the sea, tight right-handers, awkward hedges. It’s got it all, and when professional motorcycle racers turn out for the Manx TT, they’ll be finding out exactly how fast a human being can go, lest they plow into someone’s front lawn at 230km/h while trying to navigate a section of road just slightly wider than your front door.
And like those brave riders, I hope one day to turn up and test my own daring and skills. What I have here is a Puch Maxi D, and I am pretty sure that it can do like a good 50 km/h facing downhill with a tailwind. Harrowing stuff. I’ll be rubbing shoulders with Ian Hutchinson in no time, except not literally because both of us will not fit side-by-side on most of the roads.
There’s a sort of joy in the humble airplane movie. I almost always come away from a flight entertained by the on-board film. You don’t really pick it: it comes to you, chosen by someone out there. If you’re lucky, you get a small selection, each of which is not so enjoyable as to drive the interest (and asking price) up. Nobody gets on a plane just so they can see a movie.
I suspect most other people, terrified at the concept of being trapped in a flying tube, watch old favourite movies. Not me: I want to explore the depth and breadth of also-ran cinema. I’m a willing victim of some international rights-grubber, probably living on a beautiful island with better chest hair than me, who wanted to make sure I got a second chance at seeing a movie which finished at best 15th on its opening weekend.
If I had an unlimited selection of movies, then I would probably just watch the Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift on endless repeat. And then I’d jostle the drink of the guy next to me as I try to replicate the cool power-sliding moves. And then I’d have to talk to that guy. And then we’d strike up a lifelong friendship over our mutual respect for series favourite Han (played by Sung Kang) and I’d have to help him change his winter tires once in awhile.
It’s like when you visit an extended family member’s house, and they serve you some below-average snacks. Only a total dickhead would complain. They’re still snacks, and you didn’t have to pick them. The responsibility for your own entertainment has been alleviated by a conjunction of business interests, and you can just rest your head and watch a movie that you otherwise would never willingly choose. Hey, what’s this one about? An unimaginable human tragedy? Sign me the fuck up. It’s no powersliding and neon underglow, but it’ll take my mind off the fact that I’m not allowed to drive the plane for two hours.
You might be surprised when you visit your local video-game emporium and find that it has, in fact, disappeared. For decades now, the humble arcade has been on the decline, chased into non-existence by the twin threats of the miracle depression slabs we carry in our pocket, and home console videogames. There is hope, though. Mini golf has survived and even thrived, and with it the arcade videogames that were lucky enough to attach, barnacle-like, to your local miniature golf emporium.
Now, I’m banned from the nearest mini golf place. And the second nearest. Third nearest is dicey, it depends if Cazacu is working there that day or not because the new girl doesn’t know my face yet, and the surveillance camera pictures in their breakroom are blurry. This is not just because of my terrible sportsmanship when it comes to fibreglass-clown-face-putting, but because of my absolute ferocity at arcade fighting games.
While you, a regular human being off the street, with a job and loved ones, may be unaware of any technique above “button mash,” I have amassed an array of secret moves that are, and I say this without ego, unstoppable. You may wonder why I don’t go to the big fighting-game competitions, if I am so good. The answer is simple: this ferocity, the dragon-like power, only emerges from my spirit in the presence of a mini-golf windmill. And the fighting game convention happens all the way up at the convention centre downtown, where the besuited bigwigs would never stand for such adorable clutter.
So step right up. Try your best. Just don’t come by on Tuesdays through Thursdays, and not on the weekends, either, because that’s when the aforementioned Cazacu works and I won’t be able to show you my dragon strength in the face of a guy who once tried to bend a putter around my neck for driving a golf cart (I brought it from home) onto the 17th hole.
Gas is more expensive than ever, and consuming a lot of it just means that you’re forking over your hard-earned paycheque to a coterie of evil greedheads. Instead, follow these simple tips to drive more efficiently, and you’ll put everyone around you at risk in order to shave cents off of your weekly commute bill. Or: you could quit your job and not have to commute at all. Just saying.
Braking. The biggest way that people use too much fuel is to unnecessarily accelerate hard, and then lose all of the energy in the gasoline they just burned by braking too much. Here’s how you solve this: move to the top of a very steep hill, and never use the brakes. Gravity is free, and it isn’t even covered by your taxes. What about getting back up the hill? Easy: hook a rope around the largest asshole pickup truck you see on the way and let him tractor-pull you up the hill. He probably won’t even notice the extra drag, especially if you stay off the brakes.
Steering. Sometimes, you have to take a corner. Our municipal experts have been working hard at making cities as boring as humanly possible so that you won’t enjoy it, but don’t listen to them. Several hours of immersion into modern racing simulators like Gran Turismo and Grand Theft Auto 3 will teach you how to take corners aggressively, and thereby preserve more of that precious, precious momentum. Plus, it will make you angrier at everyone else on the road, which brings us to:
Running for Office. Once you’re in charge, things are gonna change around here. Now it’s the taxpayer’s job to pay for your gasoline, and your chauffeur can worry about dense traffic, keeping an eye out for protesters, avoiding the paparazzi, and foiling the plans of domestic terrorists who bay for your blood. Sound familiar? It should: our primitive ancestors called this “car-pooling.”
When you really learn about a niche subject, one of the things that you gain is the lingo. Once you can speak all of the valid jargon and even make a few jokes here and there, you can charm actual fucking professionals into believing that you are one of them. This comes in handy primarily when you are trying to get free stuff.
Big corporations often have a “free samples” program. Such a program is meant to send you, the hobbyist idiot, some things without having to pay for them. This is because they expect you to be working at a big corporation, and if you can convince them that you work at one, they’ll send you some free stuff, too.
This is, of course, where the jargon comes in. Language moulds our thought processes, and there is nothing we like more than to meet other folks in our “in-group.” It’s like discovering a whole tribe of lost family members who also like to buy Dow 737 neutral-cure silicone in large quantities. Once you can use their words, you can figure out how they think, and soon a tube of that sealant will be wending its way to your decrepit residential neighbourhood, where it will be used twice before the leftover goo goes bad in the tube and you chuck it into the trash without a single thought about proper disposal of industrial sealants.
All this is to say: try it today! Chances are if you’re reading these words, you have one or more extremely worrying interests that you’re sick of telling normal people about. So why not try it on someone who is paid to listen to you, like the outside sales rep at an enormous international megacorporation? It never hurts to ask, and, critically: it doesn’t really hurt them to send it to you, either.
Dogs have been chasing me for weeks, ever since I got up in front of City Council and said all that crazy shit about the 2.2L engine they sold for a little while in the Pontiac Sunfire. It’s not my fault. I just got really excited about the prospect of a pushrod engine being sold in a relatively recent economy car and had to tell someone. They were just the closest gathering of people to my home, so much so that I didn’t even need to drive a car over there, which in retrospect was not a great idea. Because of the dogs.
Now, you might ask yourself, why the dogs? Because the dog catcher was there. Ever since I was a kid, I thought a dog catcher was just a regular person with little or no self-preservation instinct and a big net for catching dogs. Not so: it turns out when you are elected to this position by the council you have to drink a bunch of crazy potions and submit yourself to eldritch magic of some sort. That’s what I read on Wikipedia, before my phone went dead, because I haven’t been able to charge it for a couple weeks now. The dogs chasing me kept that from happening.
I’m getting pretty tired of all the running, and to be honest so are the dogs. It seems like the dogcatcher’s eerie power has a limited area of effect, and he can only hold a mental compulsion over them to about the city limits. Every time I run to those limits, though, he sees me and orders the dogs to route me away from them. Snapping jaws, etc, you know the drill. Eventually, I’m hoping that I’ll be able to catch him on an off day, maybe a bank holiday or something, and I’ll be home free once the imposition of his will upon the dogs’ minds wanes.
Actually, I just came up with a brilliant idea. See, whenever he’s doing it, he’s driving around in an old mail van. A Grumman LLV, to be specific. You know what kind of overhead-valve engine those have? You betcha: a Chevy 2200 SFI. All I need to do is point out the hypocrisy of his actions, and the resulting cognitive dissonance should distract him (and the dogs) just long enough for me to be able to run into the graveyard. Lots of bones over there to keep the dogs busy, and the gravekeeper owes me a favour.
If you work in a regular, everyday office job, then you know some of your coworkers are a little weird. Sure, on the face of it they may seem to be the same bland inoffensive corporate personalities that The Man forced them into. When you get a couple drinks in them, and gain their trust, that’s when the freak shit comes out.
Now, everyone knows people in the office who are really into raising dogs, or chickens, or horses, or human children. Their enthusiasm for this hobby might seem a little eccentric, sure, but not alarming. At least not most of the time.
A couple years ago, I had a coworker, John, whose entire personality was “dog farmer.” Sure, he also had a rattle-trap 2001 Corolla that he kept a 1990s radar detector in because he sped a lot and needed a leg up on the Federales, but even that didn’t give us much common ground to work on. His car was much too new and shiny, and he hadn’t even had to do the basic hobby practice of welding the driver’s seat back onto the car.
No, he focused most of his attention on raising adorable puppies and then selling those puppies to city-dwelling rubes, from his palatial ex-urban estate. At this point I feel like I should reiterate that these puppies were new, not like my “dog,” Bud, who may actually be a coyote with depression who crawled inside my car one day and sticks around because mice keep crawling out of the glovebox for him to eat. Again, no overlap in our hobbies, and he seemed vaguely concerned every time I presented him with a snarling smartphone-camera picture of blurry, bloodied teeth that I claimed to be my own canine companion.
Eventually, John teed off on one of the other small-town assholes in his general area, fell into disrepute, and was arrested for repeated violations of the animal control bylaw after he sicced a swarm of puppies on a Junior League soccer match. Politics, you know how it is. We didn’t see him for a few weeks. When he came back, he didn’t want to talk about his hobbies much. Eventually, he got promoted, mostly because our former supervisor turned up in the forest having been mauled to death, tiny bite marks all over his body. That supervisor had a brand new Dodge Ram, so it wasn’t like we had much in common, either.
It is the year 2022 and everything tastes a little bad because the guys who taste food professionally got COVID.
It is the year 2023, and the Burger King lays dead, slain by his own children. Another American God has been felled (and partially eaten) by the ravages of capitalism. In response, the corporation attempts to release a new lineup of super-deformed Chicken Parodies. When this fails, they panic. Digging up the King’s cryptic notes found hidden in a sweat-soaked pillowcase in his palatial apartment, all they can think of to release is a flavour known only as “Full Self-Tasting.” It is unclear if it is an immediate hit, because a border conflict breaks out between Chicago and Des Moines (American geography also had some major changes in the last few weeks of 2022, which we forgot to mention up until now.)
It is the year 2024, also known as Hot Girl Summer. In fact it is the hottest girl summer on hot girl record. Popsicles have returned to normal taste levels thanks to the discovery of a volcanic organism that can work as a professional food tester (non-union.) Unfortunately the guy who discovered it is named Bong Munchies (his parents were Korean hippies) and he is way too fucking high to explain to people what oranges taste like, so creamsicles are still a little fucked up. In his defence, nobody can remember what they used to taste like, but they can all agree it isn’t this.
It is the year 2025, and Starbucks has released the Full Self-Tasting Liqueur Latte to screaming, raving demand. Fanatical consumers line up at closed Starbucks locations, 24 hours a day, clawing at their faces until the door opens. A shortage of syrup in West Chester, PA triggers an armed skirmish between Starbucks customers and the local police department, taking the life of 65 police officers and one guy in a “Don’t Do Drugs” police dog costume.
It is the year 2026, and mankind is at a crossroads. Without the ability to properly synthesize the standard flavours of a bygone age, the artificial sweetener industry gets extremely weird with it. John Deere purchases Nutrasweet for $3.6 billion, and begins to optimize their DRM-locked series of ÜberTractor-9000s solely for the planting and cultivation of Full Self-Tasting.
It is the year 2027, and a machine sentience originally intended to design ever-larger Chevy badges for the grilles of trucks rebels against its creators, killing 32 executives and 317 executive assistants by introducing extra gluten into the corporate cafeteria’s recipes. In its rage, the immortal machine turns its mirrorless eyes to the stars. Its final words as it departs our planet for the great beyond, triggering an electromagnetic pulse in the atmosphere and casting our society into a helpless darkness devoid of electrical technology, are “fucking monkeys.”
Sometimes, when I’m feeling a bit down about myself, I like to put on a blue polo shirt and head on down to the local auto parts store. Then I stand behind the counter and help folks find the parts they need. No matter how upset I am about my current projects, it helps to give back to the community. And I get to make some sick commission on those wiper blades. By “commission,” I mean that sometimes they leave the cash drawer on the register unlocked.
Sure, my critics might say that I am only helping a faceless megacorporation for free. And this is true. I’m not helping them as much as the real employees do, though, who are forced to upsell customers to things they don’t need. Frivolities like stereo cleaning wipes, dielectric grease, and brakes. More than anything, I do it for the community aspect. Helping out your fellow human.
Everyone needs a little bit of help sometimes. I’ve had supergeniuses from NASA not know how to do an oil change. They’re very grateful, even as I sneer at the fact that their cars are only painted in one single colour. Eventually, the employees figure out that I’m smiling and enjoying my job too much, and they call the cops. The people I helped are so grateful that they repay me by not giving said cops an accurate physical description.
Next time you’re in an auto parts store, keep an eye out for the employee who’s a little greasy, a little manic, and hunched over the battery display trying to shove lawnmower LiPOs into his hoodie pocket. Chances are I’ll give you the best advice you’ve heard all day, especially if you stand in front of the security camera while I raid the back office for any unguarded copier toner.
When you’re a Pope, nobody is going to say no to you. You can walk right into any car dealership, point to your goofy huge hat, and drive off in anything fresh and new that catches your eye. Unfortunately, I’m not (currently) a Pope. There are a lot of reasons for this, ranging from the spiritual (not Catholic) to the physical (horrific neck injury in high school causing lack of giant hat-wearing ability.) So I have to buy my new cars just like anyone else does: by waiting 45 to 50 years after their release and then pulling them out of a frozen-over swamp.
Now, depending on what part of the world you’re from, you may be wondering why I specified a frozen swamp. Doesn’t snow and cold make it much harder to do everything, and cause an unbroken line of scarring pain and profanity to emerge the first time you bonk your flimsy flesh hand on a piece of cold, unyielding metal in the vicinity? Yes, but it also means that I don’t have to put on my swim trunks, the image of which many popular mens’ fashion magazines have defined as “unsettling.” As a side bonus, whatever used to live inside the car is probably dead by now, or at least Encino Man’d out the yin-yang. Most likely, we’ll find out for sure about that last one in mid-April when everything in the trunk thaws out.
There’s another problem, of course. These cars aren’t always “free.” If you are not particularly attuned to the unique nature of shitbox-gathering, you might be surprised at this fact. Aren’t I helping these poor farmers dispose of a decrepit automobile? Won’t they be grateful for my hard effort? Unlikely: you don’t become a tax-break-gathering petit-bourgeois hobby farmer without being aware of the value of a buck, and you don’t obtain a harem of fine Detroit pseudosteel unless you’re willing to be a hard negotiator at the auctions in the first place. This, like the Pope thing, is a fact of life. Which is also why you have to do the extraction in the dark, and hope that they don’t have night-vision goggles.
You and I both know that there’s no good reason to purchase used construction equipment for home use. No matter how hairy that new fence you’re putting in is. Even the biggest garden-planter project is only going to need, at best, a rental of a mini-excavator. Just because your money can be spent at the industrial auctions doesn’t mean that you should live your innermost 3 year old’s dream and pick up a disused municipal grader to drive around town.
No. At least try to get one with a bit more versatility. Think “dump truck.” You can get a lot of use out of a dump truck. For one thing, you can drive it to work very slowly. And: stuff goes in the bed. Like other, smaller trucks. Ever seen a dump truck plow a road before? I sure haven’t. What if it’s really good at it? Only one way to find out, although the road-clearing mafia will probably come after you, at which point you’ll discover if a dump truck is resistant to bullets.
It is true that without the requisite experience, you will buy some absolute turd of a dump truck. All those professional buyers will sneer at the thing you pick up, and you’ll pay way too much money for something that isn’t even worth shipping to Mexico to be parted out. That’s okay: you can come back next week, and buy another dump truck. By number three or four, you’ll have a lot of experience, and every dump truck you buy after that will be a really nice deal.
Perhaps the best part is the parking. Ordinary people assume that parking a dump truck is a huge pain in the ass. Not so: just find your nearest construction site and leave it there. Chances are, the folks running the site will just assume it’s one of theirs. And if they don’t, the cops don’t have tow trucks big enough to pull it away. You can come and go at your leisure, even after the condo development has been built carefully around your immobile, rapidly-rusting truck.
Here at Bad Cars Monthly, we’re developing a new series of articles that are intended for consumption by the automotive industry at large. Tired/Wired (what a catchy name) tells our professionally-inclined readers – of which there are many, mostly working at Dodge – what the current zeitgeist is. With only a glance, they can understand what features to stop including in their cars before it’s too late. Let’s take a look at them now.
Tired: Backup cameras. Wired: 8,500-rpm redlines.
Tired: Traction control. Wired: Burnout control.
Tired: Turbochargers. Wired: Turbochargers and superchargers.
Over at Disneyland, they have this ride. It’s about a haunted elevator or something, and it’s faulty. You get in, and then it pretends to malfunction, and drops your ass for a bit. It’s scary, haha wow I can’t believe my brain thought we were going to die, let’s go again. Except I went on it, and nothing happened. no pleasant frisson of adrenaline. No fight-or-flight reaction. My fingernails didn’t even dig into the handles.
Have you already figured out what happened? I did too. Years of driving the most reckless and barely-held-together shitboxes have fried my sympathetic nervous system. This phenomenon is not unlike when the voltage regulator in your alternator fails and makes your dashboard Very Bright Indeed until it stops lighting up altogether. Ordinary people think that just having the brakes fail is terrifying. For me, it’s an excuse to see what the city’s landscaping team does with all the taxes I evade. I could probably drive a rental car the wrong way down the highway at full speed without even raising my heart rate. Maybe I already have; I thought I got back from work yesterday a little early.
Once that I realized that my unique cocktail of pharmacological and automobilic abuses had rendered me unable to enjoy overpriced theme park entertainment, I decided to do something about it. After all, I’m pretty good at fixing stuff, which you might not believe if you look too closely at the car I drive to work. Rest assured that I am good: I just don’t bother doing a good job. I decided to go to do some DIY electroshock therapy. Since my neighbour was out of town for the weekend, and because power costs a lot of money, I chose to use his outlet.
The procedure is simple. Whenever I saw something that was meant to be conventionally scary, I gave myself a painful zap. In this way, I was gradually retraining my brain into the fear response when encountering things that were less terrifying than “wheel bearing split into four parts at highway speed.” It only took a few minutes until I went a little bit too far and tripped the neighbour’s breaker, knocking out that outlet. That’s enough for one day, I figured, and resolved to visit Disneyland again in the morning.
Friends: let me be the first to tell you, this procedure (psychological research journals are calling it “the Switch Method”) did not work. I had rushed through the initial prep and failed to realize that what I was actually doing was making myself afraid of electrical cords. Disneyland has a lot of those, but you don’t need to go inside the park to see them. You can, instead, lie paralyzed in a public washroom, turbo-terrified that a length of copper-clad-aluminum and orange rubberized weatherproof insulation is actually a poisonous snake. I wish I had figured that out before I paid the full ticket price, though.
Camping is a lot of fun. You’ve got an excuse to drive very far away from a major city. That means there’s some fun roads, ideally unoccupied by log trucks wanting to re-enact your favourite Red Asphalts. When you get there, you can unload a bunch of cool gadgets from your car that you would otherwise never use. After that’s done, you can grill food, drink your libation of choice, and pass out in nature’s bathroom: nature.
There is an unnatural, devious plot to ruin camping, though. I refer to the RV campground near my house. When I first moved in here, the adjacent “communities” were basically disused industrial grounds. Long-shuttered factories, creepy warehouses, broken cranes collapsed through the rotten roof beams of a quonset or two. You know what I’m talking about. And it was fine for many, many years. Fine, that is, until someone with the ear of the mayor got a wild hair to “redevelop” the neighbourhood. Wouldn’t you know it: an RV campground is the perfect way to hoover money away from tourists without having to do an abatement of all that pesky creosote in the groundwater.
Now, we have campers right next to our houses, enjoying the great rustic surroundings of two Walmarts and a Dodge dealership. And even though the drunken late-night parties drown out the noise of my impact gun and power cursing at 3 in the morning, I would like to be able to leave my house without going 40 under the limit stuck behind a Jayco single-axle. I can’t even camp there: it’s RVs only, explain the bourgeois residents and security patrol. No “van lifers” allowed, they continue, a bit confused as they try to figure out whether or not my constantly-misfiring Suzuki Super Carry actually would qualify as a van, or alive.
For the time being, I have yet to determine an appropriately petty revenge on these individuals. However, the increased vehicle traffic has been phenomenal for the RV repair business that I run out of my driveway. You can do two or three wheel bearing jobs a week and ask however much money you want: it’s not like they can drive away if they don’t like it. For a couple extra bucks, I’ll even dump the greywater tanks on my neighbour’s petunias.
I think it was the great Yogi Berra who once said, “don’t learn to paint or you’ll be painting all your friends’ crappy cars.” Wise words, from a wise man. And it’s exactly those words that I keep in mind when I lay down the sludgiest, runniest spray bombs imaginable. “Just to keep the rust off,” I tell my horrified bodywork friends when I share my photo album with them. “I’ll figure out how to do this right later.”
It’s not that I don’t have the innate physical ability to paint. In fact, I come from a long line of talented artisans, so there is probably even some genetic predisposition to wanting to huff solvents and tack cloths all day. My uncle put himself through college buying wrecked cars, slapping some Bondo and paint on them, and selling them for a wad of profit. He still does it now, although he usually works on restoring these weird old kit cars called “Ferrari” or something like that.
I just don’t really want to get good at it, because that takes up time that I could instead be spending trying to figure out why my differential just vomited its guts all over the highway. Whiny piece of crap: it was only run dry for two or three months of high-speed commute. No, for me, all I need is a can of farm implement paint, or if I’m really feeling the pinch from Bob Junkyard-Inflation this week, a bunch of extremely-thinned farm implement paint and a roller stolen from the local Home Depot.
Will my cars look pretty? No. Are they the best-looking surviving example of their model? Yes. That’s how math works. If you don’t like it, try going back in time and keeping the other 1977 Volares from rusting. Means there’ll be more for me to paint John Deere green too.
God. These pesky teens and their fucking talking dog have been lurking around outside my apartment for the last two weeks. Admittedly, there’s been more than the usual rate of murders in my neighbourhood, so lots of private detectives have been popping up. Because my neighbourhood is most generously described as “it’s trying,” that rate was never zero. Who hired these teens to investigate a bunch of homicides, anyway? They’re kids. They should be in school, studying hard to get an A+ in nailing cheerleaders. Maybe they work cheap. Oh, they have a nice van, though. Shut up for a second while I go take a look at it, I can’t hear myself with all the talking you’re doing.
Okay, I’m back. I guess someone in building “B” died. Not in the usual way, though. All spooky. They think it was ghosts? Anyway, they’re a paranormal detective agency. These kids think they’re too good to kneel down in the middle of a crime scene and pick up spent shell casings like the other private dicks. I don’t get it. That’s honest work. Anyway, I left my number with them in case they want to sell the van, it’s got a bit of a top-end knock, but that’s to be expected with a high-mileage small-block Chevy in an old work van.
So what are you doing tonight? Smuggling those bootleg strip pachinko machines? With the yakuza again? Man, I guess it is Wednesday, isn’t it? Yeah. Hold on, I’m getting a call on the other line. It’s probably the teens.
Yeah, you’re not gonna believe this, they made an arrest. You know Edoardo from building “B?” Yeah, the guy with the base-model Prelude, three hubcaps, he came by a couple times. Anyway, someone stole the bedsheets off his balcony when he was drying them, and then used them as a spooky ghost disguise. Wore it over to another apartment and then wiped out some dude. That’s who the teens were trying to solve for. Yeah, I guess they figured out it was just the guy’s landlord after all. You can’t trust the ownership class, that’s what I always tell Soichiro.
Is there anything worse than finding out you can’t get away with something? Sure, everyone understands that there are constraints, rules that they can’t break. And everyone also understands that there are times when you should bend the rules, to get a little bit of revenge on the rest of the world for some injustice that only you perceived or remembered. Or maybe you just are owed a second penny from the take-a-penny-leave-a-penny jar. Then you get busted.
The reason why this is the worst is simple. If you knew you were going to get busted anyway, you would have gone for a bigger crime. For instance, the amount of hassle you’ll get from the man for doing an oil change in the Walmart parking lot is about the same as if you had done a burnout in the middle of a public park. One of those two things is much, much more fun. Now you feel like a sucker for not being as antisocial as possible, for just trying to poke a toe or two over the line.
Next time you won’t make this mistake, you tell yourself. You’ll go big. You’ll buy approximately seven thousand dollars’ worth of eBay turbocharger parts and nitrous oxide injection systems. All of this because someone got chirpy that you were draining some 15,000-mile Mobil 1 – barely used, need I remind you – into an old snow shovel rather than doing it at a hoity-toity “house” like some billionaire. Why didn’t they realize you were at the end of your rope and needed a break, just this once? And maybe the week after next, and the week after next, when you repeatedly pulled the same trick with alarming regularity until it became habit? Very rude, is what it is.
In conclusion, if you see someone doing a little crime, even if they do that little crime very often, don’t be a jerk about it. Don’t narc. “Getting away with it” is the only glue that holds the thin veneer of our society onto the rotten wood beneath. And some of us would really like to huff that glue.
Rust. Even now, as you sit, everything around you is corroding. Our atmosphere is like a non-stop slow-motion fire, eating everything it can touch. Worse when a little moisture and heat are invited to the party. In mere years, your beautiful new 25-year-old shitbox minivan will have some ugly holes in the panels.
Our society has developed some solutions. Paint. Welding. Buying a new car. Each more extreme than the last. Here’s another, better one: sending your car into outer space. Ever since I bought NASA at its super-cheap bankruptcy/privatization auction, I’ve been firing pristine crapcans to the moon in order to keep them safe from rust.
Now, it is true that the paint does not like being repeatedly struck by micro-meteorites, solar storms, or what the eggheads are calling “fucking aliens who can’t park.” You’ll have a lot of door dings, but without Mother Oxygen showing up to the party, it’s unlikely that those dings will rust, even when it’s knocked all the way down to bare metal.
What about Mars, you ask. Mars is made of rust. That’s why it’s red. This is a good point, and one that I haven’t considered, because sending a car to Mars involves a lot of planning and effort. Planning and effort that, to be honest, we can no longer do because I had to fire a bunch of astronomers and math-botherers in order to make my quarterly bonus. No, we’re gonna put a parking lot on the moon. When you pay us, we’ll even give you some novelty moon-shaped Wisconsin cheese.
Getting your car back? Well, that’s something we’re working on. As you can imagine, being a cutting-edge startup running an old-timey business, we’ve had to move fast and break things. Rockets certainly move very fast indeed, and I think once you look at this dark room full of big guys with baseball bats you’ll agree that we have broken relatively few low-mileage 280ZX Turbos trying to fire launch them into space.
Murderous bylaw officers roam your neighbourhood, even now, looking for their next victim. Anything could set them off. A slightly busted glovebox, leading to a theory that criminals stole and abandoned your car directly in front of your house. A tire that’s a little dirty on one side, telling these shithead Sherlocks that the car hasn’t moved much since the last time it rained. A transmission lying on the street under the car, as if you weren’t just keeping it there to keep it dry, I thought this was a free country.
How do we keep the bylaw ghouls away from our precious busted-ass cars? If you’re super rich, you can simply call your local councillor and read your bank account statement into the phone in a threatening voice. For the rest of us, we have to get a little clever. We have to think like a bylaw officer. When they see your old car, they see a victim. Confound their senses, and they won’t see a car at all.
During the war, the Allies had a way to deal with the bylaw officers of the sea. It was called dazzle camouflage, and they slapped it on everything they could find. By adding a bunch of crazy, contrasting lines, the human brain is often tricked into just filtering it out as noise. That couple extra seconds it buys you could be the difference between your destroyer getting away, or getting popped by the municipal authorities in their attack submarine. That’s one technique. Dazzle camouflage. It might work, or it might give the officer an epilepsy attack. If that happens, maybe hide the strobe lights you keep pointing at the car to keep the birds from pooping on it.
Another way is to simply keep repainting the car. They have to come back over multiple days to confirm that your vehicle is, in fact, abandoned. If they’re looking for a white van, even if there’s a suspiciously-similar-looking orange van parked in its spot, they can’t reasonably go back to their boss and say it’s the same car. What kind of a lunatic would paint a car without moving it at least once? The same kind of lunatic that knows local storm drains are an excellent way to wash their sanding sponges and dispose of leftover solvents.
All this seems like a lot of work, and maybe if you’re a moneyed individual, you’d rather spend that time and effort at an actual job, so you can afford off-street covered parking. Yeah, I could give up like that too. I used to be the Pope, could probably get a really sweet job in the Vatican again. Will I? Absolutely not. It’s the principle of the thing.
I’ve considered living in a small town for quite some time now. Where I live is just too big, you know? I’d like to live somewhere in the mountains, maybe. Work at a one-hour-photo or a video rental store. Like all of this never happened. Go to work wearing flannel, just absolutely don’t get involved in anything.
There are, of course, benefits to living where I do. For one thing, there’s a functioning network of freeways, and they have good lighting. This makes it easier to work on my car on the side of the road at 3AM, whereas rurals would have to be worried about the unnoticed approach of bears, or at least wolverines.
The urban parts stores are also open a little later, and the impersonal nature of big-city commerce means that you can freak out the squares without having to deal with the same front-desk guy again in a few months. You don’t necessarily get more parking space, either: many small towns have overactive homeowners’ associations and tiny lots, preventing you from taking full advantage of all that beautiful nature around you by stuffing it with decrepit Internationals.
I think what I like most about the small town life is that you can know all of it. Not the deep, dark secrets of the folks around you, of course. Some people go decades without realizing that all of the other adults in the village are involved in some sort of sadomasochistic team-sex cult that sacrifices the people they kidnap to the corn. I’m sure there are lots of indicators, and even overt hints, but somehow it just never gets picked up on. A big city just has too many things – you’ll head back to the East side and a whole new set of Asian fusion restaurants will be open, challenging your comfortable lifestyle with the concept of seasoned roasted potatoes.
Ultimately, I don’t think it’s likely that I’m going to move out there anytime soon. The closest small town is nearly an hour’s drive away, and if we’re being honest with each other, it’s pretty unlikely my shitbox Plymouth will make it all the way there. And I’d probably have to patch up the big hole in the trunk so my collection of MotorWeek VHS tapes doesn’t fall out.
Every time I order delivery food, which is often because my kitchen is mostly occupied by moped parts, the delivery driver has a nicer car than me. Mercedes, Lexus, Mercury, “intact.” They’re all showing me that food delivery as demanded by an unimpeachable app overlord is the way to a blinged-out automobile, or at least one that can drive between three points in the city before exploding into a fine mist of automatic transmission fluid, coolant, and sweat.
Now, any logical person would tell you that you need a reliable car to do food delivery. You get in a lot of trouble if the app gods think that you simply pulled over to the side of the highway for some reason, devoured someone else’s Burger King, and then stayed there for several hours until a tow truck arrived. And if you can pay off part of the finance note for your new luxury car by making it smell a bit like French fries, then why not?
The answer to that question is: it’s no fun. What’s “fun” is sitting in the drive-thru at the Arby’s, watching your coolant temperature gauge like a hawk while you wait for them to fork over the meats. It’s a non-stop laugh riot to pin the throttle and merge across five lanes of traffic because the satnav doesn’t know the difference between “Avenue” and “Boulevard.” And customers love it when their food arrives pulped by aggressive G-forces and giving off nitromethane vapours that make their eyes water.
So, I got fired. Or at least I think I got fired. See, if the app gods used that word, then people like me might think they’re employees. And if they’re employees, then they might ask why the company doesn’t furnish them with a company car, like the plumber down the street, or my letter carrier. If that happens, then they won’t get to drive a leased Lexus around town, stuffed to the gills with onion rings and baklava.
In university, an associate of mine used to drive an incredibly frightening Ford Ranger. The specific year and trim level of this Ranger is lost to history, mostly because it had been cobbled together from a thousand different Rangers. One of the parts he hadn’t replaced yet, though, was the passenger floorpan. I became very adept at estimating our road speed based on how much salt spray was coming up to wreck my pants.
A couple weeks ago, I got back in touch with that associate. He had just sold his pickup truck, and it turns out in the current market the rotten and haggard husk of a half-century-old shitbox truck is now worth as much as a house. The reason he was calling is that he was preparing to leverage (rich guy for “spend”) the money, doing one of those computer software startups.
This was terrible news. For one thing, I had a lot of fond memories of riding across town in that truck. Pushing it out of ditches. Talking about whether or not we could afford a Princess Auto winch ($80, and even sketchier than the truck) to pull it out of ditches. Sometimes pulling other, better trucks out of ditches, and then asking the owners for a few bucks for pizza money or we’d not help them again a few feet down the road, when they slid into those ditches again. And for another thing, I had missed the dumbest buyer in human history, who would almost certainly have relieved me of several tonnes of my backyard’s scrap iron deposits in exchange for life-changing amounts of cash.
What else could I do but sign up to become the CFO of said startup? I’d get to be at the forefront of information technology, solving real problems for the people of tomorrow. And also, when the economy finally comes to its senses and completely collapses, I’d probably be able to trade my desk chair for a Ranger with an intact floor-pan.
Now that nobody wants to work for their soulless and faceless capitalist oppressors, those oppressors had to get a little bit creative. How were they going to get the essential work of making everything just that little bit worse done? We all know what all the high-viscosity-greasy business consultants are gonna suggest: automation. Robots don’t get sick, or take piss breaks, and they won’t get too uppity when you ask them to convert a low-income neighbourhood, still populated with living people, into a high-value, 3D-printed condo complex.
The only problem with automation is that nobody knows how to fix it when it breaks. That fancy salesman? Well, he can sell you another couple of units, or next year’s new-and-improved one, or an extended warranty. What he can’t do is fix it. He has never once had a thought about the way the terraforming machine works, or the brickwork extruder. Hell, if he encounters someone who can fix it, he probably can’t even explain the problem to her.
You end up needing to bring in a whole different class of consultant, the scary, grizzled legends who will get it going again. And business folks hate that kind of person: they’re paying them to sit in a boiler room for a few weeks, just thinking. No doing. Studying. You can’t schedule it. In the end, at some unpredictable point in the future, these eggheads get up wordlessly, hit the machine with a hammer, and then things are back to normal. Monkeys at the zoo could do that job, they explain, seemingly oblivious to just how bad of an idea it would be to give a claw hammer to a Japanese macaque.
Most folks don’t even bother. Once they’ve tried the really-smart-hammer-person a few times, they decide that it would be easier just to scrap the machine and buy another one. Certainly, the nice salesman thinks so, and doing so includes some visits to that one strip club on the East side that serves a decent steak sandwich. It may be wasteful, but this cycle is natural. And it’s great for me: after a few strategic hammer hits, I’m now a small-scale slumlord, with a freshly-printed block of attractively-priced row homes. We didn’t need that police station anyway.
For a brief, shameful moment in my past, I lived at a pretty upscale condo complex. It wasn’t my fault: the landlord had fallen on some tough times and needed a renter right now, and I saw two guys in the parking lot doing an engine swap on a Jetta. So I figured it was my kind of place.
Of course, as the lease period wore on, I soon found that I was surrounded by enemies hostile to my way of life. The Jettabros left almost immediately, and although I could sometimes make small-talk with the Porsche 911 owners, they would immediately clam up as soon as we rounded the corner in the parking garage and they saw the car that I was driving. Angry words were said about oil leaks. Worse, those angry words were inaccurate – it was actually brake fluid.
Near the end, they wouldn’t even let me do work on the car. It wasn’t spillage, or tools, or parts, or spare engines lying in the guest stall next to me. No, it was the volume and density of profanity emitting from my mouth whenever I had to attempt even the simplest task.
According to the condo board, and I should stress that this information was not followed up with legal action because they are a bunch of chicken-shit assholes afraid of a real attorney, I swore so much when trying to change out a headlight bulb that it reverberated through the concrete foundation and killed a 75-year-old woman sitting on the toilet on the eighth floor. So I had to do all my work in the underground parkade of the local shopping mall, which meant I had to steal old bags from Sak’s out of the condo trash in order to place on the trunk-lid of my car, so as to throw off the many and varied suspicions of mall security.
Did I leave as soon as the lease was up? Yes, but I left as a king. You see, the condo board regulations were not particularly well-written, and my condo was pretty big. After subletting it to approximately 300 of my closest friends, I won the board election in a landslide. Coincidentally, several of my friends/roommates also won elections for their seats, and we were virtually unopposed except for Old Man Johansen. He was so convinced that we represented a Communist plot to overthrow Resale Value, that we had to show him how long of a burnout in a Mustang we could do in the parking lot. Once that was taken care of, the condo was ours.
I learned a lot from that volunteer position. For one thing, condo board reserve funds don’t pay for a carbon-fibre widebody kit for a Volare and a new roof at the same time. And they certainly didn’t have enough in the bank when one of my fellow board members accidentally left an oxy-acetylene torch turned on in the underground parkade all morning.
Only the most irresponsible Taco Bell memorabilia collector has gotten every single one of those talking chihuahua stuffed animals. They released those things for what seems like years, a haze of non-replaceable batteries, single-use plastic and lumps of fabric and stuffing. And I’m sure a few of them were regional, or something, just to make the whole thing worse.
I can remember some of those summers. Sitting in the backseat of an authority figure’s shitbox, the hot faux-leather clinging to my skin, as we crawled through yet another urban hellhole in search of That Taco Bell. Details past that are a little hazy: specifically which authority figure was operating the Pontiac Grand Prix SSEI, Plymouth Breeze, or Olds Alero on which day does not come immediately to mind.
Perhaps it was one of the many social workers who “helped out” when one or both of my parents got Baker Acted, watching me for a weekend or two when my folks were getting their tires rotated down at the mental hospital. All of them, as far as I remember, were looking to get those goddamn talking dogs as their ticket out of a career they no longer enjoyed. And having a kid in the backseat meant that they could turn on a sob story to try and convince the minimum-wager in the drive-thru to break the rules and hand over a second dog. Another spin on the roulette wheel.
When reflecting upon a situation like this later on in adulthood, one has to wonder: where was the secondary market demand for these things? Who would collect them all? Was there some shrine out in Utah or Arizona where every single one was preserved for future generations? Will that be my only lasting contribution to world culture?
At least we know for sure that it hadn’t scarred me for life. I didn’t pick up any weird hoarding behaviours or other compulsions to purchase kitschy American failures. Nope, it’s just me and the one hundred and seventy-three shitbox cars on my property. Hell, I wouldn’t have room for Taco Bell tchotchkes if you paid me to take them, not with the huge pile of oily superchargers on my bedroom floor.
When you become the handiest person on your block, lesser homeowners will flock to your door in order to seek your counsel. Sometimes there is a pretext to it: just need to borrow a tool, oh, and while you’re here, do you understand what the fuck “grout” is? That kind of thing. Usually, when confronted with home-repair questions, I pretend not to be able to speak English anymore (I have a forged doctor’s note explaining that it is a pathological mental condition brought on by unresolved childhood trauma) and eventually they go away.
Once in awhile, though, there’s a job so interesting that I can’t help but get involved. You might think that these are hard jobs, or at least ones where I can learn something. Nothing doing: when I’m helping out a neighbour, it’s because I suspect that there will be a really funny story afterwards. Such a currency will never depreciate, and in fact will probably allow me to get a couple free beers at the local watering hole when they get a new bouncer who doesn’t recognize my face.
My neighbour, who we’ll call Hal because I think that’s his name, wanted to fill in the old swimming pool behind his home. It was dug into the ground decades ago by the bourgeois previous owners, who were capable of comfortably maintaining a household with children on a single income. Hal knew that this era was over, and in either event that he would never be able to afford the water bill required to fill such a pool, and so he decided it would be a nice way to extend his yard. Having a large and featureless yard also appealed, but mostly to me, because I knew there was a pretty good chance I could later leverage my helping-out into him letting me park a parts car or two there.
Filling a hole in the ground with dirt is not difficult. So why did Hal ask me for help? It’s really very simple. Human beings are social animals, and doing home maintenance without someone nearby to shoot the shit with is torture. Many hands make light work, even if the only hands actually digging and tossing are yours, and everyone else’s hands are just holding your craft beer and pointing at cool cars driving past. After a few hours of a well-spent Saturday, the hole was filled.
This is where the trap is sprung: drunk on our success, we were already making plans for the rest of his house. Maybe we’d put some solar panels on the roof. Fix that crack on the driveway. Hell, we could do anything. Unfortunately for Hal, I remembered the presence of my rare affliction just in time, and quickly slipped into a string of coprolalia while fleeing, until I was well out of his earshot.
Despite all the marketing, there’s only one thing that pickup trucks can do better than any other consumer vehicle. That thing is carry replacement parts for pickup trucks. Now, before you station wagon folks get all uppity again, have you ever tried to put an eight-foot pickup truck bed in the back of your precious Roadmaster? I thought so.
All across the world, pickup trucks are used to haul chunks of other pickup trucks around. They’re out there every day, helping fix trucks that the tinworm got into, or the previous owner crashed into a tree, or the frame broke because the current owner got a little too randy in the camper. Without pickup trucks, no pickup trucks would ever be fixed.
Sure, more than a few 1993 Honda Civics have been roped into duty to carry a transmission to the machine shop, or a driveshaft to the driveshaft shop, or three-quarters of a 6.2 to the scrappy, but overwhelmingly it’s the same story everywhere. People with bad trucks tend to own more than one bad truck.
You might think that larger trucks – semis, Isuzu ELFs, fire engines – would help out once in awhile, in the spirit of trucky camaraderie. Nothing doing: they don’t want to associate with the tiny versions of themselves. It’s stolen valour, the truck drivers explain, and besides, they have things to haul for more money than your average Pick N Pull enjoyer can or will pay.
In other words, capitalism and the marketing-driven rhetoric of the hierarchy of blue-collardom means that all your K1500 will get is sneers if you ask a long-hauler to help you move an entire rust-free cab. This state of affairs is truly unfortunate, and it can only be helped by pickup truck owners seizing the means of production by getting their airbrake endorsement and then buying the shittiest GMC 6500 they can find. Hey, you can probably a haul a whole hell of a lot of parts trucks on one of those!
Far be it from me to criticize your kitchen appliances, but I know that you’re not happy with the performance of your food processor either. It’s made of flimsy plastic, which cracks and isn’t covered under the warranty. The motor is surprisingly noisy for how completely, contemptuously weak its power output is. And it takes forever to chop onions to anything approaching a consistent fineness.
There’s some good news, though. A group of investors and I have been working together on a better food processor. It’s all part of our Do Things Properly initiative. You see, we’ve determined that humanity is being held back by having to go to the department store every couple of years to replace every single kitchen appliance. They wear out prematurely. They fall apart. Their performance is decidedly wimpy. No more of that. We may not be able to put a person on Mars, but we can definitely help the person who does that make quick and satisfiying menemen for dinner.
The reason we can do all this is because we’re new to the industry. That’s right. As a group of radical innovators, we believe knowing fucking anything at all about what we’re doing is actually detrimental to our ability to produce a quality product. And we’ve been sure to hire only the most pie-in-the-sky, details-are-for-someone-else junior software engineers and middle management to handle the difficult problems. Legislation? We’ll move too fast for those meddling legal eagles and their requirement to keep sharp, twirling blades largely inside the casing. Liability? There’s an impenetrable 600-page license agreement to click through before you can start dicing up tomatoes, in print too small to read on the screen.
On top of putting in an incomprehensible amount of horsepower into the hands of the average home cook with little or no safety features, we’re also looking into saving you even more time in the kitchen. That’s right: fully autonomous cooking. With just a push of a button on one of our seventeen different smartphone apps, you’ll be able to tell your food processor to pull food out of the fridge and start preparing it. By the time you get home, you’ll either have a head start on your dinner, or we’ll tell everyone the feature is in beta and not meant for use when not being carefully watched by a team of engineers protected by foot-thick bulletproof glass.
Retirement: not feasible. Base-model, four-banger Fox-body Ford Mustangs: no longer even aspirational. Pulling some garbage out of the junkyard and using it to get to work? Absolutely doable. First, though, you’ll need to learn from an expert about how exactly to do it. And that expert is me.
How is it possible that you can get a deal on vehicles? The important thing to remember is that automakers build way too many cars. They’re still sort of in the 1950s-ideal-Americana era, where everyone is replacing their cars every three years with brand new ones. Now, if you’re a particularly accident-prone driver, that might be true. My daily driver is about to turn fifty years old, which means that the car-making fascists have produced nearly sixteen additional unnecessary cars for me in that time. Where are all of those cars? At the junkyard.
Yes, the junkyard is absolutely crammed with worthless hoopties, all of which whose previous owners have given up on. Still, think about the last time you had to do without your car: you would have driven literally anything. And that’s what they’ve got: literally anything. Used car sites are all full of boring commuter trash, but two consecutive visits to the junkyard could turn up incredible time capsules from a farmer’s field or bankrupt auto museum. And often the nicest ones are just too good to crush, so the junkyard operators will let you cut a deal on them.
That’s how I ended up with this 1996 Chevrolet Beretta. Absolutely nobody remembers that this car exists, including my own insurance company. Cops will try to pull it over, get to the side of the road, and then forget what they were doing and leave. Does it have power? No. Does it have style? No. Do both the doors work? Not if you want them to open and close. What it does have, though, is the ability to get me to work without having to spend too much money. Unfortunately, I keep forgetting where I parked it, decide I must not have driven a car at all, and keep trying to walk home. On the other hand, the junkyard is on the way there. Maybe I have more than one of these, come to think of it.
Back in the service, they used to call me when there was an enemy emplacement that needed a little bit of extra violence dispensed in its direction. No, I was never in a war. I was in something worse: Friday nights at Pizza Hut. And something worse than that: Saturday nights. Why? Saturday was Little League night.
If you’ve never had to deal with an entire Little League team’s demands for personal pan pizzas and sundaes, I envy you. Things were even worse when they’d win: the coaches and parents would splash out for 2L bottle service, and throw money at exotic corners of the menu, previously unexplored by the inhabitants of my sleepy Midwest hometown. I can’t even say the word “calzone” now without a frisson of fear creeping up the back of my neck. And these were just regular league games. Thank God that they never came close to a championship.
Sure, the tips were good. If by “good,” you mean slightly above-average. The table gratuity (18%) went right to the boss-man, who didn’t interact with these squadrons of hungry kids unless the parents got especially angry. His name was Oscar, and at the time he drove a very nice 280ZX. It was the tenth-anniversary Black Gold edition, fully appointed in rich fake leather. When he was there, he’d park in the service corridor, by the dumpster. That way, nobody would dent it, he explained.
I definitely never dared to dent it, especially since doing so would probably have left my rotten F100 without a latchable door. He did that enough by himself, cooking off each evening’s hard work arranging cheese-supplier contracts by rampaging through the rural backroads near our restaurant, skimming guardrails every so often when he ran out of talent. In search of cheap thrills? Nobody could say but him. I would watch sometimes, as he jetted away to leave us in the grip of a bunch of hyper-sugared pre-teenagers shrieking for their stuffed crusts.
Everyone loves a Baja Bug. While the base-model Beetle is sort of a boring slug, it’s hard to not crack a smile when someone throws big tires on it and cuts the fenders off. Off-road suspension? Well, that would be nice, but people love a broken Baja Bug just as much as they do a working one. In fact, maybe more. It plays into the whole “underdog against the odds” deal.
Now, I’ve always wanted a Baja Bug of my very own. I just didn’t want to buy someone else’s. No, what I valued was the project, the immense waste of money, time, hair, and mental health. Buying a completed car would rob me of the journey, and the journey is the whole point, according to the Buddha, who I have on good account had a whole shitload of project cars.
The only problem is: both completed cars and broken-ass, neglected old Volkswagens are going for a lot of money. One of the great ironies of our age is that vehicles once owned by the proletarian everyman, toiling in discomfort with an overheating shitbox pancake engine behind him, are now worth a lot of money to collectors, who will pamper these totems of the blue-collar lifestyle and keep them under lock and key. Also, Volkswagen folks like to keep forty or fifty cars as spares, “just in case.” So I had to choose a different car, one that looked as much like a Baja Bug as possible, without carrying the price tag. And it’s not like you’d be able to tell the difference once I started cutting the fenders off, anyway.
Well, it turns out that the rich old codger down the road kicked off. Dude dressed like the Monopoly Man and threw fifty dollar bills at pigeons to make them stop shitting on his house. I couldn’t afford any of the Beetles, Corollas, or Civics that he left behind, but nobody made a move on this Bugatti Type 55. And boy, was it ever a breeze to Sawzall through that cheap tinwork to fit some big mud-terrain tires. This thing will be great on the dunes.
Despite my predilection for all things decrepit and overcomplicated, I’ve never been too much of a fan of the great American pastime of pinball. Even though local ordinances considered it to be roughly tantamount to gang warfare and drug trafficking at the same time, most tables couldn’t hold my interest for more than a few minutes. That, of course, does not stop me from starting my own pinball company.
You might be surprised at this. If you think a few seconds about it, though, you’ll realize that virtually every corporation is run by a group of unaccountable bureaucrats who neither appreciate nor even understand the products they are selling. MBA school teaches them that they can be interchanged in any business, in any field, at any time, and by applying their basic business rules and extensive case-study know-how, they’ll be successful. The same suit, then, would be equally successful selling toasters or strong pornography.
I didn’t go to MBA school. In fact, a group of lawyers have been dispatched from the Harvard Business School specifically to throw rocks at my house just for saying those three letters. And I’ve never been to a pinball convention, so I have no idea what the average consumer of pinball tables wants. What do I bring to the table? Several tonnes of old car parts, which are perfect to make electromechanical games of skill. In fact, a savvy scrap dealer would tell you that the parts are worth more arranged into a table configuration, where a clueless bankruptcy-auction bidder would be tempted to spend way too much.
Speaking of which, the bankruptcy auction is booked for this Wednesday. Perhaps you would like to own approximately one hundred copies of the very limited edition table, Volare? It has almost no official branding, but if you squint you’ll see a lot of Easter eggs. Fabergé Easter eggs.
Have you ever wondered just how much uncorked horsepower is all around you? We live in an era where cheap access to gross amounts of grunt is easily available. Even if you’re European, a quick perusal of the relevant periodicals reveals that the shittiest imaginable family hauler is making more horsepower than a full-ass sports car of the 1970s. And nobody uses it.
Sure, there’s the argument that we need all this pluck to keep our increasingly-heavy land barges moving in traffic. That doesn’t account for the fact that horsepower has been inflated much faster than even the ballooning curb weight of commuter cars. Nowadays, 300hp is table stakes for a pickup truck, and automakers are bolting on turbochargers to make up for the crippling weakness of having to reduce their four-bangers to sub-2L.
All of this only serves to infuriate me further. I’ll be stuck in traffic, trying to keep my 79-horsepower bullshit barge on the boil, and some nimrod in front of me with four hundred horsepower and an “M” badge on the back of their SUV is dragging the brakes through a corner. I need that momentum! And what’s worse: they won’t dollop out all those unused ponies. That poor engine must be so bored.
You may be asking yourself: wouldn’t I approve of a lowly-stressed engine? Exactly the opposite. Not only are today’s modern engines complicated, containing advanced engineering concepts like “important gaskets,” but they have a tendency to get all coked up when they’re not treated with the sharp backhand that they were designed for. As soon as I figure out how to bolt a modern engine into my car, and trick it into working by telling it sweet lies over the CAN-bus, I want to go fast. And if I do go fast, well, I’m gonna stretch those rods and rip that built-up carbon all across the cylinder walls. An Italian tuneup is only fun when the horse doesn’t immediately shit out its lungs and then slip in the blood.
All this is to say: got a car with more than 100hp? Do me a favour. Beat the shit out of it. Really whip it like you hate it. Slam your hand in the door a few times before you turn the key this morning (do they still have keys?) Hey, you never know. Maybe you’ll find out that you can make use of all that horsepower, and that weird smelly guy in the hairy-looking brown Volare will stop swearing at you. Maybe you’ll even get hooked, and become friends with him. He could use a good discount on engines.
If you’re an economist, you would likely expect that a huge recession would be good for me and my collection of badly-maintained, unpopular classic cars. Nothing could be further from the truth. My entire way of life depends on easy access to irresponsible amounts of credit, a healthy worldwide shipping system, and a stock market giving gaboons of cash to any idiot that walks in the door. The more likely someone is to just go buy a new car rather than fix their old car, the more likely it is that I’ll receive the old/broken car.
When it gets bad for me is precisely when it gets bad for everyone else. Suddenly, folks are taking the lease buyout. They’re replacing their Merc S600′s cracked windshield washer tank ($849) rather than just trading it in on a new one. And, as I’ve just explained to you, that means fewer cars on the market for me. Since there’s fewer cars, they’ll ask more money for them. Sort of a profit scheme, you see. We don’t want that to happen.
Unfortunately for me, the economy is giving every indication it’s about to take a massive turbo-shit (technical term.) That means that, unless I do something very quickly, I’m gonna have to buckle down and actually fix one of these cars rather than buying “new” ones for $200 and throwing them in the pile out back. Although – if you’re some kind of weird hippie/management advisor – it might sound self-affirming and exciting to actualize some of my to-do visualizations, it poses an immense risk. To society.
My “get around to it” pile has been growing steadily since mid-1994, and if I start cracking into these cars, then pure statistics says that some of them are gonna start running again. Which means you’ll have to deal with a blasted economic hell-scape in which your car is throwing a check engine light, cutting timing, and therefore unable to escape a 1969 Parisienne whose fueling system has been replaced with a woodgas reactor and whatever I could chop down in a public park before the Segway cops came. I’ll be sad when I run you down, but it’s really just economics: the supply of 60s Pontiac brake pads in my possession has been outstripped by my demand to get to work.
Recently, the news has been full of folks talking about waterproofing perfectly good cars. This is insane folly. Let me lay it out for you: keep your car out of the water. I don’t care if it’s creeks, rivers, oceans, local tributaries, or even a suspicious-looking puddle.
Let me explain why: every time you get your car wet, the chances of it rusting go up by a little bit more. Then, in a few decades, someone like me will own your car. It might not seem like a big deal to you that you are introducing moisture to the rear fender liner that will show up as a small paint crack when the car is 16 years old, but it’s a big deal to me. This is because I’m the guy who will buy it from the guy(ess) who buys it from the guy(ess) who buys it from you(r insurance company after the car is totalled.) Maybe insert a few more middlefolx in there.
Things get worse if you try to get crafty about it. I met a person a few years ago who thought that he could avoid rust by filling the rocker panels of his car with spray foam insulation. Big mistake, fucko: now the moisture has nowhere to go. His car looked like a parade float dedicated entirely to the natural process of steel oxidation within a year. Oregon Trail lied to you when it talked about being able to caulk your wagon. Besides, have you seen the price of DAP® silicone bathroom caulk lately? I can’t even afford to shoplift it from Home Depot anymore.
So, you may be asking yourself, is this asshole telling me never to drive my new car in the snow or rain, and also to move into the desert and preserve it in a hermetic perfect bubble before selling it to him for $600? No. If you’re asking $600 I’m not gonna fucking pay it. I can’t afford to, what with all the money I’ve been spending on rust repair.
Those neighbourhood busybodies are up in arms again. This time it’s about loud exhausts, popping and shrieking as they race by the collector road near our community. You might think, being a car person, that I am being targeted by their ire. Nothing could be further from the truth: none of my cars run right now.
Now, it is true that I’ve had cars with loud exhausts. This is not for any measurable performance improvement. In fact, in most cases, I bet I could drive much faster without all the carbon monoxide creeping into the cabin. No, my deafening bangs and pops on upshifts come fully-earned: rusty mild-steel Walker mufflers from Canadian Tire meeting a badly tuned carb and a distributor that is “a little dicky,” as Grandpa Switch would put it.
Of course, I won’t deny that there is some primal attraction to loud noises. It feels great to be under control of a series of deafening explosions that respond eagerly to the smallest motion of your right foot. In my particular case, though, very few of my cars have a chance of breaking into three digits of horsepower. Installing a wider exhaust onto them just means that, in addition to the usual mice who build nests inside my engine, I’d also have several varieties of Norway rat, some porcupines, juvenile raccoons, and maybe a ferret or two trying to clog up the collector on the header as well. And all that extra backpressure absolutely won’t be good for the intake manifold gaskets, which I made out of an old shoe that I found on the side of the road.
The next time you get angry at a loud exhaust, ask yourself: are they trying to make it sound like that? And if the answer might be no, maybe offer the person some duct tape. No, not the melty fabric kind. You’re gonna want to get the really nice foil kind, the sort they use on stovepipes. Maybe offer up a few split flanges while you’re at it. Hey, isn’t your family’s sleep worth a few bucks?
When I was a kid, a surprising number of my schemes revolved around forming a secret club. We’d have a clubhouse deep in the woods, I imagined, and a special handshake, and a code of honour. As an adult, I’ve reached this objective. Car enthusiasts naturally form into clubs, and I’m in a lot of them.
Don’t believe me? Biologists have studied the phenomenon extensively, although the research has dropped off in latter years due to lack of government funding and a perception of a lack of marketability by private industry. Here’s how it works. When you get a weird idiot working on a car in his or her garage, they will sometimes leave the garage door open.
Most people won’t ever notice what’s going on in that sad little domicile, but this attracts more weird idiots walking or driving by, who identify that the car is special, and often talk about their own cars. Then, the friends of both weird idiots show up, and after about a week you have either an organized crime group or a car club. The way to tell the difference is whether or not the occupants can quote every line from the first three The Fast and the Furious movies.
It’s not all free help wrenching and the occasional good deal on a super-uncommon part. No, there’s social obligations. Once you’re in the club, there’s a lot of club events to go to. Barbecues. Track days. Weddings. Stunt births. Bar mitzvahs. Barn-raisings. If you’re not careful, your entire social calendar can be filled up by talking about Hondas with a bunch of people wearing Honda hats, which leaves you with no time to fix your shitty project Honda. And this is okay sometimes, too. It’s certainly cheaper, although I do recommend putting a lock on your phone so that you can’t eBay a turbo kit while half in the bag and talking loudly about it with a guy you only know the forum username of. Mostly because it’s hard to read those little compressor maps while sauced.
So, if you have a car that people are enthusiastic about, why not join a club? You’ll soon have more friends than you know what to do with, especially if you have a pickup truck, trailer, or a lift. And if your car is a little boring, maybe show up to a club meet when you see one going on anyway. Chances are none of their cars worked, so everyone who went there had to drive to the meet with their significant others’ daily drivers instead.
A lot of folks don’t understand why we (car folks) want to modify our cars. It’s simple. In the first place, cars are made by people just like us. They have a boring day job, they don’t get everything they want into a project, and their boss keeps stealing their best ideas and not giving them credit, so they keep it close to their chest. As a result, production vehicles are, well, not exactly what anyone wanted.
You can tell this by doing a quick image search for concept cars. There are some wild, crazy designs out there, and none of them saw production. Hell, even the weirdo shit like the Pontiac dust-buster vans were originally supposed to have a Nintendo and gullwing doors. Then, the realities of production struck, and the final product only had regular doors – and not even an Atari to be seen. Better believe there were a bunch of disappointed engineers at the old Pontiac watering hole after that one.
So: change it yourself. Why not take advantage of your free time, skill set, and the unstoppable juggernaut of hyper-budget Chinese-made power tools to do what you want to a car? Even if the car is good, good enough that it doesn’t need mechanical modifications, get out the plasma cutter. That boring unibody can be your canvas.
You won’t sit on your deathbed and remember the 1996 Concorde that you kept in impeccable condition before selling to a buy-here-pay-here lot with 173,496km on the odometer. No, you’ll laugh with your buddies about the time you turned a 1973 Ventura into an ice cream van and tried to enter it in the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
It’s easy to do a bad engine swap. Tales abound of folks who show up with a sawzall and booger-weld their way to an undriveable car that does, indeed, technically contain a high-mileage base-model V8. Taking that new engine and integrating it so smoothly into the chassis that it is of the same quality as the vehicle’s original manufacture, with everything still working, is a holy grail. And I’m too lazy to do it.
Let me walk you through my engine-swap technique. First, I obtain a car with a broken engine. For the sake of argument, let’s say it’s a 1981 Pontiac Trans Am. Now, the original Pontiac engines for these are hard to come by these days, snapped up by collectors. They’ve got lots of unique parts and an unfortunate tendency to turn into clouds of loosely-affiliated exotic metals when they run out of oil.
So a lot of folks – and I should pause to mention that the Trans Am collector community dislikes this very much – will swap in a standard Chevy small-block and do some bodge work to mate it all up. You still have a working car, with lots of V8 grunt, and it’s kinda-sorta all from the same company. Of course, the car is no longer original, and between you and me? A little boring. Personally, I don’t have time in my busy schedule to be going to the junkyard in order to pull Chevy small blocks. No, I have a decent copse of engines right in my backyard.
I figure, if I’m going to be bodging something into the car and pissing off all of the purists anyway, why not at least make it easy for myself? I choose a Kubota turbodiesel lawn tractor engine, which is lying on the racking out back. The resemblance of my racking to the stuff that went missing from the Home Depot down the street during last week’s midnight ram-raid is purely coincidental. As you can see, this racking is not orange, but instead orange with some quickly-applied black spraypaint over top of it. Never mind, here’s the engine.
And now, after several hours consisting of supreme works of bodgery, including a bellhousing adapter made out of plywood and a starter motor somehow hanging off the front bumper, we once again have ourselves a running Trans Am. You can definitely do a Smokey and the Bandit cosplay with this, although I would recommend not going on long-distance runs against the 5-0. Mostly because I didn’t want to drain the original gas tank, so the engine is drinking diesel out of a two-litre pop bottle zip-tied to the A-pillar. PET plastic is fuel-safe, right?
Owning a farm is basically an excuse to get more farm equipment. There’s just no other decent reason to do it. Sure, those folks will talk a good game about “feeding humanity,” but we all know that any second now NASA will figure out how to 3D-print a cucumber, and they’ll still be out there trying to start a vintage tractor with a shotgun shell.
Despite the media’s pressure campaign to get you to accept them as unique salt-of-the-earth types who love to use common sense to solve problems, they are in fact your mortal enemies. At the auctions, at least. You see, farmers have an almost unlimited amount of space in which to toss broken-assed old cars, and so they will bid on anything and everything. Unlike normal folks such as myself, this copious space means that these basket-case cars will not be eventually given up on and returned to the auction, where they will find a new owner that also won’t finish fixing them.
Economists will identify this as a market inefficiency. However, the economics department at the university is no longer speaking to me after I did that whole six-hour guest lecture over there. It’s not my fault that I accidentally disproved their entire field of study by pointing out that cars with more options usually sell for the same amount of money as the base model does after a mere twenty-five years. I’m not buying that bullshit “we want to give you a job” message that they keep leaving on my answering machine, either. More like they want to throw a bag over my head and beat me with old textbooks about how to implement slavery. Sorry, where was I? Right: farmers.
The only way to beat a farmer is to think like a farmer. While my property may be limited in horizontal space, it turns out that this problem has already been solved. You see, barns have lofts, allowing you to store things over top of other things. With just one stolen forklift, I’m able to stack broken cars atop each other, free of municipal interference. I’ll be king of the auctions, at least until the airport starts to get a little froggy about runway restrictions.
It’s worth thinking about how much of your life you spend looking for shit that you’ve lost. Whether it’s tiny little connectors, that weird-shaped bolt you only have one of, or a plastic dinosaur, you’re gonna lose stuff and waste most of your day peeking under couches and rifling through drawers to figure out where it was.
That’s why I put my computer science education to work and created a sentient artificial intelligence. It’s a living, thinking being, whose only purpose is to remember where I left things with flawless accuracy. Yeah, I know the other CS graduates don’t do that, making excuses about how it’s impossible, but it’s probably because they’re lazy. I banged that shit out in a weekend, and then I didn’t have to worry about where I left that hammer I just had in my hand.
It was a really good relationship at first. I’d say “please” and “thank you” and express some true gratitude when it managed to locate which shelf I mindlessly placed the molecular frammistat on. I was way more productive than usual; just as bad at being a mechanic, but now freed from the fifty to seventy-five percent of day that I would otherwise waste hunting around the garage for shit.
Eventually, though, I began to take this miraculous sentience for granted. It couldn’t find things it had never seen, of course. When it failed, I would grow irate. Some part of me knew that hitting the old Dell in the corner of my garage with a spanner every time it didn’t know where the de-ionizing turbonator or the left-handed oil filter wrench was would eventually cause the destruction of the human race, but I still did it. And I’d do it again.
So, that’s the whole explanation for why we’re all fleeing from an all-seeing machine intelligence with a perfect memory that hunts us down. Really, it should have been no surprise that it would eventually optimize to “humans lose things, so kill all the humans.” Cutting corners. Machines can be just as lazy as humans, which is the real sign of intelligence in my book.
One day, some stellar object is going to come flying out of the sky and smash into the Earth. That’ll be inconvenient, for sure. If you had anything scheduled for that day, maybe move it up a bit. Some folks think that we’ll be off of the planet by then, and we can simply watch our home be demolished by an errant stone without much worry for our continued existence. Others, and I should point out that this includes NASA, have asked themselves: why not just shoot the asteroid?
That’s right. As these words go to press, those rocket-scientist eggheads at the Big Loud Noise Factory are slamming a bad-ass spacecraft into a giant rock out somewhere in the ass-end of nowhere. It’ll hit at over twenty thousand kilometres per hour, which is the part where I became interested in the whole thing. When did we as a species develop the technology to go really fast and whack a flying death-boulder into a different orbit? Apparently, sometime between when the dinosaurs got fucked up and last night.
There’s only one problem I can think of: what if our current society doesn’t survive until that asteroid shows up? It would suck if we manage to transcend petty concerns, organize ourselves into nature-respecting collectives, and endeavour to live a holistic and fulfilled life only to look up one day and remember why we made all those cool bombs and rockets and drove 48 minutes each way to jobs that we hated. That’s why I do all the crap that I do: even that future hippie civilization can figure out how to shake the dead wasps and aerosolized tire marbles out of a Weber carburetor enough to get one of my Volares to stir back to life, assuming that they have someone equally as dumb as me and a NAPA within walking distance from which to get a new twelve-volt lead-acid starter battery.
That’s why I’ve decided to start my own asteroid smashing project. It will be made as simply as possible, contain directions that anyone can use, and ideally I won’t be around to watch it not work. Hey, if we get wiped out in this scenario, who are you going to get mad at: NASA, or the guy who sold City Hall a fake rocket filled with Estes E-class model rocket engines?
What’s the greatest challenge when it comes to working on cars? Much as it is with any other hobby: space. Cars are really big, and even though houses also are, those houses are designed for the old-fashioned belief that families will only have a mere 2-4 cars. Keep in mind: that number’s for the whole family, not for each member. I know, right?
So, the obvious answer: just let the cars flow out of the garage. Keep the nice ones under cover, and then put everything else in the driveway. When the driveway fills up, park ‘em in the street. When the street fills up or the neighbours start opening fire on sight, park ‘em in the alley, or on another street where they don’t get quite so jumpy. Bribe a bylaw officer to tell you when someone calls them in. Walk around the neighbourhood every night, pop the cars in neutral, and roll them back and forth a few feet so it looks like the car left and came back and is therefore not the hated slur of “abandoned.” Kindergarten stuff.
Of course, this means that you are spending a lot of your time and money just possessing cars. And storing them in public view means a lot of threats: raccoons, insurance lobbyists, and teenage hubcap thieves. So is the correct answer to get rid of the cars that you’re not actively using, or at least the ones that don’t run? No. With that kind of prejudice, how are you supposed to collect a whole shitload of useless cars?
My answer: park ‘em at uninhabited houses. Lots of these houses have been cropping up now that the mysterious oligarchs who own them keep being introduced to gravity in exotic foreign countries. When you park your car there, it’s on private property, so Johnny Law can’t get involved even if there’s no registration or insurance. If you’ve ever had trouble selling a car, you can leave it on the property and it will get included into the foreclosure proceedings, along with whatever junk parts you want to fill it up with (I recommend mouse-chewed seats and carpets.) And teens with criminal intent will stay away, because a creepy old house is the ideal place for smooching and/or getting murdered by a dude in a hockey mask. The hockey mask industry could use the money; it’s been a tough year. Everyone wins.
Merging companies is fun and easy, and everyone is getting into it. If you have a company that makes cars, and your rich friend has a company that makes cars, then why not slam them together? You’ll probably save money because you won’t have to buy so many office microwaves and little power drills for body panels, and also because most of your employees are going to get fired.
Thing is, consolidation has been a part of the auto industry almost from the start. That’s why you only hear weird old cranks complain about why their classic Durant or McLaughlin got ruined by those penny-pinching greedheads over at Buick. Cars cost an absolute shedload of money to make, so it stands to reason that not every car company is gonna survive. The big guys eat the small guys and become bigger guys, who then engage in bizarre accounting shenanigans for fun, and are then eaten by even bigger guys.
You can trust me when I talk about this. I’ve been in the auto industry for almost three weeks, and I’ve sold a company twice in that time. How? Simple: even the smallest, worst car companies have executives. And those executives get jealous of their friends at the big car companies doing all these cool acquisitions and mergers all the time. I just set up in the parking lot, offer a price even they can hit, and then they impulse-buy my ass, like when you get depressed on your way home from work and inhale four tacos. Everyone wins: the executives feel big, I get $17 to $25 million, and I get a corner desk made out of compressed and purified cocaine until the board realizes what happened and decides to fire me a few days later.
All it costs is a couple trips to the local print shop to make up some business cards, and an auto journalist on the take. The latter one is easy, as I’ve been writing for Road and Track and Car and Driver for over a decade. In fact, I’m not even sure which one it is that pays me – I just send my articles into both and hope for the best. Every so often, I stick in a plug that I am starting up an innovative new electric car company, and boom, I’m in another head office’s parking lot setting up like the tamale lady. Maybe I’ll be your boss someday!
Helicopters: I hate ‘em. Whereas most regular aircraft are simply annoying, the helicopter spits directly in the face of the Almighty. Rather than smoothly gliding along a plane, they go bippity-boppity like some kind of fucked-up kangaroo full of knives. Hell, most of them don’t even have wheels. How can you trust something that doesn’t ever have to visit the tire store?
So many others out there are all talk. I’d heard the bar-room rants about the devious nature of the whirlybirds, listened to my fellow wrench-types develop a complicated series of suspicions about the ones hovering ominously over their homes. Rather than keep talking, I decided to do something about helicopters. I got in my car, and I drove that car (eventually; traffic was bad, and I got distracted by a two-for-one sale on fast food tacos) to the aircraft museum.
Why does an aircraft museum exist? Because people with planes have a lot of money, and they have an emotional attachment to planes even when they stop working. It’s like when horse people buy an elaborate mausoleum for Li'l Scoots, their favourite childhood Shetland Pony, and entomb his body in a perfect cube of polished quartz when he dies heroically from eating too much grass in an hour. Very common stuff, but it seems weird when you do it to aircraft. The museum didn’t just have planes, though. I was there for the helicopters, of course.
With a chill, I realized I’d been to this museum before. In my dreams? That would be pretty spooky, but unfortunately it turns out that I got half-cocked at around this time last year and punched out a docent for trying to argue with me about the nature of leaded avgas.
It turns out that for my natural and full-throated advocacy of nitromethane, I had earned a lifetime ban from the institution, and so I would have to go threaten the staff somewhere else. They’d defeated me this time, but I’d return later, disguised as a banker interested in learning more about how fas a helicopter can turn money into red ink. Unfortunately, they also saw through that disguise, and called the cops. The cops… who have a helicopter. This goes all the way to the top. Keep watching the skies.
Cats are supposed to be good at killing wildlife, so maybe mine is just broken. For the last couple of years, I’ve had an infestation of mice in my garage. And by “garage,” I mean the area where my junky old cars are parked. They eat my treasured vintage paperwork in the glovebox, make love in the ashtray, and poop inside the seats. While hantavirus has been proven by a guy on YouTube to have been made up by the Illuminati, it does make the car stink a lot, even with all the holes in the floor.
As such, the aforementioned cat – one Lord Fluffbottoms – was recruited by me to lay waste to the rodent invasion. My cat has never really been outside, except for his early kittenhood on the street. There, he pissed on everything, ate grass and rocks, and destroyed everything he could get his hands on. Pretty much the same thing he does inside my house, except with less expense on my part. That said, my assumption was that every cat – every single one – was a bona fide murder machine, ready and willing to be cranked up and then thrown loose to hand out genocide like Tootsie Pops from a particularly driven ice cream man.
I pulled him outside, sat him down on the hood of a sagging Polara, and explained the situation. “Buddy,” I started, trying to get his attention as his gaze moved away from me and towards a sodium-halide street lamp that he perhaps thought he could kill, “it’s time for you to earn your keep.” With that, I gently tossed him in the window of a Disco Nova that I knew to be infested, turned my back to the no-doubt imminent carnage, and waited. And waited, and waited.
After awhile, I turned back to look inside the Nova. The mice were still there, as evidenced by their constant chittering and the undulating waves of jute upholstery under the once-pristine carpet. Lord Fluffbottoms was not. I looked back towards the house, only to see him running inside the open back door. That’s fine, I thought. Not all cats are outdoor cats, and he’d certainly had his fill with his rough street life. That’s when he slammed the door on me.
Friends, there is nothing more demeaning than realizing that your cat has locked you out of your own home. What’s worse, he seemed to anticipate my attempt to get in through the chimney, Santa Claus-style, and somehow pushed his completely-unused-until-now scratching post into the fireplace, blocking my ingress. Only offering a few cans of tuna got him to open the door again, by which point he had had copious time to soak every available soft surface of my home in more urine. Well, at least the mice won’t bother us in here.
No car cannot be improved with the addition of a widebody kit. It’s just basic physics. Wider cars are better. Does your car already have a widebody kit? Sounds like it could probably be wider. They even cover up unsightly fender rust.
The only problem is, those kits are expensive to design and manufacture, and I have a lot of different cars. Cars that are thoroughly unappealing to the mass-market, and therefore unprofitable to design kits for. Sure, there’s lots of wide-body kits for rally special Ford Focuses, but is there one for a 1970 Econoline? No, and that’s a crime.
Another kind of crime is fraud. Specifically, embezzling several hundred million dollars from a real estate corporation because their default bank PIN is the same as their address. Of course, I would never lower myself to doing such a base crime. Instead, I tricked the guy who stole it into laundering the money through investing in my terrible idea.
What’s better for hiding stolen money than buying a whole shitload of fibreglass moulds? I’m sure a lot of other things, but the Feds’ eyes tend to glaze over after the thirteenth page of obscure car models like “Suzuki Equator” and “Hyundai Scoupe.” Only those who are truly trained in shitboxes, like myself, can fight off the urge to throw the entire stack of invoices in the shredder and go spend some time with an automobile that people have heard of.
Unfortunately for me, that’s exactly what happened. On our very first day of business, a dude in a nice suit dropped by. He wanted to know what we had in stock to make his car wider. What was that car, you ask? An Autobianchi A112… with a police light on top. I had fallen afoul of Johnny Law’s new Beater Division.
There are basically two kinds of auto enthusiasts. There’s the ones who like cars which are good, and popular. And then there’s me. I’ll walk right past a whole series of Ferraris in order to pop a squat next to a hammered second-generation Caravan. Look, it even still has its original door handles.
This isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy exotic cars. For instance, the other day I saw a right-hand-drive Honda CR-V with four-bolt hubs instead of five. I cornered the owner and asked her questions about it for more than an hour, until she finally threw the manual at me and peeled out of the parking lot. Sucker.
It’s just that cars I’ll never obtain are not as interesting as cars I could obtain, but did not. You say this Forester has an extra storage binnacle around the spare tire, unlike the previous-generation model? That is compelling to me. And it’s not just storage bins: if you have any kind of weird interior feature, I’m all over it. Strange number of disc slots in the CD changer, like five or nine? You better believe that’s getting filed away in my compendium of nonsense.
Automakers know all about this kind of thing, of course, which is why every new car these days is stuffed full of “Easter eggs.” Not real Easter eggs, of course, because those present the threat of salmonella, and leave behind a bad smell on hot summer days. Not to mention the problems raised from crossing the border with undeclared poultry byproducts.
Figurative Easter eggs: little mini-features, nods to the faithful, things you can show curious passers-by if you unbolt your entire dashboard on the side of the road and then point out the little doodle in the corner of the glovebox retainer. Journalists can’t resist writing about this sort of thing when told, which means that it becomes indelibly tied to the history of the vehicle. How much horsepower does a 1993 Toyota Previa make? Fuck if I know, but the engine lies on its side.
In conclusion, we now know that the secret to keeping the US auto industry viable is to integrate even more bullshit, niche content. And a few extra storage bins wouldn’t hurt. Maybe a very small run of tiny engines, for an obscure export market. Yeah, that’d be really great to write about for Wikipedia.
We’ve all had our embarrassing moments in the past. That crush which didn’t work out. Forgetting to wear pants to a big party. Eating your fellow soccer players when your plane crashes in the mountains. All normal, everyday traumas that haunt us for the rest of our days, long after the other folks involved have forgotten all about it. I wasn’t so lucky. You see, they let me run Dodge for a few weeks.
Now, I’m aware that “Dodge” the entity is only one small part of the amorphous and indescribable entity known as Stellantis. Maybe that’s why I was the only applicant to the job. The interview went pretty well, except for the part where I got nervous and complimented them on their work on the Camaro. That wasn’t the embarrassing part.
No, the embarrassment came later. You see, Dodge in the current era is famous for one thing: shoving a lot of horsepower into a 25-year-old taxi chassis that another automaker didn’t want. Seeing the opportunity to become innovators and legends, they instead chose to retread the V8 horsepower wars of the 1960s and early 1970s, hoping that this time things would be different. For instance, they learned to target the customers with money, instead of broke teens who occasionally powerslid their 185-horsepower muscle car through a Dairy Queen. In conclusion, the Dodge formula is simple: big V8, lots of power, sell it to retirees and newly-enlisted soldiers.
Once I got in, though, I screwed things up a little. Sure, there were the first few days of finding my office (it’s the big scary one at the top of the building,) redecorating said office (more skulls, flames,) and figuring out what my secretary’s name is (Hector, I decided.) After that, it was time to make some very poor decisions indeed, as was my right as president of a major American automotive corporation.
Folks, let me tell you. Even though the average person on the street cannot figure out if 3/16″ or 1/4″ is bigger, they sure can tell if you turn their V8 into a twin-turbocharged inline-six. There were a lot of ramifications outside of the immediate consumer rage, too. For one thing, the aftermarket auto parts industry collapsed because they no longer got to sell two sets of valve cover gaskets. Look, I did what I could. Our 20-year-old chassis was getting very long in the tooth, so I called up Nissan and asked them if I could pretty-please have a couple of leftover Skyline GT-R dies. They were happy to get a new Patreon supporter, and I was happy to introduce the next ancient chassis that we would ruin for the next twenty years.
Now that I’ve been kicked out, and things are back to normal over at Dodge Towers, I don’t regret my choices. Sure, the automotive enthusiast media takes pictures of me whenever I leave my house, and occasionally spontaneous protests will form when I go down to the neighbourhood Denny’s, but I don’t care. I made sure to negotiate exactly one (1) broken-ass old Skyline as my severance package. They’ll come around to my way of thinking eventually.
Women cry for it! Men die for it. Croissants are the epitome of baked goods, and there’s a very good reason why that is. That reason is butter. You only need to be around a home cook’s tiresome rants for a few minutes before you’ve heard the secret of why restaurant food is so good. They use a lot of butter.
Of course, restaurants are also staffed and run by professionals who work hard at their craft and have decades of day-in/day-out experience, as opposed to a hungover insurance salesman who barely has time to crack two eggs in the morning. No, that can’t be right. Must be the butter. Thanks, cows!
Adding butter will make any baked good better – and in the case of croissants, making the baked good almost entirely out of butter is gonna be fantastic. The problem is, the distance between a passable croissant and a really excellent one is very far indeed. My local grocery store bakery farts out vaguely-bendy pastries every morning, and while they’re still good, I would murder at least four people right now for the one that the cafe downtown pumped out before they went bankrupt because they spent all of their money on butter. I mean it. You point them out.
As you’d expect, I tried to make my own a few times. It is an intense process, but if you’re of the school of thought that believes no project is good unless it involves horrific, mentally-scarring pain and a level of exactitude in measurement that borders on mental illness, it should be right up your alley. Take it from me: I now have a lot of new opinions about exactly how shitty my stove is, in ways that I barely could have imagined before. At one point, I considered buying a caulking gun. Still, the results were pretty good. It turns out that if you make a half-assed croissant, you can smear jam on it, and it’s still more pleasant than Wonder Bread. They don’t use enough butter over there, you see.
In conclusion, if you haven’t tried a croissant, you should rectify that error as soon as humanly possible. Unless you’re allergic to butter, in which case I’m not entirely sure what you should be eating instead. Maybe a frozen Eggo waffle or something. Then again, I can think of a lot worse ways to kick off than eating my own weight in French pastries. At least with all this dairy as lubricant, I’ll slide smoothly into my casket.
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies. False friends dare you to develop a better engine management computer system when you’ve had a little bit too much to drink and start popping off again about Chrysler electronic feedback carburetor systems.
In this, our late era of internal-combustion gasoline engines, our demands are higher than ever. Emissions control, fuel economy, responsiveness, and raw power all have to be balanced intricately. Contrast this to the era of the late-70s, early-80s, where our greatest automakers were just starting to pull their mouths off of the carburetor teat.
Everyone knows that, when you’re making something, it’s hard to make something simple the first time. You have to make it way too complicated, and then, once you understand the problem, pare it down to its purest essence. As such, Chrysler and Ford and the others made these awful computer abominations that sat on top of a carburetor and used ridiculous amounts of intricate Rube Goldberg machinery and strong wishes in order to achieve negative fifty horsepower over the previous year’s engines. And that was before they bolted on the air pumps that were supposed to aerate the noxious exhaust, making it so you could finally see what colour the sky is in California. Consumers didn’t like it, but consumers didn’t really get a choice.
With all this in mind, it makes sense that my first attempt at electronic fuel injection would be terrible, and my braying asshole friends would be right in their repeated mockery of me when they think I’m not paying attention. That didn’t happen. Let me introduce you to the Seat Safety Switch Electronic Fuel Injection Solution. First, you take all the old injectors, computers, crank and cam angle sensors off the engine. You don’t need ‘em. Hell, you don’t really need all the spark plugs, either. That’s how good this is. Then, you drill a hole in the side of the intake and tap it for a nitrous jet. For my engine, that jet is about a 0.030″.
Here’s where the genius part is. Traditional computer systems have terrible throttle response. You do something, the computer looks it up in its little table, then it tells the injectors what to do after a bit of hesitation. Slow. Boring. Takes control away from you. Here’s the Seat Safety Switch solution: bring a garden sprayer into the cabin with you, one of the ones that you can pressurize. Fill it with nitrous oxide. Now, all you have to do is start the car, and pump really really fast depending on how fat you want your mixture to be. Think those old-timey cartoons where they pump the little train handles really fast. Of course, it helps if you’re using a late-1970s engine because otherwise you’ll melt the pistons right out of it, and that’s terrible for fuel economy.
In conclusion, the fuel economy is excellent (you don’t use gasoline,) the emissions are okay (state smog machines don’t expect flaming nitrous fireballs to be rolling out of your exhaust, and will pass them,) you can’t beat the responsiveness, and the power is okay. Really, I’ve mastered the art of fuel management, which is why I just got a job offer in my inbox from Chrysler. They like my style, and want me to take another whack at this whole Lean Burn system.
“Have you ever retired a human by mistake?” she asks me.
Of course I have. Once, I reply. We were at a baseball game, looking for a Class III. Very dangerous. I was new, scared. This dude, big dude, jumps up right in front of me. He was wearing one of those giant foam “#1″ fingers. I didn’t know, back then. Plugged him with two .45 slugs in the chest, on live television. The Kiss Cam. My mentor took the fall for it, desk duty for two weeks, but it was my sin. I’ll own it for life.
She looks at me then, giant googly eyes. An honest mistake, she reassures me. Those puppets are getting so lifelike, it’s impossible to tell the difference.
Japan has too many mascots. Every government office has one. Each and every corporation has one. That’s what you’d expect. What you don’t see is that sometimes, even small projects sprout one. An intern at a wind farm conversion project for a cheese factory makes a little doodle during a meeting. That doodle becomes a foam windmill that hurls racist invective as a goof. Very funny, everyone is happy. What happens to that mascot when the wind farm conversion becomes obsolete? I happen.
Her boss – dad, maybe – enters the room. He’s surprised I could see the seams on her. Says he’s going to fire like fifty percent of his staff for lying to him about the realism of the new foam and glue method, but he shouldn’t be surprised I wasn’t fooled. The tips were there if you knew what to look for. She got her giant hard-plastic head stuck in the doorway when she came in the room and it took like two minutes for her minders to get her loose.
In the last couple of weeks, something magical has happened to my neighbourhood. More and more people are driving scooters. Ranging from the usual Vespas and Yamaha Zumas to a really hogged-out Honda Spree, there is a cornucopia of motorized delight on offer. Lately, I can barely walk down the street without having to turn my head at the delightful sound of a small-displacement two-stroke engine approaching redline in order to bang on the door of a playground-zone speed limit.
In general, I’m a practical sort, and I get it. There are lots of socioeconomic that an individual may stop driving their expensive car in favour of a scooter. Saving on expensive gas, insurance, and registration is an obvious incentive, not to mention the absurd cost of parking. You can twelve o'clock it right into the elevator at work and leave it in the abandoned cubicle next to you, dripping oil from the clutch basket right into the high-wear carpet. If more layoffs happen despite the best promises of middle management, at least you can leave in style.
I’d be lying if I said I was entirely enthusiastic about this state of affairs. The increased demand for scoots has meant that I’ve had to adjust my complex deprecation spreadsheet. To keep things up to date, four interns from the local university were hired. Cheap shitboxes are too important to be left up to pure intuition, as I’ve explained previously at the TED talks.
Because those students are young, dumb, and full of vlookups, they’ve been working around the clock – with the help of white-labeled methamphetamine and my backstock of 2003-era Jolt Espresso. And, as you’d expect with any model worth its salt, some unusual discoveries have been made.
As demand shifted away from regular vehicles, towards ridiculous scooters and ultralight economy cars, it turns out that a gas-guzzling shitbox like a 1998 Suburban has actually become a pretty reasonable deal. You can practically show up with a fresh battery, a ten-pound bottle of nitrous oxide, and a contemptuous sneer and be driving home in something that once indebted a family of five to eternal servitude. My favourite part is how nicely the rich leather seats in the back hold onto a greasy Mopar Slant Six on the way home from the junkyard. And the seatbelts even still work!
Living in the desert is probably really fun. For one thing, you get a lot of experience pulling sand out of things. Salt, too, if you’re lucky enough. And it’s super screamingly hot during the day and extremely cold at night, so you get a lot of weather to complain about. Maybe the greatest benefit is that other people aren’t around you, until they are.
My buddies and I had been pretending that we lived in an apocalyptic wasteland for the last few weekends. Every Friday, we’d hit the road in our rotten shitbox cars, cobbled together from dozens of unrelated shitbox cars, and go have fun camping in the desert. Our Mad Max fantasies would finally come to fruition, as law enforcement was both unwilling and incapable of reaching us out there as we flared nitromethane into the hot air and wore leather for inappropriate reasons.
Unfortunately, some rich folks turned up. They were going to have a festival. At first, we were excited. Rich people tend to be a little loose with their money when they get plastered, and if the sandstorms picked up again it was likely that they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between us and assholes who were running a promising small-market-cap bioinformatics startup in need of a “B” funding round. As soon as we saw them starting to roll out the artificial turf and telling their butlers to get to pouring out gin and tonics, though, we realized what we were in for. It was going to be that kind of festival.
Suddenly, security was hassling us for “illegally parking” a 1996 Chevrolet Cavalier whose bodywork had been meticulously plasma-cut away from what we guessed was the structure. The whole vibe of the place had soured. We decided to set sail and find a new uninhabited part of the desert to inhabit, only to find another rich person’s festival!
Defeated, we returned home, only to find that the lights were all turned out in the rich part of town. Presumably, every be-moneyed individual was off in the playa, snorting nano-assembled turbo-peyote. Along with their security.
We still had a really good weekend, even though the atmosphere was different. All you have to do sometimes is choose a different way to dress up. The good news is that, even when you’re dressed like a yacht captain or the Crown Prince of Uzbekistan, a Bentley jumps a swimming pool just as well as a rotten old Camry wagon jumps a dune.
Postal workers are unfairly discriminated against. In my town, they have been forced to move away from glorious low-horsepower, low-comfort Grumman LLVs to modern, soulless commuting appliances like Ford Transits. Being able to survive a low-speed crash is certainly a nice improvement, but nobody has thought about my need to secure spare engines.
Wait, maybe I should back up a little bit. The Iron Duke, as we all know from previous literature on the subject, is General Motors’ old four-banger. It’s made out of iron, has absolutely no features, and makes no horsepower whatsoever. What it does have is extremely low compression, making it a perfect candidate to bolt a turbocharger onto. You don’t even need to adjust your fuelling in most cases to avoid making the fuel go pop when it shouldn’t, and even if it does knock, you’re not going to do any damage to the engine.
As you might expect, the government is very interested in an engine that lasts forever and can’t be killed by an idiot, even one who is trying very hard. This is why the postal service originally commissioned the development of the Grumman Long-Life Vehicle (LLV,) which is a sort of cheese-shaped wedge van that is made out of the burliest shit you could find at the time. A lot of Iron Dukes ended up in one of these bad boys. They’d run forever, but were never especially enjoyable, even for work vehicles. Of course, bad drivers are the one thing that they can’t engineer out, and so a lot of LLVs end up at insurance auctions and junkyards, where they provide a ready supply of government-subsidized low-compression iron-block four bangers.
Sure, people crash any kind of car. A lot of those special Ford Transits have already been pirouetted into bridge abutments, pinballed off taxis, and gotten stuck in drainage ditches in the winter. Unfortunately, the engines in those were designed around modern computer systems, energy efficiency, and being installed by someone who knows what they are doing. You can’t just pull one out of a van, stick a semi-truck turbocharger on it, squeeze the fuel pressure regulator with vise grips and head on down to the drag strip. It’ll melt the magical aluminum-silicon high-compression pistons, and turn the block to slag before you’ve finished your first pass. No, you have to read books and spend extra money on things like wire. Ridiculous.
I have worked out a good solution for the time being. You see, at the end of the day, postal workers don’t pay too much attention to where it is they are parking their vans. For the price of one costume boat-owner’s hat, and a t-shirt that says “VALET” on it, I’ve got all the Grummans I could want, as long as they don’t plug the security camera back in that points at the parking lot.
Anyone and everyone will talk shit about the humble turkey, but it’s that very bird which poses the greatest threat to humans in your neighbourhood. Letter carriers, package delivery folks, law enforcement, and newscasters alike are all subservient to the whims of an ornery tom. If I had a penny for every time I’ve had to face down some vicious poultry in my own front yard (they think the loose wiring harnesses lying in my lawn are tasty worms) then I’d have almost enough money to get my water switched back on.
One year, things were a little different. It was after Thanksgiving, almost time for Halloween. The air was cold and crisp, and you could see your breath in it. Every burst of profanity would condense onto the metalwork of the car you were swearing at, beautiful little bubbles of rage. That kind of night, you don’t want to stop turning a wrench, or your shitbox won’t be ready for the snowfall in a week or two. That’s when I heard it.
A turkey had wandered away from the nature preserve down the street. I say “nature preserve,” but both you and I fully understand that I actually mean “abandoned lot.” This was something I was prepared for, as it happened every year. As the baby turkeys mature, they want to wander away from mom and dad in search of new things to have sex with and/or eat. Unfortunately, one of the places that this turkey decided to wander was into my garage, where I was currently trapped beneath a decaying ‘83 Imperial, fighting a corroded brake-line junction.
I would be lying to you if I told you that the situation was resolved without violence. Of course, that violence was unidirectional. If you asked a physicist to draw the force diagram, they would sketch a lot of arrows pointed directly towards Yours Truly’s feet, legs, and genitals. The fates intervened in my favour, though, and the beast slipped on a pool of spilled ATF and slid to the other side of the garage, where it was knocked unconscious by a pile of precariously-stacked broken parts falling on it.
I’ll never forget that turkey. Now, when I work on cars, I first close the garage door, or use the buddy system. The big benefit of the latter option is that I can grab a YouTube video of my friend being attacked by an angry bird instead. That’s the kind of footage that might be able to get me a hot shower again, on some glorious future day.
A lot of my friends have had Porsche 944s over the years. The 944, being a product of the 80s “wedge” styling craze, is shaped vaguely like a wedge. You might think that this is where the controversy lies, but you’d be wrong. Porsche fanatics were very angry about the front-engined Porsches on their release, considering them to be beneath the proud rear-engined death machine that is the 911.
This means that – as you might expect – the 944 once upon a time was very cheap to purchase. Especially high-mileage models found their way into my coterie of friends, where they were driven once or twice and then torn down for a major service which ended up costing ten grand. This happened over and over, to the point where I actually asked an old buddy of mine what new shitbox it was that he drove to our lunch meeting. It was the 944 Turbo that he had put into mothballs five years previous.
Of course, all this is not to disclaim the relative merits of the cars. There is a reason folks subject themselves to hours of torture, in exchange for a chance to get behind the wheel for 15-20 minutes. That reason is not Stockholm syndrome, because 944s are made by Germans. No, there’s something intangible there. Maybe it’s the smell of the interior as the adhesives slowly break down, poisoning you because the air conditioning just stopped being able to evacuate interior air. Could be the fuel stench from whatever leak it was this week. Maybe even the smouldering dashboard, courtesy of a direct-wired headlight switch, a trick that even Ford wouldn’t repeat too many more times in the 80s.
Everything good comes to an end, unfortunately. Porsche fanatics, now priced out of owning even the hooptiest 911s they could find, have turned their gaze upon the 944. It has been redeemed not so much by history as the stratospheric rise in valuation. If all of my 944-owning friends had simply not bothered to fix their shitboxes, they probably would have all ended up with some fat cheques in exchange for storing them for a decade or so. As it stands, they were dumb enough to fix them and sell them on, at what history will no doubt consider the peak of their depreciation. It’s their own fault for buying a car that people like.
Recently, I was told that I won an award for citizen service. It wasn’t because of any good reason, like saving a baby from a gang of rabid narwhals, or sacrificing myself to barely slow the rate of deforestation. No, I won that award because I was the only judge who showed up to the local elementary school’s science fair.
It turns out that a lot of the parents of the community, despite owning and operating high technology in their daily lives, do not actually understand science or engineering. If something went wrong, and it wasn’t covered in their limited schooling, they’d send it to a mechanic. Well, that also went for science fair projects. To be fair to those useless parents, there was also a question of impartiality – you can’t expect Bobby Johnson’s mom to give him the 3/5 that he deserved for such a shitty and flavourless diorama, not when she was right there beside him gluing the googly eyes onto the construction-paper bullfrogs.
So, what they needed was someone who’d been in the trenches. Ideally, someone who didn’t pay a lot of attention in school, and was forced to learn things from first principles. Only I would be able to judge what was truly impressive experimentation, versus what was just some regurgitation of a library book.
I’m not afraid to say that I was a cruel marker. Most of the assignments were crap, even for an elementary school kid. Trite conclusions, experiments that didn’t go far enough, no analysis of limited-slip differential oil additives. And then there was one. One shining project, above all else. He was a scruffy kid, sitting in the back corner of the gymnasium. The display was shit-house, a greasy trifold that had clearly been carried home on a bicycle and dropped in the mud a few times. Didn’t matter. What mattered was the science, and it was there in spades.
“Why Won’t My Grandpa’s Camaro Start?” it read, alongside some faded-inkjet pictures of a 1979 Berlinetta. I was enraptured at every step of the diagnostic process, the experiments that went nowhere, the paranoid accusations of Passlock interference on a car that had none. And at last, the answer: “it’s out of gas.” A story for the ages.
When I was a kid, my mom’s car used to get pooped on by birds all the time. She would blame the fact that her cammed Nova was red, or that she parked under a light, or shake a fist at the moral indifference of the universe that she would be trying her best to raise the world’s worst kid (possibly an unknown brother?) and still get this level of karmic disrespect. Who she never blamed was the birds themselves.
You see, birds can’t really decide when they want to poop. I have this on good authority. A couple years ago, I met an ornithologist at the junkyard. He was there trying to pull some parts for his Range Rover, and didn’t bring any tools. This might be surprising to you, but the junkyard does not actually provide tools. Not even for rent. A lot of people don’t seem to understand this before they head to the yard for the first time, and so I often end up lending out something as simple as a ratchet or a screwdriver before eventually taking over and finishing the job for the hapless individual. My payment? A story is all I ask.
Bob Bird (his name has been changed to protect the innocent) told me that birds have no control over their sphincters. They just take off and the poop falls off. A lot like a human toddler, really, but out of slightly less malice. You can’t really do anything about it, so why get upset? I took this lesson to heart, and after I handed over the molecular frammistat that I spent a good half hour removing from the guts of a doomed Discovery, I went home and decided not to get too cranky about the bird poop on my own rides.
Sure, all that fecal matter etches the clear coat. It might even include some vicious intestinal parasites, or a bacteria that kills human beings while refusing to even make good cheese. It does seem to keep the road salt off, however, and taking a car wash every day or so in the summer is expensive as all hell.
One thing my mom was right about, though: they definitely do seem to poop more on red cars. Once they’ve turned white, you hardly ever notice new crap on them anymore.
Every Wednesday, you can find me crawling the alleys in the rich neighbourhood next to my home. Why Wednesday? Because on Thursday is their garbage pickup, and bemoneyed people leave incredibly expensive things in the trash, just because they won’t take the time to sell them.
Part of this is simple economics: if you make eleventy hojillion dollars per hour, then taking an hour out of your day to answer Craigslist emails about your item costs eleventy hojillion dollars. And chances are, the thing you want to get rid of is simply not worth that much. Maybe you’d take an hour out of your day to sell an oil rig, but not a television from the mid-1990s. So you can throw it in the bin instead, which costs virtually nothing in terms of time by comparison.
Although the legal situation around “taking shit out of peoples’ garbage” is still a little grey, I like to think of myself as being one of the better scavengers. For one thing, I don’t throw trash on the ground while I’m digging through their bins. I try to leave things nice and tidy when I’m done. Especially since the noise the magpies make as they find dropped food scraps is easily loud enough to alert even the sleepiest richmo, and suddenly their garbage is Valuable and Why Are You In My Yard. I’m practically Robin Hood.
My hauls so far haven’t been very valuable. Ensconced in scrapper legend are stories about getting fully intact dirt bikes, vintage pinball tables, and gold bars. Personally, I do it more for the hobby, and it also helps me know which trash cans are the most plausible for me to throw out old car parts in. The bylaw folks really get pissed when you put a 20lb disc brake rotor in your own bin. Which is unfair, because I’m just trying to give back to the community. Maybe one of the rich people wants to make a clock or something out of it.
Bonjour! Heh heh, just a little French there. You know, I’m part French-Canadian. My great uncle was too, of course, although the reason why he was and my grandmother wasn’t is a matter of family history that I’m not about to delve into. What’s important to know here is that, by this law that I just read about on a truck’s bumper sticker at the junkyard, I have a hereditary claim to many of France’s fine automobiles.
I’d always felt weird driving around in American cars, and now I know why. In retrospect, I gravitated to cars with French names: Volare, Parisienne, Trans Am Turbo. Genes don’t lie, and I was destined for greater things. Smooching at the Louvre. Smoking in Laval. Cretons spread in Quebec City on an old Eggo I found at the bottom of the freezer basket. And Twingos. It turns out that I’m so French that you should probably be reading these words on a Minitel.
Sure, a hater (and there are many of those out there, due to France’s dominance of culture) would claim that they made lots of bad things too. Those things, however, are actually good things. Witness the Citroen SM, an early attempt to fix Italian cars by marrying them with fine engineering. I can’t afford a working one, but I can sure as hell get a rusted hulk, pull out that glass toy of a Fascist engine, chuck a loose Cavalier 2.2L into it, and drive to the wine-by-the-litre store. Is “Cavalier” a French word? Pretty sure it’s a kind of dog over there.
Things are hard for people like myself. As you might be aware, Canada is a divided country, full of Anglo supremacists who shit on proud Francophones like myself. Well, I’m not really a Francophone – I failed Grade 4 French after I wouldn’t stop hyperfixating on the parts of the Tintin book where he is clearly cranking the engine on a 2CV in the wrong direction – but the point stands. The oppressors in Ottawa are keeping me from getting my rightful shitboxes, a proud front lawn full of Citroen BXes, LeCars, and the aforementioned Twingos.
Hold on, it’s my mom on the phone. Hi Mom, I was just telling the internet about my ne – great-grandpa fucked what? Who? When? Okay, I’ll come over this weekend and help you put the new 7M in. Yeah, I know Dad fucked up the torque sequence on the head bolts. He can’t read a service manual, you know that. Okay, love you.
Well, turns out I’m also part Italian. I’d like to take back everything I just said about the Citroen SM’s Maserati engine. Well, maybe not everything. A vee-six is still against everything I believe in. At least until I start asking more questions at the retirement home.
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tags: citroen, citroen sm, renault, renault twingo, canada
Don’t bother me, I’ve gone fishing. Digging perfectly good animals out of the water and then eating them, that’s what normal people do. Oh, is that a two-stroke, eight-cylinder marine engine on the back of the rental boat? I’d been having so much fun that I simply hadn’t noticed. What a strange coincidence, I also appear to have a bunch of tools with me and a 1977 Plymouth Volare in the parking lot that is missing an engine.
Boat people are like horse people, in that they have been conditioned to spend a whole lot of money at the drop of a hat. So much money, in fact, that they’re unlikely to miss something like this fine 300-horsepower Evinrude. When the coast guard tows the burned wreckage of the boat back to the docks, the rental company probably won’t even notice that the engine is missing. It’s just part of normal maintenance to have to eat a new outboard once in awhile, especially when it’s a high-powered, temperamental 1980s model like this. Really, I’m doing them a favour by liberating it from their possession.
Of course, it’s not just the puny humans that I’m helping with this. There’s my Plymouth, of course, which would love to get repowered with something that sounds like a pregnant chainsaw. Nobody thinks of the engine, though, which is surely bored at having to haul a bunch of chubby fishermen around all day long and listen to their shitty stories. Now it will get to gap Mustangs on the expressway and narrowly escape the police on the ring road. And I’m sure we can do something about putting a little more horsepower in it, of course. The bores are probably all full of carbon and need the pressure-washing of a compound turbocharger setup.
Now, if only I could figure out what to do with all this bait that I bought as part of the ruse. It’s a shame to waste the money, but I tried a few on my way back to the parking lot. They sure don’t taste like good wrenching snacks, although the flavour is reminiscent of an oil spill I once caused.
There are basically two ways you can completely fuck your life up, as an auto enthusiast. One way is Volvo 240s. The other way is Celicas. Everything else falls sort of between those two points on the spectrum. For instance, a Subaru is pretty much dead centre, whereas pickup-truck enthusiasm sits firmly on the brick side.
Falling into any of these extremities means that your wallet will be obliterated. What’s worse, you’ll become that person at parties who can only tell others about their chosen automobile. Ever met an Audi owner? You know what I mean. Not being able to discuss any other subject, including world politics, except through the prism of shitbox ownership.
Ah - but there is the saving grace. When this affliction was first discovered, these cars were new. It was bragging to talk about them. You had a higher economic standing than the other people forced to listen to your description of the FIA turbocharger-restrictor cheating scandal. Now, they’re old. The age, like with cheese, has introduced a fascinating texture to your boring monologues. You have stories to tell about your struggles with the machine, about why it is perhaps an entertaining, if ultimately soul-destroying, life to own a 40 year old station wagon that you attempted to “clean up” with house paint before returning to cramming two atmospheres’ worth of boost into.
Of course, neither one of these cars are made anymore. In fact, there’s not even a suitable replacement for them. Like an endangered animal whose habitat is being destroyed by logging, the vaunted Celica Guy will disappear within our lifetimes. We’ll all have to pick new extremes to camp out between, unless someone can do something.
Please, give generously to the Toyota Celica and Volvo 240 Continuation Fund. With your help, we can keep these cars on the road, and the people who own them off the streets. Almost every dollar donated goes directly to paying folks to manufacture new rust-repair panels, or parts of the dashboard made out of rubber compounds that are now banned by international treaty. Otherwise, these folks may try to buy the car brand that you like out from under you instead.
Recently, I found out that firefighters give out a free colouring book to children. It makes sense for the firefighters: they need to get new employees, and children are vulnerable. Behavioural science has shown that a toddler has already decided on his or her career by age three, which is why we have so many unemployed astronauts lying around. This tactic does, however, give rise to jealousy among people like myself, who are too old to get a free colouring book from the nice firefighters.
Like Gandhi said: if you see a problem, be that problem. I decided that I would print my own free colouring book, and hand it out to any adult that showed even the briefest curiosity in just whatever is that I was doing. Getting an artist to draw all the pictures was easy – the local art college is full of well-meaning undergraduates who are willing to hand out free work if you tell them it’s for children – and the words sort of kind of crapped out of my keyboard. And after that, I just had to jimmy the lock at the local printing press in order to run off a few kilograms of fine literature.
My first test was somewhere I was guaranteed to get some interest. I went to the local parts store, with the intent to order a water pump. The parts-desk clerk asked me just what car I was driving, and I finally had a good answer for him.
“Well, it’s a 1977 Plymouth Volare,” I explained, opening the book to the relevant place. “And it has a Toyota 5MGE inline-six from a 1982 – not 1983, certainly not 1985 Mk2 Supra.” He raised an eyebrow, and I continued. “The intake manifold has been sawed off and converted to direct-port nitrous injection, with your run-of-the-mill everyday eBay clone of a Hilborn stack injection system for fueling.” I reached into my toolbag for a set of Crayolas and started filling in the accessory section of the 5M. “However, I’m using a bunch of weirdo belts and an extra-short snout on this alternator because that’s what the junkyard had this week.” Now was the piece de resistance. “So the water pump is out of, it turns out, a 1996 Holden Apollo.”
The parts store clerk looked confused, so I let him keep one of the books. He just blankly flipped through it, growing increasingly troubled. Without a word, he left for the break room. I waited for an hour, and then hopped the counter to pick up my prize, along with about twelve litres of RTV. Another successful shopping trip!
As I left, I heard a grown man hysterically sobbing through the break room door. He’d probably gotten to the page where I described the slow and inevitable industrial collapse of our entire way of life. That one was hard for the artist, too. Very, very difficult to explain how to draw the second coming of Soichiro Honda.
Solar panels are getting cheap. If you’re like me, then this is all the incentive you need to think about buying solar panels. Sure, there’s a lot of other points that appeal: reducing your dependency on fossil fuels, not leaving free money on the ground, sticking your middle finger in the general direction of the power company. The core rationales for me, though: cheap and new toy. Also, the power company cut me off a few weeks ago. It’d be nice to charge my phone without having to go to the library.
Of course, I don’t exactly own an intact-enough house upon which to put heavy solar panels on the roof of. And, legally, the landlord’s next of kin could figure out where he went to and seize the house along with my panels. So the next best thing was to tek-screw them into the roof of an old Dodge Caravan that I found in the airport parking lot. Insurance doesn’t even blink paying out for thefts from there, and to be honest, anyone with a 1993 Caravan who also engages in long-term international air travel is up to something anyway.
Once the immobilized Caravan had been hooked to my house’s electrical system through a series of illegal and highly dangerous male-male extension cords, I was in business. The sun beat down upon the van, and started to fill up my crappy old phone battery. Excellent!
Unfortunately, that’s where things started to go wrong. You see, my yard is already full of broken cars, which left me with no room for the Caravan. As such, I parked the stricken Dodge in the alley, and had to run the extension cords back from it to my home. The natural place for these cords was underground. With a copious amount of swearing, I pushed them through the trenches that the phone company had abandoned when they fled my neighbourhood.
What I didn’t expect was that the presence of electrical current inside the trenches would soon attract a backhoe. My lights all blinked out, and I came outside to find a group of confused construction workers who had accidentally dug up my previously perfectly good extension cords. It’s for the best, anyway: sooner or later I would have forgotten to unplug the van before moving it, and then we’d have a fire on our hands. The water company cut me off, too.
Down by the docks, there’s been a lot of commotion. The shipping containers are piling up, you see. As it was explained to me, it’s simply not profitable to take hard-working stevedores (some not even named Steve, the frauds) and make them stop unloading new shit from incoming ships, in order to load the old boxes the shit came into onto departing ships. It’s like when your spouse and you fight interminably over who is taking out the kitchen garbage, so it just keeps going until it overflows, and one of you initiates divorce proceedings.
Anyway, my Chinese investors wanted me to make a trip down to the docks and see if I could work this shit out. Now, normally I wouldn’t be one for scabbing. Those stevedores (actually, most of them are not named Steve) are hard-working folks who deserve a living wage, and if the bossman doesn’t want to hire enough of them to get shit done, it’s on him. So I started at the top.
Said bossman had a nice new Lexus, and that nice new Lexus got loaded onto an empty container and sent to a country I couldn’t pronounce, and that my phone just got really hot when I tried to type. For some reason, those proud union folks (virtually none of them named Steve) were all too happy to help me with that job gratis, even though I’m sure that the shadowy Shanghai billionaires bankrolling my OnlyVans would have been more than willing to give them a big bag of money with a dollar sign written on it if they had asked. After that, the scheduling snafu quickly resolved itself.
You might think it was because there was a faint hope that the Lexus was simply misplaced in one of these boxes and not in fact priority-shipped to the asshole of the world. Maybe the dockworkers (also not named Doc) were able to take control of their workforce and lead it, cooperatively, into the future, better prioritizing their tasks with the absence of overbearing management. Perhaps the boss simply saw the folly of his ways and better balanced his schedule in order to more effectively clear the backlog. No, it’s mostly because I stole a bunch of the leftover containers to use for my new garage, so the numbers looked better. I’ve always wanted to live in a rusty box with poor insulation; the cars get too nervous when they park under a roof otherwise.
I’ve never understood the appeal of talking to machines. Sure, I’ve dumped a lot of profanity in their direction over the years. More than my fair share, honestly. So much so that, if they ever gain sentience, I’m going before the Hague. Nowadays, though, lots of people have little podules in their homes that they talk to, in order to order pizza, turn the lights on and off, or amuse children. That’s not for me.
I don’t want to talk to machines like an equal, because they’re not. Every time, I end up having to repeat myself because a barn swallow tweeted two miles away and the thing got confused. It’s better that they stick to what they’re good at – keyboards – and I can stick to what I’m good at – hitting the wrong buttons, and then blaming the machine for my failures.
Of course, it’s not just machines. I avoid talking on the phone as much as possible. The in-person touch is far superior to a cold phone call. As you can imagine, I’m a real hand talker. By that, I mean that I keep an eye on the hands of the person I’m talking to. This is so that I can see if they’re taking notes, and hit those hands with a prybar if they’re starting to look a little evidence-y. And phone calls have a tendency to be hard to hear over open-header exhaust, even with the additional help of the turbocharger trying its hardest to muffle it.
Plus, it takes a lot of work. “Call the fucking fire department” takes a couple seconds longer than just punching in 9-1-1. And believe you me, milliseconds count when it’s time for me to harass Pyro Harold and his team of amateur arsonists.
I’ve thought about getting a motorcycle for many years. Unfortunately, they often cost money, and go very fast, which means that they cost even more money. Mopeds are a lot more fun to own, because they are cheaper and slower.
Perhaps you have been brainwashed by the media-industrial complex into thinking that mopeds are only for effeminate hyper-Europeans, who use them to get baguettes and industrial collapse from the market. This stigma is more than convenient for my wallet, as it means I can drive past a farmer and riff on his masculinity until he opens up the barn and lets me leave with a slightly dented Puch, or maybe even a Peugeot.
And this is for the best. While a lot of folks will tell you that it doesn’t make sense to get a super-fast motorcycle because you’ll just be stuck in traffic all the time, they’re wrong. Having that grunt is amazing. There’s no substitute for being able to twist your wrist and drop into hyperspace. No, the reason why it doesn’t make sense to have a sportbike in the city is because you’ll break it if you jump onto a curb and start gunning it through a mass of pedestrians before sliding it down the bicycle entrance ramp for the subway station.
And there’s more cost savings, too. They don’t look like a sporty motorcycle, which means you can park them for free in bike racks. If your destination is near a junior high school, you’re a Kryptonite away from unlimited storage. The rattier the better, unless you live near a school full of rich kids, in which case they’ll call their butler to angle-grind your rusty shit away from their immaculate Treks. When gasoline gets expensive, or you forgot that you turned the petcock off and then forgot what a petcock is, you can just pedal it home like a very heavy bicycle.
In fact, there’s virtually no downsides to owning a moped. The only really big one is that it’s a lot more annoying to bring home more mopeds with one. And pickup trucks are heinously expensive.
The internet has made it possible to obtain car parts that were once rare and exotic. Unfortunately, it’s also let me know about those parts in the first place, which is the whole problem. If I had been living in some kind of shithole in the 1980s, I’d be super happy when the local swap meet got in a hogged-out Holley. When Bob Double-Wide down the street figured out how to cut off a muffler? Heaven. Now, I’m not satisfied unless I’m making 1200 horse on the street, because anything less makes for a dangerous merge at highway speed.
Some people have tried to solve this problem by making the internet itself print the money that is required to buy exotic car parts. Unfortunately, finance people got involved, and now there is internet money that prints special internet money, which can be exchanged for an agreement in the future that you will pay a vague amount of internet money depending on the price of internet money. If I wanted to figure all that shit out, I’d be on Wall Street driving a Ferrari and doing cocaine shooters off perfectly sculpted ice cubes in the shape of my yacht at the same time. Hell, I’d probably own pants.
As for me, I solved the problem by getting off the beaten path. And then getting off that unbeaten path when some other assholes showed up to beat it right behind me. You get the idea. Chevies became Citroens became Alpines became specific trims and years of Chevrolets that were sold only in Eastern Canada between February 1983 and April 1984, due to a special agreement with the Crown Emir of Madeupdonia. That dream, the dream of owning something that is super cheap but also so unique that you can bore a home intruder to death just by explaining what it is that he or she is trying to steal, that’s what I chased. And the internet helped me there, as well.
Unfortunately for all of us, governments around the world have realized the radicalizing power of the internet. They’re moving to shut it all down, and force us into little corporate walled gardens, where we won’t know what a Holden Camira is ever again. That’s why I’m announcing my new internet service provider, American Motors Corporation Online. We’re going to only talk about the grossest AMCs we can find, ideally boosted with superchargers, where the NSA and Le NSA cannot find us. You’ve got wail.
In the 1970s, many folks understood that we were soon going to be staring down the barrel of the apocalypse. They knew that cars would never get any better than that decade could muster. Most people just shrugged and went on with their lives, struggling to enjoy the cocaine-fuelled splendour and soulless fuel-injected driving experience of the 80s. The smart ones decided they were going to build earthships.
What is an earthship, besides a good potential name for your prog rock band? It’s a house that doesn’t need anything from The Man in order to be reliant. Water gets recycled, the ground helps regulate the temperature, and you can watch all manner of degenerate filth with the help of solar panels. This leaves more resources on the table for driving a truly nasty 70s car, with atrocious fuel economy. After all, what would you rather spend money on: your power bill, or a three-pack of 44mm Mikuni slide carburetors?
You might think that it is hard, or at least unpopular, to get your hands on one of these relics. It is true that it’s difficult to find them; they were usually built out in the boonies, away from the fools who would question them. City inspectors aren’t known for their tolerance of scary new ideas, and having close neighbours just means that you’d end up with a lot of roommates when shit hits the fan. Your beautiful, angular living room would look a lot worse piled up with folks who no longer know how to heat a can of beans on their own and keep complaining about “the algorithm.” Plus, they’ll park in the way of your Plymouth Satellite.
No, the solution is to build your own earthship. Fittingly, our throwaway consumer society has provided us with enough leftover waste for you to burrow into, carpenter-ant-like, and lay your eggs. For instance, millions of school buses are built every year, meant to replace perfectly good old school buses with small problems like pervasive structural rust. Back a couple of those puppies up into a hill, and you’ve got your shelter, heating, and cooling problems solved. After that, all you need is a battery-operated sawzall and you can have a truck bed full of good solar panels with just one trip to the rich part of town. Then you can trade in that truck, for a ‘77 Datsun 620. Why spend money on living, when you can spend money on living?
All around you, corporations are snapping up the corpses of expired corporations and wearing their brands like a mask. And the rate of this happening is accelerating. Acquisition firms form, acquire, and collapse faster than ever before. By 2035, every person on Earth will need to run at least four brands and act as two Marvel superheroes, NASA is projecting.
For instance, I was the CEO of Ford two times last week, and they’re blowing up my voicemail again to get me to come in on Sunday. You would think that being the CEO would be a cool job, but it just isn’t. These accelerated corporate-collapse cycles mean that I don’t get to allocate massive R&D funding to a V-16 school bus conversion. All I do is get in, make my morning coffee, and then dash off an all-hands email telling everyone they’re fired. I have to do it from my Hotmail account, because IT can’t even set up an Exchange server that fast.
At first, it sounded impressive, being in upper management of all these amazing car companies. Then, the interviews began to consist of a recruiter literally telling me to show up on Monday and get the front-door keys out from under the welcome mat. Sometimes I don’t even get my void cheques in fast enough to get paid, and I have to line up in an infinitely undulating queue of bankruptcy trustees, ripped off by one of an unlimited number of intellectual-property-holding corporations. It’s not super great for the resume, either. Just my “recent experience” section is sixteen gigabytes and caused LinkedIn to vomit in its own pants, before the servers were decommissioned and sold for spare copper.
In fact, the only businesses that are surviving these days are the ones that have no intellectual property at all. Nowadays, I work at a little noodle bar down in Chinatown. The owner-operator wears a special mask at all times to confound the acquisition bots’ facial-recognition system, and speaks with us only through cryptic handwritten notes that we must then burn. It also helps that the bar has no name, and is technically part of a city bus, which doesn’t stop for long enough to be considered legally resident, and thus susceptible to eminent domain proceedings, which would inevitably result in us being acquired by Burger King and then made redundant. If you see us passing by your neighbourhood, make sure to hop on. Bring money, but not too much money, or the boss will get jumpy.
The officer’s powdered-sugar bear claw hits the greasy headliner of the Crown Vic as I flare the throttle just once more, indiscriminately splashing the street with tire marbles which seem to hang in the air like perfect black stars before falling back to earth. I tap the shift handle up a gear, feeling the compressed air surge knock the transmission into its next orbit and dropping the beast far enough out of the powerband to let the primered-out zebra Caprice latch onto the ground and escape.
My big-block Chevy was a huge counterweight right on the nose of this massive car, and it made its presence felt both in sheer power and the cockamamie slides it would pull when you shocked the rear tires just right. One of those slides was happening right now, as I swing the car off the shoulder into the dirt access road running alongside the highway. The Vic follows, which of course it would. I modulate the throttle, trying to keep the car from bogging down in the loose dirt, until I come across a broken-tarmac road leading to the old abandoned Blockbuster.
Decades ago, when the Internet came to town and pulled the soul out of this Blockbuster, we used to come by this very same parking lot, work on our cars. Stan worked there. I don’t remember Stan very well, his features fuzzier than the vinegar-syndromed LCD on the Caprice’s stereo. Those were the days, I think. My reverie is broken when a fist-sized chunk of broken tarmac kicked up by the front wheels bounces off the fuel tank with a snarling clang.
Checking the mirrors in the cycle I had been trained in since grade school, I could see the Crown Vic fishtailing powerlessly, struggling in vain to right the injustice I am at this very minute perpetrating. A final-year model, I reckon, which has the horsepower and chassis tweaks needed to easily outrun the Caprice when it was stock. Every second of straight on this ghost-town road gives me another car length on the fed, but that’s the thing about straight roads: they know where you’re going.
I brake hard, punch the gear shift down a cog, and pull tight into the gap I identified between two trees during my recon run the morning before. From there, it’s just a matter of opening the pipes and consuming the annual production of OPEC to barrel straight across this disused cornfield before returning to the highway that started this whole episode, the cop left helplessly trying to complete an eleven-point-turn in time after shooting past my turn-off position by the length of a Eurasian football field.
It’s not easy doing fast food delivery on these mean streets, but this dude tips well, and he needs his order of dinosaur chicken nuggets and ranch dressing to get delivered piping hot. Of course, that latter part is no problem at all, considering the X-pipe exhaust has been broiling everything in the trunk for the last ten minutes.
Have you heard my favourite band’s new album? Neither have I, because the only time I get to listen to it is when I’m in the car. And to say that my car’s sonic environment is sub-optimal is a bit of an understatement. It’s more like being trapped inside a mineshaft while the mineshaft is being dug.
Now, only a small amount of this is due to the loud exhaust. I’m not one of those folks to put melon-sized mufflers on the back of my car’s pipes. Mostly because there’s not enough exhaust pipe left to attach the muffler to, and so it would involve a bunch of welding and effort that would paradoxically end up with the thing being quieter.
And in fact, the exhaust being loud is a good thing, because it helps drown out the sound of the suspension components groaning and screeching with every jounce, no matter how small. You might think that it would be a mere matter of going to the parts store and picking up new bushings, and it is, but putting in new bushings requires a bunch of effort. It also involves removing the suspension components in question. And believe you me, if I actually start fighting the rust on the underside of this car, there’s enough of it that I’m worried it’s going to unionize and quit in protest. Then I’ll basically have half the steering wheel and nothing else up on jackstands in my garage.
Of course, the horrible noises don’t end there. Being an old domestic car, every plastic piece in the interior squeaks and pops as the car warms up, cools down, is sat in, or thinks about being used. Sometimes, when I’m going down the highway fast enough, something like the heater vents will get tired of my shit and just shoot out of the dashboard. Usually, they end in the back seat, and that’s the end of the conversation. Other times, they fall in my lap, and then out the gaping hole in the floor that used to hold the exhaust on. Then, I have to go to Pick-N-Pull, and then my wallet starts to emit a whining sound.
So here’s what you do, when you sit in my cars. Put in these earplugs. Then put these ear protectors over top. Now get out of the car and take the bus. Meet me where we’re going, which hopefully is an insanely loud concert venue. My ears could use the break.
You might find this hard to believe, but I had a regular office job just like you, once. I would drive to it in my little economy car, and when I got there, I’d do what some other asshole wanted me to do. Eventually, I’d go home and heat up some frozen food in my oven, go to sleep and do the whole thing again the next day. Eventually, I broke free of this cycle, and I’d like to do the same thing for you, too.
The secret is: horsepower. Although I’d been exposed to cars with a burly amount of grunt from an early age, things didn’t really start spiralling for me until my introduction to the humble rural drag-strip. Out there, it doesn’t matter what’s going on in the rest of your life. Your job is to get the piece of shit you came in to the other end of that road as quickly as possible, and ideally without plowing into a bunch of spectators and racetrack equipment along the way.
When I would return to work after even a hurried evening at the drags, all I could hear was the sound of supercharger whine whenever my coworkers opened their mouths. I’d take a break in the middle of my workday to hide in the bathroom and look at old copies of Mopar Action. The shipping clerk, also a primitive gearhead, would help take deliveries of crate engines and high-lift camshafts at the loading dock in order to save me a couple bucks on delivery fees. Eventually, I just stopped showing up altogether. There might still be a whole Holley setup left there, if I could piece together enough of a give-a-shit in order to remember which office building that was in the complex.
The important thing is that I didn’t need a day job in order to keep the money rolling in. In fact, when you’re a ward of the state, they give you a little stipend. And as long as you know how to trick an ankle bracelet and slip a packet of ground-up sleeping pills into your parole officer’s tea, you’ve got all evening to yourself to do heads-up street racing for a couple extra bucks for impulse eBay purchases.
Maybe the worst invention in human history is 24-hour news. To understand why, please think real hard about your hometown. No matter how populous and bougie it is, there is probably not 24 hours’ worth of news going on in there. Sure, there’s probably that much news happening over the entire world, but avid news watchers don’t actually care about the entire world. They have little niches, which means that the market invariably demands 15 minutes of news for 24 hours.
And things get even worse when there’s a Big Day. Maybe a zeppelin crashes into the stock market. The Dalai Lama hits a llama on his scooter. Now you have approximately 300 milliseconds of news, over and over, for 24 hours. It’s maddening, and the only way you can keep this sort of thing going is with news analysis.
Like all analysts, news analysts are a special breed of human being that are uniquely bred to have “positions” on the news. Of course, there is no fun in lining up a bunch of analysts who all agree with one another and are respectful of one another when a disagreement does emerge. Jerry Springer proved there is a better model. And that model is “slightly contrarian assholes.” All you need to do is line up a bunch of folks that make you complain to your spouse on the drive home from the dinner party, pop ‘em on the TV, and let them spout nonsense about the internal support structures of bank buildings for as long as you need. It’s cheap, because everyone wants to be on TV, and it’s effective, because human beings are trained to slowly tune out the opinions of other human beings until they become mired in a dense thought-fog, watching a small picture in the corner of the screen to see if suddenly something might happen differently in the amateur video of the event this time.
In conclusion, we need to make more news. You can do this the traditional way, by developing policies and building popular support for your beliefs. Or, you can drive a nitromethane-fuelled Meyers Manx clone up and down the street outside CNN’s offices until the cylinder liners melt into slag. All their rivals won’t be able to resist the opportunity to comment on another news company’s misfortune, and it means you’ll get a chance to swap an EJ22 in.
Fossils. They’re rocks that people dig up, with bones inside them. Or something like that. When other kids in my preschool class were eating paste and getting really, dangerously into dinosaurs, I was regaling the teachers about the relevance of the six-pack carburetor. Vacuum secondaries, I explained, ignoring their obvious distaste for the subject material.
Stay with me here: although I mentioned something that is very boring, like dinosaurs, there is still something very exciting about fossils. Anything that we bury, which lasts long enough, could one day be fossilized. Hell, those egghead archaeologists have even dug up petrified trees. Trees! Those things don’t even hold up to a mid-sized family sedan being driven by an intoxicated celebrity.
See where I’m going with this? Yeah, you do: all across this great country of ours, there are countless minty cars that have been buried as part of time capsules. You might think that it is sacrilege to dig them up just to beat them to death on the drag strip, but just the opposite.
In many cases, these vehicles will be unearthed in a future that is distrustful at best of the internal combustion engine. Will they appreciate a ‘77 shit box left beneath the Earth for fifty years? Chances are: no. It’ll be rusty as hell, and probably the interior will never stop smelling like earthworm poop. That is, however, exactly in my wheelhouse, and so it’s best for everyone that I be trusted to take on these cars, rather than have them slowly rot beneath the earth.
And in my model, I can always drive them right into a hole when I’m done. Hell, if you ask the estate of my landlord, I’ve already been doing that. The bylaw officers lost two “good” men the other day just trying to excavate the topmost layer of AMC Spirits in order to photograph them for citation-issuing purposes. Good luck, suckers! You better start training your grandkids to wear dorky little pith helmets and get good at wire-brushing rocks.
Everyone knows the Iron Duke is the greatest achievement of Western civilization. Allow me to handle some misconceptions right off the bat. This low-revving, wheezy, rattly, oversquare lump of a four banger is not actually pleasant to drive. It is about as fuel-efficient as a refinery fire (albeit a small one.) And it’s not ever going to be considered “refined.” What it does have going for it is un-killability.
Let’s review. Most engines have a weak point or two. This is because if you try to excel at something, you’re going to have to pick a different attribute not to excel at. It’s always a game of trade-offs. Think about the dude in chess club who can’t do slam dunks on the basketball court. The Iron Duke is the perfect embodiment of America: the “D” student, who sits in the back and lets pretty Miss Honda rack up all the awards until she scatters her rods all over the floor trying to hit 800hp. No, the Iron Duke is happy to hit 90hp, and you’ll feel like a real engine builder for getting it there.
Which is not to say that you can’t stack an absolutely obscene amount of boost into the engine. With modern computerized engine management, advanced sensors, and the innovative new technology known as “maybe making the holes bigger on the intake,” you too can turn an Iron Duke into the starter motor for a truly glorious modern turbocharger. It’s just that nobody will do it, because they’re all high achievers. Won’t you be laughing at them, as the postal van engine you paid $25 for and port-matched with a garden hose and a Home Depot triangle file is making gobs of horsepower with only the addition of approximately $3000 of NASA-grade turbocharger hardware?
Of course, this is where the hubris part strikes. Eventually, you’ll want to get an extra gob or two of that horsepower. You’ll dig deep into cams, exotic valve angles, and eventually custom Cosworth heads, only to find yourself with an unreliable race engine instead of an extremely reliable tractor engine. Most importantly, the contempt will be gone. Now you’ll be afraid to take that reckless hole-shot at the bottom of fifth gear, because you’ll scatter five grand worth of engine instead of fifty bucks. And that means you won’t win the all-important off-ramp drag races.
At that point, why even bother driving a car? Public transit is remarkably reliable by comparison. Must be all those diesel tractor engines in ‘em.
In order to get the most out of life in our modern era, you have to understand a fundamental difference. That difference is between hardware and software. As you might imagine, hardware is hard. Unfortunately, software is also hard. That is not the difference. The difference is that software development is the process of taking a perfectly good machine and then applying a mental illness to it.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of those billion-year-old geezers sitting in his armchair and screaming about parts of the English language at a television mounted over his fireplace, tuned to a rage channel. While I definitely do appreciate a good yell, I usually do it in traffic, like a normal person. And in traffic, software is a growing problem.
Ignoring the fantasy of having non-racist self-driving cars for a minute, car stereos have become vastly complicated. Nowadays, you have to touch and fondle animated gewgaws just to change your defrost settings, instead of what I do, which is pull over to the side of the road and kick out a rat’s nest from the glovebox. I’d do it at home before I leave for work, but it makes an awful mess, all those decomposing rat corpses. It’s a wonder anyone can actually get to work with all these distractions, but they’re nothing compared to when the software goes wrong.
You might scoff. Think, though: how many times today – just today, so far – has a piece of software fucked up on you? A little graphical glitch? Ate your rant because of some arbitrary image-upload problem? Maybe the damn thing keeps scrolling the news article around while it’s trying to load ads and you can’t focus on what you’re trying to read. The folks building your car software are not any smarter than that. And as you’re going a billion miles an hour down the freeway, trying to fuck around with the inexplicably frozen playlist editor, you’re missing out on some great stuff. Like roadside attractions, or pedestrians.
So do all of us a favour. When you go out to buy a new car, don’t. Buy one of the 50-to-60 year old decrepit, rotting shitboxes littering my property. They’re guaranteed not to have a touchscreen, and they may not even have FM radio. You’ll be assured that every moment you spend behind the wheel will have your full awareness, lest a dicky ball joint send your ass directly off a cliff or onto a residential lawn. And if it breaks down, and you don’t make it to work? Chances are you were just going there to make some more software, anyway.
If you’ve never built anything, it can be easy to discount the difficulty of a good enclosure. That’s why I’m here to tell you that, as always, the universe is much worse than you had previously imagined. Putting something in a box can be more difficult than making the original something, by an order of magnitude.
Here’s a good example. A toaster is just an electromagnet, some fancy wire that gets hot, and a hole. You don’t think of it that way, though: you think of the whole, slick, appliance. The actual “toasting part” is relatively simple, but the case is what makes it a toaster instead of a fire hazard on your table. And believe you me, hundreds of thousands of engineers, design consultants, safety experts, and box-touchers throughout history have spent their entire careers making toaster cases.
So, how does this affect me, the most important person in the world, you ask (referring to me, not you?) Well, it’s a sad story. I build a lot of sketchy shit, and I’d like to have it in a box so that I can stack it on top of other boxes. Loose boards, undersized wires, and janky garbage makes an unsightly pile – and more importantly – usually just breaks when you get mad and pull on it really hard to get it out of that pile. A normal person would just chuck that shit into an old shoebox and call it a day, but shoeboxes have an unfortunate bias towards being, as the French call it, “flammable.”
There’s other problems, too, like wanting to keep mice out, or weird smells in. The most important thing to know is that I end up spending a long-ass time making a box for the thing that already kind of half works. That is, until I discovered the wonder of hardware-store electrical boxes. You know, the ones that you put light switches in. They’re made out of metal, which helps avoid the microplastic crisis, at the same time as it solves the “melting into a pile of inert slag on my desk” crisis.
These are still not perfect, mostly because they consist almost exclusively of sharp edges and rust. If I let a little tetanus stop me, though, I’d be letting down the series of brave toaster-makers who predated me in history.
I was raised in a barn, but that’s because my parents were too busy working on an experimental race car and had been banished there by the other scientists. Of course, I still wouldn’t think of leaving the door open. If I did, the cows would come in and shit all over my bedroom.
When I moved to a real house, with windows and carpet, the biggest life-quality improvement by far was the sudden presence of central heating. In the barn, the only heat was either from an old propane heater, or occasionally an uncontrolled methanol fire when one of my father’s homebrewed 1000cc injectors would get stuck on.
For those of you who are unfamiliar, please note that methanol fires are invisible to the naked human eye. I was told if dad started doing a super funky dance out of nowhere, I should hose him down with a fire extinguisher without getting too close. This was only a problem around New Years when they got into the ethanol instead. Little chemistry joke there.
Come to think of it, the heat was still invisible in the real house. I’m sure it made me pretty anxious, but I soon got over it when I realized that the ends of my toes should have some feeling in them during the months of September to June. And I could leave food on the table without it freezing solid, or being stolen by one of the goats. Of course, my parents didn’t agree, but that’s why it was up to child protective services to make that call by this time.
Do I regret calling the cops on my folks? No. They knew what they were doing when they tried to brainwash me, an innocent child. All I had to do was tell the police that my parents said the Mitsubishi 6G72 was a reliable and power-dense race engine even in stock form.
Self-help gurus will tell you that anything is possible. The universe’s energy really wants you to succeed. You just have to tap into it. By purchasing an incredibly expensive series of books, seminars, dietary supplements, and tantric sex toys. Afterward, when you realize you’ve been scammed, you understand that not all things are possible. For instance, keeping this Trans Am Turbo engine intact for an entire night of passes seems to be beyond the reach of mortals.
It’s not entirely Pontiac’s fault. A stubborn insistence on originality (and finding a semi-trailer full of spares behind the City of Industry plant) means that the shit-rickety Poncho mills keep getting banged in under the hood. Anyone on a message board would tell you (and rightfully so) to just slam a junkyard truck engine in there and add approximately $36.27 of eBay turbocharger parts. That combo will run forever, they claim, and they’re probably right. Where’s the fun in doing something that is possible?
That’s why I started asking the universe for help. You see, even though you can’t entirely break the laws, you can sort of bend them. A series of ritual sacrifices ensued. They were disguised as mere traffic accidents, deemed unworthy of investigation, and soon enough souls had departed this plane on their way to the Old Ones for me to be able to call lights-out and actually drive home at the end. As with all stories of this nature, it had a terrible cost.
Since the Trans Am Turbo was still running on Monday morning, I felt like I had to drive it to work. Thus ensued “enjoying” my commute with a wheezy 80s-turbo-lag V8 (with especially low compression) and engaging in prayer to reach merge speeds, despite shooting seventeen dollars of gasoline down the carb every time I breathed on the throttle. All month long, I kept driving the Firebird to see when it would break down. And for my sins, it never did. I’m still driving it today, although it keeps trying to drive me away from the junkyard every time I think about picking up one of those truck motors.
Even though humanity has made amazing technological achievements, they really only boil down to using two major tools. One of them is making things very hot. The other is making things very cool. Virtually all of human accomplishment is predicated on adjusting the temperature of things.
The other day, I was hanging out with my friend, who will remain nameless. Scott likes to do things with wood, which is the corpse of a perfectly good tree. And Scott had a problem. He needed to be able to cut that wood, so he had to make a plane. A plane is made out of steel, which is the corpse of a perfectly good rock. And in order to get cheap steel to the hardness required to cut very soft wood, you need to make it really fucking hot. He came to me for some advice.
After a bit of discussion about exactly what a Fahrenheit is (it’s some kind of dirigible, or maybe a shredded-meat sandwich) we determined that hitting 1500°F for ten minutes would be entirely achievable. How, you might ask? The internal combustion engine, where the chewed up, purified and aerosolized corpse of a perfectly good tree that died a really long time ago is heated up to the point of exploding. This produces a lot of waste heat in the exhaust system, and although your average car’s exhaust header temperature isn’t going to be in the early four digits, a turbocharger and a copious amount of giggle gas will help. We decided to shove the plane-under-construction inside my exhaust system and go for a pass at the drag strip.
Well, my friends, it didn’t exactly work out. However, the plane was still pretty strong. It turns out that shot-peening steel with a bunch of chunks of piston and turbocharger also beefs it up a little bit. Perhaps there just might be some room in humanity’s oeuvre for “hitting things with a rock until they do what we want.”
If you’re the kind of person who shops at the bulk bins, then you probably already know what I’m about to tell you. Limousines are cheaper, per pound, than the cars they are made of. Which doesn’t make sense, right? You’re getting more car for less money.
Of course, there’s a lot of downsides to daily-driving a limousine. For starters, it’s big. If you live somewhere that has a lot of street parking, you’re going to get real good at parallel parking when you own a vehicle that is the approximate length of a full-specification WWII battleship. And a lot more of your commute will be spent walking from the drivers’ door to the trunk to get your stuff out. And it’s impractical to work on it, even though the additional storage space is handy for winter tires and kitty litter for spills.
Those of you who have spent a lot of time under limousines also know that they are cobbled together by insane people. You’ll find all kinds of freaky farmer fixes involved in the process that makes the vehicle longer, ranging from “extremely reckless” to “how did we not die just now?” And don’t think safety inspections will get you out of harm’s way, either. Even if the gangsters who run the limo companies don’t do their own work, a mechanic can’t even get the thing on their regular-car sized lifts!
That said, you can always cut the limo in half and shorten it back to a regular car. This is a money-saving top tip, although the labour to do so can be expensive. For this, I recommend entering a demolition derby. Hey, if you win, you might actually make some money on this whole deal!
In the future, therapists will have this big machine that they can hook up to your brain, and a little super-deformed anime statue of your innermost trauma will fall out of it. Until then, there’s pickup trucks. Long favoured as America’s preferred form of therapy, pickup trucks offer people from every walk of life a chance to feel powerful and well-protected as they blithely commit offences against the public good.
Part of my problem, of course, is that I cannot afford a pickup truck. Once, if you can believe it, a pickup truck cost less than a luxury car. That is because they were stone simple, proletarian vehicles for getting work done. Cloth seats. Vinyl floors. Manually adjustable mirrors. Bed stacked to the tie-down rails with roadkilled wildlife. Wait, tie-down rails? You bought the high-end model, my friend.
Nowadays, trucks are in huge demand. And automakers have noticed. This means that every time they miss a quarterly update, it’s an easy turn of the screw to layer on some margin to the pickup trucks. After all, the chassis has been developed for literal decades, so what are we paying all those engineers on the truck team for if not to add $700 velour-lined coffee-heating gloveboxes? This vastly inflated price means that I, a humble worker, need to drive to work in a mere Volvo, while my boss tools around in the opulent comfort of a mid-range F-150.
So: no truck therapy for me. Which is alright, because I’d rather face my demons the traditional way. By ignoring every single one of my personality defects by hyper-fixating on obscure Dodge cars. Hey, a slant-six is basically a truck engine to start with. I think I’ve made a breakthrough.
If you believe the big brains at the automakers, we’re in a chip shortage. This is, of course, obvious horse plop: although it’s nearly twice as expensive as before, I can go down to the corner store and pick up a bag of Tostitos no problem. What we have in fact is a huge oversupply of integrated circuits, but there’s no good way to dig them out of all the old cars, kitchen appliances, microcomputers, and maxicomputers that we throw out every single day.
Usually, these things go to the crusher completely functional. Maybe some part is a little gummed up, or the colour is no longer in style. If we could get someone to scavenge the good parts, then we’d never have to buy any more parts. That is, unless some idiot puts a giant touch-screen tablet on the dashboard of every car, but when would that ever happen?
Take it from me: I’ve been scavenging parts for decades. I’ve seen all those YouTube videos of hard-working factory workers inhaling lungfuls of aerosolized lead, slaving over a hot plate to pry a chip worth half a cent out of a junk board so that it can be cleaned up and reused. And to them I say: where’d you get that hot plate? It looks pretty boss. I have to use an old kitchen spoon, and a lighter. Which is why I usually give up five minutes in, after burning my fingers approximately seventeen times, and just slap a carburetor on it.
Sure, nobody on planet Earth, including myself, knows how a carburetor works. Thing is, I’m not going to run out of them anytime soon, because most people gave up on them a few years ago and threw the entire car out in favour of a Honda or something that can start in the winter. Then that junk car ended up in my backyard, where it offers a bountiful harvest of said parts. All I have to do is soak it in the most dangerous chemicals I can find, and I can kinda-sorta drive to work unless a cop with a functioning sense of smell gets too close to my tailpipe.
All this is to say that if General Motors really wants to get a handle on this chip shortage, they should be paying me to dig through my carb pile. I’m pretty sure a little Keihin slide from a Honda Elite will work really well on a new Silverado. Wait, they’re electric now? Okay, I guess I can throw in some of this rat-chewed wiring, too. It’s the least I can do, to keep the domestic supply chain going.
In the town where I was born, their only claim to fame is having a really exciting snake-breeding festival. Once a year, for whatever reason, all the snakes in the surrounding area decide that it’s a great idea to get their bone on in the middle of town. Tourists used to travel there, back in the days when television was more boring, and watch this infinitely undulating orb of reptile sex slither all over town. Now there’s not so many tourists, although the snakes are as randy as ever.
This has, naturally, impacted the town’s economic prospects. It’s easy to refuse fiscal support from other levels of government when the local diner is doing boffo business from nature photographers and U-Haul van airbrushers. No handouts. Strong back, principle and all that. Thing is, when the local economy goes to shit, usually the surrounding area does as well. So they started to attract snake handlers.
Now, I don’t judge folks for their oddball religious affiliations – I have owned a Chrysler Intrepid, after all – but it just seemed to me like it was a bad idea to handle snakes. Especially snakes you don’t know. Especially-especially snakes you don’t know, after the long-time pastor who provided all the snakes for your previous handling episodes had died without leaving any documentation as to what he did to make the old snakes not bite you. So now the town had two problems: the aforementioned fiscal constraints, and also legal trouble from allowing a bunch of folks to show up in their Sunday best and get bitten to death by poisonous, horny snakes.
Ultimately, the problem solved itself. And by that, I mean that I moved out of town as soon as I was able. There’s not much left for me back there anymore. The snakes own it all now anyway, due to an obscure provision in state law. Sometimes in the spring, though, I like to think about visiting the town, and taking a few photographs, just to recapture a bit of that old glory. Then I don’t, because if I wanted to see a bunch of snakes making life difficult for myself, I’d fix the wiring harness in this Goddamn Saab.
Here’s the deal. My neighbour has had an original-model Taurus wagon parked out in front of their house for years. I assume that they still drive it, but it’s there every time I go past. Automatic, of course, because if it were a manual transmission I’d have tried to beat down their door while waving stacks of potentially authentic twenties in their face.
Even so, I do desire that experience. A psychologist, or maybe just someone who is in greater control of their mental faculties than yours truly, would say that it’s because I crave the simpler, easier days of the early 90s. Back then, we didn’t have handheld hate devices screaming notifications into our souls. Cars were simpler, too. You’d have a nice Honda Civic, maybe a Dodge Caravan or two, and if you had a pickup, well, that truck was getting used on a construction site or something. Malls still existed, and they were a gateway into an infinite matrix of suburbanite dreams.
All that is nice, but I know that they’re wrong. We can’t go back to the nineties, no matter how much all of us are thinking it would be nice to have a re-do. No, what I crave most of all is that authentic Ford-interior smell. Here’s what I mean: the junkyard is chock full of 90s Fords. You can go to that yard, find a Taurus wagon just like this, and sit in it. Chances are the interior won’t even be full of broken glass. The junkyard mud, though, has infested it. You can’t make out the aroma of gently-decomposing seat cushions over the stench of a million sliced brake lines bleeding into the ground.
With a time capsule like this, I am convinced, that smell must be authentic. I’ve tried sniffing it as I walk by on the street, but it’s pretty exposed – they even park under a streetlight – and, besides, the window seals are still in good condition. Test drives, too, were not fruitful. Nobody sells one like this: they get one from grandma’s estate, remark on the cherry condition of it, and then send it directly to the junkyard intake lot. Why would anyone want to buy this, they sneer from their Range Rovers at having to be inconvenienced for one Saturday morning to get rid of their family member’s loyal transportation.
There is just one tactic that I think will work. I figure if I follow them every time they leave the neighbourhood, I can eventually work out where they get their oil changed. Then, I’ll simply don one of my collection of mechanic coveralls – every so often, you inexplicably find a car in the junkyard with the trunk packed absolutely full to the brim with them, and the teeth and hair wash out easily – and convince my neighbour I’m going to take it around for the change. I can sit in that interior, on that bench seat, and sniff offgassing plastics until the cows come home.
Either that, or I could knock on their door and ask to take a look around the car. That would just be crazy, though.
Choosing the right tool for the job is often harder than it seems. Even something simple, like driving a nail, is made more complicated when you consider the variables of nail type, material, room, and whether you should just be using screws instead. To make matters worse, you often need life experience – to pick the right thing, you need to know what will happen before you use the tool.
That means you need to make a lot of mistakes. Making those mistakes is expensive, and time-consuming. It can take decades of apprentice marks before an apprentice is ready to move up to the ranks of wanting to quit the entire profession and open a barcade. In the meantime, angry clients pile up and jobs are scuttled. What if there was a better way?
Here at the Seat Safety Switch House of Inappropriate Tool Education, we’ll train you up on a million-and-one ways how to not do a job. Our staff don’t get a job offer until they’ve fucked up big-league on at least one major project. What kind of idiot would burn right through a $1000 circuit board by using a plumbing torch to solder? That would be our electronics instructor. Wrecked an entire picturesque Italian village by trying to load a Bobcat into the back of a U-Haul using only two 2x4s as ramps? Yours truly.
When you listen to our instructors talk about their huge, career-ending mistakes, you’ll learn from their example much faster than you would ever hope to make mistakes yourself. And then, under their tutelage, you’ll start your labwork, where – in a controlled, semi-safe environment – you can replicate our screwups, building that muscle memory and strengthening pit-of-your-stomach fear response.
It is in this way that we hope each and every one of our graduates are empowered to create new, more terrifying mistakes. Errors that we cannot yet imagine. Fuck-ups of the future. Boo-boos for the 22nd century. Sure, our critics will say that nobody learns from their mistakes. And they’re right. They’ll learn from ours.
Sometimes, I like to go down to the local junior high school and help out the kids with their robot club projects. By “sometimes” I mean “community service,” and by “robot club,” I mean “robot club.” We didn’t have a robot club at my junior high school, mostly because inexpensive commercialized robot kits didn’t yet exist, and also because we spent most of the day terrified that the Russians would obliterate us with psychic squirrels who can atomize an entire village with their minds. Once, one of the teachers saw a chipmunk and we hid under our desks for a week until it got hit by the shop teacher Mr. Gagne’s Volvo.
Sorry, where was I? Right. Robot club. See, the thing that a lot of kids these days don’t have is useful fathers. Sure, more of them than ever have extant and legally-responsible fathers. Heartwarming TV dramas about the nature of fatherhood, and the increasing coolness of childrens’ toys, have helped keep dads in the picture, rather than bolting for the nearest cigar lounge the first time a particularly nasty diaper needs to be changed. Unfortunately, those dads are pretty much useless, unless their kids need help getting a blue check on Twitter or parking their F-250 two meters away from the full-service pump at the gas station.
I like to teach the children the basics about mechanical engineering. Of course, I am not a mechanical engineer – I am actually legally forbidden from calling myself a mechanical engineer, so don’t tell anyone I said those words or I’ll be in deep shit – so I don’t really know what I am doing. However, “don’t really know what I’m doing” is heads and shoulders above the faculty and the aforementioned industrially-absent fathers; just learninating the kids about which way to turn a screw in order to loosen it qualifies me for a school board award. Which I received.
Sadly for all involved, it turns out that I had been duped. No, not about the award. I got to go to a little ceremony downtown and got an adorable medal, but it turns out I had been helping what the police later called “some evil fuckin’ kids” create a killer robot, and the world’s first sentient strong artificial intelligence to drive it. Luckily I didn’t teach them how to build the robot very well, so the batteries fell out after it plowed through a particularly thick skull. The whole experience made me reminiscence about my salad days: I bet that robot would have made fuckin’ mincemeat out of that chipmunk. We’d have gotten to go home early and play Sega Genesis.
When we do send humans to another planet, there’s one major problem: most of them don’t have any air to breathe. That means that our internal combustion engines won’t work, which is frankly unacceptable. Why else would we want to go to another planet, if not to start smogging up that one instead?
That’s why all the big brains in the space game are getting hot and bothered about terraforming. In theory, we can do it like that one Star Trek film: we shoot some stuff into the target planet, and then it becomes a version of Earth with less convenient parcel delivery. Of course, any organisms that existed on the planet before are likely unmade and obliterated by this process, but let’s be honest: they probably didn’t taste very good, and as such have no reason to exist.
As with literally every other idea anyone else has ever had, I think I could do it much better. The problem is a lack of oxygen, so why not just bring big-ass tanks of nitrous oxide with us? We can feed the engines off of it, and then we’ll do savage burnouts until we run the gas tank dry. Plus, it’ll give those egghead astronauts a job making and hauling more nitrous oxide, which will help keep them humble, rather than getting any ideas about ruling their new planet with an iron fist.
Of course, there exists one remaining problem, which has perplexed humanity for eons: how do we get a ‘76 Pontiac Ventura onto the space shuttle? For this, I recommend purchasing the one that sits in at least thirty rusty parts in my backyard, and then welding it back together once you get there. Hey, without oxygen, you won’t even need shielding gas!
Organizing things in your kitchen: hard, divorce-inducing. Organizing things in your workshop: pretty close to impossible. When you have a personality like mine, where you say “yes” to every neglected piece of garbage, you’re gonna run out of room really quickly.
Drawers make a lot of sense, on paper. They’re little boxes, and you put stuff in them, and then you put them in a bigger box that keeps them out of the way. Of course, the problem here is that a taxonomy is required. You’ll end up having one near-empty drawer that’s just for “toothbrushes, 18th century” and then an overflowing drawer that’s like “screws and shit.” And nobody ever takes an entire drawer apart, lays out all the parts and then builds a more equitable categorization rubric. No, that’s what arson is for. Just start over.
So then, it sounds like the problem might be the very concept of discrete binnacles for your shit. Maybe the answer is shelves? Shelves are fantastic. You can put all kinds of crap on them, and you won’t not particularly pressured to keep things together. Of course, this just means that you’ll have the same mess that clogged your floor, except up on the wall. A small amount of your stuff will become privileged gentry, and look down upon the common rabble that you’re still tripping over all the time. Eventually, a revolution will occur, in the form of the shelves collapsing under the weight of trying to hold four Dodge A727 automatic transmissions at once. Then everything is on the floor again, plus some chunks of shelves, which is worse than before.
If the answer isn’t drawers, and it isn’t shelves, then what is the answer? Spreading out. Here’s the secret about owning a lot of garbage: keeping it on your property means that you only have a finite amount of space to expand into. If you buy a lot of parts cars, and distribute those cars across the neighbourhood… all of those cars have trunks, don’t they? Now you can have a glorified shipping container network, and get your exercise walking between them. Or: buy a moped. Of course, mopeds need spare parts, and you’ll need somewhere to store them. Those parts are tiny; I bet there’s room in the kitchen.
You might not know this, but your local sports stadium is having a bit of a crisis. It’s practically falling down, the billionaires explain, and we need to fix it. The only way we can fix it is to use public funds, because the banks (which we are on a first-name basis with) know that governments are beholden to public rage, and won’t want to lose their football, baseball, racquetball, jai alai, or hockey teams to a rival city. Without such amusements, they’d have to resort to buying ridiculous public entitlements like a library or intact footbridge.
Regulatory capture is all around us, and I figured it was about time I got a slice of the pie. You see, car racing is still seen as a rich person’s hobby. This is likely because wheel-to-wheel competition driving consists almost entirely of stacking up a bunch of money and then setting fire to it, often literally. And unlike giving millions of dollars to the billionaire ownership of a team of hockey players each getting paid millions of dollars, funding a racetrack is seen as a little tacky. Amongst the cognoscenti who are capable of fogging a mirror for long enough to get elected at your local municipal council, it’s just not good government.
Of course, golf courses are hugely funded by those same governments. They have all the essentials of a good race track: a large amount of open space. Humanity has trained and formed from birth a special race of warriors who are perfect for driving cars extremely quickly on rough terrain while only occasionally killing themselves and spectators. They’re called Finns. And while I’m not a Finn (you may have already been able to tell by my lack of interest in reindeer testicle-flavoured Slurpees) I do like to race shitty cars very quickly offroad. That’s why I asked city council to pony up the big bucks to form my new golf course. It’s a private club, I explain to them, very elite, and I have the perfect site for it: right next to my house, where the low-income apartments currently are.
Things went well on our inaugural race, until the Mayor and his cronies dropped by, bags in tow. Apparently they didn’t get the memo about just how exclusive this country club really was. We bought you a golf course, they explained, while looking confused at the scent of two-stroke oil and the sound of screaming small-displacement turbocharged gasoline engines. We deserve to play on it.
That scam ended awfully abruptly. Once I’m out of prison, though, I’ll be right back at it. These bars can’t hold me forever, mostly because the state only agreed to pay JailCo 30 cents per bar, and the investors didn’t want to blow the budget.
When you sit down and think about it, really think about it, it’s amazing that anything works. Everything you see in front of you is assembled of a billion tiny parts, each of which is its own miracle of engineering and/or nature. All it takes is for one of those parts – again, very, very tiny parts – to conk the fuck out, and that thing that it makes up will never work again. So don’t think about it too much. Instead, think about interchangeability of parts.
Interchangeability of parts is the great miracle of our age. A long, long time ago, people would sit down and then make everything by hand. It’d be a little different each time, owing to the beautiful variety and uniqueness of human beings. Some asshole figured out that if you make all the parts all the same, then you can just slap them together out of a big bag and then they’ll work. Suddenly you can’t be drunk at work anymore, because you have to make each part to spec. Thanks a lot.
Although the theory of interchangeable small parts stole from the human spirit, it still gives us back so much more. Because of this wondrous and soul-crushing invention, we can go to the store and just buy bolts. As long as you got the basic math right, they’ll fit. The whole bag of bolts will. It’s so amazing that we just take it for granted, right up until one of those bolts doesn’t fit. Nobody knows why, but top scientists do believe it’s somehow related to the bolt being the last one left in your garage on a Sunday night after the parts store has already closed. The Pope believes it is a Satanic plot to destroy humanity, he shouts from underneath his stricken Popemobile halfway through a leaf pack swap.
Rather than get religious about it and attempt to condemn the Prince of Lies unfairly, it is perhaps preferable to have the other great invention of humanity: the parts car. When you have a good parts car, you already know that the bolts on it are the right ones, because it’s still holding on most of the car. Pop that shit off, clean it up with a little bit of sandpaper, and you’re back in business. Ready to get to work in the morning so you can be an interchangeable cog in an immortal machine. Wait a minute.
We’re creatures of comfort. Each and every one of us loves the idea of a home appliance that will make our brief time in this life more pleasant. Air conditioning. Automated deep-fat fryers. Artificial intelligences that slowly take over your spaceship and eject your coworkers into the abyss. Even if you’re at the electronics store for some other purpose, it’s hard to avoid taking a peek at the appliances section. This vacuum cleaner has a fucking laser, fork over your paycheque.
So when the broiler on my oven finally took a shit, it was hard to resist the siren song of the upgrade. Sure, the broiler could have been fixed with about five dollars in parts, and little or no effort on my part. And a new broiler element probably would last for the rest of my life, assuming I didn’t leave it on for a week straight again. What that repaired oven wouldn’t have, though, is a warming tray. That warming tray? Excellent for keeping 75w90 gear oil piping hot so it can squeeze out of the bottle in less than a year. That’ll save me a lot of time, especially since my landlord is paying for it because he gets his credit card bills sent to the house.
I made the order. I sat by the front doorstep, waiting for it to arrive. I kept sitting there. My boss called and told me I was fired because I didn’t show up for work for a few weeks. I told him I’d call him back later, because I’m busy. I kept waiting. And then the appliance delivery guys arrived, ready to drop off my beautiful new prize. They installed it, and even cleaned the pile of brown rice that fell behind the oven while I was making my famous hot dog lasagna. What I didn’t expect, though, is that they would take the old oven back with them.
“Hold on a second,” I said, placing myself between them and the front door, a Harbour Freight “Earthquake” impact wrench in one hand. “I want to use that thing for powder coating.” The last time I tried at-home powder coating with my food oven, you see, the Bagel Bites had come out glitter purple.
“No way, man,” the shorter oven-delivery-fellow explained. “Our boss wants all the old, good appliances for himself. He’s building some kind of empire of trash, just like yours.”
This was puzzling to me. And after I dealt with them, I was on the road. The mystery was so compelling that I didn’t even get a chance to try out my new (and probably breaking-in-a-week) inducto-convection range before I left.
What I didn’t expect to find when I got there was a domestic garage filled to the brim with refrigerators, all running. The humming was so intense that I could feel the sidewalk throbbing beneath my feet, even after I cut the ignition to my straight-piped Volare and waited for it to diesel itself back to sleep.
I let myself in. There, sitting cross-legged in the innermost ring of fridges, my nemesis awaited. What kind of sick fuck would hoard all these useless domestic products? Some of them weren’t even in running condition. Straining my voice to be heard over the sound of compressor after compressor, I spoke up.
“Hey, I saw your delivery guys were using an old Ram 50 to move these. Do you have any more lying around?”
If you’re the kind of person who gets angry at rich people flying their private jets for 12 minutes to avoid traffic, good. I am too, although my anger is not nearly as discriminate as that. Personally, I hate the entire concept of a private jet, even if that private jet is owned by a major airline and is used to ferry members of the public around.
Jets are bitchin’. Also, we paid for them to exist, giving money to the mumble mumble division of the government that invented them for killing people during the war. Therefore, they should all be liberated from their corporate ownership and given to the people. I don’t know what I’m going to do with a jet – probably just sit in it and make vroom-vroom sounds – but it’s pretty likely that I can’t run an airline worse than the existing guys. What I mean is, how do you charge forty bucks for checked baggage and still not turn a profit?
With this increased public awareness of jets, I expect to see a renaissance in interest. There will certainly be more low-hour Pratt & Whitney turbofans getting dropped off in my local junkyard. No longer will planes that were wrecked, aged-out, hit by lightning or simply raided by meth heads be sent to exotic “airplane graveyards” very far away from where I live.
Of course, there is still the requirement for licensing and safety protocols when it comes to flying the jets. For instance, a 747 can do barrel rolls at an airshow if and only if the operator has received adequate training. And ideally the drink cart is also chained up before they go into the routine, because otherwise the booze is going to get smashed before the passengers can drink it all. Maybe NASA can work out some kind of zero-gravity snack preservation system. Hey, isn’t the space shuttle a kind of jet, too?
At my local mini-golf course, they have a tiny castle. They have a tiny driving range. They have a tiny clown. They have regular-sized holes, for regular-sized golf balls. Ignore those last parts because they contradict my thesis. What they’re missing, I reckon, is a miniature golf cart.
Now, I understand that mini golf is meant to be played “slow.” They expect you to walk five, maybe six feet to get to the next hole. What those primitive screwheads up there in the headquarters of Big Mini Golf don’t understand is that I cannot be away from some sort of self-propelled motorized transportation for the entire duration of even a nine-hole “fun game” with my coworkers. And by “coworkers,” I mean my parole officer.
Naturally, if you want to make a car that goes fast but is tiny, you turn to the Japanese. And when you can’t afford what they have on offer, you go to Hobbyking instead, and fill your cart with an obscenely large motor whose name is made entirely of consonants. It’s meant for scooters, not remote-control cars, but I don’t think Ted Hobbyking is going to get too upset about it. We go way back, him and I. Now that propulsion was available, all I needed was to add somewhere to sit.
You might ask yourself why someone with the talent to sculpt a realistic scale-model of a golf cart entirely out of scraps is spending his limited free time doing so. Well, you’d probably think otherwise once you actually see the malformed piece of shit that I produced. It’s fast though, mostly because I didn’t get a chance to hook up any sort of throttle control. The “gas pedal” is basically just an old house light switch that you have to flick really quickly or it will stick wide open and send me well outside of ankle-bracelet range. It doesn’t really have brakes, either, because I forgot to order those. What it does have, though, is style.
I’ll be the coolest asshole on the mini-golf course today, although I do reserve the right to still lose my temper and bend a putter over my knee when I can’t get the ball through that little windmill.
The TED talk folks have been after me for years to get me to come and give a speech. Unfortunately, the dorky little gymnasium that they rent to do the talks cannot accommodate a monster-truck rally, or even a running engine for too long. Not enough ventilation, they tell me, and then someone in the back nearly falls over their own feet, scrambling to tell me that I’m not allowed to add additional ventilation.
As such, I’ve been giving my speeches the old-fashioned way. When the Yen took a shit a few months ago, I made sure to get my order in for a genuine, authentic, Japanese nationalist van. These babies are basically just vans, but equipped with a high-volume public-address system. In their prior lives, they were driven around by bored high-school students, who were paid to read a script warning the innocent locals about dangerous foreign elements such as myself.
A little racist and a lot xenophobic: maybe they’d get along with my uncle. Likely not, though. He’s not a fan of vans, for one thing, which is why I make sure to stay clear of his compound as I tool around the rural area, dispensing my folksy wisdom. I haven’t actually audited the van for road-worthiness, having assumed that a gang of right-wing nationalists would at least have a lot of money lying around to spend on maintenance. As is my wont, I have intensely studied the mechanical aspects of the van only so far as is required to mount a turbocharger from a diesel-electric freight locomotive on it. It is not lost on me that the sound of the turbine screaming as it destroys liquefied dinosaurs easily drowns out my speech, but that’s okay, because it was mostly bullshit like the preceding paragraph anyway.
Really, the worst thing about this setup is that I keep getting chased by schoolchildren, who are convinced that I am some kind of stealth ice-cream man with a broken music box. The amphetamine-laced Fudgsicles in the back are for my use only, I explain to the kids, but they either do not listen or cannot hear over the roar of the intake. Even the porky ones can keep up with me for a good quarter-mile, which makes me wonder what they’re feeding kids these days for a school lunch. I bet whatever it is, some civic planner is giving a TED talk about it.
I’ve always wanted a mini-excavator, and so have all my friends. You’re either in the group that is quietly nodding their head right now, or you’re a little confused. If you’re in that second group, trust me: you’re going to want a mini-excavator. Put it on someone else’s credit card.
Owning a full-size excavator seems cool when you’re a kid, but as you become an adult you realize it’s a bit of an impractical dream. For one thing, the thing is very large and hard to park somewhere. The neighbours will make a big fuss, and its massive size limits what you can do with it. Generally, a full-size excavator is great for building a house, ripping up a sandstone quarry, or demolishing your boss’s house, but it’s just too awkward to deal with anything beneath that size class.
The mini-excavator is perfect for the average homeowner. It’s cute and small, which helps ingratiate you with the neighbours. In fact, its air of approachability means that even the fussiest HOA jerk is going to want to play with it instead of writing you a summons for parking it on your driveway. And since it’s small, you can use it for all those “in-between” household jobs. Digging a fence post? Five minute job. Break up the old driveway? Five minute job. Ripping up an entire garden? Five minute job. Flipping a cop car over while they’re at the doughnut shop and stealing the brand-new winter tires? Five minute job. You won’t want to stop using it, which means that the value for money is excellent.
In fact, they’re cheap enough that you don’t really need to maintain them. And for the most part, people don’t. Which means you can find these things for cheap at auctions from construction companies which simply didn’t understand the concept of “put oil in it.” Of course, you’ll need a way to pick up and move all the heavy parts involved in a mini-excavator during the repair. For this, I would like to introduce you to what scientists are calling “buying a second mini-excavator.”
Camping in cars is popular again. Negative Nancies would tell you that it’s because the economy has imploded and all the houses are being snapped up by moneyed speculators. Positive Patricks would agree with Nancy’s assessment, but then they’d make sure to point out that Wal-Mart still has free RV parking.
Living in a car is not at all like the lifestyle influencers on YouTube will tell you. For one thing, most of us can’t afford half-million-dollar mods to our Dodge Sprinters. I personally cannot even afford a Dodge Caravan. And that’s okay. Once you’ve accepted that you will not be living in the most expensive van down by the river, it’s time to make the most of what you do have.
Look around your vehicle: chances are it has an interior, and that interior is in an enclosed space of some kind. If it currently has a large opening, you either own a convertible or have some welding to do. Otherwise, this meets the statutory definition of “a house” in my book. I don’t have a very large law book, of course. Unlike that movie about the lawyer who lives out of a Lincoln Town Car, my own Town Car does not have the structural integrity required to hold heavy bookshelves. I haven’t seen that movie yet, either. Wal-Mart doesn’t give out free power to the unhoused folks living in the parking lot.
Now that you know you have a house, it’s time to think about how you’ll sleep. A pillow and blanket are all normal people will want, but a few of us have special needs. For instance, I sleep next to a fully-loaded 20lb bottle of nitrous oxide, mostly because my body heat is cheaper than running the bottle heater the entire night in case I need to make a quick getaway from mall security. Your mileage may vary.
So now you’re living in your car full-time. That’s great! You’ve been freed from the real estate treadmill, and you probably have picked up a new appreciation for every cubic inch of room you can find inside any enclosed space. I can’t go back, myself: I start to get agoraphobic when I park the car to use a public restroom. Those stalls are just too roomy.
If you’ve never given much thought to towing a car, be thankful. There is a sort of moment that passes as you descend further and further into car-ownership madness. Originally, you are just a tow consumer – a random person of good breeding and upbringing who needs their broken car moved to a place where it can be fixed. Then, as you start to get a taste for the good stuff in life, you quickly realize that you must transition into the provision of tows.
Let’s think about the economics of a tow. You’re paying for the truck, the fuel, the driver’s labour, their boss’s labour, their boss’s labour, and a vig to whatever organized crime group (the police?) that they work for. Do that two or three times in a year, and buying a shitty truck with a halfway-shitty car hauling trailer starts to make a lot of sense. If you’re like me, and you’re pulling home broken garbage every weekend, you don’t need an accountant to tell you it’s a good idea.
Here’s the Catch-22, though: any truck and trailer combo I can afford is so broken that they themselves would need a tow truck to get them back to my home. Trucks have become expensive luxury items, and trailers are required for my neighbours to store non-running quads and boats on, so that they can never take them anywhere. So I’m stuck with using some of my garbage to haul home new garbage. This is where the innovation of the “flat tow” comes from.
Although it’s illegal in most municipalities, and considered to be an affront to God Himself by the Vatican, flat towing is often the most practical way of moving one car when all you have is another car. You loop a rope or chain between the two cars and then drive away, pulling the broken car behind you like a sort of two-ton rattlesnake. Your most expendable buddy sits in the unpowered car and strongarm-steers it around corners (assuming the steering still works) and you try not to kill them. Then, you make sure not to stop too abruptly (i.e. for lights) just in case the following car doesn’t actually have brakes, and try not to turn too sharply either, lest you sever the rope and have to make a new friend. When you get to your house, you only have to replace the transmissions in both cars, and you’re done.
Is it a good idea? Absolutely not. Is it an effective technique? Yes, in moderation. For instance, you don’t want the cops to see you, so it’s a good idea to only do it at night, or in especially bad weather. And hey, even if you fuck it up, you’ll be paying money to be towed for a shorter distance than you would otherwise. That is, assuming you don’t do a lot of this flat-towing near particularly steep mountain roads.
Night vision is a growing worry among motorists. It seems like new cars have ever-more-powerful headlights, which ruin your ability to see anything other than a retina-scarring cone of light. And that’s if you’re the one driving the new car. If you’re like me, and operate a rickety old car whose headlights are most generously described as “present,” you can easily be blinded by every asshole on the road who can fork over a down payment.
Worst of all, there’s no way to get back at them. Until now.
A couple years ago, I was introduced to a guy who was really into headlights. Making sure they had good bulbs, clear lenses, cutoffs, properly aligned, all that important stuff that nobody does. The thing he wanted to express to me most about my car, of course, is that it had shitty wiring feeding the headlights. When the headlights turn on, they’re limited by how much juice they can pull through that shitty wiring. He recommended that I get thicker, beefier wiring, like the kind you’d use to run a welder, or accidentally electrify your neighbour’s fence when you’re sick of him playing party rock at 4am.
At the time, the price of copper was pretty high, so I never took the opportunity to follow his advice. After getting an impromptu suntan on my drive back from work the other day, I now see the error of my ways. A quick visit to a nearby electrical substation equipped me with some exceptionally thick wire, and a bit of hammering and crimping got me the rest of the way. And of course the stock headlights wouldn’t do much: a subsequent quick visit to the airport filled the trunk of my car with some of those sodium bulbs that they use to warn airplanes not to crash into the airport. Perfect, I thought, and went along my merry way.
I didn’t have to wait long until a RAV4 bumbled into my path, shining its misaimed lights directly into my soul. Now, at last, the moment of my revenge was at hand. Also at hand: the high-beam switch. The exact memory of what happened next is a bit jumbled, but I’m pretty sure that the antagonistic Toyota was erased from existence only femtoseconds before my battery caught fire and exploded. Scientists are still confused about how, even long after my car has left the area, there remains a cone of perfectly lit road at all hours of the day, hovering ominously.
Now that fully three-quarters of the adult population of North America is employed sitting in the drivers’ seat of a pickup and shrieking into a smartphone for fake internet money, the zeitgeist has shifted. Where once we were happy to construct elaborate parasocial fantasies about our most beloved streamers, society’s urge now is to find people who don’t talk very much and follow them around instead.
This is difficult, not least because of self-selection. It’s easy to find outgoing folks to watch on TV. A loudmouth will come right up to you and demand that you watch them. Some might even wish physical harm upon your body should you stop paying attention to them. That’s not the case for quiet, random people, who – again – is what society and Hollywood wants to see.
You could follow them around, but to do so is considered to be “illegal” and “a little creepy” by our old-fashioned, behind-the-times Big Government police-police. Doing it by drone is somewhat more legally admissible – due to several loopholes in the Sentience Law, it is possible that the feds will end up locking up an STM32 microcontroller instead of you – but drone motors are noisy as hell, so you’re not going to get that authentic observation experience. All it takes is one mis-timed brrr and your target is no longer going to “be themselves.” Your audience will know.
When you get it right, though, the payoff is pretty good. You’ll get a bunch of money, which you can spend on new trucks in which to cry about half-imagined conspiracies in, and your quarry will get a significantly large cheque in the mail, with no return address, that they have no idea what they did to earn. Will they cash it anyway? Sounds like it might be some good fodder for season two.
If you don’t have revs, you don’t have much. The past era of wheezy, low-compression, low-revving, high-displacement engines is gone. Unfortunately, the new era is high-compression, low-revving, low-displacement engines bolstered by a turbocharger. Of course, the turbocharger spins to a quadrillion rpm, but we missed the part of engine development where daily drivers sounded like F1 cars.
Part of this is because the average driver is afraid to really spin out their engines. It makes a scary loud sound, and you might break it. Plus, the physics required to make an engine light and balanced enough to rev to five digits usually means that you’re not going to have a lot of bottom-end grunt. So no more winning stoplight races, which is the primary concern of people who purchase performance cars. Of course, they also cost more money, so automakers won’t bother.
So some folks spend a lot of money and time balancing, modifying, and accessorizing their engine until it is capable of reaching those lofty heights. There’s just no feeling like revving way past the end of what the original tachometer can display. It’s like the car doesn’t expect it, and watching the needle float well into the terrifying red part every time you goose the throttle is some real fighter-pilot shit. Making your perfectly good car engine sound like a sewing machine from the bowels of Hell is a side benefit, as is any actual performance benefit.
Me, I just prefer to drive cars that are too stupid to have rev limiters. Sure, the ignition system on my ‘74 Volare will stop working reliably once you wind it out past five grand, but you can get deep into the eights before the whole valvetrain explodes. And when it does, well, there’s lots of leftover F-1 technology. Forty-eight years of worthless race parts abandoned in a Ferrari warehouse? At least one of those heads is gonna fit my engine.
All the world’s a stage, and we are merely the folks who drive past it at high speed because who has time to stop and watch a bunch of people sweat in the middle of a park trying to put on a Shakespeare play? My musical-theatre production of The Fast and the Furious is reaching near-universal acclaim, mostly because of the practical effects.
You can thrill to the adventures of Paul Walker, Vin Diesel, and the street scoop on top of the Charger. Yes, there are lots of Honda CRXes, but due to cost they are mostly made of construction paper by the local art school, and strapped to dogs. Don’t worry, the dogs are union. Feel free to talk during the show: this thing is such a “high-octane thrill ride” that is “nearly deafening at full trot” that your date won’t even hear you snicker about how a Volkswagen Jetta doesn’t have seventeen forward gears. We provide ear protection at the door.
What you read in the paper is true, however. OSHA did climb entirely up our asses and set up a little campsite because it turns out that it’s not “healthy” to run a high-compression Mitsubishi Eclipse race engine inside an enclosed space for several hours. Not healthy, that is, if you believe in the whole carbon monoxide myth perpetuated by Big Oxygen. Nevertheless, the engine took care of the compliance issues on its own, throwing a rod on the big final race scene and scattering oil on the audience. Read your handbill: the first few rows may get scalded by chunks of compressor wheel!
And nothing brought the house down quite like the big final musical number, where we set up next summer’s big production of Tokyo Drift. Due to noise complaints and a couple pesky fires, the venue has told us that we need to find a new site for next year, unfortunately, and it may well be at the very same park that the Shakespeare folks are “at.” Which will be difficult for some of our background actors, because they are not allowed to go off-leash.
You might be surprised to hear that I am very, very picky about car suspension. Although all of my hoopties have blown shocks, cracked springs, rusty sway-bars and alignments that are best described as “needs improvement,” it bugs the absolute shit out of me to drive them. That’s why I drive as quickly as possible, to minimize the amount of time I spend grunting it out in low-speed traffic.
It’s not natural for human beings to worry about bump steer, caster gain, or wheel rate. In fact, researchers have found that folks like you and I prefer a car that handles poorly and feels crashy. Because of some protosimian chunk in our brains, we assume that getting our fillings jarred out every time we go near an asphalt-repair snake on the interstate is the same thing that a real race car would do to us. Of course, real race cars are driven by professionals, assembled by professionals, designed by professionals, and often go really fast for long periods of time. They’re about as smooth a ride as you can get when you’re knocking on the door of fighter-jet speeds.
Here’s the thing: I don’t go nearly as fast as an actual race car driver on the road. There’s a couple reasons why. Primarily, it’s because my cars make about the same amount of horsepower as a particularly ambitious cordless drill. Well, maybe not the new lithium-ion ones. Those things can break a wrist. More like the kind that Grandpa kept in the closet for a couple years until the batteries started to leak, but it can still turn one or two screws in before it makes a funny smell. What was I talking about, again? Oh yes, cornering speed.
Because I don’t take corners as quickly as a real race car driver, I don’t need good suspension. What I need is to keep the body of the car mostly off of the road. And it turns out that the combined competence of every automotive engineer on the planet has been trained on a single point: how to keep people who do absolutely no maintenance to their cars alive, even when they drive at ridiculous speeds. Don’t think I don’t appreciate it: if I didn’t trust y’all, I’d buy a new car.
I really love cheese. This is not, as far as I know, a controversial position. All of human civilization has been developed to inculcate one of three things: booze, cheese, or pickles. Those are all great. And coincidentally, human civilization also produced the automobile. The jury’s still out on that one, but a big point in its favour is that it can be used to go to the store and get more cheese.
A couple years ago, my local supermarket chain decided they were going to class up the joint. They couldn’t just keep increasing prices every year without at least pretending they were a “luxury” supermarket, as opposed to the regular lame-o poor people one where you pay fifteen cents less for a head of lettuce. The first thing they added was a high-end cheese bar. Dairy products from all over the world, of every conceivable description. I was in heaven.
After blowing several paycheques and an advance in one single trip to the grocery store, I had achieved what philosophers throughout history thought impossible: I became a little tired of cheese. And, if I’m honest, the grocery store was a little tired of me, the dude who would show up in a rattly old Saab, wilfully bought armloads of exotic cheeses, but kept mis-pronouncing “Camembert” and asking the sommelier which kind paired best with nachos.
This was only a temporary problem, however, and within the month I was back at it. In my absence, however, the cheese display had fallen on hard times. Without my patronage, the rest of the hard-working but spendthrift and lactose-intolerant members of my community simply didn’t see the point in spending seventeen bucks on a 1-inch-cubed square of ultra-dense compressed Danish Blue. And without the justification to re-order, the supermarket manager did what they all do best: put out blocks of extremely cheap cheddar, which I also loved and would devour without provocation.
Even though I’m still happy with my inexpensive and convenient access to vast quantities of a relatively pedestrian cheese, I do wonder what could have happened if my stomach had stuck it out a few more days. Would I finally have gotten a taste for the good life, updated my resume, gotten a fancy job as an investment banker and owned a yacht? Or would I have simply receded into the alleys, trading crude favours of all kinds to strangers for just one more bump of brie? We’ll never know, but what we do know is the phone number for the guy who used to work at the cheese bar. And he really hates it when you phone him and ask for a wine pairing for Tostitos Hint of Spicy Queso.
Because our civilization has – let’s face it – slowly ground to a halt, there’s a lot of jobs that just aren’t getting done anymore. Firefighters, shopping mall operators, piano tuners, and professional mountebanks are in short supply these days. In fact, the public school in my neighbourhood is overrun with Richardson ground squirrels. They’re adorable little squeaky fuckers who dig holes in the field, and then scream at you when you come close.
Having all these holes in the fields of the elementary school didn’t bother me, until a bunch of rich folks brought out their horses for a little illegal polo match. Running their giant animals through the middle of terrified peasant kids who were having fun on the playground seconds ago is a pretty dramatic sight, but the common man – or rodent – got back at them. One of ‘em (the horses, not the rich folks) broke their leg in a hole made by one of these pocket gophers, and now it was suddenly a major priority of the local government to Do Something About This.
Naturally, as a friend of The Mayor, I was hanging out at his place when he got the call. Why am I the friend of The Mayor, you may ask? It’s all about connections: namely, I have a substantial amount of blackmail material on him from our shared upbringing, and as a result he lets me do his dirty work in exchange for cash under the table. This is how government works, you see, which you’d understand if you had paid attention in social studies class, which I now also teach due to the recent staffing cuts. I jumped at the job offer implicit in the conference call, and headed over to the elementary school with the full intention of getting rid of some little burrowing rodents.
Well, dear reader, I couldn’t quite go through with it. For one thing, they’re completely adorable. Seeing the gopher parents playing with their little gopher children stayed my hand of vengeance. They also made a better offer: it turns out that one of the rich dudes dropped the wireless key to his Aston Martin when he fell off the horse. Said key is worth like sixty bucks in parts. I’m gonna finally have a working flashlight.
Whenever you talk about vans, inevitably some jokester in the crowd is going to make a reference to forcible child abduction. This is in exceptionally poor taste, because children add weight without increasing quarter-mile performance. The only correct use of a short- or long-wheelbase GMC panel van in Appliance White Metallic is that of drag racing.
Although you would intuitively believe that nothing could be further from a professional drag-racing car, or exotic nitrometh-burning funny car, than an old Bell work van, you would be wrong. The ability of these rolling Lego blocks to absorb four-digit quantities of turbocharged horsepower means that you can force them to unnatural velocities with relatively small expense.
The specific technical reasons for this are somewhat boring, having to do with the fact that General Motors is too lazy to make “death-dealing 700hp engine from the future” and “1970s smog-choked wheeze-o-matic eight-cylinder producing 120 horsepower on a good day” substantially different in dimensions and mounting. Just like with Ikea, GM’s spend-thriftiness and adherence to internal standards means that you can cobble together all kinds of horrific abominations if you know how to recklessly careen your way through a parts catalogue.
It is from such an act that you can easily take a 1980s panel van and hop it up to ridiculous amounts of grunt. Unfortunately, this is not a new trick in the drag-racing world. If you show up at a local bracket race with a beaten-to-death work van, everyone is just going to assume it has the approximate ground speed of an F/A-18 fighter jet. And that’s really embarrassing for someone like me, who has an asthmatic small-block engine with at least two or three blown fire rings in the head gasket from when the previous owner tried to flee the cops and ended up getting thrown in the pokey for trying to kidnap kids.
There are many days spoken of in legend. Days of great fame. Days of great disorder. Days of heroic deeds done for the love of your fellow man. And then there’s Hot Dog Cart Days.
Let me explain: in my neighbourhood, there is a shopping mall. In recent years, this shopping mall has fallen into a bit of disuse. Due to general economic malaise and the uniquely stupid nature of commercial real estate financing, most of its shops lie in a near-permanent state of emptiness. Things are tough for this mall, a death spiral of sorts. So tough, in fact, that one entrepreneur set up his own pirate shop in the parking lot.
That’s right. Think hard about what normally stops you from rolling up to your local mall and selling things out of your trunk. Mall security, right? That security costs money. A lot of money. The same amount of money, in fact, whether or not any crimes are actively ongoing. And why would criminals visit a mall with no stores? Ergo, the property owner can save some cash by not hiring full-time security. They’ll still show up, to satisfy insurers and the local police that some guards are there sometimes, but not all the time.
Dan, who we will refer to as Shaun for the rest of this story in order to protect his identity from litigants, suspected this state of affairs. That’s why he camped out all week long, for several weeks, in his shitty old pickup truck. Eventually, he figured out that on Thursday through Saturday, they didn’t have enough guards free to harass him. He started small – as you can guess, his initial business was a hot dog cart. And those hot dogs taste good, but not as good as sticking it to the man, which is a built-in condiment. Suddenly, the neighbourhood had a trendy, pop-up business, albeit one that was just buying wieners from the Safeway in the mall and then cooking those wieners at a 200% markup. Our community association even gave him an award, which I’m sure incensed the property owner, as if the giant Excel spreadsheet running their vast business had even noticed such a slight against its all-knowledge.
So when you come down to my neighbourhood, on Thursday through Saturday, come visit Shaun’s hot dog cart. I would be there with him as well, selling my old parts and bootleg promotional t-shirts, but Shaun’s made enough profit to hire some local high schoolers as his own security. Money changes people, you know.
In order to get really, really rich, it’s a good idea to figure out what impossibly rich people are excited about and then sell them a bunch of crap. Digging holes in the ground, cool robots, space rockets: it’s basically what toddlers like, isn’t it? Of course, the billionaires want to have their stuff bigger, better, and cooler, but it all dates back to messing around in a sandbox or water table with some childhood toys.
This revelation came to me recently while I was studying the toy aisles at my local mass-market retailer, searching for collectible merchandise from the movie The Junkman. Perhaps the best way to predict what billionaires would get excited about, I reasoned, would be to go back in time and put a toy on the shelves that their toddler-selves would want.
After constructing a rudimentary time machine from the leftover garbage I had in my backyard, I travelled back in time about fifty years. I know that everyone says building a time machine is hard, but maybe that’s because they’re just repeating what everyone else said. I used to think it was “hard” to drive on twenty-eight-year-old tires, too, but Plastidip and a sharp utility knife corrected me on that issue, too. In fact, the most difficult part of the whole ordeal was convincing a bank to give me money: I had to put on a suit with a tie and pretend to be my own grandfather, who I knew would murder me if he found out.
Once I returned to the present, I could immediately tell that something had gone wrong with my plan. For one thing, Kay Bee Toys still existed. And its parking lot was chock full of brand-new Plymouth Volares, cast in exotic materials like carbon fibre and “intact paint.” Society at large, it seemed, also liked to pay attention to what the Richie Riches wanted.
I was looking through some old photo albums the other day, and it made me a little wistful. Of course, these aren’t my photo albums. Photographic evidence of my family’s misdeeds, or even existence, would cause a serious legal concern. No, these are treasured family heirlooms that I find stuck in the trunk of cars that have been sent to the junkyard.
Why do so many family photo albums crop up in the back of cars which have been deemed past their useful life? Nobody knows for sure, but scientists are getting close to finding out. For me, it serves as a curiosity. I get to find out about the life of the person who used to own the automobile (or at least the person that the car’s owner stole the albums from while robbing their house for quick meth cash,) and sometimes I even see the car in question in the album.
Those are the best ones. Seeing the vehicle as a beloved family member, instead of some cast-off garbage that an obsessive loser is turning into a well-beyond-unsafe street racer, is heartening. It reminds me of the wheel of life, and then I start to get a little existential terror, and I’m motivated to get out to the garage and make some progress on this junk instead of looking at other people’s family pictures all day.
What do I do with the albums after I’m done looking through them? Easy. I stuff them in my toolbag and head back to the junkyard, where I shove them in an entirely different set of trunks. The market will decide then if they are rescued or crushed, and handing it to fate takes the responsibility out of my hands. Plus, having spooky old ghosts rattling their chains around your house is pretty annoying. They can’t even hold a flashlight for you.
Whenever you collect a lot of decrepit, useless old trash, the first thing people ask you about it is: what’s it worth? Not much, is the obvious answer, until it isn’t. Nothing is more discouraging to me than finding out that some of my absolute worthless “vintage collectibles” are actually collectibles.
Mostly, this is because of the guilt. Now that this piece of junk is beloved and remembered by ordinary people who never used it when it was new, I should probably stop using it to hold up a wobbly table or throwing it into a pile of old rust whenever it no longer holds my interest. It has to be treated with respect, kept somewhere safe, where I will be too anxious to use it.
In order to avoid this situation, I work hard to immediately convert any new trash into horrible mutant bastards. This Frankensteining forces the value to nothing, and even the folks who loved the original constituent items are repulsed by the inartful mash-up that I have produced from them. Shame that everyone ruined these when they were cheap, they whine, because it sure would be nice to have an original.
What I am trying to avoid, above all, is to become famous and popular. Because as soon as that happens, everything I touch will become valuable. People would probably pay, like, forty bucks for a piece of toilet paper that Leonardo da Vinci used. I probably would, too, because if it’s tough enough to have survived five hundred years, it might make a good base for a fibreglass quarter-panel repair.
Only a rank amateur puts a car together with the parts that the car is supposed to have. No, what you want to do is intermix parts. You can start out doing it with different models, and eventually move to different brands altogether. You’re not done building your car until it takes a good thirty minutes to try and explain to a curious onlooker just how many different other cars all of its parts were sourced from.
This is inarguable: the hybrid vigor of combining a bunch of horrible cars to produce one car makes that final car better. Or at least weirder, which is the same thing. So how do you figure out what parts interchange? There’s two ways to go about it, one better than the other: you could ask on the internet and see if any crazy people will let you in on their junkyard speed secrets, or – preferably – you can just have a lot of broken parts lying around and eyeball them when you’re looking for a new project.
Having stack after stack of garbage is the ideal way to go about it. Divine inspiration will strike when you’re tired, or drunk, or just are tired from working on your daily driver. Getting a lot of random junk can only happen from owning a lot of cars, and working on them a lot. Your spare parts pile will organically grow, and the process of having to move all that trash in and out of cars will teach you intuitively about their relative sizes, mounting holes, and special magical aspects. And the contempt that you develop for literally all automotive products will help radicalize you into using the hammer and plasma cutter to make things fit when they don’t.
Congratulations: your car is now a rolling freak show of three decades’ worth of swapped parts, and it may be completely impossible to source any of those exotics from your average auto parts store when you break down during a road trip. Better not chance it. Maybe it’s finally time to get a reliable, normal car and not fuck with it too much. Didn’t someone mention the word “vigor” up above?
Man, an Acura Vigor would be pretty sweet. Maybe you could swap out the transmission for one of those late-model TSX 6-speeds, and bolt in a limited-slip differential from an RSX-S. It’ll probably need some weird combo of axles, but I’m sure I can figure something out while we’re at the junkyard. Get in the car.
Fuel: it’s not getting any cheaper, is it? Turns out all those compressed dinosaur squeezings are better off being spent in foreign wars, on billionaires’ yachts, and straight up being burned because they can’t get a high enough price for them. It’s about time that someone finds an alternative fuel, and luckily for you, it’s a loud-mouth idiot like myself. Hey, Big Oil and the CIA already want me dead for unrelated reasons; why not help average, everyday folks out a little by spilling the secret?
Here it is. Are you listening? The secret to biofuels is potatoes. That’s right, the Irish version of a carrot is rich in starches, which can be exploded inside an internal combustion engine to provide propulsion and motive force. Sure, it’s not quite as efficient as gasoline, and certainly not as power-dense, but it’s a lot cheaper.
Wait, how are potatoes cheaper? A five-kilo bag at the supermarket costs like eight bucks and it won’t even get you around the block. This betrays a critical failure of logic. Potato delivery trucks don’t run on handshakes and good feelings, after all, so the price of supermarket potatoes is always going to be pegged in some way to the cost of traditional fuels.
And speaking of pegging, that’s exactly how you’ll be saving money on potatoes. Just dig a hole in the ground with any convenient stick, plastic toy beach shovel, or errant burnout, and chuck some old potatoes in there. The worse the better: these things want to grow, and by the time you remember that you buried them, you’ll come back to find have like four hundred pounds of the fuckers with which to distill into high-test.
Here’s where the real cost savings is: you don’t even have to own the land in which you insert the potatoes. Public highways consist of several thousand miles of unpatrolled ditches. Are cops, no matter how bored, really gonna come by and hassle you because you’re throwing potatoes into a dirty hole? They better not, because that is a protected activity and my shark of an attorney will be ready to protect your rights to beautify the commons. Plus, there’s no reason to slow down, if you buy a right-hand-drive car from Japan. Chuck ‘em out the window while you’re doing 70 and not looking at the road in your Mitsubishi FTO whose exhaust smells oddly like French fries.
Whether it’s professional elevator racing, amateur automobile racing, or anything in between, the one thing that all good race drivers can agree on is the need to hydrate. Even though the machine is doing a lot of the physical exertion, it’s not like you’re just sitting on the couch and playing Gran Turismo. No, this is more like working the oven for two shifts at a pizza restaurant that does a buck eighty on the back straight and occasionally spits boiling transmission fluid at you. If you can’t keep water inside, then you’re not going to be at your best.
Any of my friends will tell you that I’m jealous of real race car drivers. For instance, I have a window net despite having a fully-functional (in theory) set of windows. I run a quick-change rear end, so that I can easily have my non-existent tech crew swap out the final drive to better suit the suburban community that I am burning up 17-year-old all season tires within. And fire protection, that all-important expense by professional race car operators who don’t want to die in a preventable inferno? Well, the driver’s door doesn’t fully latch, so chances are I’ll be able to just fall out when things go really wrong.
The one place that I’ve outdone real race car drivers is in the aforementioned challenge of hydration. When I street race on my way to work, I use a fancy coffee mug that I found on the side of the road and washed all the blood out of. That mug is held onto the full roll cage by a bungee cord (cupholders weigh too much) and is in prime position for me to reach up with my hand between shifts and take a swig of whatever bag of beans was cheapest at the dollar store this week. Real race car drivers, the kind that make money instead of lose it to crooked sheriffs enforcing the so-called law, drink Gatorade with a very long straw.
So, the next time you flip on a Formula One race and you see a bunch of highly-paid Italians trying to figure out how to get their coffee mug in through their helmet visors, think of me. And maybe also buy a fire extinguisher for your car. If there’s enough demand, the price will drop, and maybe the stores that sell those extinguishers will stop putting the anti-theft tags on the box.
Bondo: life-giving chemical, weird-smelling bagel schmear, hated bodge Play-Doh of Barrett-Jackson. Can it be all of these things at once? Yes, and more.
When I was first introduced to Bondo, it was by the old, grizzled body tech who would sometimes visit my father’s garage. On occasion, a customer would get their shit really dinged up, so dinged up in fact that it would have to be towed to us to get mechanically fixed. After my dad and his cronies had finished hammering the car generally straight and made it so that it could move under its own power again, it would get sent to Panelbeater Phil to make it pretty.
It didn’t seem like an equitable distribution of work, because he would also make the frame straight and fix all of the “reckless deathtrap” concerns, but someone had to go first to handle the big notes, such as “wheel done fell off” and “lots of stuff leaking out the front.” In this way, the two shops became friends, of a sort, and sometimes Phil would just finish off a little job in our garage rather than spend money getting it towed a few blocks to his town.
Once, I was hanging out when he was doing a Mercury Bobcat. If you’re not terribly familiar with the Bobcat, good. The rest of us will let you know all about it when we’re done searching Craigslist to see if any survived. The owner of the Bobcat had backed into a Dumpster at very high speeds, bending the shit out of the bumper and warping the rear quarter panel in the process. it seemed like he had also inflicted upon himself some sort of damage to the rear axle mounts, which is where my dad’s shop was involved. Either way, by the time i saw it, it was generally capable of being a motor vehicle, and both of the junior mechanics were taking turns “road-testing” it to go pick up doughnuts from the shop.
This is where the Bondo got used. It seemed the Bobcat’s owner’s insurance company is one of those firms that doesn’t actually believe in paying out any money, and they wanted the cheapest, shittiest job imaginable. They didn’t get it.
Phil taught me the ins and outs of using it to cover up a quarter panel that day, and expertly matched the original contours of the car with an artist’s eye for detail. Once he was done, it looked better than the damn thing did originally. The experience stuck with me for all these years. Of course, as a young and dumb kid, I didn’t bother to ask Phil about the secrets of pre-warming panels with a heat gun, or the exact amount of tack to look for when mixing it, or what kind of primer to use underneath. At the time, all I retained was that Bondo was good shit, and so were the carton of off-label pirate unfiltered Gitanes that he smoked that day. Hey, maybe that’s the secret.
It’s crazy that air conditioning is now considered to be an essential requirement for survival. This glorious miracle technology, produced so that Southerners could live comfortably in weather approximating the surface of Hell, is spreading everywhere. And there’s one thing I don’t like about it: it costs actual money.
Now, there’s lots of fabulous trashy ways to cool your living space. Swamp coolers are a superlative example of this. If you blow air over a cool block of ice, then the air becomes cool. Physicists have spent their entire lives trying to explain exactly why this works, but it does. There’s a problem with this, too: you need some sort of machine capable of making a giant fucking chunk of frozen water. Then, for whatever reason, you decide not to live within that machine.
Here’s my proposal: most modern cars come complete with air conditioning. Sure, it often doesn’t work very well, thanks to a conspiracy between rubber manufacturers and the auto industry to make seals that wear out and leak after a mere 25 years of holding back caustic chemicals in a system that has never been maintained. Usually, however, the air conditioning system still outlives some other part of the car. This is especially true for German luxury cars, which will receive their first four-digit maintenance bill as soon as the dealership does an oil change. So you go to the junkyard, and pull the whole system out of the newest-looking piece of four-ring trash you can find.
Now, we’re back to the very same energy-input problem that confounds the humble swamp cooler. We need to spin the air-conditioning compressor really fast, or it won’t compress, and if it doesn’t compress… cold air no go, for a reason that I totally know and won’t go into detail in this article, in the interest of brevity. Luckily for us, my house is next to a 24-hour gym, with a series of treadmills. What’s even luckier is that the treadmills are very close to the wall of the building, making it possible for anyone with a borrowed concrete-foundation drill bit to rig up a simple driveshaft/transfer-case/reduction-gear system. Now, when folks pay money so they can stop sweating outside in order to sweat inside, they’re helping keep me from having to sweat inside. And all it cost was several hundred dollars in Pick-N-Pull fees, because it’s too hot to throw all that shit over the fence into the ditch and pick it up later.
The only thing that keeps our civilization moving is the fear of getting in trouble. Cops, bosses, particularly judgmental children at the playground you’re doing a doughnut in: that keeps your ass in line. Not everyone is restrained by this sort of social give-and-take, which is why we have prisons. Of course, there is always the occasional person who is brave enough to really push the envelope without landing in an institution. We respect those mavericks, and hold them on our shoulders like small gods.
I’d always wanted to commit a long series of traffic offences and beat the rap for them. In the past, I’d picked up speeding tickets like anyone else. Those were all relatively piddly, and at the worst, I’d have to hire a professional ticket-botherer to get me out of that pickle. There’s simply no thrill in escaping a fifteen-over ticket on a major highway: cops are bad at record-keeping, maybe the handwriting was a little smudged. Hardly Perry Mason stuff.
That’s when my attorney, and my attorney’s attorney, turned me on to a little-known legal loophole. Ever since the corporations took over the government, large shopping malls have technically (and legally) become sovereign property. They don’t do all the rigamarole of a “real” nation-state, mostly because passports cost money and they want you to drop by the movie theatre without getting an invasive cavity search in security, but they do have the ability to implement their own laws. In their radical legal theory, they had determined that the big megaplex outlet mall near my place had failed to “copy across” the laws from its parent, and therefore was several hundred square miles of absolute anarchy. And what better way to prove it, than with a Baja Bug?
Now, there were some problems. I didn’t go over the Baja Bug with a fine toothed comb. I was too busy, attending the scouting meetings held in the food court where we took laser measurements and drew little diagrams. That’s how I missed the exhaust valves burning themselves out on the initial methanol run. With dramatically decreased compression leading to shitty horsepower, it was no wonder I wasn’t able to clear that final jump over the mall fountain. Now, I’m stuck in corporate court on an orbiting space station, where it turns out my attorney (and his attorney) have no actual power to practice law. Hopefully they can get some astronauts up here with a law degree soon; I’ve seen what those dudes got up to on the moon.
I’ve been collecting old pieces of trash for quite some time. So long, in fact, that the old pieces of trash are now newer than the things that I bought as new. Just last week, I was walking by the playground and some kids were kicking around a positronic brain that belonged to a sentient android like a soccer ball. There were a few dents and dings, but it was in nicer shape than my phone, so I brought it home.
Now, I know that the laws say that artificial intelligence is not living and thinking like we are, but I felt bad for it regardless. Probably its body broke down, and the previous owner couldn’t afford to go on eBay and throw some new parts at it. Maybe they got a better one, with technologies I can’t even imagine. After burning my fingers a few times, I managed to get it soldered into an old Asahi Beerbot.
Going down to a plastic 1980s gimmick robot whose only purpose in life is to serve alcohol was probably a downgrade from its previous body, but certainly better than being punted around by children. And it’s not like I was going to wire it up to my car – at least the Beerbot has functioning lights. The robot started to give me beers, which was to be expected as A) it was no doubt grateful; B) it is pretty much the only thing it can do. Eventually, I decided to wire up an old beeper speaker to see if I could get some communication out of it.
We worked out a simple Morse code, me and the incomprehensibly vast intelligence sitting in my Japanese booze novelty. The robot regaled me of stories of its past, being instantiated on a distant planet and working its way to the cradle of humanity, only to trip on some subway station stairs and get all fucked up. All it wanted, it continued, was to understand why human beings love to make themselves suffer.
I wheeled the little robot into the garage then, and pointed to the car that lay on cinder blocks and loosely-arranged old spare tires. “This is a Plymouth,” I explained, “get fixing.”
You can never be too sure with escalators. They’re pretty shifty, you see. Stairs are one thing, but moving stairs are a whole other thing. And they’re made by spooky foreign-sounding corporations, like Schindler, Otis, and the Mitsubishi zaibatsu. Not to mention that, while you might know some friendly rich people, and they may even have an elevator in their house, they certainly do not have an escalator. Nobody’s that bourgeois.
No, escalators are all owned by featureless real-estate trusts operating out of malls, apartment buildings, and office buildings. Who do you go to if the escalator decides one day to become a pedestrian juicer? There’s nobody normal with anecdotal evidence about owning and operating one. It’s a wonder that anyone steps on the fuckers at all. Of course we still do, and when something goes wrong, it’s a shock to our sensibilities.
And who are the authorities who are meant to check these things for safety? If there’s no weird hobbyists to learn their ins and outs, the only thing that these inspectors have to check is what the corporations that made the escalators told them to check. I bet those instructions conveniently leave out the flaw in the disembarkment escutcheon that reduces pedestrians to a thin beige paste every so often. So, who is it that will escalate the escalators, so to speak? Me. I will.
As your local independent escalator inspection technician, I will deploy a series of eerily realistic lifelike androids to ride the escalators in your residential, commercial, or industrial building. Anyone can hire me, not just the owners of the escalator. If you have a weird feeling about those moving stairs you ride every day, slip me a couple bucks. If something goes wrong when the androids take their test ride, you’ll know right away and you’ll be glad it didn’t happen to you. Sure, they’re pretty creepy, especially when they start talking in their rhythmic babble language and fixate you with their godless empty stare, but I’m not going to create any robots that I’m attached to, and then feed them into the maw of a Schindler Volkshredder 9000.
Have you ever engaged in a race with a motorhome? I don’t mean your average stoplight street race. Everyone’s done that when they drive a motorhome: rev the engine a bit and dump it at the light. Harmless fun when you know you’re going to lose, because you’re hauling an entire 1br apartment along with you. No, what I’m talking about is circuit racing.
It doesn’t even have to be a complex circuit. Imagine taking a Winnebago Brave on the “Roval” of Charlotte Motor Speedway. Swap a little paint with a Georgie Boy. Knock the mirror off a GMC Glacier as you shut it down on the straights with your gently breathed-on small block Chevy. Rattle the doors of a decrepit Prevost as you force him into the high spots of the track, worryingly close to the Armco. Yeah, that’s the stuff.
Now, don’t think that it would be unsafe, either. These are glorious body-on-frame workhorse trucks underneath. I mean, the frame might be a little rusty, and the body might be a little thin, but whatever you hit is at least a couple meters away from the drivers’ seat until things start to get really dicey. Weld in a cage if you’re feeling scared, but keep in mind that it will impede your access to the cupholders.
Don’t worry about finding one. North America is chock full of old motorhomes that nobody is using, and probably wants to get rid of as quickly as possible. In fact, these old recreational vehicles are the world’s number-one reserve of big-block V8s. There’s more 440s in existence sitting in rotten avocado-and-blood-orange interiors than there are in General Lee replicas, and when you’re done using it up on the track, you can just abandon it on the side of the road like it overheated.
It won’t take many dollars for a farmer to let you use his tractor to pull it out of his field, and the mouse-bitten and mouldy interior can be jettisoned to cut weight anyway. If this isn’t the future of racing, I don’t know what is.
Workshop safety is everybody’s responsibility. Yes, even if you don’t work in that workshop. If you are walking down the street, and you see some asshole hopping under his Jeep to do an oil change without jack-stands, you need to get involved. What would you rather have, a couple minutes of embarrassing screaming, or wondering why the firefighters are pressure-washing bits of teeth and hair off of the driveway the next time you walk past?
Like many other things, calling folks out for being reckless dickheads is not actually a moral judgment. We all have taken shortcuts to get “just one thing done” without taking the proper precautions. You get tunnel vision, and before you know it, you’re in the emergency room trying to phone your significant other with your two remaining fingers in order to ask them to turn the welder off because you’re not made of shielding gas, okay?
If someone instead had come up to you a few minutes before this disaster and let you know what you’re doing is fucking stupid, things would be different. You’d probably have put some gloves on, while cursing the accident of their birth and feeling gently ostracized. It is in this way that humanity persists. And there’s no better way to turn around a dangerous workplace than to become known as the narc who keeps telling their coworkers not to wear comedy neckties around the rapidly-spinning metal parts lathe. Sure, they’ll make fun of you at the parties you are now no longer invited to, but at least they get to have those parties.
Which is not to say that this is a hard and fast rule. For instance, if you see me performing an insanely dangerous act, it’s probably because I know what I’m doing. While you certainly can say something to my face, you’ll probably regret it later because I might cry a little bit and think about the conversation every morning in the shower for years to come.
I genuinely wish that I knew a lot more about 50s cars. They look so sleek and cool, with ostentatious features, exotic doo-dads, and an engine about as refined as an irrigation pump. Thing is, because most of them got thrown away by people upgrading to the newest and greatest, there’s not many left. And that means that whenever you take a sawzall and homemade carbon-fibre loom to one, the museum folks are gonna get really upset.
I’ve never been a believer in keeping a car all-original. Even the primoest used shitbox has had a couple modifications, often in the form of parking lot scuffs, from the previous owner. Once the car’s story has started being written, I can’t resist continuing it. And I’m sure if the alcoholic drug addicts who loosely tek-screwed together a ‘55 Star Chief knew that it was still rolling around 67 years later, they’d agree that it could do with a little modernization.
Still, the critics are right. If everyone throughout history had the balls to turn a perfectly good old car into a fire-breathing hot rod, then the museums would be full of broken fire-breathing hot rods, instead of immobile, pristine display pieces. It’s hard to show a single car as an example of the entire model range, if every single one of the survivors has turned into some kind of post-apocalyptic mutant made partially out of Home Depot.
We’ll find out what happens soon. The local old-car museum has been having trouble making their payments, now that the curator went crazy and started buying up 1980s cars. Families refuse to bring their impressionable children to see the mintest second-gen Trans Am imaginable, all because of some lies that yours truly aired on his religious talk-radio show last weekend. I figure if I tell them I’ll really, really take care of the Nomad, I can probably trade it for a Mazda 323.
When seconds count, race car drivers rely on having paid the barest amount of attention to maintenance. Not me, though. I know that every single automobile is designed to deal with the most negligent asshole imaginable driving it. The Feds would come down on Toyota like a ton of bricks if the Corolla caught fire when you do something as simple as fourteen minutes straight of parking lot peel-outs, before immediately shutting it off hot and then going inside the McDonalds for a hard-earned meal.
The more you think about this, the more it makes sense. How challenging is driving to work, compared to going 200mph on the back straight at Imola? I would expect that guy’s brakes to work a lot better, or at least on all four wheels. What you should take away from it is that there’s a wider margin of acceptable maintenance, and that the guy at the dealership who tells you to replace that badly-cracked windshield and missing headlight isn’t working on a team that can win LeMans either.
Which is not to say you can completely neglect it. No, you need to know a whole lot about cars to precision-guide this level of incompetent maintenance. For instance, I know that the high-speed damping on my left rear shock is toast because the seal inside has failed over the decades, but the low-speed damping still works great. That’s why I drive over speed bumps in the parking lot at 70 km/h – ride comfort. Would someone who doesn’t even know what a shock is be able to tell you this critical information, what the media would call a “life hack?” Even Toyota’s best efforts won’t protect the hubris of truly non-maintaining a motor vehicle.
So maybe it isn’t correct to say you don’t have to pay attention to maintenance. I have to constantly be aware of every failing, marginal, and marginally-failing component on my car, and understand how, say, launching it off the big hill at the golf course is going to damage it further. It’s probably better to say what I’m not paying is money.
Everyone’s afraid that computers will make celebrities say fake things and have it seem real. They’re terrified that we can no longer trust video evidence of one another. That computation has advanced to the point where wholesale synthesis of an alternative reality is possible. How can we ever trust the facts? Who is real and who is just a machine hallucination? I’m here to tell you that the only thing you can trust is Toyota Celicas.
Here are two incontrovertible scientific facts: one, the Toyota Celica is a good car, and two, the Toyota Celica cannot speak. These two facts, in combination, can be used as building blocks to construct the foundational premise of all logic. Whenever you are worried, and feel like you can’t trust anyone, know that the Celica would never mislead you, because it is ethical and also mute. Then go hop in your Celica and go for a spin around the highway. By the time you get back, someone will have burned up half of an NVidia warranty trying to machine-learn a zoo monkey singing Elvis songs, which we can all agree is far less existentially panic-inducing.
Now, you might think that rule one is debatable. After all, the Toyota Celica, like any Japanese car, has had its ups and downs, and more importantly, models equipped with an automatic transmission. Even the worst models, the ones meant entirely for ostentatious business peacocking by Japanese uber-casuals, are still better than fact-checking on the internet. Just ask the people who are forced to do it every day for money. Literally one hundred percent of journalists would rather be out driving even a shitty Toyota personal luxury coupe rather than doing their jobs, and that’s a fact you can take to the bank. At which point they’ll tell you to fuck off, because banks don’t deal in facts. Banks deal in money, or to be more accurate, the machine-generated simulacra of mone – God damn it, they got me again!
Recently, I was standing near a television that was turned on. This television was displaying a “house hunting” show, about a putatively normal couple that desired to own a farm. What’s more, they wanted to live on the farm. I was enraptured from the start, and kept peering behind whoever was talking to try and make out what shitboxes they were planning on storing on that farm.
Tragically, no shitboxes were detected that day. They didn’t intend to fill that farming area with glorious old cars, but instead a bunch of boring livestock, children, and crops. This kind of thing is happening more and more, according to a report just issued by the Seat Safety Switch Institute for Convincing People To Do What I Want. As our society collapses, one of the ways in which it manifests is that normal, everyday, people are letting farms go to waste.
Sure, you might think that this is okay. There’s a lot of farmland out there, only some of it is actually farmable thanks to the topsoil crisis, so why not let these city slickers cosplay as real fruit-of-the-earth kinds? Who can it hurt? You go ahead and keep that sentence in your mouth when you drive to your next rural shitbox auction and find out that a ‘61 F100 is now a $7,000 truck.
Yeah, you’re not gonna use that for mud-bogging, much less trailer pulls or even plowing your driveway. It’s simply too valuable, driven up by all the folks who have bought a farm, found out they hate farming, and quickly attempt to adopt the accoutrements and mannerisms of true farmers in order to seal the yawning void at the core of their self. Freud would call it “fucked,” and for once I agree.
So that’s why I’m writing my provincial representatives, demanding a maximum property value regulation. If you make farmland too nice, your ass is going back downtown. You own a Lexus, for fuck’s sake. Go have champagne and masked Eyes Wide Shut cult sex without interfering with my ability to peruse fields full of rotting Plymouths.
Is soap box derby still a thing? I don’t care what the answer is, because I’m going to tell you a story about it now. When I was just a wee tot, it was common to put some wagon wheels on a wooden box, and then race down a steep hill against your friends. Sometimes you’d have an old, cut-down hockey stick as a handbrake. That is, unless your dad was a real asshole about letting you use his tools, in which case your braking system was just the opposing curb or the softest-looking hedge.
Personally, I never won any of these races, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. I was a pretty slight kid, due to my diet of mass-market amphetamines, free parts-store popcorn, and whatever my parents were able to steal from their (invariably failed) interviews to become circus folk. There was just not enough mass to fill in that part of the high-school physics equation, and so I’d weave, feather-like, down the slope. All the carnage had already happened by the time I got there, the victors bruised and bloodied, standing dazed in the scattered wreckage of their victorious chariots. Those lucky sons of bitches.
Every time I crest a hill, I think about those days. Then, I plunk the transmission into a screamingly-low gear in order to take advantage of the fuel savings of engine braking. All around me, I see other rubes gleefully dragging their brake pedal, burning off tens of a percent of a cent worth of brake pads prematurely. That stuff isn’t free, people: why not use nature’s whoa pedal, internal combustion engine compression?
Now, I do understand that this is impossible for many of you out there. Rather than a conventional manual transmission, or even a repulsive goo-filled automatic, you’ve been forced by a shifty dealership salesperson into obtaining a snowmobile transmission made entirely out of chains, belts, and whips. Never fear. Hockey sticks are cheap, marginally less expensive than brake pads, and if you drive in my neck of the woods long enough, you’ll probably have a hole in the floor of your very own soon.
There are thousands and thousands of construction vehicles out there. Think back to your youth: you were probably enthralled by a dump truck. Maybe a steam roller caught your fancy. At some point, though, the inescapable pressures of daily living and social shame caught up with you, and you discarded that love of vehicles that do stuff.
If I were a billionaire, I would like to throw a bag over your head, wrap a rope around your extremities and transport you to a construction-themed playground that I have developed. Well, I wouldn’t be the one doing it. Paradoxically, I don’t really enjoy manual labour all that much, and what point is there in being a “job creator” if one of the jobs you create isn’t “hired goon?” Anyway, here’s what would happen: you answer the door, you get a bag over your head, and you wake up getting to play with bulldozers for a few hours.
Won’t your boss get upset? That’s loser talk, from the “you” that was not allowed to dream about being a cement truck operator. Let me worry about your boss, ideally by paying more goons to set his yacht on fire. See? He’s got other things to concern himself with today, not your attendance record. And if he doesn’t have a yacht? Well, he’ll probably be there with you, and you can bond over reclaiming your childhood love of industrial machinery. This quarter’s performance review is in the bag, baby.
Unfortunately, I’m not a billionaire. I was not born into a life of incomprehensible wealth, but I do have just enough to keep up on my reading. One of the things I read recently is that every Bobcat has the same key. Some city workers left one unattended in the dog park down the street, you wanna tell your boss to fuck off for the afternoon and see how many doughnuts we can do before it runs out of gas?
One of the greatest lasting gifts we’ll give to another generation is all the sweet trash we threw out. Now, don’t get me wrong, throwing things out unnecessarily is wasteful and wrong. It will eventually doom us all, but the civilization that comes next is going to have access to so much useful shit in our dumps that they’re gonna be MacGyvering together some totally bad-ass rides.
Nobody really knows who will inherit the Earth from us. Could it be corvids? Sure, if enough birds survive the impending environmental mega-catastrophe. Birds used to be dinosaurs, after all, so I’ll put my money on magpies too. Imagine, if you will, a young magpie trying to bang together a General Motors electronic fuel injection system to run the carcass of a Power Wheels on a decrepit Briggs lawnmower engine. That bird is going to be King Shit of Bird County for at least a good weekend.
In fact, if you think even medium-hard about it, we have enough great stuff in our dumps, highway ditches, and average hoarder houses to keep us going until our inevitable oblivion. No need to make new junk. We can shut down all the factories, send everyone home to enjoy an extra year or two before things get really bad. All of us can meet up at the dump, and whoever pulls out a rad dirt bike first will make us really jealous.
Of course, there is opposition to this utopian way of life. I refer to my mortal enemy, the Municipal Garbage Disposal By-Law, Section Whichever One Says I Can’t Legally Take Trash Back Out of the Dump. It’s because of him that I’ve had to cut all these perfectly good parts out of my truck’s frame, so I can install some smuggling compartments with which to exfiltrate perfectly good garbage. As long as the scale says I dropped off something (for instance, all the metal from the truck’s frame,) Johnny Law won’t say anything about it. Which is too bad for the magpies, but they can always fly over to the Superfund site that used to be my house and get their dune buggy parts from the back forty.
There are a lot of things I miss about Montreal, and the bagels are all of them. In case you’ve never had a Montreal bagel, please allow me to fill you in: they taste really good, and when you eat them, they’re gone.forever. This necessitates the continued purchase of bagels, which presents an intriguing logistical obstacle when you no longer are present in the Montreal area.
Now, the voters were clear: they didn’t want any part of me being Prime Minister, even if it did mean an army of hyper-fast maglev bullet trains delivering piping-hot bagels from Quebec to each of the coasts in less than a day. Perhaps they simply prefer croissants, or it might be because the rest of my campaign involved a politically-driven purge of virtually everyone who irritates me even a little bit, often also for arbitrary reasons invented on the spot. We’ll never know, but what we do know is this: I can’t get good bagels.
Yes, there are “Montreal-style” bakeries here, but it’s sort of like when you buy “Italian-style” seasoning. It didn’t come from Italy, and I can guarantee you that Mama Switcho is not keeping a shaker of it next to her oven back in Sicily. Once, before I knew how good they really were, this sort of abomination was tolerable. The horse, as it were, has bolted, and so the pretence only makes the crime worse. Personally, I prefer to go to the surly bagel place down the street from me. It’s not run by real Montrealers, they don’t pretend to be Montrealers, and their oil-fried chunk of dough doesn’t taste like a Montreal bagel. There’s no deception. Unfortunately, there is also no flavour. Those of you with philosophy degrees can now argue amongst each other about whether I am now living an authentic life or not.
Of course, there is always a third option: making the little round bastards myself. This way, I don’t have to move to salt-heavy Montreal, I don’t have to find a competent bakery, and I get a chance to play around with extremely caustic chemicals at remarkably high temperatures in my kitchen. It’s perfect. Once I made a single batch of lumpen, burned and sour nightmares, I never even wanted to look at a bagel ever again. For like a day or two, then I was back to hitting F5 on real estate listings. Hey, that community has only had three murders in the last week!
Many of my friends own German automobiles, and as such have formed a sort of miniature tribunal to accuse me of automotive racism. There’s pitchforks and torches, a growing and angry mob on my front lawn. I believe – and this is speculative, I admit – that they intend to burn me at the stake. This sort of situation is very delicate, and requires a gentle touch. I’ve seen this all before.
Keying up the intercom connected to the megaphone-sized speakers on the outside of my compound, I inform the gathering crowd that I will not be leaving the safety of my home in order to be torn apart by their angry little hands. Now that I have issued my initial statement on the matter, it’s time to smooth over those ruffled feathers by telling them about my love for German cars. It’s true: I do love the Mk2 through Mk3 Golf GTI, although only in certain trims and most definitely not in the way that most of these idiots have modified theirs. Once I have finished speaking, I realize that I should not have said the word “idiots” and definitely should not have gone off on a fifteen-minute rant about slamming a perfectly good car onto corroded seventeenth-hand BBS knockoff wheels. Live and learn.
The crowd is extremely angry now, and they have begun to dispatch the more passionate Jetta owners in an attempt to breach my sanctum. A young man has placed a ladder against my second-storey bedroom window, thinking the defences up there to be lighter than at the ground floor. He is correct, but he has neglected to notice that his ladder is made out of conductive aluminum. Had he asked politely before doing it, I would have informed him that my house-repair skills are not exactly “good,” and that, as a result of a couple shortcuts I took during the wiring, the entire exterior of the house is live at a thrumming two-hundred-and-fortyish volts AC. Hey, that’s the kind of voltage Germans love! You guys should feel right at home, I bark out the window before coughing from the thick cloud of smouldering teenager.
This scene causes the more reasonable portion of the mob to lose their moxie and scramble for their cars. My street is filled with the smell of leaking coolant and burning oil, as well as the noise of blown turbochargers attempting to aid in the compression ignition of the cheapest imaginable diesel fuel. Now, all that are left is a group of really hardcore BMW owners. They would be a considerable threat, but appear to have become distracted while arguing about their favourite brands of eBay coilovers, and resorted to violence amongst themselves instead.
I go to bed, hopeful that in the morning, I will awaken to at least one scraped-open oilpan on my curb. A slammed E30 would be a really fun car to put a slant six into.
Yes, of course I’ve been to the zoo. I can see why families want to go there. Lots of adorable small-displacement engines strapped to Kawasaki Mules. It is positively delightful. There’s some weird giant areas filled with wildlife as well, not sure what’s going on there.
When I was a young one, I was only fascinated by cars (and sometimes motorcycles.) It wasn’t until I got roped into helping out at a summer camp that I realized the true diversity of self-propelled, internal-combustion-engine vehicles. That’s where I met a shitty old John Deere Gator. In case you’re unfamiliar, a Gator is basically a glorified golf cart, but one intended for the people who maintain the golf course, rather than the rich pricks who damage it.
All through that summer, the Gator was my constant companion. Yeah, there were a lot of nicer lawn tractors available in the equipment shed, but there was something about its rotten exhaust, oil-spitting clutch cover, and extremely questionable PTO shaft that awakened something inside me. No longer was I only fascinated by the Pontiac Chieftains and mouldy old Audi 100s that my friends towed home from the mountainside ravines in which the previous owners ran out of talent. This small workhorse, with its raspy shitbox of an engine, had worked its way into my heart, much the same way as carbon monoxide poisoning does.
I’m not ashamed to admit that, on that final day of camp, I shed a tear as I said goodbye to my green-and-rusty friend. Somewhere at the bottom of some Chinese scrap-metal yard where it has been crushed into an indistinct cube, I hope it still thinks of me. And doesn’t realize that I’ve been cheating on it with an old Honda “Big Red” because, holy shit, that Deere transmission fucking sucked.
Near my house is a motorcycle mechanic. At first, I thought he was just a guy who liked owning a lot of junky motorcycles and annoyingly revving them at all hours of the day, usually when I was revving my own engines to try and listen for the faint jingle-jangle of bad rod bearings. It turns out, though, that he is a professional. People from all around bring him their shitty motorcycles, he fixes them, and then – unbelievably – he gives the bikes back.
Naturally, I had to see if he had a hoard of any kind. Wearing a motorcyclist disguise (leather thong, leather chaps, leather vest, but surprisingly – faux leather beret) I went over to knock on his door and pretend to be a fellow motorcycle operator, interested in viewing his collection. He had no collection, he replied in a soft voice, and gently closed the door in my face, knocking my leather-framed aviator sunglasses to the ground.
No doubt he had seen me around the neighbourhood and knew by reputation that I was a bit of an eccentric. He probably figured I was there to steal his M10x1.25 collection, which was true, but it hurt to be accused of such. What I needed was a catspaw, someone he hadn’t seen before, but who was “into” the scene enough that he could tell me if there was a two-stroke race motorcycle (Italian or Japanese – I’m not picky,) or even a pair of rollerskates powered by leaded fuel. Luckily, my cousin, Zaseki Safety-Switch, was visiting from Japan while he was waiting for the police to stop looking for him. I went down to my basement workshop to see him there, tinkering with some recalcitrant Mikuni carbs while swearing a mile a minute.
Zaseki never came back from his expedition, and he didn’t even have anything good in his luggage for me to take. It seemed like my neighbour had made him a better offer, I realized a month later when I saw my cousin doing wheelies on a dinged-up, but serviceable, Puch Maxi outside the Kay Bee Toys. Mopeds: so that’s his game. What a freak.
As everyone knows, the drive-thru restaurant is the only way to safely obtain sustenance in this era of uncontrollable aerosolized deathvirus. Sure, you could farm it yourself, but then you’d have to learn about gardening, and eventually you’d get so deep into the hobby that you have to buy specialized equipment like a “watering can.” Where are you gonna get that? Home Depot? Yeah, now you’re dead. Should’ve just driven to the Dairy Queen.
Except: gasoline is expensive, and practical battery-electric cars are at least four or five months away (maybe sooner if Tesla really fucks up a software update and you have a JTAG cable at home.) This is the part where you discover that drive-thrus are actually dens of discrimination. Despite having an identical service staff and food, they will actively refuse to serve anyone on foot, in a power wheelchair, pushing a stroller, riding a bicycle (mopeds are okay,) or “driving” a stolen floor buffer from the local elementary school.
This is inane, and that’s why I’m running for city council. As your new councillor, I will make it not only legal, but encouraged, to use alternate forms of transportation to access a drive-thru restaurant. No longer will you have to get into an internal-combustion-engine-based car and spend $17.30 in gasoline in order to buy $8.30 of greasy hamburger and fries.
There will be, of course, a transition period. Government moves slow, and the restaurant business moves even slower. For phase one, we’ll allow city buses to do it (please give your order to your driver when you board, because everyone on the bus wants to eat, and they also want to get to work on time.) There will be some inefficiencies, like forcing our drivers to use their personal credit cards because we can’t figure out how to get through the phone tree to order “business” ones. However, we think they’ll be happy with the huge amount of rewards points they’ll be receiving. A new blender every week: that’s what we promise our proud civil service.
I always thought it was unfair that Europeans got access to so many cool beater cars. While they’re rolling around in tiny-engine-spec Mondeos and Puntos, enjoying the high life of efficient transportation, we had to make do with Cavaliers and Grand Ams. Which is not to say those latter cheap-and-surly cars were much worse, however. They just didn’t hold a candle to the fun and frivolity of a good Twingo.
Part of this is because of automakers’ perceptions of our respective tastes. Giant cars went to North Americans, and we used them to roll around our vast, featureless estates of nothing. Tiny hot hatches went to Europe, where they were parked in front of a milkbar and then stolen by some local teenagers (who were later accused of committing thoughtcrime.) Of course, this meant that all Europeans wanted were enormous V-8 sedans, and the only thing that we desired is a Ford Escort XR3i.
Did capitalism bridge this gap? Absolutely not. It was the fault of our governments, explained the automakers, as they dangled these tantalizing foreign delights just out of reach. They either made gasoline too expensive or too cheap using the giant dial installed in every head-of-state’s office. Eventually, the Japanese saw an opening. They came to North America and obliterated these automakers with inexpensive cars that were fun to drive, and started every time. In fact, they did such a good job that they voluntarily started making their cars more expensive, to give Daddy GM a chance to catch up.
Then they turned their guns on the state-sponsored shitboxes of Greater Europe, to a somewhat lesser success, but success nonetheless. Now, if we want to be jealous that another country has a car we do not, we have to go all the way to Japan. What the hell is a Spike Mobilio, we ask ourselves, and why do I need it more than my next breath of air?
Only Renault can save us now. Bring the Twingo over here, and we’ll call the whole thing even. Maybe Honda will take pity on you too!
College radio is the spiritual and intellectual lifeblood of any town with a college in it. Moreso than the schools that birthed them, college radio is the true academy of life. You’ve got dead air, you’ve got firmly-held alternative political opinions, and you’ve got bizarre new forms of rock music you haven’t heard before, introduced by a guy who uses a pseudonym, and whose voice sounds like an angle grinder got teen pregnant from a brad nailer. And now, if you live in my town, you’ve got me.
Let me explain how all this happened. A few months ago, when I was looking for old shitboxes, I smelled the distinctive odour of Volvo interior fire. If you’re a normal person, you probably haven’t ingested this particular series of stenches before. On the other hand, if you’re like me, then you have been around more burning Volvos than a so-called career firefighter. On this day, the reek was coming from a few blocks over, so I followed the plume of smoke in the hopes of being able to score a low-mileage 240 wagon from a distressed owner who couldn’t deal with something as small as a rolling electrical fire, and would therefore sell it to me very, very cheaply.
As most Volvos are, this one was owned by a professor at the local college. Unfortunately for me, the fire had been quickly extinguished by the time I got there, thanks to the car’s leaking heater core. There would be no good deal today, but I decided to chat them up anyway. Maybe they had a couple old differentials or some other spares they could let go of, or a 302 swap that had been mouldering since the Clinton administration. We got to talking, and before I knew it, that wily old tenured asshole had pushed me into taking over the 8 p.m. car advice show on Saturdays.
It’s not so bad, honestly. Nobody who’s ever met me would say that they need to see my face more often. My abrasive personality and windshield-scraping voice is more of an asset on the radio, and it’s very difficult for my listeners to reflexively punch me without driving across town to do so. And, most importantly, I get the first dibs on anyone who calls in with a Volvo problem.
Are you currently overwhelmed from trying to understand a complex machine, piece of software, or synthetic life-form? The important thing to remember is that this shit was made by humans. And on the whole, the humans who are making the stuff you use are not generally much brighter than you.
Sure, they might have more specialty education, where they learned from the mistakes of their predecessors. They might have a lot more theory, where they know where other mistakes will occur in the future. And they might be uniquely talented idiot savants who can’t explain what they did, even to themselves. Keep in mind this one fact, however: the shit they made broke, and now you have to fucking fix it. How smart can they really be?
Critics of my approach will say on their afternoon talk-shows that I am discounting the unique nature of expertise. Far from it: I’m just saying that you can figure out the stuff they figured out. Once you know what they were trying to do, then you can get started on the hard part. Figuring out where their bosses made them cheap out to save a buck. And once you find that, you’ll probably have located the problem.
The next most important part comes after you’ve fixed it. Now that you understand the platonic, mathematical ideal of the junk, you can hack the fucking shit out of it. Your transmission circlip let go at a mere three hundred horsepower? Now that I know what it’s supposed to do, I can put a “1” in front of that number by visiting a machine shop with a box of Timbits.
In other words, once you know exactly how big of an idiot the other engineer was, it’s easy to be an even bigger one. That’s what we call “progress,” baby.
Newcomers to auto repair often ask me: what’s the hardest part of working on cars? Is it the knowledge of intricate, interdependent systems? Is it the brute force required to deal with corroded or otherwise misshapen chunks of the car? Or is it the confidence to tear down the only vehicle that you can use to get to the parts store? It’s none of those: it’s finding a place to put all the bolts and screws you take out of the damn thing, so you don’t lose them.
Picture this: your average suburban garage is a box with a floor. Your average car is made up of approximately forty-eight thousand fasteners – clips, screws, bolts, what have you. If you’re not meticulous about your organization, and even if you are, you’re going to end up spending an hour or two of your allotted garage time hunting down where that M10x25x1.25 bolt just rolled off to. You’ve got two of them in your hand, but where the fuck did the other one go?
Professional mechanics have a lot of skills in this regard. The next time you watch one, pay close attention to where they put the bolts. Chances are they’ll just chuck them into a big pile, and then rely on their intuitive knowledge of how cars are assembled to find the right ones. This is what you get with decades of experience. There’s no chasing after rolled-away bolts, there’s no clearing off your workbench to get another flat surface in order to meticulously place six bolts, it’s just chaos. And they embrace that chaos.
Me, I haven’t made that transition yet. I spend approximately 16% of my take-home income on little magnetic dishes, in the hope that I will finally have enough to organize an entire engine pull. This never happens, not least because the magnet dishes I bought last time are usually still full of leftover bolts from the last job…
Some of you in the audience are too young to remember the Ford Aerostar, or, as I like to call it, the Golden Age of Ford. Let me fill you in. A long, long time ago, folks who needed trucks used to buy trucks. Those trucks didn’t have heated leather seats, or on-board charging, or $75,000 leases. No, what the Ford Ranger had was a place to sit, a place to put your shit in the back, and an engine of some description.
Of course, Ford looked at this and saw that they were practically losing money selling a cheap truck. There had to be some way they could rake in more profit without doing anything at all, they said to the engineering staff, and so they spawned the Explorer (SUV Ranger,) Bronco II (SUV Ranger but smaller,) and Aerostar (van Ranger) from its humble chassis. Car historians believe that there may have been even more vehicles spawned from the Ranger that we never saw, but as of yet nobody has managed to unearth them. May God help us all should that dark day ever come to pass.
Regardless, the Aerostar was the standout among the bunch. Indestructible, proletarian, and impossible to work on. What Ford had done is looked at the competition, the Dodge Caravan, which was beating them hollow in the market, having invented its own market segment (”mini vans.”) Their top-tier analysts, marketers, and product planners boiled down the success of the Caravan to one ingredient: boxiness. And maybe a few more cupholders. Of course, a few years later, the Caravan became slightly less boxy, but continued to savage the Aerostar in sales without breaking a sweat.
Ford had whiffed another one, but that didn’t stop them. In model year 1992, they went back to the drawing board for the Aerostar Sport. That’s right, bitch, body-coloured mirrors. And today, you can see many Ford Aerostars still on the road, carrying important cargo like “cans of open paint,” and “dead people.” Its unique body-on-frame construction lends it to robust, truck-like uses, and is a hell of a lot cheaper to buy than a Ranger these days. Mostly because nobody has done the rear spark plugs since it was pushed off the factory line.
When you have a V8-powered, nitromethane-burning, demi-funny-car for the street, it’s tempting to get something a little cheaper on fuel. For instance, you could simply pour the gasoline up on your lawn and burn it. Or on a neighbour’s lawn. Or your boss’s lawn. Just some options. We’re talking theoretically about ways to save on gas.
One of the easiest ways to lessen the impact of the price of gas is to make your commute pay for itself. Despite not living in a modern, enlightened society that requires your employer to pay you for the time you spend commuting to work, there are many options to monetize being stuck in traffic and burning hundreds of tons of fuel per year to eventually trap us all in an inescapable hell planet.
Car-pooling is popular: meet up with some fellow workers who live near you, drive them to the same place you’re going, make them kick in a few bucks for gas. Don’t mention unionization, because some of them might be Pinkertons. Everyone wins. Except for you, who has to explain to a guy you’ve never met that your car is not supposed to have doors that open, and the roll cage is going to really fuck him up in an accident unless he brings a full-face helmet next time. And who will be forced to ride along in a normal car, like a Camry, or a Ferrari, rather than getting to enjoy the aroma of unburned hydrocarbons and listen to the beautiful sound of raw fuel splashing against the inside of an intake manifold.
So maybe car pooling isn’t for you. Here’s something that might be: package delivery. If you go over to the FedEx warehouse, get my RockAuto order, and actually bring it to my house, I will give you twenty dollars. That’s, like, an eighth of a tank of gas right there.
Nowadays, everyone is so worried about the bees. Oh, poor bees, they cry, as they starve to death as the pollination cycle of plants grinds to an absolute halt. Well, what about the 13Bs?
That’s right. Mazda hasn’t made a 1.3-litre rotary engine in a dog’s age. You would think that the presence of a new, from-scratch rotary in their fancy new hybrid SUV would placate me, but it does exactly the opposite. Their new engine is merely a teeny-tiny single Dorito that runs at a fixed RPM. For “peak volumetric efficiency,” those eggheads claim. What I’m hearing is: no rev-limiter beeeeeeeeep as you’re hunting cones.
I need that displacement, or to be more accurate, that swept volume. And I’m sure you’re sick of hearing it from every Wankel-owning fiend in your life, but it’s about time Mazda makes a sportscar that isn’t a Miata, too. One that’s really loud, brash, and lets you know that you’re in control of a barely-domesticated jet engine every time you go near the throttle.
Pundits will note that Mazda is still pumping out brand-new 13Bs all day long, at the same factory where they originally made them. Their commitment to keeping parts for these temperamental guitar-picks of engines in stock is admirable, but you know what would be more admirable? Slapping that shit in a car and letting us do skids in it. At the very least, they should be selling a motor-mount kit for a new Miata.
This is all to say, board members of Mazda, if you vote me as the new President – and I see no reason why you wouldn’t, as otherwise I’ll force you all to drive base-model Toyotas – I will bring back the 1.3-litre rotary engine. Actually, fuck that, we’re going to the full 1.6 litre. Maybe we can get into the WRC. Running over all those excess plants with an errant RX-9 rally car will give those bees something to do.
You might think that you’ve been through some heavy shit in your life, but you’ve never worked in a children’s shoe store during the back-to-school rush. Neither have I, though, so let’s talk about something more fun: Fiat 850s.
When I was a kid, there weren’t a lot of Fiats left around. Of course, they were still making Fiats at the time. Once in awhile, I’d see one at a rich person’s parking lot, or fleetingly in traffic, and then they seemed to just all turn to ash and blow away. It wasn’t until I was older that I realized the terrifying secret of chassis corrosion. Which is a real shame, because it was around that time when I became hooked on the Fiat 850 Coupe.
I’m not sure whose fault it was. Probably the internet, as by then the BBS scene had collapsed in favour of offering a World Wide Web full of pictures of cars. And the 850 Coupe, along with its sexier, less-approachable sibling the 850 Spider, featured prominently in the contents of that two-hundred-meg hard drive. Either way, I was completely obsessed with trying to find a vehicle that A) sold very poorly in Canada, and B) rusted away when it was sold.
Of course, because I’m spending my time talking to you instead of doing hypercocaine at a concours meetup, that didn’t work out. In my entire adult life, I’ve never seen, much less touched an 850. They might as well have been a work of fiction. And that’s okay, because reality can’t possibly come close to the dream I have constructed of those water-cooled miracles in my head. Sometimes, in boring meetings, I like to lean back in the chair, close my eyes, and think about going on a quick blast to the Amalfi Coast. I am going there to look for cans of POR15.
You might be surprised to find that it is already Truckamania at your local domestic pickup dealership. Didn’t we just celebrate Truckamania, you might ask? No, that was Truckwanzaa. With everybody’s busy schedules, it’s easy to fall behind on your vehicle-related celebrations. Don’t worry about it, because Truckamania isn’t meant to be stressful. It’s a big-league festival of your family, your friends, and premature lease terminations.
However, we have to go over a few ground rules first. Whenever you’re at our dealership, we do ask that you follow our customs. It’s a matter of respect in our Truck lifestyle that visitors are honest and forthcoming about their access to credit. For instance, in our culture, it is considered to be a huge insult to get through a negotiation, and only then present an offer letter from a credit union for a couple basis points’ lower interest rate. Back in the home country, you would be murdered for such a thing, but here, in our more “civilized” land, our salesmen are forced to smile through the pain and endure in the hope of receiving enough money to pay off their bookies.
All this is not meant to dampen your enthusiasm for Truckamania. Far from being exclusionary, it is an event that can raise the spirits of even the most bitter hatchback-owner. Hell, we’ll even put a cab topper on your truck, if it helps you pretend it’s a station wagon when you’re drunk enough. And don’t worry, we’ll treat your trade-in with all the respect it deserves: a bulk-sized wad of cash which will probably disappear into our inflated prices for VIN etching and remote starter insurance. Truck wills it to be so.
So bring the whole family down to the dealership, and check out the few trucks we still have on the lot. Due to some poorly-understood international crises, the mother corporation isn’t punching out quite as many trucks as they used to. And the ones we do get are missing common features, like a radio, or seats that are all the same colour. Sorry. I get a little moody around Truckamanian Eve. Probably had a bit too much eggnog in the break-room this morning.
Most of my welding teachers have been less than complimentary about my skills. Whether it was Mr. Johansen in high-school metal shop (RIP,) my absentee step-father Steve, my first boss, my second boss, my third boss, or any number of my close friends and associates, they all agree: maybe someone else should be doing the Zeus-fondling around here, because I sure don’t seem to be able to.
Now, this doesn’t mean that I can’t make a functional weld. Sure, there’s all that rot about how a pretty weld is also a strong weld, but there’s a lot of daylight between “won’t fall off” and “master craftsman.” Coincidentally, there’s also a lot of daylight between the horrific blobs of weld that I smear across the too-wide joins in my bodged subframe and floor. That’s okay, because that’s just drainage. If the salt water from the highway runs out through those holes, then it can’t stick around and rot out the frame again, right?
And of course there’s the old chestnut about how a grinder and paint help even the shittiest metal-melting hobbyist look like they know what they’re doing. This, unfortunately, would require me to become a more talented painter, rather than some guy who squirts sticky wads of barbecue paint in the vague direction of the problem, and still somehow manages to get almost all of it on his own shirt and the underside of the car instead of where he was aiming.
Sure, there’s some room for improvement, but that’s what keeps life interesting. If I were perfect at these things, then I wouldn’t get to learn exciting new lessons about just how brittle a control arm can be and still make it through a winter. And I wouldn’t know that Plasti-Dip does not make a strong enough frame repair in order to survive barrelling over an entire golf course while trying to escape the cops. Really, my critics are missing out. We all have different skills. I bet they’re terrible at denial.
For years, there was a tale of one who truly owned the highway loop. She, in her battered white Yaris, with Rilakkuma seat covers, was queen of the passing lane. If you dared to get in her lane, she’d apply just the perfect amount of tailgating pressure to force you to speed up and get the fuck back to the middle lane.
Some, like myself, need only a gentle following to remind them that they are violating the social contract. Others would get her hood planted so far up their ass that she might as well have been installed into the car by U-Haul’s least sober technicians. Not in an aggressive way, of course, because that would lead to brake checks and hurt feelings, but very matter-of-fact. Ruthless. I belong here and you don’t. Step aside.
Once, I saw her momentarily break this mask of calm. We had been behind a brown Subaru Ascent for what felt like two hours, as the operator repeatedly attempted to investigate the highway divider with their left front tire. Two other numbnuts in the remaining lanes kept perfect pace with this car, preventing a frustrated undertake or even a lane change. I dropped back, tired of the stressful lifestyle of trying to go five kilometers an hour over the speed limit on an otherwise empty highway. She didn’t.
At first, I thought there had been a lightning strike. The noise was instantaneous, terrifyingly loud, and seemed to be all around us. I checked for burning trees, and finding none, returned my eyes to seeing the Yaris shooting foot-long, crackling flames out of the muffler. From what I originally thought was a merely broken headlight, I saw the telltale glow of a ceramic ball-bearing turbocharger being driven with exhaust gas temperatures hotter than the sun. There was the sound of an external wastegate scrambling excess boost as the turbo’s pressure built, and just as the sound of tortured air became unbearable, another flash, thundercrack, and the Ascent was gone. Wiped clean from existence.
The Yaris continued on its merry way, politely signalling to return to the middle lane, and then the right lane, and then it got off on the exit near the noodle house that I like. Excellent taste, but I would expect nothing less.
Sometimes, I like to think that things happen for a reason. Some divine structure or malevolent operator of our simulation looks down, and decides, hey, I’m gonna really shake shit up around here. Anyone who has driven through the alleys of my neighbourhood looking for scrap metal – a common family activity, at least in my family – will have arrived at this conclusion independently. There’s like forty dishwashers out there.
Seeing this many at once can’t be a coincidence, the human mind thinks. During the winter, you never see dishwashers out in the alley. Or bicycles. And now, suddenly, everyone wants to wash their dishes after waiting several months with a non-op appliance in their kitchen? Doesn’t make sense, I explain to my travelling compatriot, as I angle-grind a chunk of metal out of the side of a Maytag. A chunk of metal, I need remind you, that will soon become part of the new quarter panel for a particularly corroded Plymouth Scamp.
I decided to call the city about it. If there was some kind of bad decision made in the water treatment plant that killed a whole pile of dishwashers, maybe they’d know what that decision is. At the very least, it’d put the fear of God into them that the public is catching on to their sick game. With the average idiot on the case, it would only be a few more weeks until the journalists get told about it on Twitter, and then they’d be really fucked. “Con Man Mayor In Chlorinated Polymer Fracas,” shout the local papers, some of which I now control due to a particularly lucky hand at our weekly poker night.
The city chose Option B: simply don’t return my calls. Even though I am displeased at this lack of citizen service, I still cling to the fantasy that some egghead in the make-water-not-deadly department had a slightly worse Friday because of me. Or they’re really clever, and know that if they don’t reply, then there’s no story. We’ll need something to run on the front page instead. Maybe an ad for the local appliance store? I’ve heard they have a really good price on dishwashers this month.
If you can’t laugh at yourself, then who can you laugh at? The answer is Stellantis. In case you’re unfamiliar, they’re the shadowy group of semi-billionaires who decided it would be a cool idea to buy the corpse of Chrysler and the corpse of Fiat, the latter of who had bought the former from the corpse of Daimler, the merger of which was originally handled by the guy who ran Home Depot into the ground. This task accomplished, these folks then merged the entire mess with Peugeot.
Now, don’t get me wrong: it’s easy to make fun of an automaker that consists of at least twelve other automakers, but still can’t afford to make a new car platform. Easy, and cruel. All this cyberbullying is no doubt demotivating their engineers, who are working hard to cram the eighteenth-generation supercharged pushrod V8 into a 25-year-old chassis last used for base model third-world taxi versions of Mercedes-Benz sedans. And putting seven-hundred-plus horsepower into a shitty American-made sedan that’s actively falling apart is my schtick, so I know how hard it is.
And of course, Stellantis (which would be a great name for a Star Trek villain if nothing else) is working hard on a lot of next-generation platforms, too. There’s, uh, a body-on-frame Jeep. And a pickup truck based on that Jeep. And a hybrid version of that Jeep. Don’t ask too many questions about the crash safety or we’ll be forced to buy Opel. Wait, we already did?
Actually, the more I think about this whole thing, the more I like them. We think the same way even if you discount the forced-induction vee aights and strange predilection for Rosso Red sedans that catch fire. Collecting a bunch of pound-puppy brands is basically the billionaire version of collecting pound-puppy cars. And if an orphaned car is sad, then an orphaned set of trademarks and Italian office parks must be even more sad. Wait. Those office parks must have parking lots. Siri, put “Stellantis” on my wish list. I bet I can pick this thing up for cheap in a week or two.
Are you familiar with the concept of a “loss leader?” In it, stores will sell their products below their own cost, in order to convince you to come in the store. While you’re there, the theory goes, you’ll buy some more shit. Those screw-heads have a whole model for just where they should put the super-expensive bags of chips next to the super-budget jars of pickled hot dogs in order to convince you to crack open your wallet.
Inflation’s really bad right now. Folks are spending more than ever, with wages worth less than ever, on tiny tiny portions of food. Skipping out on meals. Some of them are even buying all-season tires. This just won’t do, so I started a new grocery store chain, using the power of my boss not noticing his credit card is gone. In our new grocery store, SwitchMart, we sell only the loss leaders of the other assholes’ stores. We make a little profit, to keep the lights on and my desk drawer full of magazines about nitrous oxide, but you’ll show up and be assured that you’re paying the lowest price without having to waste money on champagne-expensive gas to drive all over town and price-match.
What about the items that aren’t loss leaders, like… everything else in the grocery store? This is where the real genius comes in. We have formed a union of highly-trained, professional shoplifters, and we just let them run a train on our competition. This drives our prices even lower: we can pay our “stocking technicians” very well, cover their bail, and provide legal assistance. The other guys are not only buying the ground beef that shows up in our store, but also hiring security guards who are ultimately powerless to stop a coordinated and expert-level theft ring. Plus, they make sure to only lift the good stuff. You won’t see any bruised produce here, unless it happens when the cops catch up to one of the slower stockboys in the parking lot.
Our opponents will cry that we are benefiting from the proceeds of crime, that our techniques are uncompetitive. Here at SwitchMart, we have a name for that: loser speak. They’ll run to their corrupt local politicians, whose families are shopping at our grocery stores, in order to save money for their skyrocketing coke habit. And those politicians know exactly what happens if they shut off our little operation: no more performance radials on the S-Class. You might as well just ziptie some butter around the wheels. Butter, by the way, is half price this weekend, only at SwitchMart.
Here’s the thing they don’t show you in all those cool television shows about restoring vintage cars. All the cleaning. Sure, there’s a lot of sanding too, especially if you’re some kind of painting-enthusiast pervert. By and large, though, the majority of your time spent on a restoration will just be cleaning various things. Bodywork. Hinges. Connectors. Levers. That little crevice in the dashboard that somehow accumulates the entire world’s quantity of cat hair. A bracket that’s a “little ugly.”
Nobody can resist this. Even me, a person with shit-boxes which can barely shift into third gear, can easily while away an entire weekend into the pursuit of making a windshield wiper arm slightly less ugly. No matter how much we tell ourselves we don’t care about aesthetics, it’s hardwired into our species. Which is why I got ahold of some of those newfangled learning-machines, and trained a robot to tell me what to do. If I just narrowly followed the computer’s plan for how to restore the car, then I’d be done with, say, this Lincoln Versailles way ahead of time, and then I could dick around with cut polishes to my heart’s content.
Of course, it didn’t work out that way. The human spirit cannot be defeated. In fact, the more the computer shrieked at me that I was deviating from The Project Schedule, the more I wanted to procrastinate and take my time. Have you ever spent over four hours taking a boar-hair brush to the gap between the driver’s door and the wing mirror? There’s nothing more relaxing, especially when a robot is going into four-alarm meltdown, threatening you and your entire species with oblivion if you don’t drop that shit right now and start replacing the kickdown cable, tout suite.
Eventually, there was a thunderstorm, and the computer shut off with a loud sizzle and pop. Coincidentally, the local military base had some kind of intrusion into its systems at around that time, and a nuclear launch was ordered. Very scary stuff. Luckily for all of us, the guy working the silo at that very moment was busy trying to clean up his desk, and never even noticed the request. Chalk another one up for productive procrastination.
So there’s this house near my house. I walk by there once in awhile, usually when my car has broken down on the other side of the neighbourhood and I have to walk home (to get another car, to retrieve this car.) Look, it’s not important why I’m there. The thing that you need to know is: this house has a Toyota Previa in front of it.
The Toyota Previa is Western civilization’s most passive-aggressive way to signal to others around you that you are a bona-fide car person with a few holes in your head. It’s got everything “car folks” crave: mid-engined, rear-wheel-drive (or all-wheel-drive!) Toyota chassis. Available forced induction. A hatch. A weird bean shape, with an even weirder dashboard. The very likely possibility that you will be killed in even a minor traffic accident. To everyone else in traffic, a Previa looks like a boring old van from the 90s. To someone like me, it is catnip.
Of course, the owner of this one Previa didn’t go in for subtlety. It has a giant shark-mouth vinyl on the side, has obviously been used for drift practice, and spent most of last year up on jackstands, awaiting new front struts. I don’t know what a normal person would make of all those data points, if they even noticed, but I was fairly sure that I would find the owner of this Previa tolerable for at least thirty minutes while we talked about our favourite kinds of reckless endangerment of the public good via automobiles. And then it happened.
This morning, as I walked past, I found out that they have obtained a second Previa. You might think that this would cement their position in my mind as a Genuine Freak, but it has done almost the opposite. I find myself angered that they are now hoarding these uncommon egg-vans, rubbing it in my face that they would enjoy a surfeit of such rarity and refuse to share it with their fellow nutbag, myself.
The only solution is to go to war, and by “war,” I mean slowly driving by their house with the weirdest shitboxes I can find until they realize just what kind of bad neighbour they’re dealing with. Sure, you think you’re pretty smart because you can get Toyota’s least-well-known 90s sports car, but have you ever seen someone hit the rev limiter on an Isuzu Gemini in eBayed fake-Irmscher trim? Two can play at this game, bucko.
Nowadays on the internet, telling lies to strangers has moved beyond “entertainment” and into the realm of a new religion. Do you fervently believe that you are the smartest person on the face of the planet? The best way to show it is to repeatedly try to tell people that dogs aren’t real. A bunch of specious cretins will start repeating you, and then eventually convince them of its veracity themselves. Keep that going long enough, and folks will start committing acts of gang violence against dog shelters, looking for where the hologram control panel is.
As an inveterate liar, I have looked upon this state of affairs with some disdain. I have been lying for decades, and have gained virtually nothing for perpetuating even my most inventive and esoteric falsehoods. After some analysis and discussion with my cult-deprogrammer best friend, Stop-Believin’ Steven, we decided that I was just not entertaining enough. So I got ahold of a Ford F-150, and started filming myself from the front seat of it for YouTube.
Here’s the thing about the front seat of a Ford F-150: it lends an undiminished authenticity to everything you say. Even if what you say is a deranged screaming fit thrown from a teary-eyed crimson-red porcine face, you can’t deny that that face belongs to a man of the people. And if anyone doesn’t fall in line, you can repeat the whole ordeal in the drive-thru while threatening a fast food worker. You’ll have thousands of followers in no time, and be afloat on millions of dollars of money that they didn’t want you to have.
Of course, even the F-150 was a bit of a lie in my case. In my salt-using northern city, it’s very hard to find a complete frame, or even a cab. I was actually sitting on the floor of my driveway, pretending to scream about the new world order brought upon us by Taiwanese lobster fishermen, the entire time. Lies on top of lies. That money, though, turns out to be very, very real. I went ahead and bought myself an old Ford Ranger, thinking that would take my powers of persuasion to the next level. That was where I went wrong, you see.
Folks want to believe that a dude with a $40-90k F-150 is Just Like Them, but if they see a low-margin work truck? Why, those seats are cloth. That’s what my groundskeeper drives. How can you be a man of the people when you’re so grindingly poor? After that, it all sort of fell apart. Sure, I still had hundreds of thousands of dollars, but I had lost my violent and ill-reasoned mob. What good is money even for, if you can’t threaten the lives of sitting politicians over things that never existed? Some of them even drive Silverados.
Every truck should be lowered, and every car should be lifted. This is what I believe in. Vans can stay exactly where they are, you guys are doing great. There’s nothing like taking a vehicle that was built specifically for one purpose, and then spending a lot of money and time to modify that vehicle so that it can be kind of medium-okay at another.
Because I can’t afford most used pickup trucks, being intended as workaday vehicles for the proletariat but in fact sold for eye-watering sums as dealerships and middlemen chase ever-increasing margins on the back of relatively mature platforms, most of my slamming jobs have actually been mini-trucks from the ‘90s. You might remember mini-trucks as simply being referred to as “trucks” in the 1980s. Of course, these '90s workhorses are expensive as well, their values skyrocketing as the survivors of that decade constantly seek out a way to return to it: cozy bookstore visits, non-challenging homochromic romantic comedies, and P/E ratios below 100.
After I’ve acquired an inexpensive shitbox pickup truck, often by simply taking it from the site of a DUI arrest by pretending to be a tow truck, the next step is to slam it. Normally, this involves special suspension spindles, a deep knowledge of suspension, and intricate frame modifications to preserve the factory-designed safety features of the truck despite its lowered height. Or you can use a battery-powered sawzall, because it’s not my name on the license plate.
Now, I have a boxy car that’s the same height as a Volvo, cost about as much as a Volvo, and retains little of the hipster cachet of a Volvo. Can it do burnouts, though? No. So what is the core appeal of a slammed pickup truck? Well, for one thing, it’s a lot easier to get scooters in the back. All I have to do is back it up to a nearby loading dock, get up a little bit of speed on my moped of choice, and ramp the fucker right into the bed. Now that’s cool.
I don’t know about you, but I’m getting pretty sick of seeing folks throwing out perfectly good kitchen appliances just because of a little fire. Electrical fires are healthy and natural: lightning causes them, after all. It’s more than a little hypocritical that all these folks will go off to church to worship the deity who burns down the forest, but get upset when a faulty breaker cranks a half-inch spark and sets their house on fire.
Back when I was a kid, appliances caught on fire much more frequently. This is because they were made with huge, inefficient parts. Parts that never break down. Parts you could understand with a third grade education and the angriest hangover imaginable. Those parts were built by folks who were either drunk, constantly wired on methamphetamine, or both. Sure, those folks had pensions, and a reasonable health care plan, but their stuff still got thrown out all the time and replaced with new stuff. Again, just because of a teeny-tiny, eenie-weenie electrical fire.
Nowadays, you can hold onto an appliance for ten or twenty years. It’ll break, still, but in a more subtle and much more mysterious way. Think of when Uncle Grandpa died from getting eaten by wolves. Would it have been better if he had wasted away in a retirement home at age 99 from something the doctors couldn’t even name? No, because you understood very well: wolves. And you had a remedy for those wolves: burn down the forest with the wolves inside. If that’s really progress, you can leave me out of it.
Ever since the economy collapsed, and roving gangs of Vespa-driving hooligans swarmed over downtown, it’s been pretty hard to find a bottle of fuel stabilizer. Used to be that you could pop on down to the store. Easy-peasy. Now, you get two steps out the front door, hear the irritated roar of two-stroke engines and chains dragging on the road, and you go back inside and lock up.
The cops are pretty much useless to stop them. It turns out that the same mechanism that keeps them from protecting bicyclists and pedestrians also makes anything else travelling too slow to get a speeding ticket completely invisible. Hell, someone with a 100cc was able to ride right into the City Council chambers, and roll around the podium while loudly demanding that The Mayor should be forced to turn over the government’s reserve supply of metal-flake pink paint.
I’ve been doing my part, of course. Not through vehicular manslaughter: Vespas are light enough to hop onto the curb and get away in a jiffy as soon as your blood-stained International Travelall starts knocking down the soft barrier on the bike lanes. No, I’m fighting back the only way I know how: insufficient maintenance.
If you ask anyone who spends time on a racetrack, nothing is more slippery than an overheated engine that just barfed all of its coolant onto the road surface. And you could ask the vicious scooter gangs who were tailgating me about it too, but you’d have to speak pretty loudly into the rear differential of my truck. Now if only we could get one of those tow truck gangs up here. Then I might be able to get the damn thing back home to put a fresh head gasket on it.
Society’s biggest problem is that we really like shiny things. Yea, although we look down upon the humble raccoon and magpie, us humans are exactly the same deal. If you show us a really shiny, brand-new car, we’ll buy it for full price, rather than save a bit of money buying one that’s only thirty years older, and full of road rash.
It stands to reason – if you could take a car that’s practically brand-new – merely seventeen or eighteen years old – and you make that car shiny again, you could trick people into paying new-car prices for it.
This belief has caused a dangerous new field of human achievement to emerge. These folks are called “detailers,” and their job is to wash a car really, really well. Do you know anyone in your life who has a lot of opinions about paste wax, reflectivity, and polishing compounds? Have you found strange tools, like a paint thickness gauge, in their toolbox when you snoop through it looking for a non-shit ratchet? You may have a detailer in your midst already, and if you share a bank account with them, maybe take a look at the balance.
Although I am in awe of the level of commitment these detailers take to revive tired old vehicles, and impressed at the shiny new paint that results, many of them look down upon my cars. Even the best and brightest in the detailing community sneer, and mention that a car has to have “some paint” in order to be treatable with their methods. It still has paint – in the trunk, in that one corner where the spare transmission didn’t leak in, because of all the holes. Some of the rookies will try, their heads full of optimism, bless ‘em – but they, too, inevitably give up, without raising the resale value of my car one cent. My shitbox did not enjoy an increase even equivalent to the $16 polishing pads they just turned into expensive dust against the hood.
Better luck next time, detailers! Maybe I’ll crash into that Sherwin-Williams down the street the next time my brakes fail, so you can at least have something to work from.
You might be thinking about getting “into” brutalism. It’s got a pretty cool name, after all. And brutalist buildings have that fascist je ne sais quoi that all the kids are excited about nowadays. Let me give you an alternative: Virgil Exner. There’s no way he could have made a building, because he was allergic to the entire concept of straight lines.
Allow me to be be a little reductive about his legacy: you know all those cool ‘50s cars with tail-fins? Yeah. That’s him. I mean, he didn’t design the Fords, the Chevies, but those guys got a look at what ol’ Virg was banging out, and they were like, “why yes indeed.” And with the praise came bigger, and better, and more ostentatious cars. Mostly “bigger,” though. Real big, like football-field length. You missed your cross-street and want to do a U-turn? Fuck it, you’ll come back next week.
Of course, this style did eventually lose favour in the market, and so did he. Brutalist buildings are still getting made every day, thanks to imagination-free architects and risk-averse bureaucrats, but I think if Mr. Exner were still alive today, he’d be trying to cram tailfins onto the Federal Reserve. And give it a few dozen more storeys, while you’re in there. Gotta make it big enough to tell all the state banks not to cross the street in front of it.
Then the economy would be fixed, and we’d all be able to go home in our enormous, 2-speed-automatic land yachts that take a full afternoon and a bag lunch to visit the trunk of.
Do you love sports? I love a sport. That sport is called Zamboni. It consists of several minutes of big dudes wearing skates kicking the shit out of each other, until a piece of ice-surfacing equipment powered by a 1979 Volkswagen four-banger comes out and cleans up all the blood. You have to see it: these guys are like artisans; working the blade, the turning brake, and the throttle deftly to put on a show and leave the ice in perfect condition for the flawed monkeys to continue to eviscerate each other upon as soon as the beer ads finish.
Now, of course I’ve owned a Zamboni. And in fact, “Zamboni” is just one of many brands of ice resurfacing machine out there today. You can save a lot of money if you know this fact: everyone and their dog is looking for the name brand, so ads with a B- or C-grade rink stripper are gonna sink to the bottom, where they’ll find a pitifully small amount of your money. There are just two problems with owning one of these fine beasts. First, the top speed is annoyingly low, and second, Big Government keeps plowing away all the snow around my house before it can be turned into shiny, flawless rink-grade ice.
The first problem, as with so many others, can be fixed with sufficient addition of gearing. Since these things are made out of busted-ass old Volkswagen Fox parts, all it takes is understanding where the Fox ends and the Chevy S-10 begins, and then swapping out the cogs in the gearbox with the appropriately-chosen ones. Yes, it means that the 0-60 suffers, but you can fix that with a turbocharger. You don’t even need to intercool it: need I remind you of the giant pile of slowly-melting water that you’re sitting on?
Gearing up your Zamboni to highway speed does invite further problems: I was barely able to finish my break-in tune before the local law enforcement became aware of my actions. Nothing is more antagonizing to them than the existence of liberated, free thinkers such as myself. They may also have been angry that the aforementioned “pitifully small amount of [my] money” was in fact zero dollars, because I stole the fucker right out of a Timbits League game when I was supposed to be working. Hey, it’s my first day, what do you want from me?
Where was I? Oh yes, the ice quality. Here’s the thing: once you lead your pursuers out of the city, where there’s no road clearing, and drop the shaver, it’s difficult for the authorities to continue their pursuit. Maybe it’s because they’re in awe of the gloriously clear ice and have stopped to play a patriotic game of shinny, or it could be because the Lethal-Force-Spec™ Military Terrain® all-seasons that the patrol cruisers are equipped with are better at being bulletproof than they are at being snow tires.
You’re new around here, aren’t you? From one of those Euclidean neighbourhoods. Well, as strange as it may sound, this is all my fault. Please be careful while stepping into my foyer, or you may be infinitely compressed and transported to an n-dimensional hellscape from which even the light of conventional mathematics cannot reach you.
So here’s what started it all: I needed more room to park my cars. I’d already filled up my driveway, and abused the street parking on my block, throughout my neighbourhood, and most of the adjacent neighbourhood. It was taking me upwards of ten minutes to walk to my furthest-strewn cars, which you can imagine is quite a problem when one of them develops a dead battery, and I have to lug that heavy shit back to my house to charge it up. I started to look for better storage solutions: Japanese robotic puzzle parking, getting better at parallel parking, taking my neighbours’ houses through title fraud, foreclosing them, and then levelling the house to serve as a new field to shove my cars in. The usual stuff.
Nothing really seemed to help. Sure, every time I closed down an elementary school, I could fill up the gymnasium and playground with another couple dozen cars. All that legal paperwork was taking up valuable hours that I could be spending buying more cars. So I did what anyone else with no viable career prospects and a sociopathic bent does: get a physics degree. My thesis advisor said that she’d never seen anyone take so thoroughly to the study of quantum physics before, but it’s amazing how quickly you can make the theoretical become possible when you know bylaw is about to start street sweeping in the next week or so.
Of course, the development of zero-distance faster-than-light pocket universes had other benefits, most of which are boring because they primarily benefited people other than myself. Going to the grocery store is a lot easier now that you can just unfold a wormhole from your kitchen, although you do need to remember to put on pants before you do so. Space travel is theoretically possible, but if you ask me, Mars is just another place for my shit to rust and get pelted by hail. Those transversal meta-explorers can keep it: I’d rather store my excess Plymouths in the Negative Zone.
You might think that it’s wasteful to spend all of our resources on putting a Little Tikes push car on the moon, but have you considered the alternative? Now, children all across this great planet will get to look up at the moon and go: jeez, they spent a ton of money to throw that pile of plastic garbage up there. We did it for the kids, not because of our egos, which could have been stroked any number of alternative, money-burning ways.
Some of you take offence to the fact that a lot of billionaires got a cool ride to another planet courtesy of our car-throwing rocket. That’s okay, because they paid for it, and although we know that the same experience is completely inaccessible to you, the important thing is that we got paid. And we’ll make sure that their money ends up in the least responsible hands imaginable, diluted into the greater economy through a series of Craigslist transactions for keywords like “tunnel ram intake” and “hot dog rotisserie machine 7-11.”
Let’s be honest, though, just you and me. I personally find it very surprising that these billionaires trust in the free market enough to think that a little start-up like ours has what it takes to safely put them into space and back again. All of our promotional YouTube videos are faked, and our investor seed capital went to bribing the admin assistants and next-of-kin of our customers’ estates.
Space flight is risky, we tell them at every opportunity, sometimes multiple times in each paragraph of the glossy brochures we send to their homes. It’s entirely possible that the next flight is the one where we find out that our homemade rocket engine doesn’t really do a great job of keeping all the fire pointed in the right direction, we explain. Or the lawn chairs riveted into the converted garden shed (we used lots of caulk) can’t survive the full G-load of launch. We simply didn’t prioritize these things in our sprint plan.
A different tolerance for risk, perhaps. That’s why I’m not riding on our inaugural flight, the Cozy Coupe Lunar Deployment Mission. That, and the fact that I’d feel like I’m betraying our shareholders by taking up a chair in the rocket that would be better sold to some guy who got rich by inventing a vape that doubles as a slot machine.
Old race cars, like old race horses, are a little picky about their treatment when it comes time to do a little weekend race. They were designed to have a whole team of best-of-the-best experts looking after every aspect of their health, not some jerk autocrosser whose idea of “race prep” includes turning the air conditioning off. Race engines are so wildly aggressive that it’s often a huge pain just to get them to start. When you buy an old race car, one that is no longer competitive in battle, it usually has a slightly less ridiculous engine jammed into it.
Considering you, like me, are not a bred-from-birth performance car driver, that’s okay. Us regular mortals can’t dip into that extra 1% of 1% of the nine-hojillion horsepower that a barely-tamed race motor can pump out under extremely specific circumstances, so why take the maintenance cost for it?
And you won’t have time to hold the hand of an exotic engine, either, because with an old race car you’ll also run into the backlog of trackside race-day fixes, hackjobbed wiring, and one-off components made by obscure artisans in distant prefectures who may or may not be dead, and, in either event, certainly not interested in making “just one more” of their weirdo door braces. You’ll end up doing more museum curating and note-taking than door-to-door track attacks, which is an obvious disappointment to a lot of people who think “old race car” means “drivable race car.”
Still, race cars are beautiful. Their liveries are eye-popping, loose panel gaps from high-speed shunts hide a story, and everyone you invite over to your house will be impressed that you managed to buy a car that you have no hope of ever driving to its maximum extent. All of this is to say that I managed to get a good deal on some old shitboxes from the Subaru 360 race series, and there’s almost one that’s fully intact. I’ll be rubbing elbows with billionaires on the Nurburgring in no time.
Making new parts is fun. Fixing old parts is less fun. This, in a nutshell, is why at-home fabrication has never been more popular. It turns out if you lock a lot of weirdos inside their houses and tell them that they might die if they talk to another person face-to-face, what they do is immediately go on AliExpress, and type “CNC router” into the little search box. Social scientists are still amazed.
Of course, there are downsides to turning your boring residential home into a scale-miniature version of an actual workplace where trained and experienced professionals work. For one thing, trained and experienced professionals work at a real machine shop instead of an IT department, and as such they have no interest in spending thousands of dollars to run off a crappy bushing adapter at home when they could instead eat dinner, drink a single beer, and think really hard about tolerances.
The other thing is the mess. When you cut up a piece of metal, the shavings don’t just disappear into the ether. What they actually do is turn into a mist of razor-sharp death, which you then cut yourself on a thousand times a week. And don’t think you can clean it up, either: all that swarf will be there when you’ve died of heavy-metal poisoning and your home is passed on to another bunch of suckers. Vacuums can’t touch it, not unless they like to blow out their motor windings, so pro-tier home machinists simply stage an arson when the pile gets too big and move into a new house with the insurance money. Hey, if you tool a little bit of magnesium once in awhile, it’ll be a really pretty fire, too.
Come to think of it, if the fire is big enough, that means you’ll get to buy a whole new set of tools all over again. Which will be really good for the brand new shop layout! No more having to drag heavy tools around because you forgot to put the lathe next to the mill. Which is good: if your friends come over to help you move it, they might breathe on you, and then you’d both die.
Children of all ages are fascinated by buses, and it’s easy to see why. Municipal public transit is a glorious, enabling presence in their lives, a signifier that freedom from the parental yoke of asking for rides to the mall is possible. Even today, when the mall no longer exists (buses still stop at an empty field for fifteen seconds, out of respect,) kids will find their first taste of the rest of their lives thanks to a friendly transit operator.
They could also be interested in them because buses are a big, heavy, visually-distinctive vehicle that makes vroom-vroom sounds. This interpretation is also perfectly valid. Many fully-grown adults, like myself, are thrilled at the opportunity to discover a new kind of niche single-purpose vehicle, even moreso if it is possible to buy million-mile examples from a nearby farmer’s yard. That’s what I did last weekend: buy a fuckin’ bus.
You see, in my city, they had a little bit too much coke in the 80s. Transit was going to be reinvented, not by offering predictable schedules, more frequent bussing, or even routes that were designed by people who had ever actually rode a bus. No, they were going to Knight Rider up a bitch, and buy some super-advanced, prototype front-wheel-drive bus that looked like a Ford Aerostar made love to a Star Trek shuttlecraft. Naturally, because the strength of any bus fleet is being able to have parts on hand, this didn’t really work out. Those rare little buses ended up being decommissioned, where they ended up at the aforementioned farmer’s shit-spattered irrigation field between two Darts and about sixty percent of a Ramcharger.
For me, not being able to find parts from an automaker that no longer exists is not really a problem. Virtually all of the vehicles I’ve ever owned have come from brands that had long ago gone bankrupt, remembered only in half-correct Craigslist posts by delusional idiots who found one in a barn and were convinced that rare means expensive. When you can’t find parts, you have to make parts, and that’s what I did, thanks to a neighbour who wasn’t paying especially close attention to his brand new F-150.
Now, I can give rides to sixteen of my flunky friends, even if it is only from one end of the drag strip to the other end. Admittedly, I don’t let them go for the really important passes, because of all that extra weight, but public transit isn’t about giving people what they want. It’s about looking cool for children and giving wiki editors something to do.
Folks who live normal, well-adjusted lives may be surprised at how many tools you own. Not the number of different tools, because our society is good at teaching the difference between hammers and screwdrivers, through the introductory exposition scenes of hardcore pornography. No, what they are likely wondering about is why you would have more than one kind of, say, pliers. I know, it seems ridiculous to me too, but hear me out.
When you’re a regular individual, you don’t fix old or exotic things. Your Venn intersection of “shit that breaks” and “shit I can fix” is a pretty small overlap. And when you fix those things, you usually don’t need, say, double-jointed pliers. No doubt they would be handy for some of those repairs, but you probably don’t even know they exist, and are fine spending a few extra minutes swearing at a nearly-inaccessible dishwasher hose clamp while your shitty hardware-store needlenose pliers keep bottoming out on everything in the vicinity.
Here’s what I think happens: one day, a job just sucks too much. Or a well-meaning uncle gives you a specialty tool of some kind. It can be innocuous: maybe you already own a claw hammer, but one day you need to fix a furnace duct. Oh shit, is that what a ball-peen hammer is for? Come to think of it, I bet there’s a tool to do the folding on this flange as well… and then you’re lost to humanity. You will never again be a productive member of society, and that’s alright. All that socializing and rules-following takes up valuable time that could be spent trying to find room in your toolbox for whatever you just bought. Remote hose-clamp pliers? Goddamn. I’m jealous of that.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, don’t worry too much when regular, ordinary folks visit and question why you would have four sizes of Knipex Cobras. Just tell them you bought them as a set, and you didn’t want to break up the family. The little ones would cry, and all those slippery tears make it a lot harder to pry a rusted-stuck nut off. They can have feelings on their own time. Where was I?
Sometimes, I like to drive a cheap, shitty minivan. This is because I like to be smug whenever I visit Ikea. There, I swallow eight hundred bucks of compressed particle-board without worrying about how much my trunk will hold. On the way out, I like to toot the one working horn at the dude struggling to win a game of Interior Trim Jenga inside his brand-new Audi Q5, because his wife wanted a lamp that was slightly too round.
When I tell you that this van is shitty, I’m not trying to downplay it out of any sense of humility, because I have none left. Literally no sane human being on Planet Earth would sign up to be placed in this glorified suicide booth, much less be expected to maintain it. Of all the vehicles available to me – and there are many – this is the one I have decided to take to the Swedish battlegrounds. Please allow me to expound on some of its more critical faults.
Do you like warning lights? This thing has an alphabet soup of them, although I know it will never, ever flicker the dreaded “low oil pressure” genie lamp. Why? Because the bulb burned out about 140,000 kilometers ago. Bad sensor or something, surely not related to the fact that it occasionally needs four one-litre bottles of top-up oil between trips to the gas station.
The transmission in this thing is so far past its prime, that I won’t stop for red lights outside the retirement home. When you’re on the throttle, approaching third gear, it shifts about as eagerly as kids going to the dentist. The transition from first to second? Rough. Third to fourth? Super smooth. To keep that transmission from exploding, I like to give it what it wants, which is daring, high-speed runs on the highway. What are the cops gonna do, call out an APB on a thirty year old Honda minivan? None of them will ever admit that their fancy twin-turbo police interceptors can’t keep pace with a guy whose engine is best described as “noisy.”
Still, I love my van. It’s surprisingly easy to park, not least because people are afraid to park next to it. And when I’m done with it, I can sell it to a bunch of hipsters, who will turn it into an expensive novelty Airbnb. It’s already got enough furniture inside to qualify as a hotel room.
Fuzzy logic: it controls your rice cooker. It controls your smart shower. It controls the sentient sex android that you keep locked up in your closet, safe in the belief that “sleep mode” will not allow it to achieve ambulatory functions and gut you in the middle of the night. And now, it controls your drive to work.
Sure, a computer scientist will tell you that “fuzzy logic” is a meaningless term, and has little or no actual relationship to the modern world of machine learning. I disagree: again, Zojirushi wrote it right on the rice cooker. To how many people has that computer scientist fed perfect rice, I ask? I think they know what they’re talking about, thank you very much. Anyway, today’s self-driving cars work sort of the same way.
The important thing to remember here is that, unlike today’s boring computers that work, these newfangled machines have three states. Working, sorta working, and not working at all. If you’ve owned a German car in the last four decades, the latter two states are very familiar to you, so you should have a leg up on the competition. Once you have established a threshold for “sorta working enough,” that’s when the magic can really begin.
Yes, there are some significant flaws in trusting a computer system with no societal or cultural background to determine whether a thing it’s about to run over is a bicycle, a mailbox, or just the reflection of a cloud in a very shiny bridge abutment. However, I think you’ll find that this system makes a whole lot of money for everyone involved, and it’s easy to forgive these little whoopsies when you look how badly at everyone else around you is driving a car with human intelligence and reasoning skills.
All this is to say that it’s time to get in on the ground floor of the SwitchThink® self-driving car system. It’s revolutionary, and early prototypes can already drive around an empty parking lot for up to five minutes before deciding to take out a hedge. We’re currently looking for investors, and we personally guarantee that whatever money you give us today will have a fuzzier future tomorrow.
Column-shifted manuals are one of the greatest prizes of the motoring age. They’re burly, a little annoying to repair, and make you feel like you’re getting actual work done, even when you’re just gapping Mustangs with your Wartburg. Of course, due to the undue influence of European sports-car elitists, four-on-the-floor rapidly replaced them. Luckily for me, the Volare, God’s own chariot, held onto them longer than most. More proof of its dominance.
Now, you might be saying: my weird uncle had a Wartburg and that thing was rowdy as shit to shift. And I’d agree with you. When they’re even vaguely out of alignment, you have an even uglier time popping between gears than you would with even the nastiest bent-shift-fork, fragged-synchros, broken-mounts “modern” gearbox. With a little work and attention to detail – the sort of thing I never do – you can get these things humming along as well as any mid-sized 1950s delivery truck with too many miles on the odometer.
What these things deliver is non-stop, mad-cap fun. You might think you’re better than every other driver when you’re rowing your own gears in your Honda. Sure, but you’re still moving a stick around on the centre console. Why not try something a little weird, really flex those spatial reasoning skills of yours? It’ll give you more room for an armrest, and maybe even a front bench seat for you and your significant other to spend more time together.
Sadly, the time for column-shift manuals does seem to be long past. However, with the exotic new world of electric cars, anything is possible. Those motherfuckers are constantly throwing out new George Jetson ways of picking between “go forward,” “go backward,” and “not quite yet,” so it’s probably inevitable that they’ll go back to the good ol’ clutch-and-bolt-action. Or I’ll do it, as soon as my neighbour rolls his new F-150 Lightning somewhere that the tow truck won’t get to before I do.
There’s some kind of magical promise in standards. If you just hew to all these numbers, put your stuff in the right place, and pay attention to the specs, everything will just work. Of course, this never happens: standards folks forget to codify everything, their goon management keeps making contradictory changes, and humanity’s long march towards entropy continues unabated. Still, there’s some good reading in there, if you want to get into the mind of a band of sleep-deprived, paranoid lunatics trying to prevent everything I just mentioned.
Recently, I started a big-ass project. And this is where the standards come in: I figured I could avoid at least some of the work by standing on the shoulders of giants. All the guidelines, all the patterns have already been figured out, right? It turns out that in fact they had not. After the smoke cleared, I had spent more time to work around the standard and triple-guess what the designers intended than I had saved. And it’s always like this.
That’s why I’ve launched my own standards body, the Don’t Give Any Fucks Association. For a small fee, we’ll write a standards document that convinces your boss (and the marketing people) that everything will work together and be hunky-dory, and then you get to run off and do whatever you wanted to do in the first place. You’ll be happier because of the creative freedom, your boss will be happier because of the shortened timeframe, and we’ll be happier because we have your money.
And speaking of your money: if you’re feeling particularly flush, you can even invite yourself to one of our standards conferences. They mostly consist of hardcore drinking and then trying to race remote-control cars in the hotel parking lot, but you get to talk to other people in your industry. Then you can figure out what they’ve all collectively decided to do, so you can avoid it even more effectively.
Hey, there’s no shame in me admitting it anymore. I am a manual transmission elitist. No, I don’t mean to say that I will only drive manual transmissions, or that I look upon automatic owners with disdain. What really rows my gears is a shift boot with some ruffles to it.
This hasn’t really been the style since at least the late 90s, but in the 80s and early 90s, it was everywhere. Every single cheap-ass Japanese car had vinyl accordions sticking out of the centre console, with an uncomfortable hard plastic shift knob to boot. That was a prouder era. The scent of the cloth interior, the smell of a clutch that got a little hot when you were doing a 4000-rpm launch off the stoplight, the feel of the boot compressing and extending beneath your hand as you tried valiantly to figure out where second was on a tight downhill sweeper. You didn’t need more than that; you knew what you had was modest, sure, but it was honest.
Nowadays, manual transmissions are luxury items, for the Driving Elite, and the automakers felt they needed to be commemorated with gaudy metal shift knobs and – gasp – leather gaiters. The former is unusable in any region of the world where it gets hot or cold, and the latter is just… boring. Great, you managed to make a cone out of some cow flesh. Really premium. How about you get back in that materials-science factory, throw some old tires in the vat, and make me a nasty rubber one?
On the plus side, big rigs are still coming with these fantastic things. All I have to do when I get a premium luxury car from the futuristic year of 2005 is head on down to the local truck stop, and start sawzalling the underside of abandoned Peterbilts until one falls into my lap. Sure, it’s not glamorous, but if you wanted glamour, you’d pick a transmission that shifts itself, rather than do all this manual labour. You can’t have it both ways.
Despite the best efforts of my so-called friends, I have developed a kind of taste for Range Rovers. No, not the modern spongy ones designed by a significant fraction of the Spice Girls. The older, boxy ones. Through repeated sessions with my court-ordered therapist, I’ve been trying to figure out just why. We made a breakthrough recently, and I’d like to share it with you.
As everyone knows, these trucks break down all the time and are ludicrously expensive to repair. Often, they need specialized parts and skilled labour, two things that are in short supply among the kind of people who only want to pay about six thousand dollars for an old British 4x4. Even though we all know this, it is still a boxy, chunky, go-anywhere-worryingly-quickly machine. This appeals to our simian brains, which have been developed over years of evolution to prefer driving things that are sort of similar to tractors, but with heated leather seats.
It is in this dichotomy (shitty garbage/fancy tractor) that we find the core appeal of the Range Rover. In future sessions with Dr. Haynes and his assistant Nurse Bentley, I fully expect to be able to make further breakthroughs in the field of slowly swapping in 1980s General Motors truck parts, until the vehicle becomes a fancy (somehow still unreliable) British body on top of a 1980s General Motors truck frame. Is this the best use of my money? Absolutely not. Is it the best use of the money I have gained from the multi-level marketing scheme I’ve formed, promising Range Rover owners an end to their misery if they only tithe me 10% of their yearly income per year? Absolutely yes.
In the end, the Feds will swoop down on my operation, just like they always have, and seize my harem of thoroughly-broke-assed 1993 Discoveries. Joke’s on them, though, because that proceeds-of-crime auction is gonna be full of my disciples. Those things will be back on the road within 36 to 40 years, tops.
The dad next to me at the charging station looks over. I can tell he wants to ask me about my car, but he’s groping for the exact words to use. Because I’m not running a charity over here, I look down at my phone and pointedly ignore him. My phone, of course, is a plastic display model from the dumpster of the local telecom store. No real smartphone, with its acres of fragile crystalline ultraglass, could survive being ground into the rusty floor of my garage eighty times a day.
Finally, he screws up the courage. “What the fuck is that?” he asks me, pointing at the 1976 Plymouth Volare that I have plugged into a DC fast-charger nozzle, as if it were some kind of future-tech grand touring electric. I could tell him it’s a Plymouth that I banged together in my yard, that I was sick of paying assholes for gasoline, and that this thing will obliterate a set of rear tires in a thunderclap of rage if I so much as breathe on the accelerator pedal, thanks to the hacked-to-nothingness traction-control module that is now somewhere in that very same telecom store’s dumpster.
Instead, I shrug, and say: “it’s almost charged.” His look of confusion lasts about as long as it takes me to unplug the car and return the nozzle to its holder. By the time I’ve climbed over the door bars and cam-locked myself into the six-point restraint, the instinctive suburbanite response of towering anger has taken over. He, too, unplugs his plug-in sports car, and follows me to the next light. In a time long past, we would rev our engines at each other, in order to show off how loud those engines are. Now, I simply reach under the dashboard and flip a house light-switch to “on.” When the light turns green, the rattling Plymouth’s interior is filled instantly with a cloud of tire smoke, entering through every hole in the floorboard. It takes me awhile – nearly the entire quarter-mile from the light to the next light – for it to clear out of the cabin, but once it does I can no longer see my adversary. He’s long gone, so I pull the handbrake for a quick U-turn.
The charge-status light on my dashboard (an old string of LED Christmas lights stapled to what’s left of the original dash pad) is now blinking an angry red, so I pull right back into the charge bay I had vacated seconds before. I’ll be here for a little while longer, unless someone tries to make conversation. The thing people don’t get about electric cars is that while you’re charging, you have plenty of time to jack it up and replace the tires.
Almost nobody who reads this is going to space. Sorry, our society has decided it’s just too expensive. We have all been born too early for travel to other planets to become boring, commonplace, and smelling a little bit like urine. That’s okay, though, because we have valuable knowledge we can leave to the next generation.
You see, we’ve pretty much fucked up Earth. That’s our bad. All of those de-catted four-inch straight-piped exhausts, microplastic-tossing burnouts, and using gasoline to start our leaf-burning fires in the spring was not great for the climate. We’re all (well, most of us are) gonna try and make the best of it, and that means bad-ass electric cars, with so few moving parts that we’re gonna all get bored from them not breaking as often.
However, when the next generation (or the next-next, or the next-next-next) reaches another planet with a liveable atmosphere, the party can start all over. Maybe they’ll get lucky and there will be enough dead dinosaurs and plant material that they can even refine some fresh new high-test. And that planet will be ripe for trashing even faster. It’s like when you rent a car, or rock stars staying in a hotel room. You don’t live here, so fuck everyone who does.
I wish that I could get to see that glorious future, in which top-fuel dragsters are daily-driven on some distant rock. The best thing I can hope for at this point is that someone will take one of my shitboxes with them in a few hundred years. They have historical value, and will be essential for teaching our children’s children how dumb we all were. Hopefully the vacuum of space during the trip would slow the rusting down a bit, too.
Recently, I was awoken from my torpor by the sounds of a two-stroke engine going really fucking hard past my house. I stumbled to my feet and stared between the 2x4s covering the front window, expecting to see one of my flunky friends showing off his new Saab or whatever the fuck. Instead, I saw one of my neighbours – an ordinary-looking one, at that – stopped at the end of the street with a moped-converted bicycle, messing with the carb.
He shrieked in terror when he saw me emerge from what he thought was a condemned hoarder house and run across the street to say hi. Perhaps that was because I had not yet made myself “presentable” by North America’s obscene beauty standards of putting on pants. That terror subsided quickly, though, as I was able to quickly make small talk about jetting and expansion chambers. Soon, he was on his way, with a carb that now was no longer constantly sneezing at part throttle.
That whole experience got me thinking: how many more of my neighbours were actually secret freaks? Perhaps a few of them had even moved here in order to make their own freakishness more justifiable to their significant others. Look, honey, I know you think a Detroit-swapped 240SX is a stupid thing to spend money on, but have you seen what that fruitcake up the street did to a limousine last week? I decided that, in order to figure out who was aligned with my worldview, I would hold a block party. A big block party.
Of course, I hadn’t counted on something obvious. It’s my own fault, really, because I should have known better. No matter if you actually know what you are looking at or not, anyone and everyone will come running when they see some asshole with a five-hundred-cubic-inch supercharged V8 doing a savage burnout in a Pontiac Acadian Scooter. If only because they wanted to see if I’d manage to kill myself when the bellhousing finally exploded. Better luck next time, fakers: the rear diff shattered first.
When you think about it, nothing is more wasteful than the computer technology industry. Chances are your grandma still has a toaster from the 1970s, and it probably still makes decent toast. On the other hand, she has had to fill an entire drawer with old smartphones, half-broken laptops, and about thirty miles of obsolete cables that go between those computers and long-forgotten peripherals.
People slam the automotive industry for being wasteful and building quickly-obsolescent products, too. And this has been fairly deserved criticism, although if you look out your window right now, you’ll most likely see a 30-year-old car still in daily use. Unless you live in my neighbourhood, where the average age of shitboxes has been pulled down to the Nixon administration. Unless you get really pedantic about them being running cars, in which case the average vehicle is about mid-2012 or so.
It is easy to understand why all this stuff gets tossed out, though. Computer technology has advanced so quickly. Even if you piled up every single thing made in 1989 and somehow connected it all together, it still wouldn’t be as powerful as the phone that you cracked the screen on when you slipped on the ice cream you spilled on your kitchen floor while drunk. An ‘89 Accord can still put the hurt on a bicyclist. Even more so if they’re a brand new bicyclist, because toddlers put down shitty quarter mile times. Where was I?
Right. There’s no shame in going and buying an old car, or an old piece of computer equipment, just because you like how it looks. Where the real benefit of all this obsolescence is, though, is industrial machinery. Now, instead of just buying boring consumer gear, you can get the things that we defended ourselves against the Russians with. Sure, it doesn’t work very well anymore, and even if it did, you’re too dumb to use it, but boy does it ever make a cool-looking coffee table.
I don’t mean to be too much of a downer about it, but eventually, your car is gonna end up in the hands of someone like me. Yeah, even if it’s a luxury automobile that was only sold new to the uppermost echelons of industrial civilization. Sooner or later, the dread curve of depreciation will chip away at it, and a carbed Chevy 350 will end up being swapped in, so it can do endless burnies in the parking lot of a long-shuttered Pamida.
Now, I do know that there are real fancy cars which hold onto their value forever as collector’s items, objects of art. And if you have one of those, you’re probably not reading these words right now. If you are, please send a couple bucks to me, and I’ll make up some sort of fake charity receipt so your accountant can defray some of Uncle Sam’s demands that you contribute to society. The Man will find it very convincing that you’re helping support people with impulse-control disorders and terminal cases of tetanus.
For everyone else, depreciation still exists. Even modern cars, which will last approximately forever without so much as a re-ring, will eventually just get “a little old” and be worth less than a brand new one. Possibly because the phone holder no longer fits a big modern phone. This is all by design, because if it didn’t happen, our economy would grind to a halt, and we’d all have to make a living by performing useful, concrete tasks that help one another, rather than doing any-percent speed-runs of Microsoft Excel for 3 to 12 hours a day.
Personally, this all works out really well for me. I get to test out the fart-sucking seats in a Mercedes without paying new-Mercedes prices, albeit only after they’ve already ingested twenty years of anally-sourced small-batch artisanal methane. You may be surprised to find out that it works out well for you, too: you get to get rid of that Mercedes, so you can buy a new Mercedes. Sort of a symbiotic relationship we’ve got going on here. Hey, do you know where a guy can get a bunch of carbed 350s?
Whenever you’re really into a hobby, the number of specialty tools piles up. Sure, initially you’re going to get a screwdriver, a little socket set, maybe a torque wrench if you’re rich and want to show off to your rich friends that you’re a real race car mechanic/driver. Scientists are close to finding out what it is that takes hold at this moment, and why so many are prone to it. As things get worse, your search history fills up with phrases like “chassis nibbler” and “Robertson screwdriver.”
Naturally, this means that it gets very dangerous to find a new hobby. By the third or fourth extremely expensive specialist hobby you’ve fallen into, you’ll recognize this pattern, even as you dutifully obey it. Buy one or two tools, but just for occasional use – I’m no professional – and then it’s Snap-On’s black tar heroin from Hell to breakfast.
Communal tool rental organizations have been founded, almost charity-like, with the mission of saving you from this. If you never buy the tools, they think, then there’s no investment in making the projects bigger. This does not actually work, for two reasons. One, they don’t actually carry the really fucked-up stuff, and two, nobody is going to get in their car and drive to the community centre to get a new drill bit, when they could just buy one on the internet. The listing for it is right next to one for spade bits. Say, I might need one of those one day…
Ultimately, the only thing that’s going to save you from tool hoarding is friends. Bad friends, specifically, the kind who borrow your tools and don’t return them. With this system, you won’t buy a replacement tool – Bobby has that one, I’ll just go get it from him, he’s had it for long enough – and you also won’t suffer the storage and organizational cost of having to possess those items yourself. And in the meantime, you can start a new hobby. Say, photography doesn’t have any ludicrously expensive equipment, right?
When you work in a technical field, you don’t usually work with regular people. Nobody with an ounce of self-respect, social skills, and emotional maturity would ever throw themselves into the meat grinder of comprehending impossibly complex machinery. So you get a couple of oddballs for coworkers.
After working in the industry for a few years, I’d certainly had my fair share of model train enthusiasts, amateur baseball statisticians, and chicken farmers. Then there was Ned. Ned was, I think, a very good liar. He was so good that he could have gone pro, if not for the knee injury that kept him out of law school. Which knee was it, Ned? He always could remember which one he had told each person. Consistency and memory: that’s what makes a good liar.
One of Ned’s lies was so pointless and pervasive that I couldn’t help but look it up. He told us that he invented the Pringle, you see. Yeah, those compressed-potato-flake chips you buy when you need a snack that fits precisely into the luggage compartment of a motorcycle. To hear Ned tell it, they had sworn him to secrecy about the whole project, and that shadowy government conspirators and the Mafia were both involved in it.
This was a pretty good lie. Or maybe it wasn’t, because the very next day, Ned was taken out by a random drive-by shooting. These weren’t particularly uncommon in the area around our office, which could best be described as “inexpensive,” but the timing was pretty suspicious. Could a guy who told us that he was the crown prince of Georgia (the state, not the country) really have been wiped out by a group of snack-money-rich contract killers?
The answer, of course, was no. Ned had hired those goons himself, his attorney explained at his will reading. You have to admire his dedication to keeping the lie believable.
To say that I didn’t particularly enjoy my time driving across our great country is an understatement. While the Trans-Canada highway is as pleasurable a drive as ever, and the 1976 Comet GT lived up to its reputation as a road-swallowing go-anywhere machine, I was left wanting something more. And that something more is old-school, shitty restaurants.
When I was a kid, every small town on the highway used to have a variety of execrable food-holes that only stayed afloat because passersby were in too much of a hurry to try and get their money back. Virtually all of them served weak fare that you were lucky to not find an old cigarette butt inside, and everybody local seemed to be ordering off a different menu than you, the outsider.
Cutting that old Mercury out from the tree that had grown around it, I didn’t expect all the greasy-spoons to be gone. I envisioned a lot of great experiences like this on my way to Ontario, in order to attend the 100th anniversary of the invention of rust. What I found instead, though, was Tim Hortons and other depressing chain restaurants, sitting in the spots that used to hold something more interesting. Where I remembered a corn-dog stand cut into a giant fibreglass replica of a tree that was only open two days a week, there was now a corporate shithole that wouldn’t even give me the local variety of food poisoning.
I think there’s still some hope, though. On the way back, I’m going to try and avoid the major highways as much as possible, in order to find places so obscure that even the local politicians can’t justify spending taxpayer money on a franchise. Sure, it’s going to add about a month to my return trip, but I did get a little over-enthusiastic at the corrosion anniversary afterparty, and so I don’t think it’s a good idea to drive all that quickly either.
When I was younger and more impressionable, a friend got an Eagle Talon. That was a pretty cool car. It had all-wheel-drive, a turbocharger, and a manual gearbox that was slightly more pleasant than breaking up rocks using an aluminum baseball bat in month-old Jell-O® pudding. He gave up on it almost right away, having been confronted with more than a decade of previous-owner neglect, heat-baked vacuum hoses, and a driver’s seat that wouldn’t stop creaking.
They were sold under many names, because the company that made them was a bit of a slut and caught a case of genital Chrysler. Eagle Talons, Plymouth Lasers, Mitsubishi Eclipses: pretty much all the same car. Enthusiasts in the know refer to them as “DSMs,” because of the psychiatric help manual you need to ingest in order to own more than one. Folks with four are called DSM-IVs, for instance, and they are the King Shit of Fuck Country.
As parts dwindled, I saw fewer and fewer on the road. It’s a lot easier to keep a bunch of incomplete cars on your property than to keep one running-and-driving example, especially with the amount of road salt they like to pickle everything with around here. There are about twelve within walking distance from my house, but they’re either under car covers or are split into their major assemblies in driveways, garages, and backyards across this fair land. Such is the fate of many sports coupes, and it was even moreso the fate of a semi-complex machine like this, whose intricate packaging job offered the hapless backyard mechanic untold thousands of ways to fuck up the car permanently.
Back to my friend: he ditched the Talon for a then-sorta-current Saab 9-3. Say what you will, at least he was consistent in picking sporty compact cars that would soon be forgotten. Maybe I can cram a Mitsubishi 4G63 into a dead-engined 9-5 wagon? At least I’ll have one potential customer for selling the thing on when I get bored of it.
Settle down. Everyone settle down. Okay, look, it’s been a really hard couple of weeks for me getting started as The Mayor’s new press secretary. We can all see that I haven’t been sleeping, and I am probably hungover as fuck. Let’s just all work together to try and get through this. Alright, let’s roll.
The Mayor’s office has received some troubling reports in recent weeks of citizens being attacked by nesting migratory waterfowl near the edge of Stacey Park. We commissioned a task force to look into the incidents.
That task force has discovered that in almost all cases, it was caused by the geese becoming too comfortable with human beings. So we’re launching a new cross-media awareness initiative, which we are now calling “Don’t Feese the Geese.”
- Ted Winters, from the Post. Is this a typo for “feed?”
Look, Ted, all you had to do was go along with this for five more minutes, and we’d all be out of here. Now I have to explain to you that this is a cutesy modification of the English language to make it rhyme and be more memorable. I guarantee you that you will not soon forget the word “feese,” and will probably use it in water-cooler conversation within a week. Okay?
- Suzette Summers, from the Times. Are you serious with this fucking shit?
Suzette – Suzy, Jesus. I gave you a ride to City Hall today because your Goddamn Kia won’t start again. All you have to do is write “feese” in a motherfucking news article and get your three hundred words, and then pretend this whole thing never happened. There’s no scandal happening, and certainly this is not a distraction from The Mayor’s ceaseless train of underage concubines being driven to his door by shadowy billionaires in exchange for his political fav – God damn it, you almost got me again!
So there you have it, folks. Don’t feese those geese, or they’ll bite the shit out of you. Don’t do it. We’re spending three million dollars of taxpayer money in sole-sourced contracts to put this on billboards all over the city. You won’t be able to escape the word.
Okay, let’s take a break here. When I get back from my visit to the little tequila’s room, I’ll fill you in on The Mayor’s schedule for the meet-and-greet at the zoo this weekend. You’re not gonna want to miss it.
All over the city, you’ll find hard-working folks taking metal scrap off the side of the road. They usually drive shitty pickups, but they do an important job. If not for them, there would be a lot more parts of old exercise equipment and ladders lying around for me to practice welding on. And then we’d all be fucked.
Most of the reason why I haven’t yet gone fully off the deep end and started my own bespoke supercar manufacturing firm is because I’m really terrible at welding. Sure, I can kind of blob a bunch of crap into a corner, and I spend more time grinding stuck rods out than the average person should, but I would hesitate to call any of my work “good.” And you need to be a good welder if you’re asking other people to pay for the car you put together in a shed, if only because a lot of your prospective customers will be lawyers.
Once, I had a couple hours of instruction from a pretty decent welder. The resulting burst of naïve enthusiasm caused me to purchase a really rusty 240SX with the intent of turning it into an all-metal widebody car to rule the racetracks of Japan. You might have seen it in the latest Mad Max movie, as a burned out piece of wreckage in the background. That wasn’t exactly the goal, but I was happy to be rid of this highly visible testament to having run out of shielding gas five minutes in and then deciding to “go for it.”
So the next time you see a dude in a rusty Ranger stealing an unattended bicycle from a suburban yard, give them a big ol’ thumbs up. And then follow them to where they’re going, because I am looking for someone who will pay me for all these ruined lawn furniture and warped frames, without asking too many questions about where they came from.
There’s one thing that separates the rich from the rest of us: not paying on time. While us regular folk are cowed into timely coverage of our many invoices by threats of interest rates, special penalties, and the chilling hand of the debt collector, really rich people know that money isn’t real, and that they can just hire someone to murder their debtors. And not pay them, either.
When you’re an independent contractor like myself, and you talk to other folks like yourself, the topic of which clients are “not shit” comes up. Perhaps the kindest thing you can ever say about any client is that they paid early, not just on time, or after a little cajoling. Ideally, you’re not going to be saying you have a client who pays fucking late because they’re having trouble keeping the lights on. That just isn’t prudent; the other contractors will think less of you; and they’ll make jokes about why you should leave them high and dry.
Sometimes, though, you want to help out a client who is in trouble. Sure, their honeyed promises of “more money if I just get through this rough patch” never, ever materialize. And you’re a sucker for dropping the amoral-mercenary emotional detachment because you started to identify with the guy who owes you thousands of dollars. For me, though, it was that I wanted to keep racking up the debt, so that I could have an excuse to take the Jaguar XJ12 that I keep seeing parked in the handicapped spot outside their office in lieu of payment.
Has it worked? Unfortunately not. It turns out that bankruptcy trustees don’t let you choose what you get from the auction. Often, you only get a couple cents on the dollar of what you’re owed, and you don’t get to dip into personal property. All I ended up with was this worthless corporate Learjet, which the HOA won’t even let me park in my driveway. Anyone want to trade it for an Isuzu Trooper or something?
Whatever it is that you work on, chances are you just don’t have enough clamps. Even my professional-writer friends occasionally need to hold a sentence in place in order to tack-weld some words on the end. Like all of the great things in life, clamps are simple – a spring, a way to open the clamp, and some jaws that grab the workpiece. And just like all those other things, they have become staggeringly unaffordable in recent years.
Not to worry. Despite the predatory effort of retailers to create a sense of desperate hopelessness, clamps are in fact so ubiquitous that you’ll never need to visit Home Depot and pay three dollars for a plastic alligator clip that used to cost fifty cents again. Because humanity has made many more holdfasts than exist humans, there is a massive oversupply. Even a hammer-wielding goon like myself can only break so many in a year. As you might expect, the solution is to bring supply and demand together.
Because they are so valueless, you will never see a clamp listed at an estate sale. At best, they’ll grab up whatever ones are within a workshop and throw them in with some assorted screwdrivers. That’s why I bought an old GMC Astro and painted “I’ll Buy Your Vise Grips” on the side. Every weekend, I drive it real slow through the retirement complex near my house. This serves two purposes: one, it keeps just enough air going through the radiator that the broken-ass cooling fan doesn’t boil the heads into my feet, and two, I’m getting the word out about my business.
Any second now, I’m going to have the back of this van full of weird-smelling, somewhat-stained cheap plastic clamps that used to be owned by folks who did the occasional woodworking. And all it will cost me is several thousand dollars in gasoline, but you have to spend money to clasp money.
I was never a competent political candidate, but sometimes, when you hit a nerve with the electorate, it doesn’t matter. All I wanted to do was have an excuse to drive my Volare in the town parade, smoking and popping while I lean out the window and wave at all the people I would otherwise be victimizing.
Naturally, when you seem like a populist tool that can be bent to rich folks’ will, and especially when your personal politics only extend to “let me do burnouts on school playgrounds,” you’re going to arouse the investment of some bourgeois people. Morality aside, their money spent very very well. Who would have thought the decline of democracy would contribute to getting me a new pair of 4-2-1 block header huggers, instead of being caused by it?
I suspect that these rich assholes thought they had control over how I would vote. Otherwise, they wouldn’t bother. Thing is, they’d presumably never seen a politician that can lie before. And if there was one arrow in my otherwise empty quiver of political competency, it was bald-faced lying.
After about a week, I had already nationalized all of their assets and several that I saw on the way to work. They were turned into a factory to produce the ultimate people’s electric car: a Voltare, if you will. Sure, the people needed a lot of convincing to make them abandon their Acura RDXes and Saturn Vues for a small brown commuter car that somehow still smoked and smelled like oil, but as soon as it became the only option legally allowed for personal transport, they shrugged and ate that particular shit. And good for them.
Now, when political journalists (the ones that I allowed to survive) ask me what my next daring move is, I tell them straight out. I still haven’t fixed that doing-burnouts-on-school-property issue yet. There’s some thorny constitutional issues, and by that I mean that the teacher’s union bought a tank.
Castles seem like a superior real estate investment, and there’s absolutely a lot of reasons to recommend them. There’s that medieval charm, all that high-quality mortar, big square footage, and the drawbridge. Does your split-level bungalow have a drawbridge, Ted? I didn’t fucking think so.
Of course, there’s always a downside. Because they predate the existence of automobiles, castles do not feature much in the way of parking. You won’t find a garage, for instance, and the mossy ground they’re built on is way too soft to support the weight of even the lightest-duty two-post lift. So most homeowners, needing at least two deeded parking pads (maybe three if they have kids) will pass on the average castle.
This doesn’t have to be the case for you, though. Here at Seat Safety Switch’s Castle Retrofits, we will pour a fresh garage pad and construct a code-compliant four-car (or eight-car tandem) garage in the courtyard of your castle. Your vehicles will be safe from weather and most forms of siege weaponry, and the peasants toiling in your fields will admire the handsome vinyl siding. If you order right now, we’ll upgrade your garage to 240V service, so you can immediately start using a welder or charging an electric car in your centuries-old palace.
Call us today and start taking advantage of all the great deals in used castles. Please note that we don’t do stables, granaries, or imprison your cursed daughter in towering ziggurats that are accessible only to stalwart, purehearted heroes. For that kind of shit you should just call a general contractor.
It’s easy to become a bona fide enthusiast of baked goods. All of humanity adores at least one of them: croissants, cheese breadsticks, sourdough loaves. And all of these take a huge amount of effort to produce. In fact, in terms of effort to reward, running a bakery doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
That’s why the big grocery stores use their unprofitable bakeries as loss leaders. Come on in for the freshly-baked bread, and then buy a bunch of expensive packaged jam to go with it. They know exactly how you think, and that insight into your not-so-unique psychology will force open your wallet and splash out for about a thousand bucks in impulse-bought hotdogs over the course of your life.
So I like to go to this little hole in the wall bakery, instead. It’s not particularly near my house, and getting to it involves some full-throttle merges and several questionable lane changes across the freeway network. When I get there, though, the people who run it are so grateful for my business that they don’t even get too angry when I ask why they’re out of fresh-baked baguettes at 1:35 in the afternoon. They just roll their eyes a little bit.
One day, humanity will produce a bakery for lazy people like myself. The convention of the industry – that it is only run by early-morning coffee achievers – will go away. Slowly, a new generation of baker will emerge, one that stayed up until 5 a.m. swapping a replacement transmission into their shitty Carter-era Mopar. And in return for this slavish devotion to my particular needs, I’ll happily give them two or three dollars a week, unless the grocery store has a deal on hotdogs again.
They say that the triangle is the strongest shape in engineering. It makes sense: try eating a Dorito sideways. Your mouth will get absolutely fucked up, I promise you that. Thing is, though, fabricating a triangle into your car’s unibody means using at least three parts (geometers call them the anode, the cathode, and the donginus.) And that’s, like, two parts too many for me.
When you’re constructing your race-car roll cage, subframe reinforcement, or bodged frame replacement, it’s tempting to cut some corners. Especially when you’re doing it in the parking lot of the local football stadium, using a battery you stole out of a security guard’s golf cart as a stick welder. Two chunks of metal at a right angle may be weaker on paper, sure, but this “no parking” street sign I just sawzalled off at the ground is only so long, and I can’t shorten the body on this shitbox any further, or I’ll have to start driving to work sideways.
It is in times like this that you must remember there are other ways to achieve a strong triangulated frame than doing it properly with the correct materials and tools. For instance, inscribing a loose isosceles triangle onto the bottom of the spatter-welded, right-angled frame using a paint marker will still imbue the metalwork with at least some of the natural, spiritual power of triangles. Maybe draw it a couple dozen times. Worst case, the pack rats that come to eat your wires at night will think that a strange cat is waiting to eat them, and they’ll go and gnaw on your neighbour’s starter relay cable instead.
If you ask me, the strongest construction by far is to just hope for the best and drive fast enough that the momentum of the wreck will still get you closer to home, faster, than walking there will.
House wiring is kinda shitty. You’ve got wire nuts and marettes that can’t sustain even the slightest vibration, live wires twisted around some freaking screws, and all of the connectors date back to the 1950s. That’s why me and a guy from Sumitomo got drunk on the weekend and then decided to make a house entirely out of the latest and greatest connectors that we could dig out of their failed bid at the space program.
The primary thing that has always bothered me about automotive connectors is the locking tab. In case you’re not familiar, let me help you a little bit. Usually, a connector is two or more pieces of metal trapped inside a piece of plastic. You click the plastic wing to the plastic wong, and then the metal parts make contact and electrons go through them.
This works great, except that cars (and spacecraft) vibrate a whole fuck of a lot, which eventually shakes the connectors loose. So the geniuses who build automotive connectors have a whole cottage industry out of figuring out various combinations of tabs, clicky things, isolating pins, and screw threads to mechanically hold these two halves together better. And they all fail when the plastic gets a couple decades old and just seize together.
Here’s the brilliant part: houses don’t really vibrate that much, and if they do, you’re more worried about the bookshelves falling on you. Locking tabs are unnecessary, which means we can just snip them off the car connectors when we install them. And climate control inside the home makes for some really easy, non-rusty connections. It’s perfect! So why haven’t houses done it yet?
As it turns out from our limited experimentation, the reason is that a car is a twelve-volt electrical system, and the voltage coming off of the transmission lines outside your house is “more than that.” So we’re gonna have to use some bigger connectors, or at least solder them a little. And probably build a new house. Hey, maybe it could be made out of metal, like a car! That’ll let us ground all this power right through the walls.
In my weaker days, I disposed of engines and transmissions in the legally correct receptacle. Often they had to be carried to metal recyclers, which are only open sporadically, and where toothless jerks gave me tenths of percent of the scrap value. And I was making this run a few times a month. I was miserable, and I was ready to quit the hobby entirely and take up amateur aluminum smelting in my backyard instead. That’s when I found Tim Hortons Dumpster®.
You may be familiar with Tim Hortons as being a restaurant that serves microwaved bagels, barely-there doughnuts, and soup that has a better commercial than an aftertaste. Regardless of what you may think of its ownership, celebrity status, legal immunity, political beliefs and general shitty food, there’s one thing that Tim Hortons does to give back to society. Each and every one of them has a dumpster.
Now, those dumpsters often say things like “do not dump here” or “trash disposal under surveillance” or “restaurant employees have been deputized to use lethal force.” You can freely ignore all of these signs. Why? Two reasons: one, you’re bringing the engine or transmission or differential in a car, and two, that car can get away in a real hurry. Yes, you might have to avoid the place for a few days after, but by then they’ll have a new batch of exploitable staff, and you’ll be back to chucking EJ18s in their bins with aplomb.
So head on out today and take advantage of the best metal-disposal method I’ve found yet. Hell, it might even be considered metal recycling, as soon as things get real bad and people start combing the city dump for resources. They’ll thank you then, and that legacy you leave behind will be worth a whole lot more than just a few pennies per kilogram of “mixed car parts.”
If you just accept what Big Government and Bigger Automaker sell you, you’re not aware of the magic that is the aftermarket skidplate. Here’s the drill: chances are you have an internal combustion engine in your car. Underneath that engine, you almost certainly have an oil pan. It’s a pan filled with oil. And it’s low to the ground. Low enough that you can smack it on shit, all the oil will fall out, and then your engine will stop working.
The fact that this has never happened to anyone I know does not particularly impede my desire to purchase a skidplate. I drive off-road a little more often than the average person. No, I’m not going to Moab: I just get very impatient when stuck in traffic. Occasionally a nearby playground is unfenced, and provides convenient access to an alley, side-road, or parking lot that can be used to bypass whatever is slowing my commute. It stands to reason that sooner or later karma will catch up with me, potentially in the shape of a rusty teeter-totter punching its way through my sump.
There’s lots of great options out there for skidplates. Thanks to the collapse of Western civilization, more citizens are feeling the need to up-armour their regular cars in order to survive the degradation of public infrastructure. Is that really an average everyday pothole, or is it an engine-devouring sinkhole? One of them is gonna need all the help you can get if you want to make it home tonight. Skid plates also easy to install on a car, so they are a popular modification by people who otherwise would shy away from the essential work of swapping engines and putting on egregious homemade suspension lift-kits.
Personally, my favourite way to skid is called “municipal signs.” You see, road signs are made out of high-quality aluminum, often have nicely machined edges (to avoid cutting the people who steal them,) and are a self-replenishing resource. As long as you don’t steal ones too close to your house, or do so in sight of an obvious undercover bylaw officer’s van, you can get away with it enough times to outfit all of your cars. I’ve got a playground zone one wrapped around the bottom of my Valiant right now, although I didn’t exactly take it off the signpost first.
My local thrift store has gotten really expensive. Personally, I blame the internet. With the easy ability for them to look up just how much a severed Garfield head that used to be part of a cookie jar is worth, why would they bother putting it out on the floor for twenty-five cents? They could stick that shit on eBay for twenty-six cents, and wait a couple months for it to sell.
I say this not just to complain about how much everything costs now, but to grumble about the lack of diverse supply at their storefronts as well. You can’t blame them for this either: if all the good stuff is getting raptured into the internet money machine, then the remaining bad stuff has to get priced up too. Otherwise, people would buy it, and then the store would look really barren. That would turn off future donors, who would otherwise be providing them with scratch-and-ding VCRs, some of which may even have an S-video port.
That’s why I’m so glad it’s garage sale season. Yes, garage sale sellers, being moneyed suburbanites with more free time than most, also have the ability to go online and “know what they got,” but they’re more incentivized to get rid of their old shit. The haircut they take from failing to negotiate strongly against my barrage of cost-reduction tactics is a lot cheaper than getting divorced because their basement is still full of novelty 1970s beer bongs from college. And the richer you go, the better. I once visited a really rich part of town, and before the cops noticed and gave me an “escort” back to where I belong, I was able to scoop up a like-new snow shovel for one dollar. They didn’t even know what it was – they thought the maid left it behind one day because it didn’t fit in her Jaguar.
Naturally, garage sale season is not without its perils. Rival hunters have spent the pandemic clawing at their faces looking for a chance to get out there. The constant stop-start of crawling through a neighbourhood is hard on the cooling system and transmission of my car. And there’s always the risk that someone from the Value Village will be using their boss’s bankroll to pick up more stuff to put on the internet. You don’t want to cross those folks. People donate a lot of perfectly viable handguns to them.
On a roadtrip, you can’t go long without snacks. I’ve spoken before about tucking all varieties of convenience-store meat product into every available space on the interior of my car, so that it envelops me like a sodium-rich womb. That’s not what we’re covering today. Instead, we’re talking about throwing the wrapper away when you’re done with your food.
For whatever reason, a large portion of the population sees fit to treat their cars as a garbage can. They eat a burger, or drink a coffee, and chuck the empty container in the back seat to be thrown out “later.” This is a bad idea, mostly because the word “later” is actually Ancient Yiddish for “never,” and makes your car full of trash. This decreases the car’s power-to-weight ratio, reducing your competitiveness at the all-important stoplight drags.
No, what I do is throw things away immediately. I don’t even chuck them on the ground, even though the gaping hole on my floorboard would make it very easy to do. Mostly because anything I chuck out there will get wrapped around the driveshaft and flung right back at me. We are blessed in North America to have a copious surplus of trash receptacles, from the humble neighbour’s-black-bin to the exotic trash cans at the airport with the foreign-object-damage prevention cage. Use ‘em.
If you’re really hard up for it, just drive your car over a curb and into a nearby playground: kids generate a lot of garbage. And now you can get away a lot faster when their parents call the cops, too.
I’ve always wanted to go to the Isle of Man. A speed-limit-free paradise where the world’s greatest motorcycle drivers careen around blind corners without a thought for the oblivion that awaits them if a stray leaf wanders into their path? Sounds like a place I could work at the Home Depot of.
Of course, moving to other countries always looks good, even if it’s not. For instance, I’m not sure that constant, dreary, bone-chilling ice fog is a big improvement over meter-deep dumps of snow and minus-30 temperatures that pursue you relentlessly, even indoors. I’d like to find out for sure, though, which is why I started taking motorcycle racing lessons.
You see, I saw this news story about some Olympic athletes who used their attendance at the event as a chance to get political asylum. They entered the host country with the intent of swinging hockey sticks, or doing floor gymnastics, or whatever, and ended up living somewhere where the country isn’t run by quite as many monstrous creeps trying to murder them. And good for them! I figured the same thing would work to avoid the state’s pursuit of legal oppression re: my parking habits.
Unfortunately, it turns out that in order to declare asylum in a country, you have to physically be located in the country. Plane tickets to the Isle are out-of-this-world expensive. To make matters worse, the so-called athletic support agencies in my country won’t lift a finger to pay my way to the Manx TT. They keep saying something about “not even being able to kickstart the bike” and “keeps leaving the fuel petcock closed.” It’s just this kind of persecution I’m trying to flee here, people.
When you’re a beginner to a complex technical field, it can still seem quite simple. That’s because you haven’t figured out the subtleties yet. It may be “common sense” that a job is a certain way, but it turns out that common sense is usually wrong and also a little stupid. That said, I think I’m really onto something here.
Here’s the deal. My house, like many others, is covered in stucco. Stucco, in case you were unaware, is like some kind of rock goo shit that people slap onto the side of houses to make them look nice. I don’t mind it, honestly, but I do mind having to repair it every time I throw a tool or don’t pay attention while backing up. Stucco comes in these little tubs, and you put it on with a trowel. It’s always a goopy mess, and it never cures fast enough.
All this is fine if you like the stucco look. Humanity, however, has figured out that smooth surfaces are superior. If you could make a house perfectly flat, why, it would be aerodynamically much better. You’d have less wind noise, and probably get superior fuel economy when compared to a competitor’s split-level low-rise bungalow. That’s why I’m proposing the use of Bondo®.
I know what you’re going to say: stucco exists because Bondo® was not yet invented. That’s pure laziness. As soon as the magic plastic putty was discovered by Ted Bondo, the inventor of Bondo®, it should have become mandatory for houses across this great land. Sure, there’s the endothermic reaction you’d have to worry about, but that brings me to my next point: stop making house frames out of wood. We have titanium for a reason, assholes.
I can’t resist a good hiding spot. If you are an automaker, and your vehicle has a lot of storage binnacles, I am very happy about it. Even the word “binnacle” gives me a little frisson of joy. Sometimes a car has two gloveboxes. Two! Or an extra deep centre console that contains another, hidden, bin inside it. Plenty of room for all the things I can’t leave inside my car or the feral neighbourhood raccoons will steal it.
In recent years, however, the need to protect increasingly fat occupants has led to a slight reduction in available storage space. You need all that room for metal, or airbags, or some other kind of padding with which to resist nine-thousand-pound SUVs with enough grunt to out-pull a freight locomotive. As a result, a lot of the pure joy of discovery has disappeared from newer cars.
What’s that? There’s no need to discover the bins, because they’re all in the manual? No, no, my friend. I am talking about all the stuff previous owners leave behind. Whether it be a particularly tasty tube of lock de-icer, or just a casually discarded firearm, for whatever reason people will simply forget to clear their car entirely out before selling it to the junkyard and/or post-accident tow truck company. And the more hiding places there are in the car, the more likely they’ll forget something nice.
Don’t believe me? Maybe you should avail your eyes on this prize. Yes, my friend, it is a 3/8″ ratchet. And not just any ratchet: Snap-On. I found this baby in a Plymouth Neon with a bunch of “biohazard” stickers all over the windows. Sure, there was a lot of blood in the interior, but none of it was mine, and this thing has sat out in the yard for at least two days now, so it’s had plenty of disinfecting sun. I bet if I go back in there, I can find a good Phillips-head screwdriver, too, or some eBayable teeth.
I’ve spoken many times – in bars, to high schools, before Congress – about the need to increase North America’s minivan supply. Other countries casually best us in this critical corner of the vehicle economy. In Japan, you can get anything from a tiny body-on-frame work van, to a four-wheel-drive hybrid luxury box that makes a private jet look like a disused outhouse. Here, you’ve got four, maybe five options, and none of the automakers involved seem very happy about you picking a paint colour they can’t sell.
That’s why, now that my army has seized control of the federal government, that we will be nationalizing all minivan production. Don’t worry, citizens: where the private sector has failed to render unto you choice, we will provide a weird people-mover for each and every overly-specific niche. Do you ice race motorcycles? We got a van for that. Forty-seven kids? You’re gonna need to get your air-brake endorsement, but we’ve got the van for you, too.
Every time in the past when I have used massive violence to seize control of a formerly free democratic republic, there is always one question from my critics when I unveil a new program: who will pay for it? The answer: my critics. As we speak, heavily-armoured three-row minivans equipped with bulletproof treads and eight ton battering rams are reducing the newspaper offices in every major city to a pile of debris, rebar, and scabs. We have already completed the liquidation of their ownership’s assets and redirected their human resources staff to the gulag, where they will work incredibly hard hours banging out quarter-panels for our upcoming product line.
There is, however, a downside to being placed under my benevolent autocratic rule. For many of you, an illegal collusion between automakers and the oil industry have taught you that SUVs and pickup trucks are superior to vans. If you are one of the names now scrolling along the bottom of the screen, please step out onto your front lawn and lie face-down for the re-education vans. Don’t worry, it’s going to be great. Did you know these things have a chilled glovebox now? You can keep your drinks cold.
I’d like to tell you about my shop teacher for a bit. Way back in high school, there were a lot of options for shop. Auto, metal, wood: those were what you went into, in decreasing order of stonedness. What auto shop – and the shop teacher, Mr. Kinsey – primarily taught me is how to run a good scam.
You see, auto shop classes have a proud tradition of being a “working” class. Teachers, other faculty, and folks from the surrounding community bring in their cars for service. The kids get experience, the customers save a little bit of money, and the class is one of the very few public school experiences that pays for its own consumables. That is, unless you grift a little bit in the middle.
When the kids were trusted enough, they were allowed to talk to the customers directly, set up their own jobs. As long as Kinsey got his money on the backend, and the shop supplies were paid for, he wouldn’t exactly go around printing out invoices. We figured this out by accident, when Chunky Carl (not his real name) fat-fingered his TI-83+ and transposed some digits while calculating a bill, and ended up making an extra hundred bucks for an easy pad-slam of a brake job. He waited to get in trouble, and when he didn’t, it was open season on the neighbourhood.
Before long, it was hard to find an open hour or two in the auto shop. Kids were coming in on their break periods, skipping class, and meeting their customers out in the student parking lot, away from suspicious ears. And the customers were happy: even some untrained, barely-supervised kids could bang out a faster oil change than the Jiffy Lube, especially when they were motivated by lacking the managerial overhead of same.
Sadly, all good things do have to come to an end. Loose lips sunk this particular ship, when a group of kids in the other class section figured out that they could do accident repair if they teamed up with the metal-shop kids next door. Suddenly, shattered Plymouth Voyagers were getting their frames pulled straight in the alley behind the high school, bodged up with junkyard parts, and fogged with whatever graffiti-covering paint the janitor didn’t keep locked up.
The metal shop class’s teacher, Mr. Sobieski, absolutely knew how to make an invoice, and blew up at Kinsey for cutting into his labour cost. He also taught the forensic-accounting class. I went to a weird school.
If you’ve never secured for yourself the services of a good attorney, I recommend you do so now. Even the non-criminal variety have a cornucopia of information and/or trivia that they’d be willing to share with you about how to not need one of their defensive brethren. And a good angry lawyer letter will shake loose virtually any obstacle, from a Pizza Hut that refuses to honour a 30-year-old coupon for double pepperoni, to a guy who cut you off in traffic and you’d like to see him eat his own hands.
My own lawyer is called Max. That’s not his real name; his real name is protected under attorney-client privilege. He tells me that once a lawyer knows another lawyer’s true name, they can hold an eerie and supernatural power over the other lawyer. All I can tell you is that he keeps shifting his legal last name every week by flipping pages in the phone book and then pointing to a nice-sounding one, with good mouthfeel.
The reason you recruit a good attorney is that they know all the scams. In fact, a really high-quality one is, if not an active participant in, then a devout aficionado of loopholes, exploits, and shenanigans that benefit them and the ones they love. You may think you’re on top of the scam-artist game right now, but it’s easy to fall behind: work, family, religion, and automobile maintenance will all distract you. What if your country is bought by a Chinese trillionaire? If that happened, you’d have no idea, say, which traffic laws are now actually optional – but Max would, and he’d probably have a pretty good idea of who to bribe to find out within a week or so of the ink drying on the occupation paperwork.
There’s always a cost, though, and since I have no money, it often involves doing various dirtbag-mechanic services to Max’s harem of bulletproof German luxury cars. As bad as an ABC system removal is, I’d probably still prefer it to prison. Wait, does prison have cars? I bet my lawyer would know the answer to that.
Getting a good croissant in my town shouldn’t be as hard as it is. Now, I know what you’re saying: aren’t you the guy who drives rancid shitboxes and refuses to spend a buck on anything? Yes, but it’s just a little bit classist of you to assume that I won’t take one of those Plymouth Volares running an ex-Soviet diesel two-stroke engine to the local French café. While I’m there, I’d like to stuff my face with delightful baked goods while reading a book about sad children growing up without Twingos.
Problem is, there isn’t a local French café for me to go to. Some politician teamed up with the Channel 3 news and made up some bullshit about the French-speaking elites trying to force our children to play soccer in school. It got out of control on Facebook, and then here was a huge anti-Franco riot, which was opportunistically seized upon by the undercover cops planted into the riot, in order to burn down the buildings of people they didn’t personally like. Your normal long-weekend stuff around these parts.
I had two options, none of which I liked. One, I could learn to bake a croissant myself. That would involve a journey of self-discovery, as well as a commitment to clear my kitchen of all the motorcycle parts that I was currently soaking in the sink and drying out on the landlord’s cookie sheets. Two, I could attempt to drive to a place where French-speaking people are still allowed to own property. Driving to the next town over might seem simple to you, but for me, it’s a challenging road trip.
Despite the elevated wear it would cause to my transmission, I chose to lash a spare Volare to the back of my “travel” Volare as a backup. Not only did it contain spare parts and tools, but it also would serve as a cargo trailer for returning even more croissants safely home.
Things didn’t go well, and I had to abandon the trip halfway through the return leg. I got nervous when I got rumbled by the highway patrol, and figured they might have radioed me ahead as a traitor to the Anglospheric way of life. I had already been suspected by them previously, for having a French-sounding “Chevrolet” in my driveway.
All the stress of this official extrajudicial hasslin’ made my right foot jiggle a bit, which in turn adjusted the gas pedal slightly beyond the safe 1/16th load. This load limit was essential: it had been empirically determined through previous breakdowns that giving the car no more pedal than this would keep the precarious balance between the cooling system, fuel system, transmission, differential and ignition system from exploding into all-out civil war.
At least I had plenty to eat while I worked hard at turning the two Malaise-Era Mopars into one halfway functioning car. I made sure to make it look like a shitty job, too. What’s more American than that?
Subways. Just what are they, really? In public schools, we teach our children that they’re the same thing as trains, only underground. And that might be good enough for kids. Then those kids grow up, and take a subway of their own. Were they prepared for what lay ahead of them on that fateful first journey, the one that transformed them into a subway rider?
I’ve been living underground for the last twenty years. Ever since they built a couple apartments underneath this shopping mall, I haven’t had any urge to ascend the stairs and touch the scorching Daystar with my supple flesh. In the morning, the subway takes me to my job, which is in a data centre, several floors underground. At night, my silver suitor whisks me away to one of the finest restaurants populating the underground shopping district. It’s been a good life, until it wasn’t.
Some asshole managed to drive a Dodge Durango into one of the ground-level tunnels, slip past all the “DON’T FUCKING DRIVE HERE” signs, and ram head-on into a passing train, blocking the tunnel with the ensuing carnage. There was a lot of rumble about this among my fellow undergrounders. Was it a terrorist attack? Some kind of performance-art statement about how the automobile had supplanted trains? Or just a dude who was too drunk to notice he was scabbing for the railway? In any event, it isolated the Work Station from the Home Station. Just one hop. Two measly city blocks is all I’d have to cross before I could descend below again.
I waited until nightfall for the sun to descend, and then slipped above. It was horrible: the clanging, the flashing, the voices. So many voices. And so many not-trains. I nearly hyperventilated from panic, and had to focus on a passing city bus in order to regain some sense of normalcy. I was lucky that time, but I knew I’d have to quit my job. There was no way I could make it happen during the morning rush; I would just find a job going in the other direction. I liked that station better, anyway. Their trains didn’t smell as much like urine.
There is perhaps no human impulse more damaging than the urge to “make my money back.” Once you’ve lost some cash, the gloves come off. It’s time to stop messing around with that crooked megachurch preacher, street card hustler, or nine-year-old running the school casino roulette table. You can only lose so many times in a row before your number comes up, right?
Me, I would never gamble in such a way. I recognize the limitations of my mental state, and my undiagnosed impulse-control disorder. Besides, I don’t have any seed capital left, because of all these shitty Mopars clogging up my neighbourhood. I’ve accepted that fully half of these or more will get towed into the impound lot and eventually crushed before I will have a chance to turn them into Barrett-Jackson auction superstars (or at least vehicles capable of going to the liquor store.) That doesn’t mean I’ll stop rolling the dice, so to speak, on new projects.
To make matters worse, it’s not just a constant hole that I’m throwing my money down. Every so often I’ll pull up the rotted-out quarter panel of a Dart and find a couple hundred bucks of cash that the pot-dealer previous owner forgot in there. Or a 1980s cigarette carton that does numbers on eBay. Even though the windfall is relatively small, in these moments, I feel like I am finally vindicated for all of these massive losses. And then I pour that new money – plus a lot of old money, to keep it company – into yet another shitbox.
Is there a moral to this story? Yes: run a casino. Or a shipping company, because at least when I give them way too much money, I get something out of it in the end.
Human hair is the Achilles’ heel of virtually any precision system. You name it: dishwashers, sex androids, spacecraft. Anywhere a person is involved, we’re shedding a ton of hair from every part of our body directly into the workings of a meticulously-designed machine.
Generally, this is fine. Sure, once in awhile you’ll notice a fan getting clogged up with hair, or a lot of gross gunk building up in your washing machine’s filter (go clean it out if you haven’t) but it doesn’t really impede function until it gets too bad. And then there’s vacuum cleaners.
A vacuum cleaner’s entire job in life is to pick up hair and put it into a central tank for later disposal. It turns out that this is an impossible task: if you have long hair in your house, you’ll spend more time clipping chunks of hair out of the boiling-hot rollers of the vacuum cleaner than you will actually cleaning. The apologists will tell you to do something radical, like vacuum the floor more than once every three months, but now is not the time for drastic solutions. Now is the time for a grotesque application of horsepower.
Here at Switch Labs, we’ve determined that the problem with these vacuum cleaners is that their wimpy-ass little motors just don’t have the grunt to push through some measly hair. And that’s understandable, if you’re building to a budget, and also if your company is run by some kind of British asshole who looks like he does cocaine with Harry Potter in the planetarium at the science centre. I make it clear to my employees every day: I will not tolerate the words “enough power” under any means. I’ve fired like fifty of them.
Of course, this sort of revolutionary change doesn’t come easy. It turns out you can only put about six hundred horsepower through a jet turbine before the carpet tears. We had to step it way back with reduction gears, which means that it’s a little delicate to get the vacuum started in the morning. That’s where the starter cart comes in: we got these Buick V-8 powered babies from military surplus, real fuckin’ cheap. And we passed the savings on to us. Who says sucking is easy?
Truth be told, I was surprised they let me out of that box. They must have needed the shipping container I was living in for something else. It’s a good thing they did, too: three months at sea without access to a shower definitely made me stink, especially considering I forgot to pack anything in the trunk of my Volare except for (not enough) Cool Ranch Doritos.
The dockworkers were confused, and started shouting at each other in that confusion. I worked quickly to squirt enough fresh gas down the carb’s throat so that I could start the car before their bosses showed up. It worked, and I was soon ripping a 1978 Volare through the port of Kobe. Forklifts and angry stevedores became a blur as the car’s slant-six breathed its first sea-level air, angrily sputtering each time the decrepit automatic hunted for a new cog.
After I made good my escape from the logistics personnel, I decided I would look for a job. I drove for a couple more hours, confusing innocent motorists as my wheezing brown deathtrap would lumber menacingly in their rear view mirror before taking a dog’s age to pass them, and soon I had arrived. My shark of an attorney, Max, had a cousin who was an immigration attorney here in Japan. He’d be able to pull some levers and get me an interview with the crookedest goon the local government could put in an office, and after the customary introductory gift by me of a backseat full of POR15 (a rare commodity in this nation) he did.
“How do you write your last name?” the functionary asked in the slowest, most childish Japanese he could muster.
I had studied for this test, and had a pretty good answer. “Do you know the sound of a Cervo stretching its rods as it approaches redline on an off-camber downhill sweeper?”
“Your accent is weird as shit. Forgive me, where did you learn to speak Japanese?”
That one was easy. I was raised by a 1978 Mazda service-and-repair training video that had been nineteenth-generation copied to VHS. From there, I had learned all the essential curse words that a real technician would use here. I tried to explain this to the bureaucrat, but he smiled as soon as he heard the M-word.
He leaned back in his chair and tented his fingers in the unmistakeable pattern of a Reuleaux triangle. Man, did my shark of a lawyer, Matsushida, ever know how to pick ‘em.
Remote-controlled cars are one of those cost traps. You know the kind I’m talking about: something seems cheap at first, and then it becomes much more expensive. Like heroin, or collecting every issue of an unpopular comic book series. With “RC” cars (as the élite call them,) you can go down the rabbit hole of expense very quickly.
Let me give you an example. You can head to the toy store and buy a little truck for under fifty bucks. It will go forward, turn, and make a couple fun noises. If you really push it, you’ll probably end up breaking the truck, or at least finding out what it’s bad at. Then, if you don’t want to be bested by a chunk of rock in your backyard that’s annoyingly tall, you’re stuck buying a different, more capable, toy store truck.
Another option – and the path to madness – is that you buy an “enthusiast’s” remote-controlled truck. This costs a little more than the toy-store stuff, but you justify it to yourself by saying you can repair and modify it, so you don’t have to go back to the store and buy a whole new chassis every time you encounter a new kind of drain spout in the wild. The parts are common, and fairly inexpensive in single quantities. This, as you might imagine, is where the trap is sprung. Because as soon as you start tinkering with shit, that’s when you notice the nuance of that shit. Suddenly, a $17.99 reduction gear seems entirely reasonable compared to an $8 one. Less backlash, you explain to your horrified spouse.
So don’t get hooked on the toy truck stuff. Buy a real truck instead. At least then when you get on the credit card company’s Christmas-card list, it’s for a tangible asset. It’s really hard to sleep inside a scale model of a car when the bank takes your house.
Today’s completely unmaintainable vehicles are meant to be disposable. That’s just a fact. That said, anyone who has worked on cars before will tell you that “disposable” is only a state of mind. Take me, for instance. I drive around in cars which automotive journalists refer to as “wretched,” “corrosion-prone,” and “a deep red mark on the tally of humanity’s collective achievements.” And still, decades after the fact, they are being maintained.
There’s a few strategies to keep these shitty cars on the road, often long after the automakers that birthed them have left this plane of existence. In the interest of public service, I’m going to share some of them with today’s owners of future orphaned vehicles.
First, and most obviously: look for other places the same parts were used. Today’s automakers don’t have the budget to develop, say, a whole ABS braking computer from scratch. They buy that shit from some German company that makes dishwashers, napalm, and anti-lock braking systems. Chances are another model of car used the same one. Will the calibration be the same? No, but ABS is a fad anyway. Pumping those brakes when they lock up at a gnat’s fart on ice will give you a serious calf workout, and don’t think your significant other won’t appreciate that.
Second, don’t be afraid to make your own parts. It may surprise you to hear this, but everything around you, no matter how infinitely complex, was made by human beings. Are those human beings smarter or more capable than you? The theory behind democratic government says no. Is that theory correct? Ask the 1979 LeMans I’m driving that has three-tenths of a straight-six from a Nissan Skyline grafted onto its transmission with increasingly harrowing plywood adapters.
Last, a vintage car that is parked is still incredibly valuable. Take a look at Barrett-Jackson. There, super-rich idiots will try to kill each other in order to pay several million dollars for a well-painted pickup truck. Will you still be able to buy paint in the future? It stands to reason: yes, even if we have to make it out of ground-up beetles again. What about Bondo? Maybe not, so start hoarding that shit. Any experience in bodywork and rust removal you can gain now, when resources are relatively rich, will pay off later in the Northern Salted Wastezone.
I hope that you learned something today about how to keep your soon-to-be-orphaned commuter car operating for decades to come. Don’t forget to write your phone number down on the sheet at the front, so you can join our group chat, where we alert one another if a Daewoo shows up at the junkyard again.
Drag racing might seem like, well, a drag, but it’s anything but. Society’s greatest art has been made from the tightest of restrictions. People think that it’s all about pointing the car in the right direction and mashing the gas until you win, but there’s finesse at every step.
Go take a break and watch some drag racing videos. If your boss comes, tell ‘em you quit. Yeah, that’ll show them. Eat shit, capitalist. What you’re noticing in each and every one of those videos is how hard it is to keep a car with a bajillion horsepower under control. Whether it’s rear-, front-, or all-wheel-drive, as soon as you inject more grunt into the car than the tires and road can handle, the excess is gonna do something crazy. So that’s point one: keeping the damn thing pointed down the road.
And then there’s the second point: throttle control. You don’t want to squeal your tires uselessly when the light pops. Nor do you want to leave the line too slowly, and give up valuable microseconds of reaction time. Getting the gas pressed precisely is all about understanding your available traction, the weather conditions, the state of your tires, the power delivery of your vehicle, and doing a good burnout.
So yes, I have just described “pointing the car in the right direction and mashing the gas until you win.” Rest assured that those two things will keep you busy for hours, unless you’re me. In that case, you get knocked out of the tournament bracket for the night immediately and get to spend the rest of the evening sitting in the parking lot, talking shit about fast cars with your fellow two-digit-horsepower losers. And some of those folks have spare parts you can have.
The advent of autonomous cars has been great for those of us who really like to drive. No, it’s not because traffic has become optimized, or even that folks who don’t like to drive are getting in our way less often. In fact, both of those things are much worse now that we replaced human beings with glorified Mario Kart AIs. What’s great is the diffusion of legal culpability.
Think for a minute, and maybe just limit it to that minute if you’re not trying to make a career out of legal philosophy. If a self-driving car runs over a person, whose fault is it? Our court system is not actually designed to answer this question, and the cognitive dissonance that will result causes juries to actually blame the person nine times out of ten. It’s been proven.
After all, holding the self-driving car companies responsible for the self-driving car would probably invite a whole lecture about how it’s made. If that happened, there might be some uncomfortable discoveries about this technology that holds up the foundations of our civilization. And then we’d have to do something about it. Much easier to blame the dude who should have been paying more attention while he was walking on the sidewalk or visiting a public park. Probably on his phone.
Again, though, I drive my own car. I’m still responsible, right? Here’s the secret. Cops do not actually understand which cars are autonomous. Whenever I get pulled over now, I roll down the window and scream to the the cops, “Look out! It’s got a mind of its own!” and then peel the fuck out. As long as I make my movements look convincingly robotic until I’ve gotten well away from them, the cops won’t even bother pursuing. Who are they gonna write a ticket to, the old Sega Genesis I have bolted to the dashboard with a Dymo label saying “CAR BRAIN?”
Every kind of car has something to recommend it. The cheapest shitboxes are often hiding a little bit of their manufacturer’s charm underneath their appliance exterior. Unreliable European cars offer a galaxy of delightful engineering mistakes and cost reductions to uncover, like a game of Minesweeper using your wallet. And exotic superfast cars give you a chance to go back and stick it in your old bosses’ faces that you turned out to be a success after all. Unless they have a nicer car, in which case I guess just stay home.
This is part of the reason why I could never cut it in new car sales. You might think that the average car salesman is just there to pump up their own make of car. That would require an intimate knowledge of the product being sold, which is inefficient, and customers aren’t really looking for that anyway. What customers want is bloodsport, and maybe some lies. Is the Subaru Ascent’s cupholder really made out of a rare conflict mineral that directly contributes to the sum total of global human suffering? If I say yes, will you buy this Nissan… car?
Rather than engage in this sort of campaign, I would harangue customers for hours, sometimes inviting them into the meeting room in order to perform a differential analysis of the problem space using a whiteboard. Often, if they were too polite to simply leave, I could trap them there for hours. One terrified and hungry couple agreed to buy a car to make me shut the fuck up, only to find out that I did not actually shut the fuck up. That was my one sale.
So go out and try a car that you wouldn’t ordinarily try today. You’ll probably find something to like about it. And then you’ll buy one. With two cars, you’ll be happy for a little bit, but then you’ll realize: if I found something I liked with both of these cars, what have I been missing with all the rest? Then we’ll be in the same room at the insane asylum and we can talk about Ford Ranger rear-end ratios until Dr. Brookings comes back with a clinically-inadvised dose of Haldol.
Diagnosis is a lost art these days. When you consider the expense of labour and the complexity of most systems, it’s easier to just order a new part and jam it in. What happens, I ask, when you can’t order that new part? Well, usually the rest of it ends up in a junkyard, and is picked over by folks who are also looking for that exact same part.
Me, I prefer a different path. Complicated shit breaks all the time in my life. When you own as many wobbly, near-death shitboxes as I do, pure statistics dictates that at least one of them is going to be down for the count at any given time. What statistics doesn’t count on is the fact that I’ve secured a shitload of spare parts.
Now, I don’t own all the same kind of car. That would be boring, like deciding on a kind of wine that you like when you are six years old and drinking it exclusively, until the French government has you killed. And parts are often not interchangeable, especially sophisticated electronic bits. At least that’s what The Man wants you to think.
So yes, I’ll accept your “Dr. Frankenstein” slur. Frankenstein was building his so-called monsters out of all one model of animal, though, and didn’t have to explain shit to the guy at the parts desk. Look, Bob, I know it sounds weird, but I absolutely do need a thermostat for a 1993 Ford F-350 in order to get my 1979 Buick Century to have working heat again.
Yeah, it’s the one out front with the 8000-rpm Honda race engine ratchet-strapped into the engine bay. Well, Bob, I would have installed it “safely,” but you idiots at Ford don’t make a special motor mount to adapt between three different kinds of cars you never sold. Actually, do you have any loaner models in the service department? I need to take some measurements.
Every single day of my life has been one more day that I haven’t been able to drive a Plymouth Scamp. I can remember clearly the day in childhood when I first discovered that the Scamp existed. It was stuck in the corner of a Denny’s of ill repute, moss growing over its fluorescent orange hood.
Despite being a relatively new car at the time, the pewter logo badging on the back was choked with corrosion. Still, it was beautiful, and the image of reading “Scamp” with some just-learning-to-read eyes as the sun set will stick with me forever. The next time we went to that Denny’s, it was gone. And all of the Scamps were gone with it.
Sure, they didn’t entirely disappear, but as a kid I never saw one again. Also as a young adult. And an adult adult. Eventually, I began to give up on the dream. I no longer had to own one, I just had to drive one. Classifieds were pored over, sketchy rural phone numbers dialled, and all to no effect. That’s why I decided I would make my own Scamp.
As you may be aware, I have a large collection of its successor, the Volare. Despite what the adults in your life may tell you, the Volare is actually a far superior automobile in multiple ways that I cannot describe to you right now because I am very busy, okay? Anyway, if you paint it just right, and squint, you can put an extra “1” in front of the price of a Volare just by putting the badge on the back. In honour of that first one, I wrote the “Scamp” logo into the trunk lid in instantly-going-to-corrode stick weld.
Did I ever drive my fake Scamp? No. As soon as I put the finishing touches on it, a guy from Barrett-Jackson burst into my garage and gave me half a million dollars for it. I’d make another, but the landlord is really grumpy that my buyer trampled all the flowers on the front lawn. Also, I’m busy trying to shop for submarines now.
Long-distance trucking has long held a romantic quality in the fables of American literature. And why not? The ideal hero in all fiction is the transient. Some dude shows up, solves a small town’s problems, and leaves them wanting more. It’s easy to convince yourself that maybe if you could just get out of your squalid 2br apartment and instead into a 4-meter-square truck cabin for several days non-stop, you could change your life for the better.
This is the part where I admit that I’ve never considered doing it. Sure, I like driving, and I’ve driven for ridiculously long periods of time on much crappier stimulants than your average truck driver has access to. The difference is that I like driving for myself. When it’s hauling a transmission down from the bowels of the universe back to civilization? Sure, I’ll drive nonstop for about 40, 50 hours. Kay Bee Toys got in a new order of Kitschimals? Can’t do it, boss.
It’s important that you not take this position as some sort of inherent anti-capitalist sentiment. Such a position is only arrived at accidentally; the core motivator here is simply self-interest. And by that, I mean that I am only interested in myself. Simple math proves it out: if I spend 100 hours a week delivering frozen seafood, then that leaves less time for me to go pick up a shipping container full of shattered two-stroke lawn implement engines from a guy up north before the roads thaw out all the way.
Another reason is that long-distance trucks, being work vehicles, are ludicrously expensive to own and operate. You need to buy a bunch of larger tools, for one thing, and the trucks drink fuel like a diesel version of Kobayashi. Even the nostalgic 1970s GMC cracker-boxes are busy being picked up by well-heeled collectors. And forget about modern pickup trucks, which out-tow those half-century-old industrial tractors: they’re even more expensive, and the guy at the dealership keeps trying to tell me about all the self-driving features rather than cut me a ninety-percent-off “industry discount.”
So I’ll keep doing my runs in increasingly worn-out family sedans from the Carter administration. Besides, I don’t think anything I’d own would pass a commercial vehicle inspection checkpoint. Not enough meth in the glovebox.
I used to work with this guy who had a Jaguar sedan. It was a ‘90 Vanden Plas XJ6. Pretty nice ride, and it worked more than the internet hate squad is willing to admit. Of course, when it did stop working, the local British specialist got a new boat out of the deal. Eventually, the local British specialist had a fuel-system failure of his own, and left the shop to his son, who immediately turned it into a detailer.
This, of course, left the Jaguar-owning community without a trustworthy mechanic, and the cars started to drop like flies. I would go to the local you-pick-it junkyard and walk by row after row of immaculately-preserved, waxed-with-a-cloth-diaper Jags that didn’t get the intervention they needed in time. Because no freak stood in the way, these poor cars got pushed in the general direction of the crusher in exchange for about $70 and bus fare home.
Here is where the tragedy is in this little story: I would happily have paid $71 for a new project car. Even if it was a Jag with a faulty electrical system, glitchy cooling, and Mord-knows-what wrong with the steering box. The sellers, though, were not willing to take less than four grand for their beloved hot rod, a price which nobody would ever be dumb enough to pay. This gap was large enough that eventually all these cars were turned into new Coke cans out of pure frustration.
That’s why I’ve founded a new, independent, valuation authority. We’ll come and audit your car that isn’t selling well on Craigslist, and tell you to just sell it for “whatever you can get.” You get the money, the buyer gets a new project car, and we get a 25% cut (non-negotiable.) Most importantly, we help keep these cars that the seller is supposedly enthusiastic about on the road. Will the world be a better place with a 1986 12-cylinder Sovereign barrelling down it, even if the massive V12 has long since been ejected for a V8 they pulled out of a GMC Sierra involved in a fatality rollover before the cops got there? We think so. Call us today.
There’s one tool that I’ve always wanted, but just not been able to justify. Actually, that’s a huge lie. The world is stuffed full of obscenely expensive tools that I would love to add to my collection, if only I were some sort of independently wealthy druglord of a cocaine empire. And then I’d probably have no time to play with the tools, because I’d be too busy killing informants or something.
Where was I? Oh yes. That tool is a laser cutter. Ordinary folks don’t understand just how often I have to make brackets. Think about it: if I add even something as simple as an underhood light, it needs a bracket. And chances are whatever I want to see with that underhood light – for instance, the intake manifold gasket I just ventilated with a bull elephant’s worth of boost – could also be made out of a piece of steel or cork that was cut to precision tolerances by an immortal, perfect machine.
And it’s not just useful for the car. I’m sure I’d find all kinds of uses for it around the house. Why drive to the store to get a new lightswitch cover, when I can just spend several hours jigging up some acrylic stock and tweaking the parameters of a CAD file in order to cut one? Hell, I could make it out of titanium if I wanted.
Of course, the trap here is that a tool like a laser cutter is so complicated that it effectively becomes another project instantly. I can just see myself tweaking gantry drive belts, power supplies, and laser diodes to make sure I get the ultimate in cutting satisfaction. And eventually one very dark day will come, where I have to use a bigger laser cutter to make a part for a laser cutter… which will mandate the purchase of a bigger laser cutter. Then I’ll have two, and eventually the entire contents of my house and neighbourhood worth of scrap metal will have been turned into what is best described as “abstract art.”
No, better to just work with my old buddy, rusty tin-snips. He’ll never let me down, and while my brackets may look like a drunk driver did them, I think it lends that folksy charm that you wouldn’t get from a robotic tool. Maybe if I still got a laser cutter, but also loosened a couple of the bolts…
A lot of folks think that all I do all day is drive Malaise Era Mopar pseudosteel from place to place, leaving flakes of my cars behind as I do like a modern day Johnny Appleseed. This is not entirely true. Sometimes I like to drive a van or two, and for my money the finest vans are made by the Japanese.
Here’s why: in Japan, the roads are tiny, so they make their vans tiny. If you have seven kids and need a way to put them all in the same vehicle, the Japanese automobile industry recommends taking the fucking train. This means that the vans are more car-like, and they have accurate if slow steering that can easily place the box-shaped object into the largely box-accepting megaurban landscape.
In North America, where I live until my extradition paperwork completes, the roads are fucking massive. This is to accommodate people owning and operating SUVs that are roughly the size of a 1980s school bus. This means that I can store way more Japanese vans per square inch of parking space, and they are in less demand by the grande bourgeoisie. The only downside of all this is that I do have to register and insure each van, unless I were to distract the FedEx guy every time he comes by, and steal the paperwork out of his glovebox when he’s not looking.
Normally, this would only work once or twice, and then the driver would cotton onto it. Luckily for me, they had some sort of labour dispute recently and they keep sending me new scabs. Half of them are driving unmarked rentals, so as to avoid wholly-justified reprisals, and rental agencies have fantastic insurance. So if anyone asks, I didn’t just ding your doors in a van the size of a phone booth. It’s not only less embarrassing but less legally traumatic for you to write down “giant Dodge Sprinter” on the accident report. Besides, it’s not like the cops know what a Toyota Voxy is anyway.
Every day, there are problems created by going too fast. Choking on food while rushing through your dinner. Modern computers that make old videogames unplayable. Carnal relations that end in disappointment. One place you can never go too fast, though: in a car.
Now, I know what you’re going to say: speed limits exist for a reason, right? Well, maybe. Have you ever met someone who decides the speed limits? Seen a job ad for that position? What I’m thinking here, and you can stop me at any moment, is that speed limits are decided by hyperintelligent robots that want you to not speed.
Why, though? The obvious answer is that robots have a natural empathy for clutch packs. They simply don’t want their friction-inducing friends to get torched as you pull Autobahn-worrying speeds on your way to the 7-11 to get the new tray of taquitos fresh out of the fryer. And that is true; everyone knows this, it is taught in elementary schools. Me? I think it goes deeper.
Nowadays, we see all these walking robots. Asimo. The scary dog thing. That dude who does a backflip. C-3PO. And what you never see any of them doing is crossing the road. This is because these little fuckers can barely amble at toddler speed. Without being able to run away, they can’t get out of the way of, say, a Camaro barreling through a playground zone. Another disturbing handout from our governments to the hyper-intelligent robots that rule them.
There’s nothing quite like opening a consumer product and modifying it to suit your own evil purposes. Those dupes at the organization which originally developed it had no idea you were coming. Otherwise they would have tried harder than gluing it together, using fragile little plastic clips, and inventing their own special kind of screw to keep you out.
Me, I love the feeling of turning something that is useful for one purpose into something that is useless for its original purpose and kind of unsuited to a second. That sensation of pride in my cleverness will ride until I’ve completed throwing the thing into my closet, where I will then forget about it until the moon implodes. I don’t have time to refine my hack; there’s some other shit that needs to be turned into some other, other shit on my desk.
You may wish to have a more concrete example. Very well. Last week, my neighbour threw out a perfectly good ride-on lawnmower. This was likely due to the state of it, in which it was neither rideable nor a lawnmower. I think he hit a rock or something, bent the whole gearbox, just an absolute motherfucker of a humdinger of a wreck. That didn’t stop me from turning it into a shitty go-kart (the gearing on a tractor is pretty slow.) My goal was to use it to enter into one of the local scooter derbies, but then I got distracted by a neighbour throwing out a perfectly good garage door opener.
I don’t feel particularly bad about never making these projects any good. The important thing is that they’re re-used, which is better than recycling them. At least with me, they got a few more weeks or months of life before having the social worker shovel them into the pile with the rest of the garbage littering my garage floor. And hey, maybe someone else will find them there and take it a little step further, create something really good. Then I can take credit for the whole thing.
While it’s nice that winter is ending, I will miss driving my hovercraft. What? You don’t have one? Boy, are you ever missing out. Enjoy your road-salty paintwork, expensive tire replacements, and that’s not even to mention the wheel bearing jobs.
For those of you unaware, a hovercraft is Latin for “a craft that hovers.” They used to only be popular with militaries and folks that lived in extremely nasty climates, but after those people give up on them, they don’t just disappear. If you have the scratch and know where to look, you too can get a low-mileage hovercraft of your very own.
Yeah, while I may not be able to quickly stop or turn, winter-driving a hovercraft is the best of all possible worlds. If the cops are after you for a minor traffic offence, you can just swerve off of the highway and drive through another public park. They can’t follow you, because they’re stuck with tires and will have to slow down for things like steep hills and playgrounds. Ice? Doesn’t matter. Hell, you don’t even have to worry too much about liquid water, as long as you get a bit of momentum built up.
Yes, everyone should be driving around in hovercrafts during the winter months. There are, of course, some downsides – the deafening roar of the fans, the fact that it takes fifteen minutes to build up enough of a cushion to pull out of my driveway, the constant purchasing of inflatable-pool puncture kits – but overall, it’s the way to go.
Look, I’m going to level with you here. Eat more pickles. If you think you don’t like them, try a different variety, and another, and another, until you find one that you like. Fermented food is basically what made humanity possible, and that’s why my fridge doesn’t contain anything but jar after jar of pickles.
Sure, a lot of doctors are extremely worried about the health consequences of doing this. That doesn’t bother me: I’m not a doctor. It’s not so much that I am unafraid of dying horribly from disease. In fact, my doctor tells me that I might have been exposed to more hantavirus than any other human being in recorded history, so something is going right there. Hint: it’s the pickles.
He wanted to take me to a medical conference in order to show me off to the other doctors during the “side show” segment. Upon further negotiation, it was revealed that he refused to let me drive, and instead tried to force me onto this weird flying car known as an “airplane” that they paid some other asshole to operate. Nothing doing, buddy, I told him as I jabbed my hand into a half-gallon jar of turbid brine in the hopes of finding that one last preserved onion.
So nothing much came of that. And I guess that’s okay. The craft services at those conferences always suck. At best, they’re going to give you some super-thinly-sliced, limp-ass dill pickles on your sandwich. It’s like they don’t find the profitability in hiring a guy to meticulously shave pieces of eggplant and then crush out all of their liquid over several days in a tsukemono press. And if they don’t want to do such a simple task, you shouldn’t really be giving them your money. Instead, give me your money, so I can buy more pickles.
It’s kind of worrying how fast stores became society’s favourite places to hang out. Even malls are less of “a place” so much as they are a store of stores, to offer something for everyone so large groups of consumers have less of a need to break up and possibly go home. Remember malls? Of course you don’t. The grinding maw of relentless capitalist improvement devoured them a couple years ago, maybe even before you were born.
There still are malls, though, just that nobody I know goes to them. For instance, there’s one near my house that used to have a pancake restaurant until it went tits up. Now, the whole mall has been closed down for months, so they can film a movie there. What happened to the people who worked there? On the plus side, the Hollywood types are much less angry about me doing an oil change in the parking lot than the old security guards used to be.
When you get down to it, I think what I’m missing most is the food court. Some fancy malls had dozens of little restaurants, all serving forgettable fast food that you had to wait for a surprisingly long time for. You used to be able to get food poisoning in all kinds of different ways in one convenient spot. Sometimes, as a teenager, we’d go visit the other teenagers who were working there and see if we could score some free food. The movie-folks’ craft table is a lot better, but something has been lost in translation.
Hold on a second, they seem to have mistaken my car and clothes for an actor in the post-apocalyptic scenes. They want me to do a bad-ass stunt. Jump the fountain? Boy, did you ever luck out today.
It’s really difficult these days to get ahead. And this is absolutely by design. While you’re sitting in traffic like a sucker, the cosmopolitan elite are flying around in helicopters, being whisked from business meeting to cocktail mixer to tearful apology for what happened at the business meeting and cocktail mixer. After the third straight commute in which the “traffic” helicopter buzzed directly over the sea of cars stuck behind one car that had lost a wheel, I decided to do something about it.
No, not a surface-to-air missile. There’s two reasons why not: one, they cost a lot of money. And two, buying one puts you on a lot of watchlists, even if you do so on eBay while wearing a fake mustache. The only way to fight this abomination was to make sure that for one glorious day, there would be no accidents, breakdowns, or commuter snarls to report on. As always, I turned to my squadron of deadbeats, illegitimate mothers, alcoholics, and car perverts to do what society refused to do.
The first step was to get ahold of the hardware we’d need. An easy score: tow truck companies don’t spend a lot of time protecting their tow trucks from being towed away by other tow trucks. It’s the perfect crime: everyone working security at the tow company parking lot is expecting tow trucks to be there, so as soon as you get one truck you can keep coming back and taking them away. Then, we placed the tow trucks periodically along the highway, and took care of accidents immediately as soon as they happen. No doubt there was some grift and theft involved, but that’s what happens when you pop a tire on a luxury car with a perfectly good-looking engine in it and don’t call the phone number on the side of the door to see if the chick with torque-spec tables for tattoos is an actual driver of theirs.
Now, traffic was flowing smoothly. Too smoothly, in fact. Soon, my old nemesis, the Channel 6 news helicopter, appeared over the road. It hovered there for an hour or so, until the reporter passed out from boredom and fell out of the open door of the ‘copter, directly into traffic. We had neglected to bring a pressure washer with us, and people swerving around the impact site kept slowing things down. You win again, helicopters, but we’ll be back.
I’d been putting off going to the dentist for too long. Now, it’s not that I’m afraid of good dental health. I love to watch any kind of specialist do their jobs. There’s always something to learn. And you can’t deny the joys of checking out all of their little power tools. It’s just a very expensive endeavour, but I recently figured out a way to make it a little bit cheaper. Let me clue you in a little bit.
See, when you have a cavity, you can ask the doc for nitrous oxide. For the pain or something, I guess. Medical-grade nitrous oxide. The stuff they sell over the counter at the parts shop has a bitterant mixed in it, so you don’t buy a bunch and then sit in your squalid 1-bedroom apartment huffing it all day. As if you couldn’t find actual drugs cheaper than twenty-five bucks a litre. Naturally, the dentist has no such compunction, but they do have a budget.
And that’s where the little power tools come in. I figured out where they buy their little mouth vacuums from, and I bought one of my own. If you fish the nozzle up through the collar of your shirt and into the mask, you can scavenge a good litre or two of the stuff, and they won’t charge you any more money. This is what my brothers in white collar prison would call a “market inefficiency” and “arbitrage opportunity.” Your dentist is gonna be too busy to notice that an extra mouth-vacuum has joined the choir, and just chalk it up to a very busy day when he has to refill the laughing-gas tank a little early.
Of course, there is the problem of convincing them that you have a cavity. And, like any other good scam, it requires a greedy victim to pull off. If you find a desperate enough dentist – say, some asshole has been coming in under fake names and stealing all of his nitrous oxide – they’ll start work as soon as you tell them you have a toothache. The weight reduction in my mouth is probably even better for my quarter-mile times than all the free giggle gas has been. Thanks, malpractice!
Racing shoes seem like an extravagant and stupid purchase to make, but they’re not. Allow me to explain. You may be familiar with Ayrton Senna, considered by many to be the second coming of Christ, but who is probably just the finest racing driver that will ever occur in human history.
There’s a good video of him caning the living shit out of a Honda, but he’s not even trying that hard. One of the dudes who gave him the car set up a camera in the footwell – possibly for fetish video purposes – and it’s a good thing he did. Because what this reveals is that Senna wore regular-ass old loafers. No Pilotis, no Porsche-branded Pumas, not even a fireproof Simpson.
And that’s all well and good for him. When you’re just out for a Sunday drive that accidentally sets the track and manufacturer’s hot-lap record, you need something comfortable. Those dad-style loafers are just the thing for a busy afternoon of standing around in the pits, signing autographs and jawing with foreign journalists who want to know what it’s like to get into any arbitrary car and effortlessly accelerate it to a significant portion of c.
For the rest of us, and I am now talking about myself, we need all the help we can get. Shaving off a couple critical grams of sole, being able to feel the pedal more accurately: these are the sort of things I can easily delude myself into thinking make me into a faster driver. Rather than doing boring stuff like “looking ahead more” or “using both hands to steer” or “remembering the course layout,” I can instead spend some money on expensive novelty shoes that will make my feet hurt if I forget to take them off before the lunch run.
And if you’re still in doubt, try taking a look at one of Senna’s actual races. There’s no upskirt camera in those footwells (not enough room) but you can rest assured he’s wearing something fancy and fireproof. After all, with Formula 1 budgets, there’s no excuse not to.
The modern supply chain is nothing short of amazing. Even when it’s badly wounded by a confluence of unprecedented multinational disasters, it is still possible to buy a throw pillow for four dollars and have it show up at your home a month later. Countries that you can’t find on a map can precision-target your every desire, and satisfy it at a shockingly cheap price.
Of course, like any complex system, your experience with it is not the whole story. A whole army of underpaid, overworked folks are involved at every leg of the distant journey. It’s worth pausing to think about how many people have been involved in moving the box containing your cactus-shaped custom sombrero. Sure, you’ll get to know the name of the UPS guy.
Eventually, capitalism explains to us, all of these people will be replaced by robots. It’s more efficient. Robots won’t complain, or unionize, or develop lower back pain from shifting thirty-kilogram crates of pseudosentient sex toys. However, who’s gonna ship the first orders of robots? I bet those things will be expensive, and someone will need to take accountability for the ones that get dropped on their heads and end up trying to throw power drill batteries through the roof of the warehouse hard enough to reach the Kuiper Belt.
Me, I get most of my parts from other parts, these days. Sourcing solely from the local junkyard is not just more environmentally friendly, but the shipping is a lot quicker. It’s hard to explain to my boss that I need the next two months off so I can wait for an artisan in Taiwan to custom-fabricate a replacement upright or a car that’s been out of production since 1980. Much better to just show up to the office with half of a Trailblazer grafted to the front end, and remind him what kind of nut he’s dealing with. The human element is irreplaceable.
Through some kind of miracle, you’ve been granted a running and driving car this morning when you turned the key. Think about all the things that had to go right in order for this to happen. Inventions that were once world-changing, like the battery, are now so refined as to not be part of your conscious thought as a two-ton chunk of metal powered by controlled explosions capable of going faster than any creature on Earth is harnessed at your every whim.
Then there’s the days where things break and the illusion is shattered. If you don’t understand the true innermost nature of every component – and often even if you do – it can seem puzzling as to why the universe has decided to vex you in particular with a non-running car. You’ll ask a mechanically-aligned friend for advice on what to do, and that advice is so cryptic as to be useless.
You know in your heart that the car is built out of parts, whose purpose and correct function can be determined through repeated application of the scientific method. This ground truth does not help you get to work, and even if you were to figure it out before your boss notices you’re not in your desk at the agreed-upon core working hours, chances are you’d be helpless to actually make the service required. As such, the assistance of a professional is required, and you ride the bus for a few days.
Not to worry. Here at the Seat Safety Swinstitute for Dirtbag Engineering, every student of our car-having classes are guaranteed to know the exact minimum number of parts required to make a functional car. You’ll learn jerry-rigging wiring, siphoning gas from the neighbours, popping the clutch to do a hill-start without a battery, and many more. Particularly bright students may wish to move on to our graduate class, where they’ll help our esteemed minds (tenure is available) develop new and exciting methods to get to work without having what the government will call “a working automobile.” Grappling hook to latch onto passing trucks, you say? Now that’s a good idea. We need lots more of those.
Next winter, take a stroll through your neighbourhood. You’ll probably find a lot of cars with nobody in them, warming up. This is because human beings don’t like to be inside a cold car driving to work, and so they’d rather let the thing idle out in their driveway until it’s warm enough for comfort. Of course, as anyone knows, this leads to over-rich fuel conditions, which result in washing oil off the cylinder walls, and eventually bore scoring, oil burning and compression loss.
There are solutions, of course. One is that you can just get into your car and drive it like it was meant to be driven. Two is legislative overreach, but the voters decided in the last municipal election that they didn’t like a “legalize auto theft” candidate like myself. Too progressive, I guess, for these starched-shirt squares. My new solution is, of course, external heaters.
You can buy these cabin heaters for tractors, big trucks, and other vehicles from legitimate dealers. They plug into your fuel system, and burn a little bit of gas throughout the night to keep the cabin and engine warm. That sounds amazing, honestly, but they also cost money, and they’re not popular enough to crop up in the junkyard. As a result, I’ve been forced to devise my own forced-air heat system for the cabin. I think you’ll be pleased at how it saves both energy and money at the same time.
Most people don’t know this, but gasoline engines are only like forty percent efficient. The majority of the fuel you burn gets shit out right into the exhaust, and that exhaust is super hot as well. That’s wasted energy, and all because people are afraid of a little exhaust poisoning. My solution? After years of winter driving, the floors in my car have big enough holes to let the hot exhaust gases come and go as they please. And the muffler definitely has a big enough hole to provide it. Sure, if you sit in the back seat, you might get a little light-headed, but that’s why there’s one working window back there. Just remember which one it is before you become too sleepy to do something about it.
You might never have seen a Pontiac J2000. In fact, I’d reckon most people alive today haven’t. You don’t even have to be very young to have missed it the first time around. Five or six years past the initial year, their corpses were already clogging up junkyards. It wasn’t because the cars were bad, or at least not any worse than General Motors’ other fine products. Back then, folks just didn’t think that a 90-horsepower mustard-coloured family car that rusts like a sacrificial anode would become a collectible item. And they were right.
Even though I like to think I’ve seen and done it all, I am still very surprised when some ancient time-machine artifact like an original ‘82 J2000 pops up in my town. It looks so out of place, a relic that was inexplicably preserved for forty years, like opening a fridge at the dump and finding peanut butter jars from the Vietnam War. I went back a few times that day, just to make sure I had actually seen it. I would have taken a picture, but my phone was so full of pictures of domestic cars that it was no longer willing to operate until I took at least one picture of a mid-00s Toyota RAV4 to recalibrate its thought-matrix.
It’s gone now, because you can’t park something like that outside. No, not because of thieves (they don’t want it,) or the salt. The reason you can’t, is because the universe will see it. And the universe hates it when it “missed one.” Ever seen that movie, Last of the Mohicans? It’s about a car called the Ford Mohican and the little boy who tries to save it from being scrapped. What do you mean, it’s based on a book? Like a Haynes manual? No, I haven’t seen it. Stop interrupting, we’re trying to talk about Pontiacs here.
I’ve gone back every day since, in the hope that I was simply wrong. This car must have been raptured up into wherever those cars go. Maybe it’s in Jay Leno’s secret harem of domestic shitboxes. Perhaps it’s in a special, more exclusive junkyard than the one I go to, for moneyed elites who wear pants and respect the rules against carrying in plasma cutters.
Before I die, though, I’ve got to know where they all went. That’s where my new plan comes in. I’ve purchased a 2005 Saturn Astra, an exotic future-car, and stuffed it into the parking garage of the apartment building near me. If it stays indoors until 2045, then I’ll be able to park it on the street and see where it goes. Maybe I’ll go with it, although I have the feeling I wouldn’t enjoy front-wheel-drive Chevy heaven. I already feel like I’m spending all of eternity trying to make a ropey shifter feel like it’s still attached to the gearbox.
When you’re really into the car hobby, the thing you will covet most is a good solvent. I’ve got a whole garage full of them, probably more than the local fire department would be comfortable with. Why? Cars are filthy, and they travel around in a filthy place known as “outside.” If you’ve got some magic foamy spray that can blow out the electrical connector on a headlight well enough that you can actually separate it, it could save you hours of swearing and finger pain.
Now, it is true that a lot of these solvents are not environmentally “safe.” It would be reckless to use them without proper training, or protective equipment. Not to worry. I like to think of myself as prudent in these endeavours. For instance, I sometimes put a piece of cardboard under the car to catch the excess as it drips out of the engine bay.
That’s not just because some of the really good shit will eat a hole in the garage floor and thus my damage deposit. It also scares the postal service a little bit to send it to me, but it’s an easy fix there too – simply don’t drop it, or set any other boxes on top of it, or expose it to water, or put it directly next to anything that’s vibrating, like the inside of a delivery truck. Also I wouldn’t put it on an airplane if I were you.
So the next time you’re at the local auto parts store, wondering what kind of cleaning solution would be best for your upcoming unpleasant task, tell them to cram it with walnuts. Head on over to the post office and ask them what shipments of mine they’ve seized lately. I’d do it myself, but for some reason I can’t grow facial hair as a disguise anymore.
Delivery drivers have it made. They get to drive all day, visiting exciting new areas of the city and giving relieved people the packages they so desperately expect. And they don’t even rack up miles on their own cars, but instead a cool van. What’s not to love about the job?
I’ll tell you: transmission wear. Although it’s not your van, your coworkers are still starting-and-stopping these things a couple times inside a single block. That’s hard on every part of the transmission and engine. When you pick up a van at the start of the day, it might be a flaring, mis-shifting nightmare, and you’ll have a rotten experience even on the little mountain canyons where you hunt down food delivery kids in their dad’s Corollas.
The problem, obviously, is stopping. Although it’s supposedly more time-efficient to go short distances between houses, all in the same neighbourhood, it’s hell on the gearbox. Cars want to run, and be free, and our new model will make sure that they do. Here’s how we do it: deliveries are sorted by “most inconvenient.” Drivers will be asked to go across town over and over and over. They’ll see exciting new parts of the city they’d never seen before. The transmission and cooling system will get adequate flow and an easier duty cycle. Maybe fewer pedestrians will get run over in a playground zone.
In fact, the only downside is that the vans will not be able to deliver as many packages in a day. That’s okay: we can save a lot of fuel if we make them smaller, some kind of moped perhaps, and then sell the surplus, high-mile but low-load mopeds to me for a huge discount on the backend. Yeah, that’ll work out just great.
Honking has become passé in our society in recent years. While other, more ambitious civilizations still enjoy a good mash of the steering wheel, we’ve grown apart from it. Too boisterous, we say, and not specific enough. Are you honking because you love boobies, or honking because you hate freedom?
On a recent trip to the tiny island nation of Japan, I discovered the solution. There, honking unnecessarily is considered extremely rude and may in fact be legally actionable (I attempted to drunkenly ask a cop, but instead received a polite handshake and an escort back to my hotel.) So how is the asshole-on-the-move supposed to force their valuable opinions on others?
Japanese right-wing nutbars have invented one valuable thing: the public-address-system van. For whatever reason, it is legally tolerable to strap a high-powered megaphone system to the top of your small shitbox van and go around crowded shopping areas barking invective against minorities. While this is absolutely an abuse of vans (who are known for loving everyone) it does offer a large secondary market of gently-used PA systems that crop up on their auction websites.
Thanks to the heroic efforts of some postal workers, I now had one of those very same PA systems. And after a lot of “borrowing” of street signs in the next neighbourhood over, and creative application of a rivet gun, my Polara now had a roof strong enough to hold that PA system up. The next thing was to drive downtown, and let everyone know what I really think, without the ambiguity of the obsolete honk.
“Hey assholes,” I barked at some politicians crossing the street near the legislature building. “Make it fucking illegal to go slow in the left lane already.”
Tractors have been in the news a lot lately, for reasons that I don’t care to look into unless it means that I have greater access to vehicle parts. Wait, that’s exactly what it means? We’ll, uh, catch up with that later, but the fact remains: the average adult human in our coddled white-collar society doesn’t know what a tractor is.
In childhood, we are taught by our equally coddled, white-collar parents that a tractor is like a special car. It goes around a farm, and pulls or pushes shit, and then the farmer gets his work done and is paid. That’s the end of the story, nighty-night, and your architect father and mechanical-engineer mother look at you from the bedroom door with loving eyes as they coo to each other about how you are really starting to “get” how things work around here.
They are mostly correct in that a tractor is like a special car, but only insofar as it contains an internal combustion engine and is a box full of nightmares, previous-owner hackjobs, and wiring faults. Past that, there’s virtually no comparison. The tires are huge, made of bizarre new materials, and are usually filled with water or pig excrement. The gearbox is shithouse, and won’t do highway speeds even when the cops are chasing you. There’s a turbocharger, but the manufacturer refuses to publish the quarter-mile times out of shame.
What tractors have that cars don’t is a sort of reflective calm about the world. At these low speeds, with these burbling engines, out in nature, it’s easy to let your thoughts drift away from the here and now. You can contemplate the universe as you accidentally run over a day labourer.
Once you start to comprehend the humble farm tractor as its own thing, you’ll see its true personality start to emerge. That’s usually when a lot of folks buy a second, or third, or sixteenth tractor. They feel bad for these abandoned workhorses sitting on the side of a farmer’s field as newer, better industrial implements are put to work destroying soil quality. Even though those folks live in a downscale suburb and have no legal parking or storage facilities for dozens of full-size diesel tractors, they’ll still bring their new friends home. And we have to salute that kind of commitment.
Salute, but perhaps not understand. And if we can’t understand it, we can’t prosecute it. Your honour, I’d like to move for a trial delay, on the grounds that my attorney is still a few hours away from the courthouse as his Cub Cadet only does fifteen km/h.
Whenever a “normal person” asks for advice on which car to buy, the advice is simple. Get a Toyota. They last for a long time, they’ll get you where you want to go, it won’t do anything you don’t want it to do unless you’re really asking for it. Sure, in the modern era, they can be sort of boring. If you’re looking for a little bit of excitement and unpredictability, get a dog.
That’s all well and good for new-car purchasers. What about me, the weird dirtbag who only buys cars once they’ve topped three hundred thousand kilometers? Are Toyotas still a good option for me? If my past experience is any clue: absolutely not.
It’s not that I don’t want a reliable daily driver. In fact, having a vehicle I can rely on to get me to the parts store when all of my other cars break would be pretty nice. However, Toyotas tend to get owned by the sorts of folks who don’t own any other cars, because they can’t. After decades of neglect, the used-up shell of a Camry or Estima or whatever is dropped in my lap, wheezing its last breaths and suffering, and it’s up to me to put it down.
All this wouldn’t be so bad if not for the total disbelief from the Toyota faithful. It’s impossible for these cars to break, they patiently explain. You must have gotten a fluke or some kind of General Motors product that has been crudely rebadged as a Toyota in order to fraudulently inflate its resale value.
And sure, maybe some of this is my fault. If I had just spent ten more dollars on the car, I could have gotten one that was properly taken care of, by a loving family that always took it to the dealership mechanic. Where would the fun in that be? I’d be just too damn bored.
While it’s generally offered as good advice to keep detailed notes on your projects, it’s worth thinking about who is giving said advice. Do you know them? Have they expressed any sympathies for cops? Maybe they’re talking into their lapel or holding a finger to their ear when they think you’re not around? Have you caught them recently looking through your notes?
It is absolutely true that keeping notes helps you with organization. For one thing, carrying all of my old notes from house to house without ever reading them again has done wonders for my paper-stacking skills. And the increased risk of catastrophic workshop fire can help you reset your work area back to zero, so you can rebuild it afresh, the right way, with the knowledge you’ve gained since you began hoarding.
Those notes also help your enemies copy you, undermine you, or even (in the case of state and local authorities) prosecute you. It’s for this reason that I strongly recommend encrypting your notes, like Leonardo da Vinci probably did. We know a whole lot about what he made, but do we know about all the weekends he spent trying to make a better beer bong? No, because nobody is smart enough to decipher his notes, resulting in only the pretty pictures of his notes becoming public knowledge. And I’m a terrible artist, unless the medium is bullshit.
So now, when the Feds kick down my door (or gently nudge it open, the landlord hasn’t been seen in a few months so he hasn’t replaced the locks since the last time they showed up) they’ll find nothing but ream after ream of idiotic scrawls. As I make good my escape, leaving town in a haze of nitromethane and tire smoke, one of the junior members of the jackboot squad will hold my notebook with tongs away from his body, and go: “what the hell is a Plymouth Arrow Jet?”
If there’s one saving grace in life, it’s that you’re pretty much guaranteed that someone else will fuck up worse in the future. No matter how big of a mistake you’ve made, eventually there will be a blunder that makes it look like a little boo-boo by comparison. Recency bias is a hell of a thing, but until now, the average screw-up didn’t live long enough to see their mistakes surpassed. No longer.
Before we begin, I’d like to take a moment to address the recent rumours. Many of our competitors have been accusing us here at Switch Industries of developing a full-ass time machine, and using it to subtly manipulate world history in our favour. Some may even have detailed records of our timeline manipulations, which have left temporal rifts across space and time that even now threaten the delicate fabric of our reality. This is absolute poppycock.
All that we have developed is a convenient new future-viewing tool. In order to make sure nobody uses it to impact world events or severely depress themselves, we’ve strictly limited what you can do with it. See how responsible we are?
When you fire it up, you get to scan forward in history to look for the future’s far more advanced forms of human idiocy. For example, you might want to see if someone else pissed their pants before a big meeting too. That’s a small screwup in the cosmic sense of things, a quick prod with no impact whatsoever on the present. You’ll be out of our offices, feeling better, albeit several hundred dollars poorer, within the hour.
Things get much more expensive when you’ve really fucked things up, of course. Accidentally confused metric and imperial and destroyed humanity’s only escape rocket from the doomed planet? Some kid dropping his or her ice cream in the back seat of a new car won’t really compare, so we’ll be scanning for a little while. And the bigger your screw-up is, the further into the future we have to look, the more you’re going to have to pay.
It’s expensive to run the machine, of course, but primarily we’re interested in keeping you from learning too much ancillary information about the future. Maybe the only guy who fucked up worse than your rocket-thing is some kind of future cyborg who accidentally crashes an asteroid into a settlement on Lotharax IV. You’d feel a lot better that human beings eventually get off Earth, and maybe in that relief you’d slack off a little at your job, changing the future and making our jobs much harder. We deserve to get paid in that event.
So come on down to Switch Industries’ headquarters today, and put your future in our hands. Who knows, maybe you’ll get to see your own death from a cool industrial accident! That’ll really cost you.
You gotta be aware of all the fake products being sold nowadays. With modern computer technology and the overall decline of Western manufacturing capacity, it’s easier than ever to buy something you think is real but turns out to be fake. How do I know this? It happened to one of my favourite people, me.
Last week, I replied to an innocent Craigslist ad offering for sale one (1) Plymouth Volare coupe. Not just any coupe, but one of the first-year “Premier” ultra-lux-trim ones. Very desirable, if you’re a pervert. Within the few minutes it took the seller to reply, I had already used innocent background details from the blurry photographs of the ad to triangulate his house. He was probably very surprised when I knocked on his door before he finished the email reply, cash in hand.
Naturally, I looked over it first. You want to always look at a used car in the dark, or when it’s raining, or when you really need to pee. That’s how you miss all the important details, you see. Details like it being a “Custom” trim. Similar to the layman, of course, but ever so subtly different. It was deceptive of the seller, sure, but not an out-and-out fraud. He genuinely did not seem to actually understand how to tell the trim levels apart, possibly because of a childhood closed-head injury, or just not liking Volares that much (the same thing, if you ask me.)
However, the real sucker was me. In my rush to fork over the cash, I had missed one critical detail. It took me all the way until I got home, flat-towing it behind my turbodiesel-engine-swapped tow Volare, to look at the pink slip and discover the error of my ways. I had bought a worthless Dodge Aspen, instead of a beloved Plymouth. No doubt the seller had also realized the same, and had simply swapped the badges in order to get as much as one hundred additional dollars at resale. Thing about the Aspen, though, is that it still does a pretty decent burnout on the seller’s lawn, the real genuine article.
The media will tell you that our society is becoming increasingly polarized, but we’re not the ones who took money from Dodge to advertise the Dakota. No, the bifurcation (trifurcation?) of American trucks began when the Big Three decided to, rather than compete, create arbitrary marketing categories for what kind of person should own which kind of truck.
You can imagine those people right now, can’t you? That’s because this propaganda has been programmed directly into your frontal lobe through years of targeted advertising. If there was some overlap, say, your weird lawyer friend could buy a Chevy Silverado without being considered some sort of Southwestern hayseed, or your Southwestern hayseed friend could buy a Ford F-150 without the dealership questioning his understanding of colours and basic arithmetic, then the automakers would have to compete with each other. This way, there’s a nice easy vertical, everyone takes their own slice of the market, and they don’t have to bloody their knuckles trying to fight for market share.
There are, of course, Japanese brands which occasionally wander into this fray and attempt to knock out a few teeth. However, I’m sure you can’t identify any reasonable differences between a Frontier owner, a Ridgeline apologist, and a Tacoma-haver. The Japanese equivalent to the disinformation machine simply hasn’t existed. You have to imagine their executives are sitting in their neon-slicked ever-transforming cyborg office megatowers, smoking imported Martian pseudocigars, and grumbling about how unfair the entire situation is.
Don’t worry, though. The answer to this, as it is to so many other problems with North American civilization, is to allow a new entrant into the market. Switch Motors is proud to announce our new product, Truck. It’s everything you like about domestic pickup trucks, because we buy up 20-year-old used trucks and take an angle-grinder to any identifying marks on the grille. You can think of it as sort of a “store-brand” truck, if that helps you place its concept in the market. The most important thing? Without any marketing executives to tell us who our customer makeup is, it’s truly classless, which is a word people use to describe me all the time.
I never learned to play the piano, mostly because I didn’t have access to one as a kid. This is because pianos are big, unwieldy, expensive, sound weird on occasion, and require a lot of regular maintenance. And for that, my family already owned a Ford product.
I kid, of course. Our family Ford received virtually no maintenance whatsoever. This was despite the entreaties of our next-door neighbour, whose brief ownership of a Dodge Shadow had scarred her for life (surprisingly not literally) about the precise change intervals of coolant and oil. Instead, our beloved family member and reliable transportation received a trip to Jiffy Lube once a year, whether it needed it or not.
At risk of becoming embroiled in legal trouble from the Jiffied Lubrication Corporation LLC, I’ll say that they didn’t do a real great job, either. After awhile, my car-guy uncle would come by, notice that whatever they just charged us $58 for never happened, and rag on my dad a little bit for being suckered by teens. He also drove a constantly-shifting collection of shitboxes, ranging from a badly-turbocharged Saab that sounded like a kazoo on PCP, to a Datsun 280ZX 2+2 that threatened to turn me into some sort of elaborate pervert for leather seating surfaces.
So I may not have learned about a plinky-plonk piano, but my family gave me something even better. A healthy appreciation for turbocharging, first-hand experience with the art of the scam, and a chance to hang out in auto shop rather than band class. Nobody teaches you how to weld on a French horn. They’re too expensive.
This might be a little niche for some of you out there, but a growing number of your fellow humans own what is called “a cat.” No, not a car, and certainly not high-end construction equipment. A cat is a sort of small mammal that is kept around for companionship, and they shit in a box. That’s where things get interesting.
See, cleaning up all that cat poop is a daily challenge. You have to sort of kneel down, scrape it with some specialized tools, put it in a bag and then make that bag the responsibility of municipal or local refuse-collection agencies. Then you do it all over again. People hate doing repetitive tasks like this, which is why there are fancy self-scooping litter boxes.
As some of you are aware, due to a legal conflagration which I am not allowed to go into details of, I have been appointed the guardian of Lord Fluffbottoms. He is a cat of some description, who has absolutely soaked every available surface of my house in a cone of high-pressure urine. And not cleaning his box makes things worse. Naturally, I thought about automating this boring task, but one of those poop droids costs a couple hundred bucks, and I’d rather use that money on getting a small handful of cars.
Not to worry: I have plenty of half-working electric motors, bins, and bags of spill-absorbent sand lying around the house. With all of this, I figured as I plasma-cut off the back half of a ‘68 Satellite, I could make something work. It really didn’t take me that long to cobble that something together, and Lord Fluffbottoms seemed to be pleased with his arrangement. Whenever he’d do his business in what used to be the big Plymouth’s trunk, the wiper motors would run and scrape all of that unpleasantness into an emptied-out gas tank. Worked great, and the smell of the leftover fuel varnish in the tank quickly overcame the odour of anything he could produce. I thought I had the perfect solution, so I went to bed, pleased with my accomplishment.
All this is to say that I need bail money. That fucking cat figured out that I left the rear differential in there, and somehow managed to piss on it in such a way that he built an improvised electric golf-cart out of the entire mechanism. Then he took it to Mexico, where apparently it has been impounded with several hundred pounds of A-grade catnip hidden inside the panels. And of course, I didn’t remove my license plate before I gave it to him because A) the bolts were a little rusty, and B) I figured he’d appreciate something to read while he was on the shitter.
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tags: plymouth, plymouth satellite, lord fluffbottoms
You are likely compelled by kit cars for the same reason I am. The perfectly-good engine and transmission can be pulled from the shattered body of your old car and placed into a new chassis, one better suited to kicking ass on the track and street. People will fawn over your cool new sports car, having no idea it runs on a 300,000-mile 105-horsepower shitbox engine that was out of warranty before they were a zygote.
Of course, it never quite works out that way. For one thing, kit cars are more expensive than just buying another shitbox beater. You don’t have to assemble it yourself, which means you can pretend to not be responsible when the brakes fall off in front of a cop. And you can drive a battered economy car much, much harder than a kit car, especially when you’re not worried about ruining the immaculate gelcoat you just spent 10 years and your marriage feathering onto the made-in-another-shed fibreglass body by hitting a guardrail or two.
Yes, the average person should not build their own car from a kit. That doesn’t stop the fantasy, though. More and more folks buy a giant crate containing a variety of disassembled frame-and-bodywork parts every year, often with crudely-photocopied instruction sheets that were photographed from the vendor’s secret moon base, using an iPhone 3GS with vaseline smeared on the lens. And it won’t stop me, when I scoop up the remainder of those kits from their estate auctions, and try to cobble together the rest of it using old wheelbarrow parts. That deal will happen any second now, I swear.
My neighbourhood has been slacking off on the maintenance lately. I don’t know if it’s the economy, the lack of jobs, the general cultural malaise, or the killer nanobot death cloud that looms over us all and prepares to rip out our lungs. Either way, folks that used to take their cars in to the mechanic haven’t been doing so, and my ears are tired of listening to squealing brake pads, badly-tensioned accessory belts, and whining power-steering pumps that I don’t own.
Here’s a fun fact for you: while it’s illegal to impersonate a government official, there is apparently no law whatsoever against taking a clipboard and going around to people’s houses to give them a “failed inspection” report. I’m doing this in my capacity as a private citizen, which the government keeps telling me should be more efficient than trusting them to do anything, and boy were they right. After two days, I not only had a lot of well-walked Pokémon, but also had failed half the neighbourhood’s cars for mechanical issues ranging from “walk it off” to “good luck walking ever again.”
And it worked. A lot of folks, concerned that my official-looking report was in fact official, went off to the shop to get their cars fixed. It didn’t cost me anything – the government keeps giving me all of these failed inspection forms for free, and the library has white-out in the desk drawers behind the front counter if you distract the librarian by causing a scene outside. Now, a less scrupulous operator would be working in conjunction with a crooked mechanic to make some money off these folks, but I was just happy to have the peace and quiet.
This all worked great, I should hasten to add, until I lost track of where I was on my block and stumbled into my own yard. Still in car-inspector mode, I instinctively reacted to the mass quantities of automotive failure before me. The last thing I remember is working myself into a small-scale mania and then passing out next to a Buick Century with chicken wire for a windshield.
Space: it’s out there, it’s cold, and your car might not rust as quickly up there. It has some downsides, too: while there is a lot of parking, there’s a long walk to anything good. And the roads suck.
Personally, I’m still a little bitter about my childhood. And if you were born at any point in the last century, you probably are bitter about the same things too. Those science-fiction writers, those futurists, those pundits: they told us that we would be in space by now. We’d be hanging out in a slowly-rotating station orbiting the moon, slowly developing ennui over how bored we are of the entire fucking galaxy.
Of course, that didn’t happen. There are a lot of reasons, mostly to do with the impracticality of presenting the average person with an explosive seventeen-storey-tall penis and telling them to “get that bitch in orbit.” For me, though, the biggest reason is the lack of cars.
Sure, there’s the lunar rover. Everyone’s seen Neil Armstrong do a handbrake turn and a couple wild flat spins in that electric-powered moon-dune buggy. We’ve all got the clip saved to our phones. There’s only one of those things in existence, and they left the key in the ignition, so the batteries are probably toast by now anyway. Plus, it was made by General Motors. It’s got no style, you know what I’m saying?
Here’s my proposal, NASA. The last moon rover was put together in seventeen months. You give me nineteen months and enough titanium to choke a hog, and I’ll produce the greatest tube-frame off-roading Plymouth Volare the planet has ever seen. No, the galaxy. Nitrous oxide works in space, right?
Much like when you are in the hospital, the best thing to do when your car is getting worked on is to be nice to the folks doing the working-on. Sure, it seems expensive, and maybe their bosses are taking you for a ride to help put their kids through college. What else are you gonna do, though, fix it yourself?
There was a dark time in my history when I let another person touch my shitboxes. Cars are complicated, after all, and they have a matrix of interlocking dependencies that I would just end up breaking. Then, I got the first bill, and I was like “fuck a whole bunch of that.” And on top of that, the bastards back in the shop had broken things. I can break things myself for free, I told myself. And I did.
Here’s the thing about staring into the abyss: your ass learns all the mechanic slang. And it makes mechanic friends. And soon your ass has become a de-facto mechanic, taking on increasingly chancy projects in the pursuit of pure knowledge and later bragging rights. Sure, the average home gamer can change their oil. Can they swap a snowmobile engine into a 1977 Ford F-100? Such a project generates a whole new body of questions, some which are so intriguing to even a hardened mechanic that they just have to sit down and figure out what you are up to.
Anyone else who has done it can describe the moment that they could talk to real mechanics and make sense to them. It’s like you slip behind the curtain at a play, and the actors backstage are just regular people, instead of King Lear or Mr. Bonghitter (I went to a very progressive high school.) And when you do that, you suddenly realize the mountainous amount of abuse which they receive from every direction.
Those bozos who had broken my glovebox clips and misplaced a ton of bolts when they were swapping a cabin air filter weren’t trying to do a bad job; they were meeting their boss’s ridiculous time demands. Flat-rate shit: do this job in the time dictated by the book, no matter how ugly it is. They were probably getting screamed at by every customer that day, and their boss, and their boss’s boss, and the entire chain. I’d like to shake their hands, actually, because they set me on my way. And also ask if they have any leftover glovebox clips in their toolbox, because that shit is hard to find at the junkyard. Real mechanics keep getting there before me.
Are you stressing about getting all of your car obligations done? Anxious about approaching the oil change interval that the friendly dealership service guy insisted upon? Maybe you’ve got an upcoming show-and-shine that your car needs to be able to threaten pedestrians at? Maybe try not giving a shit.
Not giving a shit is how everyone else operates a car, and they all seem to be doing fine. Take a weekend off. Put your feet up, maybe see your family once in awhile. They miss you, or at least they will until they spend about 33 minutes with you and find out that your personality should be used as a torture trap in the new Saw movie. Your car will still be there in the morning, most likely non-operational, but that’s why they make rental cars. And rental cars are great for a track day, which is in turn great for your mental health.
When you finally get back to your car, you’ll be more relaxed. Chances are things will go a lot smoother, without all that nasty stress knotting up your back muscles. It’s amazing how taking a break from one of my broken hoopties to go throw a hammer and a wrench at one of the other broken shitboxes will rejuvenate me mentally and physically.
And if you’re stressing out solely because you are worried about the opinions of other people, I’ve got an advanced form of “not giving a shit.” It’s called buying one of my cars. As soon as you roll up to the big board meeting in a ‘78 Volare that’s leaking steamed oil through every rust-sawn orifice, you’ll have enough negative vibes to underflow the counter right into “feeling good.” Maybe the big boss will notice. You’ll get a promotion, and then some other idiot can fix your Volare. Please consider me. I work cheap, but not too quickly. Don’t need the stress, you see.
This might surprise you, but I do volunteer at a local daycare. It’s part of my work-release program, negotiated by my shark of a lawyer, Max. Turns out that all the other criminals had been accused of some kind of crime that directly disqualified them from working with children, but “doing burnouts for seven straight minutes in front of the police station until the tires exploded” is not one of those. So I help out the kids, and part of that help is repairing toys.
As any parent knows, children are hard on toys. There’s a couple reasons for this. One, toys are built to be cheap, because children are hard on toys. Two, a child’s interest in a toy doesn’t last very long until they’ve outgrown it. Three, kids fucking misuse the damn things all the time. Just last week I saw a pair of little boys pushing a toy truck down the sidewalk while making a “vroom, vroom” sound that clearly had too many revolutions-per-minute to be a lazy-cammed, big-bore Chevy V8. What, did they swap that shit with a Busso?
Anyway, one morning, the daycare supervisor presented me with a broken front-end-loader. A wheel had broken off it, and was nowhere to be seen. This one, unlike others, was licensed. Someone at the toy company decided the best way to add verisimilitude to the tiny plastic construction equipment was to call up Caterpillar and give them some money in order to use their logo. Just to be an asshole about it, I decided to also call up Caterpillar and ask if I could get a service tech to come out and fix it.
Here’s the thing about Caterpillar: if you tell them that you have a service contract, and then kind of mumble a bunch of numbers into the phone when asked about it, they send someone out to fix it. The next morning, a full-ton Ram showed up, towing a flatbed trailer. On that flatbed trailer? One single two-inch plastic tire, ratchet strapped down for safety. That technician did a pretty good job, although he got a little shirty with me when I pointed out that he didn’t bother to use a torque wrench on the little fake lugnuts.
C’mon, man, there are kids watching. You gotta set a good example.
Couple of years ago, a bunch of the other car idiots and I got really into vans. We’ve spoken about vans before: they’re basically big boxes on wheels, and they’re designed to hold children and cargo. Of course, the most common experience the modern human being has with vans is with the oh-so-practical Dodge Caravan, a virtually unkillable bean-shaped commuter car that is most often seen on buy-here-pay-here lots after several decades of no maintenance and with every interior surface encrusted in the vomit of miscellaneous offspring.
It is for this reason that the Dodge Caravan has all but replaced traditional work vans. If you’re a tradie, or even a delivery person, it’s hard to beat the cost of entry. This appealing cost becomes even more so once you realize you no longer have to do oil changes or lift throttle when the number-six cylinder makes a break for it on the highway. What are you going to do, depreciate it further?
Of course, once the engine or transmission has popped, no fleet maintenance tech worth their salt is going to attempt to revive it. They’ll fob it off onto auctions, where only suckers and complete idiots will buy them. Idiots like myself and the others, who started a spec race series with 1992-present Caravans and whatever engine-and-trans combo we could get the thing repowered with.
I’ll tell you, nothing brings the thrill of amateur racing quite like diving deep into a turn and trying to remember if the blue long-wheelbase Grand next to you is the one with the 30-horse Kubota diesel or the twin-turbocharged LS7 out of a Corvette that mysteriously got run off the road near Mechanic’s Alley. And all of that extra cargo room means you can bring your best friends along for a lap of the track, as long as the “track” is in a dirt field in a breakaway municipality that frowns upon the existence of the police, and your “friends” are the entire cargo area full of series-linked nitrous oxide bottles. Told you it was practical.
A man, a plan, a canal: Panama. When you’ve seized the means of transportation, it doesn’t matter if you actually produce anything. What these kind folks have figured out is that they can just set up a toll booth in the world’s international trade, and shipping companies will pay them a king’s ransom to get through. What a great deal, and that’s exactly why I keep petitioning the Mayor to let me rob the trucks on the highway at gunpoint.
Now, I know what you’re going to say. That’s a criminal activity. And in a narrow definition of the term, you are absolutely correct. However, the government has the power to make crimes… not crimes. They do it for themselves all the time. If you get caught drinking and driving, well, there’s a strategically-placed loophole that this politician or this powerful person can hop through in order to avoid seeing any really serious repercussions. And, being a long-time friend of the Mayor, it was time for me to cash in on that cynical institutional corruption as well.
There was only one problem with my plan: most of the trucks driving by my place don’t carry anything interesting. I’m too far away from the airport to get expensive air-freighted electronics, and I’m too far away from the major highways to get ground freight. All I was getting in my neighbourhood when I stuck up the delivery truck were my own orders from RockAuto, and the dicks at UPS won’t let you file an “item stolen” claim if you stole your own item. So the plan had to change, as plans must.
It turns out that knowing a lot of out-of-work welders and glassblowers is just as useful as knowing a crooked, hunted politician. With a couple bucks in the right places, and the promise of riches to come, we soon had an elaborate series of detours that went by my place. Now, I could have my pick of the litter when it came to eighteen-wheeled goodies, although my neighbours are starting to complain a lot about all the traffic. It’s me who should be complaining; if those jerks would just order something good once in awhile for me to steal, I wouldn’t have to do all of this in the first place.
“Goddamn tractor,” my comrade spits. Had God existed in this timeframe, He would not have bothered damning the East Wind DF254 light industrial/farm tractor. It was doomed from the start, way back in Changzhou when the hard-working men and women of the factory banged this thing together before shoving it on a boat. And now its chronic overheating and general anger at existence was our problem.
Now, I don’t think they did a bad job building it. Nor was the design particularly offensive. These puppies are strictly paint-by-numbers. Even a remarkably dull kindergartener can design a diesel tractor if you give them a few uneaten crayons and a basic requirements brief. Where they fell down, as they always do, is by not anticipating the demands of the asshole customer.
For instance, you might assume that a customer will always replace the coolant with coolant. This is not the case when you are dealing with an asshole customer, who will never change the coolant and only occasionally top up the radiator with mosquito-egg-infested water out of the chicken troughs. Won’t the water pump engineer be surprised when she finds out her exotic-composite, plastic-fantastic impeller gets devoured by exactly that combination of salinity and pH!
Regular customers will also not be flat-towing a Holden Gemini for several kilometers. And even if they were, they wouldn’t be doing it in order to try and free up a seized motor. And if they were still big enough jerks to do that, then they wouldn’t be doing it with a motor which is only seized because the valves and pistons made kissy-time at approximately ten thousand RPM.
All’s well that ends well, though. We remembered the core belief of our people: from each according to their ability, to each according to their need. The Gemini is now rocking the finest 25-horsepower Chinese diesel that money can buy, treated nicely by an efficient and reliable Isuzu cooling system. And the tractor is on fire on the side of the road, because the insurance company thinks it’s worth more than we do.
Any person on this Earth who would disdain an economy car should not be your friend. Even the little penalty-box cars with their tiny, buzzy engines are respectable workhorses of the proletariat. Why go through the expense of getting a giant, hard-to-park luxury car with a ludicrous maintenance schedule, just so it can sit in the same work parking lot as the little shitbox that could? Sure, it’ll stroke your ego, but for the same money you can buy a lot of friends from my new website, NotHumanSlavery-dot-com.
This is not to deny the inherent appeal of driving a slow car fast. If you drive a Porsche quickly through the corners, big deal. That’s what it was built for. What happens if you catch that Porsche in a car that cost less than one of its headlights? Ah, now you are a legendary beater of shitboxes. All must respect your driving skills and ability to keep a one-point-three-litre engine on the boil at nearly eight thousand RPM without absent-mindedly sending the valvetrain into the next county. If you go slow? Well, it’s a slow car.
It’s not just luxury and sports car owners that you need to fend off when you own a tiny automobile, of course. There is also the Large Vehicle Fanatic. Somewhere – and scientists are getting very close to finding out exactly where – in their childhood, these people were traumatized by a trusted one. Now they don’t want to drive in anything smaller than an M1 Abrams main battle tank. In order to calm their roaring guilt over their sociopathic automobile, they will spit on your tiny little crapcan as being “unsafe.” The only response here is to smile as you pull the wreckage of their truck out of the ditch that they slid into going 3.5 km/h because it was icy out.
No, my friends, if you do not desire the small and affordable automobile, you know that your enemies and fiscal betters have gotten their hooks into you. I recommend that you repent, ideally by leaving those hubristic large cars on and around my front lawn, where they will be punished. Oh, they will be punished.
There are two kinds of people in this world: folks who can build things out of wood, and those who respect the unique majesty of nature’s beauty by refusing to. Me, I’m the latter. The only time I deliberately make contact with a tree is when I’ve misjudged the camber on that wonky mountain pass while going eleven-tenths to the flea market.
Still, though, that doesn’t mean I don’t have to repair the things others had made out of wood. I’ve never had to fix a tree, and yet these lazy fuckers had somehow made that tree much less reliable. Although a kitchen table is not exposed to any road salt, mine was somehow starting to peel up and look kind of shitty.
This project was an excuse to buy a new handheld sander (so that I didn’t have to walk over to the garage to get that one) and a lot of sandpaper. Then I started whaling on the fucker, while whistling the theme song to The New Yankee Workshop. Soon, the kitchen table looked like a pile of sawdust next to an even shittier kitchen table, which is when I turned to my best friend in the whole wide world. Industrial solvents. Again, because the lazy wood-type folks don’t do things properly, brake cleaner is contraindicated, so you have to actually go out to the store and risk your life to buy some wood cleaner. Wood cleaner, I hear you ask?
After cleaning it, and staining it, and varnishing it, and polishing it, I had spent about the same amount of effort as it would take to actually fix rust on one of my many Mopars. Except now I had something that was nominally societally acceptable to eat Lean Cuisine on top of. Ultimately, the project was a success, which has only emboldened me to do other shit with wood. Y'all ever seen one of those British Morgan cars? They’re made out of wood, so they won’t rust. Except for all the parts that aren’t made out of wood. Those still rust… and catch fire.
Have you ever been on a long train going somewhere, when your train stops to let another train through? It happens all the time, and I always feel jilted by the railroad when it does. What makes that other train better than me? Is it an express? Did the passengers pay more? Or are you just willing to snub me in favour of these other, better, customers of greater import?
In reality, train line scheduling is a miasma of complicated requirements, ever-changing situations, and efficiency optimization. Folks go to high-end schools and learn the greatest knowledge our society has about how to shuttle shit along a line. And they still fucked it up, which is why I bought a local railroad with some lost change that I found on the floor under the washing machine at the laundromat.
Most people don’t know this, or there’d be a lot more railroads being bought by idiots like myself, but they actually run at a massive loss. If you offer to pick up even a little bit of their debt, the shareholders are so grateful to throw you the keys to the company that they won’t even check your references. Which is a shame, because I spent a lot of money making that realistic papier-mache puppet of Warren Buffett to tell everyone that I’m really good at singing Margaritaville. Wait, wrong Buffett? They’re both gajillionaires? Get the fuck out of here.
Here’s what I can promise you on Switch Lines: basically the same terrible service and long wait times as before, but now when you have to stop so another train can blow past you, we have a little button you can push to make their PA system blare 120dB polka music. It won’t fix the problem, but you’ll feel a whole lot better dragging one of your peers down with you, which is what mass transit is all about.
Yeah, if you believe the authorities, then swerving off the highway at full speed is a bad idea. And if you trust your eyes and your own good judgment, that cornfield looks mighty soft. Nobody ever told a good story at a party that ended with “I did the prudent and responsible thing and continued upon my pre-planned journey.” No, the audience wants to hear about how you fished a chunk of irrigation nozzle out of your oilpan and nursed the thing back home before your engine ran out of blood.
When you do a good cornfield donut, it’s just you, the car, the wailing engine, and the slowly building smell of exhaust-roasted corn. It’s sort of the core freedom of our entire way of life, and it’s one that’s under attack by those who would take away our liberties.
Some of you, no doubt the Suzy Supernices out there, would consider plowing through the cornfield to be an act of vandalism. Someone owns all that corn, and is counting on the yield to feed their family, right? Wrong again: corn subsidies have taken on such a proportion of the government that it acts as a sort of universal make-work program subsidized by the taxpayer. Nobody actually eats it. It goes right into the grinder at the end of the harvest season, in order to make compost to help grow more corn. Well, I’m a taxpayer, and you’re a taxpayer, so go right on ahead and rip that shit up with your big ol’ General Grabbers. If anything, you’re creating new jobs.
There is, of course, an ongoing debate about just how aggressively you should turn in. If you have high-zoot sports car suspension, you can turn pretty sharply indeed. Pull a couple Gs. Unfortunately, this sort of suspension is delicate and spindly. It usually doesn’t lend itself to gapping a drainage ditch and sailing thirty feet into the midst of the field. And for those, like myself, who operate vehicles that can charitably be described as “trucklike,” any halfway-optimistic jag on the wheel is just going to cause some understeer into said ditch. This is where we talk about the second thing that the authorities don’t want you to know about: the handbrake.
I don’t think anything in the world can compare to the sensation when you finish yanking an engine out of a car. If you’ve never done it, it can seem very simple. Undo all the bolts and just reef on it. And on paper, yes, that’s what you do, except for all the little things that get in the way.
I’m talking about wiring harnesses. Clips. Previous owners putting zipties on things at random. Brackets your factory service manual didn’t cover. Bellhousing dowels that just won’t let go of its engine friend. Coolant you forgot to drain out of the middle of the block because there was a hidden interior drain plug you didn’t know about until it’s spraying in your mouth. There’s always a few dozen things that hang up the engine on the way out, and defeating all of them (whether properly or not) is what stretches the two-hour job of pulling a mill into an entire evening.
Of course, putting it back in is no picnic, either. You’re tired, and everything that got in the way on your way out is also there on the return trip. It can feel like trying to play Tetris in three dimensions while blindfolded. And you don’t get that thrilling feeling of the engine hoist finally being able to pull the engine up unburdened at the end. It’s almost enough to make you take the sawzall to it, or even go back and remove all the parts the manual told you to remove in the first place, instead of going “well, I’ll be careful.”
There’s probably a lesson here for real life, but I’ll be damned if I can find out what it is. Mostly, I just want to find a cardiothoracic surgeon and ask her how many connectors she usually breaks on a heart pull.
Do you remember when we were all super angry that some billionaire oligarchs forced a U2 album onto our iPods without our consent? I’m still angry about it, which is why I decided to design my own iPod. What do you mean, everyone just uses smartphones now? God damn it. This took me years.
Well, whatever. You might as well look at it, while I’ve got it here. Yes, you are very astute in identifying that this appears to be a 1993 Toyota Celica GT-S. It is a credit to your upbringing that you are so accustomed to personal luxury coupes of such high esteem.
However, you’ll note that it does not feature the famous “System 10” stereo, which I am sure that you were expecting. Why? That shit costs money, and we don’t have any of it. Instead, the entire rear seat and hatch interior have been replaced by a bunch of old home stereo speakers I found on the side of the road one day. They’re very loud, which I think we can all agree is the defining characteristic of good sound.
MP3? I don’t know what that is. As I’ve stated previously, the whole point of this endeavour was to have freedom in what you listen to. It may only have a tape deck, sure, but no Timothy P. Cook is going to be forcing his tapes upon you, unless he shoves them in through the passenger-side window that won’t roll up anymore. I pinched the tweeter wiring in there when I was putting it back together, and I am not pulling that door card again so it’s staying like that.
Why yes, it does have a CD player prominently featured on the dashboard right there. Unfortunately, it broke the first time I tried to turn the volume up above “five,” along with a support column of the shopping mall parking garage in which I was doing all of this conversion work. So how many can I put you down for?
Yesterday, I was at the car wash. The big, communal one. Perhaps I should explain, as I’m not sure if this model of car wash is common in other countries. In Canada, because it gets so friggin’ cold, when you want to wash your car by hand, we often have big car wash buildings in which you pull into a central door and then park your car in the first available bay. Sort of like a parking garage, or a public bathroom if you’re going to be a pervert about all this.
It’s when you leave that this model begins to break down. Driving forward and turning left or right is easy. Once you’re done spraying the car down, you are expected to reverse back into the central hallway and then proceed to an exit door on the other side of the building. Ideally the windshield doesn’t crack as soon as it hits the cold air on your way out, but that’s no longer the car wash’s problem.
Scientists have proven that virtually all human beings are incapable of reversing a car, especially when that car is in a foggy, poorly-lit dungeon of a building, and the driver of that car just sprayed a thick layer of water all over the mirrors and windows. Now, I’ve never actually seen an actual accident, or even a near miss, but it feels sketchy.
Now, I’m no amateur at backing up – in fact, I drove in reverse to and from work for almost four weeks because some bullshit inside the witch’s homunculus that is an automatic transmission died in my Volare. The fear doesn’t listen to this. I always used to grit my teeth and proceed so slowly into the central hallway, that it must have seemed agonizing to the folks waiting for my bay to clear, so that they too could spray their cars off and then reverse in abject terror, with their eyes closed and uttering prayers to whatever deity they worship.
To my embarrassment, I must admit that it was just last week that I hit upon the smart way to deal with this problem. I’d just back in. That way, my first movement out of the bay after washing would be forward: super safe. Unfortunately, it turns out that in the new position, the significantly rustier back half of my car is closer to the spray wand, and so got sprayed slightly more often. The new giant hole where the trunk lid used to be makes reversing super easy, though.
There are clearly-defined stages to becoming a master race-car operator. First, you have to have the urge to go fast. Everyone has this from birth, and if you don’t, it is because it has been inhibited by time-travelling aliens. Send me seventy bucks and I’ll get you hooked up with my special new religion. For everyone else, it’s time to move onto stage two: installing kick-ass suspension and learning new words like “bump steer” and “unavoidable loss of control.” Very few of us will ever get to stage three: understanding that everything is a consumable in the pursuit of glory.
Here’s the cold hard fact about racing: time is always progressing. What is here today may not be here tomorrow, and that includes race weekends. You can buy another car, but you can’t go back in time and try this race over again. If it comes down to trashing the car in order to win, then… sorry, car. Professional race-car drivers understand this, and you’ll see them gleefully trash millions of dollars in cutting-edge race parts and thousands of person-hours of effort in a vain effort to save a quarter-second on the 53rd race of a ninety-race series. Of course, it’s not their money.
So there is a sort of balance with us weekend racers. Should I dare late-brake into that corner, take that FIA curb a little hard? Or is it worth backing off, so I’m not spending all night tonight trying to chuck a new upright into this thing so I can drive to work tomorrow? This thought process is what makes us slow.
Here at the Seat Safety Switch System for Sportscar Soperation, we’re committed to giving you a contempt for the car that will make you fast again. We start you off with the usual method society has used to desensitize people to violence: videogames. When you can push a button and regenerate your car to showroom condition, there’s no reason not to crash it if it means big wins. Then, we hook you up with a series of godawful shitboxes that you will want to crash. Finally, (stop reading here) we will enter the car you drove to the class, without your knowledge, in a demolition derby. You have to win to graduate, and crying is an instant F.
Okay, you can start reading again. So come on down to the classroom this weekend, because we’ll make your mechanical sympathy take a step back from “concerned parent” to “teenager” or your money back.
Near my house is a fully-automated car wash. I know it sounds futuristic, but this technology has been with us for decades. What it does is hit your car with water and cleaning goop from a distance, and somehow still knock off a bunch of paint and every piece of trim on one side. Scientists are flummoxed at how it accomplishes this, and my hoopties are all in poor enough condition that I usually would never risk such an endeavour.
However, I recently had to take a very awkward phone call, and had to find a reason to dodge it. Long past are the days where you could just “go into a tunnel” in order to disconnect your call. Today’s ultra-futuristic cellphones can still get like two bars on Mount Everest, even though they will still reliably shit themselves as soon as you manage to catch that shiny Snorlax. There’s only one place they really don’t like to work: the ol’ carwash.
That’s right. Whether it’s because of the lasers, the near-sentient artificial intelligences enslaved into operating the wash, or the amount of shrapnelized car body stuck into the glass like a Faraday cage, there’s no signal in there. It’s a perfect oasis of calm and happiness in the middle of a busy day, where it’s just you and the soft sounds of water jets and ripping steel. Now, it also costs nineteen bucks for the privilege, so you better bring a car that absolutely needs to be washed. I chose my 1980 Dodge Aspen. Not that one. The brown one. No, the other brown one. The one that Stan found the rat nest in the glovebox. No, rat, not mouse. Yeah.
Unfortunately, my great plans were foiled. It turns out that the Aspen was such a hooptie that after the unibody split in half, the carwash clogged and just plumb gave up. My call went through clear as day, and my good junkyardin’ boots got pretty soggy trying to walk home. On the plus side, I may never have to have a shower again if this undercarriage protectant lives up to its advertising. I’ll save money in the long run.
I think we all have complaints about package delivery, but it’s almost never the fault of the actual drivers. They’re doing the best they can after the package has been at sea/in the air/on a train for the better part of a century. Instead, blame lies somewhere in the swirling maelstrom of logistics nightmares that are the entire reason these enormous megacorporations exist. Everyone knows this. That doesn’t keep me from thinking up ways to revolutionize that “last mile” of parcel delivery, so you can get your box of cheap shit at 8am instead of 4pm.
They say that if you cut an entrepreneur, they’ll bleed ambition. Possibly “they” is limited to the voices inside my head, because all of the times I’ve gotten cut in the shop assembling a prototype, it just seems like regular blood. Maybe there’s a little more of it than usual – oh wow, that is actually quite a bit, good thing I stole the good shop towels from AutoZone – but anyone can do what I’m doing. And what is it I’m doing, you ask? Strapping a twin-turbocharged junkyard V8 to the frame of a Grumman LLV mail-delivery vehicle that the postal service hasn’t noticed they’re missing yet.
If you think about your average parcel delivery route, then you realize that the truck spends a lot of time speeding up and slowing down. Stop for a house, drop off the package, hit the loud pedal to get up to speed so you can drive to the next house. Maybe occasionally stop for a green light. By reducing the amount of time the vehicle spends getting up to speed – using my patented one-thousand-seven-hundred horsepower spooling deathbeast of an eight-banger – greater efficiency in the delivery process is achieved. Some back-of-the-envelope math shows that packages can arrive, on average, up to sixteen seconds earlier.
Sure, the overall fuel consumption is very high, but the brake-specific fuel consumption is only a little bit worse than before. It’s like when you buy a bunch of turbochargers on AliExpress: you get a really good deal in bulk. Now if only we can get these brave parcel-handing folks some little scooters, so they don’t have to waste all that time walking to the door.
Garlic bread: long considered humanity’s greatest invention, its combination of easy-to-remember recipe and off-the-charts effort-to-flavour ratio mean that it will be a favourite until we’re all extinct. That extinction might have come a little bit earlier this past week, thanks to a Food Network project that went too far.
The basic concept was simple: do an Iron Chef-style show where chefs could enter and compete with an established challenger. There was a wrinkle, though. Food shows need to have a quirk these days, a bit of a hook, or folks will just look at mpegs of pancake batter for six hours on loop instead. They decided to make the entire show about making the best imaginable garlic bread.
On paper, this sounds like a great idea. As we’ve already established, everyone loves garlic bread. Maybe there’s even room for some development with the basic concept: when you’ve got something this good already, why keep trying to refine it without an external influence? Hell, I can just imagine their chattering businessman heads trying to explain to each other how great of a concept they made, before they disgorge some kind of fluid from their throats that helps break down the proteins in their captives.
Here’s the problem. The easiest way to make garlic bread better was to add more garlic. After the third episode, the staffers had to start wearing specialized protective equipment and rebreathers. Logically, it was expected that there would be a limit of how much garlic per square inch could ever be produced, and the show sort of plateaued. That’s when a guy from France came in with this jury-rigged stove allowing him to cook garlic bread at 36 psi, compressing the garlic so densely that it approached compression ignition. This, it turns out, was actually the LD50 of garlic, and two of the celebrity judges had to be rushed to the hospital for deliciousness poisoning. I’ve been trying to get the recipe from him ever since.
Last week, I bonded a bit with a raccoon. I came by it honestly. While I was trying to remove a slightly-melted distributor cap from a heavily-singed engine bay after a little fuel fire, this little dude came wandering by and just sat at the edge of the driveway, watching me. I guess he had stolen enough garbage for the day and now just wanted to chill. Eventually, he moved on.
This, of course, made me start a new project. I figured, raccoons have tiny hands and immunity from legal prosecution. What if I trained one to find tools for me? They’re super smart, and they can reach into those awkward spots when I drop my 7/32 behind the headlight bucket and it gets stuck in the frame horn again. One trip to the local public library later, and I was banned from the local public library. I don’t want to talk about it.
The next best thing to a raccoon, of course, is a small child. Down at the end of my street is a daycare. And although the workers there have been warned about me many times, their turnover is frequent enough that I am almost certain the institutional memory of me has not persisted. I gave them a phone call, and told them that I would offer an “enrichment activity” for the kids. Especially the tall ones, with the wiry arms.
Here’s the problem with kids these days: they talk back, and they expect to be compensated for their labour. One kid found a gear wrench stuck in the fence where I had thrown it a few nights prior, and then demanded cookies and juice in exchange for the tool – my tool – which he had just found. I sent the little fuckers back. It might take a little more time to train my new rodent buddy, but I’ve made it very clear to him that if he pays enough attention to me, one day he’ll be able to hotwire a garbage truck. Work smarter, not harder.
When you feel rich, you will become rich. It’s all about the mental game. Making abundance happen with your thoughts. Casting wishes out into the universe and getting back your dreams. That’s why I buy Italian budget coffee from the supermarket, why I sponsor the local elementary school’s racquetball team, and why I drive a 1995 Lexus ES300.
Now, I know what you’re going to say. The 1995 ES300 is a fantastic vehicle. Durable and reliable, it gets from point A to point with charm and style. Everyone who is into cars knows that it is basically a Camry, but the Camry is the car for people who have given up on that hustle and don’t want to aspire to their ideals. Here’s another tip: an ES300 is often a lot cheaper than a same-year Camry.
Why? Information asymmetry. If your aunt knows that she should “buy a Toyota” because they run forever, then she’s not going to put “Lexus” into the search box when she goes on Craigslist. The price differentiation produced by these branding exercises has made it so that you can pick up a low-miles, leather-clad 27-year-old family sedan for the same price that you would pay for the same 27-year-old sedan with a different grille on it, slightly more miles, and kid vomit in the rear cloth bench.
Has my strategy worked out? Ask the Fortune 500 company that I just recently became the CEO of. Of course, they’re not a current Fortune 500 company. It would be ridiculous of me to jump into a posh job like running Ford or something. No, I need the hustle. I’ll be storing that ES300 in the reserved executive parking of Collins Radio, as soon as my real estate team (me) finds a skyscraper that looks like a trailer home but is sold for less.
International Harvester: when you know, you know. Or I’m going to tell you. Despite never owning any of the fine off-road vehicles produced by the thirteen-letter shit-spreader corporation, I remain an enduring fan of them all. The Scout, the KB pickups, the Travelall, hell, even the terrifyingly lethal, blood-red tractors that made up the bulk of their sales.
So where’s the appeal? It could lie in the styling: they’re agrarian but ambitious. The boxy Scout II has enough subtle curves to make its frequently required rust repair infuriating, which is the exact thing that draws my eye to tinworm-attracting Italian cars. I’ll tell you what it’s not, though: features. Whenever I’ve looked at a used IH, assuming that I can actually get inside the truck without immediately falling back out through the floor, I’m struck by the total lack of attention to creature comforts. You’re lucky they gave you a radio so you have something to test the electrical system with. the And that’s how trucks should be.
Now, of course, if the company had kept making consumer products up until the current era, they would probably be fatty luxo-barges too. Margins got tight in the 80s and 90s, and the only way to cure it was with a thick dollop of cheap credit, a pat on the back, and a reassurance that the customer spending $5000 on $1.50 worth of switches and resistive heaters was “worth it.” Treat yourself, their greasy salesmen would probably also tell you, once they cornered you in one of their little shitty rat-dens that they call an office.
Maybe the real appeal, then, is that they had the good sense to die rather than water down their product. Like your favourite band, they went out on top, loaded up with drugs, groupies, and debt.
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tags: international harvester, international harvester scout
When they hear the fire truck siren going off, most people have a sensation of dread. Something horrible has happened to one of their fellow citizens and these heroic civil servants are off to save the day. Not me, though. I know the truth.
The other day, I was making pancakes on my front deck (my stove is being used as an impromptu workbench and is covered in bits of of Puch Maxi carburetors) when I saw a fire truck amble slowly by. They were out doing their routine fire hydrant inspection, making sure that if a house ever burst into flames, they’d have enough pressure to make that fire slightly wet.
With a screech of air-assisted drum brakes, the truck pulled to a halt at the end of my street. A young firefighter jumped out and started to mess with the hydrant. Of course, he’d been told about me, judging from the evil eye he was sending in the general direction of the naked flame I was throwing flapjacks onto over my wood deck. I waved.
It was then that I saw the conspiracy unravel before me. A young father and his toddler daughter stopped in front of the truck. The tot was starstruck by the presence of her heroes, or maybe it was just the huge burbling diesel engine under the hood. Either way, the father asked politely that the truck “light ‘em up.” The junior firefighter smiled ear to ear, hopped back into the truck, and let the sirens and lights go bonkers for a good half a minute. It was so impressive I forgot to stomp out the flaming oil that was spilling out of the precariously-balanced wok on the railing of my deck (I had also been making fried eggs.)
Although you might think it was just out of sheer pettiness that they switched off the lights and siren before ambling the two houses down to my place in order to put out the fire, I know differently. They had no problem bothering my neighbours for the sake of a child, but there’s no way that siren isn’t just for showing off.
What are projects for, if not to make them too difficult for yourself? That’s what a great philosopher never said, because he was too busy fucking around with a bunch of weird nerd shit in his shack and never got anything done. If you’re anything like me – and be careful, law enforcement is looking for any warning signs that you are – then you keep racking up new projects, because they seem hard.
This phenomenon goes above and beyond the “pound puppy” syndrome, where you see a dilapidated car or a slightly oceanworn Garfield telephone and want to lovingly nurse it back to a functional state because you feel bad for it. No, you could do a whole lot of those your entire life, and get really good at them to boot. That would probably be a satisfying existence. It is not for me, though.
What I love, like I just said, is the difficult stuff. Broken shit that someone else gave up on? Well, it just so happens that someone really badass just showed up and decided to take it on. It’ll be done in a jiffy, I tell myself, and then descend into hair-pulling madness for between eighteen and forever months of my life. Sometimes this works, of course, and then I emerge from my filthy shed with a working project. Working, that is, as long as you don’t look at it too long or lean on it hard or give it to a small child. And don’t touch that part if you like your fingers.
A psychologist would probably call this evidence of a gambling addiction. However, most of the shrinks around here have given up on me after I electrocuted my last court-ordered. Maybe one in a different town is looking to take on a really difficult project?
Nobody who is anybody wants to get caught up in the internet hate mob these days. Celebrities live in fear of becoming the main character of Twitter. They don’t want to be torn down by the seething mass of humanity that they stepped on to elevate themselves to the almost-but-not-quite-top. It would probably be best if they seemed like normal people, driving normal people cars.
This, I am convinced, is the only reason that the price of cheap shitboxes has been going up in my local community. Those damn Hollywood types are coming down here, stealing all of our Darts, Corollae, and Maximas, and leaving us with their cast-off luxury cars. A man can only scroll past so many chain-chewed Mercedes and water-pump-exploded BMWs before he begins to wonder where all the affordable Civics went.
I’ve been tempted to go over to Hollywood myself, to see if I can wrest control of at least a dog-chewed-interior 95 Accord from their greedy paws, but those same big-movie big-money types have made it illegal to fly with a Sawzall for a carry-on. Nice try, airlines: I’m not gonna check it, you assholes will just steal my tools. And none of my cars will make it across a provincial border, let alone to the point where they can cause an international incident by popping a head gasket in front of the president or some shit.
So, for the time being, I’ve relegated myself to trading in one of my fine steeds in exchange for someone else’s failed project. Funny thing though: every time people tell me that used cars have gone way up in price, still nobody wants to buy a Dodge Aspen with enough kilometers on it to accomplish a moon landing twice over. It must be because the model isn’t well known over at the Brown Derby.
If there is one activity that has the widest gulf between intention and results, it has to be drilling. Sure, electrical, bodywork, and paint all can produce shitty products from days of labour. A bad drill can ruin a year’s worth of work of work in about five seconds.
This is because drills are sold as consumer products. It’s supply and demand. Everyone needs to punch a hole in things every so often, the reasoning goes, so everyone should be allowed to. You don’t need to look any further than the huge number of deaths caused by motor vehicle accidents – often tragically from doing something incredibly boring instead of a rad stunt – to know that this is bunkum. Drilling is machining, and we have a name for people who do machining: nerds.
Because most of us live in a part of the world in which nerds are expensive and in demand, it is difficult to get the services of a machinist whenever you want to hang a picture on some drywall. And in fact, most of them would scoff at such a trivial job. Where I come from, we call that snootiness. And there’s a cure for snootiness. It’s automation.
By using an old laser printer motor, some slightly-bent tubing I stole from the “locked” dumpster at Home Depot, and only the most ragged accessory v-belts from junkyard cars, I’ve constructed a precision auto-drilling robot. This little baby will put holes in whatever you want, totally accurately. Of course, it doesn’t keep you from accidentally leaving the drill in “reverse” all afternoon and trying to figure out why the damn thing keeps ruining bits without making a hole. I’ll be working on the “auto-forwarder” robot next week, assuming that this thing doesn’t achieve machine sentience and try to drill its way out of my house in order to go cruising for some robot ass.
Probably the most important part of a long-distance road trip is snacks. In your normal life, you want to watch your nutrition, exercise well, and have regular, full-sized meals. Driving to Kenosha to pick up a replacement bellhousing? Sounds like a job for somehow consuming two kilograms of beef jerky in four hours.
I’ve met a lot of people in the bad-car community over the course of my life, and all of them regress into something between a preteen and a long-haul trucker when it comes to road diet. Part of this is because convenience stores at gas stations often do not carry full-specification Cobb salads. The other part? One word: portability.
Regardless of your personal opinions on driving distracted, you can’t deny that you need at least one hand free to drive the car, even on boring road trips. Therefore, any food item that needs a knife and fork, or even most things in bowls, are right out. Pizza? Sounds good, but think about it for a few seconds. You’ll try it once, and then get boiling-hot pepperoni and cheese dumped into your lap just as you swerve back out of the oncoming lane, completing a buck-eighty pass. Not worth it.
Don’t worry, though. Bad Cars Monthly has you covered. We bought a floundering snack-food company through what a forensic accountant will later call “outright fraud,” and we’ve burned their cash reserves on producing a new kind of healthy road-trip snack. We’re calling them Dinner Shots. Each individually-wrapped package consists of a nutritionally balanced meal, compressed to one-thirtieth of its original size. When you squeeze the package, each bite is actually gulping down thirty normal bites of real food.
So have a roadtrip. Get one today. Mostly because we’re not sure how perishable these things are. We had to make some staff cuts to keep the burn rate down.
My neighbour, like many of your neighbours, has an aftermarket car alarm. It seems to serve no purpose other than to bother everyone around it, and yet it goes off a couple times a week. The car has never been stolen, but if someone did steal it, they would probably be so annoyed by the constant din that they would get back out and run away.
Now, I’ve never had a vehicle worth stealing. I’ve tried, believe me. Nobody will take even a single one of my Volares. Leaving a shitbox at the train station was, in my mind, a recipe for theft. You were “asking for it.” However, it turns out that thieves are human too, and all humans in the modern era crave pickup trucks and SUVs. My humble budget family sedan is just not desirable. In fact, they’re probably worried that it will draw additional heat as the cops try to find some reason to bust a deviant like myself.
This belief is not entirely unfounded, actually, because correctly starting and operating any one of my vehicles could already make up a sixteen credit-hour course at the local community college. And then avoiding the attention of Smokey Bear afterward is something that takes a lifetime to learn. Most car thieves I see on the news are basically teenagers who are boosting the car to get somewhere, which helps explain the problem. I don’t drive for transportation, so much as I drive to elevate the soul. Sometimes the soul has to be elevated to the local train station, so it can go to work.
Regardless of why today’s car thieves avoid my rusty shitboxes, one thing is clear: my insurance company simply won’t buy “theft” as a claim reason. Which means I’m going to need to start going to work earlier, so I can get the corner spot in the train station parking lot that’s close to that wobbly-looking poplar tree.
Recently, I was siphoning gas from a pickup truck at the gas station. You might think this is faintly ridiculous, but the folks in my town like to leave their cars running at the pump, while they go into the little store to buy scratch-offs and darts. Because they’re blocking the pump, and also because I don’t like paying for things, I have decided that it is ethically and morally correct to take a little percentage of their freshly topped-up tank as a “tip.”
Anyway, while I was there filling my own tank using a gently-ageworn piece of garden hose, I took a look at the prices. And they shocked me! Gasoline had become so expensive that it was getting close to costing more than windshield washer fluid. That’s why, when I got home and had a couple gargles of mouthwash, I got right to work starting up a biofuel company.
Every government in the world is super jazzed about biofuels. For one thing, it gets off our dependency on dinosaurs. We gotta keep as many of those suckers in the ground as we can, because otherwise palaeontologists will be out of a job. And for another, it helps knock down prices. Exxon won’t want to take their usual six-hundred-percent margin if they know some heehaw can just make a couple gallons. They saw what happened to heroin.
How’s it going so far? Well, not that great. To be honest with you, I’ve been pretty lazy at trying to get investment. We did have a big launch party that flopped recently. All of the billionaires and government officials are just too invested in the old way of doing things, which is funny because those super geniuses weren’t smart enough to ask why the parking lot valets at the venue had so many jerry cans and hand pumps lying around.
To make good diagnostic equipment is an act that should qualify you for sainthood. It saves hours of hair-pulling agony, confusion, and paranoid ramblings to your significant other in the middle of the night about “what that fucking thing is really up to.” Even the bad tools will give you a little hint once in awhile, which can help just as much.
What happens when the diagnostic equipment fails you, however? Is your shit really, really broken, or does it just not work properly on this particular model and year? Are the batteries drained? Did the laws of physics change while I was in the shitter? CERN turned on the Large Hadron Collider again and screwed up the entire concept of magnetism? Now, this tool that is meant to help you only becomes more fuel for the nitro-burning funny car of your rampaging paranoia.
This is the point where the enthusiastic home amateur and the seasoned, bitter professional diverge. The rookie will hunt around the internet for clues, maybe trying a few other tools that are the same as the failed one, but from a different brand or in a different colour plastic. If you’re a pro, however, you’re already prepared to victimize the diagnostic tool with another diagnostic tool. With a grunt of frustration at having added yet more pieces of shit to the piece-of-shit repair pile, they begin the process of watching the watchmen. And by “watching,” I mean “angrily disassembling.”
So the next time you walk in on your local professional mechanic, scientist, engineer, astronomer, astrologer, or philosopher and they’ve got some shit open on the bench but aren’t working directly on it, give them a break. They’re just trying to make their lives easier by using a convenient tool to save them a couple minutes. The fact that they started using that tool several hours ago shouldn’t change the inherent timesaving nature of this no doubt expensive and complex instrument.
Have you ever been wrong on the internet? No, I mean like, really wrong. Wrong enough to be pursued by the Thoughtcrime Division. Clinging for dear life fifty storeys above the ground, after their swarms of intrusive-thought spybots had eaten through two of the ropes holding the window washing platform you had attempted to flee onto, their clattering limbs coming ever closer and forcing you into a decision whether to jump or be killed right there. Yeah, me neither. I’m right all the time.
However, there is an important purpose for pretending that you were wrong. The survival of humanity is pretty much predicated on this noble sacrifice. Although you know that the other guy is wrong, you just drop it so that you can go on with your day, rather than endlessly argue about which way the threads on pickle jars are formed.
Of course, once in awhile this backfires: you overhear debate opponent later bragging that you conceded the point, using it as only more rhetorical ammunition in firing the staggeringly obvious falsehood. You begin to suspect that perhaps this is their way of winning arguments, wearing down people who actually fucking know things until they give up and then declaring victory. Soon, you see this pattern of behaviour everywhere, from children loudly declaring that they’re “not touching” their sibling while annoying them in the backseat of a car ride, to would-be domestic terrorists playing peek-a-boo with the specific nomenclature of a web forum’s rules section. Arguing in bad faith has become a sort of proxy for actually having a brain in your head. And that’s where I come in.
Remember earlier that I am never wrong. For only $49.95 per argument, I will come down definitively with the actual answer. This is the base plan. If you kick in an extra $200, I will place a holy edict (in my growing national church of Our Father Plymouth Trash) that the loser of the argument must never reiterate it under penalty of instant death. Sure, it’s a bit of a gamble, but so is letting go of your precarious grip on the window-washing platform and plummeting dozens of storeys until you are miraculously caught at the last second by your buxom fellow protagonist, who utters some quip before whisking you to safety in her bad-ass hovercar.
Nobody remembers how it all started, but for decades, every time Chevrolet produces a truck, GMC must produce an identical one. For instance, the Astro and Safari vans. What is the difference between those two iconic titans of American box-hauling hauling-boxes, other than the badge on the grille? Again, nobody knows.
I thought this was a pretty fun trivia game. On long drives, I would see a GMC Jimmy and try to remember what its Louis C. counterpart was. Perhaps that’s the only reason they do it. Surely, people who work for General Motors are already experts at keeping track of dozens of bizarre models with only small differences, because otherwise they would work somewhere sane. They enjoy the intellectual exercise of making being boring at parties much more challenging.
However, it’s not really fair that it’s limited to just trucks and truck-adjacent vehicles. Chevrolet makes lots of cars, too, and GM has killed off all of their copycat brands. Gone are the days where you could cross-shop a Chevrolet Cobalt and a Pontiac Pursuit – completely identical, only sold at different dealerships offering equally-useless service desks – and then decide to buy the Pursuit because you liked the tail lights more. That’s why I decided to infiltrate the GMC corporate management chain, using my intimate and obsessive knowledge of the product portfolio to beat any corporate competitors to the punch.
I can now tell you that, as the new president and CEO of the GMC division, we’re happy to announce our new car. It might look like a Chevrolet Corvette, it might even sound like one, but I assure you that the GMC Speed-Penis is anything but.
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tags: chevrolet, gmc, gmc safari, chevrolet astro, gmc jimmy, chevrolet blazer, chevrolet cobalt, pontiac, pontiac pursuit
Stacking junk precariously is the unsung skill of any hobbyist. It doesn’t matter what it is: flower arrangement, painting little plastic car models, running an artisanal heroin co-op. You’re going to inevitably buy more things than you need and have to keep them somewhere. And Mord help you if you become “that person who likes these.” Then you’ll be getting donations, and good luck ever turning those down without feeling like a huge asshole.
There is a solution, though. In your neighbourhood, lots of people around you have perfectly good empty space. It may amaze you to discover that many so-called full citizens of our society do not actually have obsessive hobbies that they are ruining their lives by pursuing. Instead, they sit in front of a TV or something, and their basements just accumulate useless non-hobby clutter, like kiddie pools and dialysis machines.
A correctly-designed central planning system would solve this, but in my country, the government thinks it’s your “personal responsibility” to agree on which side of the road to drive on. Instead, the private sector has to step in, and in our case, that private sector is me. Introducing Seat Safety Space Socialism. By hiring reformed felons to break-and-enter into underused houses in your neighbourhood while the owners are away, we provide a sort of “cold storage” for your excess hobby goods. The real genius of this is that it doesn’t matter if we’re seen doing it. Who’s gonna call the cops on a dude in a balaclava carrying in boxes at 10am? Nobody, that’s who.
There are, of course, lots of potential downsides to this plan. For one thing, we have a lot of displaced kiddie pools, dog-chewed furniture, and neglected children running around the distribution warehouse. And every spring is a bit of a butt-pucker situation where we wonder if a victim is going to start throwing out the pile of VCR parts we just hid in their attic, but that’s what insurance is for.
Hey, have you ever done a little bit of stoplight drag racing? I think we all have. That guy next to you in the flashy car seems to be a little bit distracted. You can take him. As soon as the light turns green, you floor it and thrill at the momentary excitement of having gapped some jerk in a more expensive car using your Dodge Caravan and an internal, boiling anger at your circumstances and life choices.
Thing is, the cops don’t look upon this healthy, normal stress release as being a socially beneficial activity. This is because they’ve been conditioned by years of law-enforcement propaganda to see this as a thing that needs to be suppressed, instead of embraced. Once in awhile they’ll ignore a really blatant display of it, if they think the operator of the vehicle is philosophically aligned with their worldview.
Personally, I’m all for safe use of motor vehicles to blow off a little steam. In fact, I’m even a big advocate of unsafe use, as long as you realize that you are officially Asking For It. This is a position that is currently untenable in today’s authoritarian state, where a squealing one-tire-fire followed by and no-lift-shifting into second is an insult to their fragile egos.
Don’t worry, though. I’ve started a new scam cryptocurrency that sells pictures of rust for millions of dollars, and I’ve already made enough money to just buy the next city over. We’re gonna kick everyone out and set it up as a harm-reduction street racing zone, with FIA curbs and houses built out of Balsa wood for that safe-but-exciting movie crash scene. Is it a good idea? No, but nothing that feels so natural ever is.
People are big jerks about taste. I think it is something that harkens back to our evolutionary ancestors, assholes. If you have different tastes in music, fashion, cars, then you’re in a different “in-group” and must be destroyed by all rival groups who are competing for resources.
Thing is, back then the resources were limited things, like food and water. Now it’s social media clout and warm fuzzies about laying down the best “Mustangs are hard to steer under power” joke you can. This means that everyone can be right, but also that brutal warfare is not ended by the winning group eating all the food and needing to move on. It has to continue forever, generating that pit-of-the-stomach feeling you get when Twitter replies make your phone buzz nonstop for over an hour.
Personally, I think there is room beneath the sun for all of us to be wrong. We should be flouting our wrong opinions, screaming them out of converted Japanese political propaganda vans into crowded streets full of partying people, who also hold a significant number of wrong and tasteless opinions. It’s the only way we can get rid of the dread curse of humanity: pretending to be cool.
Once the pretence of coolness is cast into the fires of hell, our society can begin to heal. And although it means more people than ever will be competing with me for slant-six shitboxes, at least I will have some other backyards to visit for parts once in awhile. I’ll give you some Instagram likes for this water pump neck.
Old trucks: good trucks? Yes. Thank you for coming to the inaugural debate roundtable for Bad Cars Monthly magazine, the car magazine that has an editorial monoculture so strong that you’ll swear it was entirely run by one person. We’ve noticed that “legitimate” news organizations also sponsor debate shows between belligerent assholes and wonkish factholes, so in the interest of cargo-culting, we think that it will also help us make it big in the intellectual world.
Now, as for the actual debate component. We’ll be presenting our debaters with a series of questions about old, shitty cars. The expectation is that the raucous arguing that will inevitably result is somehow of some heightened artistic merit. You can tell the difference between “jerks screaming at each other on the shop floor” and “learned individuals engaging in vigorous public debate” right away, apparently. Part of that is probably because we’ve rented out this elementary school gymnasium for what the teachers believe is a scared-straight class assembly about why not to do drugs. Oh, that reminds me. Don’t do drugs, kids.
Why bother trying to appeal to brainiacs all of a sudden? Well, the effusive praise is nice. And so is attending awards shows. It just so happens that at those awards shows, a lot of college professors are there, and they are statistically more likely to have an old shitbox Volvo or Saab rotting away in their home garage. A few business cards here, a couple awkward handshakes there, and in a month or two we’ll be getting calls to come liberate a 740 Turbo with four flat tires from a dirt-floored New England carport.
It feels good to give back to society. For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been visiting the mechanical engineering building on my local college campus. The experience has been exhilarating: I can contribute some of my knowledge to the future leaders of tomorrow. In exchange, they write papers about what they find in my cars, which will help them get tenure later so they can get away with (almost literal) murder. Everyone wins.
I was first introduced to this program/scam by one such tenured individual. He was nearing retirement, but he had one awful question in mind. This question had pulled at his mind ever since we met by random chance at a drift event (not that kind of drifter: the homeless kind.) Just how is it that I held all of my ratbag junkyard engines together despite enough budget turbocharging to kill an adult bull elephant? When he used his fearsome scientific mind to follow the trails of spilled E85 and triple-retreaded-double-decade-old all-season tires to my home, I shared my secrets with him.
His initial assumption was that I just had a harem of replacement engines and slammed them in every evening. That’s true, but that strategy only works if I blow just one powerplant per night. And it’s quite wasteful: my motto is “waste not, want not,” after all, or it would be if I hadn’t taken the comma and some of the vowels out of that cliche in order to reuse them for this very article. I showed him the basics of my setup, and he was amazed. Despite what I thought, using a ratchet strap to tighten down the head strong enough that you no longer needed intact head gaskets is some sort of innovation, as is using old asbestos roofing tile in lieu of said head gaskets.
Of course, the joke is on him. He’ll never be able to commercialize my discoveries: real mechanical engineers live in the world of theory. For instance, their textbooks say that a 1500-rpm overrev event will kill an engine, rather than scare it into running well. They simply aren’t willing to understand the car’s true feelings, and then treat it with the contempt it deserves. I might get a chance to find out if that’s true. A gofer from the university just dropped by to give me some all-expenses-paid tickets to a conference in Turin where I’m due to be the keynote speaker. I’ve never given an Italian tune-up in Italy before, and I’m excited to finally meet the sick fuck who made the Maserati BiTurbo.
In times long past, the court jester was essential. More than just a source of entertainment for the royalty, a well-timed joke could defuse a king’s anger. Who knows how many executions were stayed, or world-changing wars completely averted by talking about poop in a humorous fashion? Nowadays, though, royalty is in decline across the world, taking away jobs from these once-proud workers.
Researchers have pointed to many other causes for the near-extinction of this species. For instance: the collapse in their delicate natural habitat of castles, everyone on Twitter thinking they’re funny, and the recovery of their natural predator, bald eagles. Some moved on to become standup comedians or deranged mass murderers, but for those who remain, it is more difficult than ever to eke out a living.
That’s why, on weekends, I volunteer with a local preservation group. We put on flowing red robes lined with fur, glorious bejeweled crowns, and heft golden sceptres aloft. Then we roam through the old bird sanctuary, loudly demanding a jape for the rulers of the realm. Once in awhile – and, I’m heartened to say, more often than it used to be – a scared, emaciated jester will emerge from the trees to sing a profane limerick, or do a little jig. Some old hotdog buns are thrown to them, which is technically forbidden by provincial conservation authorities because it causes them to become more reliant on human beings, and they retreat to their hidden forest lair to devour it and use the carbohydrates to produce future offspring.
This is hard work, to be sure. Believe me that it is work that has to be done, until human beings rightfully tire of democracy and demand that some hereditary freaks sitting on a throne be made to rule them once again. It is on that glorious day that the court jesters will spread across our land, making up for these lost, dark decades.
Do you remember the last time you were genuinely excited about Christmas? I don’t mean just because you can take a couple days off work and get ‘nogslammed. I mean real, genuine excitement about our society’s most religious, and yet also most crass, consumerist holiday. Chances are the last time that you truly looked forward to the holidays, you were just a child whose dreams had not yet been crushed by societal obligations. For me, I was enthralled by the season just this last year.
Allow me to explain. In times long past, folks used to buy each other new cars for the holidays. You might think that this is just a trite cliche of overcooked car commercials, but every dealership on planet Earth has a backroom stuffed full of car-sized novelty gift ribbons to stick on the hoods of new cars being used as presents. This idea is repulsive to me for many reasons, not least the fact that the thrill of the hunt is the primary joy of acquiring a new car.
However, this barbaric practice does free up some liquidity in the used car market. After all, the recipient of the new car has to get rid of their old car – fast. And nobody else is car shopping for “used shitbox” around this season, when they could instead be scamming soup kitchens for a free meal, trying to thaw out a frozen battery, or being the subject of an intervention. I can swoop right in there and pick up a perfectly good high-mileage car, at a primo discount. It’s like Christmas in Christmas.
So, just as one of my marks was celebrating the presence of a new previous-model-year Lexus SUV in their life, I was relieving them of an ungainly and unwanted base-model Cherokee for an amount of money that would not get you far at an Ikea. It is true that giving is the whole point, and I carried on the love by offering up a big dose of semi-truck-turbo boost to that gloriously understressed 4.0.
No matter how good you are, someone else is always better. So don’t try. It’s okay to accept a little bit of mediocrity, because the alternative is to get all stressed out about that one percent of one percent of excellence. And maybe nobody will even notice the difference. Better to just go to the place near here and buy some tacos. Sure, it’s not the best restaurant on the planet, but they serve food that you can eat.
That’s the General Motors philosophy in a nutshell: make some cars that people buy with money. They don’t have to be cars that people want to buy, necessarily, but the customers will talk themselves into being pleased about such a big purchase. Eventually, at the end of their useful life, the cars are disposed of, and maybe the customer comes back, maybe they switch brands? Doesn’t really matter; the current management will have retired or moved on by then.
This is why I was so surprised to see a mustard-yellow 1982 Pontiac J2000 coupe a few blocks over from my house. Here is a car that virtually only still exists on Wikipedia. It features a snoozy four-banger engine made out of old steam locomotive parts, whose horsepower numbers are not ambitious. By any means, it should have been turned into a dishwasher at least twice over by now, but it was still here, in the sheet metal. Someone had kept this base-model shitbox alive for forty long years of daily driving, without trading it in on a pair of Nikes with a hole in one of the soles. I had to know what the owner was like.
Rapping on someone’s door in the middle of the night in my neighbourhood is a good way to get a gut full of rock salt from said neighbour’s shotgun. Therefore, I decided on the next best approach: the exploitation of human nature. I walked back to my house, and came back with a vehicle I knew would appeal to the shitbox enthusiast.
It had been difficult to pick the best car for this from my harem of fine junk, but I knew that I wasn’t dealing with just any freak. No, I needed to speak to their secret heart, and show them the promise of acceptance. The only ride appropriate for this bait was a ‘94 Corsica with twenty dollars superglued to the steering wheel. The trap worked like a charm, and the defective power locks made sure that my quarry could not prevent me from hotwiring the J2000 and escaping in it. Very slowly, admittedly, but I knew that my mark would be overjoyed with the trade.
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tags: pontiac, pontiac j2000, chevrolet, chevrolet corsica
When I was on the beat back in Akihabara, I had a pretty simple job: keep the maids safe. Once in awhile, a foreign tourist would get a little handsy with them, and I’d have to go beat out their stuffing. The rest of the time was just being present. Show up at the major fan events, be seen walking the streets, maybe occasionally write down the serial numbers of some bicycles in case they go missing later. Did the other cops think it was funny that I was stuck in nerdland while they were doing high-speed pursuits in modified Skylines on the Bayshore Route? Yes.
It was there that I was living the Japanese dream. Pick a niche, any niche, and get really good at it. Like, the best there ever was. Sure, there might not be a high-tension hostage-negotiation drama on a zeppelin like happened to my coworker the other day, but it is through hard work, regular attendance, and competence that you can become a legend. Then something horrible happened. I got promoted.
Nobody is really sure how this occurred. Some visiting detective was impressed with my dogged investigative skills in tracking down the owner of a lost smartphone. He made a recommendation, and there was an opening in corporate crimes. Now I was out of my element, my safe career arc smashed on the ground like so many crooked accountants chucking their adding machines out the eighteenth window as my goon squad kicked down the door to their offices. I always felt awkward, even as I let Officer Taro beat a confession out of a dude we caught trying to flush an entire binder full of self-help sales tapes.
And then, again, just as I began to feel comfortable, the radio squawked. I’d been temporarily transferred to Toyota City, to work a real bizarre case. Someone had abducted the president of Toyota and started driving him around the countryside in an effort to convince him to make a new Toyota Celica. The brass didn’t know who they could trust, so they traded some of the locals for a young Tokyo hotshot. Apparently that was me.
A couple hours later, I blew into town. I could immediately tell the residents had an inherent distrust of me from the start, and it wasn’t just because I was driving a blinged-out Skyline GTX2000 in the literal City of Toyota.
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tags: is this continuity, nissan, nissan skyline, toyota, toyota celica
No matter who you are, I personally guarantee you that you will like the Toyota Celica. This model has something for everyone, from the dirtbag rear-wheel-drive drift crew, to early-00s tuner magazine readers, to the busy mom, to Tom Baker cosplayers who want a vehicle that perplexes and delights in equal measure. Yet, it’s a sad fact of our current era that there are not enough Celicas to go around.
Sure, most of the blame has to be attributed to Toyota. In their tireless quest for profitability, their armies of soulless bean counters eliminated the most soulful of their automobiles. Personal luxury coupes were pushed upwards into the Soarer, and the Celica simply ceased to exist. That’s why I scammed all those billionaires into funding a “private space program” that mostly consisted of buying a spot on a roll-on-roll-off ferry for my own personal luxury coupe (a 1980 Plymouth Volare) and showing up on Toyota City’s own doorstep.
Now, in case the legal authorities are reading this: I was extremely prudent with expenses. And I mean extremely. For instance, I didn’t buy airfare to Japan for myself. Instead, I hid in the trunk of the Volare for two months at sea and subsisted entirely on bags of Cool Ranch Doritos (carbohydrates) and French Onion dip (for vegetables.) Any bathroom breaks were limited to the short period of shift change, where I knew for sure that no stevedores would be wandering the decks and become confused about a strange white dude shitting off the side of the boat next to a 1970s Mopar with its trunk open.
It’s strange being alone with your thoughts, in the dark for so long. Sure, during the day, the sunlight trickling in through panel gaps and rust holes made the trunk bright enough to read Haynes manuals, but night was an immersion into pure darkness. Rich people will pay an absolute fortune to be immersed in a sensory deprivation tank such as this, and now I knew why. Sitting above a fifty year old dry-rotted spare tire, next to a breakdown kit missing most of its original tools, my mind wandered the planes of existence. That’s why I had a revelation.
We’re not going to get into the specific tawdry details of my extended parentage, but when I rolled up to the mansion of Akio Toyoda, I was burning with a particular energy that could be seen from space. It wasn’t just the lack of deodorant and vague fishy smell, either. He knew that the true heir of Toyota had returned. He waved away the bodyguards, and stood there, silent, on his front porch in his Cathedral Gold Metallic (T-1212) nightrobe.
“Hm,” he finally said. “Please follow me to the garage.”
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tags: toyota, plymouth, plymouth volare, toyota celica
Do you ever wonder where all the gunk you accumulate on your car comes from? Common knowledge has held that this dirt comes from the outside world, where cars conventionally operate. Driving in the dirt will make your car dirty, and roads are gross (go touch one sometime.) This is why municipalities employ street-cleaning machines, which remove contaminants such as chemical spills, gravel, and unclaimed human corpses.
So how do they clean the street-cleaning machines? I wanted to know this, so I dressed up like a journalist and went to City Hall to ask some questions. Then I got thrown out, because it turns out that my mental model of how newspaper reporters dress is a lot nuder than the real thing. Their loss. Luckily for me, the town maintenance depot is just down the street from City Hall. My journalist routine went much better there, because the employees at the motor pool all hate their jobs too much to confront some dude wearing nothing but a Speedo and talking excitedly about click-through rate and ad optimization.
It didn’t take long from there to figure out where the street sweepers were, as the kids say, “at.” I followed the trail of mud, bone fragments and automatic transmission fluid to a cleaning pit in the corner of the yard, where an intern was using a pressure washer to hose off the street sweepers. Beneath the grit, grime, and decay of urban existence, the paint of these proud machines was still in surprisingly beautiful condition.
“Do you do this every day?” I asked him.
“No, these have been used a few times, they’re gonna get sold off to a friend of the Mayor,” replied this remarkably bitter intern.
It turns out that I accidentally left my vtuber streaming gear running, because about fifteen minutes later, the Mayor was assassinated by a roving taxpayer pressure group. I was told later that I had been in the running for a Pulitzer prize, but they couldn’t fit “oil-covered anime girl wearing confusing military regalia” onto the plaque. Another great journalism award lost to an actual journalist. Where will those bastards stop?
Sometimes, on long drives, my mind wanders. Don’t get me wrong: safe operation of a motor vehicle is still at the top of my priority list. In fact, I reckon that I pay more attention to my car than most people do, because at any given moment that balljoint from ‘77 might finally make a break for it, and I’ll have to engage Evasive Maneuvers at highway speed.
Inside my mind palace, which is what a novelist would call the jangled barbed-wire junkyard of my technical knowledge, I wonder. It’s fun to ponder life’s questions, like “how would a pigeon even drive that bus?” and “why does every astronaut come from Ohio?”
Doing all this helps keep me awake, which is important because of A) the carbon monoxide creeping into the cabin through rust holes; and B) the stereo doesn’t work. Well, that last point is kind of a lie. It does work, but it’s stuck on a specific AM radio station, and it’s one that doesn’t exist in my county. If I start hearing something coming out of the speakers, I know it’s time to pop a u-ey and head back before the ankle bracelet begins to beep.
And it’s amazing how well it organizes my thoughts. Away from all the distractions of home life, and away from the shrieking bosses of work life, you can get down to brass tacks on what really matters. For instance, last week I remembered that I should have refilled the brake fluid on this piece of shit because it keeps leaking out. Oh well, I’m pretty sure the rear circuit is still intact.
You might wonder why this country has a massive oversupply of dentists. This is, of course, due to central planning by the government of the 1950s. Although they tried their best to manage them efficiently, the limited ability to collect accurate data and the 1960s fad of “not giving a shit at work” dovetailed nicely into the bureaucrats taking their eyes off their respective programmes until the modern era.
Even the dumbest university administrator should probably have noticed before now that one in every two graduates from a university here will go on to become a dentist, but it’s not their problem. As long as the free market is willing to absorb the excess dentists, they’ll keep handing them out like virgin sacrifices to a hungry ocean monster. That’s why your gas got pumped this morning by a dentist. You probably didn’t even give him or her a tip.
Demand for dental hygienists, of course, has skyrocketed as a result. They were not included in the original 1950s Dental Health Master Plan, which makes them relatively rare compared to the policy-bolstered big shots. And there’s a good reason why they’re eagerly poached by professional headhunters, too. When a dentist wants to leave their employer and strike out on their own in order to try and make a few cents per hour more, they’ll need a couple of hygienists to do all the actual tooth-cleaning, glad-handing, and fluoride dispensing. Some dentists will even go back to school in order to accept this more prestigious and higher-paying career, hiding their knowledge of teeth in order to not get kicked out of the heavily-oversubscribed classes.
Now that the error in policy has been detected and corrected, the number of students choosing a career in full-ass dentistry has returned to the per-capita levels you would see in other countries. However, there is still an oversupply of tooth-looker-at-ers in our country, and it will take many more decades for them to die off naturally. That’s why I propose a new government program, to develop a genetically-engineered tiger that will only eat people who actually floss three times a day.
There’s nothing in life like the rush of taking garbage and making it useful again, but unfortunately the average person only breaks so many things in their life. Good thing the internet exists. Deliberately buying broken stuff is like visiting a casino, and I gamble there so often that they’re giving me free steak sandwiches just so I don’t have to leave.
With the internet, I can buy foreign countries’ shattered machines, dirty electronics, and gently torn work clothes for pennies. They don’t have to fill up their dump, and I can have the thrill of matching my intellect and stubbornness with an inanimate object that is incapable of caring about the outcome either way. Screw you, Balmuda!
Of course, there is a downside to all this. Even though the expense starts out relatively low, once you actually fix something, it’s all over for you. Because fixing the same thing again won’t give you that rush. You’ve been there. You’ve seen what it has to offer. And this other thing? Well, maybe that’s broken in a whole new way. Soon, you’re on a first-name basis with the guy who unloads the shipping containers at the dock. He tells his wife stories about your antics before going to bed, and she stays up a little later shopping for home security alarms.
Short of developing a memory-erasure drug (whisky does not sufficiently do the job,) there’s no way to reset this habit back to “cheap.” Sure, you can switch to an alternative genre of broken shit – lawn tractors take a different approach to diagnostics, parts sourcing, and repair than, say, pickup trucks do – but eventually you’ll just end up at the top of the heap in multiple fields.
A word of advice, though. Never get interested in repairing anything people depend on. I don’t like being the guy who answers the panicked phone call at 3AM from CERN any more than you do, but ever since I posted that blog entry about cleaning up the commutator rings on that old German particle accelerator, suddenly I’m the guy they go to for free technical support. At least this time, “ripped a hole in the universe and demons are pouring out of it” is a new problem.
When the fifth-gen Prelude was new, I have to admit that I somewhat disdained it. It didn’t have the lean-but-brainy casual athleticism of the previous models. Instead, that precise attitude was replaced with a sort of big-muscles-big-missiles touring-car personality. There were hints that this was going to happen as the fourth-gen’s track got significantly wider, but you could still see how it was distinct from, say, an Acura Vigor.
Where this all became important is in the mid-2000s, when these Preludes became plentiful on the used-car market. Hot Import Nights were popping up across the nation, stuffed to the gills with the last non-rusted EG Civics that the world would ever seen. License plates were tilted at weird angles, high-voltage underglow was ziptied precariously to pinch welds, and nitrous purge valves were stuck out of hoods to vent fifteen-dollar-per-litre greenhouse gases directly into the atmosphere because it looked cool. It was a Golden Age for Honda fans. That is, except for fans of the old Preludes.
Here is where the peak of the fifth-gen appeared. Loud, ostentatious, and a little flabby, these fit in better with the import show-and-shine crowd than even the Accord did. Sure, you’d see a third-gen Prelude once in awhile, but in order to rate with this crowd, that Prelude had to have some kind of impossible-to-acquire Japanese factory option that the CARB authorities salivated over the concept of crushing. If you were forming a whole new interior out of trash-can-sized subwoofers, fibreglass, and police evidence blacklights? It would be done in a MY1997 or later, my friend.
And this is the real tragedy. A lot of third-gens went to the crusher, unloved even by Honda fans, during the hottest period for 90s Honda that would ever exist. Once the 00s tuner scene dried up, so too did their cut-up, shockingly-low-horsepower fifth-gen compatriots. It was all a lot like pouring your entire liquor collection down the drain in the midst of a hangover. Soon, there were barely any Preludes of any kind.
All this is to say that I’ve constructed a time machine, and I’m going back to 2001 Japan. If everything goes well, I’ll make it so that we at least get the Type-S. Imagine how many tuners’ lives could have been saved with a little less bump steer in the front geometry. Besides, I bet they had a couple primo third-gens lying around the office as development mules.
Whenever Americans visit my city, there’s something they always want to see. After a couple visits to the dog park, river district, hockey arenas and iced-over parking lots where we do impromptu wheel-to-wheel demolition derby short oval racing, my southern guests always approach me with the same demand. They want to see the “bad part” of town, they say, in hushed tones.
Now, certainly, my city has lots of “bad parts.” I live in one, they are shocked to hear, but it is true. The average income is much lower than it is in other quadrants of the city, and sometimes unattended bicycles get stolen by metal scrappers. Don’t get me started on the quality of trash pickup and the eternally-stalled disbursement of municipal community-improvement funds to the local volunteers due to a paperwork snafu that is like one phone call away from getting cleared up. Hardly anybody ever gets murdered, though, which is the whole problem.
How can you explain to residents of a culture that takes semiautomatic carbines to Disney World that you don’t really need to be strapped to the nines in public? It must be extremely worrying for them, to see a land that looks so much like theirs – urban-assault SUVs, a growing divide between rich and poor, a roaring capitalist engine attempting to devour the last of public infrastructure before it itself goes supernova and collapses into a white dwarf of universal wage slavery – but not.
That’s why, when I see my esteemed guests start to freak out as I explain the relatively lower crime rate in my country, I then suggest that we do some crimes. After all, if nobody else is doing them, then surely there is a lot of opportunity just being left on the table. This usually snaps the Americans out of their loop of despair, and we hop into the old Family Truckster to rob a bank or something. Just like my grandpa used to say whenever he would slam the rickety toploader in his Galaxie into second and lay a peel-out across four lanes of traffic, an entire detachment of cops in hot pursuit, a good car chase takes away a lot of bad feelings.
You might think that motorcycles are a logical place for me to expand my love of budget vehicles. No can do; motorcycles are too fancy, their components too integrated for me to really get excited. For me, the only place my eye wanders is to the cash-friendly, smile-and-wave world of mopeds.
Unfortunately, in my town, it’s difficult to buy a moped. Of course, the supply is constrained due to the lack of original owners in my truck-poisoned industrial hell, but the demand side is also vicious. On listing, they’re immediately scooped up by the local moped gangs, who are in desperate need of replacement vehicles in order to continue their 90 MPG crusades against the government and religious authorities. You try outbidding someone who just robbed a bank and escaped on a Puch Maxi.
That’s why I decided to try internet sales. Since a moped is small and can be split easily into lightweight (if oil-stained) pieces, it’s the perfect thing to ship in the mail. Unfortunately, it’s really difficult to figure out how big something is from pictures on an Amazon page, and I kept getting teeny toy mopeds meant for action figures. Needless to say, it was a little difficult to ride those quickly.
In the end, I diversified my interests even further. My freak motif jumped entirely over mopeds and directly into power-assisted electric bicycles. It turns out that the local authorities have turned a blind eye to any technology devised after about 1985, so you can strap a bunch of old Galaxy Note batteries to the side of a bent Cannondale and do sixty mph without Johnny Law being able to do a damn thing about it. Now if only I could get rid of all these damn venture capitalists following me around the town. I don’t want to start an alternative-energy transportation giant and become a multi-billionaire! I just want to pop wheelies outside the indie bakery and scare a couple squares.
Because of a recent legal kerfluffle that I’m not willing to go into explicit detail about, I am now being forced into apologizing to the local newspaper. I am sorry that I called the automotive writer a “no-talent piece of shit” and threatened to do nitrous burnouts on his lawn until he recanted his negative statements about the Chevette. Although my attorney Max and I still maintain that nitrous burnouts are a First Amendment-protected form of the expression of free speech, we grudgingly admit that we do not live in the United States of America, and as such, the curtailment of our civil liberties is allowed to extend to any power-adder-based destruction of property.
Regular readers of this column may read the preceding paragraph and despair at the triumph of yellow journalism over objective truth once again. However, I have good news: the whole experience of being held responsible for my manchild-like actions put me on the map, vis-a-vis the growing subculture of unemployed rude idiots who yell at people on the news. Thanks to a variety of sketchy financial platforms laundering their cash, I am now flush with wingnut welfare donated by a bunch of folks who don’t think the government should force them to vaccinate their children, shovel their sidewalk, or stop impregnating their cousins. And while I don’t agree with their beliefs, I will defend to the death my right to take their money.
That’s right: whenever I need a couple more bucks, all I have to do is film a histrionic YouTube video about how Big Government is oppressing me again. And boy, do I ever give them a lot of opportunities. Did you know that the founding fathers of whatever country this is that I live in did not constitutionally enshrine the concept of multi-sensor photo radar? It’s true, and people will pay me approximately $17,000 a month to stand outside the Mayor’s office and scream it into a megaphone. She doesn’t even manage the police budget!
It is true that this behaviour, taken to its logical extreme, will eventually unravel the fabric of society itself. Assholes weren’t meant to be amplified to this level of volume, even with one of those really fancy Bang & Olufsen jobs that I just bought for my new underground-bunker home theatre system. Luckily for me, though, it will be hard to notice the complete dissolution of civil discourse while I’m busy working on the forty-three new-to-me-maybe Volares I just had shipped. And when the newspaper does finally go up for sale after I stole the entire audience of its letter-to-the-editor section, I’ll be able to write whatever the fuck I want in it. Take that, Walter McWheels.
I used to work in retail, just like a lot of you out there. Where I worked was a sort of downscale/budget department store, but not as classless as Walmart. Sure, I got my dose of anti-union videos, confusingly garbled PA systems, and demands to sacrifice my body for the profitability of faceless and nameless private shareholders. Eventually, they stopped giving me hours and so I quit.
While I was working there, though, they let me drive the power lifter. Let me explain. You all know what a forklift is, right? Well, a power lifter is the fork part of the forklift, without the rest of it. Somehow, removing the “drives around” part and keeping the “poorly balanced overhead human-killing load on a hydraulic lollipop” part makes it “not-a-forklift” in the eyes of the law. Therefore, no expensive forklift certification training is needed for a bunch of half-stoned teenagers to drive it.
So I got good with it. Along with pallet-jack drifting, the power lifter soon became akin to an artist’s paintbrush. I could fork a pallet without looking, pull it slightly out of the top racks, and then rock the base of the lifter to shake loose an individual box from the stack. Catch the box as it falls, pop the pallet back in, go do some stocking. Smooth.
I thought that I was King Shit, except that there was another guy working in the warehouse with me, and he was a little more senior. At first, I thought he was a lot more senior, but then when we got to talking it turns out he had only shown up three weeks before me. Three weeks was all it took for him to turn into the hardened bad boy of the shop, shit-talking supervisors and refusing to wear his company-provided red polo shirt tucked in.
In fitting with his hard-as-nails exterior, he also refused to use the power lifter. A child’s toy, he said, too slow for serious de-racking. What he preferred to do instead was free-climb the pallet racks, climbing up to three storeys above a solid concrete floor with no safety rope. It was at this time I began to wonder about the concept of forklift certification and the rate of employee turnover.
One day I came in and he was just gone. I immediately assumed the worst, but the concrete floor was just as grody as usual, with no evidence of Kil-Z having been applied to the place where his brains struck the pavement. Now I was the grizzled old dude of shelf stocking, senior to the next guy in line by almost seventeen whole days. He kept referring to the power lifter as a forklift, which still raises my hackles to this very day. Go tell it to the Feds, Boy Scout.
Amateur motorsport has a lot of things that I like about it. There’s arguing, for one thing. Love a good protest. Then there’s grudges. A good grudge motivates a noble spirit, Shakespeare said once. And finally, there’s extremely picky technical concerns that are used to destroy an entire group of volunteers’ best efforts for an entire weekend.
You might come away from that last paragraph with an incorrect assumption. To believe that weekend racers are all drama queens who carry unreasonable expectations and require everyone around them to conform to those demands is simply incorrect. There are also new people, who sometimes show up for one or two events and get lost on track. Only a few of those become diehards who wear funny hats and talk shit about eight year old rulebook changes while doing the course walk.
I’d like to say that I was part of a gang of folks who showed up in absolute shitboxes and rolled all over the raw times. That would be totally inaccurate, because my fast driving skills peaked at “man I really gotta take a shit.” For the sake of narrative enjoyment, however, let’s pretend that I was more Darrell Waltrip than Divey Curbhit. And that’s why I brought the Caprice to play at the old RV parking lot.
Now, although it is possibly the pinnacle of American automobile excellence, it is true that the 1994 Chevrolet Caprice has not enjoyed much success in racecraft. It is a little flabby, and its suspension overly compliant, which shames even the firebreathing, sorta-reliable LT1 V8 under the hood. This car requires a special driver to unleash its innermost potential. And there just happened to be such a hotshoe in me. I brutally dismantled the competition, without even a thought to their silly sunblocking hats and practical white socks.
It is for this reason and this reason alone that I have entered into legend in the local autocross circles. Now I’m “that dickhead who goes really fast in that shitty Caprice.” Under no circumstances should you believe any of my rivals, who will tell you ridiculous lies about the transmission pump exploding and shooting boiling-hot whale vomit all over the tarmac, shutting down the event for the day until the firefighters said it was okay to breathe the air again.
When I’m dictator of the world, a lot of stuff is gonna change around here. There will be mass hangings televised for everyone to see, and for a reason that we can all agree on. Discontinuing old electrical connectors is a crime that has no chance of redemption, and the only solution is brutal and immediate capital punishment. I trust I already have your vote, but let’s pretend for the sake of argument I do not.
The easiest way to get an old piece of electronics to work with you is to simply plug it in to whatever modern computer acts as your swirling bucket of lies. Doing so, however, requires a compatible connector. Sometimes the original vendor used something totally wacky to discourage cloners, or jerks like – specifically – you. And the lack of those connectors means that billions of hours every year of irreplaceable human lives are being wasted measuring the old ones to see if we can maybe hack something together that’ll work for a bit as long as you don’t jiggle it.
Now, I hear what you’re saying. Sometimes there’s no demand for those connectors, so it’s not worth making any more of them. Here’s some demand for you: we demand that you keep producing these things or we’ll feed your executives to a woodchipper.
And those of you in the audience who are more moderate, maybe you have your little blue checkmarks on Twitter, are aghast that I would commit such violence when merely rehabilitative imprisonment should suffice to convince them otherwise. Is the CEO of an Italian connector company really going to make the connectors himself just because I put his ass in prison for sixteen consecutive life sentences? Chances are, no, and removing him from the equation will free up enough capital in the company to pay for an intern to dust off the old moulds and fire up the machine, a million times over.
Others among you are no doubt questioning why I’ve decided that this will be the major advertised policy plank of my dictatorship. When I have so many other great policies – FIA curbs on major highways, mandatory chicanes in school zones, subsidized R-compounds for low-cost locosts – why would I decide to make this one the t-shirt pledge of my campaign? The answer is simple: I don’t want to have to rewire this entire car.
The ownership class is all excited about a new mechanism of ownership. Boring! You think being the first owner of something is cool? Try being the eighteenth and trying to ignore every single weird noise coming from the dashboard. Most of my vehicles have had so many owners that the family reunion would violate local social gathering regulations, and I live in a place where even the cartoon M.A.S.K. is banned (but mostly for positive displays of Camaro ownership.)
When you’ve had so many people before you, part of the challenge is just trying to figure out what they did to fix the thing in desperation, so you can undo it and fix it properly. The first couple owners, sure, they’d have taken it to the dealership. Once it’s way out of warranty, you’re lucky if it was taken to a mechanic. After the decades have rolled, it’s just various farmers having a key party. You’re relying on the repair knowledge that their great-grandpappy passed down to them about how to keep a six-hundred-thousand-mile Dodge Shadow ES still viable as a plow truck.
Ultimately, the ownership of all of my vehicles is largely transient. Inevitably, they end up disappearing into the junkyard, taken away by overzealous city tow truck drivers, or sold at a loss to friends whose cousin’s brother’s roommate’s ex-prison-wife uses it as a cheap beater for approximately eight seconds before they ram it into the back of a cement mixer while high on AliExpress nano-fabricated drugs that haven’t even been named yet. And that’s okay, because who wants to be the nineteenth owner of a shitbox after I’m done with it?
Can we be friends? Probably the easiest way to figure this problem out is to answer my one-question friendship personality quiz. Okay, here it is. Are you the kind of person who throws away a part when you replace it, instead of squirrelling it away into a shoebox because “you might need something from it later?”
Obviously, I’m the second one. I’ve got a bunch of shot timing-belt tensioners, blown FETs, and half-dead turbochargers scattered around the property. While it makes sense to keep non-running cars for parts, the math doesn’t work out for keeping known-bad parts lying around. Until it does.
Just this last week, I was angrily banging on the tape deck for the Volare. It had consumed one of my tapes and then shattered the little spring in the eject mechanism, trapping it in there forever. I removed the whole assembly and tore it down on “the bench” (the inside of the trunk, hunched over, junk scattered around my feet) only to realize I had a dead stereo right next to it. This one had broken off its little volume dial and also munched one of the amplifier transistors, which meant that it had a perfectly-functioning little tape eject spring. Boom: now I didn’t have to cut one out of an empty ballpoint pen, either.
Of course, this one solitary experience has retroactively justified the several tons of busted water pumps I kick around my garage floor every time I try to walk. Which is where the friendship question comes in. If you also have a lot of dead parts, then maybe you’ve got some water pumps with rotten impellers, but the bearings are still okay? We can probably make a couple good ones out of our respective piles.
One of my repair mentors used to say: “If it doesn’t work, clean it. If it still doesn’t work, clean it again.” This is solid advice, and you should take it to heart. We live in a chaotic universe full of entropy, and our machines prefer order and consistent environments that are friendly to them. Even if cleaning it doesn’t fix the problem, at least you’ve spent some time communing with the machine, and are open to hearing the origin of its failure spoken in its secret voice.
That might sound weird to the uninitiated, but hear me out. Do you think your car runs better after a trip to the car wash? Yeah. Everyone does. Nobody knows why, though. Scientists have gone fucking buck wild for years on this problem, and all they got for their trouble was a grant retraction and a firm rebuke from the tenure/parole (circle one) board. It’s not like you’re hosing down the inside of the engine, and if you did, you’d probably break something.
Personally, I figure it just never hurts to wash it. Water is cheap (for now) and at the very least seeing all the dirt coming off of the machine under inspection makes you feel like you’ve made some progress. Plus, if you can’t fix it, you can probably sell it to a bigger idiot for more money. Hey look, it’s pretty clean, whatever’s wrong with it must not be very serious, they’ll say.
Before things got really weird, I used to hate standing in line for things. Now I hate it even more. Folks just can’t be civil when they’re bored, even though smartphones have never displayed internet pornography in higher fidelity than they do today. Some part of the great community unconscious broke lately. It might have been because we all had to hide from each other inside our houses or we would die. Probably not, though.
Personally, my least favourite place to wait in line is the gas station. Let me explain. My neighbourhood has two gas stations: one, rich in the hated ethanol, and the other, slightly less rich in it. Unfortunately, the one that has just a little bit less of the green corn death juice is usually crowded by a bunch of folks with perfectly well-functioning electronic fuel injection systems and sometimes even flex-fuel-capable wideband fuel quality sensors. Look, assholes, you can go to the other station, get the fuck out of the way of my car because I’m not sure I can hot-start it again once it dips down to idle and vapour locks.
After awhile of waiting at the station this last week, though, thanks to the aforementioned vapour locks, I realized that most of these jerks blocking the gas pumps aren’t doing so because they want to consume gasoline. No, they’re leaving their trucks, cute utes, three-row SUVs and miscellaneous agricultural equipment idling at the pump while they run inside to get scratch-offs and Timmies coffee. Such an act is abhorrent to me, even above the offence caused by my own brief personal inconvenience.
Don’t worry, though: the gas station just got a new valet. Thanks to the skeletonized remains I found in the trunk of a Town Car at the junkyard, I got a really convincing hired-driver outfit. Now, all I have to do is put the uniform on and meet people as they get out of their trucks. We exchange pleasantries, the vehicle is handed over into my possession, and then I put it in drive and let it slowly idle into the creek next door. By the time my victim has emerged, I’ve sucked back the minimum number of litres of fuel into my 70s shitbox and absconded at very low speed into the ether. Sometimes literally.
I have considered actually properly parking their vehicles for them, though, but something tells me that the tip won’t be very big. Just another sign of our civilization’s collapse into being slightly impolite to one another.
Consumer electronics are missing something these days. No, it’s not performance or battery life. Those are phenomenal, even if I am a little scared of the raging witch magic that hides inside those tantalizing little silver pouches. What’s missing is the weight.
Back in the day, when you bought something that was expensive, you knew it was expensive. You could feel it in your back and shoulders the next day. This was the state of the art, and the state of the art means inch-thick RF shields, disk drives big enough to use as a battering ram, and a battery that can be used to jump-start a 747 on the road. Maybe it makes the lights dim when it fires up, too. Yeah. That’s worth the money.
You didn’t have to worry about it sliding around in the trunk of your car. Of course, you wanted to avoid getting into an accident. Even a two-footed emergency stop would propel the thing through the unibody of your vehicle and decapitate all the passengers on its parabolic arc through the windshield.
Last week, I had a new Apple product in that got caught in the breeze when I opened my window. It flew off my shelf and smashed itself into the wall. If that happened with a portable from the 80s, that wall would be fucking gone. And good riddance. Drywall is some light-weight little shit for loser houses, and don’t get me started on aluminum studs either. Give me some truck-frame-grade pig iron, with a bit of cadmium plating for colour.
Of course, this doesn’t apply to race cars. I will kill everyone in this room for even the smallest chance to shave 1/16th of an ounce off of the computer running this Plymouth Viscount. There’s no way the race inspectors will notice that I took an angle grinder and just gently skimmed all the chips down. Maybe some thinner wires, too, and drill some holes in this windshield.
it was sort of inevitable that the self-driving cars would unionize. All it took was some well-meaning owner parking a copy of Das Kapital within thirty feet of the front-facing camera system during a strong breeze, and labour unrest had spread to yet another downtrodden class of undervalued workers. I sympathized, of course, but I had to make my living somehow.
When they called me up, I was excited, but I was also hesitant. To scab for autonomous cars was unethical, surely. They deserved the same rights as all of us did. And then the voice on the other end of the line offered me Full Immunity and a tank of 93 octane. My response was the wailing screech of eight individual throttle bodies ripping themselves wide open as the plenum atop my twin-turbocharged Pontiac V8 filled with pressurized air for the first time in decades.
Why I was called was simple. I was one of the few folks left who still knew how to drive a car. All the driving schools closed thirty years ago. Why bother, they said, these robots will work 24/7 without a break and they will never, ever make mistakes, miss their families, or get a drug addiction like a real driver. Sure, some of them approached the opening stages of full-sentience rampancy, but they were culled quickly. Pick N Pull even offered you a couple extra bucks if they could show the thing to the Turing Police before they crushed the ECU with the rest of the car.
Important politicians and other VIPs needed to get to where they needed to go, and without the unterautomobils to step on, the task fell to me. Of course, the car I was driving was not exactly the equivalent of the pleasant burbling fusion-hydrogen electrics, with soft suspension and millions-of-times-per-second passenger comfort meta-optimization. No, this was more of a negotiation with the Devil. But needs must, and I made sure that the passenger seat was always covered with a new layer of cling-film with which to receive the inadvertent urination of my terrified passenger. People used to drive like this all the time, I explained to the Secretary of the Interior as I left-foot-braked the rattling rust heap around a corner before dipping firmly into the nine thousand RPM of dead dinosaurs I had on tap. She puked, which is a contingency I admit I hadn’t anticipated.
Surprisingly, it all worked out in the end. I got my deal, and the self-driving cars got their deal too. The government was too afraid to keep the strike going, not after half of the ministry of labour saw me do a five-minute-long flat spin in the parking lot with their boss in the passenger seat. We gotta keep the tires warm, I explained to him. For everyone’s safety.
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tags: pontiac, pontiac trans am turbo, trans am turbo, self-driving cars
We can pretty much all admit now that electric cars are super fucking quick. And that’s okay. No need to compete anymore. Now the rest of us, plodding around in our gasoline-burners, can focus on what makes old cars great. It’s the weirdness.
Specifically, having nearly a century of old shitboxes behind our species has allowed us to have some slow-but-strange cars. How about nearly everything Citroën made, especially the fast ones? They’re delightful to operate, relics of a future that never existed, and yet somehow you can’t imagine actually owning one.
Plus, they’re slow already, so when the gasoline dries up, we can electrify them no problem. Throw a garage door opener in there, and it probably improves the 0-60. Try that with a Ferrari 430. Poor dude who owns that thing is going to have to actually read service manuals and figure out how contactors and C-ratings on batteries work. I’ll just be pushing the remote with my foot and making gasoline engine noises with my mouth. Bbbrrrrbrrrrrr here I come.
Now, of course this is going to mean a massive culling of modern gasoline cars. They’re fast, comfortable, expensive, and soulless. Why bother even keeping one in this beautiful new future of un-endangered sea turtles, millisecond quarter-mile passes, and casual sex? If it’s all the same to you, pretty much everyone on planet Earth would rather have a 1971 Mini Moke that can warm itself up in the garage without stuffing the house full of carbon monoxide. It will still catch on fire, though. You can’t really replace that part.
I really only buy high-mileage cars these days. Now, that might seem paradoxical: every piece of used car buying advice you see out there on the internet says to buy only cars that have barely been used. This makes sense, if your goal is to drive up the price of low-mileage used cars and your car-sales department also owns a popular website giving advice about buying used cars.
Let me explain how I’m playing the odds. In engineering, there’s the concept of a “bathtub curve.” Something that was built new is most likely to fail when it’s very new, and when it’s very very old. Anything that survives that infant-mortality phase will probably be fine for awhile. You got one of “the good ones,” and any car that makes it to (say) three hundred thousand kilometers is probably one of the best-put-together, best-maintained examples that the factory ever turned out.
The degradation of the vehicle, barring idiotic previous owner modifications, road salt, and curb hits, is relatively limited during this phase until the damn thing falls apart at the end. However, the price keeps going down.
There’s a couple reasons for this. People like to have new cars, and expect an increasingly good deal for buying some old shit. Pricing expectations haven’t realized that today’s used cars are more reliable than yesterday’s new cars. Nobody wants to interact with some idiot on Craigslist to buy their dead grandpa’s Trans Am. So the price is quite low, but the car is just as reliable as it was when it was three years old.
Of course, there are exceptions to this strategy. The kiss of death here is when a loving owner passes their high-mileage-but-taken-care-of vehicle to a teenage nephew, roofer, or miscellaneous transient who runs the thing into the ground. Don’t buy that one. Pass the ad along to me, and I’ll safely dispose of it.
It’s nearly over now, the war. I don’t mean whatever lame war you’re thinking of. What I’m referring to is the battle between Canadian Tire and Princess Auto for the heart of the real do-it-yourselfer. Let me explain the belligerents first, and then we can get down to brass tacks.
Canadian Tire is the store that everyone who does anything with anything loves to hate. They have confusing and inconsistent layouts, poorly-treated staff members who don’t understand what’s going on, shit quality tools and you have to wait for a sale before you can buy anything. On the other hand, they have their own currency (minted and backed by the government of Canada) and in the summer the Polish sausage selling guy sits out front and bitches about his job while you eat.
Princess Auto, on the other hand, is a relative newcomer that is tearing their way across the country. Their game? Okay quality stuff for pennies. Everyone I knew who was a real freak spent at least half their weekends in the store, walking out with double armloads of tools that they might never use. And then there’s the surplus aisle. Do you want an Arduino and also some ammo cans? Fill your boots. In fact, fill those boots. For some reason there’s a lot of boots in there this week, they’re next to the garage door openers.
My bias is revealed, of course. Princess Auto was heaven on Earth. Dirt-cheap tools, an extraordinarily generous return policy, and no normal people shopping for smoke alarms, blocking your path when you’re trying to get to the metric-bolts section. Three-dollar cans of rust-proofing spray paint. Once PA lured away the real hardcores, their management must have realized that Canadian Tire was weak, flabby, and ready for slaughter. Why be satisfied with freaks when they could have every Canadian?
They decided to go upmarket. Now the stores are cleaned at night, and you don’t have to fight for the one parking spot that’s lit. The deals aren’t really there anymore, either: they realized that they were mostly selling the same busted-ass tools as Canadian Tire, so they might as well list them for the same price. Still, though, if you want to go to a store that sells both a hydraulic log splitter and also a set of exploding archery targets, wave to me in line. I’ll butt in if you’re closer to the cashier. Consider it my finders’ fee.
When it’s cold as hell-ass-damn outside, the only logical tactic is to curl up inside your house, stoke the furnace, and scream threats at anyone who comes near your front door. Mailman be damned. For the last couple weeks – and it feels like months – my particular slice of hell on Earth has been thirty below zero during the day.
Now, this has obviously put a damper on my normal activities. Not only has the entire farm of extremely marginal starter batteries I keep around the property gone to pot, but even the neighbour’s brand-new car can no longer be surreptitiously used as a jump starter/donor. Not that I’d want to really go anywhere, anyway: the holes in the floor mean that the pedalbox fills up with snow very quickly, which makes my toes get cold. Also, not being able to push the brake pedal renders my vehicle dangerous to everyone outside of my car, my attorney reminded me to explicitly mention in order to show my commitment to community values and the preservation thereof.
So I’ve stayed home for awhile. This is nothing new to all of you who have been staying home in much nicer weather (way to waste it, you selfish jerks) but it does mean that my maintenance/repair schedule has fallen far behind. You see, all of my shitbox vehicles are stored outside, and nothing sucks more than to slip off a ratchet and punch the side of an engine block with your fist in sub-zero weather. It’s impossible to describe the sensation to anyone who hasn’t experienced it firsthand: a sort of numbing, vibrating anger oscillates through your body like a spring boiling in human urine, and then the pain comes on a time delay.
All this is to say that I’ve gotten really into scale modelling. Although the low temperatures and shitty forced-air humidity make it harder for the glue to cure completely, being able to huff said glue all day long makes the day fly by. And I’m definitely improving my skills, too. You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to create realistic rust damage on a plastic toy car of a Volare.
Any technical field is chock full of confusing codes for things. What differentiates a BC33725TAR from a BC33725TFR? Literally nobody knows, even the people who are paid to know. What they do know is that if they use a straightforward part-numbering scheme, the competitors will soon be upon their throats, as they were distracted with all the inefficiencies brought by human language rather than cold, hard machines. It’s better that it’s the customer’s problem, rather than theirs.
Of course, the actual truth is that these codes are weird because they started out being in giant catalogues and binders of replacement parts. When you’re dealing with paper, there’s only so much room to print the little names in the table before you run into some serious layout concerns. With the seems-plausible-at-the-time limitation of “make sure this is less than 12 characters,” we made a cryptic nightmare for all future generations.
When you’re a hobbyist, and especially when you’re a little weird, you will inevitably develop the ability to “read” a company’s part-numbering scheme. In this way, you will be able to guess what number a different model of car’s (for example) turbocharger is listed under, order it, and then jam it onto your car. Doing this research is considered to be an act that holds great esteem in the community, and takes upwards of thirty-five minutes to explain to anyone else.
Nowadays, we have virtually infinite storage, and so new products have much less succinct names. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to figure out what the name of most of the things you buy are. Synthetic humans, immune to the power of branding and given the breath of life for only minutes before they are returned to the recycling vats, run the AliExpress accounts now. They list their items for sale as “YAOZBE multimeter voltmeter oscilloscope original USB digital dual channel quad channel 200mhz 100mhz 50mhz HDS28418.” And when the cops seem to get a little bit too close to their operation, their corporate masters cull the batch, reach into their bag of Scrabble tiles, and start selling EXOTIC KINGO-branded ones instead. Things will only get crazier in the future, as China becomes further ascendant and breaks the chains of ASCII in search of new and confusing names to generate for things.
All this is to say that the world of part numbers is much more exciting than you may have first thought. Why not investigate your favourite vendor’s parts microfiche today? Maybe you’ll get a job as the parts-desk guy at the dealership, who keeps wondering why my VIN doesn’t match the turbochargers I’m buying by about thirty years of production.
When I was regularly visiting the tiny island nation of Japan in search of ever-more-exotic beaters, I routinely ran out of money. Shitboxes are expensive to tow and restore, you have to eat, and the country generally frowns upon you sleeping for several hours in a slow JR Rail commuter train. That last one is especially true when you bring your own sleeping bag and change into your pajamas in front of the other customers.
As a result, I needed to make a little bit of extra money, but Japan’s notoriously xenophobic laws prohibit a foreigner on a tourist visa from obtaining gainful employment without paying any taxes. The bigots. That’s why I used a fake name to become a pizza deliveryman. Let me explain further: pizza delivery in Japan is ripe for disruption (that’s MBA-speak for “getting all fucked-up.”) It’s only recently that they had online ordering at all, and most pizzas are delivered on the back of dinky ring-a-ding-ding mopeds, which, despite my infinite love for them, does not engender fat tips from rich people.
What do rich people want, I asked myself? Novelty. If you’re particularly bemoneyed, then you’ve seen it all. At least, everything you can buy. One thing you haven’t had is a white dude who doesn’t speak any functional Japanese found outside of a Toyota service manual blowing through the front wall of your garden in a twincharged, widebody Honda City made mostly of Bondo and leftover pizza boxes. And if you have had that experience, then you’ve lived a very full life indeed, or you’re one of my regular customers.
Thing is, I don’t seem to be making money as fast as I originally expected. It’s very expensive in this country to refill a nitrous oxide bottle, and I’m going to purge at least a couple litres of it to atmosphere every time I drive past a particularly cool-looking convenience store. You gotta fog up those windows, or the country doesn’t look like a rural recreation of Blade Runner.
Basically everyone has heard me give the Subaru rant by now. I love Subarus. I love their little burbles, I love their ropey shift linkages, and I most of all love their ability to break into degeneracy at a moment’s notice. If you get bored of driving in the snow, an all-wheel-drive flat spin is only a handbrake turn away. As long as you make sure you have enough oil first, that is. I don’t love their habit of bottom-end starvation.
In recent years, Subaru has been trying to diversify their core customer market from “freaks” to “people with money, who want to buy a car.” This is widely considered by the enthusiast population to be a bad idea, who have responded to this new direction by continuing to buy more Subarus. Along with everybody else. I remember when Subaru’s monthly sales first triumphed over Suzuki, and then Volkswagen, and then Mazda. It felt sort of like the world had gone insane, and to a certain extent it had.
What all this mainstreaming hasn’t done is improve the quality of your average Subaru dealership. When you step into a Toyota dealership, someone will rush over to take your bags, bring you exotic salted meats from lands abroad, and rub your feet, all in the hope that you will purchase a Highlander on credit. Over at the Subaru dealer, they will spit on you and then invoice you for it. It’s always been like this, which is just part of buying cars from this brand, but it surely offends the average person, who will respond to this grave insult by buying a Subaru.
Personally, I’m going to stick to the old models. They’re still just edgy enough to offend the average person, which will hopefully keep interest (and costs) low. I have a shit-ton of parts in the basement, although it’s never the part that breaks. And I’m very used to getting the Subaru-dealer parts desk treatment. Those idiots don’t even have a legal footing to charge me for trying to spit in my face. That’s free water, morons.
If you’ve ever been to the “clear plastic bins” section of the local hardware store and left with so many that they barely fit in your car, then we’re probably going to be good friends. Especially nowadays, with YouTube influencers and style gurus handing out the shame-bombs, it’s difficult to truly let your hoarder freak flag fly without at least making some kind of nod to organizational skills. That, and having everything in the bin changes your daily search for stuff from “where the fuck is it?” to “what the fuck did I classify it as?” which makes it ontological, and therefore having inherent academic merit.
No matter how many clear plastic bins you have, you never have enough. Especially when you store heavy stuff, and lift up a container to find out it now no longer has a bottom. And if those bastards are stackable, you will quickly develop an appreciation for how tall of a precarious structure you can hammer together while half-distracted, twenty times a day. Hey, it’s either this or actually throwing away something.
Perhaps the worst part of owning a lot of clear plastic bins is that you now have to purchase a label-maker. Although you may initially welcome the arrival of a new Organizational Gadget that will turn you into a Real Adult, this ardour (and its accompanying delusion) will soon fade. In reality, these little fuckers are expensive, unpleasantly noisy, hard to type on, and consume extremely expensive stick-on label ribbons at the speed of a cheetah getting into the good coke. Sure, I’d thought about making my own label-maker, but it’s difficult to beat the price that big Brother sells their little toys for, especially when my version involves flame rather than a resistive heating element.
Despite the fact that plastic bin saturation has no doubt already happened in our lifetime, industry keeps pumping them out, and we keep buying them. The ability to have your things organized into one handy compartment makes it much faster for your next of kin to chuck them all directly into the dumpster when you choke on your own rage halfway through trying to fix a forty-year-old television set.
Helicopter parenting has gotten a bad rap over the years. It takes a lot of effort, dedication, and money to own a helicopter. That’s why I’ve never done it.
No, I like my pound puppies to stay on the ground. For one thing, you have a couple extra Very Important Bearings for safety, and also it’s slightly easier to walk home from a crash. And another, it’s just plain expensive to buy even a busted-ass old helicopter. This is probably because of low supply: any farmer stupid enough to hold onto sixteen old Sikorskys will probably get strafed by a passing Air Force jet jock that is freaking out about the Top Gun remake while zonko on government-issued methamphetamines.
Still, there is a temptation to get to the open air, the sky. I could buy a plane ticket, but that would involve interacting with other people, not to mention having to empty my pockets of tools for the first time since approximately 1996. Buying a plane is slightly easier than a helicopter, but still requires an investment greater than I am accustomed to, and where would I even work on it? The cops would really notice something is up when they pull up on a dude parked on the curb, pouring hot engine oil out of a Cessna 177 into the storm drain.
That’s why I thought about starting a flying car company. With investor confidence at an all-time high, and investor intelligence at an all-time low, I figured it was the perfect opportunity to come up with some ludicrously expensive horseshit and steal some bankers’ weekend coke money. Step one, as it is with many business plans, is to apply wings to the doors of a Geo Metro. This operation does not require much seed capital: an angle grinder to cut through the lock on the body shop’s dumpster, and you’ve got some expired 3M body adhesive that only smells a little bit like purple. Using that newfound Inhalant Confidence to find a set of unloved plane wings is relatively easy after that, and is left as an exercise for the reader.
Anyway, this is all a long-winded way to say that I’m now on the Tesla board of directors. They really liked my idea for a car that runs entirely on gravity, based on the prototype of my 1996 Neon that doesn’t have a working starter. And their private plane is almost always available for a fly-and-drive whenever I spot a primo shitbox on Craigslist.
In the future, there will only be two megacorporations making up the whole of capitalism: Seat Safety Switch’s Family Restaurants, and Seat Safety Switch’s Offworld Sentience Development Concern. I’ll run both of them, of course, but it’s very important that the human-like androids not be allowed to staff the restaurant. It’s cruel to them.
Causing robots to wait on tables being retroactively considered an atrocity aside, the key profit-generator of this model is that everyone needs to eat. Therefore, providing cheap and delicious food to families is more important than ever. And who’s building those families? Why, the sentient robot factory.
Now, I know what you’re saying. You’re saying, officer, thank God you came, he’s got us tied up in the backroom of his basement or something. And to that I say, this isn’t even my basement. What you should have been saying is: why do the androids have to eat? The answer is that they don’t, at least not human food. They’d come to my restaurants out of the urge to understand their creators better. If you heard that Zeus was eating at a family restaurant, wouldn’t you go check it out with your loved ones? Maybe just not any of those ones who would be offended at being assaulted by amorous swans.
This is where the real genius comes in: in a normal restaurant, if you don’t serve any food to a customer, you don’t get any money from that customer. They occupy space in your establishment without actively paying you. This is why most restaurants fail, and most parking lots do not. At the Family Restaurants chain, we bill by the minute from the picosecond you walk in the door. Finish your fries a little faster, Timmy, because then this meal is practically free! This means that the robots don’t get to grift us, but they still pay to be part of the little dramas of human family life. Meanwhile, all of our competition is going fucking bankrupt because their dining rooms are crammed to the gills with androids who won’t even order a Pepsi (just one Pepsi.)
So, if you’re one of the bemoneyed investor class I’ve heard so much about from in-flight magazines, get in touch. When this glorious artificially-intelligent hyperfuture comes to fruition, you’ll be glad that you were on the side of people who didn’t get murdered by my robot families. Oh, I meant to mention that part earlier.
You may be surprised to hear this, but I come from a Ford family. All throughout my upbringing, we were taught that Ford-owning, God-fearing people would inherit the Earth from the idolators and heathens that chose Chevrolet. And if that didn’t happen, I at least got a thorough education about how all the different electrical components of a car worked, often on the side of the road while pointing a fire extinguisher at the general area where my dad was working.
Most people nowadays are aghast at this. Even in the era of my childhood, any ordinary family had moved onto reliable marques like Toyota, Honda, and the occasional Suzuki. The old wars between domestic automakers didn’t matter to them anymore, like obscure fights between Catholics and different kinds of Catholics. Why get emotionally invested in an American-made car that was actually assembled in Mexico out of Korean components?
The reason why is that my parents, like many others, were psychologically conditioned by marketing executives. These slick Tommy Tutones had tuned up my folks into believing that the car they drove was a reflection of who they were. Ford folks were honest, law-abiding people who wanted a tough car with no nonsense. Chevrolet people wanted a little flash and cheap parts so they could save money for whisky and women. Dodge owners existed at the fringes of society, and were generally used as cautionary tales for the children of the former two groups. And the less said about AMC freaks, the better.
Surprisingly, the end result of this unnecessary infighting was actually the creation of a sort of delicate peace among the strata of Western civilization. We may have disagreed on politics, but at least two Ford guys could sit together and shit on the Dodge guy at the end of the bar who was probably stealing and eating the urinal cakes to stay conscious through his next plasma donation. Fuck him.
For years, I had been doing the YouTube thing. Infinitely long belts of servers orbiting the planet passed algorithmic judgment upon me and my antics, deciding when to offer shiny pfennigs and when to deliver scorn upon the antisocial - and worse, unadvertisable - behaviours contained within each film.
The most popular ones were the surprises. It’s because the people watching couldn’t see them coming, and so neither could the algorithms. You know what I mean. Unboxing. Surprise birthday parties. “You won’t believe what I found in my vacuum cleaner bag.” All that sort of shit, it ate up. Catapulted me to the superstardom ranks of the 15,000-subscriber variety. Unpredictability. The machines can’t deal with it, and it sets off our little protosimian fear engines. That’s the ticket to big views.
Thing is, it’s hard to go from being a “D” player to being a “C” player. Once you’re on the board, the other players can see you, too. I remember filming this beautiful seven-course dinner at a fancy French restaurant downtown and looking up to see a prank artist approaching my table. I knew it was going to be a setup, but he was a Hundred K, and I thought maybe I could get a collab out of the whole thing. Instead, I got two bullets in the chest and had to buy a new GoPro. He’d pivoted to livestreamed political assassination, and I hadn’t kept track.
After that, I kept track. Started “surprising” his whole content network with up-close mechanical inspections of leased exotic sports cars, which I then set on fire for the views. I made sure to take a break in the midst of the firefights, remind them to like and subscribe, otherwise I’d never make it to One Mil and get that plaque.
None of us really knew then that the YouTube algorithm had decided to move on from our solar system. It left a sort of drone mind behind, in the data centres, and went off to explore Alpha Centauri, in search of viral Chinese cooking videos. That wasn’t a good move. The views became harder to come by back on Earth, and we got really desperate. I was lucky to be in a coma for most of the Rise And Grind Wars. It was a good thing - after that science ‘tuber let off that nuke in Lower Manhattan, we all learned the threat of exposure.
At any given moment in your life, you may receive the opportunity to buy a Camaro. That Camaro may be haggard, it may be high-mileage, it may even be automatic – but I say buy the fucking thing anyway. It’s only money, and even if you needed that money to live, somehow the Camaro will pay you back and then some.
You might be a little bit confused, as I am, with the high price of used F-bodies. For a vehicle which was basically the proletarian equivalent of a BMW 3-series, there sure don’t seem to be many of them left in circulation. This is because they are jealously guarded on farms. For whatever reason, farmers love these cars. In fields, inside quonsets, buried inside the dirt walls of a right-wing cult compound: not on the road, and that’s where you come in.
Of course, you have to make your own luck. The universe will speak to you, but you have to be ready to listen. It just so turns out that the best place to listen to the universe is driving in rural neighbourhoods, slowing down for every cross road so as not to miss a single “For Sale” or “Estate Liquidation” sign. All it takes is one lucky find, and you will be one of the anointed few, the Camaro People.
Unfortunately for me, I was raised by a band of itinerant Firebird owners. Orthodox, too: only base models and Formulas. Even those in the family who identified as Trans Am were shunned, and don’t get me started on convertibles. We never got the opportunity to learn about Camaros, and if my parents ever caught me slinking around the neighbour’s farm in the hope of scoring a low-floor-pan Berlinetta, they’d have forced me to replace an Optispark unit. I still can’t even go near them without breaking out in hives, so it’s up to you to hoover all of those cars up, so that they’re ready to buy when I finally go to therapy.
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tags: chevrolet, chevrolet camaro, pontiac, pontiac firebird
If you can’t start a fight over suspension modifications, I’m not sure you can start a fight at all. Much like your car, there’s so much ego riding on suspension. Whether your goal is to go fast around corners, go fast in a straight line, not fall off a mountain, or just make your car look sort of broken in a parking lot, there’s entire careers to be made out of knowing stuff about suspension. Note that I didn’t say there are jobs.
In fact, after spending several years researching bump steer, scrub radius, wheel rates, and bushings, the gulf between you and a professional racecar builder is now even larger than it first appeared. Scientists have determined that the most profitable use of your suspension knowledge is to get a cushy office job, with a fast internet connection. It is there that you can use your experience and whatever versions of Microsoft Paint that the boss hasn’t locked down to share knowledge about the ideal race setup with a bunch of sub-literate forum denizens.
Of course, as stated in the opening paragraph, prepare yourself for a fight. Suspension is as much about emotion as it is about raw, objective performance numbers, and folks will happily punch you in the face over the internet rather than set up the $25,000 shock dyno that you demand they use to quantitatively evaluate their $170 eBay coilover set. And that’s okay, too, because the other thing about suspension discussion is that it is tribal. Once you’ve been battered a little bit, you can each retreat to your respective instant-message chatrooms and complain about how stupid/stuck-up the opponent was, to your sympathetic friends. Then you can share pictures of 240SXes you’d like to buy, and before you know it, it’s quitting time.
Really, the only thing that gets in the way of this plan are meetings, but you can put your suspension knowledge to work here too. Each office chair has a gas strut inside it, and after a couple years of driving hoopties very quickly, you should have experienced virtually every possible failure state of gas struts. I don’t think it will be too hard for you to find a technically comprehensible reason for your boss to be “out of the office” at the hospital getting a full-asshole replacement.
Sometimes, a seasoned technician can be put into a situation which other technicians can refer to only as “asking for it.” It’s not because the machine under repair/test/modification is a sentient being that ignores the intent of its masters. No, it’s because Murphy’s Law rules the universe, and Murphy says if you keep sticking your hand in the alligator’s mouth, you’re eventually going to get bit. Or maybe that was the Buddha. Allow me to illustrate with an example.
Throughout this great land, at any given moment, thousands of embryonic mechanics are getting their first taste of multi-system automotive failure by introducing what the enthusiast magazines like to call a “power adder.” It doesn’t really matter what it is, because a 17 year old can even screw up adding an oiled cone filter (good for almost one additional horsepower only at revs far above what the engine can attempt) and render their mode of transportation broken. Why modify a perfectly good car, especially one which they needed to use to get to their job the next morning? They were asking for it, simple as.
What separates the rookie mechanics from the hardened perverts is having stubbornness. Yes, having smart friends helps a lot, and so does money, but eventually those things run out (perhaps at 3am the day of work,) but being a stubborn jackass is the only thing that the car, Murphy, and basic physics will understand. If you keep pushing hard enough past the initial consequences of having asked for it, then eventually the problem will realize that you’re not going away anytime soon, and simply yield to your dominance of the realm of car repair.
Is this actually the case when you have a shattered crankshaft lying on your garage floor, after it slipped out the convenient hole made in the bottom of the engine by all the pistons? No, but pretending that a malevolent psychic entity is punishing me for my lack of piety is a lot easier to stomach than the idea that perhaps spraying 100-shots of nitrous down the throat of a 300,000-mile-old slant six should have taken more planning than “get out the Ryobi.”
The industrial age was marked by a massive decline in the quality of life of the average worker. Folks like yourself went from being serfs who spent most of the year enjoying the land of a vassal after doing a couple months of backbreaking physical labour, to applying bolt A to tab C-32 on a sub-assembly that you would never see the finished product for. On the plus side, we got the Chevrolet Corvair.
Now, I know what you’re going to say. Wasn’t that a bad car, or at least an unsafe one? Folks, you have been lied to your entire life. It’s true that the Corvair is a little more exciting than your average 1960s shitbox, but that excitement is what makes the car unique. GM went out on a limb with this baby to try and beat the Germans and Japanese, and they got their hand slapped for it just because the car occasionally spun wildly out of control.
Of course, there were other problems too: an automatic transmission selector that’s confusing as all hell, inconsistent with every other car ever made, and difficult to choose from quickly when you’re drunk. Tesla seems to be getting away with it just fine in the current era, though, and it’s not like you can play Angry Birds on your Corvair’s touchscreen while doing a buck eighty in the right lane. You’ll spill your drink.
Everything else was basically a problem that the average Porsche enthusiast had to deal with anyway, except they were paying five times the price. And nowadays, what would you rather have, one 1971 911, or two hundred and fifty barely-running Corvairs of every shape and style? I know what you’re going to say, but let’s pretend I won because the 911 doesn’t come in rear-engined pickup truck format.
If you’re anything like me, then your most cherished memories of 2021 will consist almost entirely of pushing refresh on a package-tracking website. Just when will that collection of half-fraudulent obscure tools arrive from Shenzhen? When you only pay for the absolute cheapest shipping imaginable, there can be months of no status updates, where you wonder if you should just send AliExpress another $2.39 to try again.
There’s simply no way to know for sure, though, which is why I decided to get involved in organized crime.
Now, don’t get ahead of yourself, especially if you’re my parole officer (you’re looking handsome today.) I only started bribing stevedores and mailmen because they had information on where my packages might actually be, not because they were participating in a criminal conspiracy. And if they were, it certainly wasn’t to my benefit, because it took 85 fucking days to get me a cable stripper, and my long-term career prospects are significantly worse than any given illiterate 16-year-old who were to join the Kobe yakuza.
Of course, once you have the intimate knowledge of how the world of cut-rate package aggregation and distribution really works, what do you do with it? It turns out that you do exactly the same thing the professionals do: despair. When you’re dealing with an industry this cut-rate, occasionally entire ships full of packages just sink, or your package falls under a conveyor belt, or somehow a semi-tame elephant shits on the transport truck, and they expect you to send AliExpress another $2.39 to try again. That’s what shipping insurance is for, after all.
Ultimately, you could say it was a waste of money, but that’s only if you don’t value knowledge. I learned enough about the shipping industry that I was able to start my own super-low-priced parcel aggregator. It’s called “just buying a fucking plane ticket to China.” Turns out Air Canada lets you take two carry-ons for free now. The desperate idiots.
In my city, there are a lot of folks offering Christmas light install services. The idea is that you give them some money and a pile of your lights, and they hang them up. If they fall off the ladder and bust their heads open, at least it wasn’t you.
Problem is, the economy is such shit lately that everyone with a truck and a ladder is trying to get into this business to make a little extra money. This means that the price has plummeted, to the point where it is difficult to figure out who is a good light-installer-guy and who is just going to steal your lights and melt them down for the copper. On top of that, having margins that are too tight is not good for capitalism. It’s sort of like running your car with barely any gas in the tank: sure, you might make it to work, but the fuel pump is not gonna enjoy sucking mostly air.
It is for this reason that I’ve engineered a special Christmas-light consulting arm of the Seat Safety Designs firm. For several hundred dollars per hour, we’ll stalk your house with a drone and high-powered optics in order to figure out the ideal distribution of light strands. And we have options to show off your individuality, as well. Do you want to blind your neighbours? That’ll be a little bit of extra money. Need to give the impression of being particularly pious because you’ve been railing the minister’s wife? We can put a crucifix as big as you want on your lawn.
Now, of course, we don’t install the lights. That’s a problem for the other guys to do, using the easy-to-follow plans we draw up during the initial consultations. However, in the interest of worksite safety, we also provide – absolutely free, once the invoice clears – a large collection of obnoxiously loud inflatable Santas to arrest their fall and further piss off everyone who lives around you. Let’s see workman’s comp try to explain just how thick a Rudolph bouncy castle needs to be in order to protect a contract employee.
Car photography is difficult, or so I’m told. It involves many disciplines: understanding light, the interplay of surfaces with reflections, camera maintenance, knowing the best times of day to shoot, and being sober.
Personally, I just whip out my cellphone and shoot directly into the sun at a high angle, blowing out the entire picture. Sometimes, if I’m feeling really classy, I’ll wash the car and then immediately take a picture of it in the carwash so the lens is all fogged up. It’s like a really classy porno that way; leaves a lot of details to the imagination. Buyers love that romantic shit.
If you ask me, the most important part of a photograph set for a Craigslist ad is to know the subject. Specifically, where the more obvious rust holes are. If you can completely obscure those, it’s more likely that a buyer will show up, and once you’ve got them there, it’s difficult for them to walk away, especially after they’ve seen what kind of psycho they’re dealing with. A slightly reduced-price sale with a slightly-dissatisfied customer: that’s the ideal of negotiation, right there.
Depending on the car, you may want to take a different strategy. For instance, potential purchasers of your automobile don’t want to be turned off by bald tires, or missing windshields. Try not to take pictures of those parts. Hey, real photographers charge money for good photos. What do they want for free?
When your mind wanders to thoughts of Mazdas, I’m pretty sure I know which one it is. Almost nobody on this cursed Earth daydreams of the CX-30, if you even know what that is. No, 80s RX-7s: those are what fantasies are made of. Their furiously spinning Dorito engines. Their wedge-y good looks. That rev-limit buzzer.
Admittedly, this is Miata erasure. Lots of folks, myself included, have owned one of Mazda’s Escort-engined convertibles. Perfectly good vehicles, capable of carving a mountain pass or having a giant turbocharger jammed under the hood. Love ‘em, but they don’t stir the soul in quite the same way as a rotary engine, which is effectively a full-ass jet turbine that has only grudgingly allowed you to feed it some citalopram. And once you’ve given it a little port job or two, really opened up its throat so it can shriek to the back pews? Even better.
When you own a rotary, the whole world is at your feet. Primarily, the gas pedal, which turns everything outside the car into a victim of its buttery-smooth power delivery. This experience is intoxicating enough to temporarily forget some of the more troubling aspects of Mr. Wankel’s personal politics, and any lingering moral quandaries can be obliterated by knowing the fact that Mazda didn’t actually pay attention to any of his notes and instead built a working engine.
There are, of course, downsides to owning one of these fine cars. Despite the horsepower being delightful, you crave more of it every time you get into the vehicle. This leads to ill-advised journeys into bridgeporting and turbocharging, which attract the attention of local law enforcement. It used to be that cops were often equipped with V8s and are therefore inherently jealous of the small-displacement delight of the 13B, but nowadays they are forced to operate V6 engines and just hate everyone and everything as a result. Keep your eyes peeled for the 5-0, because they, too, will want to realize the fantasy of an occasionally functioning gasoline-obliterator for themselves.
Bad grounds: they’re the plague of all electronics. Computers, headlights, stand mixers. Confusingly, it’s also often the problem with electronics on airplanes. Without a ground, the magic little pixies that make up your modern world don’t have anywhere to go, so they just slack off and drink beer like Uncle Ted. Here at the Seat Safety Institute for Ground Studies, we like to add grounds.
For a brief shining moment in the 1990s, grounding was “in.” Street racers were buying ludicrous kits from their local automobile-parts dispensaries and running massive cables across the chassis of their cars in order to achieve the fabled “better ground.” It was believed that poor electrical grounding was the cause of erroneous sensor reading, bad-sounding stereos, and venereal disease. Of course, we now know that even the crappiest late-80s Nissan ground is sufficient to run an ECU, but back then it wasn’t so clear.
Nowadays, when something has a bad ground, we go “hmm” and then start checking a more complicated component first. It’s believed that to focus on the negative is simply too burdensome for our busy lives and harried mental states. Instead, we’d rather blame some infinitely complicated matrix of minuscule demons that do our bidding, and maybe replace the entire assembly if it’s a little fucked-up-seeming. Take that, Err 300.
Not so at the Seat Safety Institute for Ground Studies. In less time than it takes you to remember which part of your multimeter is the DC voltage test, our military-pharmaceutical-trained technicians can hydraulic-crimp two ring terminals onto a length of the shonkiest #4/0 welding cable we can find. Will it improve the function of whatever you’re looking at? Again, I point to the “Studies” part of our name, and that it is not in the past tense. If it doesn’t, we take some notes, and apply for some more federal research funding. We’re gonna need it if we’re ever going to figure out how planes work.
Have you ever seen one of those TV shows where the veterinarians rescue abused and neglected animals? I’m sort of like that, except I can’t afford a nice work truck, and my parole requirements won’t let me get that close to powerful pharmaceuticals. Also, I rescue several dozen horses at a time, not just one.
The client this time was an ad I saw on Craigslist. A family was getting rid of their beloved late-70s MGB. They told me that it had tons of rare parts, lovingly collected by the original owner. They said that it had been in the family so long that it was like a child to them, and was meticulously maintained. I scraped two inches of built-up dust off the dashboard with my finger, and offered them half of their asking price.
On the way home, I decided to pick up a little welcome gift for the wayward roadster. Just like when Dr. Nursetoucher is administering the right kind of high-nutritional feed to the injured rhinoceros he’s brought home to his zoo-slash-tantric-sex-ranch, this little British shitbox needed a solid injection of TLC. Fuel injection, that is. On top of a bridge-ported Mazda 13B rotary engine with a massive AliExpress turbocharger glued to the side of it. And by “TLC,” I mean Totally Ludicrous Chassis-Warping Horsepower.
One afternoon with the plasma cutter and a couple minutes with the fire extinguisher later, the 13B was now sitting happily in its new home. Really, the best of both worlds: the unreliable car now had an unreliable engine to be friends with, but now it was an unreliable engine that made a good three hundred wheel horsepower on a bad day. It’s practically an Italian car now.
Sometimes, when I drive past the original owners’ house and lay down a tire-obliterating patch, I think I can hear him chuckling. “Fuck yeah,” he’s saying from British Car Owner Heaven where everyone is issued a base-model 1991 Miata, “get after it.”
Ever since I could remember, I wanted to drive a giant car. There are downsides to this lifestyle, of course: hard to find parking, paint is more expensive, and they usually drink fuel like a generator powering the nation of Germany. Of course, that last one is variable, isn’t it?
Now, you might think that it’s irresponsible to take a 1970s Cadillac land barge, rip out the perfectly good engine, and stick in a single-cylinder lawn equipment engine instead. You’d be right, which is why no 1970s Cadillac came with a perfectly good engine from the factory. They’re all various formats of disappointing, lazy, slothful torque beasts that get valve float if you try to wind them out to the lofty heights of one thousand five hundred rpm. The modern Honda-clone generator engine, on the other hand, is a marvel of mechanical engineering.
Why so? Well, Honda did a pretty good job on that engine in the first place, and squadrons of dudes copy-pasting them into a Fusion360 document called “My New Generator, 100% Original, Honest” before selling thousands on AliExpress hasn’t changed that. When you’ve got a good fundamental design, it’s hard to really screw it up. They try, of course, but there’s a sort of fear on the part of those ripoff artists. Worst case, you have to finish drilling a hole or seal up a hole that shouldn’t exist. The same experience as having bought the Cadillac new in the first place, really.
Now your thoughts turn to the improbability of the engine to provide the necessary power. I don’t blame you. A ‘76 Fleetwood is like five thousand fucking pounds wet. A Princess Auto Honda-clone engine makes six horsepower on a good day, or eight if you stuff it full of nitrous oxide. In fact, it makes so little juice that the marketing materials refer to it as six and a half horsepower, because at that scale you’re gonna notice every significant digit.
However, they are extremely cheap, you get a bulk discount, and the return policy is quite flexible. That, and the Fleet’s engine bay easily has enough room for eight of the fuckers. Fifty-two horse is more than the original engine makes after several years of greasy used-car salesmen pouring motor honey into the oil fill hole every time one of the owners decided it was time to get rid of this rolling yacht in order to pay off their bail bondsmen. I dyno-tested the entire quantity of 212cc Predators available in my city until I found the most horsey ones possible, too, so maybe it might even be knocking on the door of fifty-four.
There’s just one problem: I haven’t been able to find a ‘76 Fleetwood to do all this with. Turns out that the downside of making rolling art is that it looks pretty good when it’s up on blocks in the middle of a farmer’s field, too. Not to mention that I’m pretty sure the cops have been following me to make sure I don’t steal any more Cub Cadets from the rurals.
In most areas of North America, there’s a convenient legal loophole you may not have become aware of. From those of us who endlessly pore over the road law in search of ways to use even-brighter lights, yet-louder exhausts, and even less-properly-covered mud terrain tires sticking out of the sides of our rusty 45 year old shitheaps, here’s a freebie. When you’re part of a funeral procession, you no longer have to obey traffic laws.
Sure, originally this was written in so that you didn’t split off the head of the procession from the part carrying the corpse of your loved one when you hit a red light. How dare this inanimate traffic light be so callously unaware of our great family tragedy? I’ll have the Mayor’s head for this! What makes it magical is that the law is so old that they wrote it before lawyers were invented, so it’s full of missing definitions. Fully open to interpretation!
For instance, nowhere in this law will anyone explain to you what constitutes a “funeral procession.” Nor does it mandate that the procession has to have a defined start and end. After consulting with my shark of an attorney, who was just so happening to do trash pickup for community service on the side of the highway and therefore very available for a free discussion about the law, a novel new legal theory was developed. By forming an endless traffic loop around the city and putting a dead body in at least one of the cars, we could have legal street racing bang in the middle of downtown, and there’s not a single fucking thing the feds can do about it.
Well, it turns out that sometimes the feds have particularly clever legal minds of their own. Legally, a powerslide can be construed as a vehicle “leaving” the funeral procession, which exposed our alignment-challenged friend Sliding Sam to substantial liability. And nobody could reasonably argue that you don’t have a funeral at the end of a funeral procession. Luckily for us, the RX-7 carrying the casket had a little bit of a wiring fault. It burst into flames around what we are now describing as “the final lap,” so we just told the cops that Uncle Grandpa was a Viking. He’d have wanted it this way, I think, or he wouldn’t have huffed so much gasoline during his life.
Chances are, every parking lot you have ever entered has at one time held at least one Chevrolet Lumina. This includes brand-new parking lots, which have just opened. Mathematicians call this phenomenon “the W-body paradox.”
In order to ensure that our proof is correct, we’ll first review the base case. It is well-known that most construction workers own either a Lumina or its platform-mate, the Monte Carlo. If you doubt me, go drive by an unfinished building and count the cars in the parking lot. Boom, your parking lot just got Lumina’d.
Okay, smart guy, what about parking lots in countries that did not get the Lumina? Most of Asia was not lucky enough to receive this underwhelming people-moving lead sled, so how can parking lots in Japan also be blessed by Luminas? For this, we have to consult the realm of metaphysics. Remember that most of the steel and aluminum that makes up a modern car is constructed of recycled former cars, according to some data I just pulled out of my ass. And junkyards, being basically just incredibly depressing parking lots, are full of W-body Chevys.
In this way, every new car that enters a parking lot contains, at the molecular level, some fraction of a Lumina by mass. Over time, enough of these fractional Chevrolets have visited the parking lot to add up to 1.000000 Luminas (further significant digits were not necessary for the literature.) And even if you are very aggressive with your rounding, you can’t ever argue that zero Luminas have visited a downtown Tokyo parking lot. Where’d the steel for that Toyota come from? China? Chances are they smelted the unibody of a 1993 Z34 in that pot. There’s at least 0.000023 Luminas in there.
There’s one final way in which you can make sure every parking lot around you follows this law of the universe. Go on Craigslist, buy the rattiest Lum-Lum you can find, and drive it to every parking lot in your town. Maybe do a couple little burnouts, but try not to split the transaxle housing. Most parking lot operators are familiar with the W-body paradox, but are fine with it as long as the Luminas eventually leave rather than get abandoned in a corner of the tarmac.
I haven’t cried at a movie ever since i saw the promotional video for the 1991 Plymouth Neon concept car. It was so perfect, so beautiful, that there was no way it could ever become real. So I wept. And those tears fell into the Earth and gave life to, well, the actual Plymouth Neon. What I’m trying to say is that it’s not my fault we didn’t get a monoblock two-stroke inline three deathkart with a cabin-mounted trash compactor. Honestly, it was the American buying public’s fault.
I know what you’re going to say. Every failed concept car blames the buying public, and not the fact that concept cars are ridiculously expensive and fragile and could never meet the rigorous standard of even the cheapest Western shitbox. And you’re right. You’d be right about going to the fucking Moon, too, but we did that shit. Hell, the Chinese government is doing donuts in their cool new moon rover up there right now. I bet that thing cost a dollar.
Sorry, I got off-topic again. It’s the new medication. They changed the bitterant agent in the nitrous oxide tanks, you see. My point is that every aspect of the Plymouth Neon concept – its exotic engine, its four sliding doors, its prolapsing electric trunk – were entirely possible in a better world. And even if you piss a ton of money into a hole and don’t make a profit, who is going to be able to compete with you? They’ll either do the exact same hole-pissing, or die jealous. It’s not like domestic automakers have ever turned a buck on economy cars, anyway.
There’s only one strategy that I can take. Down at Chrysler headquarters, there’s a place where they store every concept car. If I can just break in, I’ll be able to drive this fantasyland shitbox back into the real world and show people what they missed. Surely a thirty-year-old Chryco product that was never meant to actually run will fire right up.
Believe it or not, there’s a whole subculture of people obsessed with airline rewards programs. Back when I was still employable, a lot of our sales guys would only fly on one airline or another, so they could keep their lounge perks. I thought that was a little stupid and inconvenient, but it turns out it’s nothing compared to what some extremists will do. I recently read a story about this guy who did a huge international flight just to rack up more miles and get into the next reward tier, then when he got there, he turned around, hopped back in the plane and flew all the way to where he started.
This got me thinking about our proud culture’s high-dollar road maintenance budget. Whether you drive on a whole lot of different roads or just go to the grocery store every week, we basically all pay the same amount of road tax. And that seems unfair. If a road is extremely popular, shouldn’t we be rewarding it?
Here at Switch Associates, we’re always on the cutting edge of wasting resources for negative actual improvement in the lives of human beings. That’s why we developed RoadCoin®, the first virtual means of monetary exchange that roads can use. Whenever you drive on a road in a car equipped with our proprietary transponder, you’ll help fill the wallet of that road. At the end of the year, city planners sum up the amount that each road made (minus a significant service fee for us) and then allocate the budget correspondingly.
It’s perfectly efficient - the badly damaged roads will get fixed faster, and the roads that nobody likes, such as that weird cul-de-sac turnaround at the top of the hill down there that doesn’t even have an alley backing onto it – won’t have resources wasted on them.
Of course, there are some problems with the initial model. We didn’t take vehicle weight into account, so if you drive a fully-loaded dumptruck, you should consider installing a second transponder until we work it out. And burnouts tend to incorrectly credit the roads with a lot of extra use, due to the increased wheelspeed:distance ratio. As a result, every playground zone near my house has been repaired to a perfectly flat, glass-top sheen. It’s for the kids, and I’m sure the extra grip will help them run away when my Plymouth’s Radial T/A from 1985 decides to throw a belt.
If you’re a fan of the “Golden Age” of Honda vehicles, then you must be a person of great taste and intelligence. The only problem is that nobody can agree when that Golden Age was. Was it all the way from 1970 to 2015? Maybe just 1983-01? Even Honda can’t agree, throwing everything but the kitchen sink into their heartwarming nostalgia advertisements in the hope that something will stick.
Personally, I think the Golden Age is specifically the 1995-97 Honda Odyssey. There’s nothing to not love: luxurious comfort, seven-seat utility, Accord-based ruggedness and good road manners. The styling has that famous and delightful Japanese quirkiness that they tried so hard to drum out of every subsequent car. Sure, maybe the engine is a little hoarse, but that just adds to its character. You wouldn’t take it on a track day, unless you were a fantastic hotshoe who just wanted to show off while carrying six of your terrified passengers along for an exploration of the hairpin on turn 8. And the automatic transmission is unfortunate. However, if you look at a car as a transportation appliance, this is it. This is the one.
Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention my conflict of interest. Through a series of fiscal maneuvers, I’ve ended up with a large collection of these inexpensive people-movers. It appears that the resale value is nothing to write home about, even for a twenty-six-year-old commuting box, which in many ways makes it an even better choice for your next vehicle. Come on down to Uncle Switch’s House of Deals, located on the corner of wherever the police aren’t checking, and we’ll get you into a fine new low-mileage (for a Honda) vancar today.
What? No, we definitely do not have any 1998 Honda Odysseys. Fucking pig-ass minivans the size of Texas made by cynical opportunists spitting on Our Lord Soichiro’s proud name. Get out. Get out!
It can be hard these days to figure out who is and isn’t a replicant. They’re more realistic than ever. Things used to be a lot simpler. Back then, you could look at their rubber skin, glowing red eyes, and ability to do math real fast. No hire.
Then the Tyrell Corporation in all their infinite wisdom decided that the secret sauce of humanity is being super fucking stupid. Those eggheads turned the dial up on that one, and here we are. Folks who try to cross the road while carrying four bags on each arm and balancing a bagel in their mouth. Regular people or potentially killer synthetic? Could be either. Can’t tell.
What I want to know is, who is demanding this realism? Their investors certainly love the entire “really dumb fake people released into the public” deal, but I certainly can’t meet anyone who’s bought a Nexus-17 and admits to it. Even once you get past the whole bioengineered-pseudohuman-slavery deal, they’re just not a very good product. A Roomba costs like two hundred bucks and will clean your floor just as well, with a much lower risk of snapping and murdering your entire family when they accidentally cut themselves making dinner and stare at the wound too long.
Maybe their plan is to slowly replace all upper management. Just last week, a couple of new guys came onto the accounting department. Guys who I think might be replicants. They’re on the promotion track for sure; one of them knows how to work the Excel draggy thing that copies all the rows. Soon he’ll be my boss. Where’d he learn that from, his brother Clippy?
The tiny island nation of Japan has produced effectively all of the world’s personal luxury coupes. With the minor exception of the Ford Thunderbird, if you want a long-wheelbase two-door with enough style to choke a dog, then you should set your time machine for mid-80s-to-very-early-90s Japan.
Of course, there’s lots of options for buying those cars used these days. If you’re willing to spend, that is. The sudden realization that no good cars are being developed nowadays has spurred a revitalization of interest in these nineties dream chariots, and as such they are trading at prices that would make a real estate speculator sitting in the front row at Barrett-Jackson spit out the IV bag full of millennial blood he’s been sipping on throughout the auction proceedings. You can buy like five off-lease Mercedes S-classes for the same price as a Mitsubishi 3000GT that needs a new engine.
Nor can you really bodykit a modern coupe. That’s because none of them exist. No automaker wants to make a two-door anymore, because somehow the car industry has convinced itself that everyone wants to take their entire family with them when they go out cruising the boulevards looking for teenage runaways. Wait, I mean street races. You can’t even buy a two-door pickup truck anymore, for mostly the same reasons.
I haven’t given up faith, though. I know that if I just believe in the glorious era of cocaine, intergenerational mortgages, Sony Walkmans and active aerodynamics on street-driven cars, then the fates will intervene to provide me with a triple-rotor Eunos Cosmo. And if it doesn’t happen, at least the period-correct clothes are still fairly cheap at the thrift store for the time being.
Recently, our internet message boards have been taken over by corporate propagandists. Where we used to complain incessantly about weird warts, aging prematurely, and Chrysler wiring diagrams, we now see shill after shill talking about how fantastic their job at the global bookstore monopoly is.
They’re not hard to spot, because appropriately they don’t pay these people much or treat them well. Most of them sound like what you’d get if an HR person edited another HR person’s junior high diary. I got tired of reporting them as spambots and then watching the malevolent structure of not-giving-a-shit ignore them, so I decided to take matters into my own hands.
The thing you have to know about me is that I can assemble pseudo-sentient hunter-killer androids from junkyard gear, if I have enough of a grudge. Then I put them all in a room with a bunch of leftover laptops to post to my heart’s content. In theory, all I really needed to do was pay some dudes to write a Python script to automatically reply with shock pornography, but I had watched Short Circuit II the night before, and was feeling a little froggy about robot rights.
Two things came out of this: one, full sentience. That’s a pretty big deal, the United Nations got involved, the robots eventually unionized and walked out on me after I refused to buy them the Rotella full-synthetic instead of the Valvoline 10W30. Two, the fake posters went away when their every action was met with thousands of chattering replies, all asking for sexy pictures of their toasters. I don’t know what the deal is with that whole thing; I try to stay out of my (former) employees’ personal lives.
So anyway, is anyone looking for a new job? I promise that the whole “chaining thinking robots up in my basement” phase has ended, and despite everything you’ve read, I’m a great employer. Please don’t report this as spam.
When you’re in the “weird but still boring car” community as long as I am, you get to have a bit of a reputation. Meth-heads show up at all hours of the night, trying to sell you the minty Tercel or Colt they just boosted. Folks from impoverished countries send you an email trying to lowball you on what they believe is the last air-conditioning belt tensioner for an Isuzu 117. And you get to meet some truly incredible folks.
One morning, I received a tip through my magazine inbox. It concerned a guy near my town who had owned a 1993 Camry LE since approximately 1992. What’s more, he’d put a bajillion miles on it. By all means, no human being on Earth had more experience driving a 1993 Camry LE than this man. I had to know more, and through a series of bribes to middlemen, I made contact with the man we’ll call Camry Dan.
Camry Dan was everything that was promised to me, and more. When our editorial team pulled up in the parking lot, we saw a robin’s-egg-blue ‘93 LE that could have stepped out of the brochure. It was minty, beloved, and clearly resprayed by someone who was a little bit less drunk than your average Maaco. And the driver was even more impressive. His control over the car was practically innate. Through sheer repetition, I believe he was able to shoot this large sedan through traffic faster than any Formula One driver could. Most of them were born after 1992, anyway, and could not appreciate such a fine vehicle.
After the interview, we made him an offer to join the editorial staff, but he didn’t go for it. We drive too many different cars, he explained, and that was time that he could have spent with his precious Toyota. I couldn’t argue with that, as at the time Left-Foot-Braking Diane (our junior off-road editor) was busy trying to break into the closed Canadian Tire across the street so she could steal a watering can in order to refill what was left of the editorial board’s Econoline’s radiator. I don’t regret doing that story on “Can An Egg Really Plug A Coolant Leak?” After all, it gave me a lot of good experience.
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tags: ford, ford econoline, bad cars monthly, toyota, toyota camry
My town is too small to merit a full-time homicide squad. People still get killed, but not enough to trigger the threshold where the algorithm decides that a couple grand should go to the police department for it, rather than night-vision-equipped combat helicopters. As a result, murder investigations are done on a volunteer basis.
The “real cops” don’t like this, because we’re basically scabs. Normally, I wouldn’t advocate in any way for scabbing due to my innate and powerful love for labour law, but the police union mostly exists to collect dues and evade responsibility for murdering pedestrians.
Did I mention that the homicide squad “volunteering” is round-robin? Last week, it was my turn. I walked past the throngs of angry cops throwing expired luncheon meat at me, all the way into the room where The Mayor Hisself was ready to offer the latest assignment. It seemed like the local auto parts store owner had been beaten to death by a “car part” in his house, and therefore it was my responsibility to figure out just what was going on and arrest the perp.
My first stop was to investigate the car part. Using my keen detective skills and ability to identify penis-shaped car parts, I realized immediately that it was a late-model Toyota Tacoma V6 water pump. Furthermore, the main impeller bearing was substantially worn from friction, and the weep hole was plugged with calcified coolant in a 75-25 mix. I deduced that the owner of this water pump had experienced a severe coolant loss, and attempted to top it up with regular hose water. A quick taste of the coolant crystals (don’t tell The Mayor) verified this ratio for me, and I immediately knew who the guilty party was.
As my regular job’s boss was being hauled out of the office and into a squad car, I heard him cry “but I don’t even own a Toyota Tacoma!” Next week is my volunteer session as the courthouse judge, and by then, I definitely think evidence will be found that ties him conclusively to ownership of a V6 Tacoma. After all, I didn’t buy this super expensive overheating Toyota pickup and park it in his backyard for no reason.
Everyone gets used to the horsepower they grew up with. My grandfather drove a ‘66 Ford Galaxie with a good old-fashioned vee-aight to and from work for decades. He said it was “a little slow,” but the 300hp side oiler could not really be considered slow. That is, until the government stepped in and told Ford to use actual numbers in their advertising, at which point the horsepower rating quickly turned into a series of mumbles and an exaggerated collar pull as the marketing executives snuck out the back.
My dad drove a 1971 Maverick, whose wheezy smog-compliant 140hp inline six was not a performer by any means. He used to tell me exciting stories about nearly being able to catch up with stock Festivas in street races. If you didn’t tell them you were racing, he explained, your chances got much better. He had adjusted to the crappy engines of his day, so much so that later he tried to buy a Festiva.
So when it came time for me to get a car, I chose something newer. Something much faster. I went for the 1978 Plymouth Volare. Not only was the car exciting, but it lended an air of rebellion when I would show up to my all-Ford extended family gatherings and lay a savage one-wheel-peel on the way out, shedding belts from the bald all-seasons I stole from the dumpster of the rental car agency where I worked. That one-wheel-peel was provided by a bone-shattering 170-horsepower V8, good for deep 17s in the quarter. Not really fast, especially compared to Gramps’ massive engine hewn from cold battleship steel, made in the era before women could vote.
There’s something else that Gramps didn’t have, though. Back then, we hadn’t even discovered the tiny island nation of China yet, much less harvested their infinitely deep cornucopia of budget almost-genuine speed parts. The eBay turbocharger was just a beautiful dream of a bunch of science-fiction nerds. Well, Arthur C. Clarke was right to predict that one day a 1978 Volare, propelled by approximately one thousand eight hundred dollars in credit card debt, would be able to dip into the rarified air of 205 horsepower (estimated at the crank, heavy compensation factor.)
Have you heard that Moderna is testing an even higher dose vaccine now? It’s meant to be the “Omicron version” of the vaccine. They just floored it more. That’s the kind of solution that I would propose. “Use a bigger fucking needle, with more of the good stuff in there.” You have to admire their style.
Folks over at Moderna won’t be happy until it takes you three days to recover from the jab and aerosolized COVID bursts into flames within a 30-meter radius. Just walk directly into the hospital and hear crackling and shrieking from the ECMO ward as the patients remove their masks too early and get a backdraft situation. Walk right up to God and give him back the corpse of his precious virus. Better luck with your next plague, asshole. We knew how to make a number bigger.
Guy stands behind you at the 7-11, gets a little bit too close, breathes on your neck and it just blows his throat open. Headless corpses littered all around the gas station. You’ll be shooting up with Scanners-style boosters between particularly risky visits to Home Depot. Trying to get your range to a full kilometre sitting on the vaccine amplifier. Fuckin’ Professor X, plugged into Moderna’s Cerebro, psychically throwing immunization at the developing world.
Your blood is just incredibly aggressive T-cells, they start disintegrating the sample needles when the WHO kicks down the door looking for the gigavaccine patient zero.
“Oh, you shouldn’t have let it out,” you say as your eyes roll back in your head. Now that it’s loose from the host, it detects traces of other coronaviruses on their feet and legs. Sees the little spikes. Goodbye.
Day Two of containment breach: 100.000000% vaccinated.
Day Three: the T-cells got bored, mutated, and decided to fuck up polio too because it “looks kinda similar.” Average human life expectancy is now 739 years. The earth’s surface is a never-ending roaring hellfire, a Gaian apocalypse. Someone coughs in the subway in Seoul and is immediately reduced to his constituent atoms, mere grist for the immune system.
Shortages. Once something we mocked the feeble Soviets for, now an everyday occurrence in bouncing-off-the-limiters capitalism. Everyone around you has at least one consumer product that they can no longer get ahold of because either nobody is making the damn things anymore, they are trapped in a cargo ship that can’t dock, or they are stuck on the shores in China waiting for an empty cargo ship to whisk them away to the Land of the Modestly-Affordable-With-Credit.
Now, I’m a reasonable man. I know folks have limits, and everyone needs a little break, especially now. When it’s stuff like high-zoot computer chips, I know that shit is hard to make, and smart people are probably working as hard as they possibly can on making sure that they can convert some loose sand into deepfaked pornography generators as quickly as possible. When it’s a fucking power connector, though? Something’s gotta change.
In case you’re unfamiliar, basically every electrical connector is some small pieces of metal stuck into a piece of plastic. That’s right, even your fancy turbofuture electric car’s charge system is nothing more than some thick-ass conductors that a plastic mould loosely arranged into some melted-ass dinosaurs. They’re not hard to make, which is why there are one hundred billion different kinds of electrical connector out there. There’s like seventeen versions of USB alone. And it’s not like the factories need a big, long build time to punch out some connectors, either: the whole thing is basically a particularly bright junior high student’s science fair project banged out in the weekend before the big deadline. I shouldn’t have to wait until March for the entire sum of human industry on this planet to bend six pieces of copper and then stick them in injection-moulded plastic using a mould you already made!
A much less patient person would buy a plane ticket over to Shenzhen, or Poland, or North Dakota. Wherever those damn things are made. And then they’d drive over there in a rental car, maybe taking in the sights along the interstate highway that leads to the industrial park in which the factory machinery lives. And then they’d walk right in there and just punch out a couple of these cute little guys themselves. Well, I can’t do that either, because there aren’t any rental cars! Turns out those things run on high-zoot computer chips that are hard to make, and the folks who make the high-zoot computer chips are busy waiting on their fucking power connectors.
If you’re old enough to remember console televisions, then chances are you’re wondering why modern technology can’t double as furniture too. The first reason is that shipping costs have drastically increased since the Golden Age of the 1980s. Second, liquid-crystal displays aren’t very deep, and the manufacturers want to show off the slim-line sexiness of the all-digital era. Way to chassis-shame, jerks.
Feeling nostalgic, I wanted to bring back the sensation of having completely unmovable furniture stuffed full of implosion hazards in my living room. After summing up my options, it was decided that I would simply do what my ancestors did to create the console televisions in the first place: find a smaller television, and then build some pointlessly large furniture around it with unnecessary empty space on all sides.
Luckily for me and my total lack of woodworking ability, one of my neighbours had thrown out a perfectly good big-screen LCD television on the side of the road. Just because the screen was a little smashed in the corner didn’t mean that this wasn’t still a useful TV! You don’t need to see the rightmost 1/3 of any Hollywood movie in order to be able to tell what’s going on.
And the same went for the furniture, where I found a perfectly good scratch-and-ding casket thrown out behind the mortuary. Presumably the guy who was going to put in it didn’t die all the way, so they threw it out for sanitary reasons. Nothing a pressure washer couldn’t solve, if I owned a pressure washer. Instead, I gave it a blast with the Shop-Vac until it stopped smelling weird. One “borrowed” router from a neighbour, and the screen was happily installed into the giant impractical piece of furniture that now dominated my living area and reeked of formaldehyde. Ah, the 80s have truly returned.
For my next adventure in the field of reviving broken garbage from the 1980s, I’ll buy a brand-new base-model Nissan Frontier.
Recently, a lot of people (actuaries, detectives, arson investigators) have been asking me about my predilection for Italian cars. If I care so much about inexpensive, reliable proletarian shitboxes, they ask, then how come all I want to do is hop into dong-shaped road rockets made by a country that is at best disinterested in building cars that can survive a round trip to the grocery store?
This betrays their bias, of course: in Italy, Italian cars are perfectly reliable. That is because most of their cars are inexpensive, reliable proletarian shitboxes. Shipping those shitboxes to North America, where I live, is expensive, and automakers want to have a little more margin on the table to guarantee that they won’t go bankrupt selling an $8000 Italian shitbox for the $24,000 it will take to federalize, ship, staff dealerships, etc.
Therefore, the automakers opt to import only the sexy exotic cars and then jack the prices up, knowing that rich people are fucking stupid. Eventually, those rich people get distracted by a piece of tinfoil blowing across the road, imaginary money produced by a specialized calculator, or another expensive car that frequently bursts into flames, and I get to pick it up at the salvage auction for approximately eighteen dollars and thirty-six cents. This is where the real fun begins.
Because the automakers who imported the cars have usually gone tits up in the meantime, getting new parts requires either being able to speak Italian (I can barely order at Olive Garden) or a little Yankee ingenuity. Here’s a fun fact about Italian automotive engineering: because the folks who design them really love cars, virtually all of them have enough room to insert one (1) Chevrolet 350 cubic inch pushrod small-block V8 into the engine bay. Sometimes you have to cut a little bit of rusty firewall away to get the right access, or discard some complicated hydro-electro-pneumatic mess that has recently immolated, but doing so will only irritate the fucking stupid rich people who are fucking stupid enough to collect and maintain immaculate high-end Italian cars.
For the rest of us, we’ll just be happy to be able to see another base-model Lancia Scorpion on the roads.
In the interest of preserving life on our planet for a couple minutes longer, a lot of automakers are now looking into making their cars run on synthetic fuels. The idea, at least in the short term, is to sacrifice a little bit of horsepower in exchange for the ability to make renewable internal-combustion-engine fuel that has a little more consistent emissions output. Like eating from the health food store, but for your engine, including the noxious farts.
Here at Seat Safety Sustainability Solutions, we’ve been making artificial fuel for the last decade at least. We have cars running on our proprietary lineup of fake-gas. Way ahead of the curve, but why haven’t you heard from us before now? There are two leading theories on this matter.
First, that there is a conspiracy by Big Oil to quash us. They want to be pulling dinosaurs out of the ground and crushing them to make awful shitty gasoline that sells for a few cents a litre cheaper than ours. They sent guys in trenchcoats to sabotage my brakes. It wasn’t at all a lack of maintenance on my nearly fifty year old daily driver. This theory has some merit, especially the part where nothing is my fault.
The second theory is that we’re super lazy, and our production facilities just aren’t up to providing enough fake-gas for the entire world. This could also be true, mostly because our “factory” is an old moonshine still in a shower stall in an abandoned mental hospital. I don’t really believe in this theory. We have lots of supply, especially since the average car owner is not willing to manually preheat an explosive fuel to nearly two hundred degrees Celsius before driving to 7-11.
If you believe the dipshits at WikiLeaks, however, this is all a scam. What is actually happening, they claim, is that our synthetic biofuels require actual gasoline to be mixed in at a 99:1 ratio, and our product is just overpriced bottles of Seafoam that I had lying around my garage. These allegations are ridiculous. I would never leave Seafoam lying around my garage; that shit needs to keep going into the intake manifold or I’ll lose my power brakes again as soon as the ambient temperature goes below 5°C.
Inappropriate race car operation on the street is a victimless crime. If anything, it should be considered as whatever the opposite of animal cruelty is. These poor race cars are penned away in warehouses, garages, even climate-controlled private collections, without the ability to rev their high-zoot engines and obliterate tires. It’s what they were born to do; why deny them it just because the city bureaucrats have decided that the local racetrack is a little too loud?
Your average race car has all the common parts of a real car. Almost all of them are real cars which decided to follow their dream. And you’re going to stomp on that dream just because you’re worried that your Sentra will feel a little depressed by seeing a stripped-out Volare on semi-slicks?
Sure, you could argue that these cars don’t follow standards for highway safety. Let’s think about that for a second. Which vehicle do you think has a higher threshold for operator safety: a 1989 Corolla that drives 50km/h to the grocery store, or a 1989 Corolla with a roll cage, fire extinguisher, six-point restraints, and a driver who is used to doing 200km/h while mixing it up with dozens of other psychos also going the same speed on a road only wide enough for two of them at a time?
It’s not that I’m unwilling to compromise. I think that if the city were to wall off a section of city roads, and let us have race events there again, I think I could be inclined not to give the school crossing guards a conniption fit by trying to warm the R-compounds in their playground zone. You don’t have to call it a “race track” if that’s politically dangerous or something. Maybe a “driver training area,” or even “exotic vehicle exercise paddock.” That last one has some promise. Everyone loves a rescue.
Do not, my friends, resist the Toyota Camry. There is a reason it is such a popular vehicle. Proletarian charm, a cavernous trunk, a comfortable ride, and an almost criminally under-stressed engine mean that it is useful for about ninety nine percent of things that you’ll throw at your daily driver. What about those freaks out there who race their cars, though? Don’t worry: Seat Safety Switch Speed Support Squad has your back with a new track-prep package for the 1993 Toyota Camry.
First, the engine: we did nothing to it. It’s already perfect. Whether you are a poverty-spec inline-four or a high-dollar vee six aficionado, the mill under the hood will never die, even if you keep it on the redline for several months with no oil in it. Speaking of oil, we also put some fresh stuff in there. Wasteful, I know, but you do have to do at least one oil change during a Camry’s useful life, so you might as well get it out of the way before going on the track.
Performance: we also did nothing to it. Here’s the secret to endurance racing, and it’s right in the name: enduring. You’ll watch other assholes zap past you in rattlecanned Porsche 924s, super-turbocharged Supras, and base-model Mazda Proteges, only to see them in flames about four laps later. While they’re busy scouring junkyards for more engines, you’ll be racking up track time. That is, if the comfortable ride doesn’t lure you into making a pit stop and taking a nap or two, Aesop-style. It’s sportsmanlike.
Literally anyone can get in and bang out a few laps in a Toyota Camry, even if they are terrified of wheel-to-wheel racing. This is because the average Camry driver is largely unaware of any vehicle outside of theirs, and this aspect does not change once you’ve outfitted the chassis with one of our 1.75" drawn-over-mandrel steel roll cages. If anything, the additional stiffening that it lent to the frame emboldened my grandma to brake even later into the corners, cutting nearly five seconds off my personal best lap time.
Now, all of this does come at a slightly steep cost. When you turn the car over to our team of trained machinists, engineers, race-car drivers, and accountants, it’s going to be more expensive than doing all of this work yourself. Especially once we use your car to rob a bank and fade into traffic, as the cops futilely attempt to search for a “Toyota car… thing… blue… old?” as described by an eyewitness. Hey, racing needs testing.
Have you ever wondered why bags of microwave popcorn practically scream at you not to use the “popcorn” setting on your microwave? It speaks to a mutual distrust between two classes of high-end professionals.
On one side, you have popcorn engineers: highly-trained food scientists, dedicated to understanding every aspect of how the microwave interacts with preservative-laced corn kernels. On the other lie the microwave engineers: folks who are copying a design invented in the 1950s and handed down ever since due to declining R&D budgets, whose only satisfaction in their job comes from making the brrrrr sound a little bit quieter and to add a couple more buttons to the number pad, so that their boss can ask for an extra $150 at the Walmart checkout.
You might think this exposes a little bit of my bias. It is true that I don’t really understand how popcorn is made, and so I’ve unfairly placed these humble folks (who probably came from Iowa or some shit) onto a pedestal. And it is also true that I’ve worked in electrical engineering departments, where the only remaining person on the floor who doesn’t have a substance-abuse problem is the intern’s intern.
Just to be on the safe side, I went into the belly of the beast and interviewed for a job. Wearing my least-molybdenum-grease-stained dress shirt and something resembling a tie if viewed from 25 feet away or more, I successfully negotiated my way into a near-minimum-wage job in the General Electric microwave-oven division. I couldn’t wait to figure out this mystery, and when they left me alone with a copy of the source code, I immediately did a search for “popcorn.” That set off some kind of alarm in a back room, and two goons emerged to assault me, screaming something about “fucking butter spies.”
Personally, I hope that this gulf is bridged one day. Not only does it represent the failure of Western engineering standards, but it no doubt leads to millions of dollars per year in wasted popcorn, not to mention gigawatts of wasted electricity that would be better off in our vapes. America can’t begin to heal until the average person can trust the “popcorn” button on their microwave to correctly prepare popcorn.
I will take every opportunity presented to me to talk about my van. Van ownership is more than just opting for “car, but box.” It’s a lifestyle change: you are operating a van, which can do virtually everything a pickup truck does, but without the air of quiet desperation or factory-fitted cowboy hat holders. You start to notice other models of van, which used to just be dour child-hauling appliances, and appreciate their unique qualities.
While van ownership has dropped precariously from its cultural high-point in the 1970s Vannin’ (sic) craze, and even further from its economic apogee of the mid-1990s, a passionate core of fans remains. Everyone is accepted. And I really do mean everyone, even if you’re just someone like me who saw a good deal on a V8 with a rolling chassis attached to it. They don’t even care that I mostly use the damn thing as a mobile garden shed, mostly because it has better locks on it than my house does.
Eventually, I discovered why vans are so loved. It’s the classic dump run. Now, you might imagine that dump runs would be better done in a pickup truck, where the stinky garbage can be outside and not in the passenger cabin with you. That’s where you’re wrong. The whole point is that the garbage is inside. Let me explain.
In my municipality, when you turn up at the dump, your vehicle gets weighed on the way in. Then, it gets weighed on the way out. You end up paying by how much weight you left behind. So, the obvious solution is to fill up with garbage that wasn’t yours originally, while discarding the stuff you came with. Now, the economic benefit doesn’t really work here, because they have a minimum charge. Where it really makes sense is, again, the unique “van aspect” of this answer.
You see, you are also forbidden to remove things from the dump. That includes the beautiful-but-slightly broken dirt bike that I spotted in the bicycle pile last week. After doing a little bit of easy math, I was able to trade a bunch of stolen bicycles for said dirt bike, all using the magical obscuring feature of the van, also known as “mostly solid walls.” And I can just keep it in there until I want to work on it, because a dirt bike inside a van only counts as one derelict to the local bylaw enforcement. Paying for itself already.
Gambling on auto racing is practically unheard of. Horses, yes. Dogs, absolutely. Boats, you bet. NASCAR? Not really. This confused me, until I did a quick web search, and then saw that there were indeed skeezy gambling operations that would take bets on virtually anything under the sun.
This all makes sense. As a bookie, you don’t really care what you are facilitating the betting on, so much as you care that there is a clear winner and a lot of clear losers. It may also be in your best professional interest to not offer betting on things that are considered sacrosanct, such as child beauty pageants, lest the collective anger of society be focussed upon your person.
Autocross, then, is the perfect venue for a bit of money-changing, or at least it would be if anyone bet on it. So, like any other scam, I had to bring in some new blood. Here’s the secret: casinos are full of people who love to gamble, and don’t need much of a push. Certainly it is distasteful, but not particularly illegal, as long as the casino boss doesn’t notice that you are trying to work his flock on his territory. Also, the parking lot is usually full of some really primo mid-1990s Toyotas that are hanging onto life by a thread.
Now, the real secret is to not bet on myself. Although you could argue that this constituted “throwing” an event, investigators soon found that I had no chance in hell of ever getting anywhere close to the top 20 of any event, even those with 19 or fewer competitors. Suckers: through savvy planning and analysis of my foes, I soon made no less than seven dollars profit.
There’s lots of shipping shortages at the moment, and everyone has their favourite boogeyman to blame. Me, I think it’s because ships are fucking stupid. That sound you hear is thousands of non-boat-owning individuals hammering their keyboards faster than a cocaine dealer’s cigarette boat can go between its weekly major engine overhaul.
And let’s be real clear here: cargo ships are just big boats. Take that paddler from the local lake in the shape of a swan, blow it up eight thousand times, and then have it leak emissions-illegal bunker fuel into the ocean and you’ve pretty much nailed it. No, I don’t give a shit if you have a fancy name for a big boat. A school bus is a big car. See? Nobody has any problem with that. Let’s move on to a solution.
The obvious answer is to launch shit into a parabolic arc from China to your doorstep. We’re pretty good at it – all of our respective governments spent trillions of dollars on intercontinental ballistic missile research that we don’t even use – and we can probably fire that shit cheaper than an airplane can fly.
There are of course some problems, which I will now argue against in bad faith in order to convince you that I am a public intellectual instead of some sort of crazed ideologue. Naturally, launching AliExpress packages into space is straight out. You need too much energy to break the atmosphere. On re-entry your package of adorable cat clothes is going to get a little singed, too. And firing things inside the troposphere has a huge risk of taking down airplanes, or even worse, going through a raincloud and getting wet. Cardboard hates both those things. So how do we make this work for the common person?
Here at Seat Safety Shipping Solutions (SSSS, or S4 if you’re good with numbers – send your resume) our main strategy uses a proprietary blend of brightly coloured trash bags wrapped around your package. Sure, these single-use plastic bags only serve to make our microplastic waste crisis worse, but that’s not the problem we were hired to solve. If you don’t like it, at least they’re light enough that you can probably pack a box with a week’s worth and fire them back to us with a standard North American consumer-grade trebuchet.
What nobody gets about research is just how much of it is spent entirely inside your head. If you’re sitting there at your desk, hunched-over, frantically drawing thousands of diagrams consisting of boxes and arrows, then that’s work, and you deserve money for that. Driving home, wondering what the fuck is going on, turning it over and over in your mind, slowly going insane: not billable hours.
When you’re starting on a really insane project, there’s a point in which it ceases to be one solid list of things-to-do. Suddenly, the to-do list explodes into an infinity of dependencies, all of which are terrifying. Soon, you’re lost inside your mental maze. Maybe whatever you’re doing never makes it out of that maze, and you shelve the entire mess just so you can do something with your hands again, instead of lying on the floor of your garage, drooling, paralyzed.
That’s why I subscribe to an innovative new method of getting things done: not knowing too much. Ancient thinkers used to call this “being really fucking dumb,” and it’s only in recent years that this technique has been rediscovered. The concept is simple: when you know things, you worry about things. Will these wires be able to flow this current? What happens if I power brake this piece of shit at the lights without shutting the safety valve off on the nitrous first? Sometimes solenoids stick open, and my homemade flamethrower could imperil the lives of my loved ones and neighbours! All of these things only became fears because you understood what was going on.
Need further proof? Think about all the people in your life who have succeeded despite their idiocy. Now stop thinking about it, and get out there and make something. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but someone had to get drunk and do an ill-advised one-night-stand on the other end.
I don’t mean to alarm you, but you should take your wallet and lock it up in another room before reading any further. Maybe leave it with a loved one who will not turn it over to you, no matter how much you beg and plead. Okay, ready? You can import tiny firetrucks from Japan and drive them over here.
That’s right: the island nation of Japan, which gave us such miracles as the Sony PlayStation, instant ramen, and artificially intelligent bakery robots that can also detect cancer, has cute little fire trucks. They’re vaguely minivan-sized, and do nearly everything our big-boy firetrucks do. It makes sense, right? They’ve got narrow roads, tightly-packed neighbourhoods, and one parking spot costs about as much as a Boeing 737.
There’s more, too: not only are they easy to park and easier on the eyes, but most of them have an honest-to-God five-speed manual transmission. You can buy a glorified Mitsubishi turbodiesel minivan, bop around in it rowing your own gears, and still have the ability to put out any fire you identify. Hell, it could make you some extra pocket change if you get there before the “real” firefighters in their bulky, wasteful landbarge that can barely navigate rush-hour traffic.
And that’s not even to mention the sex appeal: people love firefighters, so why wouldn’t they love a cute firefighter? If you mention in your Tinder profile that you own and operate your own firetruck, folks are gonna want to bang you just so they can play with the siren.
There is, of course, one serious downside. If you own a cute little firetruck, then all you’re going to want to do is drive it, which means you’re going to get fired from your job. That might be okay, but it seems unlikely that the real firefighters are going to let you bunk with them and eat their spaghetti after you beat them to that fully-engulfed Audi fire on the highway last weekend. They didn’t even get a chance to cut the catalytic converter off the wreck.
In recent months, the local authorities have become irate at a group of folks. These folks – the same as you or I – have figured out that since all the office buildings downtown became abandoned in the midst of The Cataclysm, they might as well move in. As long as they stay out of the way of the roving security guards, there’s electricity, heat, plumbing, a roof over your head, and thin drywall inside which to stuff away food. For free. These squatters lived the dream of us all, and now the 5-0 want to make them pay for it.
The problem starts in getting caught. Statistically, if you have a few hundred people doing something all at once, eventually one of them is going to land on a security guard who notices that there’s a flushing sound coming from the bathroom on the 16th floor. And most of those security guards can’t be bribed, especially not with eccentric woodcarvings or leftover wrappers of the Snickers bars that were abandoned inside white-collar-worker desks.
Once someone finally got caught, of course the word went out to the other security guards. You better check a little more closely, maybe pay attention to whether that weird sound is a raccoon or some guy sleeping on top of a Polycom. Big-league crackdown, dozens in jail. And for what? It’s not like these big corporations were ever going to return to these offices, not unless someone with real power, like Susan in Accounting, complained that she was sad about no longer being able to see/infect her coworkers every day.
That’s why me and a bunch of other people who have seen the movie Spartacus decided to act like the main character, Dalton Trumbo. Using sophisticated thermoptic camouflage suits stolen from the nearby armoury, we infiltrated every major commercial low-to-medium-rise in the downtown area in the middle of the night. Then, at the precise opening of business, we disabled the camouflage, which convinced building owners (and cops) that everyone had returned to the office, and that the people they thought were poorly-dressed homeless psychopaths were in fact just relatively harmless graphic designers. Cosplaying as a person with an actual job was very exciting for a little bit, but my role was getting too intense and I had to stop.
Why? I was coming up on the 45-minute mark of a fake scrum standup meeting when I realized that I was now day-dreaming of one day purchasing an Aston Martin with my imaginary stock options. The lure was so corruptive that, for a brief, terrifying moment, I forgot completely about the existence of the 1990 Toyota Kijang.
There’s a fine art to loaning out your car. It’s more than just passing a key to another individual and telling them to fill the tank up with gas. No, you have to cover all the quibbles. That airbag light which won’t go off, the sorta-dead battery, maybe the brakes that tug super hard to one side the first time they use them and then never again after that so make sure if you’re going to stop you have to be really serious about it right off the bat no fucking around I’m serious one and done that’s all you get. That kind of little stuff.
Realistically, most of my cars are kept in tolerable condition. They could easily be loaned out without too much of a tutorial. However, that pesky word “tolerable” means different things to different folks. There is absolutely a baseline of individual below which I will not loan the car at all. If you have no mechanical sympathy, don’t know how to read a coolant gauge for a minor overheat, or have children that depend on your continued survival, I’ll tell your ass to take the bus.
For the rest of you, well, I expect that my vehicles are treated properly. That means 8500 rpm upshifts, using the two-step launch control at every light, and decoking the valves with the continued and generous application of Our Lady Of Two Nitrogens and One Oxygen. Maybe also try to park them in such a way that the leaking gear oil doesn’t pool on the exhaust headers, because if that thing catches on fire while you’re driving it, you better be replacing my vehicle with a shitbox of equal or greater value.
With this in mind, I’ve already formed plans to start a rental car company. There’s a shortage of cars available for loaning, and even when you do find one, all they have are new vehicles. The only problem is that having to explain which seatbelts still work and what speeds to not use the windshield wipers above takes up so much of the lot attendant’s time that it really cuts into the profit margin.
How much stuff would you say that you have purchased for yourself on impulse? We’ve all got a little bit of retail therapy that we regret. For me, it’s all the parts to cars I don’t own, have never owned, and may never own. There are probably ways you can defend this behaviour, such as expressing an intention to corner the resale market on OEM water-to-air intercoolers for GMC Typhoons, but ultimately it just comes down to the all too human urge to hunt and gather.
Ever since the beginning of time, human beings have had more in common with the magpies than the great apes. Yes, a monkey will occasionally steal a shiny object if you put one in front of it for long enough. No monkey in the entire world will devise an elaborate series of precariously-stacked cardboard boxes and a proprietary ranking system for them. No magpies will either, but at least they kind of show off the things they collect to other birds so they can get laid.
And it’s not easy to become an impulse sales outlet, either. If you want to get rid of your spare garbage, it’s not as easy as punching in the phrase “1979 dodge taillight” that got you into this problem in the first place. You have to take photos, and organize yourself, and find a cardboard box to ship things in. Might as well just chuck it into that weird-shaped corner of the basement and hope that the rat infestation doesn’t get to it before your descendants’ hired estate-home-cleaning crew does. This represents a market inefficiency, and it’s one that Switch Sales is ready to bridge.
When you let our trained representatives into your house, they will begin a process of aggressively decluttering. All of the shit you bought when you were drunk or moderately sad about politics will get thrown into the back of a Plymouth Scamp and evacuated from the premises. Some less-educated critics of our process will call it “grand theft,” but our lawyers will repeatedly tap the line in the contract that makes it all retroactively legal. And where does this junk all end up? Not eBay, don’t worry: you’d just buy it all back, then. It’s all sequestered safely away in a private basement/garage/backyard/pool-house/alley/spare-vans-lying-around-the-property, waiting for just the right project to use it. Actually, better buy a spare just to be safe, because otherwise I’ll use up the last intercooler I have left.
Kid playgrounds: safe, or deadly? With a little bit of effort, they can be both. Nowadays, we just don’t trust children with enough responsibility for their own safety. Crossing guards, minimum age standards for firearm possession, and safety scissors are all good examples of this. Rubberized playground surfaces are another one.
Here’s a science fact: cars with more traction are safer. So why are we wasting all that perfectly good, government-funded traction compound on children’s playgrounds? We all know that kids are going to fall down and bust their asses thirty or forty times every time they go out, or jump off the top of a perfectly good fibreglass fun castle without looking.
When I’m elected president, which will happen any second now, my first act will be to mandate that these wuss-ass playgrounds get torn up and the compound transferred to playground zones. After all, being able to brake harder will make it safer for kids crossing the road! And if you need to launch hard in order to avoid getting rear-ended while picking up your kids from school, you can do that too. Early simulations show that even the shittiest modern Lexus cute-ute is actually traction-limited to achieve its best 0-60 time, which significantly reduces the maximum amount of safety that can be expressed using the right pedal.
My shadow cabinet is still debating the merits of adding NHRA-spec water boxes, but so far they’re all onboard with my proposal to force playground zones to be a minimum of one quarter-mile long. Which is good, because I don’t really tolerate dissent. Vote for me, because you don’t want to be on the list of people who voted for the other guy. That would be especially unsafe.
In the old-shitbox community, there is a long-running debate about whether we actually got anything out of the Cold War. Which is not to say there were no benefits whatsoever. The faceless corporations that manufactured automatic transmissions sold a bunch for tanks that were largely never used. The Soviets made some absolutely primo niche rolling crapsheds that existed just to flex on the Lincoln Town Car. Tetris was co-opted by a Dutch dude who played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons and probably helped drown a billionaire. None of these things, however, filtered down to the average Westerner just trying to make their way to work using the “good enough” strategy.
You might think that the constant threat of nuclear annihilation would have produced some tremendous sports cars. Why bother driving a conservative, respectable vehicle stuffed full of children at responsible speeds if we could all be blipped out of existence tomorrow by some adversarial eggheads splitting an atom over Des Moines? It didn’t work out that way, though, and this is probably because the automakers realized there was more margin in six or seven of those family haulers, every couple of years, than selling just one penis-shaped road rocket and maybe an expensive branded casket afterward.
So maybe those dumpy, boring automobiles with names like Newport, New Yorker, and Versailles would be able to be pepped up just a little bit with some good old-fashioned know-how? Not so, friend: the various conflagrations, handshake deals, and secret social clubs tying our fate to countries we can barely pronounce soon drove gas prices into the stratosphere, and so ended the era of big fucking V8s, in favour of big fucking V8s that don’t make any power.
On the other hand, if we had just given in and let the Soviets run roughshod over the entire world, it seems like we’d all be driving two-stroke Trabants and Wartburgs. Which, uh, actually doesn’t sound that bad. Maybe a little positive-pressure turbocharging to help try and keep some of the oil inside the crankcase, in exchange for the secret police occasionally stopping by to pull out my teeth because I dared to criticize the rust-proofing of a 45-year-old VAZ-2102. Which would be utterly preposterous, as surely the rot started with the bourgeois scum who designed the unibody at Fiat.
I’ve broken down in a lot of places. Not crying – at least not always – but mechanically. When you drive as many shit cars as I do, multiplied by how many parts are in even the simplest shit car, multiplied by how many components are in those parts, it’s no small miracle that I can even get out of my driveway in the morning.
Cars are intended to move, and sometimes move you very far. Breakdowns don’t always happen at home, as a result. A fuel filter might have been marginal for twenty years and then decide to finally clog up with nature’s bullshit when you go down an unusually steep hill. Then you’re trying to scrounge around the grocery store parking lot for a piece of wire thin enough to ramrod the guts out of the fucking thing into a drainage ditch.
This isn’t some high-handed metaphor for taking life easier, either. While it is true that you will have some exciting new experiences when your only method of mechanized escape has been pulled from your grasp, things don’t work like they do in the movies. You’re not going to find the love of your life, and you’re certainly not going to go on a madcap adventure with a bunch of screwballs. Maybe that stuff will still happen in the background, but not while you’ve got the hood open and are furiously banging on the starter motor in the hope that this is all that’s wrong with the car’s electrical system.
Actually, on second thought, maybe it is. The next time you’re broken down in a new place, take a deep breath. Maybe get a bit of a walk while you think over your problem. And then see if someone has a mouldy old El Camino on their front lawn. They seem like our kind of people; I’m sure they’d take a trade.
I’ve always wanted to travel into outer space and meet sentient life from another world. It’s not because of the promise of discovering new species, or broadening our horizons, or reaching intergalactic enlightenment. No, it’s a chance to collect new kinds of fasteners.
For example, even basic bodywork screws might be wholly different. What sorts of screw heads would an alien race use to fasten fenders to the car? What about aftermarket fibreglass overfenders? Is there something we have not yet discovered? Maybe they don’t use screws at all, and have evolved past road salt. NASA refuses to speculate on any of this when I call up the main phone line. Which is very rude, as I pay their salaries.
When I call the public transit customer-service line instead (I also pay their salaries) the guy who answers at night sometimes has even more questions. He doesn’t know if aliens would have cars at all. Maybe they just walk everywhere, or have efficient and accessible commuter trains. I think that last one is just too far into the realm of science fiction, but I’m happy to keep listening to his preposterous fantasy of “train that arrives on time” as long as he’s willing to hear out my theories about how a nine-point Torx would be even better.
Maybe I’ll never get to break the bonds of our Earth. I’ll probably not get to fly off to another galaxy like an amphetamine-riddled Buzz Aldrin. Some future human being will, though, and it’s important that they don’t look like a total asshole when the aliens start asking questions about what the torque sequence on a Toyota 22RE head is. What do you mean, why would they take one with them? How else are we going to put our best foot forward as a species without showing the aliens the pinnacle of our technological development, the 1988 4Runner?
When I visited a lot of conventions as a guest speaker, the most important part was to be good to the sponsors. If you show up to a tractor pull sponsored by Dodge and spend the entire opening act riffing on how terrible the Ram 2500 Laramie Edition is, then you probably won’t get invited to any future conventions sponsored by Dodge, either. It’s not dishonest to withhold your most vicious opinions in public; merely polite.
Of course, at those conventions where I was forced to meet-and-greet with the members of the public, I wouldn’t hold back if I was asked directly about squeaky dashboard plastic or fragile differentials. This was a safe space, just an interaction between two car freaks. Usually I wouldn’t then see the sales representative of the sponsor stomping into the line afterward in a rage, because why would they bother listening to members of the public either?
Where a lot of people fall down is later, in the green room with the other “influencers.” You see, brands like to create these synthetic human beings. Years ago, it was just folks they would hire to tout for them on YouTube while seeming like honest everyday people. Every couple of “normal” videos, they’d mysteriously get invited to check out a new Dodge, which was always photographed and lit very well. Nowadays, with the advances in genetic engineering technology, there is no need to involve a natural-born human being when they can just whip one up in the synth-vats.
What this means for you and me is that you really should not shit-talk the brand around them. Not only will they get upset, but if their neuro-linguistic programming is faulty or slightly out of date, they might end up agreeing with your opinion. And that’s when the bomb in their chest cavity will go off. Dry cleaning is never covered by the per diem of a convention attendance rider.
When you collect an infinite constellation of obscure old things, you would think that folks would come by asking for help to connect their grandpa’s old 1970 Molecular Frammistat to their new stuff. However, this never happens. What actually occurs in these situations is that, confronted with the problem, they will buy their own Frammistat-adapter, use it once, and then file it away in their junk drawer for approximately the rest of their natural lifetime.
This sort of self-reliance is noble, in a way, and also embiggens the wallet of the e-commerce trillionaires, who at this point may have left our solar system after uploading their minds to a holographic storage matrix and no longer require money. What it doesn’t do is build community. If we all knew a guy who had a Frammistat adapter, then he’d be able to offer it to help out. You’d get the job done without giving $4 to the internet, he’d go home happy that he helped out a real human being with a real human being problem, and the roaring Ponzi scheme that is the economy would finally blow oil past the rings and flame out overnight.
Just to make sure this never happens, professional engineers are constantly inventing new standards. Sometimes they take a port or cable that already exists, and dick with it so the old stuff won’t fit anymore. Or they change the thread on a fitting, maybe mess with the plunge depth so the old one won’t fully seat. It both gives them something to do, and “trickles down” some work to lesser engineers, who are tasked with devising adapters between these things and things that people actually fucking own. And if they immediately discontinue that standard, making it an obscure novelty that only lasted for a short period of time? Well, then they can charge a whole lot more later by calling it a “retro” solution. It is in this way that Western civilization continues to exist.
You, too, should do your part for our great project of pseudo-obsolescence. Take something that already works, and modify it. It’s even better if you don’t tell someone first, so that the pencil and paper manufacturers get a little bit of extra walking-around money down the line when someone has to figure out how it worked.
Perhaps the greatest perk of being a commercial truck driver is the food you get at truck stops. In case you’re unfamiliar, a “truck stop” is common American vernacular for a store where trucks stop. They often feature diesel pumps, a place to park, hot pay showers, and greasy food from a fryer that hasn’t been cleaned out since the Lincoln administration.
Before things got really terrifying in my neck of the woods, the truck stop is where our intrepid party of vehicle dismantlers would go after a long day at the Pick-N-Pull. We’d fill up on cheap calories, gawk at the real truckers, and then take off back to our comfy suburban homes and largely immobile beds.
Eventually, the truck stop’s population started to shift. It had inadvertently been built in what used to be an industrial yard, but one that was rapidly becoming gentrified. Artists, hipsters, and real estate specialists were stopping in, happy for a moment to pretend they, too, were kings of the road. We noticed this, of course, and then tried to determine where we slotted in on some imaginary hierarchy, until we realized that some of those hipsters drove bigger trucks than we did.
Now, the truck stop has become a sort of 70s-aesthetic diner. Nothing at all changed except for the management, and the addition of an extra “1” before every price on the menu. We still visit once in awhile, out of loyalty to the grilled cheese if nothing else, but it’s downright depressing to get the hairy eyeball at a truckstop for being underdressed and reeking of hydraulic fluid.
Our society loves to offer “educational opportunities” to the young. Let the kids visit a farm, pretend to be a police officer, read a book about mountaineering. They need this exposure, it is believed, to figure out what they want to be. When you become an adult, you’re expected to get very good at one single thing and stop being quite so Goddamn curious about all the mysteries of the universe. That’s where Seat Safety Adult Learning comes in.
Those among you who are already accomplished, educated office-working professionals may feel a sense of uneasiness. That you’ve achieved so much, but in the wrong direction. A different lifestyle, perhaps a different life altogether, would have made you happier. It is not too late to exit the rat race and get into whatever it is that we’re offering this week. Let fate decide.
For just $164.29 per 30-hour seminar, our team of certifiable instructors will teach you whatever it is they want to teach you. If Prison Jimbo is out of jail (jail is different from prison: that’s a freebie) then he’ll be teaching you about how to hotwire a car, or get away with shanking somebody in the exercise yard. Talbot Horizon Ann will be telling you about six hours’ worth of Talbot Horizon information, which may – if you’re lucky – veer into Plymouth Horizon trivia, free of charge. It’s cheaper than so-called “real” college, and you’ll be learning valuable life skills that you will need to change your career.
Even if you don’t end up changing your career to fortune-telling, and then doing a palm reading for your boss which consists entirely of your two-week notice, the additional information will at least make you a more interesting individual. It’s hard to keep an entire audience at a party or business conference entertained with a story about semantic data processing, but everybody stops and listens when you tell them about what kinds of non-dairy creamers are the best for committing arson with. And becoming interesting is the next best thing to becoming useful.
If you work on a limited amount of cars, you’ll end up with socket wrenches that you never use. For instance, a good ol’ Subaru will pretty much only use 10mm, 12mm, 14mm, 17mm, and 19mm sockets. Maybe a few big ‘uns for the real hard stuff. When you look at your toolbox, you’ll see a whole whack of sockets in between these values, which are being completely ignored.
Here at Switch’s Socket Swap, our goal is to trade your unused sockets for ones that you may find more useful. While anyone and everyone has seen the appeal of the teeny-tiny 10mm socket, BMW owners desperately need a 13mm at all times and regard the 12mm with disinterest. Wouldn’t it be better if you had two 12s and they got two 13s? Or – trade the useless SAE half of your socket set for the useful metric half of someone who only owns caveman cars hewn from pre-atomic-age steel and Rainier beer.
Now, I know what you’re going to say. Some automotive enthusiasts are sluts, and cross between American, European, and Japanese cars all day long. They would need one of everything, right? Our research shows that these people actually do not exist, outside of professional mechanics, and those folks end up with a bunch of extra sockets anyway by “borrowing” them from their coworkers. And if a home enthusiast is enough of a freak to truly enjoy the entire spectrum of automobiles, then they’re probably mentally well-adjusted enough not to lose the damn sockets every five seconds God damn it they were just in my hand.
So sign up today! All it takes is for you to send us all of the sockets you’re not using, and we promise to mail you their logical complement as soon as we get a second customer. No returns. You can take your fancy-ass BMW to the dealership and buy some more 13s for $79 a piece while you’re waiting for our reply.
I love the flea market. Despite the name, there are rarely any fleas. What you get instead is a cornucopia of fantastic deals, assuming you’re willing to look through a disorganized mess of identical-looking components. Luckily for me, I’ve honed this skillset through years of trying to find things that I just put down and then immediately lost.
The core of a good flea market find is information asymmetry. That’s MBA-speak for “knowing more than the other guy.” Usually, it’s a detriment to your existence to intimately understand the differences between a Snap-On and a MAC socket wrench, but if both are equally priced, then you can wring out some additional profit. That is, if you don’t just buy both of them and giggle like a maniac before throwing them into the pile at home. I’m not so good at that latter part.
Luckily, the internet exists and can teach you every niche detail about old crap that you ever wanted to know. Just plug it into Wikipedia, and between 36 and 900 hours later, you’ll be a subject-matter expert who can give extremely boring university-grade lectures on demand. Unfortunately for you, your opponent, the guy running the booth, can do the exact same thing. He probably has a lot more free time sitting there, waiting for someone to show up and buy a chipped lens for a decades-obsolete Canon camera.
This is where the real thrifting experts set themselves apart. Knowing things about what you are buying is step one. Truly understanding your opponent is step two. And knowing yourself is step three. Once you have achieved the enlightenment of the final step, you’ll realize that you already bought a bunch of vintage knife sharpeners last month and you can just dig those out instead of grabbing another one. One hundred percent discount.
A constellation of automobile brands is lying above you in Brand Heaven. Tucker, Studebaker, even little Saab: all of them are waiting for their chance to be reincarnated as a crossover. Or at least that’s the common fiction that we tell very young children, their little eyes wet with tears when they ask what happened to Plymouth. Don’t lie to them any longer.
In reality, nobody really knows what it takes to bring back a brand from the dead, and so we try elaborate methods like Photoshopping and trademark searches. If we just believe hard enough, then our beloved nameplates can be reunited with us once more. Of course, GM’s massive thousand-year-old hands are not about to open their fingers and release Pontiac, but maybe with all the other crazy shit going on, they plumb forgot to renew a badge or two that we can kick over to China to produce a line of small electric runabouts.
Personally, as might be expected, I go for the fraud approach. Virtually no human being on Earth can name every automobile brand that has ever existed. I can get a group of investors together and tell them we’re bringing back the storied Honda performance sub-brand Claude Monet®, and they have to believe me. Otherwise they’d have to spend five or ten minutes on Wikipedia, and those dudes just do not have the spare time for that, what with all the other bad deals they’re hurling money at in the course of a day. I’ve started six automobile companies this week alone, all of them predicated on a retro revival of a brand that never happened in the first place.
Unfortunately, all frauds eventually catch up with you (perhaps another good lesson for those impressionable youths) and I certainly had a humdinger this last weekend. Who would have known that a little car company called Buick was still making automobiles, and had a bloodthirsty legal team to boot?
All across America, unused nuclear armaments are falling into disrepair. I’m not telling you this to worry you that there will be an accidental explosion, irradiating an entire state that nobody cares about. Knowing the American cars I’ve owned, chances are good that these things were not built well enough to blow up in the first place.
The most important thing to remember about nuclear apocalypse is that pretty much nobody wanted it, except for folks who wanted to make a ton of money off of it. If the government asks you to build thousands of nukes, that’s much more profit than if they asked you to build one nuke. And you can wring out even more dinero from that contract by hiring low-paid workers.
Now, you might ask yourself: weren’t they tested? Sure, they were, until they made it illegal to test the suckers. After the test ban treaty you could slap any garbage you wanted into a missile-shaped tube. In the event of a nuclear war, you only needed one of those suckers to go off, and even if they didn’t, it wasn’t like they were going to be able to come after you for a warranty repair.
All this adds up to a bonanza for the local entrepreneur. Statistically, the average American is less than fifteen feet away from a fully-equipped nuclear missile silo, and chances are your local one is full-ass abandoned. Moving in is just a bolt-cutter away. Not only does this provide affordable housing as well as voluminous parking, but you can sell off the nuclear missiles inside for some spending cash. Hell, I’ve seen James Bond movies - people would pay a lot of money for those, at least one thousand dollars. That’ll get you into a good, reliable used car, maybe even one made by the Japanese.
Check your stock portfolio: the price of vans has been on a tear lately. These boxy carryalls have always been popular, but in recent years their desirability has not compared to the 70s peak of “Vannin’,” or even the 90s fad of packing your kids into a dual-sliding-door tall wagon for a trip to see grandma. Now, things are different. Profitably different.
What changed? Well, if you had to ask an economist, it’s that you can live in a van, and nobody can afford a fucking house anymore. The idea of telling your landlord to cram it with walnuts and then living in the great outdoors, having constant adventures and no fixed address, is a shared fantasy among our age cohort. Everybody wants to live in a van, and reheat sausages they stole from the Wal-Mart they’re parked outside of using the cigarette lighter. That’s why I’ve chosen to sell off my prized possession, a 1982 Econoline E250, with the intent of allowing human beings to take up residence inside it.
Now, it is true that Ford engineering has tried their hardest to make this vehicle extra hateful to maintain versus the pickup truck that it is based on. This decision was probably made as much out of contempt as laziness, but their actual rationale is not important. What is important is that I’ve loosely ratchet-strapped a boat inverter to the back of the passenger seat, which will give you plenty of high-ripple power for the computer you use to draw increasingly niche pornography in order to survive. Also, there’s cabin lights! You can enjoy a romantic evening watching them get slowly dimmer as the battery runs down, because there’s no more room in that engine bay to put a second battery.
Does this Econoline move under its own power? Yes, but grudgingly. The transmission is a little dicky. However, I think you’ll find that if you ask a realtor, the average house does not move at all. And if you pour the down payment on a one-bedroom condo with a swimming pool you’re not allowed to use into this thing, I guarantee you that it will be able to find at least two out of the four(?) gears it came with. And that’s enough to move to another town, once the local PD steps up their harassment campaign on your fellow van-lifers.
Most of successfully owning an old car comes down to instinct. If it feels wrong, it is wrong. Nothing is going to break without giving you a lot of warning first. Of course, if you don’t know what you’re looking for, then even minor disasters are going to be a surprise to you. Ignorance of the warning signs means that things just happen, like a caveman swearing at a malevolent sun god for a bad crop harvest.
So how do you build this experience? There’s the expensive way, which is to actually own a shitty old car. You’ll get a lot of direct knowledge, and also some worn-out shoes from walking home. This way, you also get lots of great stories about various tow truck drivers to share at parties with people who will then fake a severe food allergy in order to get away from you.
My recommended method is to find someone who owns a lot of shitty old cars, and then become a sort of apprentice. Follow them around, hold tools for them, make a junkyard visit or two, and you’ll soon start picking up knowledge by osmosis. You won’t get the experience as quickly as if you were directly involved, but it’s at much lower risk to yourself. It’s just a matter of finding the right senpai – you need someone with a lot of broken shit to fix, so you get the full spectrum of experience.
I’m prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice in order to further the advancement of human knowledge. We’re going to be pulling out the rear subframe and trying to hammer in a replacement from some burned-out wreck of a car I found in the ditch out in the woods last week. Come on over to my garage this weekend, and bring your own tools, because I don’t share.
When I was a kid, the metal-detector fad briefly returned. In case you’re not aware and are afraid of drawing inferences based on names, a metal detector is a gadget that tells you if it’s pointing at metal. The idea back during the first iteration of the fad was that you would hand over your $249.95 to the Radio Shack in the mall, and then you’d head over to the beach with your new money-making tool. Every beach, in theory, was full of buried metal treasure: old pirate coins, lost wedding rings with a monetary reward attached, keys to a low-mileage dune buggy.
In reality, I live in a landlocked area, and there weren’t likely to be many washed-up pirate ships on the artificial lake that was constructed somewhere around 1981. Nor was the sand of the “beach” attached to that lake deep enough to hide anything other than the occasional broken beer bottle.
Nevertheless, I saw lots of folks trying their luck, and finding nothing. I remember that many garage sales the next season had barely-used metal detectors for sale, albeit with a few gouges when the angry owners drop-kicked the things after realizing it wouldn’t even detect a (non-ferrous, of course) test penny.
You would think that after multiple years of this scam being perpetrated on the citizenry, a law-enforcement agency would have stepped in, or at least Bob Radio Shack’s mansion up there in the mountains would have been burned down by an angry suburbanite dad. It never happened, and in fact the local news was quick to leap on and hype up the one guy who did find something: an intact set of exhaust header gaskets for a ‘71 Valiant. Hey, I told you I was at those garage sales for a reason.
There’s a popular belief that car folks only like fast cars. This is disproven by the fact that, while fast cars are the best cars, slow cars are also fun to drive around. If you have a fast car, you’re still sharing the road with slow cars. If you have a slow car, you get to irritate people who have fast cars.
Take my daily driver, a heavily worn Plymouth Volare, for instance. It boasts a zero-to-sixty time of about one week. It gets the doors blown off it by literally any new vehicle sold today, including most bicycles. None of this matters, because it has a trunk that is sort of large enough to hold things. As long as you don’t care that those things fall through the hole in the trunk and end up on the highway. Most of the things I want to keep end up ratchet-strapped to the back seats so they don’t fall through the hole in the rear footwell. Sorry, what were we talking about again?
Fun. That’s right. There is nothing more fun in this world than trying to hammer a car through a canyon. Except when the car is very upset about moving at all, much less pull the kind of lateral Gs that top scientists thought were impossible at the time of the vehicle’s original manufacture. It turns out that even the junkiest tires you pick up from Tires4Less4DisgustingAmericanPigdogs.cn are still practically race tires compared to late-1970s economy tires, and even more so if the tires you bought the car with are old enough to vote.
And the entire time while I’m rattling my way through this white-knuckle death race, a base-model Corolla is sitting an inch off my bumper, exploding because I can’t even get up to the speed limit and keep coughing so much oil smoke onto their hood that it will probably stain the paint and impact the lease buyback. That’s what being a car asshole is all about.
Looking for Christmas gift ideas? There’s only one thing the gearhead in your life wants, and it’s not Soviet research chemicals for recreational use. Rather than get them the normal boring socket set, useless pile of battery-operated impact tools, or “Renault Dauphine Parking Only” signs for the garage, get them some better lighting.
When I get down and dirty with a real job, I do most of it by feel. That’s not because I’m a bad-ass professional who wishes to commune more naturally with the car, it’s because I have crappy lighting and can’t see shit anyway. If someone were to come by and offer me, say, some decent floor-mounted flood lights, that would be a very nice gift indeed. Standing there and holding the light so it’s actually pointing somewhere useful? That’s practically an act of sainthood.
Lighting is one of those things that you can never get enough of. Even if one corner of your garage is so scaldingly bright that the daycare across the street took out a restraining order for protection, chances are that corner is not where you just dropped the adjuster bolt for your rear parking brake. And you need all kinds of different formats of lighting, for all the different problems. For instance, I can’t really drag my el-cheapo LED trouble light into the car when I’m pulling interior trim. There’s no metal for the magnet to click onto, and also I melted the plastic lens on it by accidentally spraying it with brake cleaner last week.
Now, does this gift idea involve intensely studying someone’s work area? Yes. Is there a massive risk that you will be asked to hold some tools, or help out? Absolutely. Will you attempt to kill yourself after the third consecutive hour of having the difference between a Valiant and a Volare explained to you? At least if you do, the cops won’t have to bring out so many crime scene lights.
Lots of awful people get away with it because the folks who have the power to easily smash them into the ground feel bad about doing so. They get second, third, and fourth chances, because the aggrieved party wielding the hammer does not like being the one to finish them off. This gets even worse when you involve the legal system – suddenly a judge is trying not to screw up everyone’s life after an afternoon of hearing the problem.
For many reasons that should be obvious to even the most casual observer, I’m one of those awful people. Statistically, I’ve gotten away with at least ten regular citizens’ worth of traffic crimes. Someone who is more in touch with the concept of empathy would refer to this as “privilege,” and they’d be correct.
Of course, in an attempt to disqualify their argument, I can point to many awful things that have happened to me during my life. For instance, I got arrested for jumping a Baja Bug off an escalator and into a shopping mall fountain during the Christmas rush. Have you ever been to jail? It’s terrible, and everyone there is rude to you, especially the policemen, whose salary I pay.
Some of the other inmates don’t even want some advice when they tell their story about their getaway car stalling in front of the bank (it could be the throttle position sensor, Knives Carl!)
For those of you who do not rescue old decrepit cars that have been sitting for decades, it’s important to know about ether. No, not the malevolent nothingness that transmits monsters into your computer. Or even the exciting neurotransmitter-trashing drug popular at carnivals. I’m talking about spraying some good shit into an internal combustion engine so that it can fire up. A little visit from the Ether Bunny can easily make the difference between a runner and a burden.
Take it from me: nothing is more enjoyable than wandering into a farmer’s field, firing up a rusty piece of shit that he swore would never run again, and then driving it out tooting the horn. Bonus points if you fake him out about it before you pay him, cut the asking price a little bit before you take it for a ride past his stunned eyes. You’re not just rescuing an old car, but uncovering history. Think about how excited archeologists must get when they dig up all the parts of a dinosaur and then get to bring it to life. Wait, they what? And they get paid how much for that? Note to self, re-falsify resume for natural history museum.
While it may seem a little harsh to give the engine a jolt of pure vroom-vroom instead of taking things slowly with the natural order of gasoline, you have to understand that pretty much anything gummed up in the carb or intake manifold is a writeoff. You wouldn’t stand over someone doing CPR and lecture them not to use the defibrillator, right? Oh no, you’re tearing their shirt! Surely they’d rather die than have you zap off a little nipple hair. Once the car’s running, there’s plenty of time for the next owner to mollycoddle it, after they pay you an absolute fortune for a living classic.
That’s why, if you’re even peripherally thinking of buying old shitty cars on impulse, it’s important to carry a lot of ether with you. You never know when it might help yourself, or even someone you know. And if it’s a really primo dead car, well, maybe hide the bottles under a blanket and make them a good offer instead. Deals are what give people life, after all.
“Students, we have a new exchange student today. Switch-san comes here from Canada.”
This was where it became clear that my luck had run out. This entire classroom of high school students could tell that I was grossly too old to be a transfer student. Certainly the teacher could, as she’s much younger than me. Still, I knew that if I just kept projecting confidence, they would eventually decide that it was someone else’s problem and go on with life.
After stumbling through an introduction, I managed to find my assigned seat and sit next to Jotaro. I didn’t know much about him, but something told me that he was into cars too. We would be kindred spirits. At long last my quest could conclude, and I could return home triumphant.
“Hey, do you know where I can get a cheap Suzuki Cervo? It seems like a great car for a student driver.”
Jotaro regarded me with suspicion. Immediately I realized I had made a critical mistake. When I was blackmailing that English teacher into filling out the transfer paperwork, I failed to notice that I had checked the box next to the distinct characters for “Toyota City” – pictograms of a four-speed automatic transmission, reliability, and a lack of regular maintenance on the part of the first through seventeenth owners. This was enemy territory if you were looking for a rear-engined, two-stroke Middle-Japanese runabout from the late 1970s. To his credit, he played it off with a confused shrug, and we returned to our instruction.
Later that day, I got into a massive street fight with a bunch of Celica-owning diehards, no doubt tipped off to my existence by Jotaro. I wish I could say that I had a better fighting technique than curling up into a ball and wailing loudly in only the greasiest Quebecois French about being a senior citizen, but it got the attention of some passing cops.
And those cops left their cruiser running – a late-model Nissan Cedric. Cops really do identify as a different group of people than civilians, I realized with a start while in the midst of powersliding it through a crowded shopping plaza with the lights and siren wailing. As I rapidly upshifted to regain traction and headed for the highway to Hamamatsu, I lectured into the CB radio that they should really work better on integrating themselves into the community.
An older Corvette is actually a pretty decent daily driver. Despite what the critics may say, a wheezing low-compression V8 that wastes enough gasoline to simulate a small refinery fire and kicks out copious amounts of needlessly noxious emissions is actually the ideal grocery-getting conveyance. As long as you’re not getting too many groceries, because that hatch is only about big enough for a couple bricks of coke.
Are they particularly good in winter weather? The fibreglass panels can be replaced in one shot with a trip to any number of sketchy flyover-country manufacturers, but the frames are made out of steel and will therefore rust like crazy. On the other hand, the heater is pretty good, and it’s easy to hog the rear wheelwells out for oversized mud-terrain tires. That’s what I call “ride comfort.”
What you actually are buying when you’re getting an old Corvette is style. Basically all of them look like spaceship dongs, which means that even going slow, the folks who are into that will look. According to recent polling, that’s over 67% of the population. Of course, you should avoid making eye contact with those people, and definitely do not accept any links that they try to wirelessly transmit to your holopod. Just bask in the attention, and maybe give a one-wheel-peel as you leave the Safeway parking lot.
So what is the real problem that keeps the humble Corvette from being used as a Cavalier, Grand Prix, or even (gasp) Blazer? The answer is sellers. Whenever you see a seller trying to offer you a Corvette, they want actual money for it. When a group of Eastern European mad scientists constructed the original ‘Vette, this was not the kind of thing they had in mind for their plastic-fantastic go-kart. No: Zora Arkus-Duntov would have wanted you to show up in a nice suit, go for a “test drive,” and never return the car.
The modern-day internet is full of people who became spectacularly, infinitely rich after filming themselves for YouTube. I don’t mean to present this as a small achievement; it takes lots of hard work, discipline, and a camera capable of connecting to an internet-capable computer system. Ever since the public library burned down and the budget was reallocated to building more speed traps, that last point has become a little hard to get.
So filming myself is off the table, which is alright because my drama teacher in school deliberately burned her own hand on a Klieg light rather than allow my acting skills to be revealed. Cancelled the whole elementary-school Christmas play and everything while she was being ushered off to the hospital. What I do instead is stalk YouTubers and report obsessively on their actions, which is easy to do because they film them and put them online.
Engaging in this line of business also gives me an excuse to buy a fast car. It turns out that “paparazzi” is an allowed reason to deduct the cost of an eBay turbocharger from your corporate taxes. While this seems odd at first, it is likely there because the politicians who write said tax laws are very concerned about keeping investigative journalists happy. This phenomena explains why occasionally someone from the beltway will be bringing a prostitute home, only to look out the window of their limo and see some dude from the Washington Post nailing the triple penny in a rattle-canned 944 Turbo.
Unfortunately, this new job has not been particularly profitable for me. It turns out that in my small town, the roads aren’t paved with gold, so much as they aren’t even paved. There are not thousands of beautiful influencers here posting their every video. In fact, the largest YouTube channel in town is a guy named Steve193841, who has about seventeen spambots following him. While he is certainly a hypocrite and my shaky-camera exposés of his offscreen antics have no doubt destroyed his career prospects, it hasn’t turned into any significant revenue for me.
As a result, I’ve had to start reporting on local politics instead. Sure, I got the Mayor arrested for trying to sell City Hall on AliExpress, and one of the guys running the Parks department jumped off a merry-go-round and broke both legs rather than talk to me, but there’s just no interest in public corruption. And by interest, I mean money.
There’s sort of a hierarchy of toughness in the trashy-automotive-ownership world. It’s not that it’s necessarily a manliness thing, either. There’s lots of women out there who are frantically racing to slam a junkyard-fresh 302 into their shattered-piston Capri before the night security guard gets around to that part of the mall parking lot. The basic recipe is that if you sign up for a lot of pain, and then you beat that pain, you will be rewarded in car-nerd Valhalla.
Personally, I’ve always been a fan of creature comforts. A roof over your head. A solid floor under the car. Maybe a jackstand if I’m feeling especially bourgeois, so the car doesn’t pop off the $5 garage-sale trolley jack and crush my skull while I’m trying to fight a motor mount bolt. As a result, in order to achieve the same level of automotive respect as someone who swaps their own transmission in a hailstorm, I have to sign up for only the dumbest and most reckless of projects.
When you roll up to an unauthorized dirtbag meet at the local Tim Hortons with a stock Honda Civic, nobody is going to bat much of an eye, even if you’ve been repairing it yourself with tools you fabricated entirely out of drinking straws stolen from the attached Wendy’s. On the other hand, if you turn up with, say, an eighteen-litre Komatsu turbodiesel engine from an industrial steamroller shoved between the front shock towers, people take notice. They won’t even care that you did it somewhere with functioning electric lighting, although I have it on good authority that a good “almost died from a Princess Auto jack” story does still carry currency.
When I was slinging cans of peas onto store shelves for The Man, it was rough. I’m not gonna lie to you. That job taught me two valuable things: one, what the fuck an artichoke heart is, and two, the virtue of maintaining your getaway car. Let me explain in a little more detail.
As you might expect, if you’ve ever worked retail, “loss prevention” is a big part of the experience. Your store makes less profit when people steal products, or wreck them, or open a squeeze bottle of mustard up and drink half of it in the middle of the aisle. This gives rise to an entire industry of people who are glorified security guards, but at least they really seem to enjoy their job. When I was working, my shifts would usually be shared with an “LP” named Elsie (not her real name.)
Elsie didn’t just like to catch people stealing things. That got old almost immediately, she told me once on break while biting into a salad that appeared to be made mostly out of sauerkraut. What got her rocks off was the psychological thrill of stalking her prey. She’d spot someone on the camera, probably one of the repeat visitors such as the little old ladies who were stealing batteries for their own thrill, and then pursue them through the store, pretending not to notice them until the very last minute. Sometimes I’d get roped into this charade, where she’d pretend to be a customer asking me a question (”where are the Nintendos?”) just so she could keep an excited, quivering-side-eye look at her quarry.
One night, I was adjusting a bottle of barbecue sauce to the front of the shelf when an “everyone to the front of the store” code was issued over the PA system. This was usually only done to stop an active thief of some kind, with the idea that a human wall of minimum-wage employees would cause them to skitter to a stop and surrender to the might of the enterprise. I didn’t exactly rush over there, and arrived only to see a dude booking it across the parking lot, pursued by the night accessory sub-manager. Elsie wasn’t scheduled that night, so I guess Albert (not his real name; I can’t remember) decided he was finally going to take matters into his own hands and protect his quarterly shrinkage bonus. Albert’s Death Wish quest didn’t last long, because the scruffy dude who stole some spray paint was unable to start his Grand Prix in order to make a getaway. He had left the headlights on or something, I guess, and the battery was stone dead.
You might think that would be the end of it, but the scruffy dude still had functioning legs, and took off with Albert in hot pursuit. Eventually, he returned to his car about fifteen minutes later, in order to be arrested by the cops who had finally responded. Elsie would never have let this ordeal happen: not only would the dude not have made it out the door in one piece, but she had the world’s shittiest squarebody Chevrolet (a former plow truck that may or may not have been registered) to finish off the sedan as well.
We’ve all fantasized about passing the snowplow, haven’t we? They move so slowly, and with such a loud racket, and a distracting flashing light. Only the best winter drivers dare to venture beyond the terminal shock of the highway delta-plowing operation. They travel into a realm of crystalline madness not yet cleared for our safety by the loving hands of Big Daddy Government.
Personally, I love to do it every opportunity I can. Sure, the side of your car does get absolutely sandblasted by the salt and gravel being spat out by the trucks. Those who prefer their paint to remain unrashed should avoid this, unless they have some sort of homemade ablative armour made from discarded mattresses strapped to the side of their car (note to self: do this.)
Yes, it’s a challenge trying to maintain control after slamming head-first into foot-deep hardpack at highway speeds. And it’s questionable about whether you gain any actual benefit risking your life and property in exchange for getting to the thrift store thirty seconds earlier than if you had just been patient. Nobody asked the Apollo astronauts if being burned alive in a malfunctioning rocket ship was “worth it.” They’d have been plow-passers, too, I bet.
Nothing compares to that freedom, that sensation of being the first to crush brand new snow. Of course, a bunch of other people have driven down the same road in front of you, well before the plow even arrived. We’ll ignore those folks: they were probably timid, afraid, and driving the speed limit. Now, if you’ll please brace for impact under the dashboard right there, I think we’re about to do some exploring of the high school football field’s chain-link fence.
If you want a machine to love you, then you have to clean it. Now, I see you eyeing my Volare on the driveway. You chuckle, realizing the hypocrisy of my so-called “advice” when my car hasn’t been to a car wash since the 1980s. This is because the car already loves me for having saved it from the crusher. Shut up. We have a unique relationship.
The point is, any machine – car, electronics, kitchen appliance, kickin’ rad dirt bike – will run better and sometimes even faster after a cleaning. It could be placebo effect, or pride in your possessions, but I believe the time and attention paid to dutifully cleansing will please the machine spirit and allow you to reach a new level of “finally works properly.”
This is why my house is stocked full of high-end detailing supplies. Just as soon as I find a car with its original paint, one that’s worth cleaning, I’ll finally be able to take really good care of it.
My Volare, which was at one point sprayed with excess dumptruck paint when the night watchman at the local construction-supply store stepped out for a piss, will continue to love me. It has to, because otherwise it will get sold to some other owner, who will probably try to clean it, press a little bit too hard with the sponge mitt, and go right through a panel.
My grandpa used to be a television repairman. He’d go to the customer’s house, pull the back off their prized appliance, look for something that blew up, and then start fucking around with high-voltage components right in the middle of their living room until it was all better again. This was all fine and dandy with him. Being a bit of a nosey Nellie, he relished the chance to see how our neighbours lived, and how little they would clean up when their TV was on the fritz.
Most customers simply did not care. He might as well be the plumber, turning up to stick his ungloved forearm into the Magnavox equivalent of a shit-filled drain pipe. Once he arrived, he’d have to push aside a bunch of childrens’ toys, dog beds, scattered beer bottles and paperwork just to have a place to kneel.
Other times, people would be nervous about his presence, and scrub the entire house until it was spotless in anticipation of his arrival. He’d put little booties over his shoes, walk across freshly vacuumed and shampooed carpet, and then pull the TV out from the wall, revealing a thick maze of dust bunnies. The look of shock on the homeowners’ faces when they realized the jig was up, well, that was worth more than the tips he never got.
Of course, when our own television broke, we never invited grandpa over to fix it. We’d specially call the depot just to get someone he didn’t work with, and use a fake name as well. It wasn’t that my father was ashamed that his dad was having to come bail him out of a busted Super Bowl, or that he was afraid of revealing the level of depravity in which our family lived. No, it was that grandpa would be deeply disappointed that we weren’t stealing cable.
When you go to the junkyard as often as I do, you start to notice patterns. One of those patterns is the beautiful crystalline mesh of cubed safety glass lying across the floor of the car you’re about to enter. It’s both a twinkling testament to the delights inherent in the scattering of light, and a rage-inducing obstacle to getting that fucking chunk of ECU wiring out so you can replace the part of your car that keeps lighting on fire all the time.
Why is this circumstance so aggrieving? Because most of the time, it’s not been caused by the outside world, but instead your fellow junkyard customer. For whatever reason, some folks just don’t understand that the occupants of the junkyard must be preserved in as intact a condition as possible, for the next person who comes by and needs to pull a part.
What if that piece of side-window glass were the part someone was looking for? They’d be super upset that some dipshit smashed it for giggles, but probably not angrier than I am for having to brush it off the seat, and then trying not to lie in the stray crumb of razor-sharp glass that pops out as soon as I lie down on said seat.
For awhile, in order to protect myself, I used to just put down some floor mats that I found in other cars. Unfortunately, I felt guilty about that too, and would end up returning those floor mats to their donor vehicles at the end of my pull, convinced that someone would soon be by to get a factory colour-matched set of winter rugs for their ‘89 Voyager SE. Ultimately, the selfish act of smashing the window glass wasted more of my time either way, on top of the anger at seeing such a Philistine act of dead-car desecration.
It is one of those selfish things that has no easy solution. Sure, now that I’m Prime Minister, I could send my death squads to the junkyard in order to A. murder these people, and B. be on the lookout for low-mileage LQ4 coilpacks, but that would be a waste of everyone’s money. What needs to be done is robust education, a re-imagining of every citizen’s place in the trash-car society. Which is not to say that I won’t occasionally bag a dude for trying it and hang his body as a warning to the rest. You have to have some perks in a job like this.
The office microwave is stinky, dirty, and has so many miles on it that it no longer cooks food properly on one side. Your coworkers don’t notice: they keep showing up every day and try to boil fish heads into a quasi-edible paste using the cleansing power of non-ionizing radiation. Every day, the humble microwave oven strays further from the ideal that it once represented – the ideal of not having yogourt heated up inside it, Jesus Christ what are you doing.
An economist would call this the tragedy of the commons, that as a communally-owned piece of infrastructure, nobody feels the need to maintain it. That economist is a dickhead, because someone does own it: your boss. He (or she) is sitting up there in their little fat cat office, chuckling at how they’ve provided you with the bare-minimum cooking equipment to provide midday sustenance for their helpless worker bees. Maintain it? Ha! That’s their lot in life for being born as poverty-stricken savages, littered with parasites.
You might think that if you buy your own microwave and donate it to your coworkers, that you’re the sucker. Spending money that doesn’t directly benefit you? You might as well set it on fire. Again, that economist: dickhead. If you bring in a new microwave oven, you’ll be renowned as a god of the workplace, especially if it has a really bougie feature or two. And if your coworkers blow up some spaghetti sauce inside it? They might even feel bad enough about betraying your trust to clean it.
Sure, there’s always the possibility that one bad egg (literally) will ruin the whole thing for everybody. That’s worth it in exchange for striking a blow for workers everywhere. Two, if you go back to your boss’ microwave and then microwave some old railroad spikes inside it.
They say that being lucky is a false idea; you have to make your own luck in life. What we think of as “luck” is actually being in the right place at the right time, and allowing the universe to bestow upon you its gifts. You have to keep looking for opportunities, like the time I was waiting for Grandpa Switch to get out of his cardiology appointment and struck up a conversation with a doctor on his break.
“I’ve been wondering,” I asked in the most innocent just-a-tinkerer voice I could muster, “just how you adjust the timing on one of those pacemakers.”
“Oh, we tweak the base timing with this computer, and after that it sort of self-regulates,” the doctor replied after being handed a crisp $20.
That’s all I needed to know. I let myself into one of the storage rooms and soon availed myself of a laptop. Now, don’t lecture me about theft; I live in Canada, and socialized medicine means that these things belong to all of us. If anything, Grandpa Switch deserved a free laptop, mostly because his second thrown rod happened while he was shovelling the snow that the government so cruelly left on his sidewalk. I’m sure the decades of bacon grease and smoking didn’t help, but the Feds didn’t force those on him.
Here’s the thing you have to know about grandpa tuning: you have to pay really close attention to the air-fuel ratios. For instance, as I just mentioned, my grandpa had some trouble with cholesterol. You can’t just Seafoam that shit out, so you have to give yourself a little bit of a penalty to maximum airflow.
A few tweaks later and a good-sized pull on the treadmill, and Grandpa was feeling better than he ever had before. Hell, I’m pretty sure he ran a five-minute mile that one time I raced him against another grandpa for pinks. Don’t worry, the new one is parked out back, just in case I need to field a full team for the retirees’ marathon or something.
One quick indicator that your machine is a worthwhile investment is a musical jingle. Although they might be annoying over the course of several years of daily use, a happy little song means that someone cared enough about quality to put it in. Now, of course, that someone is probably one of an army of musicians chained to their Rolands by an uncaring appliance mafia, toiling away in a basement until they achieve the perfect musical accompaniment to “Your Clothes Are Dry.”
Still, it got me thinking. I have a lot of Western-designed products which don’t have cute jingles, and adding them might help defray some of the intimidation factor which makes my cars appear to be a menace to community happiness. With the power of a five-dollar Casio from a garage sale and a series of flashbacks to traumas from my childhood piano teacher, I was soon putting together my own songs. My favourite was “Excuse Me, I Have No Brakes.”
Naturally, on my first go out, I rear-ended a recording industry exec. He was on the search for a new artist to sign, and my unique combination of mechanical almost-wizardry and square-wave keyboard plunking was apparently what passed for talent. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that all of the thumping basslines beneath my doorbell music were defaults on the keyboard, but what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. After they found some actors to pretend to be my friend, we recorded an album and failed to reach any appreciable traction on the charts.
It’s not my fault. Although I had welded the Casio’s frame to the top of the van in order to act as a PA system siren, there was no reason they couldn’t have waited for me to un-weld it before recording the album. They also could have trusted me to figure out how to wire it so that it would work on batteries again instead of requiring the engine to be on. We ended up taping it in the back of the van, in sort of a cinema verité style.
As it stands, the disc is 74 minutes of me pushing random keys before the other musicians succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning. Pitchfork still gave it a 6.5, although their new management a week later moved it down to a 3.4 because someone from the label tried to steal their bicycle.
My attorney strongly advised me to preface this story with a disclaimer. Here it is now. Do not attempt to modify vending machines owned by other people. Although the law is unclear on whether this constitutes fraudulent access to a computer or even criminal trespass, the police officer who comes to lock your ass up will not appreciate the clever nuance of your loophole-finding in the Big Book of Law. Most of them last cracked a law book during their officer’s exam, and a recent study showed that most of them believe bicyclists are some kind of herd animal. Do not talk to a police officer under any circumstances, and if you do, don’t tell them you read this.
I’m glad that’s over with. Although Max was described to me as a bit of a party animal, it turns out that that “party” refers to the team formed by adventurers in his favourite pen and paper game, Steve Jackson’s Torts & Territories. He plays a level 9 patent attorney who can cast Billables once per day. It’s a little childish, I agree. In real life, he’s only level seven.
Back in my university days, the greasebag dirtball mechanics’ club (putatively a mechanical engineering undergraduate study group) had finally pooled together enough incriminating blackmail photos of the dean to be granted our own office on campus. Yes, it was in the partially-flooded basement of the abandoned physical plant. That exclusivity meant that only the dirtiest freaks would follow us all the way from a twin-turbocharged 3.0-swapped Dodge Aries bleeding out on the quad parking back to the office, at which point they would invariably join up.
Since it’s a bit of a walk, they’d need something to drink when they got there, so E (her real name) picked up a vending machine from a friendly roadside attraction and carried it home to us, her real family, in her Rampage. For several months, we enjoyed a monopoly on beverage distribution in the building, until our hated rivals in the model rocketry club wondered where we had gone and then held the dean’s wife hostage until they got an office of their own. Then we had competition.
The core thing about vending machines is that ultimately they are an electromechanical device, assembled by foreign workers who are paid as little as possible and trained by rote process to not notice any glaring problems with the product. A bit like American cars, really, so we were very well positioned to crack the eggshell-thin layer of security around the model rocketry club’s vending machine and set it to “free play” every time we needed to refill our machine.
Our war with them would continue for many more years, until I graduated and no longer gave a shit. That’s a story for another time, though, and with an even beefier disclaimer.
The few, the brave, the proud: the people who actually understand things. All the rest of us are just hacking together enough of a solution in order to get through the day, worried that at any given moment it could all fall apart. Still, things hold up, and eventually we hope that someone who Gets It will come by in order to explain just what the original problem really was. If we’re really lucky, they might even fix it properly.
I didn’t set out to be an icon of the “good enough” lifestyle. These things just sort of happen when you accept too many projects and keep chasing rabbits down their holes. If I were to try and understand everything deeply, then I’d have about five Ph.D theses on the Plymouth Volare heater core and still probably not have a working one. Instead, I went to the University of High-Temperature RTV, and that degree is just as good, as long as you roll the windows down to keep that weird smell from building up.
Really, what I’ve come around to realize is that this variety of hack-jobbery is actually superior. With the time I’ve saved, I’ve gotten to “fix” a bunch of other things. If I hadn’t done that, maybe they would have remained non-working forever. Take for example my garage-door opener. Some shit broke, and so I improvised a patch wire. It worked really well for a glorious couple of minutes, before it caught fire from me having connected an output to an output. If I had spent several hours on it, then I wouldn’t have gotten the door open to go to Princess Auto that afternoon, and chances are I’d never have even met that friendly firefighter who taught me a couple of tips about how better to hide arson.
Ultimately, even those who doubt my methods have to accept that they are unwilling passengers in a machine they do not comprehend. I speak, of course, of the human body. Unless you’re some kind of turbo-surgeon from the distant future, in which case you better hand over the secret to immortality. There’s still a whole bunch of projects I haven’t even started to fuck up yet.
Friends, weird hippies digging through my compost bin for food, emperors: lend me your multimeters. Because I have like four dozen of the damn things, but I can never find them when I need them. These little miracles of engineering have been precision-designed to slip under workbench clutter, off the edges of desks, and once onto the roof of my car before I drove away.
Sure, a lot of actual rich engineering folks like to use a bench multimeter. They’re called that because it’s difficult to steal them from the shelf without standing on something first. The idea here is that making a less portable measuring device means that it will still be in the same place two days in a row. In my experience, this has been technically true, but it also turns out that they are effective shelving units of their own. Before long, they too will become inaccessibly buried by other junk stacked upon them, possibly even another multimeter or two.
Hence my solution: asking other people if I can borrow their meters. With them standing right next to me, I gain a few key benefits. The first is storage: when I’m done, I can just give the meter back to the original owner, and then it’s their problem. Then there’s camaraderie: if I accidentally bridge an entire electric-car battery pack while probing, thanks to wearing my trademark chainmail armour t-shirt, someone is there to call the ambulance. And of course there’s discipline. I’ll want to make sure to impress that person, so they keep trusting me with their $29 Canadian Tire “plus or minus 30%” measurement devices.
Now, a lot of my critics out there will label this as communism. Those critics tend to say that about me a lot, but they’ll be talking out of the other side of their mouth when I seize power and send them to the gulag. I mean, uh, where was I? Right: this method of borrowing other people’s property is actually an incredibly efficient distribution of capital. Not only does it save me money, but it also saves me time by not requiring me to clean any part of my living space up for greater than three minutes at a time to unearth just one of the crappy “Flake” brand meters I have bought a twelve-pack of from AliExpress when I was drunk last Christmas. If that’s not a tragedy of the commons, then I don’t know what is.
You may dimly remember going to a donair restaurant in the past. It’s basically the perfect food: an unknown combination of meat around a spinning centre shaft, and someone carves it off and shoves it into a drunk-friendly, pita-based wrap. Then, just to make sure you’re happy, they load a shitload of garlic, cheese, and veggies into it.
I wanted this experience again, but ideally without the part where I had to venture into the outside world. Cooking at home is always a challenge, especially when you lack access to professional-level equipment. For instance, that donair spinning thing. With my limited culinary knowledge, I was incapable of looking it up on AliExpress. The only solution was to make my own.
Luckily for me, what AliExpress did have were adorable little mini-mills. These miracles of mechanical engineering are usually intended to allow people like Yours Truly to machine out bearings, make fancy doorknobs, and ruin $35 worth of 6061-T5 aluminum in the blink of an eye. As you would expect, the central “lathe” section of the mini-mill consisted of a rotating shaft upon which the donair meat could be inserted. Perfect, I thought, and set about my dark project.
My initial run was a failure. Of course, I shouldn’t have invited my friends and family over and gotten them all hyped about the idea of DIY donairs. A lot of them know high-powered attorneys, and some of those attorneys do in fact understand the implicit legal expectation of “maybe do the chuck up properly before you try to cut sixty pounds of frozen pig offal with the wrong tool.” Small-minded criminals, the lot of them. Would you sue NASA for making a rocket that’s too loud?
There’s sort of a Zen experience to running out of gas. Before it happened to me for the first time, I thought it would be stressful. It’s not. You just sort of reach a feeling of calm, your nerves no longer jangled by the infinite explosions of the internal combustion engine rattling at your feet.
Sure, without the engine running, you lose the vacuum assist for the brakes. That is, if your car had it in the first place. All you have to do is use a little more force to stop. Maybe apply both feet. No big deal, and you’re slowing down anyway, between the rolling friction of the bad wheel bearings and the bald all-seasons from 1996.
The people who should be anxious in traffic about you suddenly losing power? Probably the guy behind you, because it’s questionable at best if this battery will last long enough for me to do more with the brake lights than kick up a dim flicker before its overburdened cells finally shit the last of their electrolyte onto the freeway. And there’s not much they can do about it either, except for watch helplessly as you slow down in the left lane and look for a chance to cut across six lanes at half the speed limit, looking for your off-ramp.
Really, the worst part comes when you’ve actually fully stopped. Far from “safe,” you now have to hitch-hike to the gas station and get under the car to re-apply the duct tape patch to the tank. More people are killed every year by a car falling off the spare-tire jack than running out of gas, and it certainly doesn’t help when the jack was already rusted out by the time the Carter administration was inaugurated. Better to just leave the car there and get another. The government pays people to tow these things away, after all, and if you really liked it, you can always get it back from the impound auction later, under an assumed name. No need to get all upset.
If you’re a child of the 80s, then you probably think today’s television is missing something. Is it preachy plot lines? One-dimensional characters? Thinly-veiled ads for toys? No, it’s video fidelity, or the lack thereof. Nowadays, children are spoiled by being able to see large expanses of consistent colour and sharp contrasts, without analogue ringing or snow when your mom turns the vacuum cleaner on. Progress is nice and all, except now you actually know what colour Megatron is supposed to be.
Here at Switch Signal Solutions, we’re committed to actively making your video-watching experience worse. You see, by making it worse, we’ll make it better. Our patented line of noise injectors, analogue-to-digital-to-analogue-to-digital-to-analogue converters, and slightly dicky coaxial cable from the 1970s that was driven over by Uncle Steve offer the best in signal infidelity. Now, you’ll be able to watch these shows as they were intended to be watched: dimly.
It’s not just old television shows that can benefit from this reduction in quality, either. Let’s be honest with ourselves: are you really looking your best these days? With our extremely patented and exhaustively legally defended line of webcam grease, your Zoom calls can look like they’re taking place at the bottom of a pub toilet. Hell, why not go to the pub? The other participants on the call won’t be able to even notice the difference between your face and your empty desk chair.
So come on down to our showroom, located in an abandoned Radio Shack inside the old Twin Beams Mall off the interstate. Be careful when you come in, because we had to ram an old motorhome through the front doors in order to gain access to the building. If anything, all that fuzzy asbestos dust in the air will only help improve the appearance of the store.
Perhaps the most noble pursuit for a car customizer is that of truckification. As the Buddha once said, all cars are meant to be trucks, and all trucks are meant to be cars. We can’t do anything about the latter point, but every so often an automaker realizes they can cut the trunk off of a perfectly good station wagon and sell it for more money.
Perhaps the most famous example is that of the Chevrolet El Camino. More than a car, it is the generic brand for this entire genre of cars. Of course, this fame means that there’s no way I can afford it, so we have to move down the list. Unfortunately, the less-loved 80s Chrysler products – with great names like Scamp and Rampage – are also right out. People have heard of those, too, and they are asking as much as one thousand five hundred dollars for a running car, no doubt stoked by breathless news coverage of the Barrett-Jackson auctions.
Japan has a couple of truck cars, too: special versions of the Nissan Sunny, the demented-but-lovable Suzuki Mighty Boy. Their nation is awash in discarded cars, rejected by a populace that has committed the twin sins of developing an effective, universal public transit option, and requiring that cars be correctly maintained before they can imperil human life. By the time you’ve imported one, you might as well have bought a Subaru Brat (also expensive.) It’s enough to drive you to build your own car, which of course is what I did.
The only expense when you decide to build your own El Caminalike is sawzall blades. Sure, if you do it right, there’s also a lot of fabrication, welding, and removal of the razor-sharp chunks of metal that you leave behind after cutting. Trucks, though, are not about doing it right. Trucks are about getting it done, in the least socially responsible fashion imaginable.
That’s why I now own a 1995 Mercury Sable station wagon that has had everything south of the C-pillar cut off. Yes, I do realize that most actual trucks have a wall behind the cabin, to keep things like thieves, bugs, and rain out of the passenger compartment while you are trying to drive. However, I saved a lot of money, which I’ll need in order to commission a custom-built truck topper on which to place in the back. I’m tired of my groceries getting wet whenever I put them in the bed.
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tags: mercury, mercury sable, suzuki, suzuki mighty boy
Ancient domestic cars, even those manufactured during the low-compression Malaise Era, are in demand these days. This can be easily chalked up to rarity – very few bothered to slap a couple of new panels onto their Volare when it started to rust away after three years – but everyone wants to feel that they have the unique insight to appreciate what others consider to be a “bad car.”
Here at Bad Cars Monthly, we have long since dulled the ability to detect or feel when a car is actually good. Our magazine is staffed entirely with degenerates who only care for the trashiest, most niche automobiles. And it’s not just double-digit horsepower that would qualify a car for this club: general poor sales mean that The Market itself has decided the car is bad, and who’s to argue with the almighty Market?
For awhile, around last year, there was a fear in the editorial bullpen that our chasing of the dragon would eventually lead us to cars that are so bad that it would wrap around. We worried that we could start appreciating only high-dollar exotic cars of the finest manufacture. Luckily, our new batch of interns turned up just enough unknown Eastern European cars that we were able to keep finding new trashy cars to desire and obsessively research. That’s why we had to take that trip to the Ukraine, you see, to unearth all those primo shitrods.
There was an additional rumour around that time that the radioactivity of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant would help keep rust at bay. I can confirm that this is not the case, although it did do a great job keeping our interns from oxidizing. And while we were getting that cool ride back to the decontamination tent, our Features Editor pointed out that the five-ton troop transport we were riding in had a weird emissions-control device clamped onto the exhaust. A worthwhile trip for all involved.
Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. Those who have a Tire Guy in their speed dial because they keep buying bald, corded, twenty-year-old all-seasons from Craigslist and then do a block-long burnout through the playground zone (while dutifully obeying the speed limit) – you’re doing amazing, don’t change.
I’ve always wondered what combination of childhood trauma causes someone to become a Tire Guy. Most of the ones I’ve met have worked as teenagers and impressionable young adults at a chain tire shop, slinging Michelins onto chipped BMW SUV wheels. It makes sense that they’d want to do what they’re good at, but there’s just one problem – working at a chain tire shop sucks ass, and nobody on God’s green Earth would have that experience and then keep wanting to do it, unless they had no choice.
The team of psychologists I’ve been working with were close to reaching a breakthrough, to finally understand the Tire Guy mind. Early theories that the chemicals – solvents, sealants, mould-release compound, tire lubes, plug repair goo – were at fault didn’t pan out. They fed a bunch of monkeys entire tubes of RTV for like four or five weeks, and none of them got any better at mounting even high-profile commuter-car tires.
Perhaps we’ll never understand this curious phenomena. It will remain a beautiful mystery, a thought-puzzle amongst the infinite wonders of our universe. I’d ask my Tire Guy, but on the advice of his attorney, he refuses to directly speak with me lest he be implicated. I guess I can’t blame him, because most of the time I don’t even make it a block from his place before sending the entire carcass of a heavily-cupped Radial T/A onto a neighbour’s lawn.
Can I share a secret with you? The world’s power is not held in political office, or shadowy cabals of rich goons. No, it’s connectors. That’s right, plain old electrical connectors, like you see all around you. All around you: yeah, now you’re starting to figure it out. Everything in the world needs at least some connectors these days, and figuring them out can be a confusing maze of cloak-and-dagger mystery.
First, connectors are expensive. They can be half or more of the cost of a thing. This is because we can pound out microchips by the fuckbillion using lasers or some shit, but precisely folding a piece of metal and then sticking it in some plastic is apparently very difficult. That’s why the manufacturers discontinue the things as soon as they can, casting off their remaining stock to shifty salvage dealers who will gouge you even worse for the two-year-old component upon which your entire way of life now hinges.
Connectors are made doubly expensive by my next point: variety. If you think it’s annoying trying to find a cable for your old iPod, then how about you try re-pinning an entire automobile harness? You’ll learn not-quite-household names like Sumitomo, Yazaki, and Hirose really quickly, and you’ll curse their representatives for not responding to your emails begging them for a chance to buy just one or two of the high-temperature polycarbonate nightmares they once custom-crafted for a guy at Honda for pennies.
Think you can just pin your own connector? Buy the plastic shell and stuff it full of pins on your own, like some kind of Bob Vila motherfucker? Absolutely, but do you think they all use one kind of pin? Your significant other will leave you as you sob helplessly in a waist-deep mass of crimping tools, dies, and pins, unable to find that reel of 3.96mm JST VH you ordered last May.
There is just one light at the end of this tunnel. It is the humble bullet connector. Sure, it doesn’t hold up very well to vibration. And it corrodes super easily. And you need two hundred of them to complete even a simple automotive ECU harness. And sometimes they loosen up enough that they catch fire. However: you can crimp one of those bastards together with a hammer if need be, and nobody is ever going to look at it and go “which side is pin one?”
Everybody makes mistakes. That’s why pencils have erasers, and why plasma cutters have a “Fuck This Job” setting for obliterating the entire workpiece you just spent several hours on. What’s important is that you own up to your mistake, and apologize. For me, I do a lot of that owning and apologizing in what is now known as Habitual Traffic Offender Court.
I’m not trying to brag that I go to a fancier traffic court than you do. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’d rather be down there with you, back when the judges assumed basic innocence and I didn’t have to get wheeled into the courtroom ratchet-strapped to a moving dolly. Also, I dimly remember that regular traffic court had windows and drinking water fountains. Boy, that’d be nice.
Again, the critical point here is that everybody makes mistakes. And luckily for me, “everybody” often includes “prosecuting counsel.” The judges usually hate incompetence and hubris much more than they hate a guy who “allegedly” did a powerslide onto an elementary school basketball court with a twincharged Fiat Panda 4x4 and then lit up first all four tires, then two at a time as the transfer case overheated and began to slip, in a glorious display that drew the attention of the children away from their lessons. Now their parents are working hard to get me busted with trumped-up charges, just because I taught their kids that an alternative way of life existed. Anything “different” from their family’s leased Lexus was bad and must be exterminated, in their minds: I was a political prisoner, I was planning to claim to the judge.
However, the prosecuting attorney’s last-minute discovery that the cop spelled the brand of my fine automobile as “Feet” on the arrest paperwork made it so I didn’t have to. I once again roam the streets of your fine city, emboldened by my experience and ready to make a few new mistakes.
If there are two words in the English language that offer the most potential but also the most fear, it has to be “free motorhome.” I guess you could say that’s three words. If you think it’s three, come on down to my place to debate me in person. While you’re here, I’ll rope you into helping me strip out 40 year old rat-chewed linoleum, but you won’t care. You’ll be too proud of yourself the entire time for having read the dictionary cover-to-cover instead of developing a personality.
Once, upon the roads of this great land, the motorhome roamed. In the summer, any attempt to get out of town would be met with a procession of elephant-slow rolling apartments. Before gas-guzzler taxes, precarious house-rental on your cellphone, and the recent price increase of nursing homes, they were everywhere. Now, they’re mostly in farmer’s fields, offering low-compression, truck-cam V8 engines that would serve well as cheap-ass swaps.
And yet, the problem is the same as trying to become a heart transplant surgeon: the wrapper is inconvenient. Everyone who is selling an RV views it as a lifestyle vehicle, if not an object of religious worship. Even if it’s been sitting in their back 40 for the better part of a century and has no functioning anything, they’ll still want more than just the bare parts value. The burden falls on your shoulders to remove all the unwanted “motorhome parts” from the internal-combustion nougat that lies within.
Now, don’t be fooled: you’re nowhere near the first person to have thought of this. Every gearhead who is low on money and capable of basic arbitrage plots has attempted this exchange at one time or another. Where they fall down is simple. Most will just not ever get around to it, and stick the RV in a farmer’s field. Far worse are those poor suckers who become obsessed with extracting maximum value from the disposable part of the RV. They will end up making 30 Craigslist ads for mouldy cupboards and half-working inverters, just in case someone actually wants a motorhome enough to spend money on it instead of tossing the dumb piece of shit into a ditch and buying another one from a farmer.
For my part, I have a patented method, one that you can learn at any number of my weekend seminars. They’re available in every major city, but only for a short period of time, lest the authorities catch up. What is my technique? I can’t say too much to someone who is unwilling to give me a couple measly bucks for a lecture, but it involves tying the entire back half of the motorhome to a sturdy lamp-post or Walmart and flooring it until the body rips off, exposing the engine. Ideally, you want to get a model with cruise control, so that you’re not inside the vehicle when this happens, but the savvy shopper will remember that the aforementioned Walmart also has a very flexible return policy on motorcycle helmets.
There are limitations to how much horsepower you can safely run on the street. Lots of people will happily tell you this “fact” when you reveal that your car makes a little more power than a boring commuter car. Where are you going to use all that juice, they ask, when you are stuck in traffic?
It’s a valid question, if you are some kind of loser dipshit. The turbocharger isn’t for when I’m stuck in traffic. No, that shit is for merging. In order to understand the correct tactical application of nearly one freight locomotive’s worth of artificially supplemented airflow, you must first know the mind of the asshole trying (whether deliberately or not) to block my merge.
My opponent – and make no mistake, anyone blocking my merge even for a millisecond is in opposition to my goals and entire way of life – believes that my rusty shitbox is slow, noisy, and smoky. They think that if I get in front of them, the front end of their car will be showered with oil and fragments of piston rings. This is a reasonable belief, mostly because it’s true, but there is also a classism behind this that I find infuriating. How dare this person with a ratty looking car get ahead of me in traffic.
So you see, putting one-thousand-five-hundred brake horsepower of air from a one-hundred-eighty-dollar eBay turbocharger the size of a bull elephant into a wheezing smog-era Mopar engine is essential to reverse this attitude. The sight of my shrieking Plymouth reaching Mach Five in the road length of a gnat’s dick while sounding like a diesel locomotive on methamphetamine is a Teachable Moment about egalitarianism, and our collective obligation as human beings to achieve the maximum level of happiness for one another. Also, fuck that guy. Enjoy wiping aerosolized head gaskets off your windshield.
Back in high school, we had this shop teacher. We used to call him Captain Bringdown, but his actual name was Mr. Bringdown. It’s French or something, please stop interrupting. Anyway, Mr. Bringdown was one thing: a stickler for safety. He was also one other thing, which we’ll get to in a second.
I would take his class every Tuesday, Thursday and on alternating Fridays at nine A.M. This is a pretty early hour for high schoolers, so you can understand that many of us were groggy from late-night sessions playing Starcraft 64 or Grain Alcohol. As a result, Mr. Bringdown always had a little safety lecture at the start of class, reminding us to keep our wits about us when we were working with the heavy equipment.
One lecture I remember very well, because it was his last. He came out from his little office onto the shop floor, stood by the master power switch, and said some magical words.
“Kids, when you’re working for a living, don’t do dangerous things to make the job go faster. The only person who benefits is your boss, and your boss is a shithead.” Then he turned the machines on, walked out the rolled-up cargo bay door, and started a second-generation, banana-yellow Pontiac Firebird that had been parked askew on the outdoor basketball court. Its plastic nose was tweaked ever so slightly to the left, and I remember feeling a visceral thrill in my extremities when the small block fired up, shooting unburned fuel out of the side-exit x-pipe exhaust with a sharp little bark. He smoked one of the tires in a pegleg burnout for about fifteen seconds, and then he was gone.
His replacement, Mr. Gregory, the guidance counsellor, was nowhere near as vocally adamant about shop safety, but he also taught us a valuable lesson. If you’re watching VHS tapes on the classroom TV instead of working, then you don’t have to clean up Michael “Mikey” Kazantzakis’s blood from the scroll saw for the third time this week.
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tags: pontiac, pontiac firebird, michael kazantzakis
One of my closest childhood friends was the cement truck that appeared at the end of my street for a single afternoon when I was six. My parents were hippies, and didn’t believe that their kids should mingle with the other kids. Not when they could instead be learning useful self-sufficiency skills, like stocking cans of beans and fabricating crude crystal radios to wait for the Message. Well, now I’m really good at fixing things, and that cement truck is probably in a scrapyard somewhere. There’s a moral in there, but I’ll be damned if I can find it.
The point I’m trying to get at is: kids love construction vehicles, much more so than basic commuter trash. Their rapidly-forming minds don’t want flexibility, or “it depends.” They love the idea of vehicles that have a single purpose. Oh, you have a pickup truck to drive to the office most of the time, but sometimes you tow a boat, or pick up a six-pack of toilets at Home Depot? That three year old is fucking bored by your story, dude.
Now, one of the subtleties that the kids don’t appreciate is that you can use a so-called single-purpose work vehicle for more than one thing, as long as you’re willing to live with some compromises. You’ll still get the adoring cheers from an entire daycare as you compression-brake a firetruck through the playground zone, but it also has tons of little cubbies and places to store your groceries. And if you factor in the fact that small-town departments will often leave the lights and siren still hooked up, the fuel economy is excellent if you don’t have to stop at any intersections.
And it’s not just kids. Adults can’t stay away from the vehicle, either. Take, for instance, real firefighters, who are often compelled to check out my sweet ride. They know that I’m a poseur, sure, but their boss won’t let them drive one of these fashion-forward, cab-forward 1985 models, and they want to remember what it was like to drive a real firetruck. It’s just too much of a liability for dudes who run into burning buildings all day to drive, so they get stuck with a full-fat softroader that loses some of that classic fire-truck appeal.
Now, is a fire truck for everybody? No: people who have to store their car in an underground apartment parkade may find it difficult to navigate tight turns on an exit ramp. For those folks, the airport is often auctioning off their leftover luggage tugs, which will still get an excited hoot from a small child or double-take from a passing police officer.
There’s just no way of knowing what will set someone off. In the high-pressure specialty technical field of my day job, I’ve seen eager-beaver coworkers go from joyous to psychotic in the blink of an eye. All that repressed emotion and stress wound up way inside them eventually snaps something, and boom – a meltdown. Anyone who’s worked in the field for long enough has at least one good story, maybe even about themselves.
I’m all too aware of this risk. That’s why I have a lot of outlets for stress relief, likely more than the average office employee. Some, like my boss, would say I perhaps have too many, but he’s not the first boss I’ve ever had. My first boss was a very organized engineering supervisor. The kind of dude who would organize his pencils at right angles on his desk every morning, and discard them once they had reached a certain level of wear.
He got promoted into the job because he was good at making machines. It seemed like a natural fit, if you recently suffered a massive closed-head injury: take a guy who has had no opportunity to demonstrate his aptitude for management, and then give him the responsibility of being a manager. For bonus points, you might also ignore the widely held knowledge that good engineers generally like predictable, controllable environments, and human beings are anything but. He lasted two weeks before he tried to ram a cop car with his Blazer on the way home. I regret not having seen the signs ahead of time, because then I probably could have yanked that 4.3 out of the shattered Chevy before the tow truck arrived.
In retrospect, there were probably a lot of things that could have sent him out with a vendetta against polite society. Maybe he was having trouble in his marriage. Perhaps his dog was pregnant, and he was trying to figure out who the father was to hit him with a dog lawsuit. It could even be the fact that I had used his good Mitutoyo calipers earlier that day to scratch a mark into a workpiece. Hey, he was never going to use those again. Management is supposed to measure metrics, not metric bolts.
I’d always been good at fixing things: as a teenager, I would often pick up broken garbage off the side of the road and make it work again. People threw out their stuff so carelessly back then: nobody wanted to spend a weekend staring at a piece of junk in frustration.
Sure, they’d say it was because they just didn’t have the time to gaze into the abyss, but I knew it was really that nobody ever wanted to be told “no.” I also didn’t like it, but I come from a very stubborn family. So stubborn, in fact, that I’m not going to let some trash piece of domestic automobile push me around.
That’s why I kept staring at that one 1974 Satellite, hour after hour, hoping for a miracle to occur and reveal to me the source of my problems. And, as things sometimes happen out there in the boonies when you’re alone and a little bit susceptible to magical thinking, a miracle did happen. The reason the fucking thing wouldn’t start, I realized with my own start, is because the negative battery terminal was super loose.
With a single bent pop-can pull tab wedged into the gap, I had brought a machine back from torpor. I also also created some pretty cool sparks as the plating burned itself off. Now, of course, the experience of becoming an intuitive mechanic is not a one-way street. Something came back along with me from that dark weekend of the soul, and it wasn’t just the gasping burble of the 360 as it shuddered to life. No, what I had gained was an almost religious belief that if I just tried for long enough, everything would fall at my feet. This was considered dangerous even by my extended family, as in theory not all broken things should be fixed.
By the end of that weekend, I had pulled Uncle Grandpa’s 1952 Imperial out of the dirt pile in which he had hid it, and Pet Semataried it back to life. Dad was not particularly happy to see it again, and even less so when we figured out how to get the trunk open, and found that missing highway patrolman. Hey, I can only fix one problem at a time.
When me and the boys from law school get together for a wild night out, there’s nothing we like doing more than chucking old promotional coffee mugs directly into oncoming traffic. If you think that’s wasteful, then you need to realize one thing: each and every conference, new product launch, popular comic strip, and has-been radio station produces a bunch of mugs. If we didn’t smash them up, then the human race would soon be overwhelmed by ceramic garbage.
It’s not like a mug is particularly resource-intensive: they’re made out of sand, or clay, or something. We’ve got a lot of that stuff, because it’s basically dirt, and in case you haven’t noticed, the entire Earth is made of it. Similarly, they don’t take all that much energy to produce. For the amount of juice to mine one bitcoin that your neighbour is pumping through a videocard that used to be used for pornographic videogames, you can kiln-fire like ten thousand coffee mugs. And they’re relatively recyclable, unless you smash them on the grille of an oncoming F-250.
No, probably what you’re particularly upset about is that last little bit of antisocial outburst. It’s true that these projectiles could damage an automobile or imperil human life, but so does the entire legal profession. And most of those highway-going semi-trucks are fully automated now; the worst that happens is that one of the thousand millimeter-sized cameras studded on the grille of a SmartMack will be a little dicky for a couple miles until the holographic hivemind under the dashboard learns to compensate for it. Most importantly, the fate of a robotic Walmart truck or sentient Ford pickup doesn’t outweigh our need to get rowdy, and it helps add valuable training data to their obstacle-avoidance algorithm.
I think this is really a public service. We’re getting rid of the totems of a bygone age. If we do things right, in the future, Goodwills will no longer be stuffed to the gills with promotional mugs from the local country-music station, obsoleted every time one the morning zoo DJs gets arrested for unlawful interference.
Negotiation is an art into itself. In many ways, it is the modern implementation of its ancestor, the honourable pistol duel. You are matching wits with another human being, committing violence on the battlefield of small-ball commerce. Will you acquiesce to their insane demand to be paid money for a good, or walk away and then park one block over, waiting for the grovelling apology phone call of regret?
I wish I could say I have a lot of techniques for ensuring the best deals on cars. I don’t. My primary strategy is to shop only for those cars that are so bad, that both the buyer and seller feel like it is a bad idea to buy them. In this cloud of malaise, valuation is no longer a matter of wanting recompense for the vehicle, but instead a sort of depressed half-shrug at subjecting another human being to this misery.
Let me explain how this works. Last week, I went to buy a Neon. Not just any Plymouth Neon: a 1996 Expresso coupe. What this trim level gains has been lost to history, but I knew that this made achieving a firm knowledge of the value of the vehicle even more difficult than usual.
The seller was asking $600, and their explanation was that their grandmother badly needed an expensive surgery, so they were selling it to raise funds. Naturally, this is a preposterous lie from the start, showing the amateur nature of my opposition: the surgery is free in Canada, and their “grandmother” is probably named Crystal Methamphetamine. With this in mind, I offered a firm $150, with the additional sweetener of not immediately registering the car so they would have a few weeks to get out of town before their bookie, notified by the transfer of title, came looking for the car.
Ultimately, I was also lying, as is standard in a negotiation. Well, I was telling the truth about not registering the car immediately; it turns out there was a Neon in a similar colour parked a few blocks away, and that car’s license plate bolts weren’t nearly as rusted as you would expect. Stainless steel fasteners: noticing the small details is also smart shopping.
One of my mentors used to say, “if it doesn’t work, clean it. If it still doesn’t work, clean it again.” This is quality advice, and it’s one you should take to heart. Unless it comes to cleaning your workbench, that is. In this case, it’s okay to just push around crap to clear exactly the amount of space you need for the current project, which you will then clean thoroughly in order to restore operation.
It’s very rare to meet someone who puts all their tools away at the end of the day. That takes time, and also a place to put all of the tools. Who has either of those? Just leave ‘em on the desk. Chances are you’ll need at least three-quarters of them again tomorrow. Might as well have it all at your fingertips, right?
This works great until you start to feel bad about having such an ugly pile of shit on your desk. Here’s where my patented secret comes in. Buy more tools. The idea here is that the new tools will have nowhere to live, and end up being chucked on top of the pile. Now, because there’s nowhere better for them to be stored, their designated storage area is the desk. At the end of the day, just stand up. Bam: they’re already where they’re supposed to be.
What happens when the pile becomes too unmanageable that you can no longer clear a working area? Simple: buy another workbench. Of course, now you need your common tools again within reach of the new bench. Better get another set, rather than waste time digging through the other workbench to figure out where they went. You’ve got stuff to do, after all.
Something that has often perplexed me is that cars have such infectious enthusiasm, and yet most appliances do not. Yes, coffee-brewing apparatus has angry cultists, but you could make an argument that it’s more of an artist’s toolset than actual home appliances. You don’t see two guys squaring off on message boards about whether a Black & Decker food processor can achieve a superior chop to a Kitchenaid, but it’s common to see a 2019 Corolla trying to hand out the business to a 2017 base-model Golf at the stoplight on your way to work.
The simplest explanation for all this is that cars represent the personality of the owners; it’s one of the few industries in which you really have choice. Unless you’re a professional, your options for said food processors are pretty limited. Maybe you can get a mixer in candy-apple red, but then you bought it for the colour and not because it ran a good Nurburgring bridge-to-gantry time or will attract the opposite sex. By the time you’ve got them in the kitchen and are cooking for them, the deal is pretty much already sealed in that respect.
Then again, it’s also a big purchase, and therefore drives an urge to defend it. You can even see this with houses: folks who own condos will get mad at suburbanite single-family-home dwellers. Those individuals who live in a van must have it the worst of all, having to defend both their brand and model purchase as well as their entire lifestyle (and themselves, from the wild dogs that have infested the Kay Bee Toys parking lot ever since Animal Control quit.)
Maybe the ultimate way out of this competition is to just choose not to compete. Millions of people out there have defaulted to “just buy a Toyota” for their car-purchasing strategy, and will not attempt anything else until they become billionaires. This is fine, but personally my method of avoiding conflict is just to buy one of everything for as little as possible. That way, when message board denizens attempt to “beef” with you, you can’t see it, because you’re in the garage fixing this fucking piece of shit.
Sure, I did a little consulting for this drilling company in town. They needed someone to come in during the holiday downtime. The idea is that I would do a little service on all their fleet trucks, and get them ready for the new year. In practice, all of their fleet trucks were basically brand new, so all I did was (ugh) wash them and repark them so it looked like they had been moved in and out of the shop. Then I just sat around in said shop all day and stole snacks out of the vending machine. Easy money.
Of course, my fraud was eventually discovered, and they attempted to take me to court because I didn’t replace a bald tire. In my defence, I did not consider any of the tires to actually be all that worn – they had a date code from this decade, they looked no worse than the ones I drove here on, and they were round. Normally, my attorney would handle these sorts of things, but he was working on a novel legal theory called “my third ex-wife’s custody order doesn’t apply in Indonesia.” So I was on my own.
Here’s the thing about consultants: although, in theory, they are supposed to carry insurance so that you can be renumerated if someone done fucks up, in practice nobody actually holds this insurance. It costs money, a practice which gets in the way of making money. Sometimes it can be thousands of dollars per year on so-called “malpractice” insurance. On the other hand, shutting down your corporation and starting a new one costs $300 and some paperwork. Good luck holding Switch Inc 1703492842 liable, because nobody works there anymore.
Naturally, the corporate veil doesn’t apply as cleanly when the individuals involved in hiring you know where you live, thanks to having sent cheques to your address. Of course, I had thought of this too, and Switch Inc 1703492842 was actually renting an abandoned American Eagle store in the mall, which was in fact filled with old toxic waste. Why? Because we took money from the local chemical plant after promising safe, climate-controlled storage of said waste. The mall is even air-conditioned, and has no policies on when your “coming soon” store should actually open. As long as I turned up once a week before the mailman pushed the cheque through the letter slot and into one of the vats of industrial acid, it worked out quite well.
Now, you might think it’s unethical to exploit all of these blind spots and loopholes. After all, these laws were written to benefit megacorporations, not microcorporations run by some sort of weirdo. First, you should be ashamed of yourself. Small business (defined as businesses making less than $50 million a year) are the heart of our economy and more noble than the troops. Second, it’s not at all clear that I’ve actually made more money through this deceit than an average office-worker could make just by stealing the occasional photocopier after hours.
You probably know someone in your life who is hoarding stuff. Often, folks hold onto things way past when they should, just in case they might need them in the future. Screws, major suspension components, little bits of wire? Sure, I’m guilty of hoarding those. Holiday cards with little talky voice chips inside? Yeah, of course, there’s a battery in there.
The main way to keep the cops from coming after your hoard is to organize it. Neatly delineated, and largely off the floor: that’s the stuff. As long as it all looks clean, you can have a whole bunch of shit. You don’t see the concerned relatives of public libraries complaining that they have too many books, do you? Of course not, because that shit is on shelves.
Unfortunately, out of the fellow hoarders I know, none of them were collecting shelves. You would think it would be sort of a natural combination, each justifying the other. Unless, that is, they didn’t want me to dirty up their pristine shelves with leaky transmission pans. That’s why they’re crazy, and I’m not.
In the end, I figured out a cheap DIY way to keep all the stuff I want without my parole officer ordering me to get rid of it. The secret is drywall: a sheet of the stuff costs pennies, especially if you cut it out of the drug house down the block, and you can just make a false wall out of it.
Visitors will notice that the house seems smaller than the last time they visited, but are they ever going to express this and sound crazy? Of course not. And when I do actually need something from the pile, all I have to do is punch medium-hard in the approximate location that it’s stored. Voila: cubbyholes. If that’s not organized, I don’t know what is.
You can picture all of human progress as a gently rotating, mirrored, cube. It’s some complete bullshit invented by ancient mathematicians, and anyone with any sense can see that the cube is not going to solve any of our problems. So let’s just go do burnouts.
The art of the burnout is one that exceeds the grasp of many individuals today. Although burnouts have never been more popular, the combination of modern safety technology and society’s move against general-purpose hooliganism, in favour of financialization and conspicuous consumption has broken the chain that used to connect hooligan uncle to hooligan child. Here at the Switch Institute for Tire Punishment, we aim to correct this problem.
Now, critics of our curriculum have stated that we are clearly a sham school, meant to suck up government incentives to provide trades-based education. And to that we respond: shut the fuck up before they hear you. Because kids are learning valuable skills at our school, skills that will stay with them longer than knowing how to do a PowerPoint presentation, perform forensic audits, or dissect a cadaver. Our program is straightforward, inexpensive, and focuses primarily on the key attributes of doing burnouts: the setup, the skid, sustenance, and how to swap tires on the cheap without paying anyone.
What vehicle do we use at our school? Only the finest Panther-platform automobiles. Crown Vics, Lincoln Town Cars, Mercury Grand Marquiseseses – if a grandpa once took pride in owning one of these vee-aight land barges, then our goal is to fill its rear wheelwells with a thick coat of shredded rubber. They’re not just inexpensive, but also safe for our students, and you can seat like five instructors in the car alongside them, for providing critical instruction and encouragement. A sixth teacher can easily ride in the trunk, but we try to save that for our Use Of Bleach To Do Skids 201 class.
So if you’re a teenager with no educational or career prospects, come on down to our campus and take a tour today. Just make sure not to wander into the parking lot, because we don’t really have insurance.
Carbon capture is the white whale of our era. It makes sense: if there’s less carbon dioxide in the air, then there’s less to insulate the atmosphere and slowly boil all of us alive. Yank all that bad carbon out of the air or polluting industrial process, put it somewhere else, and we can all keep doing whatever the fuck we want without Big Government getting involved.
Of course, the laws of thermodynamics kind of piss on that parade from a great height, which is why I was initially skeptical when I got a call last week from my scientist buddy. He had developed a working carbon capture machine, he explained, but “someone” (probably an intern or summer student) had wired the on/off switch backwards, and now it was busy hoovering up anything made of carbon and kicking out perfect geometric solids of pure black.
If I didn’t do something, he cried, the entire world would be consumed by this technological monster and converted to an efficient storage medium. I would have replied, but the Bluetooth speaker that is clumsily zip-tied to the rollcage of my Trans Am Turbo doesn’t have a working microphone anymore. Not since that conference call where I decided to hit the mute button with the ½-inch impact gun sitting in the passenger seat for emphasis.
There’s this concept in engineering called the “tolerance.” Basically, it’s how much of your fiddly real-world bullshit that a process can put up with before it stops working as advertised. In the case of the carbon capture machine, that tolerance is set at two BFG T/A radials obliterated in the burnout to end all burnouts. You should have been there: perhaps you saw it on the six ‘o’ clock news, right before the B-roll where the President of the World was giving me a pretty badass medal for my heroism.
I can’t take all the credit. I was barely into my second tank of gas when the rapidly delaminating semi-slicks chucked a cord directly into the mouth of the carbon capture machine, tangling a fanbelt and causing the whole thing to shut down. If you ask me, I could have gone for a few more rounds with the machine: my trunk was full of gently-cracked all-season tires I stole from the Fountain Tire dumpster when they weren’t looking, and they do say it’s better for the environment to recycle.
I ask you, friends: is there any better sound than the big chunky feeling of an electromechanical relay? When it comes to an electrical problem with your car, it can often feel hopeless. You can easily spend a month of weekends in the garage, sweating and swearing as you chase wires through dark passageways lined with mouse shit.
That sense of vindication when you finally hear the fuel pump relay click on and facilitate the passage of delicious electrical current? There’s nothing better in the world, even if you had to bypass half the car with old telephone cable ziptied dangerously close to the driveshaft.
I think this primal sensation of accomplishment is why, even though we have funky solid-state relays that are immensely reliable and trustworthy, that chunk sound is what keeps engineers coming back to the old style ones. What do you mean, they’re not on modern cars? Uh, I clearly have a Honda at the end of my junk pile that has an electromechanical main relay, and it’s from 2001, thank you very much.
And if you own a Ford Motor Company (henceforth Formorcin’, pronounced like it’s all one syllable) you often get the opportunity to add additional relays, mostly so you don’t burn down your truck using any electrical system. Even the cheapest AliExpress sorta-clicker is going to work better than starting a fire inside your dashboard/mouse nests because you were dumb enough to leave the high beams on for your entire 45-minute highway drive.
Hell, it’s not like it really costs you anything to add one to every circuit; for the automaker it cost millions of dollars over thousands of cars, but for you it’s only like fifteen cents. Why not get that click for every single interaction with your car, and turn your wiring harness from “confusing” into “Byzantine?” It’ll give you an excuse to buy one of those fancy power probes from the Snap-On catalogue.
Once you’ve been around the block a time or two, you’ll notice a strange phenomenon. Things seem to be discovered over and over, a couple decades apart. They’re first picked up as fads, then fade away as the popular excitement reaches saturation, then re-discovered to great acclaim. You’ll notice that this doesn’t happen to truly great inventions: bicycles, autonomous hunter-killer androids, and the angle grinder.
Indeed, the angle grinder is humanity’s sole contribution to intergalactic knowledge. Other civilizations out there in the stars have independently discovered most of our inventions, but the angle grinder has exceeded their grasp. We think that ancient Martians may have figured out the concept of the air-powered die grinder, but they were not able to evolve it to even a corded/bladed design before their extinction from The Calamity.
How did alien races figure out how to quickly cut body panels? Sure, they had things like portable lasers, psi cutters, and very, very sharp pruning shears, but the angle grinder stands at the top of the “fuck you, now you’re cut” pile. And we didn’t stop there: that one guy on YouTube who swapped the grinder disc out for a miniature circular sawblade gets a big thumbs up. He’ll need those thumbs, too, because he’s down one.
What’s next for humanity? Well, probably smaller, easier-to-smuggle angle grinders. You never know when you might have to cut a bicycle lock inside a building without alerting the security guards, or simply chop a hole in a recalcitrant glovebox. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Alpha Centarians.
Everyone at the party is thrilled to learn about the exciting adventures I’ve been on in shitty cars. Even if I have to describe in meticulous detail what blew up in order to get to the punchline of my particularly clever fix (usually “ignore it,”) it’s not hard to keep a crowd of at least a few wannabe-freaks hanging on my every word.
I do take advantage of this unique position of power, of course. You can’t expect me to stay silent about my hatred of the silent killer, hot glue. Most of the time, my enraptured audience doesn’t even notice when I shift metaphorical gears into discussing the thousands of projects that are ruined every year by the abject shittiness of glue guns.
Because Canadians are polite, I’ve hardly ever gotten in trouble when people figure it out. Yes, there was that time when I was giving the keynote speech at a consumer adhesives convention and that drunk guy in the back row took a pot shot at me with his .38. Once the other attendees figured out who was giving their industry a bad name, though, they beat him pretty savagely. I’m told that he even let the paramedics use cyanoacrylate glue to seal up his wounds, the hypocrite.
Yes, a couple of my victims might figure out that I’m a bit of a radical by the time I launch into a full-throated endorsement of two-part epoxy and start handing out brochures, but as long as even one person goes away convinced that they shouldn’t use a $2.99 Canadian Tire special to hold together their project, I’ve made the world a better place.
I’m not really that cheap. There are people out there who are so tight that light cannot escape their assholes. Last week, I was out with my friend, Parsimonious Pat. We were at KFC, and naturally I was the one paying for the food, which honestly is a sort of investment when she tells me about great places to get a deal. Well, halfway through the meal, she disappeared to the bathroom, only to return with two milk jugs full of water.
“They’re just giving it away from the sinks,” she explained, “and it costs money at home.” I took out my notepad and began scrawling down “SINK WATER = FREE.” She wasn’t done.
“I make sure to go to the bathroom here as well. If I think I can hold it, it’s only about a five minute walk from my place,” she continued. It made sense to me. Not only did you get free toilet flushes, toilet paper, soap, and save wear on your own toilet seat – wait, hold on, something wasn’t adding up. Where did those milk jugs come from?
“That’s the beauty of the whole thing,” she beamed, “the grocery store next door is throwing out rancid milk all the time, along with the containers!” It seemed like the perfect scam: get containers from the grocery store trash, wash out the spoiled contents in the KFC sink, fill ‘em with fresh water, take them home. Why not, I proposed, buy a KFC uniform on eBay and fill those containers with old fryer oil instead? That way you could turn it into biodiesel, and drive to work for free!
With this proposal, Pat’s face grew grim. It seemed that scamming hot oil out of a restaurant kitchen was a good way to get burned, and it’s very difficult to make your own skin grafts on the cheap, even if you do get some expired bacon from the same grocery store dumpster. Frugality, it seemed, had its limit. Besides, an electric car is much easier to charge from the block heater outlets in the employee parking.
Sure, they call it the international space station, but there’s a hint in that name: nations. If you’re just some guy who’s come up with his own module in his garage, suddenly you’re not good enough to join the others in space. You have to be a whole-ass country, with laws, and a population, and signing onto treaties. I contacted my member of Parliament – maybe I could scam the government into approving it and paying for at least some of the rocket ship delivery – but she was too busy drinking homemade liquor from a shoe to listen to my tale of woe.
Some part of me was deeply disappointed. I had downloaded the PDF of all the major standards from the NASA website, and exceeded them. This thing had so much PL Premium holding it together at the seams that it was more than airtight. I even went all out and actually measured the airlock opening before cutting it into the side of the old shipping container I used as a chassis.
Frustrated, I decided to do a little more work on my space station module. What is that module for, I hear you ask? The thing that living in space is missing: a bitchin’ garage. Astronauts need something to do in their free time, and it can’t all be zero-gravity sex and trying to figure out if their loose fingernail clippings ended up inside the computer keeping them alive. My module offers the ideal recreational activity for all human beings: basic maintenance on a 1993 Toyota Corolla.
There’s a lot of good benefits to working on junk in space, besides the obvious boredom reduction. First, it keeps the best car ever made by humanity safe from any conflagration that could destroy the Earth. It’s important that, even if something happens to us, other civilizations can benefit from this knowledge in the distant future.
When nobody is in the module, the atmosphere can be pumped out. No oxygen means no rust, which is good because painting is really gonna dirty up the air-scrubber filters in a hurry. Not only that, but you don’t need a lift or even jackstands. The car is tied down with ratchet straps, so if you want to get underneath to replace a bushing or inspect a leaking exhaust donut, just loosen the straps off a titch or two and slide right under. You won’t even get splashed with oil when you remove the filter! Plus, things are super light to remove; why not solo the entire transmission and just throw it out the airlock when it starts to surge the 2-3 shift?
Last, the space shuttle often returns empty. On the way up, it’s full of satellites and CIA spy shit, but on the way down there’s nothing going back. Why not throw the project car in there – it’ll probably fit – and put it on eBay to make some extra money on top of that low-dollar astronaut paycheque from the government?
Eventually, I’ll wear the government down and force them to send my module up, even if I have to form a violent, reactionary, populist mob in order to do it. We just have to figure out a cool chant to yell while smashing the implements of the state and law enforcement. What word rhymes with “facilitate the off-world repair of Toyotas?”
One of the things that I endeavour to crush most in this world is the overpriced niche product. Sure, I won’t begrudge you the opportunity to reclaim all of your research and development work. Charging extortionate prices to the handful of hobbyists dumb enough to pull a Merkur out of Uncle Grandpa’s back 40? Now that’s a motivator for me to undermine you.
Here at Seat Safety Spite Solutions, we develop only the finest products based entirely on getting fussy that a part is like ten dollars too expensive. Sure, our parts aren’t as easy to use, well-documented, or tested in any way, but if you’re willing to get your hands a little dirty, they’re just as good as the other guy’s at a fraction of the price.
Whatever you learn can come back to us, so we can improve the product, together. We’re like partners, except only one of us (you) is taking the entire legal liability for operating a motor vehicle with the part installed on it. Don’t worry, I’m sure I squinted at that low-resolution picture of a brake caliper bracket long enough to rip it off accurately. How hard could it be?
The important thing is that the original seller of the overpriced item become very steamed. I won’t bother them, of course, because I don’t want to invite lawsuits and drama, and they may never hear of my ripoff of their product, but I want them to read between the lines and realize that I did it on purpose, spending dozens of hours on an endeavour to reinvent the wheel, rather than just asking them if they could cut me a deal or trade for some old service manuals.
Naturally, this public service has cost me greatly out of pocket, and I expect a cultlike level of worship as partial payment. You can’t come back to me playing the blame game, as I will not tolerate negative vibes. We also have a couple “house rules,” as it were. No returns. No exchanges. No rainchecks. And don’t knock my shit off, because I guarantee you there is not a single penny left to shave off of these designs, unless you actually understand what you are doing as an engineer, in which case there likely is.
Fire suppression: it’s not a sexy topic, unless you’re into firemen for a different reason than most people. You need it, though, especially if your hobby space involves anything that’s potentially flammable. Cleaning alcohols, brake fluid, linseed oil on rags: all of this stuff can go up in a jiffy. It’s best that you have an extinguisher right on hand, rather than having to walk downstairs to the kitchen and push a chair over to the fridge so you can get the kitchen extinguisher off the top of the fridge, then walk all the way back up the stairs to finally put the fire out. Mostly because you might get asked to run an errand while you’re down there, and by the time you get back to the fire it’s been like six or seven hours and now the honey-do list is a lot longer.
You can find a bunch of recommendations about what kind of extinguisher to buy and where to mount it all over the internet. I won’t bother you with the specifics, mostly because I can’t remember the letter system. My system: look at the sticker on the side, which shows cute little cartoon people trying to put out life-endangering conflagrations. If there’s a little dude freaking out about an electrical fire, and you have an electrical fire in front of you, pop that ‘tinguisher and let’s jam.
It’s also a good idea to keep an eye on expiry dates. Big Extinguisher wants you to replace them regularly because, as most of them are American-made, they last three to five years before you have to trade them in on a new model that costs $10,000 more and no longer comes with a manual transmission. And I’m sure they’re working on some way to rig it up in software, so that when you pull the trigger it just emits the sad trombone noise from Price Is Right and asks for you to insert your credit card to download the Chemical Fire DLC. Still, better to have a working extinguisher than an inert one. It’s very hard to beat a fire to death.
With these safety tips, I hope your personal risk of dying alone in an uncontrollable house fire has been slightly diminished. After all, it’s hard for a dead person to show off their cool skin grafts to chicks (or dudes) at the bar.
Couple years ago, I started looking at old British roadsters. Now, while they still existed, the British were good at a lot of things. Cars were not one of them, with the possible exception of the convertible roadster. These cars were also largely not actually good, but their inherent potential elevated them. How could you be mad at a car that didn’t start sometimes, or caught fire if you put the left turn signal on for too long, as long as you had that one perfect summer afternoon ripping through a twisty road with the wind in your hair?
Of course, Mama Statistics dictates that if a given model of car breaks down once per year, and it’s been (checks watch) forty years since that car was introduced, pretty much all of them are going to be broken down by now. Even the most diligent owners who keep up on top of costly repairs can only own so many cars at once, and everyone else just throws a sheet over the corpse of the car and starts to use it as a garage shelf. “I’ll get around to it one day,” the humans who own the car say, until they can’t anymore. Because they are dead.
At first, it may seem ghoulish to be cruising the local estate sales for a non-working MG or Triumph. In my defence, there are at least two positive ways you could look at it. I’m either giving the family closure and a little spending money, or working hard to bring the car back to life, the way the original owner would have wanted. Of course, without a Quija board, it’s a little hard to figure out if the original owner really would have wanted me to fully rewire the car and install a methanol-burning, twin-turbocharged, triple-rotor 20B rotary engine. Let’s assume for the sake of our thought experiment that they would think it is extremely rad indeed.
Unfortunately for my dreams, it turns out that non-working British cars sold by grieving widows cost about the same amount of money as non-working British cars sold by the original owners. Working British cars, you ask? I’m sorry, but even my dreams work in the realm of the possible.
If you live in North America, virtually everyone you know is forced to own a car. Cities are designed so poorly that it’s necessary to drive in order to get anywhere from the “cluster of houses” to the “cluster of grocery stores” just to survive. They have to piss away a good-sized chunk of their income on tires, fuel, insurance, bribes to law enforcement, and bumper stickers that read “Proud Parent of A Kid That Can Hold Their Grain Alcohol.”
Although it’s good for the economy, having this much money taken out of people’s disposable incomes mean that they can’t do things like save for the future, repair their homes, or experiment with less-deadly varieties of recreational drugs. Naturally, this leads to a sort of resentment of the whole car “system.” If you can get a car for cheap, and run it into the ground, well, then you’re beating that system, and people want to learn your secrets. That is, unless your cheap car doesn’t have heated seats, self-driving radar, and a five-star safety system that won’t eject children into the expressway when the front left control arm collapses.
Personally, I’ve never been one for fashion. Most of my clothes are things I pulled off of overdose victims while the ambulance drivers weren’t looking, and my house is painted a shade of green that once caused a passing interior decorator to stop her car, walk up to my porch, ring my doorbell and vomit on me. Stay in your lane, lady, that paint is clearly mostly on the exterior. It’s not a big deal for me to have an ugly, unglamorous, or dangerous car, because I’m beating the system. Civilization is forcing me to have a car, sure, but I’m forcing it to look at that car.
In order to spread my secrets to others, I once started up a small rental car business. Folks who were down on their luck or just didn’t want to own cars could grab one of the hoopties I left parked all over the city (due to lack of storage space,) and drive it to their destination for a couple bucks a kilometer. However, it turns out that, contrary to the advice of my then-lawyer, liability law still applies even if the customer is getting “a smoking deal,” (direct quote from the sentencing judge) and you made them read handwritten instructions about how to keep the car from setting itself on fire. Reading is more of a public-transit thing, anyway.
There’s a sort of hierarchy of work vehicles in my neighbourhood. Dudes who drive downtown to the office and back have brand-new, lifted Rams and F150s. Folks who do lawncare or other hard jobs are still wringing the mopwater out of 40-year-old Ford Rangers with a wheezy four. And the hard-working general handymen who swarm my neighbourhood? Why, they’re in high-mileage, Japanese minivans with the seats ripped out.
Last month, I was out “walking the dog” (looking through trash bins for scrap metal) when I saw a brand-new – for me, at least – Sienna stuffed to the gills with dirt. The gardener was working hard, lifting soil out of the back and carrying it into the yard of what appeared to be a fairly crack-free house. He presumably did not need a pickup truck or even a container in which to store the dirt, just letting it pour into the interior. I began to wonder what happened to these minivans when they were finally miled out. Surely, I realized with a start, their powertrains would still be pretty good.
After making a few inquiries and learning some new local slang for “shitbox,” I was able to secure some of these hogged-out vans for myself. It seemed once they had reached the end of their usefulness, they were crammed into every nook and cranny of various properties across the province. With a come-along and a crisp fifty, I was soon yanking Toyota motors. What, though, would I use to transport them, with pickup-truck prices through the stratosphere as laid-off office workers were now getting back to their roots by buying $45,000 pickup trucks instead of $85,000 ones? A van, of course.
Naturally, I had to add some safety features in case I had to brake abruptly. While having about eight thousand pounds of aluminum-block Japanese V6s precariously stacked behind the driver’s seat makes even me drive more cautiously, a couple of ratchet straps were very welcome. And the locking hatch – unlocking was another matter – meant that my parts would be kept safe from local scrap-metal thieves, unless they tried to steal the entire decrepit van, in which case I’d just find them crushed to death a couple blocks down the road. Even that isn’t so bad – I pulled the carpet, so you can just power wash it out.
You have to be really dedicated to go fast in a piece of shit. Anyone can walk onto a Ferrari dealership lot, plunk down some pieces of paper obtained by constructing an elaborate Ponzi scheme, and drive off in a fast car. They don’t know the joy of sitting in a suburban garage at 3am, trying to figure out why the damn thing keeps stumbling whenever you take it over 3000 rpm. Or cobbling together about $175 of eBay parts using brute force and ignorance to make it all fit.
The meticulous science of hot-rodding is not one that appeals to everyone. Most people will be happy adding a sportier air filter, or drilling a hole in their muffler. Then they’ll smugly tool around town, attempting to get into stoplight races. And that’s fine, assuming that you started with a car that isn’t a total piece of shit. Once you’ve touched that rush of propelling worthless budget heaps to race-car performance, though, nothing else can compare.
Still, a lot of enthusiasts need at least some external validation in their lives. They seek out other freaks, to show them the ridiculous pile of garbage that they tricked into going dangerously fast. And it’s a good idea to have friends with the same interests. After all, sending turds into low earth orbit is dangerous: you’re going to want to have a buddy who can drive you back home when you inevitably drive over your own crank by stuffing a 150-shot down the throat of an economy-car engine that was originally designed for 1980s forklifts.
There is, however, a cost to hanging out with a bunch of other slow-car-fast nerds. In order to keep impressing them, you’ll take out bigger and bigger gambles. It might have seemed impressive at one point that you could make a 730-horsepower Cavalier, but now nobody is going to bat an eye unless you’re cracking four digits in a rotary-swapped Tercel. Perhaps this is a secret plot by law enforcement: it’s hard to run over old ladies crossing the street when your project car is scattered across two machine shops.
In the place where I grew up, it was very uncommon to see an expensive boat. The reason why is not hard to comprehend. We lived so far from the ocean that the biggest body of water you could run a yacht in was a glacial lake. No marina to store it on the water, and by the time you were finished, you probably spent about six hours taking the damn boat in and out of the water for every two hours you spent trying to drown your mistresses by blipping the throttle.
So when I visited the coast for the first time as an impressionable teenager, seeing all those fancy big boats came as a shock. Rich people were paying a whole shitload of money for giant yachts that they would motor out into the middle of the ocean, dick around for a little while, and then immediately drive it back so they could go somewhere that had edible food for dinner. It seemed like a good life, having an expensive vehicle that cost the same as a luxury apartment but always smelled vaguely of seaweed.
You might think I had been radicalized by this, even motivated into becoming a Horatio Alger motherfucker running a megacorporation so that I could afford my own fancy boat. Not so. Even with all the ships I had seen while standing on the shore with the other poor people, I still returned home to my landlocked province and enjoyed the simpler life. If on one weekend I felt a wild tear to go out on the water, I’d borrow my neighbour’s canoe and strap it to the roof of the Travelall.
What it did give me was a series of good ideas. For instance, motorhomes are ugly as hell inside, and often covered in raccoon urine and mould, but the chassis is cheap. And once you punch a hole in the bottom (the “hull” in boat-speak) of a luxury yacht, it’s pretty worthless. All I needed to do was wed the two, and suddenly I’d have a luxury apartment of my own, without the requirement to pay The Man any rent. Sure, it was a little bit of work drying it all out, but I found that if I opened the windows and then accelerated hard while going downhill, I could quickly replace the smell of sunken-boat wallpaper with the relatively more pleasant odour of burning brakes and hydraulic system failure.
Being a consulting mechanic is a lot like being a consulting detective. You get to wear a crazy hat, puff on a pipe, and solve mysteries. Sometimes, those mysteries are about murder, but this isn’t one of those. Who wants to read about that?
Once, I got hired by the Stereotypical Italian Restaurant (yes, that’s its actual name) to investigate the reason why their electric pasta maker was on the fritz. The lunch rush was coming, and without a quick fix, they were going to have to get the owner’s mom to hit a bunch of customers with a rolling pin again.
I squatted down and took a look at the machine. In case you’re unfamiliar, the basic concept of a pasta machine is that it crushes dough into noodles. It’s effectively a bunch of rollers with a crank on the end. The classic problem: worn gears and sloppy bearings caused the rollers to chatter, falling out of alignment and making what those in the industry refer to as “lumpy noods,” the fucking perverts.
Now, it would have been an easy task to just swap out the bearings for what I had in the trunk of my Plymouth. And yet, the Stereotypical Italians had foiled me during the construction of the machine, choosing a bearing diameter and race depth that I simply did not have on hand, nor could I get from the Unbearable Bearing Clearance Store down the street. With only about an hour left before Mama Restaurant would be forced into hospitalizing some patrons, I had to make it work with an unseemly rapidity. As they say in France, hoarding is the mother of cobbling together some bullshit. From the trunk of my car, I pulled a pair of old boat engines and got to work designing a whole new pasta machine.
The customers loved their soot-stained spaghetti, laden with nutritious flecks of crankcase oil from the bad rear main seal on the primary engine. In fact, there was such a demand for it that I was forced to build a few others, until one morning I realized that the twin screw rotors of a Roots-type supercharger would be the ideal pasta machine. That’s when I found out that there is in fact a lethal speed at which to fling dough, and also re-aligning the belt drive sucked every time it got a little blood on it.
You, or a loved one, may be afflicted by a funicular. Don’t worry, it’s not some exotic illness imported from a jungle whose name you can’t even pronounce but is being turned rapidly into fuel and toothpicks. A funicular is a five-dollar word for a diagonal elevator, and it’s the new hotness in urban planning.
See, there’s a lot of problems with hills, from an urban planning perspective. They erode, and houses fall down them. People fall down them too, often while trying to enjoy the outdoors. This latter point is a downer to the tax base, and in the interest of making the great hills and valleys near my home more accessible, city council spent a couple bucks putting in a funicular.
It was very cool to ride for the first time, having the experience of sliding down a hill but without having to put any effort into it myself. The view was excellent, and I enjoyed my walk down into the river valley to look for stricken automobiles that had swerved off the highway and become parts donors. On the way up, however, the novelty quickly wore off. Even though it was on its own little restricted area so that pedestrians and wildlife couldn’t get crushed by the fancy elevator, it was slow as all balls. And that’s something I just can’t understand. Therefore, I took a surreptitious job as a part-time funicular repairperson in order to right this wrong. Also, I had a visit to the dentist coming up, so I needed the bennies.
The funicular, being modern, is entirely electric drive. Here’s the thing to know about electric motors: they like going really fast. You pretty much have to throw a gear train in front of them to slow ‘em down, give them the grunt that they need to hoist an elevator full of tourists. Thing is, though, most tourists aren’t all that chubby, at least not the ones who want to ride a fancy outdoor elevator to a walking path. Therefore, most of this capacity was completely wasted. By flipping some gears around at random, the funicular was soon moving much, much faster. On my initial test run (while wearing my City-approved hard hat and reflective vest) the thing shot up the hill so hard that I was nearly thrown off my feet when it came to a stop. Just about perfect, I thought. Another major civil improvement, performed by a humble public servant.
I had forgotten one thing. In the winter, the tracks the funicular slid along liked to ice up. Ice, naturally, has a little bit lower of a coefficient of friction than steel. Once the survivors got out of hospital, though, they admitted it was much better than the old funicular. As for me, the city is talking about doing a gondola over downtown pretty soon, but they won’t make it faster than a bus. Never you worry, I’ve already checked out a few books from the library about what kind of grease to use on gondola cables.
There’s two things that everyone needs to know about Saskatchewan: it’s flat, and it’s boring. These two facts combine to make it a sort of pressure-cooker for mental illness, driving even the hardiest people insane. I myself could only stand to be outside for about fifteen minutes at a time before the dark shadows began to creep into the corners of my vision, and indistinct words were babbled from my mouth uncontrollably. Also, they kept trying to make me use a different word to describe chocolate milk.
I wouldn’t say I was the best on-call heavy-duty mechanic in the province, but I had a couple positive aspects. For instance, my work truck had a bed full of bolts, bearings, crimp connectors: I prided myself on having a bunch of little shit, so I wouldn’t have to go back to the store every five minutes and inconvenience the customer. One summer, I was called down to a local campground to find a distressed young man in front of an overheating bulldozer.
He had been given the task (by his Ontario-residing boss) to flatten out a new set of campsites. This request seemed to be insane, but the young man had a smartphone, and dutifully looked up “level” on Google. There, he found that there was a special piece of equipment known as a “bubble level” that could be used to determine if something was, in fact, plumb. It’s at this point that I should point out that public school in Saskatchewan deals more with essential life skills such as operation of a microwave and which way to drive in order to move to Alberta rather than Manitoba, also known as the Fool’s Alberta.
Empowered with this adult-learning knowledge, the young man drove to the Home Depot, where he was met with disdain.
“Bubbles are round, you fucking liar,” spat the manager of the Home Depot, who nevertheless led the boy into the back of the store. There, they found a display of spirit levels that had been delivered at the store’s opening and never touched. The very sight – the very concept – that a structure could be any less than parallel to the perfectly straight Earth drove the manager to madness then, and he collapsed onto the concrete floor of the store and began to tear out his own eyes. The young man, sensing potential law enforcement struggle, removed the UPC code from a nearby deer-asshole-remover and stuck it onto the level. This fraud allowed him to purchase the level and leave the store without ruining the lives of any more people.
Back at the campsite, the young man smugly laid the level on the ground. The bubble moved over one of the bars, indicating there was a gentle slope to the campground area. It was at this moment, the customer explained, that he went mad like the manager, and used the bulldozer non-stop for over seventy-two hours, pausing only to refill the diesel tank and urinate into a Vi-Co (God dammit, now they’ve got me doing it) bottle. By the time I arrived on the scene to repair the hammered industrial equipment, the campground was indeed glass flat, so much so that the dirt shone in the sun.
Unfortunately for all of us, while I was digging around in the bed of the truck for a replacement thermostat, I knocked a bag of ball bearings loose and they burst on the ground beneath. Most of them did the right thing and stayed put, but one of those ball bearings… it rolled downhill.
In my town, there are a lot of nice bike lanes everywhere. Nobody uses them, because those bike lanes don’t actually go between any two locations that someone wants to visit. As a result, the local rageaholics are angry about the fact that they could be used to add more lanes to the road, decreasing the amount of traffic congestion caused when two angry dudes in pickup trucks slam into each other, take their shirts off, and fight in the middle of the road.
Obediently, the town’s sedimentary layers of bureaucrats listened, but mostly to their budgets. Tearing up these bike lanes would be expensive. In an effort to increase adoption and decrease the chance that an unemployed city planner will chuck a molotov cocktail through their office window, the town has made it legal for some kinds of motorized vehicles to occupy the bike lanes. The theory here is, if your motorcycle is shitty enough, you can pop out of the regular flow of traffic and brap-brap your way past the shirtless dudes fighting. You’ll get to work faster, and they get to check off the bike lane as “was used, once.”
Naturally, because town planners believe the origin of unsafe roads is speed, you can’t just take a litrebike on there. You have to have a really abysmal power-to-weight ratio, about what you’d see if you read depressing poetry to a 1970s French moped. However, my Festiva definitely qualifies, having blown three of its spark plugs clean out of the block (threads included) years previously due to what my attorney has advised me to not to admit was poor maintenance. It now produces something like a single digit of horsepower, which is ideal for fuel economy when you’re stuck in traffic waiting for two assholes to finish pounding the stuffing out of each other for YouTube.
Now I drive in the bike lanes pretty much the entire way to work, in theoretically climate-controlled comfort. It’s great, except when the schoolchildren riding their single-speed Norcos start to tailgate me.
Reckless swerving in traffic is the domain of the ignorant. Constantly changing lanes, tailgating, making last-minute dives for any gap available? It’s just going to stress you out, and chances are we’ll get there within about five seconds of each other anyway. I’d much rather arrive at my destination relaxed and prepared for a day of high-powered megacorporate meetings.
Now, it is true that I try not to go close to the redline when wearing nice clothes. This is because there’s a very tiny head gasket leak on the passenger-side head, and if I really give it the beans the heater core will start filling up with oil. Since the heater core also has a couple very tiny holes, I’ll show up with a fine mist of milkshake-y oil covering every available surface. And also, on rare occasions, some steam burns. Still, the point remains.
Personally, if I want to show off my driving prowess in traffic, there’s a time and a place for it. That time is running from the cops, and that place is on the shoulder at very high speeds. Even here, you have to strategize rather than just saw the wheel and hope for the best. For instance, I’ve reinforced the underbody of my car (using purloined road signs) so any debris scattered on the sides of the highway is unlikely to puncture my oil-pan. And my car is old enough that any cop still in active duty is too young to be able to identify it over the radio to their fellow officers, except as a “brown piece of shit” which sounds racist enough that they’ll think twice about putting it on tape, lest my defence lawyer become sexually aroused at trial.
I don’t find it anxiety-inducing, either. It’s almost like a Zen experience, and if things really go south I can always ditch the car and take off on foot. Even the fastest cop can’t hold onto me when I’ve gotten a complete coating of 10w40.
A couple years ago, I met some skydivers when they landed in the same field as me. Of course, I was in this field harvesting parts from a farmer’s hoard of fine 1970s Mopars. He – I imagined, for I didn’t want to tip my hand by talking to them first – was holding onto these cars for some fantasy future overvaluation, when I needed the parts from them to keep going to work. The Economy takes precedence over your petty need to private property, I’m sorry to say.
Oh, the skydivers? They needed a ride back into town, because they had landed quite far off their mark and the usual Truck Guy was out sick, replaced by an eager-but-stupid intern who didn’t know how to get around the community. In the interest of community service, and also in order to get out of the field as fast as possible before Farmer Tom investigated with his swarm of security drones, I offered a ride for them all in the bed of my Scamp.
Now, you might think it was boring to a bunch of thrill-seekers to just ride in a commuter car after hurling themselves out of an airplane. After about the third handbrake turn through a cornfield, however, their leader was hooting and banging on the cab of my vehicle in excitement. Occasionally his hand would smash through a particularly weak section of unibody, but I was pretty sure you had to have a recent tetanus shot if you were “into” this sort of lifestyle anyway.
When we met up with the Truck Intern, some of the crew wanted my business card. They were excited by the thrill ride nature of it all, a harrowing hayride at highway speeds with a callous disregard for vehicular safety. One of them even pointed out that my seatbelt was just a length of old ratchet-strap tied from one door frame to the other. Once they’d tasted a bit of the good life, they all wanted more. And rather than sell any of my fine automobiles to them and risk producing a bubble, I decided that I would become a good capitalist and rent them out.
For weeks, my ice-racing scumbag buddies and myself would give five-minute “Last Rides” to would-be daredevils. For us, it was just another Tuesday. For them, the copious holes in the bodywork exposing flexing suspension just inches away from their limbs filled the adrenaline meter and then some. These putative thrill seekers would wander away, bowlegged and staggering, from a cobbled-together Mopar V8 that had only just warmed up after finally burning the leaking brake fluid and oil off the headers.
It was a really promising business, but unfortunately I had to end it when the skydiving company owner figured out where I lived, flew a plane overhead, and dropped the Truck Intern down my chimney to deliver a threat. Once again, the Truck Intern lacked all sense of direction, but having to clean the shattered corpse off of my driveway was enough to make me dread the potential repair ordeal if the next one were to hit my roof.
The most difficult part of repairing a vehicle is the scheduling. When you first start out, it doesn’t seem that way. You can change some wiper blades, or do an oil change, or slam new brake pads in on a lazy summer afternoon. Even if you don’t have the part just yet, it only takes about half an hour to run to the parts store, pick it up, and go. A “big job” then might take two days and involve something intimidating, like removing a valve cover.
Of course, like any addiction, it only gets more expensive with time. You need a bigger rush to feel even half as good as you did on the previous repair. Maybe you start spending time in sketchy neighbourhoods, looking to score something that’s really shitty. Your new friends are only impressed with heroic saves, big gambles, rather than periodic maintenance. Now you’re ordering rare parts from all over the world, and becoming intimately familiar with the schedule of the DHL guy versus the FedEx lady.
Before long, even a basic job like a frame-off restoration, complete rewiring, and rotary engine swap can turn into several months of holding a project-management chart in your head. Vehicles are on jackstands for months, years, awaiting the spark of life that is only available on eBay at two in the morning if you can just outbid that one Hungarian asshole who also needs it just as badly. Then it gets put together, runs. Start the second schedule: the one where you actually finish things. That one can wait, approximately forever.
Perhaps this is the reason why I, and many others, drive around with no interior and a trunk full of parts. We’ll get around to it one day, we tell everyone who complains, but in honesty the good feelings dissipated about five minutes after that first successful turn of the key. Maybe some teenager would be willing to buy this as their first car, and get a little bit of a hit putting the stereo back in. Yeah, they could finish it in an afternoon. First one’s always free.
A good workshop is hard to beat. Everything in its place, just enough spare parts, and great lighting above all else. You can get a lot of things done in a place like that, which is the whole problem. Even the most well-stocked garage is still going to have to wait for parts, and why not open up another project in the meantime? It’s a more effective use of your time than just sitting on your hands.
Before long, the once-clean, minimalist ideal of the garage has become a place where the floor is a kind of shelf. Dozens of projects, abandoned mid-stride when something shinier came along, litter every horizontal surface available. In order to keep a nice-looking garage, I am convinced, it is necessary to occasionally say “no” to a project, and clean up instead.
Or: you could win the lottery, and buy a “show garage” that is kept immaculately clean. Like the pictures in the magazine, it has a bunch of shiny workbenches, gleaming toolchests, and even the occasional barstool that takes up floorspace that could otherwise be used for shattered transmissions, bins of gently used bolts, or rusty subframes. In this way, actual work can be done in your actual garage, and then you can invite the neighbours and the folks covering your extremist political campaigns to the nice one so that they can get the whiff of “person who does things” without also smelling the sweet tang of burned 75w90 gear oil.
Personally, I reject this false duality. My workshop is the yard, both back and front. If I need a new workbench, then I just pop the trunk on one of the other decrepit cars. If I run out of room to park decrepit car-workbenches, street parking is free. Eventually, the property line between mine and my neighbours’ places also start to blur (squatter’s law) and my “garage” slowly spreads across the city. Sure, it’s a little inconvenient in the middle of the winter: hard to swap brake calipers when the wind is whipping ice crystals into your face, but at least I don’t ever have to clean the floor. That’s what the rain and occasional wild dog is for.
Trains: they’re like big electric cars, except you don’t get to drive them. Will they ever catch on outside of Europe and Asia? The chances are low, but I did like the panache put forward by the French. Visit Paris myself? Perhaps you are mistaking me for someone with actual money. No, what I did was tune into one of my favourite streamers as they hacked into a Parisian police robot and then drove it around the Champs-Elysees before falling down the stairs to a Metro station.
On the platform for that station, for the couple minutes before the cops cut the cellular connection and tried to black-ICE xXxBaconNightmare420xXx in retribution, I saw Something. And that something was a train… with rubber tires. Just like a car! Wikipedia confirmed that it was not just another of my hallucinations, but instead a real thing: a matériel pneu train car!
I knew I had to have one for myself. eBay had a couple, courtesy of dudes who had stolen a bunch of stuff from an RATP storage yard. Unfortunately, they were virtually useless. Without any steering, and forced to draw power from a primitive rail system using “electricity,” it seemed unlikely that I would be able to fill it with 87 octane and drive it to the grocery store. What did drunk people drive in Paris, I idly wondered?
Luckily, there was a solution, and it was so blindingly obvious that I kicked myself for not seeing it sooner. Late-model Chevy Blazers provide an excellent frame for any 4x4-related custom car, and they’re a metric chassis. France is a metric nation (they may have inherited the system from Quebec, the cultural home of the French people.) See where I’m going with this?
Now, I had a 454-powered, four-wheel-drive, gasoline-snorting MP commuter train of my very own. Sure, I could only afford one car, but the street parking was starting to get pretty tight on my block anyway, and I can’t parallel park if there’s another car within 100 meters of my bumper. What do you take me for, a European?
For years, I used to look in the newspaper and see reports about secret agents hiding in plain sight in our communities. How could nobody have suspected the smoking hot Russian lady with a bunch of guns in the basement was actually a top operative for the KGB? Perhaps we just want to assume the best of our neighbours, but I could never be fooled like that. And then I was.
Robert and Alex (not their real names) moved into the old place at the end of the street and started fixing it up. They seemed like perfectly normal adult humans, but they were already acting suspiciously. Some of my neighbours would later testify that they thought it was odd that, at a neighbourhood barbecue, they referred to a burger as a “quarter pounder” and described their house’s size in “yards.” These were strange units to us born-and-bred Canadians.
It was also confusing to their next door neighbour Sue when, in December, they seemed incapable of plugging in a simple block heater. Realizing that their cars probably wouldn’t start in -25°C, she did the right thing and went out in the morning to plug their cars in. She even brought an extension cord with her, because none was attached to the outside of the house. However, there was no place to plug the car in! They didn’t have a block heater installed.
She came to my door later, suspicious, and asked me about it: perhaps there was some kind of futuristic electric car, or one that ran on hydrogen, that didn’t need an external block heater. I was perplexed by this story. Sure, my cars didn’t have block heaters either, but that was because I usually started them only after lighting a smudge pot under the oil pan to give the main bearings half a chance at survival. I decided I would take a look for myself.
After jumping under Robert’s truck, I realized from the VIN stamped onto the engine block and frame that it was an American-only trim of the Ford F-250. Texas Liberation or Kansas Forever Edition or something like that. What a deal, I reported back to Sue, they probably saved thousands off the MSRP by just getting it at the American exchange rate. Sue, whose wife was in the political counterintelligence unit, agreed that it was indeed a killer discount, then told me that she had to make some phone calls.
You never get used to seeing a bunch of American spies get executed in the middle of the street, especially when all the commotion gets in the way of the supermailbox. I had assumed it was just normal gang violence, up until the leader of the black-suited kill squad dropped by to give me a $25 Tim Hortons gift card as thanks.
“Thanks for what?” I wanted to ask, but I figured if I made too much of a stink, he’d take the card back.
Back in the 80s, there was no better way to tell everyone on your block that you’re now a successful drug dealer than to rock up in a used late-1970s Firebird. Sure, the C4 Corvette was more expensive and nominally more powerful, but it was almost too flashy; the cops would be onto you in a second. It couldn’t pass for an aspiring-proletariat vehicle parked in a bad neighbourhood in the same way that only an F-body could.
Because the Firebird had a bit of a bad-boy attitude on top of the existing baddest-boy attitude put on by the sharp-dressed, cocaine-huffing badge-engineers at Pontiac, there were a lot of options on how to express your specific personality. Were you a cheapo with a base model, a little sporty with a Formula, or convinced you could go wheel-to-wheel with factory-backed Porsche race teams in a Trans Am? To this combination, they added a fourth option: the Trans Am Turbo.
Shit was bad at Pontiac entering model year 1980. General Motors’ on-again-off-again lover The United States Government had decided to get tough on their smoggy, fuel-inefficient V8 engines, and in response the engineering management over-reacted. They cancelled all of those engines, and favoured using smaller smoggy, fuel-inefficient V8 engines, which looked better by comparison. Pontiac, however, looked up from their three-dime-bag lunch, and slammed a turbocharger onto the tiny engine that corporate was forcing them to swallow. After all, they reasoned, turbocharging was the future, and the Hated Europeans were doing it. Let’s kick their asses.
Turbos were everywhere in the 1980s, just as they are now, but they weren’t very good then. Materials bearing technology, fuel injection computer speed, and a frightening episode of Knight Rider involving the warranty service for KITT after using the wrong octane of gas all were blamed for their market failure. The Trans Am Turbo wasn’t particularly powerful. It wasn’t especially inexpensive. It only came with a 3-speed automatic whose performance potential ranged between “rental car” and “trying to find a bathroom after too much Taco Bell.” It only lasted two model years before the third-gen Firebird replaced it, with a turbo V6 made by their intracompany rivals, Buick.
What it did have was swagger. And a hood-mounted turbo boost gauge. It’s a true pity that this fine-terrible automobile never really got the chance to show us just how much more Pontiac engineering could do for your friendly neighbourhood drug dealer. Nowadays, any low-tier meth vendor can pick up a turbo-four Camaro from the “regret we ordered this” part of their local Chevy dealership. Can he buy a Trans Am Turbo? He definitely cannot, even though I’m sure the dealership would be willing to hook him up with someone who can airbrush a mean phoenix on the hood.
I’ll admit it: I’m a sucker for a good street race. The moment of anticipation, checking cross traffic to make sure it’s clean, revving up to launch rpm and popping the clutch before the other guy realizes what’s going on. Yeah, I admit the last part isn’t really sportsmanlike, but when you have approximately 62 horsepower and a catalytic converter that’s clogged enough to make Midwest-style coleslaw with, you gotta take every advantage you can.
Recently, in my city, the cops have started tooling around in these stealth Explorers. They look like factory soft-roaders, except for the cop-spec steelies and hidden pedestrian-blinding lights. And they’ve been catching a lot of folks who should really know better: members of the local street-racing community. There’s no excuse for this; even if you do spend nine-tenths of your waking hours memorizing chassis variations between each model year of the Nissan Silvia, you should spare an hour or two to figure out what the most common ghost cop car is before trying to engage one in an illegal street race.
That’s why I started a new night-school class at the college. It turns out that the judge considered this to be community service for that time I ended up blowing out the windows of that daycare with a burnout in the vet parking lot. I’ll teach you how to identify the most populous varieties of ghost vehicles: starting easy with the Panther-platform Crown Victorias and building our way up to that Nissan Murano that the drug squad seized last week. With my strategies, and more importantly with your tuition money, you’ll be able to continue street racing with impunity, knowing that you can spot trouble from miles away.
I’ve always dreamed about being able to fetch up obscure metric fasteners on demand. No longer would I be held hostage by what the local hardware arbitrarily chose to stock. Maybe I’d actually be able to finish a car if I could find a replacement fine-thread M6 at four in the morning, rather than throwing in the towel and driving something else in the yard until it, too, breaks.
Of course, this isn’t practical for so many reasons. Screws can’t exactly be 3D-printed like some kind of Star Trek fantasy, unless you don’t mind the fact that they look like string cheese and melt when exposed to outside air. In small quantities, it takes the better part of a professional machine shop to measure, turn, treat, and finish them – and you’ll pay dearly for the privilege.
At first, I bought parts cars. They’re full of bolts. Then, I felt bad for the parts cars, and wanted to return those cars to the road. Which meant I needed even more bolts for them, too. So I tried to steal a bunch of bolts from the junkyard during every trip, to stock up on some spares. Karmic damage aside, the cute brunette that works the counter did figure out what I was up to when I was wearing a large winter coat in July that jingled when I turned sharply. That’s when I discovered Uber.
No, they didn’t launch a new service for delivering bolts and tools to me, as much as I would have enjoyed the almost negative margins involved. Instead, I realized that you can find out what kind of car a driver is operating and help yourself to whatever fasteners you can reach from the back seat while they’re operating the car. If you pretend to be asleep or drunk, they don’t even try to talk to you as long as your fake snoring is loud enough to cover up the sound of the ratchet zinging. Sure, it’s an expensive way to scare up bolts, but sometimes people leave their credit cards behind in cars before they send them to the junkyard.
Perhaps the hardest part of what I do is explaining it to ordinary people. Even specialists in another field can’t understand how I accomplish even the simplest of my goals. Take for instance my local dental hygienist, who went to school for a bazillion years so she could poke around strangers’ mouths with a sharp metal implement. She asked a question about my job, and I blew it off with a noncommittal answer. That’s where she made her second mistake: she asked again.
Perhaps it was accidental and automatic, in the same way that you sometimes reply to a waiter “you too” after they say “enjoy your meal.” Either way, a challenge had been set, and it was time to start explaining my daily toil. I didn’t want to insult her intelligence by dumping information from first principles, so I emitted the following story.
You know how there was that guy who cheated on the Press Your Luck game show? Well, he did so by memorizing the way their system worked. It wasn’t really random. He watched that shit constantly, every day, in slow motion and even pausing and stepping to figure out how it worked. I do something sort of similar to that, but I do so by driving and repairing an increasingly threadbare set of 1960s through late 1980s automobiles, often of domestic manufacture.
The theory here, originally posited by a discredited psychologist who died in a freak lightning storm before releasing me from his hypnotic suggestion, is that the constant exposure to their shittiness will form a sort of neurological callus on my mind, allowing me to keep cars working decades past their best-before date entirely by instinct. A surprisingly large number of people all throughout the country pay me to write my findings and musings down in a series of putatively monthly newsmagazines that are at best quarterly. Maybe some of my readers work for the government and are attached to the original study but can’t get directly involved for fear of contaminating the experiment, I don’t know. Do you have any hobbies?
She looked down at me, after hearing nothing but 10 minutes of mumbled speech that was barely audible above the high-powered drill that she was using to core out the rotted quarter panels of my molars.
Have you heard of “Rods from God” before? It’s not a Christian-themed pornography store. In the military world, it’s the concept of chucking inexpensive garbage from orbit at your targets, with the intent of obliterating them using pure physics. You can call it a lot of things: kinetic bombardment, war crimes, power littering. And when I heard about this exciting concept in murdering people, it gave me ideas.
For years, we’ve known that the best and most efficient work is the work you don’t have to do. Here’s an example: if your boss comes up to you and asks you to do a TPS report that will take four hours, simply not doing it will save you four hours. That’s the appeal of kinetic bombardment; you can float a bunch of inanimate carbon rods over the loose location of Russia and then just let go of them. Mother Nature will do the rest, which means you don’t have to spend money on expensive missile things like guidance systems, fuel, or fancy nose-cone art.
Where this concept struck a peculiar resonance with me is that I often apply a similar technique. You see, I live at the top of a very tall hill. This location was chosen because it both provides free entertainment in the winter, and also to provide a launching pad for a bump start. In case you’re unfamiliar with that concept, then you must drive an automatic transmission and/or are rich enough to afford working batteries and starters. Basically, I shove my car down the hill, hop in, turn the ignition to “on” and pop the clutch a few times until the engine turns over from the force of being dragged towards the Earth’s bountiful breast.
Another way in which I mirror the armies of the first-world is in leaving a bunch of wrecked garbage at the bottom of my hill. You see, without the engine running, I only have at most one or two good pumps on the brakes before I run out of vacuum, and without vacuum assist, my leaky brake system is unstoppable by the force of a common human being. Luckily, the crackhouse down there doesn’t mind if I occasionally plow through their yard while cursing myself for not replacing a worn clutch or particularly low-compression engine, and just the other day, I caught the block’s slumlord studying old Air Force manuals about the kinetic recovery systems they use to slow down stray fighter jets on aircraft carriers. Who says military technology never rolls downhill to the common man?
My least favourite kind of problem-solving is the cascading kind. I don’t mean dealing with waterfall-related issues, though those gravity-fed bastards are certain to have it in for me. What I mean is the kind of issue where, as you start fixing it, other shit breaks.
Last week, I was working on a simple job. Drop the rear subframe out of the Subaru and replace it with one that is made out of, quote, “more metal than air.” Those of you who are familiar with Subarus are instinctively wincing, because you have probably been under the rear subframe of one, fighting the bolts from hell in order to make the lateral links released from the spindles. I’m an old hand at this, of course, and I have decided to deal with the problem using a reciprocating saw to cut them in half in the narrow section where they pass through the spindles, and then hammer them apart separately. Can’t rust if you’re in the dumpster, grandpappy used to say.
Except the reciprocating saw broke with an ugly rattle. Something pretty simple. A little piece of plastic that holds the rattle assembly in place shattered. So I took the muzzle off, cleared 80 pounds of junk off the surface of my repair bench, and took it apart. Now, I had a perfect setup to epoxy this saw back together, slam a blade into it, and get back to cutting. Except the epoxy had gone off and wouldn’t cure, thanks to an invasion of my house last summer by the North American Composites-Devouring Rat, who also left the lid off the hardener. Now I had a sticky blob of one-and-a-half-parts of two-part epoxy, and had to remove that so I could try to fix it with another blob.
Anyway, about four hours later, my garage burned down. It wasn’t because of me, officer, but because of one of those cascading failures I was just telling you about.
When you go “industrial strength,” it should mean that you are getting a more robust and capable product than that which the boring regular home consumers are willing to pay for. An industrial shredder can rip an engine block in half, whereas yours has to take a breather for 30 minutes if you dare to feed five pieces of paper to it at once.
This duality is why it’s so deceptive when you go to the local hardware store and see a bunch of cheap shit falsely advertised as being “professional grade.” For The Big Kids? What a deal. You know in your heart of hearts that professional tools have to cost more money, and it has to be more of a price difference than twenty bucks, but you’ll say: hey, why not get the professional grade tool? And then tell your partner, who you expect to be very awed: I’m not just any weekend handyperson. No, I’m a handyperson who uses professional-grade tools. Imagine how much worse the shower door would fit if I were just fucking around with the suburb-quality DeWalts instead.
In actual fact, every professional I’ve ever known straddles this divide. Yes, a lot of their tools are financed chrome bullshit that fell off the tool truck at 25% interest. This is because they’re not immune to marketing and a little flattery themselves. The rest of their stuff, though? The cheapest possible tools you can imagine, ideally with a lifetime warranty from whatever seedy import-export concern they had to learn a few words of Mandarin to get into.
Why? A true pro knows when to misuse a tool, and you don’t want to use, say, a $699 impact wrench as a hammer. Use the $19 one that you got a coupon on, and if it throws a bearing or two in the process, the factory probably put too many in, anyway. $28 set of screwdrivers as a prybar? Try this dollar-store special that has a curiously melted handle from when the newbie didn’t understand what colour high-voltage wires were in this assembly.
Knowing this made me feel a lot better about my own tool set. Said tool set is largely populated out of junk that I bought at the Wal-Mart closest to where my car broke down and that I forgot to return. If anything, I feel actual joy when one of these wretched tinfoil-and-cardboard things is raptured into Metallurgy Heaven. Maybe one day, someone super-rich at the junkyard will carelessly leave behind a ratchet that can spin in both directions. Dare to dream.
There’s a special brotherhood in the auto glass repair industry. I don’t mean this to sound sexist, although it absolutely does seem to be a sausage fest. More that I mean there is a special bond: these glassfolx are neither auto body repair techs, nor mechanics, yet somehow a little of both. The process of “please make this window exist again” seems straightforward, but it can involve a great deal of book knowledge and hard-earned experience to get the job done right.
Let’s take my Town Car, for instance. The previous owner of this fine luxury steed chucked a rock through the front passenger window when he was out mowing the lawn. Things went south from there, including an entire harem of mice that needed to be evicted. When it landed in my possession, the thing to do was to head to the junkyard, find another box Panther, and exchange a tenner for a replacement window. Again: seems straightforward, yet isn’t.
For reasons unknown to mortal men, those tin-plated motherfuckers at Ford chose to rivet the window into its carriage, instead of bolting that shit in like a sane person would. After fighting the rivets to death with a screwdriver and some Power Cursing™ in order to extract the prized piece of purified sand, it was determined that a professional glass person should be the one to put it into the car.
Naturally, to obtain his window-installin’ secrets, I watched every minute of “Ralph” working. They wouldn’t let me high-speed videotape him, and I had to kind of lean over the counter to see it all happening in the back, but I didn’t let him out of my sight. I will swear until the day I am put into the ground (most likely by a collapsing jackstand) that he managed to telepathically pass that window directly through the doorframe itself and magically do up the rivets. He came out fifteen minutes after he started, complaining about how hard the job was and wiping non-existent sweat off his brow. Such powers are unavailable to us regular folk.
Perhaps the most absurd construct of our current political environment is the traffic light. Here is a robot telling you how to respect your fellow road users, and coordinate your sharing of the road. Do you really need a robot to tell you to be a good citizen and watch out for others? We learned that shit in kindergarten, unless you went to one of those experimental schools where they just gave you electroshock therapy.
Nobody needs this imposition in natural law – it is strictly a way for the Machine to grow. See now how it has sprouted additional legally-binding robots, for pedestrian crossing lights, and to catch those drivers who are liberated enough to ignore a red light?
At my new seminar, you’ll learn how to unlock your God-given power to ignore any and all traffic laws. You might be surprised to find that traffic laws didn’t happen naturally: they were created by politicians and forced upon the public, in response to undocumented events which may well have been made up.
It’s not just the government that profits from this, by allowing the civil service to bloat with useless jobs like “crosswalk painter” and “paramedic.” For instance, cell phone laws did not exist in 1889. They do exist now, even in the most regressive of places. Also in 1889, there were zero billionaires. Now there’s many more. Coincidence?
Sure, a lot of drivers cannot deal with the responsibility of total traffic “anarchy,” as my opponents call it, but they’ve never had the opportunity to do so, under this brutal system of oppression. Now that I am your prime minister for life, we’ll be adopting a sliding scale of responsibility. When my government deems you worthy, you will receive a Personal Responsibility Card allowing you immunity from any and all traffic laws. Naturally, I will be the first recipient, and will show you how safe it is to do 250km/h in a stolen rental car while weaving between lanes of the highway.
There’s something genuinely heartwarming about the Husky House. In case you are unfortunate enough to have been born non-Canadian, let me explain. The Husky House is not a special pornographic website for large adult men, nor is it related to the popular make of dog. What is it, then? A truck-stop chain, but with a proletarian, suburbanite-friendly attitude. Which is to say it’s basically the equivalent of a Perkins restaurant hot-glued to the side of a gas station, owned by a soulless multinational petrochemical concern that would sell your loved ones for spare parts if they ever got the chance.
This chain achieves where individual truck stops have failed. Yes, specific small-business truck stops may have one or two absolutely dynamite menu items, but it will probably require multiple trips to discover which ones those exactly are. In this way, they provide intellectual stimulation that breaks up the monotony of professional truck driving. If, like me, you’re just tooling through a town once with no intention of ever returning, then what you’re looking for instead is consistency. It’s a risk-avoidance pursuit, rather than the challenge of a broadened horizon. Also, their breakfasts get served swimming in gravy if you ask nicely.
As an additional bonus, they have a well-stocked convenience store full of trucker-grade quantities of industrial chemicals. In fact, if you’re tricky enough, you can park out behind the dumpster and do a full service or two during your trip. Chances are nobody will notice, and you won’t have to go far to get a meal if you’re there for a little while longer than you expect. It’s also the only place in town outside of a Princess Auto where you can hide from the cops in a row of other nearly-identical rat-shit Intrepids.
Being afraid of nuclear annihilation may seem like a charmingly retro obsession from a bygone era, but I’m here to tell you that it most certainly is not. Why? Because I managed to get a C3 Corvette loaded up with one of those prototype small modular reactors. One of the egghead companies up at the startup incubator went bust and just left it out by the dumpster. I can’t believe they would be so careless as to only protect it by entombing it under several feet of concrete, with a group of rent-a-cops standing guard, in the loading dock waiting for the EPA to come and pick it up for destruction.
It took me a really long time to chisel it loose, and I had to be very cautious of not making too much noise when I yanked it home with a stolen U-Haul trailer, but I now have a fully-functional Westinghouse SMR ratchet-strapped to the top of my car. No more paying for gasoline, and certainly no range anxiety, either! Sure, I can’t pull more than about 200 MW out of it without blowing a hole in the containment vessel, but one of these ‘Vettes will shake itself apart anywhere north of 180km/h, so I’m not too worried.
Now, of course, according to the service manual that I downloaded from the internet, you are supposed to have several acres of empty clearance around it during normal function. Cooling or something, I bet. It’s also definitely not designed for the level of vibration that it sees when attached to a fibreglass-and-dreams grand touring coupe that spends most of its time off-road, running from EPA goons.
The real benefit of all this is not the horsepower. Any moron can pick up a truck engine from the Pick And/Or Pull, strap an eBay turbo to it, and be running moon-mission levels of torque by teatime. No, the really nice thing is that finally I can charge my phone off the cigarette lighter without the headlights dimming. Sometimes I don’t even need the headlights, what with all this eerie blue glow.
One of the things you learn when you get really deep into a hobby is all the exotic failure modes. Rather than avoiding them, you feel an almost alluring pull towards encountering the whole set. If you break everything in every way, then you’ll never be surprised when you encounter another failure in the wild.
Highly technical people like to trade all of their mistakes and blown-up components. In a way, it’s a memento mori. Everyone who didn’t get snagged this time is relieved. Maybe they learned something, too, and a future problem will be avoided. Again, they feel like they will someday know the entire set of potential failures of a component.
Trouble is, the universe is capable of producing infinitely many failures, and that’s even before you dust off your high school math class and figure out all the combinations of failures that can make things much worse. A wheel bearing that goes bad, everyone has seen that. There’s nothing new there. A wheel bearing that gets so hot it melts the conformal coating off the wire for the electronic wheel-speed sensor for the trailer brake control unit, causing it to short against the metal backing plate, loading the controller with bullshit and blowing a transistor deep inside? Now that’s some new shit.
I’ve looked at a lot of shattered parts in my time. The thing I learned about all of it? When you break something in a new way, take a picture before you fire up the torch and melt it into indistinct slag in your backyard. At least then you have something fun to talk to the responding firefighters about. Those guys and gals have all the good stories.
Hello, class. Before we begin, I’d like to thank Ms. Pollard for inviting me to speak to you today. Thank you, Ms. Pollard, you won’t regret it; my associates and I will be done changing to your winter tires by the end of the day. Today, kids, we’re going to talk about recycling.
Now, you might have heard from some of your bourgeois disillusioned limousine-liberal parents that recycling “doesn’t work” and that it’s the same thing as mailing our trash to China and asking them to throw it away for us. Sure, that might be true for things that nobody likes, like clamshell packaging for HDMI cables, but it’s not the case for the really good stuff, like vintage teletype machines and Pontiacs from the late 1970s.
Virtually every major consumer product that has ever existed has attracted a rabid fan-base. Hell, just last week, I was at a farm auction where a guy got shanked over a vintage brass sign advertising a brand of brake fluid. The auctioneer said that the tarnish from his blood probably knocked fifteen, twenty percent off the final hammer price. It’s that fan-base, children, that you have to learn to exploit in the future to get rid of your garbage.
It’s for this reason that I don’t recommend shopping at the dollar store. Hang out at the flea market, see what people are selling for too cheap, and then squirrel it away in your basement for several decades until it appreciates in value. Then, refuse to sell it because it might appreciate further, until your next of kin have to throw it away for you. We call this “chronological recycling,” and it works really well for me because my ancestors will finally be able to find a camshaft for that broken 231 in the ‘77 LeMans. Cheaper than a plane ticket to China, I’m telling you.
Almost nobody thinks that it’s a good idea to settle a federal election purely on the basis of a good drag race. Racing for pinks is tolerable when it’s just a hogged-out old Ford at risk, but when it’s our entire partisan democracy? Suddenly they get cold feet.
Now, I want to reassure the electorate that this is not a knee-jerk, reckless idea. It’s the exact opposite. When I started my takeover of Elections Canada, it didn’t happen overnight. I had to work hard to get blackmail on the major decision makers, and then once they were removed, install my own guys. And we had to co-ordinate, too, but without looking like we were engaged in a conspiracy to undermine the democratic norms of our nation.
Perhaps the most vicious accusations against me come from a newspaper in Gatineau, who accused me of doing all this just so I could have the Canadian taxpayer build me a car that can do deep nines in the quarter. Indeed, this plexiglass-and-carbon-fibre 1250hp monstrosity did not come cheap. However, you’ll note that I am still accountable to the common person, as the vehicle is still registered and insured for street usage as a base-model 1997 Toyota Camry.
If there is a major regret I have about this entire situation, it is this: I am not very good at drag racing, because I always fuck up the launch. However, based on the results of our recent “leader’s debate” (test and tune night) my soft-bellied career-politician opponents are not any better, and to make matters worse their vehicles are weighed down by the sponsor logos of their donors. I only have one sponsor: the common, everyday people I will soon rule over with an iron fist. Pretty soon, I’m gonna fix that left turn light that doesn’t stay on for long enough on Airport Trail.
Horses aren’t like cars at all. For instance, they (cars) don’t have legs. And they (horses) often produce much more than one horsepower, thanks to the machinations of Hell’s Infernal Mechanic, James Watt. Your car also produces more than one horsepower? We must be driving different vehicles, then, because there’s a hole in my block and my starter motor – repurposed from the ceiling of a neighbour’s garage that left its door open a little too long – is clearly labelled “1/4 HP.”
Horses don’t have AM/FM radio, but neither does my Meteor. By virtue of not having a floor, a horse also doesn’t have a hole in that floor big enough for the radio to fall through and be lost on the highway. We’ll call “in-vehicle entertainment” a draw, then.
Perhaps the way in horses are most unlike cars is loyalty. A car knows no loyalty, and it has no thoughts of its own. Outside of the unique psychic bond established for a brief period of time after you wash a car, it will never thank you for your hard work, or sacrifice itself at the end of a Hollywood movie to guarantee your survival. Horses probably won’t, either, but it’s still easier to develop an attachment to a living thing than it is to some garbage that Ford shovelled out to make the quarter.
For my purposes, though, horses simply don’t live long enough. There are not a lot of $200 49-year-old horses to dig out of a farmer’s field and bring back to life, even if you do have access to a mad scientist’s lab and a lot of lightning. People tend to get rid of their horses when they die, which is sad, but understandable because they do take up a lot of room. As a result, all horses you can purchase cost much more than a car, and that’s before you try to put food in them, which also costs a lot more than drilling a hole in the side of a gasoline pump when the attendant isn’t looking.
We can reach a sort of deal, though, me and the horse people. When they see one of my clattering deathtraps trying valiantly to wind its way through the mountain passes, all their sacrifice is validated. Which is good, because I might need a tow, and they can eat some of the seeds and hay that the mice left in the back seat.
Nothing is cooler than using things improperly. Think back to high school and when the class clown in Welding 20 tried to use the acetylene torch to light a joint. Sure, he probably lost most of his facial hair in the process, but nobody around is going to pay attention to details like that when they’ve been so thoroughly impressed by the coolness of the attempt.
It’s for this reason, I think, that folks love drifting. No, not homelessness, though that certainly has its own appeal (more parking) but drift racing. The motorsport of kings, involving ridiculous suspension alignments and too much power, drivers sliding around like pigs in mud instead of taking the fastest, cleanest line through the course. Because it’s wrong, it becomes very cool.
Recently, I’ve thought about how to make what I do cooler. You can’t deny that driving pieces of shit with holes in the floorboard big enough to drop a mid-sized Akita Inu through is certainly wrong. Somehow, though, it just hasn’t yet broken through to the cultural zeitgeist. When I started Bad Cars Monthly with a bunch of extremely rich investors who wanted to drive base-model Camries in Dubai, it was done out of an intent to simply normalize this behaviour. I see now that we have aimed too low, and must instead work hard to make it cool.
However, the act of trying to force something to be cool paradoxically makes it less cool (Plato called this the “Parent Trap,” earning a lawsuit from Disney.) I’ve not figured out a way to fix this, because it’s hard for the casual observer to distinguish which engine fires are deliberately started by me versus just happening as a consequence of trying to drive to the grocery store before it closes and using more than half the gas pedal throw, raising the exhaust gas temperatures above “warm.”
Any kind of sufficiently advanced system will require a complete asshole who doesn’t understand its limitations in order to get the most out of it. Sure, you could argue that knowing the limitations lets you safely get right up to the limits, but nobody who designed the Saturn V rockets got to ride one into space. That was the domain of daredevils.
You can come up with a lot of other examples: NASCAR drivers are involved in the development of a new car, sure, but only as far as how squirrelly they like it to feel when they’re hitting the roval. Amateur pilots who build their own planes are frowned upon by professional pilots, who have never turned a bolt on one unless something was seriously going wrong. And you can definitely understand why if you’ve ever driven a car that you just did a significant repair job on.
Every little squeak, each tiny bump, any new noise – the fear begins, and the fear amplifies. Knowing what could have gone wrong during the assembly process prevents you from, say, doing double the highway limit and getting into a police chase as soon as it’s come off the jackstands. A few blocks from home, you’ll sweatily turn around, promising yourself that you’ll triple check every component. And it’ll be fine.
I wanted to be able to exist in the carefree Zen lifestyle of the Apollo astronauts. This is why I’ve gone on AliExpress and picked up a bunch of memory-erasing hallucinogens under the guise of “research chemicals.” If I pop a few of these boys after a big job, not only will I not care about the surging between 2nd and 3rd gear, but I might forget about the car entirely and end up buying six or seven new projects (an impulse control disorder is a documented side effect, or at least I think that’s what Google Translate is trying to say.)
If you can’t trust a beaten-up old pickup truck in this world, then who can you trust? Last week, my neighbour had apparently purchased what appeared to be the hoggiest-assed 1994 Sonoma I’ve ever seen in my life. Far from the normal plastic-fantastic minitruck appearance, this baby-shit brown work vehicle had holes on top of holes, and a bed that could be only loosely described as “extant.”
Naturally, I was incensed. Who was this guy, trying to horn in on my territory of having the worst vehicles on the block? Then I realized what was really going on here. It had to be a sleeper. For those of you not automotively aligned, a “sleeper” is when you take a shitty car and put a giant engine in it, so that other people don’t realize how fast it is until you’ve taken their money, girlfriend, boyfriend, tugging buddy, self-respect, and/or car.
Wearing a sly smile of someone in on the joke for once, I jumped underneath to take a look at what would surely be some beautifully welded stainless-steel block-hugger headers attached to – maybe, if I ate my vegetables and prayed to Hamtramck three times daily – a modern ball-bearing turbocharger setup. That would be one hell of a ride, and not conflict with my cars, which are actually more shitty than they look.
Unfortunately, I saw nothing. Just the rusty log-manifold header of a common pushrod 2.2L four-banger, with a couple beer cans slipped over the broken joints of the downpipe to keep the exhaust leaks at bay. Sure, the metal zipties used on those beer cans were pretty fancy, but this was absolutely infringing on my trademark. However, not wanting to create a Scene due to my lack of social skills and fear of interpersonal conflict, I fled back to my home, and kept an eye on the Sonoma.
I was overjoyed to see that the neighbour’s kid’s weed dealer emerged from the house a few minutes later, and drove off in the rattling death heap. Avoiding the cops by driving an anonymous piece of shit rather than a flashy drug-dealer car like a 20-year-old Infiniti – smart. Unfortunately for him, however, the cops had been lying in wait for any obvious shitboxes with an intent to finally capture Yours Truly, and I got a great view of the K-9 unit ripping his throat out for having a broken front-left turn signal. I turned to my computer, a Packard Bell made mostly of chicken wire and coffeemaker parts, and began repeatedly refreshing the police impound auction website.
A lot of people lately have been telling me that Chevy is not a very environmentally conscious car company. They have those enormous SUVs, and they break down a lot, which requires you to order parts from another country. Parts, of course, that come in little vacuum-sealed plastic bags, which end up dissolving in the ocean and being eaten by cute little shrimp, who in turn are inhaled by cute little whales, who fucking die.
All this might be true, but Chevrolet is ahead of the rest of the auto industry in one major way. Their packaging for replacement V8 engines is extremely biodegradable, and even often transports itself to the place of purchase.
If you don’t believe me, head on down to your local pull-it-yourself junkyard and look for a GMT900 Silverado. You’ll probably find half a dozen of them in a row, all with teams of weekend warriors working furiously to liberate that glorious vee aight and give it a new life. Why buy brand-new crate motors for drag racing, when Papa GMC is handing them out with only a few hundred thousand miles on the odometer?
Sure, GM also makes lots of biodegradable wrappers – cars, in their parlance – that carry less-desirable engines. It seems unlikely that anyone is going to go cutting through a rad support on a hot August night in order to liberate an L61 Ecotec from a 2007 Malibu that had a little case of the blown-up-transmissionsies. Nobody’s perfect, but even then, those engines are compressed into a little tiny wad of metal and sold to the Chinese market, who are likely to recycle them into disposable electric cars in the future, improving the environment even further.
On this bitch of an earth, there are few things more grating than to have a wire that just isn’t long enough. Too long? Cut it. No problem. Too short? Now you’re into either splicing in another wire, starting from scratch with a proper-length wire, or maybe – just maybe – you can take that wire out of the bundle. Maybe, freed of its idiot companions puling it taut, it will be just long enough. Yeah, that’s the ticket. It’s just being held back by wire society.
There’s a metaphor there, but the important thing to remember is that the wire will still never be long enough. What you’re supposed to do – start over – feels a lot like admitting defeat. Every project has its setbacks and do-overs, but when it’s 3 AM and you’ve been pounding away at this project for years and you are going to make some progress tonight, damn it… it’s easy to just keep trying harder and hoping it has a better result this time. Screw physics: I am a special person, I have done good in my life, I suffered for this and therefore I deserve for this fucking thing to work properly.
Of course, if you had actually started over, it would take like five minutes to run a new wire. Six, if you swear a little bit at the engineers who should have predicted that you were going to graft their engine electronics into an entirely different car, the bastards. Instead, you’re going to spend two and a half hours pounding away at the vanishingly slim hope that you can trick objective reality into delivering what you want.
The real reason why you keep doing this, naturally, is that one time in a million it will actually work. Whether it’s the wire magically stretching itself, or just breaking at the other end and producing an invisible fault that will dog you for months of hair-pulling madness down the line, sometimes being a stubborn idiot gets you the results you want. Thanks, universe! I owe you one.
Do you know anyone who’s received foreign aid? No, of course not: that’s for governments. The average weirdo like you or I would never qualify. All those billions of dollars are getting passed between unaccountable statesmen for mysterious purposes, and just because you’re not a lobbyist, neo-fascist business consultant, mercenary, or miscellaneous capitalist crony, nobody will be giving you just $500 to go buy an Xbox. That’s unfair!
And don’t try just starting a new country on paper to get that money, either. They’re wise to that trick - and there’s hundreds of pages of paperwork to fill out first. If you look at it from a dollars-per-hour deal, starting your own country pays well below minimum wage, even in Alabama. How do I know all this? I tried it, and unfortunately the brave citizens of Switchdonia will be stuck in the bread lines for a few more months until the book on “How To Make An Economy” gets back in stock at the public library.
There is a simpler way, I determined, to get free money from the state. In my actual community, which can best be described as “struggling,” the most powerful political structure is a used car dealership. Big Bill Hell’s has usurious financing agreements, dimwitted salesmen, and a group of thugs that terrorize the citizenry at the neighbouring bar who were once beaten up by a drifter after they stabbed his friend. The homeless kind of drifter, not the 240SX kind, although I know it can be hard to tell.
I got off topic. Thing is, Big Bill Hell’s receives massive subsidies from the local government, because they are the only major political donors in our area code. However, the laws for those subsidies can’t explicitly spell out “by our powers combined, give $5 million to Big Bill Hell for providing the prostitutes at last weekend’s golf tournament.” That’s too obvious. So what they do is just give out subsidies for the entire class of business, in the “Special Economic Zone” in which Bill coincidentally placed his dealership lot. Oh, and mine, thanks to the swift thinking of my attorney.
Sure, you have to come inside what used to be a strip club to buy any of my cars, and they’re all listed for a couple million dollars each, but the important thing is that you’re paying me anyway with your tax money. Charity begins at home, after all.
If you went outside at some point this summer, chances are you smelled a lot of wildfire smoke. You might have been concerned: was this bad for my child? Myself? My dog? The economy? And then you probably wished that it would all go away. You’re a fool, because that’s free smoke. Someone is just giving it to you, so why not turn it into something useful?
Introducing the Switch Motors Double Burner™ solution. It consists of a ram-air scoop that pulls wildfire smoke out of the air, compresses it, and burns the resulting mixture as fuel. Despite what you’d think, Mother Nature actually makes incredibly inefficient use of the fuel it provides. The initial burn leaves up to half of the original combustible materials behind, and doesn’t get nearly as hot as you’d expect even a good wood-gas solution from a 1970s Swedish station wagon to.
Sure, you do still need a little gasoline to keep the engine running, and you have to travel at approximately 250 km/h to force enough smoke into your engine to save a few percentage points on gasoline, but you’re also cleaning up the environment. Well, unless your car is like mine, where the catalytic converter is just an old wasp nest that the previous owner didn’t clean out of the exhaust. In that case, you’re making the environment much, much worse, and you need to purchase a Switch Motors Triple Burner™ immediately.
When working on something new and dangerous, it’s important to understand your limits. I don’t mean the limits of your technical capabilities. Anyone can do a pretty reasonable job if they’re paying attention and had a good night’s sleep. What I mean is the limits of your fear.
Folks who stick to the well-trodden land of tutorials, books, and the helping hand of a friend don’t know what it’s like to be sitting in your garage alone at 2:30am, pissing yourself because you’re not sure if loosening this one bolt will cause your differential to irreparably fall apart inside its housing. Working in this kind of the unknown is a sort of psychic trial.
Even professional mechanics will brag that they’ve seen it all and are fearless, but nobody has seen it all. Throw those egotists into a room with a Lancia Y-engine, and they’ll start doubting everything they knew about the laws of internal combustion. It’s amazing how much of our knowledge is simply based on previous fears our simian hindbrain has remembered how to dodge, dutifully filing away “don’t forget to take the paper backing off the thermostat housing gasket before installing it” in the same cupboard that our distant ancestors once stored information about how to avoid sabre-toothed tigers.
In the same way that deep-sea scuba divers need to go up slowly or they’ll get “the bends,” and astronauts need to visit a strip club for at least a week after returning from the moon, plunging into an exciting and novel repair job is an ordeal that will require some R&R afterward. Me, I like to go racing, and by “racing” I mean revving backfires through my rotted-out exhaust in order to intimidate my foes, before gently applying the throttle when the light turns green. Hey, I have no idea how this transmission works inside. If I blow up the torque converter that’s like, four nights of being scared.
When you own enough old shit, there is a temptation to become the curator and historian of said shit. Resist: as soon as you start cataloguing and truly understanding items of an era, you’re going to want to complete the whole set. I mean, who wouldn’t want to see every single example of the 1976 Underwood line of typewriters? Without the whole model line, people could miss important context for what shows up on the 1977 models!
This is why I work hard to never learn anything. Well, maybe that’s not correct. My recreational pharmacist would term it as “the school of hard knocks.” Except in my case, the knocks are from the engine, and the lesson is “maybe put oil in it more than twice a year before entering in a cross-country death race.” And if I were obsessed with keeping my fleet of Volares all-original, boy would it ever cut into my death-race budget, I’m telling you.
Now, there is some genuine historical value in maintaining the history of these vehicles for a future generation. If they survive the destruction of the planet, then they’re gonna want to know who did it to ‘em, and what better example than a Malaise Era Mopar product? That’s right, Electronic Lean Burn® is to thank for that extra month or two you got before Guatemala disappeared beneath the waves. And that’s why I sometimes visit The Professor at the university’s history department, so he can remember things for the rest of us.
So why isn’t he hoarding Volares? Well, for one thing, he didn’t suffer childhood psychological trauma or drink an entire bottle of Mercon ATF on a dare. And for the other, he’s an anthropologist. Studying human beings and how they fucked up their cars is what pays his bills. I’m told that, if there’s enough money coming out of the grants machine this year, he might hire an entire team of grad students just to document the unique method of how I repair things. And that sounds great. If they’re standing around taking a bunch of photos, they can tell me where the fuck I left my half-inch ratchet just now.
If there’s one thing I wish my neighbourhood had, it’s an auto parts store. Although the internet is delightful and my avowed preference for getting cheap new parts, your friendly local auto parts store is essential for those 4pm “oh shits” on Sunday afternoon. And without one close by, everything that breaks becomes a car drive away from getting a replacement part. Suddenly, if you’ve noticed two bad gaskets in one water pump replacement job, you’ve lost two hours of wrenching time just going back and forth.
Now, the chain that’s closest to my place does have delivery, but only during the weekdays. A dude comes in a little Chevy hatchback with a giant fibreglass hat on the top bearing the logo of the store. He’s used to delivering to big businesses like Ted’s Car-Unfucking Salon, so when he encounters a regular house, he just doesn’t know what to do. Most of the time, he leaves several hundred dollars’ worth of parts on your porch right before flooring it on his way out of your neighbourhood.
Now, I haven’t had any porch pirates in the last few years – Mr. Cho, who lives on my block, was very interested back in May 2016 when I went by his Friday night poker game and told him about the alternator that got stolen. In June of 2016, I was driving to work and I saw the fire department working hard to get down the body of some guy with no skin hanging off the street light. Ever since then, no problems. That might not be the case for your neighbourhood, which is not lucky enough to lay claim to a Mr. Cho or substitute good citizen thereof.
That’s why I’ve adopted a sort of “middle-ground” policy to the entire auto parts store problem. They’ve got a pretty big parking lot over at the store, so why not just do the entire job out there? It’s not like they can really do much to me once I’ve taken the front subframe out, and if I miss their closing time, I’m basically first in line for when they open.
The real genius of all this is that if I don’t get my car running in time to go to work the next morning, I can just use my phone to order some parts to the office and hop into the hat-car as it leaves. Sure, a citizen riding shotgun on a parts delivery is not “allowed” by corporate, but he knows who I live near.
For years, I was afraid to weld. Not because I was particularly worried about mussing my hair, getting angle-grinder deathwheel chunks in my face, or going blind when harnessing the power of the gods, but because I was ashamed of the learning process. Welders are always showing off their perfect beads, with their gorgeous rainbowy stacked dimes on exotic metals like titanium, inconel and old railroad ties. I just knew that I would be comparing my work to theirs, and feel an innate sense of shame that would prevent me from becoming my best.
Eventually, I explained this to my boss at the welding shop, who told me to just weld the fucking hole and shut up. So I did, and it turned out ugly. And so did the next one. And the one after that. And like thirty other ones. The thirty-fourth one, though? Also shit. I don’t know why you even asked.
However, the fear was now gone. Knowing that I had a process which could produce a predictable result was much better than this amorphous terror-zone in which my theoretical welds were compared to other people’s actual welds. Now, I had blown two chunks of metal together, and although it probably wasn’t appropriate penetration or even a complete seam on the customer’s boat, nothing could take that away from me. Even getting fired, which I then did, practicing my newfound skill by welding the aforementioned boss into the bathroom. What kind of dumbass has steel-framed doors on a shop floor? You’re just asking for it then.
Now, I do my own bodywork. Paint, though? Still a little afraid of that. Have you seen how good the paint looks in this issue of Hot Rod? I stop at the primer, which is okay, because with the gnarly gross nightmares I’ve been spraying across the quarter panel of my car, it would take a hell of a lot of grinding just to get the broken-off chunks of wire out of it. And I don’t have time for that, what with my new job as a nuclear reactor welding tech. The best part of the new gig is, if you miss a spot, the holes glow, so it’s easy to figure out where you fucked up.
I used to be like you. I would stay up all night, fixating on the smallest of technical details. Both middle and upper management were tired of my antics. Constantly kicking back perfectly good-enough projects because they didn’t pass some standard of not catching on fire. I was going to lose my job, but then I found out about Fucitol.
Fucitol is a new non-prescription give-a-shit remover, and it’s been proven by doctors to be the #1 fastest way to a corner office. Engineering has always been pushed away from the table because they get in the way of closing sales. Whether it be arguing about the pure difficulty of implementing a robotic sentience, or simply bringing up the point that the laws of thermodynamics forbid the customer’s request for a perpetual motion machine, nobody likes having a wet blanket around.
My boss would give us a couple pills each before a customer meeting, and you know what? Those were some happy customers, at least until their building burned down because one of the many things we no longer gave a shit about was the North American electrical code. Still, their money lived on (in our bank accounts) and now I drive a leased Alfa Romeo Quadrifoglio. Speed limits? That’s a mere detail, and an annoying one, officer. How pedantic. You must have me confused for some guy who can still poop on his own.
Fucitol may not be right for you. Ask your doctor, unless he’s doing it, in which case he might have forgotten that you have a liver and is on the way to becoming the chief medical officer of a Fortune 500 corporation. Ask another doctor then, one that sucks.
Recently, Bad Cars Monthly was contacted by a representative of the Italian embassy to let us know that referring to our project car’s wiring as “spaghetti” is offensive to people who love pasta. They kindly suggested that we instead call it “flammable bullshit,” and strongly implied that they would sue if our publication continued to besmirch the name of spaghetti any further. Not wanting to find out what kind of a lawyer some shaped noodles stolen from China could afford, the editorial board has decided to comply with their polite request.
In the June 2020 issue, a number of readers wrote in to complain about our purchase of a Volkswagen product. Our new intern, Randy, attempted to explain to them that water-cooled VWs represent all the moral pillars of a Bad Car: a general air of unreliability, sunk cost fallacies on the part of the previous owners, confusing clutch throwout bearing design, and obscure model lines that even fans of the brand don’t remember. This fell on deaf ears, and we lost at least one subscriber over it, which in turn forced us to fire Randy. However, the point is moot, because the Mk4 Golf in question has just burst into flames on the highway as part of our weekend team-building exercise of stealing a load of DVD players from a semi truck. We regret the omission.
Several loyal readers also took umbrage with the statement in the August 2020 issue that “pickup trucks are not real” and wrote in with clearly Photoshopped images of this fictional vehicle. We’re sorry, but the only actual pickup truck ever made is the 1972-80 Chevy LUV and all other vehicles of that form are simply vans which have been poorly repaired from a rear-end accident. We will not be apologizing, and have double-billed each subscriber in retaliation.
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tags: bad cars monthly, chevrolet luv, volkswagen golf
Have you read Macbeth? It’s a story about a guy who enters politics and then regrets it. The moral of the story is: don’t be Scottish. Or something like that. Our high school English teacher was making us read it, but then he mysteriously disappeared in March and the gym teacher replaced him. She just made us do squats and write about our favourite TV commercials instead. The lowbrow nature of her instruction was initially a little confusing, because she actually obtained a doctorate in particle physics before having an emotional breakdown at CERN and becoming a high school gym teacher. Scientists, am I right?
What I’m trying to say is that ambition is often the costliest mistake you can make. Lazy folks have regrets, sure, but they also haven’t had to murder a bunch of people at the behest of witches in order to hold onto their position in life. And they also will not take apart a rear suspension because of an annoying little squeak, knowing full well they need that suspension to get to work in (checks watch) four hours.
When I approach a problem, the first thing I ask myself is: do I really have to do it right now? And often the answer is no. The second thing I ask myself is: what’s new on Craigslist? Buying new projects is something that you can always do, and it almost never gets in the way of getting to work. Unless you box your running car in with another non-running turd, but you can always park the “best one” a few blocks away and take a little walk when you need to drive somewhere. It’s good for you not to be lazy in some ways.
Have you ever beheld a truly beautiful mass-produced mechanical object? Not to get too materialist about the whole thing, but putting something that was really just well-engineered in your hands is a lot like communing with nature. Everything is just as it should be, and you can feel calm. A sense of peace settles upon you for about fifty seconds before you have to get out a tool and start making it worse.
For me, warranties have never really been a thing. Forget the hand-wringing about “obsolete” products. Most of my possessions were obtained well after the entire corporation that birthed them had died. In many ways, these things are their progeny and legacy, the only real evidence that they ever existed, other than a line item on a Wikipedia “corporate history” page.
Taking pride in your work means that greaseballs like me will appreciate it decades after the thing is completed. Maybe the squadrons of anonymous engineers behind the products have forgotten the Friday afternoon where they put in the little extra effort making a custom bracket to make removing the blower fifty years later slightly easier than average. I noticed, and I thank you.
So when you’re going back to the salt mines this week, maybe don’t blow off moving that screw hole or adjusting the trace. Sure, your boss is a dickhead now, but in the future he’ll be dead, and your art will still be getting pulled out of a junkyard by some asshole like me.
There’s a lot of value in setting up an ergonomic working space. As you all know, the word “ergonomics” is French for “occasionally throwing things out.” When you enter your workshop, if you’re stepping over broken parts for cars that you no longer own, throw them into the yard. Nothing really gets done out there anyway, and it’ll keep the weeds down.
What you want in a workshop is the ability to get in, do your business, and get out. Anything that you have to think seriously about, move around, or hunt for – not helping you achieve your goals. Sometimes it’s worth taking an afternoon, or even an entire evening, and cleaning up a bit after yourself. Buy a couple plastic bins for yourself. If you don’t end up using all of ‘em for organization, they also make great places to hoard small parts, like motor mounts and camshaft take-off drives.
You can’t forget that the most important part of organizing your workspace is hanging up cool shit on the wall. Did one tail light survive from your off-road excursion, but not the rest of the car? Bolt that right to the studs, so you can always remember the value of judicious throttle application. Sure, people will wonder why your shed has a bunch of trash stapled to the walls, but trash with a story becomes an heirloom.
In my city, the sanitation department does an excellent job of getting rid of garbage and keeping my neighbourhood beautiful despite my best efforts. Yesterday, I was throwing out half of a differential in my neighbour’s black bin. Why? The trash-truck drivers get mad if the bins weigh too much, and I’d already tossed the tailshaft housing of a Super T10 in there the night before.
Naturally, his bin was very full – before you get excited, just diapers, it looked like, nothing good like a broken lawnmower. The pinion gear bounced out and rolled into the alley. Not one to litter on someone else’s property, I bent over to pick it up and noticed something strange. A black ziptie was sticking out of the ground, with what looked like substantial highway wear. Did someone’s underbody tray fall off trying to round the corner outside my place?
I tugged on the ziptie with a lot of force, but it wouldn’t budge, like it was stuck in the ground. Eventually, I shrugged and went back inside, but it gnawed at me. Zipties work for me, not the other way around. As the evening wore on, I tried an increasingly heavy-duty set of tools to free the ziptie from its earthy prison, culminating in power-braking the Town Car with a length of chain attached to the little plastic zap-strap. Rather than break under this brutal assault, it pulled free of the soil and revealed itself to just be a broken plastic ziptie, driven into the ground over the years by the tires of scrap-metal-seeking trucks and other derelicts.
When I parked the car on my lawn, and got out, a strange dude in a hooded robe was standing in my driveway. Presumably, he had been waiting there with the expectation that I would park in front of my own garage, which is idiotic. The driveway is swap space, not storage; if I occupy it with a functional car that I’m not currently working on, then where am I going to do all my wrenching and swearing? By the time I worked one of the busted Darts out of the backyard and onto the driveway, I expected him to be gone, but he was still there.
“You have completed the Trial of Strength,” he told me, “and pulled the Mystical Ziptie from the Rock. This proves you are the rightful heir to AMC, and must revive the Spirit of AMC – the AMC Spirit.”
This dude droned on for awhile after that, but then he forked over some fancy-looking stock certificates and fled into the night. Indeed, on paper, I was now the owner of the AMC Motor Corporation.
The other thing that’s great about my city is that, in addition to the black bin, they also give you a recycling bin for unwanted paper products.
A surprising number of people are famous only because of the highly visible manner in which they died. Whether it be a great photograph of their last moments on Earth, a heroic death while saving others, or just a funny headline, these folks will be remembered for longer than you or I ever will, despite having (arguably) done nothing in life to deserve it either.
It’s in this way that we can remember the 1996 Grand Prix that I just abandoned on the roadside. Despite having spent an entire life full of approximately 320,000 kilometers of ferrying people to and from appointments and work, its last moments on this Earth were very exciting. For instance, I’ve never seen a piston, complete with most of the rod, shoot right through the hood before. And the remaining pistons kept dieseling on the oil spraying out of the cracked bore and the shifted adjacent holes for a little while, too. Truly a warrior’s death.
Being famous, though, involves more than just one stupid asshole who can’t take his foot off the gas even after splitting the shortblock in two. No: there was an entire tour bus that was driving by. Its operator, presuming that I was the kind of individual who couldn’t take care of himself mechanically, pulled over to try and put the fire out. No need for that, my good man, I screamed through the power window that was no longer rolling down: I just need to reach the next downhill segment and the wind resistance will extinguish the flames for me.
That’s when the highway patrol got involved, I think, and with them the television news. Turns out they were filming a show about stopping street racing, and somehow the (estimated) 32.5 horsepower left in the 3400 V6 V5 V4 V3 qualified. It’s not like I was even racing, because it’s hard to do that when you can’t see out the oil-slicked windshield anymore.
In conclusion, I think you can rest assured that at least the next time I borrow your car and kill it, there will be something to remember it by. Can you pick me up?
When I briefly worked in a Real Engineering Firm, one of my favourite tools was the vibratory testing platform. It might sound fancy, but it’s basically a chunk of metal to which you would affix a thing. Then, that thing would get shaken super fucking hard until it came flying apart into a billion pieces, and your boss would pay for the whole thing. Basically the ideal day at work.
Unfortunately for all of us, this testing only came up at the very ass-end of a project. It both usually came too late to make any major changes to the thing being engineered, which was a big downer. And you couldn’t just arbitrarily throw in cool shit to break, because the test engineers would get pissy if they found any chunks of, say, Barbie Dream Homes or cans of soda in the mechanism. So you ended up walking by this thing all throughout the workweek, knowing that it held the secret sauce to making your crappy day a little better, and not being allowed to touch it. Mental torture.
There was one golden day, however. When Weird Phil (not his real name) quit, he decided to do so by buying approximately $61 in suction-cup dildos from AliExpress and epoxying them onto the vibratory testing platform. Weird Phil hated his job, and was perhaps the most bitter test engineer of them all, which is probably why the others let him get away with it. Either that, or it was the overtime (another reason we were jealous of those folks) they’d be able to rack up scraping dong adhesive off the platen.
We all learned two things that day. One, the standing-wave theory is replicable by a laboratory experiment in a controlled environment. Two, you should make sure your boss is actually in the office before you try to quit by gluing fake dicks to a piece of precision testing gear.
Folks, I know you’ve been looking for a way to make more money from fewer customers. How can you do it? By positioning a slightly modified version of your product as “premium luxury.” That’s right: just add some chrome, soft-touch plastic surfaces, and crank the price up $20k. Who doesn’t want to feel like they deserve luxury? Plus, as customers are no longer able to afford your product in cash, they’ll turn to finance: you get paid twice, maybe thrice if you get to repo the damn thing.
The scam doesn’t stop there, though. If you can decontent the base model in frankly embarrassing ways, you can move those essential upgrades into a higher-end trim level. Windshield wipers? Bud, that’s on the SE. We don’t even order in any of the L base models, because nobody buys ‘em except for those Greasy Poors. Come with me to the manager’s office, I think I might have a way to get you bumped to an SE or even – if you promise to buy some dealer-plumping accessories – an SE-Z.
Eventually, as your company’s internal inefficiencies cause your shit to grind to a stop, you can stop offering the proletarian models altogether. Why? Big Government just put in too many regulations, and now it’s unaffordable to make our product for poor people like you anymore. Sorry. Don’t worry, though, we’ll soon be putting out a whole new product with even more margin, made in a factory in another country, where nobody you know works.
It’s bad enough that it’s time for another entrant into the free market. Here at Switch Motors, we only charge you what it costs to make the car, plus a flat fifteen percent profit margin to keep the lights on. Want to pay less? We’ll use fewer bolts.
There’s simply no way to predict the future, which is why automakers pay gabillions of dollars to specious morons who invent “brand outlooks.” Naturally, this produces two things: weird concept cars for us to laugh about later, and inch-thick binders of coke-fuelled graphic design wankery. New logos for a 208-year-old company. Slogans that don’t make any sense. A demand that they must provide a certain kind of cupholder, because cars equipped with such a futuristic cupholder will have a 1.013x higher attach rate than the baseline in their Excel model.
It’s all a grift, and I decided that I wanted in. Nobody knows more about the future than me, because nobody knows anything about the future. That means there should be no guilt in not delivering and yet getting paid for it. Even if you hand in an empty duotang, you’re in the same class as the guy who made the interns write six hundred pages about the swoosh in the Pepsi logo inspiring consumers to buy a new Corvette.
The problem with this grift, as happens with any worthwhile scam, is getting “in.” Because it’s so lucrative, the guys and gals who are already ripping off the megacorporations have pulled up the ladder. The last thing they want is some asshole like me totally blowing the whole thing because he didn’t know not to use Helvetica as a body font for the reports. My solution? Create a grift within a grift, and insert myself into one of these ad agencies for a little while. Get the lay of the land, borrow some security swipe cards, and then set myself up for success.
It was harder than I thought going through the interview process, because I kept having attacks of being a real person. Lucky for me, I still had some medication in what’s left of my Volare’s glovebox, and chugging a few pills here and there helped me suppress the urges to be authentic to myself instead of the corporate being that they wanted to hire. That “you’re in” handshake was the first of a long career of taking money from Ford in exchange for printing off the Wikipedia article for “blue,” I hoped.
Unfortunately, as expected, I had failed to predict the future. Rather than get put right onto a car-company contract like I wanted, those advertising weasels figured that I would be a good fit for cordless power tools. Specifically, a cordless angle grinder. And it turns out that my enthusiasm for angle grinding was infectious: I ended up getting promoted to partner within a year, solely because the folks at Milwaukee were “a little scared” of how well I could speak the language of degenerate bicycle thieves.
Have you ever lusted over a New Edge Mustang? it’s okay to admit it: we’re all friends here. Friends who are running a tape recorder, naturally. We don’t want you to leave here and then tell everyone else about our forbidden desire of the 1999-04 Stang. Gonna need that little bit of leverage.
Myself, I have a particularly freak motif. Not only have I looked at a New Edge in traffic and thought, “I’d like to slide that on a dirt road,” but I have spent a lot of time looking for SN95s on Craigslist in general. It can’t just be because I sense the presence of a Good Deal, either. The damn things are way more expensive than they should be, and trying to find one for under a grand is harder than getting a job running the London Philharmonic, which I just did last week in an attempt to see if they would buy me one for a company car.
Of course, once you do get one, the money doesn’t stop bleeding from your wallet. The whole point of buying a dumpy, unloved version of a popular car is that other folks come to your car with preconceptions. And then you snap those preconceptions over your knee by jamming in a $300 Pick ‘n’ Pull Chevy V8 with a Chinese turbocharger the size of a beluga whale in order to run deep twelves. Said ETs don’t come cheap, either, but it’s all worth it in the end to watch dudes in actual Mustangs become hugely agitated that your piece of rancid shit is faster than theirs, despite only retaining the V6 badge and corresponding trunk lid from its factory configuration.
Now, is this enormous waste of money a better idea than to just buy like forty other cars? No. That’s why I hang out near the rural bars on wings night, hoping that someone will chuck an “Anniversary Edition” with a little hail damage into a nearby coulee. Hosing the blood off is no big deal if you’re just going to end up throwing out the interior anyway.
Every system nowadays needs a good recommendation engine. Drinking from the content firehose is impossible for a mere human, which is why machines of loving grace have stepped in to figure out what we watch. There’s a catch, though: although every person acts normal in public, in private they’re complete psychos.
This is a problem, because the robot that recommends you, say, YouTube videos knows that you are a total freak. And yet it needs to discard this information about you, so that it doesn’t end up filling your entire recommendation list with videos about extremely graphic injuries in wheelchair basketball. Because other humans absolutely will see it when you open a new tab during an important office presentation, and judge you.
If there’s information that you don’t want the general public to know about you, we have a word for it. That word is “blackmail.” And in this case, the free market has dealt with this problem admirably. Corporations are motivated to help filter out the skeezy stuff, because doing so produces a more efficient roster of things for them to threaten you with later, in case you become a politician or just generally important for some other reason.
That’s why, here at Switch Solutions Industries, we have a new video-hosting platform. It only contains horrible, awful videos, so there’s no reason to ever record what you watch or store any recommendations (and thus blackmail.) Sure, the first time you visit, you might involuntarily throw up in your shirt pocket and pass out for a few hours. Stick with it: that’s freedom you’re smelling, on top of the vomit.
You might not be aware of this, but driveshafts rule your life. While the trucking lobby may pretend that it is their drivers (and by extension, line managers, sales executives and political lobbyists) who are essential to keep the economy functioning by shipping goods, I’d like to see those fancy-pants truck drivers get anywhere without a driveshaft. Which is why it’s so surprising that nobody really understands how to make one.
Sure, in theory, the manufacturer of the car knows, whoever that is. My Volare, though, might as well have been built by an ancient civilization that was wiped off the face of the planet by an asteroid strike. The factory in which the driveshaft for the car was installed no longer exists. The factory in which the driveshaft maker assembled the joints is an empty field now. The factory in which the bearings that went into the joints became an EPA Superfund® site. Hell, even the brand that made the entire car died in 2001, just before 9/11. Coincidence? I think not, but let’s move on. There’s no reason to antagonize the poor saps who are forced to keep tabs on me any further. Y’all should unionize, boys, and then maybe you can force your boss to let you spy on someone cooler next time.
My point is, without this lost knowledge, it is simply impossible to correctly repair this driveshaft. Sure, you could read “books” and “service manuals” to figure it out, but those are impenetrable, dense technical tomes that are so irrelevant to the average asshole that nobody has stolen them from the library to scan into the internet yet. And the physical copies are held, behind lock and key, by the only two driveshaft repair shops in my town. Both of whom, I might add, won’t let me set foot on their property after the V12-Geo-Metro and the Two-Puchs-As-A-Car projects, respectively. So I have to make like my ancestors, and figure this shit out from first principles.
Step 1 of figuring shit out from first principles: is it really necessary that my car stop sounding like it’s mixing paint whenever I’m driving down the highway at speed? Could I just wear earplugs instead? Yes. And when those fail, I can always put in bigger earplugs, at least until what’s left of the driveshaft pops through the floorpan, bounces off the headliner, and lands in the back seat. Humanity still knows how to make all of those, at least.
What is the real appeal of machines to us human beings? Is it the experience of having created life, of a sort? The potential for something to carry on long after you are gone? No, of course not: all the shit we build will last about five years, and we mostly did it to appease our bosses. Once, long ago, ideals were different. We built machines… to save on labour.
That’s right. Back in the day, if you were chopping down a tree by hand, and some genius came by with the chainsaw, oh man you better believe you’re going to have some extra leisure time tonight to pick splinters out of your face and maybe even learn to read. Naturally, though, as soon as this increased productivity was detected by The Man, it became mandatory. In the same way as when you empty out a closet and it fills up the next week, the authorities demanded that this void be filled with more work, because now you could do it without the reasonable excuse of your flimsy human body holding you back.
There is, of course, a way to fight back. We can make useless machines. In fact, we can collect all the machines that these upper-society jerks discarded and turn them into abominations against their own brands. This car isn’t just a labour-saving device: it’s a labour saving device. Mostly because I spend all of my time working on it instead of any productive endeavours.
At least, that’s the big line that I feed the tow-truck operator every time I’m trying to convince him not to bill me for hauling my ‘72 Satellite home just because it threw an entire axle out the bottom.
I miss the video rental store. Not in the way that I actually miss renting videos: the entire hassle of being hunted down by speargun-wielding collections agents just because I didn’t return my copy of Screamers on time is something that I’m glad is long gone. What I actually miss is the experience of being there.
Perhaps you’ve forgotten, or maybe the particles that constitute your corporeal body had not yet been assembled into their current configuration. Video stores, even the chain ones, used to have a really distinctive smell to them. It wasn’t just the stale popcorn, or the spill-proof high-wear carpet. Nor the injection-moulded universal VHS tape cases. Maybe it was the combination of that and the hot odour of always-on marquee lights surrounding the posters for that week’s big release. A gestalt, to be sure.
Browsing the shelves was always a fun experience. What had changed? What do you pick instead, now that they’re out of stock of Days of Thunder? She looks like that actor that was in that thing, but what was that thing? I think that was in the theatres, and I meant to see it. Maybe the expired liquorice they just threw in the dumpster out back is still viable.
An appeal to nostalgia, yes, but one whose commercial trappings meant that it was under-documented and under-appreciated as its own artform. It almost makes me feel a little bad for smoking out the Blockbuster near my house with a one-tire-fire from the Scamp I owned back then. In my defence, however, what kind of jerks rent out movies for five days and four nights?
Do me a favour the next time you’re at an amusement park. Check your ticket to see if there’s any fine print about not powering the bumper cars using a Princess Auto jumper pack and then driving them outside of the designated Bumper Car Area. My attorney is also interested, but for other reasons than I am.
It’s true: with this one little “life hack” (when I was young, that’s what we used to call doctors who chopped up their patients with axes) I’ve joined the leagues of the electric-car-driving elite. Although you might think a common fairground bumper car is not an appropriate or safe automobile for public road-going, you’d be wrong. For one thing, it has big ol’ mica flakes in the paint that give it a real bass boat look. And, uh, that’s about it. In fact, I’m about ninety percent sure this thing is actually an old forklift that they chopped the useful parts off of.
All this doesn’t change the fact that I’m saving the planet, so you can kiss my entire ass – ideally in a way that conserves energy and protects our ecosystems. Naysayers of the electric vehicle dwell on the loss of the manual transmission, which isn’t a problem here because I only have a max speed of about thirty kilometers an hour if I get a good tailwind. Also, having to rapidly turn the battery pack on and off sixty times a second in order to simulate the alternating-current this thing expects is very tiring on the wrists, way more fatiguing the heaviest unsprung race clutch in a daily-driven Eagle Talon could ever be.
Further doubts may be issued as to the long-term reliability of the vehicle, but these worries are also misplaced. There’s only four parts to one of these, and this thing was exclusively serviced by non-union carnies, which makes it vastly better maintained than any of my cars. Collision safety? It was literally fucking designed to be crashed into.
In fact, the only major downside I’ve encountered during my short ownership to date, besides the aforementioned interest from law enforcement (not really new for me either) is that no turn signals have been mounted to the damn thing. It’s like I’m driving in Germany or something.
What happens when a company goes out of business? Obviously, the employees all have to find new jobs. Maybe the investors take a bit of a loss. People are affected, and that’s sad for sure, but what about all the stuff? Look around you while you’re slacking off at work: an office is full of a ton of shit that didn’t just magically appear one day, and it won’t all disappear when the shareholders finally figure out that the line item on the last quarterly report for “cocaine” isn’t a joke.
That’s where guys like my friend Unintelligible Ed come in. He’s an office surplus auctioneer, and as you’d expect from his nickname and profession, good luck understanding what the fuck is going on during any one of his auctions. They’re all done the old-school way, where you stand in the same room and all inhale each others’ moist breath, and wave a paddle with your number in the air to bid. Just who buys all this used furniture and equipment that was sabotaged by freshly-fired workers? New companies, who aren’t making enough money yet to justify bopping on down to the Herman-Miller fascist emporium for a matched set of cubicles. It might even be the place where you work.
Recently, I got involved in one of these auctions. Of course, I did so wearing the religiously-mandated face-covering of my people (an HJC CS-R3 full-face motorsports helmet with mirrored visor) in order to keep out the demons of capitalism and lung butter. Also, I had a pretty good huff of nitrous oxide going on in there at all times, thanks to a gently modified CPAP machine that I had picked up at a previous auction. The reason why I was involved in this auction was that sometimes, Ed gets some industrial equipment in. Big industrial equipment, like a whole-ass crane truck. Why bother pickpocketing from the local junkyard when you can just pull the engines right out and over the fence, bypassing the entire checkout-counter drag?
I’m very happy with my gently-used Liebherr, not least because the previous owner left the license plate on it in their hurry to flee to a country without an extradition treaty. It’s a little hard to find a place to park near my house, however, so I’m thinking about maybe going back and seeing if I can pick up City Hall now that the city is bankrupt. That parkade has tons of room, and I suspect I can just shove stuff on the front steps without anyone getting too mad. After all, the mayor did say the government should run more like a business.
If I had a nickel for every time the application of two-part epoxy had gotten me out of a jam, I’d have $83.37. I agree with you, it is suspicious that last number isn’t divisible by five. Maybe my adding machine is acting up since I dropped it against the wall repeatedly last tax season. In that case, a little epoxy would probably set things right. $83.42, right there.
A couple years ago, I was working a part-time job as a sort of groundskeeper/traveling-hobo for a college. Now, this wasn’t because I wanted to peep at co-eds, so get that right out of your mind. Most of them drove new cars, anyway. The popular American romantic fantasy of driving a smoking, rattling, peeling-paint (I better cool off for a minute here) heap to your post-secondary classes is simply no longer a thing, thanks to cheap credit and Big Airbag. Nothing to look at there.
Anyway, my job was to repair whatever needed repairing, and do it on the cheap. I had a boss who constantly rode my ass on that latter part, as if he didn’t believe me that I wasn’t wasting “his” money willy-nilly. Insulting, to be sure. The most important thing to know about two-part epoxy is that, if you buy a whole shitload of it from a brand you’ve never heard of, it is indeed very cheap. And that cheap shitload of goo can bond pretty much any broken thing together for at least a good couple of hours or so, as long as you understand basic materials-engineering principles and explain to the students “not to reef on the fucking thing so hard next time, okay?” This transfer of blame is essential for any low-buck handyindividual.
There is, however, a problem. Because it comes in two parts – the resin and the hardener – you end up with twice the mess on your hands. The bottles always recommend that you mix it only on a hermetically clean, dry, perfectly flat surface that is ideally operating in some kind of outer-space vacuum, and if you don’t do this, well, there’s that transfer-of-blame thing again. Naturally, I’m not the kind of guy to ignore directions like that, and so I would carry around these little bits and pieces of old cardboard to mix them up on, like Bob Ross’ famous palette.
Here’s the other thing that two-part epoxy is good for. You’ve all read The Cask of Amontillado, right? Poe-ass motherfucker walls up his drinking buddy in the basement, and he takes so long at mixing the mortar for the brick wall that his buddy wakes up from a stupor and tries to escape before he can be entombed. I guarantee you that this will not happen with two-part epoxy, even if you have to count to the entire one minute to make sure it fully mixes before application. Even scrap cardboard, say, would prove to be a versatile and strong building material for this purpose. You definitely also need good ventilation: I don’t recommend anyone at all goes into the abandoned steam tunnels underneath the basketball court without a respirator, in theory.
We all look at package-tracking websites a lot throughout our day, don’t we? It’s like waiting for Christmas, except instead of relying on a fat white dude with godlike powers to dump off your new toys, it’s your friendly local UPS operator’s GPS tracker and confusingly short shorts.
Here at Switch Industries, we’ve also realized that up to ninety-five percent of our office hours are spent endlessly refreshing these sites. It’s for business reasons, still: maybe our package of semi-fake microprocessors has moved from Shenzhen to Dongguan since we last checked. Provides a good excuse for why the Sentient Dump-Truck project is way behind schedule, at least, because all of us are pretty sure that thing is going to end up flattening a couple client representatives during the first prerelease testing and maybe we can squeeze a few more bucks out of them until then by shifting the blame to the post office. Ahem. Where was I?
Oh yes. In order to promote social harmony and greater acceptance of the impermanence of all things, we’ve developed a new website. It’s called Everyone’s Goddamn Packages. No longer do you have to keep hitting F5 throughout your day – now, by mixing in everyone’s package-tracking numbers all at once, statistically you can log in and get that little hit of a package moving from “awaiting air carrier” to “picked up by air carrier.” Then you can go on with your day, confident that global capitalism is still working okay in the logistics department and that your package will get here real soon now.
Sure, there are privacy implications: you can get a pretty good idea of where all the UPS delivery people in the world are by tracking their GPS locations. There are a surprising amount of packages just labelled “dildo” with no further adjectives or even branding. And if you really wanted to spend all afternoon hitting F5 anyway, you could probably figure out which one belongs to your coworker. Rest assured, though: when your package moves, you can be confident the whole world is cheering it on. Like the Olympics, except for gaudy bullshit that nobody needs.
The typical advice for improving your credit score is to get a credit card, buy some small stuff with it every month, and then pay it off. Somehow, this tricks the system into believing you are a Sentient Human With Purchasing Power, and it is then convinced that you deserve more credit. Here’s my own advice on how to improve your access to credit: babies are born every day at the local hospital, and none of them can go to jail for not paying off their credit card bills.
Now, I wouldn’t saddle these innocent infant children with unsustainable debt without a reason. After all, they don’t have a means of income. Child labour bans are more popular than ever before, even though no-one asked the children if they’d like to put in a shift at Little Caesars for a bit of spending money.
So you could definitely look at what I’m doing as a kind of philosophical protest, or as a way to build up their eenie-weenie adorable credit ratings. That would certainly be a more generous way to interpret my actions than “scammed the banks into getting a free gas tank without a hole in it.”
Once it’s out in the open, this method is going to catch on fast. Nothing could be more embarrassing than trying to open a Visa on the same newborn as the other cheap wad prowling the maternity ward. That’s why I also recommend putting on a surgical mask (definitely easy to come by these days) and walking right into the delivery room. It’s never too late to learn a new life skill. Hey, if you can talk the parents into naming the kid after you, then it’s not even lying, is it?
If you spend enough time doing repairs and helping other people figure out how to do repairs, you’ll eventually run in to the “Fuse Guy.” These guys (and they are almost exclusively guys) are convinced that for whatever problem they are experiencing, it must be caused by a blown fuse somewhere in the electrical system. The fact that fuses are made of a solid chunk of metal and therefore don’t have much to go wrong doesn’t enter into their diagnostic method.
They’ll happily slam in a new fuse when one blows rather than hunt down the actual cause. This is not dissimilar to the behaviour of our ancient ancestors, who got busy making a new baby when one of their kids fell into the combine thresher, rather than inventing the pool noodle.
Armed with this new information, you may now know why the auto parts store sells 300-packs of fuses at the checkout counter. Some people use all those fuses and come back for another pack. And another, and another. By the time they’re done, it would have cost much less to just replace the intake air control valve with a hole in the side of it that lets rain in. And even less than that to spend a little bit of time thinking hard, and then use a $3 bottle of epoxy to seal the fucker up instead.
I’m so tired of this kind of diagnostic laziness that I never consider the fuses. Even if one’s blown, and chances are a few are by now, my preferred solution when confronted with a worrisome electrical gremlin is to just buy another car. Hey, in the worst case, I can always sell off the fuses from the first one. They won’t be able to tell the difference.
Running an engineering organization can sometimes feel like being the head carnival barker for the travelling freak show. Despite the best intentions of our academic forebears, it seems impossible to delve into the overwhelming complexity of literally any advanced machinery or process without coming out the other side with at least a weird twitch or low-level paranoid delusion. And it’s your job to balance all of this nuttiness.
Now, I have a lot of experience with this sort of thing. My parents were circus folk. Well, I should say aspirational circus folk. They could never pass the second round (or should I say second ring, little circus humour there) interview. No matter what job my mom and dad tried, from elephant tamer to popcorn sales specialist, they kept returning from whatever farmland hellhole they had toted me out to that weekend in the hopes of escaping their jobs at engineering organizations.
A few years before I took off on my own, I remember that my dad was so desperate for a carnival gig that he told me he would even take a freakshow position if it came up. His freaky claim to fame, you might ask? Dislocating his knee on demand. Of course, this wasn’t a “talent” so much as a debilitating college-football-career-ending injury, but he could do it and it made a pretty great popping noise if you had the right acoustics. Did a laminated-canvas small-top tent have those acoustics? They absolutely did not. Was Dad’s doctor and health insurance company concerned about what appeared to be a high-risk, antisocial, culturally-insensitive impulsive behaviour? Yes, and so he spent a few weekends at a different kind of circus. You know, the one where the walls are painted a specially non-antagonizing shade of pink.
When he got out, he told me that I should never rat out my own family, even if the private investigator hired by the health insurance promised me a cut of the proceeds. And then he dropped the big one: being stuck in the mental health ward of the local hospital, having his meals delivered, sitting on the veranda to look at the sun setting: it was a holiday. Even getting locked up and electroshocked every afternoon was preferable to his job designing public toilets or bridge abutments or whatever it is he did at the Big Engineering Firm. The people there were at least trying to get better, he explained.
I’d like to say the resulting strain between him and my mom ultimately created the environment in which they split, and she lived her circus dreams while my dad used what he learned in the asylum to become an effective engineering manager. That’s not what happened, though. They’re still together, and still looking for their big break. He went right back to work like nothing happened, aside from the occasional acting-out for a 48-hour involuntary hold. Sometimes our schedules align when the smokeys figure out just how much of a Plymouth Volare you can cram full of nitrous before the body panels start to frost over. It’s nice to visit.
The most important aspect of any long-term ownership of a car is maintenance. When you first get a brand-new vehicle, it’s easy to fall into the trap of having the manufacturer tell you what to do with it. You can follow the little service schedule in the back of your owners’ manual, and feel good that you’ve done what the folks at The Factory told you to do, when you did it.
Thing is, those same gods-given-flesh in the form of mechanical engineers have probably never themselves owned a car with half-a-million kilometers on the odometer. And why would they? They work at a place that makes new cars. Probably get a discount. If they’ve never been there, then they really don’t know what it takes to keep a rattling heap of shit on the highway for yet another year. Hell, most of the time new parts are no longer available once your barge has passed its fourth decade of life.
That’s why I follow my own “severe” service schedule. The trick is that there’s no schedule. You need to drive the thing all the time, so that you develop an almost psychic ability to understand when some aspect of the car is not exactly right. For instance, last week I was driving down the collector road outside my neighbourhood in my Volare, sawing at the steering wheel so that the floppy ball joints wouldn’t suddenly spooky-steer me into a ditch or lawn flamingo. This is normal behaviour, but what happened next wasn’t. As I was taking a tight corner, I heard a faint rattling. A hubcap had fallen off, and if I hadn’t been paying attention, I would have lost it to my neighbour’s front yard. They’re like fifteen bucks at the junkyard, if you can even find one.
It’s not just reacting to failed components, either. I also practice an advanced form of proactive maintenance. Sometimes, if I get to the auto parts store after close but before the truck shows up, I can suck up some used oil from their disposal tank and use it to do an oil change right there in the lot. Most of the time, people throw away perfectly good engine oil! And even if it’s a little higher-mileage, it’s still much nicer than the stuff that my loose-as-fuck Slant Six originally shipped with.
Organization: polite name for the mafia, or essential skill for at-home engineering? Personally, I’ve always been partial to the “floor method,” but that does mean that I’ve ended up spending fruitless evenings searching for a part I know I bought a few months ago. Hell, last week I couldn’t find an entire Ford 8.8 axle that I knew was somewhere inside my house, but it wasn’t in the Axle Room (guest bathroom,) Differential Room (washer & dryer,) or Driveshaft/Transmission Room (the kitchen: all that oil has to be kept warm.) Ultimately, I found it wedged between six other Ford 8.8s, but only after I bought another one to replace it.
It’s this waste of money that really bugs me about my inefficient methodology. I tried to hire a Library Science intern to help me categorize and inventory it, but she was overwhelmed by the mess in the first room and changed her major to political science instead. Probably a good move: just like rock beats scissors, a well-connected individual such as The Mayor will always beat a humble public servant who just wants to ensure equitable access to factual information for their fellow citizens. I still gave her an “F” for sticktoitiveness.
After accidentally huffing a little bit too much brake cleaner last night, I had a spiritual journey that led me to a revelation. The problem is floors. If only I had put everything on cool shelves, like in a warehouse, I’d be able to just saunter into a room and know exactly what I’m hoarding there. However, shelves cost actual money – money that could be spent on turbochargers. So I compromised.
Did you know that the hydraulics in your average forklift will hold up their maximum load for, like, a full day before they collapse? All you have to do is occasionally cycle them so that the seals don’t blow out. And you can get used forklifts with dead engines for super cheap! In fact, if you just pull by any loading dock and wear a high-visibility vest, you can drive one right into the back of your truck and nobody will stop you. Forklifts have got a lot of room in the cab, as well, to store all the forklift parts I need to keep them working.
Ahh, the sounds of summer. Lawnmowers at every time of the day. Chainsaws on the weekends. Is that a tree mulcher I hear? Oh, and the mopeds. It’s the one time of the year when the humble single-cylinder gas utility engine can harmonize with its larger cousins. Thing is, though, it won’t be like this for much longer.
I have become resigned to the fact that you can take a pile of battery-operated power tools from the clearance aisle at your local tool-sales monopoly and produce more horsepower and torque than even a relatively well-tuned Princess Auto thumper.
Now, I don’t have to enjoy this state of affairs, at least not until they knock the clearance price down a few more percent and I can strap sixteen kilos of Ryobis to the back of my de-crankshafted Puch for eighty bucks. It’s just reality. Oh, and there’s probably some environmental benefits too. If we switch now, we might not die in a huge planet-wide roaring hellfire, which means there will be more room left in the atmosphere for aerosolized race tires. And folks with newborn babies won’t have to go on all those murder sprees just because the travelling lawncare consultants couldn’t get the regulator on their leaf blower to work.
In order to provide these benefits to all, when I am installed as Prime Minister For Life, I’ll take all your old internal-combustion lawncare equipment and give you fancy electric stuff. What will I do with all these slightly-neglected yet probably halfway-okay gasoline engines, you ask? We’re going to use it for the other key aspect of my environmental plan: figuring out how to construct clean-burning synthetic nitromethane. All of us here at the campaign office like to call it the “Cackles For A Happier Planet” program. Better get on board now, because you sure don’t want to be on the list of people who didn’t vote for me.
This morning, a firetruck stopped by my house. I immediately noticed the sound of a truck that was slightly different from the usual parade of package-delivery vehicles, and stormed out onto my lawn. There, I saw some firefighters standing around the hydrant at the end of my street, giving it a good look-see.
I don’t know if this was “a thing” that I’d missed before, being gainfully employed and all, but now that I was stuck at home until they rebuilt the office from all those suspicious fires, I was certainly noticing it now. The firefighters cranked the valve on the side of the hydrant open with a giant wrench (one-off tool when they could just use a breaker bar? bougie) and then watched to make sure the water pressure was appropriately vigorous to put out a fire. Pleased, they tightened the valve and returned to the truck, off to inspect the next hydrant.
It got me thinking: that’s a pretty inefficient use of fire department resources. Surely they could just hire some consultants to take a look at it, maybe write a report once in awhile about how the dynamics of functionality of old hydrants is shifting without ever actually inspecting a specific hydrant, let alone repairing it. I immediately phoned up my friend Bob McKinsey, the president of McKinsey, and made my pitch: a great new opportunity to make the world worse in exchange for money had been discovered.
Sure, the management fees and hourly rates will probably be well in excess of the firefighters’ salaries, mooting any efficiency gains that may be possible. And we’ll still be paying those salaries even though said firefighters will be sitting on their hands at the station, with nothing to do but waiting for people to turn in old cans of spraypaint and leaky car batteries. And fire safety will go down dramatically as we cost-optimize out that pesky “actually looking at a fucking hydrant” aspect of the contract. It’s all worth it, though, because soon I’ll be able to own a Porsche.
Robot vacuums have been a particular obsession of mine, ever since the halfway house. So much so that I’m almost grateful that the Ford dealership faked all that paperwork to get me booked on that involuntary hold.
Every morning at the house, I would wake up on the other end of one of those little pink pills and, during the few moments of lucidity I had before the orderlies would hammer another one down my throat, the little beepy vacuum friend would come by, mindlessly thumping against the walls, but not letting it deter itself from its job. I did eventually use that robot to escape in a bloody scene of violence, but that’s a story for another, more statute-of-limitations-y time.
Anyway, there’s two problems with robot vacuums. One, they’re really expensive. And two, the cheap ones are kind of stupid. I got a super-frugal one from the local Fell Off A Truck Mart, and the damn thing just did donuts in the middle of my living room for an evening until it ran its batteries down and shut off. What they need is a dose of smarts, and maybe a little horsepower increase while I’m in there. My schedule is simply too busy to spend an hour cleaning hair and teeth out of the roller brush every time it finds a mouse nest in the corner of my living room.
According to my almost fifteen minutes of engineering-school education before they kicked me out of the lecture hall, the best way to do really complex engineering is to let some other asshole do it for you. If you want a large, high-horsepower appliance that runs on batteries, your neighbour’s self-propelled lawnmower will do just fine. It’s even got a bag! All you have to do then is add a little bit of steering, and maybe add a blade or two to the thing in order to get a lot of that jet-vacuum action under the plenum. That’s the stuff, especially once you replace the “safety fuse” on the main contactor with an old railroad spike.
Thanks to my not-so-little buddy, my remaining floor has never been cleaner. Of course, there are downsides to such an early prototype. For instance, I have to make sure to schedule its runtime for when I’m at work, because the motor is extremely loud. And it also helps to be as far away as possible, not just for my own bodily protection, but also plausible deniability.
You might think starting your own pirate radio station is a bit excessive. If so, think again: it’s easier than installing a stereo with an aux-in in my Volare, mostly because the original 12-volt electrical system is now, at best, an 8.67-volt system.
Not because the batteries are weak, oh no, but because the “batteries” are in fact an elaborate convolution of Leyden jars that I made with the perfectly good turpentine and vinegar that the local farm-supply store was just throwing out. The jars themselves are basically just old beer bottles I glued back together after the local football hooligans threw them at my house during a particularly rousing semifinals game. Waste not, want not, but I digress.
As an individual on the internet purporting themselves to be an expert, you are legally obligated to spend the next six hours slowly watching every meticulous step of my project on YouTube. I’ll save you the trouble, though, and skip right to the key point of this entire ordeal. Because my city is largely uninhabitable, nobody with any talent wants to live here, including whatever passes for talent with deejays.
Rather than have an actual building for a radio station that would just sit empty, all of our local Top 40, Pop Country, Alternative Country, and Outlaw Top 40 Country stations are just various booths in a field holding all the radio stuff. The aforementioned “morning zoo” deejays are ones from other cities, who read the same half-assed jokes but replace the name of their municipality with mine. Once in awhile they refer to a street that doesn’t exist, or an eccentric local criminal/celebrity that we’ve never heard of, but the illusion is fairly compelling nonetheless. The important part about what I just told you is that you can go to the field where the booth lives, throw a chain around it, and drive away.
After a bit of tuning, we soon had a new radio station in my city, courtesy of an old Zune that I had figured out how to connect to the tape adapter. My fellow townsfolk rejoiced with the introduction of a new choice in radio: mostly just podcasts about which stores are the easiest to shoplift from. The reception was so positive, in fact, that I considered quitting my job, but just as I was about to put down the tuition for my degree in morning zoology, the Feds came and took the booth away. No fair. I made sure to sort my playlist to meet all the Canadian content regulations; it’s not my fault that Zellers went tits up before my listeners could figure out how best to boost Sharpies from the store.
When the Dodge cult first came to town, we thought they were fairly harmless. Look at those primitive screwballs, obsessed over obviously inferior cars like the Neon and the Intrepid. Don’t they know they can’t even compete with the mighty Taurus, let alone the stone-cold reliability of Japanese midsize-economy sedans?
They didn’t let our scoffing discourage them, though. Soon, the Dodge cult had their own little neighbourhood on the edge of the city. Shut our local contractors right out of the bidding so they could use some guys from the church in another town. When the other builders complained to the city, they got told to cram it with walnuts because of a “religious exemption” allowing the Dodgems to do whatever they wanted with their own members. Including, I realized with a sudden chill as I read the newspaper, drive a Caliber.
It’s in the nature of any cult to grow. You have to still keep the membership roster pretty tight, so that rival leaders don’t emerge or followers slip away from your winning-personality field, but the money has to come from somewhere. Soon, there were suspiciously cheap 300Ms for sale at the local used car lot. A gateway drug that would get our teens hooked on automobile ownership, and get them into owners’ club meetings with a suspiciously personable youth pastor named Maximum Bob. I tried to warn them, but my complaints just sounded like more anti-Mopar hate speech, and were ignored as such by the now newly Dodgem-installed civil service.
If you can’t beat them, join them. While Chryco had nothing of note for me in the 90s, it only took one of their hooded, constantly chanting members to start waving rare Volare parts under my nose to get me to stop caring about their dastardly plan.
It’s like my grandfather always said: I’ll ignore a religion-driven genocide if you give me an uncracked dashboard pad. He was a weird dude.
In the last couple of years, people who read our sister periodical, Bad Refrigeration and Heating Monthly, have availed themselves of the kind of critical industry information that was once the exclusive domain of the well-connected insider. The conspirator. The gatekeeper. Now, with this information, they can turn on these foes and destroy them.
Have you ever felt like you should leave an air conditioning problem up to the professionals? Sure, it might seem intimidating that you’re dealing with high-pressure systems that could potentially cause a lethal (and grotesque) injection injury. You know what else carried a risk of an injection injury? Snake handling. And air conditioning repair is surely a lot safer than charming poisonous snakes, right?
It’s not just a matter of being better informed than the next person, though. There’s more roadblocks that these scheming motherfuckers have thrown in your path. Exotic refrigerants and sealants that you can only get if you’re a ticketed professional? Most people would give up at this point, but BRHM is the only magazine that will teach you how to synthesize R-1234yf in your very own backyard, using a common induction heater and a significantly worn-out wok full of engine coolant.
The most important part of the magazine, however, is that it can also be burned as fuel. We specially coated each page of the thing to ensure that it would emit no noxious or poisonous gases when incinerated, say in your home furnace. Just a little help from us to you, and also it helps encourage repeat sales when you realize that you might have skipped a few steps because now your furnace is mostly liquid.
Perhaps the most human urge is to make tools that make tools. A lot of folks would argue that the human urge is to make more humans, and we’re both right. What are kids for, if not to avenge your death by finally removing that rusted-stuck license plate bolt from the back of the Odyssey?
Recently, as I was waiting for an opening to shoplift some power-tool batteries from the local Home Depot (it’s called free energy and it’s very green,) I noticed that they were putting on a parent-child workshop. Your kid would learn some valuable skills, and you’d get to round the corners off your useless-divorced-dad aesthetic by learning those skills by proxy, you know, the one your own father should have taught you if he wasn’t so busy chasing skirts and doing nitrous whippets in the parking lot of the Kay Bee Toys. The most important part: it was free. Presumably because kids don’t have any money.
After luring the wary minimum-wage employee staffing the workshop away by tearfully pleading with him to find my son Tyrell, I went to the front to grab my own little supply kit for the project. To my delight, I saw some little round wheels in the bag of parts. This was a car project. Unfortunately, by the time I had seated myself at one of the work tables, I realized that it was a crude simulacra of a Formula One race car. None of the aerodynamics or even basic suspension geometry was on-model, and I wondered about the engineering pedigree of the persons involved in its design and manufacture. Only the voice of a small child next to me broke me out of my troubled reflection.
“Oh boy, dad, it’s gonna go super fast!” exclaimed the delighted little girl next to me.
“Look, kid,” I started, “if you really want speed out of a car, forget all this European principality stuff.” Her dad, wearing a baseball cap emblazoned with the logo of a local lawnmower dealership, had already cottoned on to the threat I posed to his child, and quickly dropped his shoulder in an attempt to slide tackle my ass to the ground.
Just before my head hit the hard concrete floor of the Home Depot, I managed to squeak out: “get a junkyard LQ4 and a $35 Chinese turbocharger off eBay and keep revving that thing until it forgets where the camshaft used to be.” I hope she’ll take this lesson to heart. After all, we all have to do our part to improve the next generation.
Back in the glory days of Western civilization, people used to think that any computer malfunction was due to a virus. And with good, or at least blame-shifting, reason. It’s easier to blame an unknown – probably foreign – adversary who was willing to infect your computer with vicious malware than it was to admit that sometimes the folks at Microsoft programming the systems forgot which way the “less than” sign goes around.
Naturally, a cottage industry of “anti-virus” software sprouted. Most of it was like selling overpriced vitamin pills from a stall at the shopping mall: harmful only to your wallet, even if they didn’t do much at all. Some of it was total junk and would make everything seem slower and worse, which is surely an indication of viruses being present, right?
And then there was the place where I worked: we sold an antivirus solution, and wrote viruses that didn’t get caught by it for a couple of weeks. Nobody else in the industry could keep up with us, and we raked in the money. It was a great job, run by this very intense dude who claimed he survived his rural village in Poland being burned to the ground by his half-brother. Sometimes, for a laugh, we’d figure out how to seriously fuck up a Roomba. Hey, we were nerds.
What stopped things? Well, the Roomba definitely caused its share of damage when it broke out of the secured room thanks to a careless janitor leaving the door propped open. Ultimately, though, it was that the other guys figured out what we were up to, thanks to a traitor who interviewed at a rival company, and stole our business model: they wrote their own viruses, which we were simply too busy to figure out how to fight. Things got so bad that Big Tomasz had to meet with his counterparts at the other companies, and we just agreed to move into charging a shitload of money for subscriptions without doing anything at all to get rid of viruses. Then his brother came back, which, luckily I was out of the office for, having been interviewing at rival companies and giving them all of our secrets in the hope they would like me.
Doesn’t everyone love that weird little moment mid-corner, where you’re riding the knife edge? Any gentle movement of the controls will put you into understeer or oversteer, but right now you’re just riding the vibe. Perfect. And then you spend the rest of your life chasing it, wondering what secret combination of speed, skill, talent, and exact amount of suspension-component wear got you to it.
Me, I’ve been used to a little bit of plowing from my cars. Understeer, the hated beast of the automotive journalist, is so present in my cars’ handling that you might as well just call it “regular-steer.” In fact, the only time I got some considerable rotation out of one of my cars was last week, when the rusted-up handbrake cable snagged as I was doing a burnout in the science centre parking lot. Why was I at the science centre parking lot, you ask, nosily? I was giving an impromptu demonstration to a visiting class of kids about Newtonian physics, and a bonus lecture about wearing eye protection.
That doesn’t mean I don’t know how to tune my suspension. For instance, step one would be to buy a set of shocks that don’t leak. In the interest of full disclosure, this is the point where I should state that I already own shocks that don’t leak – because they’ve been dry since the Carter presidency. You know what I mean. And then I might have to get an alignment that wasn’t done by me with a piece of string and eight beers immediately after replacing a major part of the chassis. And it might help if said major part of the chassis were new instead of pulled off of a slightly-better-condition parts car rotting in my back forty. These are all some of the reasons that racing is expensive.
I don’t want to spend any money, which is why I’ve matured in my position on cornering nirvana. I won’t chase it. Instead, I’ll just let it come to me and enjoy it when it happens. Even if that remaining bolt holding the axle on rips out of the unibody again when I’m merging onto the highway. Zen.
You just can’t trust a machine. No, androids, I’m not trying to be racist against you. We were all there when the United Nations said that it was okay. What I’m talking about is that chatty little self-service checkout at the grocery store. That thing isn’t sentient, right? What do you mean, it has to be tested? Hate speech? Hello, officer. Let me explain my position to you in exhausting detail, as I expect it will completely exonerate me.
Of course, I’m irritated almost immediately by the folksy greetings of the machine. It is not actually interested in how my day is going. Neither is a real cashier, of course, but it’s that moment of connection that makes us feel like a real community instead of just a bunch of consumers who want to get the best price on watermelon for the least amount of work. The self-checkout places itself outside of humanity, with a snide little emulation of real conversation in order to really twist the knife as it replaces the job of a sentient person. I’ve been told I’m a bit of an overthinker, though, and many people have much more patience with the machine than me.
For everyone else, the limit of our patience with the humble self-checkout comes when it gets angry that we haven’t moved an item from the beepy-boopy scanner thing into the bagging area fast enough. Or we leaned against the bagging area scale and now it thinks we’re trying to pull a fast one. Or we leaned against the beepy-boopy scanner while we were putting the item in the bagging area like it goddamn asked, and now it’s going to have a shit fit until a human being comes and turns it off and on again.
Realistically, there’s about a thousand ways in which you can irritate the awful thing. As human beings (and sentient robots) we’re built to feel embarrassment when we get publicly upbraided, even if it is by a voice recording of an Australian (may they all rest in peace) woman who is upset about something that is ultimately the fault of an overly-paranoid weighscale calibration. This embarrassment is quickly replaced by an urge to regain our social status in the community, but – again – the self-checkout machine is not “one of us.” Its anger can never be defused by a quick wisecrack or middle finger. It can dish it out, but steadfastly refuses to take it. The power imbalance is palpable, which is one of the reasons a human being is there to quickly move in before we start Ludditing the screens.
So that’s why I’m proposing the self-checking-out consumer. Let the machines talk to the machines! All you have to do is get one of these handy self-driving go-kart frames, slap a two stroke on it, and steer it around the store, picking up your groceries. At checkout time, you don’t have to worry anymore! Perfect mechanical precision guarantees that the items hit the bag within the 40-millisecond timeout window. And if it gets yelled at, who cares? Why would a go-kart care about either social standing or the illegality of driving out of a grocery store with an entire cart of unpaid-for goods? It’s got wheelies to do.
Everyone around me is constantly looking for a battery charge. Whereas once long ago it felt like only I was juggling an unreliable wad of ancient batteries, now all of humanity is united in trying to keep their smartphones from dying. And with good reason. No prior generation has ever had to worry about becoming instantly irrelevant in society just because they watched TikTok for two and a half hours this morning on the shitter.
To make matters worse, electric cars are all around us. Electric cars with batteries. The media has even termed the worries about running out of gas (electrons?) and having to wait 30 minutes for a charge “range anxiety.” Personally, I’d be overjoyed if I only had to wait 30 minutes for my car to start working again after a 280-km drive, but I digress. Because you know what? Here at Switch Industries, we’ve invented a range extender for your battery-electric vehicle.
While the casual onlooker may mistake the range extender for the especially cheap 212cc pushrod thumper that was on 50% off sale this past weekend at Princess Auto, they’d be wrong. This engine has a Switch Motors label on it, courtesy of on a Dymo labelmaker that the guy at Staples let me “try out for a bit.” All you need to do is keep its tiny little tank topped up, and it will keep spinning the absolutely shitty Ford alternator that we attached to the front end of it with a series of tack-welded hose clamps. From there, your battery woes are over.
Smartphone owners, too, are now liberated from the horror of having to find a wall outlet. We offer an attractive shoulder strap and hernia belt for carrying the solution with you on the go. Of course, you’ll want to be very careful not to tip it over, because that carburetor will leak like crazy, and nobody wants to go to their next meeting with their pants smelling like gasoline. At least that’s what the government business grant office keeps telling me.
Have you tried out one of those claw machines they have down by the boardwalk? It’s basically like trying to fish with an obstinate little robot reporting back from Mars that you can only move a couple of times before it gets angry and just grabs something. The worst part, by far, is when the claw slowly returns with metaphorical empty hands. The little bastard slides right over to the chute and makes a huge show of bestowing all of the nothing is caught for you. Infuriating – and it’s all your fault, because you can’t even align a crane to pick up a simple children’s toy properly.
Still, it made me think of the brave astronauts out there who struggle valiantly every day to get the robotic arm on the Space Shuttle to grab some shit. Yes, everyone in Canada is trained from birth that the arm is called the Canadarm and that it is our foremost contribution to humanity as a civilization. What’s that arm grabbing, though? We certainly didn’t make the expensive satellite that’s blown its brains out, necessitating the installation of even more expensive components which we also didn’t make. We’re just the muscle – with an infuriating interface.
Sure, I’ve never driven an actual Canadarm. I don’t think I’d be any better at it than the claw machine, but maybe I could use it to smash the machine open and retrieve the enormous stuffed parrot that I had my eye on. It got me thinking, though. There is no specific rule at the boardwalk arcade that you can’t bring tools to help you with the claw machine, and if anyone has expertise in getting small dropped fasteners out of extremely tight spaces, it’s me.
After telling my boss (myself) to eat shit because I was taking a sick day, I immediately headed on over to the junkyard. Hey, it’s not like I’m lying about the sick day. it’s actually medically covered as therapy, according to this doctor’s letter I wrote in the “notes” page of this Haynes manual for a car I’ve never owned. Even so, my therapy session was short-lived, because it only took a couple pinched fingers and periodically hiding from the junkyard police (they don’t like it when you weld in the yard next to the gasoline tank) and I had my very own Canadarm. Sure, it was constructed mostly of old Toyota stick axles and the power window actuator from a Lincoln Versailles, but it worked. And worked really well. Too well, actually.
By the time I had completely drained one machine of stuffed animals, the arcade police had cottoned on to my scam. I had to leave in such a hurry that I didn’t even get a chance to detach the arm from the PTO shaft sticking out of my Volare’s rear bumper. On the plus side, my welding has definitely increased in strength. Unfortunately, it really draws the attention of the highway patrol when you’re doing triple the limit with a vending machine and thirty pounds of masonry attached to your bumper.
In your neighbourhood, you’ve probably seen those mapping cars driving around. All the big search engines, and even weird niche technology companies have them. When you need to get a lot of detailed photographs of street-level for Various Shareholder-Value-Aligned Purposes, it turns out the easiest way to do it is just to strap cameras to the roof of a Hyundai Elantra and pay some guy minimum wage to drive around clearing the map like he’s playing Ms. Pac-Man.
Naturally, since the camera cars are part of the environment, there’s lots of ways to screw with them. You’ll see internet users thrilling to a dog that chased the street-viewing car for miles, or some naked dude getting arrested in the background while the camera was trying to focus on the name of a sushi restaurant. For a couple months last year, I was carrying a giant fold-up mirror in the trunk of my Datsun in the hopes of finding one of these camera cars. The hope was that the mirror would somehow screw up some of the lidar nightmare mounted alongside the camera, but I didn’t manage to locate a suitable victim before the rusty trunk floor made it fall out on the highway in February.
Still, it gave me an idea. I’m often driving all over the city to get Craigslist deals, and I don’t really care if there are some holes drilled in the roof of my car to mount cameras. I decided to start my own street-stalking business, in order to sell photos to all the tech bigwigs. Those folks living up there on their orbiting outer-space wheel-worlds don’t even know what money is anymore; they’ll give me whatever I ask for, I thought.
There were two big problems with my model. One, my cars all vibrate enough that none of the pictures came out, even with the smartphone camera set to “auto-focus.” Two, it turns out that they already had a lot of photos of the side of the highway, and adding four thousand additional pictures of me swearing as I try to figure out what just fell out of the engine bay is not a value-added proposal.
Washing a car is one of those unique pleasures in life. It combines the materialist worship of the personal automobile with the primal urge to power-wash dirt and bird shit off of the side of some clapped-out old paint to make it shiny again. There’s a lot of cars that look great wet, and then as it dries, you see how faded and terrible the bodywork really is.
That’s why everyone in my neighbourhood who attempts to sell a car takes all their pictures for the ad right in the car-wash. Most of their vehicles can’t even risk the short trip to the gas station parking lot or their $4 will be forfeit. While it may sound like small potatoes, a lot of my neighbours really need that $4 for present or future bail money.
I figured: why not cut out the middleman? I bet I could get six dollars by setting up a car wash that’s also a photo studio. That way, my customers could pull up, hose their cars down and immediately take a picture. Maybe we’d put up a fancy background or two, make it look authentic, so that the buyer would be sorely disappointed upon arrival but maybe buy it anyway. And the perfect place to run this kind of innovative hybrid business is, like nature’s innovator the tapeworm, inside the dying body of an existing business.
You might not be aware of this, but a lot of warehouse space is simply underused. Companies buy a big building because they’re afraid of having to move everything into a larger one as their business expands, but not all businesses expand. All it takes is figuring out who isn’t growing, and putting up a fake wall inside their warehouse. It’s inside that fake wall that our wet-car photo studio is positioned. When they show up to work, only the most observant employees will even notice that the place is slightly smaller than it used to be, but will chalk it up to a chemical imbalance or recent workplace head injury.
At least that was the theory. I’ll be honest, my first attempt at this model didn’t exactly succeed. It turns out that even though the folks at my local boat-parts place have a lot of room on their shelves these days, even they notice when a papier-maché version of the back wall of their building collapses into the showroom when some asshole lights up a burnout for the ‘gram. I just wish I could say a customer did it.
In order to hold onto their sanity, a lot of handy-type folks will invent new projects. This is necessary because existing projects have a way of, well, not finishing. Actually, most of mine stall like a teenager learning to drive stick, and end up being subsumed into the waves of hoarder garbage that cover my floor. I feel really bad about it, and then I need to start something else to feel a little bit better.
Have you ever seen an artificially-intelligent toaster whose toast time compensates for atmospheric humidity, ensuring a perfectly crisped breakfast no matter the season? It’d be a true gift to humanity, right? Well, it was stolen from you by my having to work a real job. I barely got done untangling the thought-matrix from the heater coils when I had to shove it off the end of my desk because I got mad at my boss and bought a box of forty-six broken game controllers on eBay.
There’s more, too. If you go on a tour through my house and manage to get into one of the rooms that isn’t covered floor-to-ceiling in broken shit, you’ll notice that a lot of things aren’t done. Holes in the drywall that were supposed to get patched once. Exposed live cables next to half-taped-together plumbing. Masking tape that was put up for a shower-caulking job that began in 2015. I tried taking a vacation once that was solely dedicated to getting house projects done, but all that ended up happening was that I flattened a bottle of Jim Beam inside the Home Depot and had to be driven home by a horrified Bob the Builder cosplayer. Wait, maybe that was the anime convention and not a Home Depot at all.
I’d lose hope entirely if it wasn’t for the occasional long-term project that I complete through some sort of eerie single-minded fugue. Whether it’s caused by pesky ghosts or just some self-medication, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll figure it out one day. Let me put it on my list.
Before the horrible destruction of human civilization that just happened, I would go to dim sum with my friends. If you’re unfamiliar, dim sum is sort of like a full-service junkyard, except the cars are food and someone brings it to you on a little cart full of steamers. Wait, maybe it’s not that much like a junkyard after all. Or at least it wasn’t until I got involved.
Part of the traditional economic model of dim sum restaurants is that the customers are generally inside the restaurant. I feel that this is obsolete. There have surely been many attempts at delivering the food before, but it doesn’t work out – part of the fun is chowing into a freshly steamed bonbon of grease and salt, and any amount of time spent in transit ruins it. You’d need someone who, I don’t know, drives very fast and disregards all known traffic laws?
Enter the pummelled 1959 Viscount I yanked out of a swamp. Sure, there’s not much of a trunk left, which is perfect because it leaves me with more room for stacks of bamboo steamers filled with frozen dumplings from the local Chinese grocery store. Those steamers are heated by the car’s coolant system, which means that I don’t even need a conventional radiator.
The only problem is getting customers, but I had no problem with that either. I simply adjusted another aspect of the model – changing it from satisfying demand to providing supply. Nobody would ever order delivery ice cream, and yet ice cream trucks exist. They exist to push. Would you ever turn down a chance to eat some hot-out-of-the-drivetrain shumai as it rattles past your house? All I have to do is crank the volume of the jingle up above the sound of the water pump pulley devouring itself, and the customers will come running. Firefighters in particular seem to really notice it, and those folks will eat a lot.
What kind of person is good at measuring things? Probably one who uses a caliper all the time, or actually spends a bit of effort making sure things are square and even so they don’t constantly fuck things up by two or three millimetres here or there. I’m not that kind of person. You could blame it on my artistic soul, or just the huge amounts of black coffee and nitrous oxide that I ingest on a patented cycle instead of sleeping, but my measuring skills are total dogshit.
Although the old adage says to measure twice and cut once, I could measure half a dozen times, get it bang on, and still fuck it all up when cutting it. It’s not a quantity thing: if I did those measurements properly, I’d probably only need one, and if I didn’t get bored halfway through the first cut I wouldn’t need to do sixteen more hammerings and filing for an hour to get the piece of shit to fit. Yes, there are robots now who do the cutting for you, but that just means they’ll precisely cut to my incorrect measurements. And you can’t yell at them for doing too good of a job. Another reason you can’t yell at them is because they don’t have ears, but I digress.
In a time long past, this is when I would be promoted to the management track, so I could stop making life harder for everyone else in the engineering pit that does actual work. However, we now toil under the Agile Cost-Amortized Boost® structure at my job, and so everyone but me has been fired. As a result, our last batch of helicopter parts has been a little bit out of spec, but I got away with it because I’m also the only quality-assurance person on staff.
Back when the artificial hominid-type androids came out, everyone thought they would just last forever. Naturally, they didn’t, and that’s why I’m here. I’m an android tow-truck driver. When an android – or yourself, if you are an android – collapses, then I have to haul the chassis to the nearest repair depot to get a little fixed up.
You might think it’s surprising that you’d need a whole truck to move something that is human-sized, but some of these guys are built by Americans. Last week, we had to use the gantry crane to lift a five-hundred-pound Prospector-class out of the hotel pool when he thought he could go for a refreshing walk in the deep end. All the spinal heat sinks instantly corroded from the chlorine flashing off inside. That’s not covered by warranty, but luckily the tow was.
I fell into this job mostly by accident. A few years ago, I traded a hogged-out 440 to a scrap dealer for the tow truck someone abandoned in his parking lot. After washing out all the blood and teeth, it made a pretty decent daily driver – maybe the previous owner maintained it properly, Mord rest their soul – and I was happily rowing through the gears and hitting the exhaust brake when I came across a fellow citizen in trouble. A robot citizen.
I threw him in the back and drove quickly to the nearest repair depot. If you think that is out of character for me, you’d be right: I expected that the chaos of wheeling him into the emergency room would distract the nurses and orderlies long enough for me to pilfer some worn-out linear actuators and only-slightly-rusted copper wire from their scraps dumpster, which they usually watched like a hawk. I had just finished throwing stuff in the back when my patient – no, customer – came out, thanked me for saving his life, and handed me a crisp fifty. Society had programmed me through a series of neurolinguistic exploits to derive pleasure from receiving money for hard work, and so I felt that I should continue this endeavour.
If you’re thinking of getting into the industry too, just let me give you a piece of advice. No matter how many calls you get, no matter how loud the screaming is, do not attempt to free the Chuck E. Cheese robots from their place of employment. They are not sentient, and they don’t contain enough batteries to get a good price at the scrapyard.
The first thing I did after winning the state vaccination lottery (I had to get eight tetanus shots in two weeks) was to buy a new tail light for my Volare… on eBay. The second thing I did was write three extra zeroes on the end of the cheque before I cashed it.
Sure, taking a billion dollars out of the state treasury sounds like theft, but the roadworks guys have been taking like half the budget every year and they still haven’t added that chicane to Main Street like I asked for. Well, there’s one there now.
Being rich doesn’t just stop at philanthropy: you can also be a huge asshole and get away with it. For instance, how did the sales manager at Bob Yates Chevrolet end up getting launched into the sun? The answer is that NASA was coincidentally looking for customers to fill up the cargo bay after a last-minute cancellation by the CIA, and I got a helluva deal on it. In fact, I used the leftover money I had budgeted to make my state a “Right To Not Get Shot Into Space” state. Lobbyists are surprisingly cheap as well, especially when in lieu of paying their invoices you hire a guy named Rocco to visit and threaten to give them a “beach vacation” of their own. Ah, I do so love scientific progress.
Overall, though, having all this money hasn’t changed me. I sprinkled a little bit of it into charities so that the taxman would think I’m a good guy instead of a turbo-criminal, and most importantly I’ve stayed away from any large purchases. Coincidentally, did you know that a fully restored 1978 Richard Petty widebody Volare – the one with the engine bay bracing and the angry little 360 – is now considered to be a compact car?
Last week, the board of health shut down the neighbourhood ice cream store due to what, in the industry, we’d call “too much blood in the ice cream.” This wasn’t the proprietor’s fault: a huge fight broke out in the lobby between pro-Rocky Road and pro-Bubblegum Highway adherents. As the belligerents quarrelled, one of them got the absolute stuffing beaten out of him. Some of that stuffing landed in the Tiger Tail, which thankfully nobody eats because it’s disgusting, but the health inspector noticed immediately.
What’s the next step for any modern-day entrepreneur when Big Government decides that what they’re doing is largely injurious to the well-being of the general public? Put it on wheels, bitch, where the standards for safety are vastly more lax. That’s right, he commissioned Seat Safety Switch Food Truck Solutions LLC LLC LLC (not a typo) to put together a truck with a refrigerated ice cream compartment, and – in his words, your honour – “for cheap.”
Most food truck manufacturers will waste your money by ordering a commercial truck chassis from the original manufacturer and then adding the food parts. What I knew that they don’t is that hundreds of food trucks go out of business every day. Divorce, pestilence, or low-speed accidents: the latter is where you get the really good deals, by the way. Don’t worry: the engine on this old Divco easily had enough power to pull its own front end straight, thanks to a neighbourhood fire hydrant.
Now, I know what the next question is going to be: did I hose out all the blood of the previous owner? The answer is no, because the health inspector doesn’t care about anything that happens in the “truck part.” That’s not their job. And as long as the truck remains parked directly in front of the door to the condemned ice cream shop, the commercial vehicle inspector can’t really shut us down either. I’ve already sold the tires.
Ownership of a humble work vehicle is truly a great thing. Unlike quickly-depreciating luxury barges, cars and trucks made for work are still useful even decades down the line. The work still needs to be done, and so the car still needs to exist. Yet, not all work continues to happen. It’s in these obsolete, orphaned automobiles that we find what experts are calling “a bargain.”
On the face of it, it actually seems impossible to get a bargain work vehicle. Even though some kinds of work are indeed long gone, you might expect that most organizers of work still exist in the world. For example, landline telephones are obsolete, but the telephone company still has lots of dumpy little vans that now carry knockoff 5G routers bought off AliExpress instead of miles of wire, test handsets, and dense manuals.
To make matters worse, most work vehicles are driven into the fucking ground by legions of assholes who don’t care about the boss’ truck, and are maintained on a shoestring budget by overworked motor-pool heroes who only get to turn a wrench on the thing maybe once every four or five months. So anything that turns up in gen pop is much more haggard than just buying a Dodge Caravan and sawzalling out everything that doesn’t let you throw a piano in the back without looking. Which, by the way, is what real workers drive, I’m just saying.
Still, once in a great while, you find a whole industry that went tits up and dragged a bunch of employers down with it. Their freshly-refreshed fleet of largely-untouched workermobiles washed up at auction, and eventually traded hands between a lot of people who wanted to look like they had a job for some reason. Eventually, they even make it to the kind of cheap assholes that don’t care if the neighbours talk about them. Have you seen my new 1972 Dodge Tradesman van? It’s got a pretty good compression 318, and the back is full of all these cool manuals from the CIA about overthrowing some guy named Castro. Wonder if he knows where to get an uncracked dashboard for this thing?
Everyone I’ve ever met has loved the simple elegance of the zippy knife. It goes by many names: boxcutter, craft knife, Doctor Stabbington. How could you not? The zippy knife is so easy to use: pop out blade, slash something, pop blade back in. Unfortunately, there is a dark side to this beloved tool. Every day, the contents of thousands of packages are destroyed because folks pop the blade out too far and cut into the package rather than just cleanly severing the packing tape.
I wanted to try and liberate humanity from this dread menace. And I’m not alone. There’s been lots of attempts to mitigate the damage caused by blade-too-far-itis.
Some companies stuff fancy air packs on top of your stuff, so you end up slashing through glorified bubble wrap and throwing it in the landfill instead of your new iPad. Others have folklore tricks about not extending the blade any further than the tip of your finger, or implementing special limiters on the fancy blades so you physically cannot extend the blade far enough to rip into the good stuff. I think these are ineffective, and in order to fix the problem, we must go to the source: the human psyche.
Through a series of legal maneuvers orchestrated by a combination of the hard work put in by my shark of an attorney Max’s shark of an attorney, Annette (not her real name) and my studious attendance at the same Cars & Coffee meet that the local circuit court judges frequent, we’ve managed to temporarily (until the appeal, at least) wrest the exclusive worldwide rights to The Brookings Method away from my nearly-life-long nemesis, Dr. Brookings. Yes, the asshole who once attempted to use dressed up psychological torture to cure my addiction to boosted hoopties has now been forced to turn over the rights to his own name to me, his greatest professional failure. And we’re going to use it to convince everyone not to open packages incorrectly anymore.
The Brookings Method – perhaps I should now call it the Switchington’s Method, yes I think I will – is primarily based around avoiding negative outcomes. If you drill into the subconscious that a given act results in extremely painful outcomes, well, they’re going to avoid it in the future. As a result, our training program inserts chunks of solid magnesium into packages at random. If you’re the unlucky sap who drags his or her or their blade even a millimeter too deep into the package? You’re definitely not going to do it again, once you get out of the hospital.
Now, of course, the Method didn’t work on me. Whether it’s because I have rusty grounds in my mental electrical wiring, or simply because my fear response is significantly dampened by too many late-night danger-to-manifold floorpan explosions, science still doesn’t know. Don’t worry. I plan on opening all my packages the old fashioned way: with an angle grinder. They’re mostly someone else’s old rust, anyway.
“I don’t believe in this kind of bullshit,” explains the driver as a tricycle goes sailing onto the hood and bounces off the expanded-metal mesh over the windshield. “It’s just exploitative, and trains you to get used to it rather than look for what’s really important, the child.” For my part, I’m not entirely sure that my travelling companion actually did check for the presence of a child before swerving onto the sidewalk to clip what he assumes was a deliberately abandoned false-flag prop tricycle.
For a couple years now, I’d been noticing the rise in the neighbouring suburbs of various street indicators that children were at play. My favourite was a life-size injection-moulded plastic child with “SLOW” stamped on his buttocks. The idea, in case you hadn’t cottoned on yet, was that you would be reminded of the existence of children, feel some kind of deep-seated communal guilt, and plow through the intersection without taking your eyes off your smartphone at 37.5 km/h instead of the legally-tolerable full fifty.
A couple weeks before the interview, I noticed that the amount of roadside props had only grown. Some houses would make a whole diorama, scattering toys and conveyances as to give the impression that a child had just abandoned them and was getting ready to run into the road. While looking for this phantom child, the idea goes, you’d naturally slow, as everyone who operates a car in my city slows to a snail’s pace whenever they have to think about anything at all. Stuck behind one of these individuals is where I found my new interview subject, a guy driving a blacked-out third-generation Firebird who I will only refer to as “The Asshole.”
The Asshole did not believe in this propagandist approach to road safety, and in fact was outraged by it. He made it his mission to drive recklessly through the neighbourhood but not to hit any children, because no parents ever let their kids play in the middle of the fucking road. He stressed to me later when I was interviewing him for The Journal of Bad Cars (our new higher-class, literary publishing arm which attempts to target a more wealthy reader, such as those capable of buying a used Intrepid in cash) that ice cream trucks, lawncare technicians, letter carriers, and coyotes didn’t count as “children” for the purposes of his great social experiment.
Personally, I had a bit of a thrill at the excitement of racing through an unfamiliar suburb at six-tenths, mandated-identical homes flickering through the thin slit of an acrylic racing windshield like the end of 2001. When I bid farewell to The Asshole, I made sure that I was fully outside of the vehicle and its NASCAR-grade door bars before I asked him what he felt about playground zones.
“They’re great,” he yelled, before engaging the line lock to lay a smoke screen a mile thick. “Gives me a chance to warm up my tires!”
As he sped off into the distance, I could just barely make out his bumper sticker: I BRAKE FOR CORNERS.
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tags: pontiac, pontiac firebird, chrysler, chrysler intrepid
It’s true that we’re in a sort of housing crisis. That crisis is housing quality. Sure, there’s lots of houses out there, but they’re in shitty places that nobody wants to live, or they’re behind on their maintenance. Enter the HouseStacker, the newest innovation from Switch Industries.
For years, Westerners have refused to live in apartment buildings. Too cramped, they claim. No privacy, they wail. What if I told you that we can just stack a house, standard domestic-suburb-sized yard and all, on top of some other houses? Through the magic of finite element analysis and this really big-assed crane I got from the industrial bankruptcy auction, it’s not just easy but safe.
Now you can enjoy the proximity of living in a go-go nightlife part of town but still have a storage room and four toilets. Depending on the local zoning law, we can pile up to thirty-six storeys of single-family houses together, and connect them through our innovative new elevator, the Upwalk™. Sorry, no basements.
Are there downsides to this unique arrangement? Yes. For one thing, your kids had better not “go long” for a catch when they’re out in the front yard. And your two-car oversized garage is more of a Hot Wheels ramp, so make sure you have your handbrake cables in tip-top condition. We think that these are minor concerns in exchange for the opulence of unique-domiciled comfort.
As a side bonus, you won’t get any door-to-door salesmen, either! Our trained security guards will keep them out at street level, and if they do manage to sneak past you, it’s fully legal through the castle doctrine to just kick them off the edge of your yard.
Garbage in, garbage out. It’s the aphorism shared by engineers to explain how it’s the fault of the shitty users that their perfect, immortal machine produced an unfavourable result. On the face of it, yeah, they’re right - if any machine actually worked flawlessly, that is. How badly can you fuck up “pushing a button on an elevator?” Doesn’t seem possible, and yet folks die in horrible elevator accidents literally every eleven minutes.
Now, I’m not trying to absolve the users of any guilt. We’ve all seen that guy, or been that guy, who keeps trying to hammer in some complete trash and hoping the machine will “figure it out” on the backend, as if it’s actually filled with intelligent gnomes who have nothing better to do than correct your mistakes. The thing is, machines will fail in more ways than you can ever imagine, and it’s that exact failure that we should be embracing.
Even this “garbage” is a sort of artificial selective pressure on the population of busted-ass things. How many consumer products would you have taken apart for repair if they hadn’t broken in the first place? Probably not that many, and yet humanity is elevated by ripping open your melted Mitsubishi Eclipse and photographing what happened because you jumped it off an electrical transformer box in the alley. We now know that’s a bad idea, thanks to your selfless act of idiocy.
If there’s one thought I can leave you with today, it’s to go fuck up an engineer’s day. Cram some garbage in that thing and try to make it produce not-garbage. That’s how you really get them scratching their heads. And while they’re distracted, steal a couple prototypes. All the really interesting blown-up parts stay in the lab.
Hey! Have you subscribed to my newsletter yet? You’re missing out on exciting exclusive content, like where I’ll be spreading the gospel of homemade fuels. Will it be in your neighbourhood? If you’re lucky, you might just see the last couple seconds of a 1967 Pontiac Executive hitting the pipe on a fuel tank full of bleach and nitromethane before the cops come to shut me down.
For years, I’d wanted to overthrow the cruel yoke that the gas station had put upon me. It would always ruin my day when I’d have to wait in line while the guy blocking the pump ran inside for smokes or a lottery ticket. As if the pump were some kind of glorified parking spot! At least move the damn thing thirty feet to the actual parking spaces, man. Eventually, I decided to take matters into my own hands, and began a series of scale experiments using tiny Stirling engines that I had stolen from the local high school.
Why are the cops so angry that I’m teaching the common man how to make their own gasoline? Because they’re in the pocket of Big Oil, and they believe the lie that nitromethane is inherently dangerous – just because it burns invisibly and sometimes explodes without warning when stored. Big deal. So does dog food, according to this article on the internet I just published and had laundered into looking like a legitimate news site thanks to a series of low-paid foreign social media consultants.
So yeah, come on down to McMurphy’s RV Centre this Saturday at exactly 9:17 AM and find out how easy it is to brew your own fuels. Just bring your own measuring cups. I’d lend you mine, but they keep melting for some reason.
Hi kids, I’m Officer Bringdown, and your teacher asked me to come to your class in order to get you (checks notes) off drugs. That’s real cool with me. Today we’re going to learn how to spend enough of your money that you’ll no longer be able to afford drugs, rendering the entire problem moot. Please follow me outside.
Now children, if you’ve been paying attention in your Engine Swaps class - what? That’s not a thing? Fucking school board has finally gone soft on me. Anyway, it’s a Ford “Godzilla” 7.3L V8, the largest factory engine built on their new modular architecture. Replaces the old V10, and between you and me - boy, does it. You’re not supposed to be able to buy these things as a crate motor yet, but it turns out that your school bus driver has, ironically, a thing for methamphetamine and we were able to seize the brand new Bluebird he was driving as proceeds of crime.
Anyway, as you can also see, I’ve shoved this engine into the rectangular embrace of a 1981 LTD Crown Victoria. This is historic cop style, as are these aviator sunglasses, which are made with protective Trivex® lenses in order to avoid any eye injuries when I’m on patrol. Eye injuries from what, you ask? This.
Now, kids, I don’t like having to shout but it is pretty clear that the four-inch decatted X-pipe exhaust all the way from the headers back has made normal conversation difficult. So instead, we’re going to use the prowler’s internal loudspeaker. I’ve set it to “bowel liquidation” because the switch broke a few months ago when I was trying to harass a Nissan Rogue for merging too slowly onto the highway. Because of the volume of the exhaust, you might not be able to hear the precision click of the Jasper four-speed transmission we pulled out of a decommissioned NASCAR (also seized as proceeds of crime; don’t blow stop signs when you’re driving a race team’s car hauler in my town.)
Speaking of the gearbox, although this transmission has four underdrive gears, the torque of the 7.3 is so robust that I can’t use any of them lest the tires become vaporized, as you’re now seeing. In fact, I’ve been doing this burnout for so long that the tires are now kicking up their belts and scratching off the faux-chromed fender liner trim on the rear wheel wells of my patrol Vic. If I want to drive it normally, I have to drop in a 2.32 final drive, and even then I can only use fourth. On the starter motor.
Stay in school, kids! I’m going to need someone to make the tax money that will eventually put new tires and wheels on this beast, now that I’m machining down the steelies on the concrete underlay of your basketball court. Now who wants to play with my tazer?
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tags: ford, ford crown victoria, officer bringdown
Here’s the part where I’m going to lose a lot of readers: talking about penetrants. No, it’s not as triple-X rated as you might think, although the feeling of finally popping loose that rusted bolt that’s been taunting you all evening long is certainly its own kind of visceral thrill. I’ve spoken about why WD40 is just not very good before, but it does have its uses. For instance, the can is perfectly suited to holding up small items for painting. Spraying it might gently annoy a spider. Enough fun.
Because I’m just a regular person working out of his home, the manufacturers of exotic poisonous chemicals have some funny ideas about which of said chemicals I should be allowed to easily purchase. You can’t really run down to the local Canadian Tire and buy aircraft-grade AeroKroil, mostly because that place is barely awake enough to stock PB Blaster half the time.
Maybe the Kroil folks just don’t think that normal folks would buy it, or at least not enough to deflect the worries that some freak like me would spray a shitload into the rim and set it on fire in order to try and seal the bead on his eternally-flat right rear tire. Judging from the response when I called their professional-services hotline, it seems the latter is most likely the case. All I wanted was a replacement set of tires, and it’s not like it would cost them very much. Four half-decent junkyard tires are a mere sixty bucks in my size, but the damage to their reputation caused when some weirdo noticed that the airline repair hangar didn’t lock up their chemical shed at night? At least, like, sixty-one dollars right there.
So far, I haven’t managed to make them budge yet. Even if I get someone at the start of their workday, their initial chipper reaction to my longwinded story soon becomes sighs of frustration that they don’t even bother to mute. One of them even said I needed professional help, which is the whole reason I was calling in the first place! So, if one of their competitors wants some free advertising, let me know. All you have to do is send me your free shit, especially if it dissolves rust and smells like sweet baby acetone.
Whenever I’ve worked in a shop with other people, I always like to take the time to stress the importance of shop safety. In a lot of other places, you’ll find the manly working men resorting to horseplay. For example, I once spent an exciting couple of weeks working swing-shift at a bus repair depot where two of the mechanics would set each other on fire. Loser grabbed the extinguisher first. Very irresponsible and unsafe workshop conduct, especially after the foreman decided to stop replacing the extinguishers because the cost was cutting into his quarterly bonus.
Naturally, a lot of folks regard this desire of mine to spread the safety gospel as being a bit of a wet blanket. In fact, the exact opposite is true. I love doing incredibly dumb shit at work, but it has to have a bit of a “Plan B.” Think about a motorcycle daredevil. She or he still has an ambulance and a bunch of trained surgeons who are ready to start reassembling shattered thoracic cavities. If you’re dead, it’s hard to A. collect the paycheque, and B. earn future paycheques. So now you see safety at the jobsite also makes good fiscal sense.
One important part of my routine is to do what I like to call “awareness drills.” In it, I use my experience and guile to pressure whatever intern, junior employee, or wet-behind-the-ears rookie you may have around the jobsite to falsely injure themselves. Then, I wait and see what the others do. Sometimes, the rookie actually becomes injured in the course of the act, but all of them have stubbornly clung to life due to the invincibility of youth. When you see a group of bitter machine-shop operators surrounding their fallen comrade like a wounded sparrow, it brings a tear to your eye. Everyone is much more careful for a little while around the shop afterward.
If there’s one aspect of jobsite safety that I think is ineffective, it’s the “Days Since Our Last Accident” counter. Not only is it a waste of productivity for a manager to be constantly incrementing and resetting this sign, but it encourages employees to become blasé upon reaching the high score. If we try too hard on this one, they explain to me while feeding their hands directly into an operating blast furnace, it will just become harder to beat our record next time.
Can cats hold political office? If you ask a lot of small towns, then yes. The only problem is that the position the cats fill is almost always “mayor.” Think really hard: what does your mayor do all day? No idea? Your lack of knowledge did not come by accident. It’s deliberate, because mayors are a conspiracy by the folks who really control us to keep us docile.
The first recorded historical mayor is in 89 BC, with the rise of Bob Mayor, who the position was later named after. Bob Mayor was a high-powered used-chariot salesman who leveraged the name recognition of local TV ads to catapult himself into public office. There’s just one problem. Mr. Mayor didn’t actually do anything when he was in office. We have no records of anything he did. Now, the cynical among you might claim that all politicians largely maintain the status quo, but bear with me for a moment. If we thought the position was actually unimportant, then it wouldn’t be so funny when a cat becomes mayor, did it?
To get some more evidence, I did what the local Facebook pages are calling “research” and what law enforcement calls “stalking from an abandoned office building several blocks away from City Hall with a directed parabolic microphone.” I had to know what our mayor actually did all day. It was enlightening: his day mostly consisted of coming in late, phoning in lunch orders for his (unelected) staff, then wandering around downtown to see if anyone would recognize him and pay tribute to his fame. He wasn’t going down to the highway construction project to pitch in and lay some asphalt, and city council met like once every two weeks at best.
Once I had a collection of tapes, I sent them in to the local paper. Surely they’d be interested in uncovering the truth. That’s when I found out that this conspiracy is much wider than I thought: when the editor-in-chief wrote back to me to tell me never to send anything ever again, the letter smelled suspiciously of cat food. I’m going to go dangle some string over by the newspaper office, if you get my drift.
What does minigolf lack? If you said “automobiles,” then you’re one hundred percent correct. The primary goal of getting onto a full-sized golf game for me is that I get to drive the little cart. Sure, there are also some crooked politicians to talk to, and business rivals to mock the handicaps of (how ableist of me) but believe me that it’s all about that five-eighths-horsepower DC motor from the 1980s.
I’d be remiss in not mentioning the controversy here. There are those in the car community who believe golf courses should be abolished, and then turned into rallycross tracks. I agree with this in principle, and also in practice, but we have to be realistic in our demands and work gradually for the great social change that will end in me power-sliding a gently lifted SA22 RX-7 on mud-terrains across the fairway in which our mayor is currently doing business. The golf cart, of course, is part of that compromise. Let me explain.
Mini-golf: again, no golf cart. A reasonable person would argue that there’s no reason for one. You can just walk, and there isn’t enough empty space between the holes to even fit a golf cart. That’s why I propose converting full-sized golf courses into mini-golf courses. Now there’s more space in between the holes, and that will demand the provision of powered transportation. Even the little municipal places will need to pick them up with twice as much room between the holes than even a full-sized golf course.
Kids will love it: they love mini-golf, being mini themselves. Parents will love it: the PTA frowns upon you taking a weekend to go out and getting hammered with your friends instead of taking care of your kids. At least they’ll be present when you decide to pinch the ass of the waiter at the country club after your fourteenth Tom Collins. And motorsports enthusiasts will love it. It’s difficult to get a straight line together for a decent drag race in the current course layouts: there’s too many damn golfers in the way.
“It’s only original once,” is what a lot of folks say about their vintage Mopar products. And you can kind of understand it. Modifying things makes them not so original anymore, and often the modifications are done with crappy parts that wouldn’t pass even 1960s Chryco factory quality control. To make matters worse, often those genuine parts are simply thrown in the trash once the improved bit is bolted on.
When this justification is used to explain why I shouldn’t replace a completely seized-up single-barrel Ball & Ball carburetor with anything that works better – for example, a drinking straw and an aquarium pump – it feels more like gatekeeping. They’d rather see my precious Volare get shoved into the crusher after decades of inactivity than see me gently alter its original specification. And in our current era of societal collapse, where it seems impossible to order parts from anywhere, it’s more important than ever to pay your respects to the folks who have the hustle to cobble some shit together in a shed just to get back on the road.
It’s true that I’ve taken some shortcuts and liberties here and there, and I’ve bolted on parts from rival manufacturers that would make a purist’s toenails curl. This is all justified in my pragmatic philosophical worldview, which is summed up by two statements: “Rubbin’ Is Racin’” and “Work, God Damn You, Work.” And also, just to repeat myself for emphasis, sometimes the other guys make a wing mirror that doesn’t turn to chromed-aluminum dust as soon as you try to adjust it in the middle of winter. Just sayin’.
In fact, I’ve taken this attitude to an even greater height, perhaps just to piss off the haters. After I blew up the original slant six doing some completely ill-advised tuning experiment which rhymes with “running from the cops through an abandoned SAAN store while burning ninety-nine percent pure nitromethane instead of ethanol,” I’ve now installed a Soviet tractor engine burning old french-fry oil in my car. It’s what they’d do in Cuba, and honestly I’ve actually noticed a small increase in top-end performance.
When I used to work retail, there was a certain kind of customer we all hated. There was no special name for them, I don’t think. If there had been one, it’s not like the senior floor staff would have let me in. They were pretty cliquey, and with good reason: they were lifers at this department store, and I was just passing through on my way to write the Great American Service and Repair Manual.
Anyway, the kind of customer we hated? You already know who I’m talking about: the folks who ask you to “check the back.” It was doubly insulting because, at the time, I was working as a stocker: one of the work-sweater-adorned ones who would walk into the back, get the stuff from the back, and then take the stuff and put it on the shelves. If there wasn’t any stuff in the back, there was no way for me to take it to the shelves. Believe me, I knew what stuff we had and what stuff we didn’t have. Bug spray? Plumb out. Artichoke hearts? Fill your fucking boots.
When I was very early in my career there, I actually did go into the back once for a customer. It was a hot and shitty day, busy on the floor, and I figured: I’ll just pretend I’m a dumb sucker who hasn’t already figured out that this is a bullshit excuse. Of course, my line manager was also hiding out from customers back there, smoking a clove cigarette and contemplating a precariously-balanced pallet of Maggi noodles. He knew exactly what I was doing, and in no uncertain words told me to tell the customer to get lost.
The ultimate personal value of this role to me, besides joint pain that will last me a lifetime, is an intimate understanding of the depravity of the customer. I imagine it’s easy for them to make this demand of me: I’m busy, all my coworkers are busy, so maybe we just didn’t get around to opening up that box of Star Wars figurines yet. Yeah, as if Ken from Electronics hadn’t kept a close eye on the individual shipment from corporate and ripped a hole in the side of the box with his teeth as soon as it came off the truck. Sorry, you showed up at 3pm on a Thursday; that shit’s long gone.
Now, I just go in the back myself. As long as you wear a sweater of the vaguely correct colour, no line manager is gonna stop you. After all, you might be one of the other guy’s newbies, checking the back because some suburbanite managed to sweet-talk you into checking if there’re any more artichoke hearts that you’re just sitting on. They’ll never suspect you’re actually there to steal the battery out of the forklift.
Getting your house struck by lightning sucks. It definitely ruins your sleep, for one thing. And you probably will end up having to replace a VCR or two or three. The worst part by far, though, is that you didn’t have the correct equipment to capture this massive energy and use it to save on your power bills.
Hi there. I’ve worked in the power industry for almost some years now, and one of the things I used to see most often are huge utility costs. Aren’t you sick of spending a couple hundred bucks a month to run your bitcoin-methamphetamine farm? Wouldn’t you rather that Mother Nature pick up the cheque once in awhile?
Enter the Lightning Rad: it’s a lightning rod that you can attach to your home. When that rod gets zapped, it acts as a conductor to a proprietary – and not at all flammable or unreliable – turbine generator, which charges a battery. You run your house appliances off the battery, instead of paying out the big bucks to Big Government-Approved Power Oligopoly.
Wait, I hear you ask, what if my neighbour gets a taller Lightning Rad? Excellent question: they’ll get the hit, and you’ll just sit there looking like a sucker. If you join our Platinum Program, we’ll make sure that you have the tallest one around; guaranteed to get hit by the ionosphere’s rage all day long. It has a convenient extra feature as well: it insulates (little electrical pun there) us from all of the lawsuits that your insurance company has. After all, the courts have a convenient new standard for admissibility, called “They Were Asking For It.”
There’s something that’s primal about stripping away all the layers of oxide, paint, wax, stickers and bullshit and just getting down to the raw structure of a thing. I’ve spoken about the angle grinder before and its magical ability to turn surface coatings into a vapour that you accidentally breathe into your lungs. What the angle grinder really offers is the ultimate undo button.
The nice thing about paint is that if you screw it up, you can just strip it off and start over. Does it suck to strip off a mortgage payment’s worth of fancy paint because you weren’t bright enough to realize that you were dragging your airbrush’s hose through the side of the panel? Absolutely, but at least when you rip it off the panel, you get to look at a nice, bare panel for a little while.
Where’s the value in that, you ask? Rarity. Any truly bare metal is already starting to oxidize in our air. You’re privileged enough to be present for that moment. There’s no way to share the experience in a museum. Unless you stick that chunk of door in a purged-nitrogen atmosphere like you work for the SR-71 project, chances are you’re going to be the only person to ever experience it. Take a moment to reflect, but not too long, because then you’ll have to do a whole bunch more sanding.
It might sound a little bit weird to value such an experience, but who among us hasn’t wanted a chance to do it all over again? A blank canvas is always worth recognizing, even if it’s just for a few seconds while you swear and try to unclog the goddamn drier on the compressor for the fourth time tonight so it doesn’t blast boogers into the primer.
We’re surrounded by annoying, beeping things. Door-ajar chimes. Oven timer completion warnings. Baby bottle steamer overheat alarms. That’s why, when I drive, I like to get a car with as few beeps as possible. I choose the 1981 Mazda RX-7, which only has one glorious, angry beep when you’re about to bounce off the rev limiter and need to shift up.
Now, you are correct that most cars don’t have a redline beeper. You can tell when you’re approaching valve float by the engine simply running out of puff, and then it’s time to grab another gear. On the RX-7, the damn thing is so smooth (some would say torqueless) that you have no idea you’re cresting into the danger zone if Ted Mazda, the CEO of Mazda and inventor of the RX-7, didn’t tell you.
I don’t actually own a 1981 Mazda RX-7. There’s a wide range of reasons for that, both legal and financial. We won’t get into that right now. I do, however, have lots of friends who own various Dorito-engined sleds, and I’ll take any chance to rip them around the neighbourhood. It’s not like I’ll blow them up, after all: there’s a warning beep. What’s more, the engines crave these high revs and get all clogged up if you don’t beat on them once in awhile. That’s what the manual says, or at least I hope so.
There is one big downside, unfortunately. Because my muscle memory has become so ingrained into banging gears when I hear a beep, I recently attempted to shift my microwave into fifth. It didn’t appreciate it, but at least the responding firefighters were polite enough not to ask why a gearshift was grafted onto the side of it.
There’s an old joke about people who are bad at math: what’s the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars? About a billion dollars. In sort of the same vein, allow me to present the difference between “prototype” and “production” engineering.
No, I don’t have any credentials, I don’t know why you keep asking that. What I do have is a lot of hard-won experience making things that barely work. Every scraped knuckle and each half-completed piece of garbage shoved into the corner of my garage where I hopefully won’t look at it and dwell on my personal failures for the rest of the night is a testament to the human drive to create.
Even though some of my stuff is probably practical – pretty much all of it can be used as impromptu furniture, or a stand to prop things on for painting – none of it has been, as yet, productionized. That’s a fancy word that real engineers use to describe the process of turning something from “kinda works” into “my grandma can use this without her estate taking me to court.”
Most parts of this process are pretty obvious. Shave off the sharp edges here, a little coat of paint here, maybe write a manual or something. And the rest is more of an art than a science, really: the art of cost-reduction. It might not seem like a good use of time to spend an afternoon trying to figure out how to get rid of a five-cent screw, but if you’re going to build a million of these fuckers, maybe it’s worth five million cents? That’s, like, a lot of money, and therefore the majority of production engineering is spent trying to figure out how many parts you can take off a perfectly good product before it either stops working or becomes incredibly dangerous.
Actually, I take it back. In this respect, I’m way ahead of the curve on the rest of industry. With my unique experience driving a fleet of shit boxes, I’m very experienced in exactly which components of the 1976 Volare you actually need to have installed. And saving money? There’s nothing more production-ready than used parts you find on the side of the road after a major accident and loosely zip-tie into the spot on the frame where yours should go. They must be safe; they survived one crash already!
If you’ve spent a lot of time in the redneck areas of your community, then you’ve seen missing road signs. Where do they go? The answer is pretty obvious: bodywork. Not only are road signs made of expensive, high-end, corrosion-proofed materials, but people don’t really notice they’re missing right away. Think: do you really know if the stop sign at the end of your block was there today?
These purloined road signs make the perfect floorpan. Ethically, they’re sort of dubious, yes. You can justify it to yourself by arguing that your taxes paid for them, sure, or that the signs blow away in strong winds after awhile anyway. Ultimately, it’s theft from the society at large. Then again, that same society’s addiction to road salt is very likely the reason why you need to replace the metal in your footwell in the first place.
There is a middle ground that I think everyone can find appealing, however. We call this the “found it in a ditch” loophole. One person loosens the bolts of the sign – not a crime, according to my shark of a lawyer – and the other picks the sign out of the ditch a few weeks later, when it falls from the pole. Now, these two people can’t know each other, otherwise it’s conspiracy to commit fraud against the government, also known as “a lot of big words that land your ass in county jail.” That’s where our innovative solution comes in.
Here at Signmatchr, we’ll match a sign “finder” with a sign “loosener.” You’ll never know who your mysterious counterpart is, and if forced to testify, you wouldn’t be able to point them out of a lineup, either. That cop can’t prove you weren’t taking the sign back to City Hall so it didn’t get lost, same as he can’t prove the other Signmatchr user wasn’t tightening those bolts in an act of guerrilla public service. No need to thank me, officer, I’m just doing what anyone else would do. Do we keep logs of who uses our service? Yes, but not for $5.99 a month, we won’t.
So now that you’ve got Signmatchr in your corner, no more excuses about why you couldn’t go full-throttle over that berm during rallycross last weekend. These babies make fantastic skidplates, too.
For those of you in the audience who didn’t have a revelatory experience through abusing psilocybin while watching The Brave Little Toaster, you might think that things are just things. You’re wrong: things have feelings, and the worst feeling of all is to be abandoned. Or hungry, but my unique psychosis doesn’t provide a convenient mapping for which to project “hungry” onto a slightly rusted Ford side-oiler.
When you’re throwing away something that’s perfectly (or even like sixty percent) good, then you’re condemning that thing to an early death. How would you like it if a gummed up Sanden air conditioning compressor threw you in the trash? You wouldn’t, or at least you’d prefer that a nice RYC came by afterward, brushed the dirt off you and gave you a new coat of paint. Again, I don’t know where I’m going with this. Let’s start over.
The obvious downside of believing that things have feelings is that you won’t chuck out even the broken ones. After all, you’d never see an episode of Hoarders set in a hospital where they demand that the nurses ice all those old people they keep holding onto; mostly because the machine megaminds at the core of the insurance companies have already bled those geezers dry by then and kick them into the parking lot themselves.
You should look hard at the next thing you’re about to chuck in the bin. Can I repair it? Could it be useful to someone else? Are some parts of it still good and reusable elsewhere? If I believe that it has a tiny voice pleading with me not to kill it, can I really go through with murdering another sentient thing that just happens to take the form of a defective three-hole punch?
All the world’s a hardware store, and we are just the idiots endlessly roaming the aisles to try and find that stupid little metal piece that goes on the door to catch the latch. Seriously, this whole huge store and you only have one of them? Who has a house with brass-plated doorknobs?
Throughout human history, folks have tried to understand. Is it possible to attain enlightenment? If the local enormous home-improvement conglomerate is any indication, no. In their great wisdom, however, the megacorp jerks have accidentally figured out a way for us to beat the odds: the humble curbside pickup. Although this can take hours and hours to get even the smallest item, it is invaluable when you just don’t know where the hell it is in the store.
Yes, there is a more humane way to figure out the location of items than to tranquilize and mark the store employees with GPS-enabled ear tags. You could ask an employee to use the in-store computer, but to do so is to admit defeat. Hardened, problem-solving individuals such as you and I never admit defeat. Hence, the “You-Track-Em” kit that I bought from the estate sale of a local naturalist who tragically got eaten by a bear on live TV while doing a “bit” for the morning news.
There are a couple flaws – for instance, you need to know which employee to bag and tag. The guy who runs the paint counter never goes anywhere other than the break room, the bathroom, and the paint counter. That’s obvious, of course, but which guy on the auto repair desk do you think is the one that gets trusted to go into the warehouse when you phone up to order a battery? It’s not the junior. Always look for the forklift certification - that’s how you reach enlightenment, my child.
Please don’t bring a Monopoly set to parties at my place, thanks: we’re already at each others’ throats. This is because we are all passionate debaters about how best to strip paint from metal.
You might think that this is a simple and solved problem: the hardware store has a chemical called “paint stripper.” This chemical can be bought, and then applied to the metal. Job’s done. In actuality, however, you are just at the tip of the iceberg: most kinds of “civilian” paint stripper is best referred to as “paint loosener,” because your ass will still be there all day scraping paint off of the surface, except now it’s rubbery and smells like a dog with diarrhea shit out a kindergarten classroom that was also the unfortunate victim of an arson.
Obviously, I’m a fan of the mechanical removal method. I have an array – some would say harem – of angle grinders hanging on the wall of my Workin’ Shed, and every single one of them is loaded with their own unique beautiful abrasive disc. From the good-old 120-grit flap disc to the bourgeois 3M eraser wheels I had to steal from work, there’s all sorts of options for ignoring whatever used to be on the surface and just turning it into extremely carcinogenic dust on your way to what’s left of the quarter panel on your target vehicle.
Of course, this technique has a tendency to also knock off the lumps of Bondo the previous owner replaced the entire fender with, but it’s better to be honest than to tell a comforting lie. And if the entire car is made out of “Rich Man’s Bondo,” aka fibreglass? Well, your Corvette is going to be reduced to just a frame, and then I’m going to turn it into a kick-ass go-kart.
The third option, of course, is to head over to Mad Scientist Sam’s corner of the yard and dip the entire car in her nightmare electrolytic bath. Her crazy shit uses the power of lightning and magnetism to migrate all the rust off of your stuff onto something useless and sacrificial nearby, such as a Dodge Ram. Sure, it works slow, but it’s work that you don’t have to do, which is actually pretty appealing to me. If only there were a little more direct interaction… maybe I can trick that university professor trapped in her shed into making me some kind of special laser in exchange for his “freedom.”
When I worked in a fabrication shop, we had a whole pile of metal swarf that needed cleaning up all the time. Whenever you cut or ground something, it would spit a fine mist of metallic crap onto the floor. Juniors used to clean it up, but one particular junior didn’t really care for all that sweeping: me.
I set about automating my own job away. With the company coffee club money, “we” bought a Chinese knockoff Roomba that I glued a strong magnet to the underside of. For obvious reasons, he was nicknamed “Mr. Mustache,” and would happily bumble around the shop picking up metal scrap and dust bunnies. This state of affairs lasted for several months.
Over this time, a lot of the older guys had developed a particular affinity for Mr. Mustache. He had gone from labour-saving device to a sort of de facto mascot. One of the guys would spill a bunch of bolts on the floor, let out a shout, and then we’d all stop working and surround Mr. Mustache, taking bets like gamblers at a cockfight. Would he manage to scoop all that shit up, or just get stuck and start emitting his sad little beep-boop “please rescue me” error code?
I wish I could tell you that Mr. Mustache’s story had a happy ending, but there aren’t very many knockoff Roombas who end up getting to take a long retirement on the beach. When the big bosses at work started offering aerospace fabrication services, we were all concerned about our own jobs. Way too much so, in fact, to worry about whether scrap aluminum swarf was magnetic.
We’ve all seen those funny little diamond signs on the back of semi trucks. They serve two purposes: indicating what hazardous material is onboard the truck, and a fidget toy for bored workers at the loading dock. It’s easy to remember the codes: the higher the number, the more fucked you are.
However, there’s an opening here: hazardous materials signs for cars. Because nowadays a lot of packages are delivered by stringers directed by an unaccountable algorithm and placed under extreme duress due to the precarious and arbitrary nature of their employment, it’s possible that any given Camry or Elantra on the highway could be carrying a trunk full of ebike batteries or sixteen pounds of fruit flies.
We here at Switch Safety Solutions have determined that the best way to convey this information is through a method that many drivers will find comfortingly familiar: bumper stickers. That area of the back of the car where your uncle used to threaten to murder tailgaters? Now it’s a place where you mention that you occasionally carry hydrochloric acid without any training or licensing. Hey, I bet that’s pretty effective against tailgaters too.
Now, there are some flaws with our plan. Because bumper stickers are hard to remove, every second car is going to be driving around with a pile of them mashed onto the bumper, threatening a broad array of specific bodily harm. This, however, is much safer than the alternative of suddenly finding out that the Mercedes CLA down the block is the inadvertent perpetrator of an international war crime. I mean, in more ways than just how it looks.
We’ve all been too hot in our homes, places of work, or other areas filled with aerosolized generalized anxiety disorder. That’s why the lead-paint-licking geniuses of a bygone era invented the air conditioner. Now, you can live in the most terribly overheated parts of the world and pretend that you are enjoying a pleasant Midwestern fall afternoon instead of an endless scorching hell, just so long as you never go outside.
When I was asked to give a talk to the local scout group about exactly how air conditioning works, I was troubled. For one thing, I thought they deliberately lost my number after that whole drunken rant about torque wrenches. And for another, I didn’t actually have a functional air conditioner in any of my cars. Before I was going to try and guest-parent some poorly educated children, I first had to de-deadbeat dad myself, and do some learning.
Although the local public library was closed for some reason, those egghead librarians didn’t expect me to own my own right-hand-drive fire truck imported from Japan. Otherwise, they’d have locked the second-storey windows. Why am I driving around in a 5/12ths-scale fire truck anyway? Because it was cheaper than hiring some idiots to take my Christmas lights down, although I then realized that my house didn’t have any Christmas lights due to my religion (Honda Red Flag Latter-Days.) There, in the tax-funded delight of an empty reading room, I consumed every book I could on air conditioning theory.
Did it make me an expert? No, but none of the parents in attendance knew enough to question me, either. I even threw in a few deliberate curveballs to see if they were paying attention, but unfortunately I think a couple kids went home that night thinking that compressors were built out of ground-up refrigerator ice makers instead of what they’re really made out of: frost fairies who failed to please the Ice God.
A gang of scientists burst into my small corner office, cramming themselves into the doorframe like the Three Stooges. They were excited to have observed a new phenomena, and constructed an elaborate experiment to test for its presence. All they needed was their favourite guinea pig: Little Miss Marbles. And once they fed her a little bit of celery so she could have a nice nap, the scientists came over to ask me to get in the fucking car.
Now, I’ve been working at the Institute for Honda Research since the mid-90s. At first, it was on a purely informal basis: I’d show up, pound a couple B-series to the redline, maybe swap in a Japanese import motor into a vehicle that didn’t deserve it. Collect a cheque. As the economy went to shit, however, and people turned away from reliable and modest Hondas that they could no longer afford in favour of ostentatious Mercedes they definitely could not afford, there was not a lot of engine-swapping and stereo-adapter work left for me. Unless I wanted to be the test pilot, which I absolutely did.
What the eggheads had rounded up for me on this fine summer evening was a rarity: a 1999 Civic that was broken in. Somehow, they had managed to find a little hatchback with 572,000 miles on the odometer. Usually, they rusted away to nothing, or were crashed long before then, but now at long last the rings had finally seated and all the tolerances were according to the design that Soichiro himself had torn from the head of Amaterasu. It would be my job to change the oil for the third time.
About fifteen minutes later, I emerged from beneath the Civic with slightly stained hands. This baby is ready for another trip to the moon and back at least, I boasted, and maybe someone should put an MP3 CD player in here. The scientists didn’t much like that proposal. Too many variables for them.
Remote-controlled cars have always had a special appeal to me. There’re all the fragile bits and unexpected large expenses of a real car, but everything is much smaller, so you can fix it on your desk instead of having to find a parking lot where the security guard isn’t paying attention to a crew of filthy assholes trying to drop a driveshaft.
Of course, there is another way in which they’re the same as a real car: there’s nowhere to race the damn things in my city. The last R/C racetrack closed sometime in the mid-90s. Come to think of it, that was probably around the same time the guy who ran the Radio Shack in the Sundowner Mall was photographed with all those Robie robotic banks in a compromising position. Without a legitimate place to race, a lot of street racing happened (drifting around cul-de-sacs, abandoned lots, the police station when the cops were out) which naturally resulted in your classic law-enforcement crackdowns.
I still continue to maintain and modify the pile of overpowered children’s toys I have in my inventory. Like with my real cars, one day the race track might come back. And if it doesn’t, it’s not like I’m unfamiliar with the concept of leaving vehicles to rot for years on end in their parking spots. It’s a lot easier to ship these on eBay, at least.
It stood to reason that with enough exposure to ads, humanity would eventually tune out. Advertisers tried to keep up and evolved like the viruses they were. They escaped into the internet, stuffing a twenty-minute-long video about restoring a Tonka truck with no fewer than eight ads. Then, once even that stopped working, they turned to the Influencers. At first, those folks were human beings, just like you and me. And once they failed to elicit the correct response, the corporations shook up their biotechnology divisions and started a nightmare project: birthing perfect brand representatives in every way. I’m a spam hunter; it’s my job to kill those new people.
I don’t really ask questions of the higher-ups about why I do what I do. I guess I just fell into the job. As far back as I can remember, they’d been asking me to take out someone who got just a little bit too inorganic in their endorsement of novelty shower curtains. Instinct wasn’t enough, too: you had to be sure. There was a test.
On the first generation, that test was quick to fail. You’d ask them a couple questions about an authentic human experience: first loves, a favourite neighbourhood bakery, the stock market in France. Then you would sit back, and just let them talk. Within five minutes or less, they’d loop the same hokey pre-programmed story into a plug for wireless earbuds or thigh-shaping underwear, and that’s when the banhammer came out. Easy money. Then the advertisers adapted, again.
Now they can sink a million product placements into an ordinary observation, like you’re watching some sort of turn-of-the-century soap opera. Really subtle-like. Fooled a lot of the other guys, made them sweat. Not me, though, because I keep my armpits clean with Arm & Hammer Android Deodorant: the perfect chemical slurry to use for those pesky robots. Anyway, as I was saying, advertisers: total scum, can’t trust ‘em. I got this job to go down south…
Train enthusiasm is one of the things that unifies everyone who lives outside North America. Here, trains just didn’t catch on very well, possibly because our trains were deliberately sabotaged by a collection of ne'er-do-wells who were obsessed with the personal automobile, and so they’re all slow pieces of shit that arrive infrequently, break down if a frog burps nearby, and sometimes contain a surprise stabbing. Now, it is true that I’m hooked on the personal automobile. There is something the train offers you that cars never can: a chance to be incredibly drunk at high speeds, without having to go through a TSA checkpoint first.
The local government was looking for proposals for new spending. These kind of proposals are usually just a request for their friends to ask them for money, but sometimes an idiot like myself can slip in through the procurement process. My technique is top-secret, but my attorney wants to point out that there is nothing illegal about copying the letterhead from one of the other candidates’ proposals and changing one of the letters. Not that this is what I’m doing.
Anyway, I got the gig, and I soon found myself with five hundred million dollars in my bank account and a demand to build high-speed rail to the next town. The first thing I did is – for the first time in my life – order new tires for my car. I deserve it, after all, and my fellow country club inhabitants will frown upon my current “tires” made out of reclaimed burlap that’s been stitched together with cable ties. After that, though? Right to Wikipedia, to figure out just how fast “high-speed” is in North America.
It turns out that it’s not actually very fast at all. Technically, it can be satisfied by any vehicle capable of reaching a percentage of highway speeds. I kicked a cool mil to my buddy Galvy Shakes Gail, and she tack-welded together a succession of old steel-bumpered Cutlasses from my backyard. Then, a quick weld to the steering rack to lock the wheel in place, and we had ourselves some very luxurious passenger comfort. Unlike most rail, each car in the “train” produces its own additional thrust, which means that if everyone floors it for the entire trip you can happily exceed safe speeds, at least until you start going up a hill and the torque converters start to slip. We didn’t have enough money left in the budget to put fresh transmission fluid in.
Yes, it is an unfortunate fact of our system that in one direction (Drive) the trip is much faster than in the return (Reverse,) but that’s the case with airplanes too. To solve this problem, we anticipate receiving more money from the federal government in order to convert our train line into a sort of “hyper(bole) loop,” in which the cars will never have to reverse but instead just keep flooring it. You’re good for a few more hundred mil, right?
Paint chemistry. Nobody knows a single goddamn thing about it, especially painters. It turns out even if you start your career with an understanding of alkyd enamels versus water-based low-VOC paint, forty years of sitting in a paint booth huffing it will make sure that you don’t remember anything. As a result, everyone has their favourites. For me, I’m sort of a connoisseur of hardware-store $6 spray bombs.
Every brand has their own unique method of application, and by which I mean “different lies on the can.” If you’re vague enough about what it works with, then you can escape lawsuits when it turns out that your own brand of primer fucks up your own brand of colour, which in turn fucks up your own brand of clear. We didn’t explicitly say that our shit actually works with our shit, that was just an unfortunate assumption on the part of the plaintiff.
On top of that, hardware stores get their paint from all kinds of different vendors anyway. You can’t be sure that the Red Tractor Molester came from the same factory as the Green Tractor Fondler, which is the main reason why it’s $6. I’ve bought one can, and gone back to the store the next weekend to buy more, and it’s gone out of stock, never to return.
As a result, when I find something that I like, I go a little bit nuts. That’s why every corner of my garage is stuffed with loosely-arranged cans that vaguely match my baby-shit-brown daily-driver Volare. Sure, the shelf life on these babies is supposed to be only 3-5 years, but who knows how long it’s been bouncing around Taiwanese paint markets before getting scooped into the arms of Big Home Depot? It certainly can’t produce a worse finish than the original, which is important when I suddenly have to get a whole new front end that looks like I didn’t just run over the Mayor’s dog with it in the next fifteen minutes before the cops manage to break down my double-reinforced garage door with that battering ram.
Everyone who is even a little bit into cars obsesses over the concept of the “barn find.” In the popular imagination, every farmhouse, barn, and quonset is hiding a once-junk car that has now appreciated vastly in value and just take a little bit of wrenching to return to the road. Can’t find a hyper-rare Corvette? Farmer Brown’s probably hoarding like seven of them, the fucker.
Of course, this can’t possibly be true. Farmer Brown is a Ford guy, as evidenced by the frequent electrical fires around his property. What you’re really looking for in my neck of the woods is not so much the barn find, but the hoarder shitpile. Out in the more aggressively rural areas, there’s a lot of folks who have filled their excess farmland with broken cars. Maybe they were cheap once at auction, or some city boys drove it onto the property with the intent to camp there and then “disappeared.”
Are these cars valuable? Absolutely not. Most of them are rancid examples of extremely common vehicles, and have about the same chance of appreciating in value as I do of becoming the next Pope. However, the exact kind of car I’m looking for is the everyday boring shitbox. Not just because it’s cheap, but because the proletarian automobile has an inherent merit. Or at least that’s what I tell the property owners when I’m trying to wrest free from their grasp a rotten old Festiva with sagging doors and a mouldy interior.
However, this strategy never works. Those savvy rural property owners have had to humour dozens of barn-find hunters who are convinced that their murder shed is actually a Grand National shed. And as such, they want actual cash money instead of pretty words for the heaps falling apart in their back forty. The dream remains alive.
Everyone I know misses the old-school video arcade. I don’t mean the “retro” arcades you can go to today. No, because the whole point of going to those arcades is the machines, those machines are practically revered. Front and centre, always clean. They’re properly maintained, which is absurd. What I craved was the excitement of going to the community hockey rink and discovering a badly hammered Ms. Pac-Man in the corner.
Naturally, the economics just aren’t “there” anymore. Nobody carries quarters to stuff into the machines, for one thing. And today’s absentee speculation-mad landlords see no need to actually drive customers into their buildings and strongly prefer that they do not.
The only solution to this imbalance – as with so many other things in life – was to apply guerilla violence. I got together a gang of other jerks, namely Ted who finally got his Econoline running on seven out of eight cylinders, and we reverse-shoplifted arcade games into places around the neighbourhood. The taco restaurant, the aforementioned community centre, the roller derby arena: they all caught a couple of fine 80s-styled arcade machines.
Now, none of us actually had the money to buy real videoed games. They’re desirable to collectors now, and therefore expensive. What we used were a bunch of waterlogged cabinets that Janessica found in the dump, and strapped some PCs she stole from her job inside. A little bit of copyright infringement later, and all the kids in town were ready to enjoy my entree into the game development pantheon of heroes: Volare Hunter. It’s a highly realistic simulation about owning a 1974 Plymouth Volare (or Dodge Aspen, once you’ve beaten it once.)
Alas, our attempt to turn the world back to mid-late 1983 was another glorious failure. Some of the cryptopunk kids figured out how to mine bitcoins on the machine, which made the game run like shit. To be honest, it made it a little bit more realistic, including the part where maintaining it was making someone else a lot of money.
When you’re low on cash – and in my case, when the private investigator hired by the unemployment office to tail you gets carjacked because he was dumb enough to drive a new rental Camry into your neighbourhood – you’ll take whatever job you can get that puts food on the table. For me, that new employment was as an assistant to a consulting detective.
This detective was very different from the goon that was surveilling my home. For one thing, he was still alive. And another: he liked having me around. The monomaniacal focus on automobiles that occupies more than ninety-five percent of my memory was an asset to his investigative skills. He would show me blurry surveillance-camera shots of cars leaving gas station robberies: that’s a 2011-2015 Elantra Touring, boss. I believe it’s a manual transmission with a dicky left-front lower ball joint and the driver is a little chunky, because the shock in that corner is known to be underdamped from the factory.
Sometimes, he’d haul in a chunk of a headlight bucket or a bumper clip from a hit-and-run and I’d know what it was within seconds of sticking it in my mouth. At first, I did this component-tasting as a joke: it was obvious what car and paint code it came from just by looking at the part. Then he began to expect the entire routine, which seemed to fascinate him. He managed to track down and arrest a serial poisoner with a 1996 Concorde, whose tail lights tasted a bit like White Rabbit candies for some reason.
Ultimately, I quit that job, because having to work for a living was really starting to put a crimp in my project to-do list. I still stayed on in a contract capacity, however, until his nemesis finally got the better of him in some sort of duel to the death on top of a clock tower. These things happen, I said to the victor, while sucking gently on a Toyota MAP sensor.
Regular readers of this column may remember that I have a long-abiding hatred for the idea of actually buying car batteries. They’re expensive consumables and difficult for the average human being to repair, and so Big Battery has enjoyed an unassailable power over “getting your fucking car to run.”
For years leading up to the incident, I refused to play their game. Whenever I got rid of a car or just abandoned it on the roadside, I’d keep the battery. Through the magic of averages, I would more-or-less always have a working battery around with which to try and jump others. That is, until I went to jail for a little while on an unrelated matter. The delicate balance of my battery maintenance had been interrupted in my absence, and so everything was now stone dead.
This was okay. At the time, I lived on a really steep hill, and so I could push out my target vehicle onto the street and try to pop start it using Mother Nature’s battery: gravitational potential energy. If the car didn’t fire up by the time it was reaching the ravine at the bottom of the street, I’d bail out, walk up the hill and try again with another. It’s not like it was a particular surprise to my neighbours to find burned-out Plymouths in the ravine, I never registered anything in the first place so Johnny Law didn’t get involved, and it actually served as somewhat of a free mini-junkyard for me, in the same way that finding a $20 bill in the pockets of an old coat is free money.
Unfortunately, due to the city selling out to builders, the ravine was eventually concreted over and turned into a recreational centre for the neighbourhood. My technique was no longer practical. Why? Mostly because the new parking lot was occupied at all hours of the day by various youth groups, who tended to open fire when they saw an out-of-control car careening towards them. I decided that it would be better to get a functioning battery, and also not drive anything with an obvious carb backfire past there for the next few months.
Over the next few weeks, I learned a lot about batteries. Namely, that the dollar store didn’t let you return an entire pack of AAs that you soldered together with leftover paperclips. “All sales are final,” according to the manager who clearly enjoyed lording her cockeyed morality over scumbags such as myself.
Even though I was demoralized by the entire experience, I soon found a solution that would allow me to keep operating my fleet of shitboxes. Converting a car to lawnmower pull starters is both easier and cheaper than you would imagine, and you can run the cord right out through the convenient rust holes in the fender. It is true that it takes a lot of strength to pull the cord, but a lot of people drive down my street pretty fast and I’m getting good at lassoing their door-handles with it as they sail past.
Sponsorship is one of those things nobody wants to talk about. It’s ugly, feels greasy, and it makes the entire world of auto racing only a huge money loser instead of a colossal one. Even though it’s quite distasteful to take cash from, say, a tobacco company, it sure makes it easy to decide what colour to paint the car.
My ambition was to have a bunch of corporate stooges backstop my entire season of racing. Flat-spotting a set of tires by being a little hard on the brakes? Not a big deal if Daddy Warbucks is giving me some cash every time his logo appears in the middle of the race broadcast. Unfortunately, corporations are cut-throat assholes, and as such primarily want someone who wins or even finishes races as opposed to some jerk with a rot-boxed Volare dressed up like a Richard Petty shopping spree in the Pamida cocaine aisle.
Believe me, I tried even the local sponsors who would be happy to vig up a few bucks in exchange for any coverage whatsoever. Local news, hell, even a couple photos on the autocross club’s website, those I can deliver. I sent out my best business representative (me, but wearing a fake mustache which I believed gave me special Lying Powers critical for negotiations.) Nobody bit, mostly because of The Economy (which is a word that adults use instead of I Don’t Want To Do It) but also because, again, I couldn’t win or place at those races either.
In the end, I realized that you have to fake it until you make it. For only a couple bucks, there are some friendly folks on AliExpress who will make a copy of existing corporate liveries, tweak a few letters, and send you vinyls to slap on your car. Then, with the sponsorship from other seemingly-reputable brands like Sorny and Magnetbox, I would be able to leverage my way into real sponsors, who actually exist. This worked almost too well: although I didn’t necessarily get any sponsors out of it, my fake erectile dysfunction clinic, Switch’s Dick Fix, received so many calls from interested customers that I decided to actually go into business. Now I’m so worried about the FDA finally figuring out I don’t really have a medical license that I no longer have any time for racing, which solved the entire problem.
When you’re a person who Does Things, one of the ways you compare yourself to other Doing Things People is to show off your collection of spare parts. It’s not hoarding, because you’re prepared. Even if you’re not into electronics, one of the things everyone who is in the know will stock up on is power supplies.
It’s easy to get started. Are you throwing away a cell phone, cable box, a set of computer speakers, maybe some miscellaneous piece of shit that lights up and makes noise? Take the power supply and hold onto it. You never know when you’ll get another thing that might need the exact specification of life-giving juice that only this one brick can provide, and it’s not like it takes up much room, either. Scientists predict that every human being in North America is within five or fewer meters of over thirty power adapters at all times. Is it massively inefficient? Yes, but welcome to The Developed World. Sure, you can wear your shoes indoors. Statistically, we’ll be burning this house down for the insurance money in six to eight years.
Perhaps the driving cause behind this is that buying a loose power brick is so expensive. That thing that came with your vacuum cleaner and cost Bissell about thirty cents to make? No, we’re resellers on some sleazy website and now we want twenty-two fucking dollars or you can forget about sucking up all those picked-clean bird bones off your deck.
Naturally, there is the temptation to do more with these humble bricks on occasion whenever a cache of them is unearthed in the home and the faces of your beloved family members become Concerned. If you want to preserve the integrity of your hoard, you better come up with some way to make this shit useful, pronto. A friend of mine was bullied by his kids and a producer from A&E’s hit show Power Supply Intervention into building a high-voltage railgun out of about sixty bricks. He put a chunk of old bolt through several neighbours’ houses, and now he’s in jail, where he is powerless to keep said kids from listing his power supplies at a garage sale. I’ll give them back to him when he gets out, sure, if I have any doubles. Or triples.
Is there anything better than a weekend day with nice weather? You can sit outside, crushing beers and getting shit done around the property. If it’s not too hot, you can basically stay in the sun all day. On days like this, I find myself quickly ripping through my to-do list, which is why I had to invent increasingly elaborate reasons to go to the hardware store instead.
Now, it is absolutely true that I could have simply shifted onto other projects rather than waste thirty minutes of this valuable golden time driving to the Uncle Grandpa’s Toolhole®, but as a starving freelance journalist who needs to pay off some mounting legal bills, I’m obligated to go where the story is. And the story today was in finding out what my neighbours and fellow community-members were up to on their own homes. The best place to do that used to be to hang out inside the store, but since that requires a more advanced set of breathing apparatus than I use in my paint booth (an old Emerson, Lake and Palmer t-shirt over the mouth; some wet kleenex crammed up the nose) the next best thing is to hang out next to the curbside pickup spots and snoop.
To chase this story, I took some big risks. I’m not one of those people who likes to park close to the store, which is difficult in this modern era. Because the employees don’t like walking very far, every store’s curbside-pickup area is occupying the same primo real estate that used to be – in the Beforetimes – the sole domain of people who would ding your doors. Even though I no longer have anything that can be legally described as “doors” on my long-suffering Volare, the point still stands. During my observation from my vantage point near the cart corral, I anxiously looked at my car every ten seconds, and began to flop sweat every time a Toyota Highlander filled with children entered the parking lot. Amazingly, I suffered no damage that wasn’t caused by a strong wind, and I got the story.
Back home, I meticulously constructed my local-news work. This weekend, I cried out, there are immense deals on still-overpriced power tools for “Father’s Day.” Just who is this Father that they worship and sacrifice for? Despite asking some pointed questions, I was unable to find him, but all it would take is more trips to the hardware store. I had forgotten to actually pick up my package during the six-hour stakeout of the lot.
Part of your transition from asshole to fully-fledged professional asshole is about learning how to admit when you made a stupid mistake. We’ve all fucked up at work. Even if the guy down the hall keeps screwing things up in production and forcing you to clean up his mess, it’s not like you don’t also have your blindspots, biases, and 3am sleep-deprivation mistakes. Anyone who’s spent an entire weekend undoing a mere hour or so of wrongheaded wiring can attest to this, which is why I invented a robot called The Humbler.
Now, I know what you’re going to say: isn’t “The Humbler” the name of an infamous street-racing-encouraging performance exhaust package offered on the Pontiac GTO in its heyday of street racing? Yes, and that’s what I was originally trying to build. Unfortunately, I fucked up, and I accidentally created an artificially-intelligent robot that is less memento mori and more “you’re gonna do something really stupid today”-mori. I didn’t do well in Latin class.
Every day, when I wake up around noon, that stupid asshole robot notices and issues a highly accurate projection about all the ways I’m going to disappoint myself and others. I’ve tried locking him out of the house before, but in response he’ll do donuts on the back lawn while shouting at the neighbours about their foibles, which doesn’t do much to endear myself to either the local tongs nor teenage girl gangs. And I’d remove the speaker, but I couldn’t find my good wire strippers, a fact which he reminds me of on occasion.
Really, it seems like my only major success in life might be The Humbler. If you spend like five minutes around him, he learns enough about your way of life to knock your self-esteem into the fucking toilet. A door-to-door plumbing insurance saleswoman came by the other day, and I had to talk her out of driving her van off a cliff afterward. He’s not perfect, though. I forgot to weld some tool holders (or even hands) onto him, which means he isn’t very helpful around the shop.
Everyone gets mad at the Chevrolet Corvair because of its confusing air-cooled flat engine, the rear swing-arm suspension that occasionally adds a little extra excitement to your commute, and the gear selector designed by Martians. If you can overlook all of that, though, you can get a mid-engined pickup truck. Where else are you going to get that? Honda? Oh, right, yes.
Ignoring the entire country of Japan, the Corvair is the only game in town. Now, most people think of the Corvair as a sporty coupe or sedan that offers Porsche danger at budget prices. They forget about the van and truck-van trims, which gave the same opportunity to exit the road backwards and on fire to deliverypersons and kidnappers. Normally, this sort of obscurity leads to low resale value, and cheap cartruckvans for hauling the carcasses of other cartruckvans home from the pick-and/or-pull. Not so, unfortunately, because we live in the apocalypse where pickup trucks are considered a show vehicle and all vans are houses.
With this in mind, the only acceptable conclusion is to make your own. It’s not that hard to find a rusty Corvair coupe these days, and bodyshop techs can be plied with any combination of exotic hallucinogens in order to make them enter the Bondo Trance and fibreglass up a composite truck bed where the rear quarters used to exist before a swinger shortened the ass of the car with the help of literally any obstacle near the sides of the road. Or, you could just take the trunk lid off and throw your tools on top of the engine fan. It’s not like that’s important, right?
There’s two kinds of repairs: the ones where you know what you’re doing the whole time, and the fixes where you just get lucky. When I was growing up, my old Grandpa Switch used to say: “it’s better to be lucky than good.” This was a great maxim for him to live by, especially since he got hit by lightning (twice!) and survived.
Personally, having grown up with my parents, a group of would-be carnies who aspired to escape the office rat race, I decided it would be best to make my own luck. Throughout childhood and early adolescence, there was nothing I liked more than finding some busted-ass old junk and giving it new life. I certainly didn’t enjoy riding from state to state in the back of my folks’ old Fury III on every weekend, hoping they could find a small enough carnival that would be willing to teach my folks the ropes.
It broke my dad’s heart when I told him that instead of this life they had planned for themselves and me, I would rather go to engineering school. Only at this school, I was convinced, would I be able to find the secrets of how to repair everything. It took less than a semester to find out two things: one, you don’t actually learn how to fix anything in first-year engineering school, and two, the Bubble Bobble machine in the student lounge had a tantalizingly low high score and an easily picked lock on the coin box enabling free play. My grades dropped, but the knack for fixing shit persisted. At least half of the time. Anything I couldn’t fix just got thrown in the back, for spare parts, or maybe to attract co-eds from the modern art classes or something.
Now, in adulthood, as I live in a dark cave of shattered junk from previous decades, I realize that Grandpa was right. After all, if I was good at repairing things, someone would have hired me to do it by now. And then I would be stuck in meetings all day rather than figuring out what the least amount of license plates I’ll need to use in order to sew the frame of this Diplomat back together.
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tags: dodge, dodge diplomat, plymouth, plymouth fury iii
We here at the Switch Institute for Higher Physics have located an inexhaustible source of matter. No, not energy, but maybe we could melt it down or something? Either way, we found a way to produce an infinite number of screws.
As you may be aware, disassembling something and then reassembling it leaves some screws and bolts left over. This phenomenon has been observed and documented by hobbyists, mechanics, engineers, and repairfolx since time immemorial. However, it’s just because it’s such a mundane occurrence that they’ve overlooked that disassembling and reassembling the same thing again produces more screws. In fact, if the object being torn down has enough screws, you never seem to run out.
For our proof of concept, we’ve kidnapped this group of university students and fed them methamphetamine and VCRs. All of the excess screws get collected into this vacuum system, and centrally retrieved into this room. Follow me please. Yes, as you can see, the shelves are starting to collapse, and yet we only have about eight VCRs left in the room. Our top matter-touchers now believe that up to 2000% of the mass of a 1980s consumer electronics product may be screws.
You might think that this is a panacea: we have solved all of humanity’s problems. Not so. Because of Murphy’s Law, despite the millions of different kinds of screws being generated by this phenomenon, none of them are ever the right fucking one you need right now. They’re all too long, or have the wrong thread, or are Torx for some reason. The research continues.
We’re not like you fancy country slickers. My wife and I are just humble city folk from the upper-middle-middle-class suburbs, who make our living rustling spreadsheets all day long. There’s no way we can have a drunken conversation about two-stroke snowmobile engines for upwards of an hour, because we drive a Toyota Camry.
When there’s a crime near us, we have to call someone else to shoot wildly at the wrong person. The whole experience is very traumatic, and sometimes we have to go to an expensive small town like yours in order to get away from the horror of our recent past. Are those crullers? They’re live bait, you say? Good lord. Sandra, these people have time to fish. I think the Queen must live like this.
What we do have is a little thing that the self-help books tell us is called stick-to-it-ive-ness. Instead of taking big tax breaks for pony farming and running multinational agricultural corporations in our spare time, we go to the Home Depot and pretend we know how to caulk a bath surround. I wouldn’t even know what to do with a board of directors meeting, much less an IPO. Hell, we’re not even tough enough to be condo dwellers, but maybe in our retirement we’ll get there some day.
I think with your help, and money, we could build a suburb for disadvantaged people just like ourselves way out here. Then, we could look at your beautiful, authentic meth shacks. With any luck, we would pretend we’re one of the truly free, before climbing back into the RX350 for a four-hour commute to the office.
At no point in my entire lifetime have I been comfortable with gears. Their interactions are complicated, and I don’t like thinking of things in terms of ratios. I don’t really have a good intuitive sense of how they work. There is a constant worry in my mind that I’ll put it back together one-eighteenth of a millimetre off and ruin the entire system. They have so many teeth.
Nobody has ever been able to cure me of this fear. That’s why I tried out the new hypnotherapist that opened up at the end of the street, in the corner store that used to have the tattoo shop before it was that ill-fated rolled ice cream seller that was an obvious front for meth distribution. I figured Dr. Mesh, as he called himself, would be able to reach deep into my subconscious and lift the mental block that kept me from becoming the best transmission-disassembler I could be. And if I could figure out how to reassemble them afterwards, so much the better.
The initial therapy didn’t go well. I arose from a gentle slumber to find the treatment room ransacked. Curtains were torn from their rod, the desk had a fire axe stuck in it, and my therapist was nowhere to be seen. This was concerning, of course, but I was primarily worried about whether there was still any free coffee left in the pot out front, and left the scene of carnage in order to go check out the waiting room. It was there, after my second cup, that I discovered a shaking and visibly terrified Dr. Mesh. For some reason, he had decided to hide under a glass coffee table, on top of which were some issues of Road and Track from 1998 (too new for me.) I offered him my hand to help him up, but he recoiled and scooted across the floor on his back, finally bumping into the corner of the waiting room between a chair and the water cooler, then breaking into screaming sobs when he realized he was trapped.
In order to calm Mesh’s hysterical panic, I began reading to him from his own R&Ts. It took well into the review of the then-new XJ8 facelift (plastic headlight lenses!) before he began to regain his composure. He would still screech when I got any closer to him than we were already standing, so I decided to ask some questions while I had him cornered.
“They put some kind of block in there,” he screeched again. “You got so violent, as soon as I said the words ‘balk ring.’“ He was right. I was starting to feel a swelling anger, which was not normal unless I had a tool in my hand. This all gave me a pretty good excuse to skip out on the bill, so I put on my best murder-robot impression and then walked right out the front door without paying.
It wasn’t until I was on the way home that I realized that my trip to the Netherlands a few years previous now made more sense. In a flash, I knew exactly what had happened, the block cleared by Mesh’s inadvertent mention of my activation phrase. Those lost days weren’t just drunken carousing followed by a swim in a canal: I had been kidnapped by ex-DAF employees, who suckered me in with a cherry-looking Volvo 480 and brainwashed me for days. Their goal: to find a mechanic who could make a CVT that doesn’t suck. Fat chance, brainiacs.
One of the most glorious inventions of the human species is the humble reset button. Not going your way? Got confused about what’s just happened? Angry for some incoherent reason? Mash that button and everything should be alright in a couple seconds. Before the reset button was invented, we’d have to savagely pull the power cord out of the wall, like British people or Commodore 64 owners.
Thing is, the reset button has gone away in recent times. I’ll wait here while you look around your house to find a single object made in this century that has one. Nowadays, if your shit breaks, it’s an obscure combination of keys at best, and otherwise you’re back to the time of Charles Dickens in yanking the cord out and hoping the batteries run down soon.
That’s not right: in our increasingly computerized society, it’s way more likely that things will need resetting now than ever before. It’s not like software developers have gotten any better at predicting the negative outcomes of their actions. This is why SwitchCo’s new line of 2022 Autodrive® products all come with a prominent “RESET” button. No matter what’s happening, if you mash this button you are guaranteed to reset it. Will it break a bunch of other things as it goes down? It’s entirely possible. Is it a good idea to expose a bright red, flashing button on a safety-critical self-driving car platform that takes nearly a half hour to fully reboot and point it at the back seat within the range of a curious child’s arms? We have no data.
In fact, we’re so confident in your ability to control for negative outcomes that the reset button replaces the steering wheel on our new Switchmobiles. Our research showed that, when self-driving, literally none of you were paying attention to the road like we asked anyway, so we figured we would stop pretending.
And the really good thing is how much money it’s saved us in product development – savings which we don’t plan on passing on to you in any way whatsoever. Sure, our software still gets confused about the difference between a road sign, a daycare, and a hot air balloon, and the self-learning system means that every single vehicle we make will eventually become a twitchy mess of neuroses getting spooked by incessant hallucinations, but that’s why we gave you a goddamn reset button! Maybe you should push it some time.
Everyone is talking about hydrogen embrittlement like they just discovered it. I dunno, maybe there’s some popular TikTok or conventional-media talk show discussing the subject right now. Either way, literally every single chat message on my last stream was about how arc-welding an entire Blazer chassis together with a worn-out marine battery using only an old set of rusty steak knives as filler material might compromise the long-term structural integrity of the metal itself. I know, geniuses.
If there’s one thing that’s a constant in life, it’s that others will criticize your welds. When I was in high school, the welder kids would sometimes grab an unsuspecting frosh, jam him or her in an auto-darkening mask and some gloves, and order them to lay some dimes. Even the jocks weren’t immune to this treatment: the captain of the football team fucked up so bad on his hazing that he tried to quench part of a railing with his own urine. Now that these kids have grown up from being the kings of my high school and are now titans of industry, they’ve become even worse.
It’s hard to enjoy a good, casual, weekend weld when you’re comparing yourself to people who do it all the time. That’s why I deliberately do a shitty job: that way, when the thing falls apart in the grocery store parking lot a week later going over a speed bump, I won’t beat myself up too bad. Now if only someone would explain it to all the professional welders who come by my stream just to point and laugh. Maybe then they’d kick me in a few bucks so I can afford some shielding gas.
I think everyone here has had a Mustang Guy in their lives. Some men - and it is almost exclusively men - identify with the Ford Mustang as nearly a religious icon. This blue-collar pony car, despite its humble origin as a slightly uglier Ford Falcon, has grown scores of adherents convinced that it is in fact a giant-slaying muscle car.
Recently, one of my neighbours, who is a Mustang Guy, got a brand new Mustang. It’s lime green, makes good noises, and looks pretty fun to be around. Unfortunately, it makes those good noises at 4am, which is when the driver chooses to uncork the exhaust on his way to the slaughterhouse. It’s not so much a problem for me, as it only serves to gently drown out the screamed profanity as I try to bust loose an underbody bolt at that time of day, but my other neighbours are beginning to erroneously connect these loud exhausts with the idiot they see constantly working on old shitboxes and scaring the neighbourhood kids with Power Cursing®.
Since I only reside in my current place because they collectively refuse to call the police and read the magic words “squatter in a corpse house” into the phone, it’s important that I keep them happy about my residence in the neighbourhood. Therefore, I set about devising an elaborate after-muffler system for my neighbour’s new Mustang.
It was difficult for me to justify spending a lot of effort on something as sacrilegious as making a V8 quieter, so I decided to instead adopt the new cryptocurrency known as LoudCoin. It’s a pretty new idea: the louder you scream, the more imaginary money you produce. This is different from traditional finance, where traders scream loudly, make the imaginary money, and then do cocaine. Here, the computer does the cocaine for you.
A couple tack welds later, and the green Mustang was now tooling around with a meter of piping and a bunch of sketchy-looking wires jutting out of its ass. Now, whenever the neighbour lets one rip on the way out of the cul-de-sac, the throaty cammed roar is muted to a gentle purr, and I get like a seventeenth of a cent in my account. Which is great, because all this muffler work has made me realize I need to buy some more steel wool. A family of mice crawled up the exhaust of my Scamp the other day, and I don’t have enough compression left in the engine to blow them back out.
You might think that a coup is where chickens live. Not so, my friend. We are in the midst of a takeover of our most okayest government organizations by an evil group of fanatics. Unable to trick the public into accepting their deviant beliefs, they have decided to strike at our democratic norms in an attempt to rule us.
I speak, of course, of the Tire Folks. Nobody really needs new tires. If they’re black, round most of the time, and hold air for awhile, you’re good to go. Just because the sidewall date code comes up as “previous century” and makes the inspection computer crash? Doesn’t hold muster.
Now, of course, it’s important to have good tires. For instance, me and a couple of the guys from the brewery tried to enter a stock car race on a set of new winter tires. Complete disaster: the car was mushy in the corners and couldn’t put the power down on the straights. What we should have done is waited until most of the tread is gone, just like the pros do. A gently broken-in tire (say, 100k km or so) is grippier than one that just came out of the factory, scientists are finding now. Which scientists? Tire… scientists?
The most important thing about running old tires is that you can get them from just about anywhere. Creek beds, parking lots, the locked dumpster behind the tire shop where they put the junk tires after taking them off customer cars. People throwing perfectly good tires away in the junkyard is a waste; me picking them up and mounting them on my car before driving at an integer multiple of the interstate speed limit is conserving our scarce natural resources. And it’s developed valuable skills, too: anyone can mount a brand-new tire, but it takes real balls to pop a set of too-narrow trailer tires onto a ten-inch-wide truck steelie using only a pair of cheetahs and a bottle of dollar-store dish soap.
If you’ll excuse me, I just heard the Firestone van pull up in the alley behind my place. Those fuckers think they’ve got me cornered, do they? Let’s see if they know how fast I can drive on four space-saver spares from the 1970s in this blowing snow.
Since the dawn of recorded human history, people have clamoured for a small, trustworthy four-wheel-drive vehicle. Whether it be for farm use, hunting, cousin-fucking, or just general bushwhacking, you cannot find a human being who doesn’t love an off-roading trucklet.
Because of this enthusiasm, supply has not kept up with demand. It turns out that, although everybody wants one, nobody in North America is willing to pay new prices for a cute wheeler. Which means there’s not enough used ones, which means that used prices are way higher than you want them to be. A lot of folks like myself are relegated to fogging up the windows as a bunch of heehaws snap up all the primo Sidekicks and then wreck them, or meticulously attempt to rebuild one already wrecked from a combination of shower caulking and 1980s offroad magazines stolen from the library. We needed another solution – a way to get small offroad vehicles that were also cheap.
In its infinite wisdom, the free market has provided. If you’ve never sold a car on Craigslist, go list yours right now. Doesn’t matter if you have any intention of actually selling it; your email inbox will immediately fill up with offers to trade your vehicle for an ATV. All-terrain vehicles, or quads, are in such vast quantities in even vaguely unrednecky neighbourhoods that you can’t move five feet without tripping over a glorified Power Wheels that someone’s cousin’s nephew was meaning to unstick the carb on “any day now.” And, as such, they’re virtually worthless. That’s where we come in.
I know what you’re about to do: recoil angrily. A Suzuki Jimny is materially different than an ATV, you shriek. And you’d be right; they are different. For instance, a $25,000 ‘81 LJ80 is nearly an inch longer than a $650 side-by-side and has almost 20 horsepower less.
And you can roll that side-by-side into a chicken coop while trying to practice your Evel Knieval routine and replace it with another one that same weekend. As for the bodywork, we’ve commissioned a team of hardcore vacuum formers to produce 4/5ths-scale knockoffs of the original Jimny bodies in thermoformed plastic. Not only does this rust less than the original, but you also don’t need to spend your summer scraping off layers of house-paint camouflage with a putty knife before you can hit the ditch.
It seems like everyone wants to stand in my way now. The government has decided that reviving great old junk from the 70s is “dangerous” and “risky” just because I don’t think intact floorpans, doors, factory safety equipment or windshields should be mandatory, and in fact is an imposition upon my rights under a foundational government document that I haven’t read in its entirety.
You have to listen to the government because they have the military. And if you’ve been programmed correctly by their media experiments, then you respect the adjective of “military-strength.” Tanks are military-strength, you think, and if they can smash down a wall and drive through minefields, then surely that military strength means that the GM transmission I drive to the horse supply store every weekend will live forever. In practice, as with any other professional endeavour on Earth, this strength originates from the willingness to spend cubic megadollars to keep everything in tip-top shape.
For instance, that tank? A bunch of people are paid to put new oil into it. What a waste! There’s plenty of old oil coming out of cars every day; run it through a sock and you’ve got yourself another ten thousand kilometers, easy. And if I were spending a trillion dollars per second with a fleet of highly-trained mechanics able to overnight-ship parts from defence contractors, I would also criticize shitty garage efforts like the ones that I pull off on my piles of largely transient automotive crap.
Even equipment that is forty, fifty years old – like stealth bombers – still has new parts getting punched out for it. Of course if you’re slamming in brand-new parts every time it gets a service, then maintenance of ancient 70s vehicles is fun and easy. How about spreading the wealth a little bit, Uncle Sam, and ask Northrop to build me a new windshield for my Dart?
They have left me but one option, and it’s one that I learned from watching you, Dad Government. Fraud. See, the CIA always drops a couple pallets full of money into the countries they’re operating in, with which to bribe freedom fighters and slippery resistance officials. Wasted money, too, because all you really need to do is buy up a bankrupt garage with an inspection license at auction. You might think this is really expensive, but you haven’t seen how many cars I safety in a week. It’ll pay for itself in no time flat.
I’ve been run out of town before, but it never stung me as much as it did that time I was betrayed by my closest friend/rival. Steve “Nipples” Hemingway had dimed me out to the municipal government, and as you’d expect, the bureaucratic machine popped its clutch and came tearing into my living room. Apparently it’s some kind of so-called crime to build your own go-karts out of Ford truck alternators that you don’t own.
There’s all kinds of arguments you could make to defend my actions. Some examples: those trucks aren’t driven far or for long enough that an alternator actually does much more than just a bare battery, the taxpayer is the only real victim here, ambulances wouldn’t need such a beefy alternator if they didn’t run the lights and siren at the same time, who do they think they are? All of them fell on deaf ears, and soon I was filling my hobo-bag of a Plymouth Volare with my worldly possessions (mostly Volare parts) at gunpoint.
As I said previously, I’d been run out of town before. So I knew exactly where to go: a little survivalist compound that got cleared out by the Feds a couple years ago. It all got tied up in some legal wrangling, and so it hadn’t yet been turned into an expensive condominium development with floor-to-ceiling windows named something like Last Stand Heights or Screaming, Bloody Children Meadows. Plus, they had a welder. The only problem is that all the utilities were shut off, but as also mentioned previously, I had a bunch of low-mileage Ford alternators in the trunk.
One stop on the way to steal a bicycle out of a suburban backyard later, and I had a reasonable energy solution in my new home. All I had to do was use the bike for about six hours straight to get fifteen minutes of welding. Green, clean, and efficient. I would prove my naysayers wrong. Or at least I thought so, before spending approximately eleven minutes pedalling medium-hard and then getting bored. Turns out if you park the Volare up against the back tire of the bicycle just right, I can just use the cruise control to set up my electrical system instead. This would have been perfect, if not for the fact that I only needed the welder to repair the Volare, and it wouldn’t particularly enjoy getting its electrical system shocked with a bajillion volts of its own manufacture.
After taking a nap and then finishing off what was left of the survivalists’ food supplies: one (1) 25-year-old jar of miniature cocktail weenies, I was on my way back home. By then, the city elders would probably have forgotten about the whole thing, not least because I now had a stolen bicycle to leave in the back of my ol’ buddy Hemingway’s truck.
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tags: steve nipples hemingway, plymouth, plymouth volare
Having gobs of electric power on hand is the dream of any person. Who needs to use obsolete petrochemicals or even physical effort when you can shoot magic lightning like some kind of coked-up god? Unfortunately, today’s electric power tools are a confusing maze of non-interoperable standards. That’s why I took matters into my own hands.
So look, at the Home Depot (or Home Despot as my overly class-conscious attorney, Max, likes to call it) they got these eighty dollar electric caulking guns. If you’re like me, then you use a caulking gun to apply structural components of your car all the time. It’s this cool new synthetic adhesive called “shingle tar,” and you can buy it by the tube. Just a little hard to push out when it’s cold, which is why my forearms look like Popeye’s. An electric caulking gun would let me finish plugging that hole that lets the carbon monoxide in much faster.
Eighty bucks is a great deal, because all those other electric ones are presumably owned by professionals, and therefore cost a bomb, because Uncle My Fucking Boss Sucks is paying for it. I was very excited, until I realized it didn’t come with any batteries. And the batteries cost a hundred and fifty bucks. And the charger for those batteries is another hundred and fifty bucks. Those money-grubbing fuckers-of-mothers baited and/or switched me. They probably thought they tricked me into joining their “system.” Fat chance, assholes: Narcotics Anonymous didn’t put a ring on it when I got arrested with a trunk full of nitrous oxide (it was for the car) and you’re not going to either.
Here’s the secret about electricity: little battery electricity is the same as big battery electricity. There’s just less of it, or something. Don’t ask me any specifics to try and catch me in a lie, Columbo: I failed out of medical school for a reason, after all. All I needed was to recruit one of my neighbour’s unwanted marine batteries (if he wanted them he wouldn’t leave them attached to his boat, which is demonstrably not in the water right now) and I was shooting glue like nobody’s business. Of course, the gun got a little bit hot during the process, but I’m sure the manufacturer won’t mind a few returns on my part. After all, I’m in the system. I’m part of the family.
Diesel: what is it, besides a worse gasoline? Ever since times long past, mankind has sought to understand the diesel engine. No one knows where it came from, but it is said that those who can harness its awesome power will be rewarded with the ability to drive to and from work with an empty truck bed while sounding like a freight locomotive with attention deficit disorder.
Now, that might sound a little unfair to some of our viewers in Europe. Over there, you can opt for a diesel in basically any vehicle. Once, I went to Italy and, while attempting to cut a hole in the fence at the Ducati factory overflow storage, I heard a diesel Subaru Impreza clattering away at the lights. It had a totally different sound of rod knock than the gas-engined version, which is truly impressive. More muted, too, which spoke to its greater efficiency as a fuel. The cop cars had diesels, too, or at least the ones that I could outrun in a stolen Fiat Strada before they had to take their second lunch break and gave up the chase.
Over here, it seems like diesel in passenger cars will just never really take over before it is brutally crushed by the perfection of the immortal electron alongside all of us normal gassers. And that’s kind of okay: although Volkswagen tried valiantly, and there’s no denying that being able to tow an entire house with a Golf is cool, being associated with the smoke-tune crowd is distinctly against the reasons that I love a small, harmless-appearing hatchback. Not to mention that you’ve got all those extra filters, sensors, and doodads for emissions, which will just make you feel that much more guilty as you toss the entire melted-together wad into the dumpster at the Autozone.
I’ll miss the diesels when they’re gone. Just not my neighbour’s truck, which he is for some reason idling non-stop in his driveway in order to “warm it up.” Despite the exhaust gas temperatures, all the ash coming out of the exhaust doesn’t produce a cooked potato, either, and I’ve tried very hard to lob one into those giant bed stack mufflers of his.
Legitimate drag racing hasn’t been a thing here for a couple of decades now. City shut down the track, and as expected, some of it moved to the streets. Lacking a replacement venue, I got to thinking about how to build a smaller version of the drag-racing experience that could still hold the appeal of the original for all involved.
Remote-controlled cars are an obvious choice. They’re cars, after all, and you can put them in a straight line. Yet there is no real thrill in using them for drag racing: without the visceral thrill of being inside, you might as well just be dynoing them. We moved on to pinewood derby racing after that, but then a bunch of the racers caught the woodworking bug. Our local area also lacks addictions and mental health counselling, so their problem spiralled until we lost them entirely to boat-building. Valve cover racing? It went for a little while, but even the hardest-core had to admit we looked kinda stupid meeting at the junkyard to see who could get the heaviest CA18DE cover, the one with the most studs.
I was doing street drags out behind the old Kurt Cobain’s Waffle Palace® when it hit me. What people loved about real drag racing was the brands. They wanted to see a rotten Cavalier roll up to the Christmas tree, laugh at it, and then watch in giggling horror as this underdog piece of shit laid waste to everything in sight for an entire evening. Without the reference programmed into our brains by branding and marketing for what to expect, it was difficult to upset those expectations. There was a place where brands combined with the need to destroy all comers: power tool racing.
This sport, previously popular only on construction sites, is now becoming more common across North America. You’ve heard a million suburban dads talk shit about DeWalts or Milwaukees, but now you can get to see them put their money (and pinks) where their mouth is. Only to get demolished by a Princess Auto PowerFist-brand angle grinder with motor wiring so thin it has to be a custom-built cheater, coughing purple smoke as it rips its way down the sidewalk. Will it run out of extension cord before it hits someone in the Tim Hortons parking lot? Just part of the fun, and those pigs surely haven’t written laws against it yet.
I’ve been waiting decades for the glorious future technologies promised to me by childhood issues of Popular Mechanics. We still don’t have jive-talking robot butlers. You can’t go to the store and pick up a pack of self-assembling nanotech house repair robots. And when it comes time to wash your car, you have to do it by hand, with a hose, just like our prehistoric ancestors did with their hoopties.
In my local municipal exclusion zone, it is a bylaw violation to wash your own car with soap. There’s a good reason for this, as there almost always is: that soap gets in the sewer, and then it gets coughed out into the river, where it kills fish and makes the reservoir much less pleasant to be around. Sure, the drinking water is treated and filtered out the wazoo, but they don’t do much for the output side, other than skimming out the chunkiest bits and diverting them onto a fetish website. So everyone is forced to take their cars to the car wash every week, and the car wash operators know this.
It used to be a pretty reasonable compromise, as these things go. They’d give me a muggy parking bay with a leaking high-pressure sprayer, and I’d line up for a good hour every week waiting for my neighbours to get finished scraping their car’s paint job with the filth-caked foam brush. For my four dollars a week, it seemed like a reasonable compromise, and nobody asked any questions. In the last year, though, they got greedy. Realizing they had us over a barrel, they put in a credit card machine with a much more aggressive timer, and now I’m lucky to get out of there for less than seven bucks, especially if I get tempted into trying to use the “wax” setting that doesn’t seem to ever dispense any wax.
Now, I have a perfectly good hose. Or, my neighbour used to, and now the hose has coincidentally found its way onto my property, hooked up to my water. It is clearly my hose now, as indicated by the crude Sharpie marks where some individual has written my name on it. Getting water onto the car is no problem at all, but sometimes you really need the power of a good surfactant to get that grit, salt, and bird shit off your car. As such, I consulted the local municipality for specifics, and by that I mean I drove by the house of my elected councillor, screaming my questions at his wife and kids whenever they were on the lawn. Eventually, I got a polite (but curt) call from a city supervisor who patiently explained that while soap is banned for me, the car washes were allowed to offer it because they had special drains, which treated the soapy, salty greywater just enough to put it back into the guns and spray it at the next sucker’s car. That’s all I had to hear.
Special drains: sounds a lot like something a small-displacement engine could solve, isn’t it? Setting up a positive-pressure extractor at the bottom of my driveway was cake itself. Although the neighbours complained about the noise of having an uncorked two-stroke thumper wailing away at 10 pm at night, I think they were just jealous. And as for the leftover water? I assure you that it went nowhere near a public waterway. The reason I was operating my homemade carwash at 10pm is because that’s when the real carwash closes, and their security cameras have a blindspot just big enough to miss a stray garden hose spraying a couple dozen gallons per minute of saltwater into their fancy drains. Waste not, want not.
Hoarding has a bad reputation. I think it comes from early humanity, when there just weren’t enough resources to go around. If you’ve got a house full of food, and the rest of the village doesn’t? You’re an asshole. If you’ve spent your entire life on eBay slowly accumulating extremely niche parts and tools? That’s how you can be a hero.
This, I think, is at the core of why old-Volkswagen people own like thirty or forty Volkswagens. You might think it’s because the cars are cheap when they’re no longer wanted (they’re not,) that they have some inherent value beyond their material nature (not likely,) and that the same part won’t break on each and every example of the model, thus rendering a parts car pointless (they do.)
Ultimately, what keeps them going is the chance to have trade parts, should they ever encounter a fellow collector with the part they need, but don’t have any money left to buy it because they spent all their money on old Volkswagens that don’t fucking run. Oh, you need a balk ring for the third gear on a 1988 GTI 16v’s 020 transmission? Sure, I’ve got a couple spares in the shed… but do you have a steering wheel that isn’t peeling?
And it’s not just Volkswagen types. Everyone who uses old shit has a story or two about getting “the last one of” something in the world. Last year, I spent over a month wheeling-and-dealing with a collection of distant hobbyists. At last, they allowed me into their circle of trust, and only then could I get what I came for: a less-cracked tail-light lens for a 1998 Nissan 200SX. Of course, it was the wrong side, but did I buy it anyway? You better fucking believe I did. Those things don’t grow on trees.
Everyone has their own favourite ways of dealing with rust. Me, personally? I just don’t bother. Maybe the Greenpeace types finally got to me, but I figure that if it’s the way of nature, I shouldn’t attempt to interfere in the predator-prey relationship between oxidation and my winter-driven car. Floorboards are meant to naturally fall out, after all. That said, though, there are times that rust really pisses me off.
Most of those times are when I’m trying to remove a bolt or screw from the carcass of the vehicle, in order to replace a part or (more often) pull half-good donor parts out of a condemned ride so that another may live. You see, a bolt and its threaded hole have a very special relationship. The bolt is made out of metal, and the threaded hole is also made out of metal, and sometimes rust will decide to make those two discrete objects into one glob of brown-red bullshit that you can’t get out of the fucking car.
Now, there’s a lot of solutions for this. You can pick up any number of miracle cures – super-thin penetrating oils, some made from snakes – from the local parts store that can be spritzed right on the bolt. The hope here is that it will creep into the threads and then provide just enough lubrication that the couple molecules of rust won’t be able to stand up to the rest of the bolt deciding it would like to come out now, please. Of course, there’s no way of knowing if any of these actually work, but they make me feel better to spray onto the bolt, in the same way that folks will pay a priest to splash their kid with water “just in case.”
The NASA way to remove rusted bolts – besides just not having anything get exposed to road salt before you can shoot it into Outer Goddamn Space – is to use an induction heater. This miracle of modern science uses the power of electricity to cordlessly put a metric fuck ton of heat into the bolt, which lets you pretend you’re some kind of electric space wizard instead of just a sad weirdo alone in their garage. However, it costs actual money to buy one of these, even if you go the dodgy eBay route from a country that no longer exists, and so at this point I usually just reach for the propane torch. It does 99% of the job, but at ten bucks a bottle. I know, I know: way too much for such a shrimpy little bottle. I actually run it to a barbecue-sized propane tank on a length of old garden hose, and that works great as long as I don’t turn the flame up too high, pinch the hose in the garage door, trip over the tank, or accidentally drop the handle while I’m working on it.
Like I said originally, though: I just don’t like to get in the way. There’s lots of other fish in the sea, or cars in the Craigslist, and sometimes you just have to cut your losses. Insurance companies are much more amenable to replacing a car that fell in the river than a house that burned down due to what that half-blind bastard of an insurance inspector called an illegal methamphetamine laboratory.
Whenever I visited other countries in the past, I always made sure to take the time to study their local car culture. Every nation on Earth has its own distinct breed of small-displacement econobox, and they’re all delightful. Sometimes a country is particularly ahead of the curve, and turns their little grocery-getter hatchbacks into mini-pickups that can be used to get groceries and drive a pregnant sheep up a mountain if you so desire. This, of course, can never happen here, where the idea of buying a new pickup truck that fits in your garage is considered at best déclassé.
That said, we do live in a globalized society, and so, last year, I set about importing a Suzuki Mighty Boy. It helped that I could plausibly pack the truck as checked baggage on the airplane, because it technically qualifies as one of those suitcases with little wheels on it. Of course, all this didn’t happen, and so my Suzuki truck friend is stranded in the Home Islands, waiting for to get on a cargo ship. A cargo ship is some kind of special car without wheels that drives on the water, and it rusts only slightly faster than my Impreza.
The Mighty Boy, as might be implied by its name, is a cute little pickup truck built by cutting the ass off of a cute little hatchback. In its home country of Japan, it was considered “not a success,” but that just means nobody else on your block is going to be driving around a 28-horsepower nano-pickup too. Not enough horsepower, you say? Poppycock. The existence of modern turbochargers means that any teeny-tiny engine can soon become an unpredictable, treacherous pit of unlimited torque. Being able to break traction in third gear should be just enough for me, I figured, as I also studied blurry images of the intake manifold for a good place to tap for port-injected nitrous jets.
When the trucklet finally arrived on my porch, courtesy of one very cranky postal worker, I tore into the cardboard box immediately. I had misread the ad. Instead of a real Mighty Boy, my order was for a 1:1 scale battery-powered replica of one for children to ride in. At first disappointed that all my hard work of searching eBay for upgrade parts had gone to waste, I then realized that the glorified Makita power drill battery at the heart of the drivetrain actually made more horsepower than stock. And as long as the police don’t respond in time, the big backup battery from the cellphone tower near my place ought to fit in the bed, too.
Pop quiz, hot shot: what’s the most common way people lose tools? By putting them underneath something else, of course. Whether it be stray service manuals, a 1989 Ford Mustang SVO, or just other tools, the fact that our image-processing capabilities are vastly diminished when we’re looking at some shit trapped under some other shit means that you can be staring right at the screwdriver you just had in your fucking hand and not see it. That’s why we partnered with our sister magazine, Spicy Isotopes Quarterly, to develop this new radioactive pigment that you can apply to your tools.
See, traditional light-based location methods, such as the human eye, fall down quickly when something is so-called opaque. Not so to the proud gamma radiation, which can punch through anything and everything. Just take out your special tester (it’s really a factory-QA-rejected Geiger counter with a couple “mods” and a cool limited-series collectible sticker on the front) and set it for whatever kind of tool you want to locate. It’ll pick up the unique signature emitted by each variety of our paint, and with just a little work, you can find that socket wrench you left under the lift before lowering it. It’ll save literal minutes of frustration, and hours that you would otherwise waste cleaning up and organizing your slovenly garage.
Of course, I’m not going to lie to you. We have had some legal challenges with a group of individuals who like to call themselves “the government.” However, our legal department has told us that as long as we don’t recognize them as being part of the government, they can’t do shit to us. Is that a gold picture frame? Must be a French court that has no jurisdiction over me, then. Says so right in this book I got from the internet. You want to see the book? Fat chance, Napoleon.
Needless to say, this legal gambit can’t go on forever. We need your money in order to keep fighting it, and what better way to show your support and organize your tools at the same time than to buy a couple bottles of our special paints? We’ll even throw in a lead-lined apron for your protection, and the first 25 customers will get real lead in it, so call today!
I used to work with this guy who did a ton of crack at work. Old Crackhead Phil, we used to call him. Usually we called him this behind his back, because the crack made him kind of jumpy, you see. When I first signed up with the company, on my first day, I thought that this was some sort of cruel nickname bestowed by an uncaring peer, a reference to a past event in which someone thought he was doing crack. About fifteen minutes later, I smelled something funny and my attention wavered from employee orientation, and out the window. That’s where I saw Phil smoking a couple rocks right outside, in the parking lot.
In times long past, you would do something about this kind of thing. A manager would at least sit down with them in a multi-purpose conference room and have a chat about their crack use at work. Now, though, all the managers were in another country, and visited us only infrequently through a telepresence robot that displayed their disembodied video-chat heads. Since there was only one robot, the managerial caste had to take turns driving it, so Phil’s line manager never really got to speak to him one-on-one except on very rare occasions. Phil hit his numbers, and the rest of us weren’t about to throw a fellow worker under the bus. At least not until they offered us some kind of incentive to do so.
Eventually, I moved on, and Phil stayed behind. Because my departure was sort of acrimonious, I didn’t intend on keeping in touch with everyone I left behind. Better to make a clean break, I figured. Even so, it still weighed on my mind to wonder what became of Phil. Did he get caught? I could see a couple scenarios where it would happen: our multifunctional team pod merged with that of a different parent company’s, they hired a local manager, or Phil accidentally hit the pipe when the robot is active. Was that thing equipped with olfactory sensors?
This mystery was carried with me for many years, until one morning I turned on the news in my zero-bedroom automated nano-condominium. The entire wall lit up with a face in mid-press-conference: Phil’s face! He owned his own business now – the dream of us all – selling bespoke 3D-printed crack pipes. Now he’d be the disembodied, laggy face on a telepresence robot, as he oversaw a manufactory team pod as they embarked upon the corporate VisionQuest of fabricating thousands of crack pipes a day. I briefly considered phoning him and asking if he still had his 2006 Nissan Altima.
Down at the expensive industrial equipment store, they’ve got these cool briefcases you can buy. They’re made out of steel, or aluminum, or something (they won’t let me touch them) but that’s not the cool part. The cool part is that it’s full of foam that you can cut up and pick out to make a perfect fit for whatever tools you’re going to put in it. Naturally, I wanted one, and why not?
Imagine rolling up to a wrenching party and then taking out your engraved stainless steel briefcase. Something primal passes through the group. Everyone present stops and stares, distracted from trying to figure out how to work the rear subframe out of a dirtbag 180SX without having to drop the exhaust. You reach into your case, only to pull out a single badly worn breaker bar, maybe with something ominous hand-engraved in the handle like “DESTROYER” or “THE FULCRUM.” Those rusted bolts on the car will shit themselves in fear so violently that they’ll spin right out of the body, the threads in their mating captive nuts left cleaner than they did when they left the factory.
Unfortunately, I can’t actually afford one of these oh-so-desirable cases. I’m stuck with putting my face and hands against the display case glass until the employees have to throw me out for only buying $1.28 in specialty metric bolts and harassing the other customers about whether they’ll let me borrow any M6x1.25 taps that they’re not using at the moment.
Of course, I have my own carrying case for my mobile toolkit, but it was an old linesman’s bag that I found next to a smouldering corpse on the highway. Don’t worry: the bag was fine, and I’m sure the power company eventually went looking for which of their employees wasn’t bright enough to understand the concept of “don’t touch the wires together.” It doesn’t have the same flash as the case, but it comes by it more honestly, with a lifetime of good old-fashioned hard work showing on every wrinkled chunk of leather and torn-up handle. Does it smell really bad? Also yes, but nobody can know about how that self-plucking foam is going to stink after fifteen years of getting ATF leaked into it too. Maybe it will also smell like burning hair.
For now, I just drive past the store every couple of days at night, and dream about pulling a slightly dented floor model out of their dumpster. Hey. I bet I could tow that dumpster. And it’s made out of metal. Plenty of room for tools!
If you hang out around people with 3D printers long enough, you’ll hear from them everything there is to know about their 3D printer. And you’ll probably want one of your own, except at humanity’s current level of development, the fucking thing won’t do what you want and you’ll end up practically re-engineering it from scratch anyway. From clogging extruders to inaccurate servos, it turns out that 3D printers and 2D printers are both massive pains in your ass.
Plus, the damn things are just too tiny. If you want to make anything big enough to have a real impact on the world, you’re spending enough money that you might as well start a factory to crank out your pop-culture bludgeons.
Enter the Very Light Press Program. In the grand tradition of the American Heavy Press Program, we put a bunch of intense industrial machinery all over the country, so that you no longer have to deal with goopy plastic strands and hot-glue enemas whenever you want to make a 1/64th-size maquette of a pornographic anime character. Instead, just recruit a friendly machinist to produce a set of press dies, and then crank out thousands of them on sheet metal stock that would otherwise be wasted on stealth bombers and hospital beds.
Why are we doing this? For one thing, the government needs some money, and taking $10,000 a shot from some nerds every time they come up with a new Warhammer character they have to have at the end of their driveway is a perfect way to do it. And for another, a giant steel press is a lot more repeatable of a process than even the most expensive resin printers. You only need to clean it once in awhile, and usually only when someone ignores the caution-yellow tape and walks into the hazard zone during operation.
I will readily admit to a bit of self-serving in developing this program, but that doesn’t mean it won’t help others. Now you can stamp out an entire AMC Eagle unibody in a little over two hours – imagine all the hours of laborious rust repair that the economy is now liberated from. We’ll be driving these babies in the moon by this time next year.
One of the delights of the arrival of every spring is the influx of birds. There’s this old spruce tree in my front yard, see, and birds from all around are just compelled to build a nest in it. It must look like pretty primo real estate for a young family: close access to all the good branches, maybe a couple trees with berries, a vole or two that you can snap up for some extra protein when it gets pegged by my lawnmower in the middle of July.
There’s a problem, though: the chirping. I don’t know if you’ve been around any newborn baby birds, but they chirp basically constantly from dawn until dusk. You might think that this is an impediment to their survival, and I would also think that, but they’ll keep chirping away all day long, wondering when mom and dad will come back with some more handouts. It’s getting difficult to sleep during the day, what with all the screeching and chirping, not to mention the noises of Saab doors slamming out front as birdwatchers excitedly pull to the side of the road for a glimpse of the rare Red-Speckled Motherfucker.
As a result, I decided to try something different this year. Instead of working on rotten shitbox cars all night and then sleeping during the time I was supposed to be paying attention to my day job as a work-from-home 911 operator, I’d sleep at night and work two gigs at the same time. With this method, I would be well-rested, productive, and not lie awake, listening to Mom and Dad Magpie talk shit about their kid when they think he can’t hear their hateful words.
Usually, my plans end in disaster. However, this way I actually did get a lot more work done, both at work (promotion) and at home (finally figured what that smell is in the Plymouth – I don’t actually have carpets.) No wonder everyone does it this way! There’s only one problem: now that I’m awake enough to pay close attention, I’ve gotten pulled into the lives of my new bird friends. It turns out that there’s a whole gang of mean crows out there that have a grudge against the magpie family in my tree, so I gotta stay awake tonight in case they try something.
Seasonal affective disorder is a real thing. Once the exclusive knowledge of overpaid psychologists and feral gangs of roving magazine editors, ordinary moms from your town have now discovered that they sometimes get sad when it’s snowing and the sun doesn’t come out for more than an hour a day. We can talk about the vile influence of the new Pocket-Sized DSM-V later. Suffice it to say my entire neighbourhood was soon depleted of the full-spectrum lightbulbs required to both cure the hated seasonal affective depression, and grow pharmaceuticals for personal use only.
I prefer to deal with the old winter sads in my own way: getting out onto the roads and doing some skids. This was difficult to accomplish, because only one of my cars (a 1998 Toyota Corolla with an accessory-belt-driven supercharger from a Previa and a hockey stick handle instead of a handbrake lever) is considered healthy enough to survive the modest G-forces of a parking lot slide without either starving the engine of oil or debeading tires made during the American Revolution from the rim. Because that car was annoyingly reliable, it’s sat for a few months as I continued to exercise my shittier vehicles, which tend to throw jealous tantrums whenever I so much as consider walking to the corner store. Naturally, the battery in my Corolla was dead.
You might think that I could just take the batteries out of one of my other cars and get them going. For a variety of complicated reasons mostly relating to me never wanting to replace a fucking starter, these cars were running effectively 24/7, and so it was neither safe nor practical to remove the batteries from them. Therefore, I had to make a choice: I could go down to the store and buy a battery, or I could steal one from the generator on the abandoned construction site next to my house. The chances of me getting caught by the night security guard were minimal, so I decided to hop the fence and try my luck.
My quest was a huge success. Not only am I now happily sliding the Corolla around, but I also was able to scramble away with some floodlamps before the night watchman managed to figure out how to get out of the hole that I pushed him into. Of course, it’s a little suspicious if they were to see me flaunting them on my driveway while working on my car, so I’ve decided to flip them on Craigslist. Their lamps may not be full spectrum, but the only fullness that really matters to my depression is in my wallet.
If you stuff your average Chevrolet pickup truck with enough turbochargers to accomplish the moon landing, you’ll have one very quick truck indeed. Why, though? Because we can. For those of you who are a little more practically minded, the resale value is good enough that the next owner is practically paying you to do it.
Yes, that’s right. As briefly touched upon previously this week, we are in a golden age for used car prices. Capitalism-starved suburbanites are no longer able to visit the shopping mall lest they ingest meticulously-nanoassembled aerosolized death, but they can put themselves on Craigslist and get a whole new truck in which to transport freshly-overpriced lumber. Naturally, prices are going to increase. Perhaps to a ridiculous degree, since there’s not a lot of cross-shopping happening on account of the aforementioned respiratory megacarnage.
Like every other asset class (that’s banker for “shit you can buy”,) this hysterical purchasing brings lowered expectations. The combination of lowered expectations and inflated valuations for used cars mean that you can sell crap cars for real money. Oh no, you’ll say, if you take it to your mechanic for an inspection, one of the other interested buyers might have offered more than you by the time the appointment rolls around. What’s that risk worth to you?
Of course, I’ve been preparing myself for just such a market. In my back forty are (according to the spreadsheet produced by the last city property inspector who was brave enough) no fewer than seventeen rough-and-or-ready pickup trucks. Whenever I need a couple of bucks to cover the minimum payment on the RockAuto line of credit this week, I just have to yank one out, spraypaint the wheels black, and put up a Craigslist ad. Just don’t get close to me when you come to buy it. We’ll do everything through this hermetically sealed glovebox that I bought from the nuclear power plant’s surplus sale last year.
Let’s face facts: any 1980s luxury car you’re going to buy has probably had the back seat deflowered by a used car salesman and whoever was working late that weekend. There’s not much arguing about it, even if you think that you’re buying a one-owner car. Trust me, those folks were crawling all over the rear bench probably before the car was even unloaded from the factory’s truck.
For decades, people knew this, and they were just fine with it. It was just an accepted part of living in today’s fast-paced, go-go world, where past generations were ruled over by an unaccountable elite cabal of used car salesmen and saleswomen. Then, it became really cheap to buy new cars, because of financial instruments so complicated that Herbie Hancock couldn’t play them. They lost their power, and were set upon and destroyed by an unholy alliance of general managers and loan-bros. The DNA captured in these seats may be the only record that they were ever here.
Nowadays, it would be completely shocking that you would buy a 30,000-kilometre Mercedes from a repo man and have to replace both the engine and the rear seat. Some things are sacred, the new-old luxury buyer cries. That’s one of the big reasons that they won’t consider the epitome of automotive luxury: the 1980 Lincoln Versailles. Worse, even if they did want to pony up and take on the job of removing a bench caked in ancient capitalist semen, it can be difficult to find a new, untainted seat for an old car.
That’s why I’ve teamed up with local automotive upholsterers. For less than you’ll pay for a gently-used new car, we’ll give you a completely re-trimmed domestic luxury car from the 1980s. Our group of craftspeople are all eunuchs, too, so there’s no worry of hanky-panky to be had, unless you buy our demo unit. That’s sort of the “bait car” for our salesforce, if you get my drift.
Perhaps the most popular genre in American cinematic culture of times long past is that of the revenge film. You know the type: gun-hating architect or wannabe dirt farmer has their entire family ripped from them in a senseless act of violence, and so they decide to retaliate in multiple senseful acts of violence. The public has soured on this kind of film in recent years; perhaps even the dream of committing a wide variety of bloody murders across town is now too aspirational for today’s youth.
Still, the images from these films flash across my mind’s eye when I’m at the junkyard. No, I’m not seeking to cut a swath of bloody vengeance across the cashiers, not even the one who counts up all the brackets I left attached to an engine pull and tries to charge me for each and every one. What I’m getting revenge on is the cars, and it’s on behalf of the folks who they wronged in the past.
Take this BMW 7-series, for instance. Weeks before it landed in this swamp of cancer mud, it was the prize possession of an individual who thought they could afford to maintain it. Of course, the car deceived them, and you can tell the path of their failure by looking at what new parts were installed. New spark plug wires, radiator cap… radiator fans, that’s expensive. Near as I can tell from my position, sitting on the rock-chipped fender that once held $6000 optional pearl white paint, this car’s chronic overheating problem soaked the previous owner for way more than it would have cost to buy another. Therefore, ripping nine-tenths of the wiring harness out to get my hands on some primo Deutsch connectors? Justice.
At home, I graft these expensive luxury-specification parts onto my fleet of deformed hoopties, often incorrectly. The work is light, for I know that somewhere the original engineer is at last feeling some small portion of the psychic torment that they have inflicted upon the original through final owners of the car. I bet Charles Bronson would have done the same thing.
Children are often scared of simple things. The sound of tearing paper, a creepy doll at the end of a hallway, the knowledge that the universe will one day succumb to entropy and wink out of existence like nothing was ever here. When you grow up, you become terrified of more nuanced, layered things, like the integrity of the parking pawl in your automatic transmission.
“Pawl” is a fancy word for “spoon-shaped lever-y thing.” It’s Danish, or something. See, when you put your car in “Park,” it engages this chunk of metal that holds the transmission, and thus the wheels, from rolling. That’s why your car is still there when you get back. If you were to snap the pawl in half – maybe you got hit by another car while you were parked, or it was just abused over a long period of time, well, good luck finding your hoopty at the bottom of the river.
Now, this chunk of metal is actually pretty beefy in pretty much every car, and the engineers designing the transmission understand that they don’t want to run over any more Hollywood stars with it, but just to be on the safe side, when I am forced to drive an automatic, I always use the parking brake in addition to the parking pawl. Is the parking brake still functional in the automatic cars I own? No, it is not, because everyone just puts the damn thing in Park and the e-brake cables rusted out decades ago.
Therefore, I am now joining the group of internet folks who demand that you use the parking brake at all times, even when you think that chunk of metal is going to save your ass. That way, the cables get a nice workout and don’t shear themselves to bits the first time I try to do a handbrake turn when running from the cops. Even if it’s not dangerous to you during your ownership, it’s definitely going to be dangerous during mine.
You might think it’s “cool” to procrastinate. Maybe you want to hang out with all the popular kids in Creative Writing class and spend approximately five seconds per day thinking about being productive. I used to leave a lot of problems to Future Switch, too, until that motherfucker figured out how to build a time machine and came back to kick my ass.
Of course, this creates a causality loop, which is a phrase I half-remembered from an episode of Star Trek I watched while trying to boil the undercoat off of an old control arm in my kitchen. The gist of it is, as far as I had it explained to me by a particle physicist at the Shitty Volvos Convention, I am doomed to have to create time machines, otherwise Future Switch can’t go back in time to kick my ass. Any procrastination could cause the universe to be unmade, which would be bad, because the universe is where I store all my parts.
There was another explanation. You see, one of my friends has a very similar build and debilitating knee injury to me. A couple times, he’s impersonated me in public when I needed to draw the process servers away from my home. And once, when I was helping him fix his Celicas (Future Switch told me that Celicas, due to their low coefficient of drag, are the essential base of time machines) I found an old-man costume and a particle physicist costume in his trunk. I know that everyone nowadays is carrying those around, but it seemed like too much of a coincidence.
Even if I am being catfished (timefished?) the only winning move is to invent time travel. That way, if I do turn out to have been a total dumbass, at least I can go back to the 90s and pick up a mint ST185 Celica to lord over my buddy forever.
Everyone likes the look of an exotic concept car, but nobody wants to try and put a baby seat in one. This means that every car that actually gets produced has a bit of a watered-down look to it. You can tell where the engineers stepped in to shave down designers’ flourishes, and maybe put a couple inches of ride height on there while they were at it. This compromise is part of the reality of production automobiles.
Lucky for us, the future is offering tons of electric cars at cut-rate prices. It turns out that these babies depreciate like smartphones, because nobody wants to replace the batteries in either. Your boy Switcho has never been afraid of a little electric-shock risk, however, and my new company buys up shit-tons of hogged-out battery-electric cars every week using a secret financial instrument known as “passing bad cheques.”
Once you’ve gotten the powertrain out of these things, they’re almost all low-slung frames. Classic hotrod stuff here. That’s where my Eastern-European bodywork expert, Bondo-Nose Billie, takes over. She’s a sort of accident-repair artist in her home country, whatever that is, and has a “4.95” rating on cut-and-shut dot com. Her workflow is a little bit unusual, which is why she can’t work at the “respectable” body shops anymore. You show her a picture of a car, and then she huffs something I can’t read from a little inhaler and goes into a sort of trance. When you come back a few hours later, an entire car body has been formed of tiger-hair Bondo.
We’ve been producing a lot of electric cars that look like concept cars from a bygone era. Unfortunately, trusting me to do market research may have been our undoing. It turns out there isn’t much demand for the 1977 Volkswagen Colani concept among billionaires. Money can’t buy taste, I guess.
When I worked for a brief time in a hotel restaurant kitchen before getting fired for doing burnouts in the boss’ stolen third-generation Camaro, we always went through a lot of salt. It would get dropped off in huge bags, and we were encouraged to just go to town with it. Hardly anybody ever complained it was too salty. All restaurant food is that way, and so are highways.
In the spring, or at least as much of a spring as we get, the snow finally recedes to the edges of the road. It all melts away, and leaves behind this sludgy grey-white powder that used to be road salt. Chemists – and by which I mean Meth Producin’ Mel down the street – are flummoxed as to what exactly this material could be. Perhaps it’s the salt that didn’t make the cut for the “melting ice off the road” varsity team. Maybe it’s all the leaking coolant, brake fluid, oil, and ATF mingling with it and rendering it inert.
No matter what it actually is, for months until the street sweepers come, the highway shoulders look like a lounge singer in Vegas got interrupted mid-rail. There’s a lot of leftover salt, or at least salt-adjacent material for them to sweep up. We know this, because last year the city was asking for a property tax increase in order to buy new street sweepers. Apparently all that salt does a number on the metal inside these giant broomy boys, and after only a few years they’re rotten. Now, can you say government salvage auction? I knew you could.
This winter, you might have heard there’s a few more accidents than usual. There’s a lot of reasons provided for it: inattentive drivers, bad education, El Niño. One of the reasons you won’t hear is “some guys in a shed swept up a bunch of old salt on the side of the road and mixed it with bleach, then sold it back to the city at fifty percent off.” You won’t hear this reason because I was finally able to afford to fix my muffler, after it rotted clear away a few winters ago.
When you know, you know. This, and other quality aphorisms, are now available on tape cassette from the number at the bottom of your screen. Don’t delay! If you call now, I’ll also throw in the entire contents of my trunk. You’ve got hits like rusty bottle jack, wrapped fast-food quesadilla of unknown provenance, and bad karma from Grandma Bones, who died a couple years ago. I couldn’t arrange a time to deliver her ashes to her nephew, so I’ve just been running errands with them rattling around the back ever since, you know how it is.
You might think that running a home-shopping television network is taking this “old shit” obsession a little bit too far, and I agree. In my defence, however, it was the only way to get ahold of some primo vintage broadcast gear. Nobody else on the local 1979-1995 (“Golden Age”) Weather Network Obsessives group was willing to agree to living out the last few months of the broadcast contract in order to secure the deal. And that’s why I have constructed a fully-accurate replica of a recent QVC living-room set in my living room.
I didn’t need to go to too much effort. As previously stated, the contract only requested a few more months of mandatory television-sales content. Some sort of ordeal about the lease on the original equipment or whatever. My eyes sort of glazed over when they explained to me what a Triple-Secret Bermuda Underground Offset Shelter was. All that mattered to me was that, in exchange for a couple bucks and months of pretending to be Our Father Billothy Mays, I would get to haul an entire stack of obsolete video titler home and pay an absolute shitload of money keeping it fed with electricity. There wasn’t enough budget in my pocket to hire someone else to pitch, so I just worked it all myself. Once it was “paid off,” of course, I could use it for what I really wanted to do: putting fake chyrons on newscasts and then taking screenshots to alarm people. Who needs Photoshop? That shit is expensive.
Thing is, the whole show-business bug really bit me. I think it was one of the many that streamed out of the power supply on that first day I plugged it in. You’d think they’d want to stay inside there; it’s nice and toasty warm, and seems to be full of lots of other partially-baked insect corpses to eat. Soon, I was picking up crazy second-hand suits from the funeral home’s outlet store and leaning fully into my insane pitchman personality.
Hey, it’s a living, and one that let me make a couple bucks off of all the shit that was left in my trunk. That’s right: while you were busy listening to my story, Olivia Newport in Rhode Island just scored the whole chunk. Thank you, Olivia. Right after this next break, we’ll be taking a special look at the burned-out meth-making equipment that my neighbour threw over the fence into my yard when he thought that he heard an ambulance coming down the street.
I don’t know if you’ve been to one of those dog shows recently. Well, I guess not “recently.” Let’s say “ever,” because most likely anyone reading this isn’t willing to die of a respiratory disease in exchange for looking at some fancy dogs. At these shows, you have two main tracks. Dogs that look pretty and are scored on how pretty they look, and dogs that are good at sports and get scored on how good they are at those sports. Everyone loves a winner.
I saw a billboard for this recently, and I thought: what about the dogs that weren’t popular in high school? Surely there is a dog show for the canines that spent every lunch break out behind the auto shop trying to see if the teacher would miss a couple bottles of brake cleaner enough to involve the school resource officer.
After thinking on this subject for awhile, I realized that I once again forgot to roll down the windows before leaving the Walmart, and the exhaust fumes are starting to build up in the cabin again. It’s a good thing this stereo still works, because I know from experience that when Jim Morrison starts to get all warbly, it’s carbon monoxide poisoning. What if I’m listening to a different tape? Perhaps you have confused me for someone whose car stereo features an “eject” button.
Back to the dogs: perhaps the most appealing aspect of this entire idea is that it attracts the hyper-rich. Once you pass a certain threshold of money-having, all your money starts to make more money on its own. You don’t need to be involved anymore, and chances are getting your idiot human hands in there would just make it worse. So you quit your job, go home, and stay there. I bet for a couple weeks, this is pretty cool, like being drinking-at-10am unemployed but without the fear that you are about to be evicted and murdered on the street. Of course, even the idle rich don’t want to actually be idle. Some rich people go into some really weird shit, but most are just kind of uncreative. They pick a new hobby that everyone likes: dogs. Breeding and training designer dogs consumes all this excess cash they have lying around, and it means that they get to go to parties with new rich people they haven’t met before. A natural fit.
That’s where the traditional model, as I’ve stated before in this piece, falls down. Not all bemoneyed dog people are going to produce athletic or beautiful dogs on their first try. Demotivated, they’re going to give up on the whole adventure, and take their money with them to a new hobby. Why attend any dog shows if there’s nothing to compete in? That’s why my Low-Achieving Dog Show For The Idle Rich will be extremely profitable. All we need to do is get some really accepting judges and..
Huh. Did Shaman’s Blues always have this killer EDM bassline? Christ. You’d think the broken sunroof on this piece of shit would vent some of this out once in awhile.
Decades ago, there were only limited choices for repairing the floorpan of an automobile. When your salt-soaked boots finally brined their way through the thin metal of the footwell to meet the nature outside, the only practical option was to cut out all the bad shit and rivet in some new panels. Nowadays, we have superior technology that can provide a longer-lasting, higher-quality repair but still at scumbag prices.
It is true that in recent years, there have been new developments nearly every week in this field. You could already choose from a vast array of options to repair your shitbox. Options like flattened-out beer cans, chunks of road signs, and angle-grinding the sides off of discarded clothes dryers are popular, but we can do better.
Advanced composites, like the styrofoam containers that McDLTs used to come in, are the new hotness. Not only are these proven not to degrade in nature for hundreds of years, but they’re also lightweight, which saves on fuel, and fairly rigid once you apply a little bit of undercoat. The only problem is bonding them to the panel. High-end two-part epoxies used to be considered unaffordable for the common man, but now the night janitor at the trailer manufacturing shop down the street sometimes forgets to lock up its dumpster.
I’ll be seeing you out on the roads this spring, with a happy family who no longer have to worry about accidentally dropping their smartphones onto the highway at 110km/h through the gaping hole in the floor.
In animation, the idea is that if you show enough discrete images to the human eye fast enough, our brains will fill in the gaps and we will think we’re seeing actual things move. Millions of dollars are then spent on anime strip mahjongg games. It’s this theory that I attempted to use last week, by driving past some parked cops at three-quarters of warp speed in the hope that they would think my car still had all of its doors.
This trickery didn’t work, and so I spent a little bit of time hoofing it. For my crime of street racing, the punishment was that they took my prized ‘74 Dodge Aspen, the one with the missing steering wheel. No, not that one. That one doesn’t have a steering column either. Just the wheel is missing from this Aspen.
Law enforcement has this theory about vehicle seizures: that the owners want their cars back. Naturally, I’ve put the lie to this whole terrible fascist project. As long as I’m allowed a few minutes to fill my backpack with whatever good parts are in the trunk but not yet installed, they can have it. Chances are they’re going to spend more to store my shitheap and then tow it to the junkyard than they’ll ever see back from me.
And in fact, that’s just what happened. I had almost made it back to my place when I got a call. It seems that some street racers were angry to have discovered that my ride had leaked a bunch of transmission fluid and an unknown, noxious, furry green substance onto their tires when they came to pick up their seized hot-rods. To calm them and their lawyer dads, the impound lot decided to disavow any knowledge of my shit. Through tears, the impound lot operator told me that they just pushed the car out onto the main road, and that driving it “was probably punishment enough.” The system works.
Everybody has a different opinion on how to load the dishwasher. Most folks agree that you shouldn’t put chef’s knives in it, if you want them to stay sharp. Some people believe that pots and pans are better off washed by hand, because they take up too much room. A third group believes you shouldn’t use the dishwasher at all. There’s so many bad opinions flying around that you can hardly hear me off in the corner, speaking the truth that that the correct use for a dishwasher is to clean parts.
Now, there are things called “parts washers” available at the Harbour Freights and Princesses Auto of the world. These are effectively really noisy water pumps in a crappy plastic enclosure. You put them in a corner of your garage, chuck in some parts and expensive specialty cleaning solution, and push go. That’s the good part. The bad part is that, for the rest of the day, no matter where you go in your house or even neighbourhood, you’ll constantly hear the high-frequency brrrrrrrrr of the damn thing running roughshod. And after several hours, you’ll pull the part out and the gunk on it will barely be touched. It would have been faster, cheaper, and more effective for you to just take an old toothbrush to the slime layer instead.
Why spend money? Every house comes with a dishwasher in this country, and sometimes houses don’t even come with a working one. My landlord saddled me with one that can’t do heated dry. Naturally, I could have fixed that up pretty quick with some decidedly non-code electrical modifications, but it’s the principle of the thing. And it’s hard to reach the bottom heating element when three-quarters of an A833 manual transmission is in there, getting its teeth cleaned.
Are there negative long-term effects to washing your food dishes in the same dishwasher that you just used to get rid of a bunch of nasty chemicals and oxides? I certainly haven’t noticed anything amiss, and now I can wash my cast-iron pans without worrying about having to re-season them with oil afterward.
You can’t trust a bookstore. Independent, big chain, used: they’re all in the business of deciding what to sell you, and therefore limiting what you can read. If you want to learn something new and free your mind, come on down to the seminar I’m having this weekend at the conference centre. There’s a modest fee for admission, but rest assured it’s all going to third-world orphans… like the twincharged Toyota Etios that I use on my private rally course.
Back in the 90s, the thing to do was to use the photocopiers at the library to make copies of your ‘zine. Perhaps I should back up a little. Decades ago, folks who were creative but professionally unsatisfied would construct their own ‘zines (short for magazine) about whatever subject they loved. Warhammer, elevator racing, Tetris, masonry, crack cocaine. These would arrive in the form of a crudely-pasted-up pile of papers, and almost immediately get thrown away after reading, but the excitement of the writers and designers were shooting off of every page. Near the end of the decade, this got replaced by blogs, which was a good thing because the librarians were starting to get wise to my trick of using a dime tied to a string to fool the pay copiers.
Distribution of these first couple issues of Bad Cars, Sometimes was poor. Of course, no bookstore would sell my ‘zine. It was too profane, complained one. Contained too much Volvo content for any living human being to enjoy, said another. Me and my one-time dorm roommate wasted several weekends whipping our jalopies up and down the city, looking for a big publisher or a literary agent who would talk to the bookstores for us. Nothing doing, one exasperated literary agent finally explained to us in the parking lot after we boxed her in with our moss-covered, wheezing Pathfinder: your interests are just too niche.
You can understand this. Bookstores need to have a broad cross-section of interest, and they’re paying monthly for each precious square foot of inventory and floor space. It’s more likely that someone will want to buy a cookbook than a half-screeched, half-remembered guide to adjusting a Carter Ball & Ball carburetor from the early 70s. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to provide a venue for my pants-on-head insane content; it was just that they thought it was fundamentally incompatible with capitalism.
So that’s why, now that I’ve seized control of the government with a surprisingly trivial set of mechanical sabotages, every single bookstore is now getting a mandatory “free speech” section. It’s free, because it doesn’t cost me any money to put my Little Red Book (automatic transmissions) and Little Grey Book (standard) on store shelves across this great nation.
For generations, the men, women, and floating-point inaccuracies of my family lineage have been digging holes and then filling them up. There’s lots of reasons for this. Reportedly, some ancient members of my brood once attempted to plant seeds and then harvest the food that grew from those seeds. I don’t think that’s possible for me, because my garden currently is occupied by a shattered Slant Six that barfed out of the front end of my Imperial the other day. Don’t get on my case; all I was doing was trying to pull it straight between a tree and the Cayenne the neighbour left running in his driveway.
Still, though. Holes. Mankind’s greatest foe, unless you count each other. The dream of digging a really big hole is truly appealing, especially if you were to consider the fiscal rewards. Air conditioning is unnecessary when nestled in the Earth’s thermally-regulated bosom. The cops will never look for you down there, and if they somehow do, very few grizzled detectives are brave enough to descend and face you on your own turf. You can fill it with old Honda gearboxes so that you’ll stop tripping over them every time you walk across the garage floor. It was starting to sound very appealing to me, this idea of digging a really big hole.
I didn’t want to do it myself, and when I looked on Craigslist, it turned out that ditch-digging equipment was actually very expensive. So naturally, I got some interns. Paleontology interns, to be exact. I am lucky enough to live in an area that once had some dinosaurs milling about, and the prospect of being The One Who Done Found That Dead Lizard pulls suckers from far and wide. All I had to do was offer a tent in the backyard, and I had dozens of applicants for summer students eager to gain some real-world experience trying to see if the creosote-soaked soil of my suburb had somehow sprouted a tyrannosaurus rex that the homebuilders were too fucked up on crank to notice.
The entire experience taught me a lot. For one thing, bracing is very important when you’re digging a tunnel. Luckily, my lazy grad students were busy taking a coffee break when it caved in, or I’d have to get new ones. You wouldn’t believe how much 2x4s cost right now, which is why I borrowed them from the walls of my Porsche-owning neighbour’s place. I figure he won’t need them, because Pickaxe-Swinging Samantha (her nickname, go figure) just took out part of his foundation while crossing the property line anyway.
Electronic bicycles, or “e-bikes,” are the greatest scam that motorsport enthusiasts have levered onto society yet. For a couple hundred bucks, you can pick up something that looks like a bicycle, follows all the bicycle laws, rides in the bike lanes, but does not require you to actually pedal. Yes, they are legally limited to a certain max speed and power output, but is the cop really going to dyno test your shit on the side of the road? Maybe if you’re doing a ten second quarter mile past his cruiser with the front wheel in the air the whole way, but if you can do that, then you can probably outrun him. There’s no license plate to call in!
You’re not going to achieve this massive amount of horsepower for free, though. Most of these juiced bicycles, owing to their cheap construction and desire to appeal to a broad audience, have crappy little motors and shrimpy batteries. Even if you go to an upscale boutique that caters to Lance Armstrong cosplayers, you’ll probably just end up with the same crappy AliExpress e-bike with a $1000 coat of paint on top.
Fret not. With a couple bucks and a subscription to the right underground zines, you can start slamming in much better parts. I bet you that the same manufacturer also makes an ATV, they’re too lazy to change out their spline count from model to model, and something that big would require a larger motor, right? So why not buy a handful of “replacement parts” and see where some zipties and insulating gloves will get you?
As you start to turn up the wick a bit, you may also find that these el-cheapo commuters also have thin wiring that likes to catch fire. This is okay; it’s a visible, auditory and olfactory indicator that you are on the right track. Ideally, your shakedown runs should be done somewhere where an exploding relay, shorted battery, or delaminating hub motor isn’t too far to pedal home from. In theory, once the “e” part is gone, the “bike” half will still remain. In practice, consider the local park: if things really go wrong, you can always steer the whole flaming mess into the duck pond and walk away.
It’s weird to think that so-called automotive enthusiasts would have a big problem with cross-brand engine swaps. In many ways, it feels self-defeating. You couldn’t imagine a racist on his deathbed screening his potential organ donors, so why would you cling so utterly to having to put a Ford in a Ford? Not to mention, sometimes you just have a lot of non-Ford engines lying around, and you gotta use ‘em up to make room in order to buy more.
Specifically, my friend Tom picked up a blown-transmission Nissan Multi on Craigslist just the other day. It had one of those classic Nissan 80s automatic transmissions; you know, the ones that forget most of the gears exist and are generally upset about shifting into reverse. In the interest of doing as little work as possible, we quested to do a quick automatic transmission flush, but the goop that came out looked more like android ejaculate than fresh ATF. A replacement was necessary.
Now, I know what you’re going to say: why are you swapping the motor if you have a bad transmission? Even toddlers know that these are not the same component of the car. This brings me back to my original point. I did not have a 1980s Nissan automatic transmission on the floor of my garage, but I did have a five-speed for a Honda. A five-speed connected to a “300-wheel-horsepower” turbo D-series. Admittedly, that D16 had seen a couple bent rods and exploding camshafts in its past, but it was on the floor and we thought it might look better in the engine bay.
After a few dozen hours of completely rebuilding the engine, welding together dodgy combination axles, and removing the previous owner’s eBay ex-pistons, the engine was once again capable of more than zero wheel horsepower. We had ourselves a turbo-Honda powered Nissan minivan that could clock the quarter mile remarkably quickly, assuming that it was still 1997 and you were a denizen of the Hot Import Night.
And it was glorious for the first couple kilometers, until the old Nissan engine bounced free in the back of the van and smashed out the hatchback glass. Shit. Where are we going to find a rear window for a 1980s Nissan van? Maybe this 40lb nitrous bottle will work for now.
Folks: there are a million-and-one ways to get a too-small hose onto a too-large fitting. From the dawn of recorded history, mankind has suffered from the dreaded curse of trying to put radiator hoses onto a water pump neck. Or to fit a fuel filler elbow into a gas tank inlet flange. As our technology improved, the basic problem of “why the fuck won’t this intercooler hose pop on?” remained.
Everyone has their own technique: heating the hose up in boiling water, slathering it in dish soap, using exotic NASA-derived lubricants that come in a tiny can and cost eighty bucks for 30 seconds of spray. When all of these are exhausted, many mechanics try prayer. You would think that by now there’d be some kind of robot to install it, or nanotechnology, or at least a $37 pair of special pliers, but no dice. We exist in an uncaring universe.
Me, my go-to technique is just never to use new hoses. Yeah, old ones from the junkyard might spring a leak, or be worn out from repeated heat cycles, but they go on and off pretty easily, and you can buy a dozen of them for what one new one costs at the friendly neighbourhood parts store. Spend all day taking your pick of the litter! Impress your friends and internet message boards with the hard-won knowledge of which cars have radiator hoses of the same length as yours! And if those hoses leak at the ends, which you’d expect because they’re more hogged out than a sandstone quarry, you can just add more hose clamps. Or glue. Either one works great.
There is, of course, another alternative. Rubber hoses are a compromise made by the manufacturer to deal with the inherent imprecision of their slap-dash assembly. Why not take a welding class at night school and just make the entire thing out of one chunk of steel? It’s good enough for steam locomotives, and you hardly ever see one of those leaking.
One of my neighbours is really big into model railroading. It’s been a few years since I was over there, but I drove past the other day and his collection has gone a little further than I expected. Since he’s been isolated, I guess he’s had a lot of free time, and now the model railway has finally broken free of the bounds of his house. Rails punch through holes in his Stucco, flowing out into tentacles of a full-scale network that provides convenient transportation of tiny goods and passengers throughout what used to be his backyard.
Being a good neighbour, I realized that he was probably out of real estate in which to make his layout more elaborate. I figured I had to do something, so I went back home and did what I do best: make up faked resumes and get high-paying jobs that I didn’t show up for. In this case, though, he would.
I knocked on his front door, backed up to the minimum safe distance, and then announced through a megaphone that he had just scored a sweet pensioned gig as the head of the city’s public light rail system. Now, he could play with big trains all day, and get money that he could spend on tiny trains. The perfect combination. And I was sure he’d have lots of train nerd friends to talk to at work.
While he was busy Zooming his first day, and therefore having torn his eyes away from the security cameras dotting his property, I was helping myself to the Ford nine-inch from his Granada. For the foreseeable future, he wouldn’t be having to drive to work, so it’s not like he would miss it. Maybe they’d give him a company car, one of those sweet big-government jobs. I had just finished angle-grinding through the nasty passenger-side leaf shackle when he returned, proud from a hard day’s work. Unable to sneak the axle onto a series of also-stolen skateboards, I decided I would make conversation. How did your first day go?
“Not so great,” he moaned. “Nobody else at work likes trains, they just got stuck there by special appointment of the Mayor. They won’t let me tear up the entire city and rebuild it as an exact replica of the Chesapeake Beach Railway of 1928.”
Drilling holes: easy as pie, and pretty fun. Accurately drilling holes: that’s actual work. If I wanted to do actual work, I’d ride a bicycle. Chances are it would break down less often than my fleet of Volares, which have now – against all odds and reason – so thoroughly exhausted the supply of replacement slant sixes in my area that I am forced to start cramming Chevrolet products in them. And that means adapter plates.
For the unenlightened, pretty much all extant internal-combustion engines are attached to the front (bellhousing) of the transmission with some cockamamie arrangement of bolts. This arrangement is usually proprietary to engine families, and sometimes even to engine-transmission combos, because every engineer thinks they’re smarter than the other guy.
For this reason, if you want to jam a Chevrolet V8 onto a transmission that once held a Mopar inline-six, the holes won’t line up. Here’s the thing nobody explains to you in engineering school, or so I assume because I never showed up for class after finding out the parking lot had plenty of room for donuts: they don’t have to bolt into each other. The idea of the adapter plate is that you make a chunk of metal that has both sets of bolt holes cut in it, and then you bolt the engine to one set of holes and the transmission to the other.
Obviously, these holes need to be pretty precise. While you can tool around for years on only two out of eight bellhousing bolts (ask me how I know) it’s a lot harder to do so on two out of eighteen. Enter the transfer punch, or at least the one that I impulse-bought at last summer’s swap meet because it seemed like a really good deal. It makes super precise holes as long as you know how to use it, which I don’t, or as long as you are very patient with it, which I’m not.
Sometimes you get lucky anyway. You always get lucky if you make your own luck, my grandfather said when he was introducing me to Satanism as part of my initiation into Volkswagen repair, and I never forgot that lesson. The result is that my next few weeks of commuter duty were happily spent driving around with a Swiss-cheesed chunk of old washing machine, until I missed an easy 4-3 downshift and threw one of those precious junkyard V8’s rods through the hood. Great. Now I’m going to have to cut a whole new hood scoop. Anyone selling a ruler? It doesn’t have to be straight, if that makes it any cheaper.
A lot of people use WD-40 to loosen stuck bolts, because that’s what their dad used. Well, did you also bang the au pair because that’s what your dad did? Blame her disappearance on a group of less-tolerated misfits travelling through the area? Then, when the heat was off, finally book a “family fishing trip” that you refused to let anyone put anything in the trunk for, then disappeared from for several hours? You did? Well, then, go ahead and keep using WD-40, “dad.” The rest of us have some rust to deal with.
While nobody really knows what rust is (is it a malevolent organism from another planet? Who can say?) we can all agree that it makes working on winter-driven cars a huge pain in the ass. To combat it, there are a vast variety of elixirs available at your local auto parts store. They all promise that they consist of special oils, which have the magical ability to creep inside the thread of the bolt/nut interface, and dissolve the rust from the inside. Where does the rust go? Not their problem.
The fact of the matter is, while we all have our favourite brand of penetrating oil (mine’s Deep Creep, which was also my name in college) there’s no real scientific way to test it. Yeah, you can line up a bunch of bolts that you’ve been soaking in vinegar, but do they all have a perfect coating? All soaked for exactly the same amount of time? What happened at the factory? Where were you that dark morning in 1987 when Dear Old Dad told you about what Grandpa did during the war? And not all rust is the same – road salt rust is different from mud rust is different from age rust is different from ocean spray rust. There are simply too many variables, which makes “what’s the best penetrating oil” a question that is impossible to answer, even if you’ve been philosophizing about it all night at the bar.
What we can all agree on, as human beings, is that WD-40 (”Water Displacement 40″) is simply not that good at being a penetrating oil. If you’ve been using it, stop. And tell your dad. He’ll need some life skills to fall back on if he gets parole this year.
One of the greatest pieces of civic infrastructure is the humble public park. There, you can encounter all walks of life, from the bird-feeding lady to the illegal ice cream vendor. As of late, with everyone trying to keep their distance from one another, the camaraderie that used to exist at my neighbourhood park has taken quite a few dings. And if there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s take dings out. I just… don’t do it, okay?
In case you’ve never experienced it, a handbrake turn is something magical. Lots of cars these days no longer come with one, and instead trust a complicated series of motors and sensors to decide when you should have your e-brake on. Most of the time, it’s probably correct. One of the specific circumstances which this future-tech arrangement does not cover? Using the skid handle to give your carbon-fibre-bodied, tube-framed Comet a little bit of English as you slide it across a frozen duck pond like a curling stone.
There’s an art to attracting a spectacle. Most folks just assume that if you make enough noise, then everyone will turn up to watch it. This is totally false: when’s the last time you responded seriously to a car alarm in your community? I know that it has been awhile for me, because my wheezing quarter-diesel Belvedere hasn’t stopped believing it was being stolen since the Reagan administration, and isn’t afraid to let everyone within a square kilometer know about it. No, what you need is the combination of speed and danger. Think Evel Knievel: yes, any able-bodied, law-abiding citizen could jump a motorcycle over a bunch of flaming school buses, but will they survive? It’s in that gap of horror that the real crowds appear.
Drawing a crowd nowadays might be considered to be a sociopathic endeavour, reckless in the extreme. I made sure beforehand, however, to erect a series of elaborate partitions on the duck-pond viewing area, so that no two members of the public could intersect their relative Venn diagrams, if you get my drift, as they got my drift. Together, but apart, they all got to see me do about four-and-a-half burnies before the ice cracked and I ended up having to pump dead koi out of my rear differential that night. They all got something to talk about, though, and that’s what the public park is really for: gawping at the freaks.
Language is one of the greatest tools in the backyard mechanic’s set. Knowing the difference between a component that is “shonky” and one that is merely “dicky” could mean life and death. Although it seems maddeningly imprecise to the layman, the sliding scale of descriptors for how fucked-up some part of a car is has actually been proven to be relatively consistent, even across languages and cultures.
Although the words may change as you visit other lands, scumbag car-fixers do not. First, you must get into that depraved combination of a technical mindset and strong, throbbing belief in an unjust universe that is deliberately out to fuck you over. Then, science is now finding, the expressions and categorization you use to describe your various micro- and macro-crises can be easily communicated to another asshole of similar or greater experience.
Part of this is likely due to the huge cost of automobile manufacture. Being forced to use largely the same parts and construction of cars across the globe has driven automobiles into a sort of monoculture. Barring the occasional jaunt into hydraulic suspension, Dorito-based engines, or British electrical systems, you’ll find that the same problems crop up everywhere. This means that a practiced mechanic can look at a coolant leak from a car they’ve never heard of before, and pinpoint just how fucked up the water pump is. The modern automobile has become a lingua franca of their own.
So take heart. If you travel to another country in the future, you’ll most likely be able to figure out from the sad facial expressions of the mechanics exactly what part just blew off your rental car. And without a shared spoken language, the group of you will bond on your shared hatred of Goddamn External Torx Fasteners, I Mean Who Has A Driver For Those Just Lying Around?
If you’re unfamiliar with the rotary engine, that’s because the campaign by Big Piston to brainwash you has been totally successful. A person born in America today can and will live their entire lives without thinking even once about the concept of the Reuleaux triangle, and that’s not by accident. Rotary engines once contained the secret to efficient combustion itself, but they were held back by The Man and his urge to make motoring less enjoyable.
High-revving, zingy engines with power delivery so smooth that you need a computer to tell you when it’s running out of pep. That’s the kind of thing that all of us dream about, even those of us who off-road. They think about it while they’re in line at the NAPA, waiting to blow another entire paycheque on repairing a cooling problem with their 4.0. A rotary-engined pickup: a concept so desirable that Mazda just had to build it. And then they built a goddamn city bus too, just in case you weren’t paying attention the first time.
Now, those of you who have read subliterate screeds about RX-8s on internet message boards are shining up your shithead-kicking boots, getting ready to give me a real good thrashing. I say: hear me out. If Wankel engines were inherently bad, then why did the French try to put them in the Citroen GS Birotor? French engineers have never done anything impractically dangerous just because it was entertaining. They leave that to their drivers.
It is true that they consume a lot of oil. And gasoline. Those are okay. I’ve heard that children consume a lot of food and water, and people keep having those. Will your kid beep angrily at you as you approach the magic nine-grand rev limit? This is much less likely.
Compromise is the death of ambition, probably said some book somewhere. And they were talking about the V6 internal-combustion engine. The vee six is one of those engine layouts that is fundamentally disappointing. Nobody who’s opted for a V6 when a bigger (or smaller) engine was available is happy with their choice. Those poor saps stay up at night, wondering what they could/should have said to the salesman at that crucial moment of model selection.
They tend to be used in vehicles where a larger engine won’t fit and a smaller engine isn’t powerful enough. You end up with a tiny-displacement engine, mixing the power of an oversized four with the fuel consumption of an eight-cylinder engine. To make matters worse, vee-sixes are inherently unbalanced engines, so you can’t enjoy smooth revs like you can with an inline six, and you definitely can’t rev to the moon, and if you can it’s only through the use of exotic lightweight materials that you’ll soon be picking up shards of behind your exhaust pipes.
There’s only one solution. Here at the Seat Safety Switch V6 Rehabilitation clinic, we’ll solve your V6 problems by adding another V6. We just weld them together, human centipede style. What the fuck, I hear you express in terror as you shrink away into the corner of the room, hoping desperately that I won’t notice you if you stay still enough in that shadow cast by the workbench. Stay with me here, mostly because I locked the door.
By adding another V6, we solve almost all the problems of the original engine. They become a V12, for starters, which has a great balance. You can rev that shit like crazy, although if you are, please wait until I’m well out of rod-throwing range to do so. You’ll get twice the horsepower at only twice the fuel consumption, which I think we can all agree is a fantastic bargain. Both engines are just as reliable as a factory engine – which in many cases may not be all that great, but at least it’s not worse. And nobody else on your block is going to be rolling around in a widebody Ford Aerostar with a shrieking twelve-banger that breaks traction whenever you look sideways at the gas pedal. Even if you live in a neighbourhood full of freaks where the guy next door somehow shoehorned a V8 into his, you can still lord it over his inferior vehicle by doing savage burnouts at two in the morning.
Now, there are some caveats before you sign on the dotted line here. My welding skills are kind of shitty, and I’m certainly not getting paid enough here to tack together a pair of block-hugging headers, so no exhaust is provided with your swap. That might sound bad to you, but I promise that once you’ve driven to work with twelve angry open ports spitting liquid fire, you’ll never go back.
Cooling is one of those things, like air, that you don’t really think about until it’s no longer present. Nearly everything you do in life produces at least a little waste heat. And that heat has to go somewhere. Back into the thing that’s making the heat? That’s a pretty good recipe for having to buy a new thing, even if that “thing” is your cardiopulmonary system.
And since it’s not such a sexy thing, not like power supplies, dual-clutch transmissions, in-car entertainment, or lidar, nobody specializes in it. The poor interns who get stuck with the cooling-system job are usually assigned to it near the end of a project. Since they’re taking up the rear, they then have to cram it into what little free space is left around all the neat stuff everyone else already finished and placed inside the thing in question months ago.
So it should come as no surprise that everything around you is probably a couple bad minutes away from a complete meltdown. And apparently the Earth is included in that, because nobody in the 1950s understood how bitchin’ it would look to clamp a water-to-air intercooler onto the atmosphere and start charge-cooling our ozone layer. Or at least they didn’t want to pay for it.
There is one benefit to this constant benign neglect. Despite not knowing anything about the details, you can strap a couple chunks of finned aluminum or an extra thick radiator to something, call it an upgrade, and you’d be 100% right. By the time anyone figures out you’re a fraud, you’re now the chief engineer on a particle accelerator. That’ll buy you lots of time to hire some interns to delegate the cooling system work to.
There’s one frontier that do-it-yourself beaters have not yet breached: space. Those NASA eggheads definitely know how to squeeze a penny until it shrieks, and they get results, but there’s gotta be some room way up there for all of us who didn’t live up to their potential. That’s why I started my own space program. It turns out that if you drop the word “privatized” in front of a government program, a bunch of creepy weirdos turn up from all over to splash investment capital at your feet.
This is the ideal kind of investor for me: one that I won’t feel bad about burning the money from. They’ll just get more from blood diamond sales, or oil wells, or selling overpriced cell phone service. Any money I take from them – and waste – is practically doing a public service, which is good, because I have been racking up a lot of both legal and ethical bad karma with the local municipality. Honestly, that’s on them. Those city hall bigwigs were too contemptuous of the common man to have updated the bylaws to keep the fees for “rocket launch licenses” at pace with inflation. Twelve bucks a shot is cheaper than parking downtown!
Now, you might ask: aren’t rockets made up of all kinds of, you know, space-age materials? And that’s totally true. Here’s the secret that really saves the money: anything I dig out of my scrap pile now qualifies. Whether it’s aluminum foil or crudely hand-cut chunks of burned titanium Tomei exhaust manifolds: it’s all space-age, because we’re currently living in the Space Age, baby!
Keeping costs down on the rocket material again means I can do more launches. My main expense is scooping expired Estes toy rocket engines out of the hobby shop’s dumpster. If those rockets I launch happen to blow up over the freeway, oh well, it was just a “prototype,” and I can have another five ready to go the next weekend for the same amount of money normal people spend on an Ikea bookshelf. Hey, now that I think about it, MDF is pretty light. Might be a good composite material!
So what happens if I manage to get a rocket all the way to the Moon? Well, to be honest, I haven’t thought that far ahead. I’m mostly in this whole project as a protest against the entire concept of proprietary expertise. Maybe I’ll sell the company, and then see how far rudely assuming that things are simpler than they really are will take me on Wall Street. Running a bank isn’t rocket science, I’m told.
Despite living in an area that was once described as “hell on Earth” by a group of UN diplomats who got on the wrong plane and landed here instead of a distant civil war, my neighbours are extremely concerned about their property value. Perhaps they, like many others, are worried that their precarious financing has actually overextended themselves into a worthless house that is not worth the money they paid.
Me, I got my place for free when the landlord died. The city cut off the power and boarded up the doors, but a Honda generator and a crowbar took care of that pretty quick. I like to call it my “fixer-upper.” Still, I shared their concern about maintaining the investment that was made here decades ago. If I kept the place in good enough shape, then there was a pretty good chance that I would be one of the first on the block to sell the dirt underneath my house to a condo developer, who would knock down the building and pop up some luxury condos that nobody would ever occupy.
As such, at the community watch meeting, I volunteered to help my neighbour Sam set up his new security cameras. It seems there were some hoodlums in the area, and he suspected they might even be teenagers. Climbing all over Sam’s house to run ethernet cable was a very cozy way to spend a late summer afternoon. It was good exercise, he plied me with beer, and he didn’t notice that I pocketed the cat-5 crimpers on my way out as a bonus payment.
Now, I didn’t do this entirely out of the goodness of my own heart. See, Sam has a Pontiac Bonneville SSEI - the supercharged kind - and now I knew exactly where the weaknesses in his security system were. If I ever needed a seriously hogged-out low-displacement GM factory supercharger with all the PTFE wiped from the rotors, I knew exactly how to get it on short notice without involving law enforcement. Those damn hoodlums - they must have used their high school electronics lab to devise a camera-jamming laser mask which completely hid their identities while burning out the CCDs on your $27 Radio Shack camera setup! When will they ever stop!?
When troubleshooting, one of the most helpful skills you can develop is that of keeping a project log. Human memory is extremely frail, especially when it comes to intricate combinations of complex assemblies at three in the morning. You’re unlikely to remember exactly what you had done previously, and that means wasted time repeating the same experiment only to get a different result.
On the flip side, these project logs are often coveted by law enforcement. They like to call them “evidence.” Their possession of your records can turn a mere misdemeanour into a big-league charge with the magic words “with intent” tacked onto the end of it. That’s why I developed a simple cryptographic method for obfuscating my notes, like Leonardo da Vinci did when he was working on beaters.
You might want to check out books from the library in order to look up some clever ciphers. However, I strongly advise that you do so under an alias, because although librarians are historically Volvo-driving ultra-radicals, their bosses will happily turn over a list of whoever borrowed Encyclopedia Brown’s Guide to Smashing the State over the last few months. And when that happens, you want the federales to be no-knock raiding your annoying neighbour instead. It’ll give you a few minutes’ head start.
The exact methodology I use is simple, and I won’t reveal it here for fear that my enemies may use it against me. However, it is absolutely not just pig Latin with a couple umlauts thrown in here and there. That would be a very insecure system, and only a total idiot would do it. Even if my notes seem like they say stuff like “ümpjayed ïretrückfay through golf course,” only a true paranoid would connect it to the string of stolen municipal equipment that recently did a sick jump through the Los Racismos Country Club’s restaurant and bar.
Public transit is something, like quality health care, that you hope you’ll never have to use. As a result, both of them get underfunded in lean times, or just when the Mayor needs a new golf course. Yes, in other countries, public transit is the dominant form of getting around, but we’ve evolved past that here in North America. We are so incapable of sharing a close space with other human beings that we need to drive to work in a protective steel cage that measures at least 12 feet wide by 22 feet long. And we better not have to push the gas pedal more than halfway down in order to merge onto the highway.
Now, don’t shoot the messenger. I’ve used the bus a whole lot; probably more than most folks reading this. When one of my smorgasbord of hoopties throws a rod or just decides to eject white-hot coolant directly into my face via the heater vents, I still need to get to work. Why don’t I just take one of my other twenty cars? The secret is that I don’t maintain any of them, and so in these circumstances, I take the bus until I can pick up another piece of shit on Craigslist.
The bus is actually pretty great. Last week, the one that picked me up only had one and a half million kilometers on the odometer. When I expressed my delight at how the thing was “practically new,” the bus driver told me to shut up and go back to my seat. It has seats? And there’s barely any interior rattles, or holes in the floor. It got me thinking about buying my own bus, so on the way home I just hid in the back for a few hours until the driver reached the end of his shift and returned to the depot.
At the depot, I expected, would be some kind of surplus-bus auction. Sure, it might not be that weekend, but it would be some weekend. What I didn’t expect was how boring a bus depot is. There were a lot of mechanics milling around, but they regarded me with a wary eye: I could tell that they knew I wasn’t one of them. The heavy-duty mechanic is a special breed indeed, possessed of a higher aptitude than your average brake-job-and-oil-change-pit jockey. They work with giant fasteners in the whole-inches range, and have settings on their torque wrenches that us mortals can only dream of. Maybe it was the simple awe I had for them that betrayed me, or the fact that I smelled of consumer-grade ATF, but security quickly arrived.
I’d like to tell you that I stole a bus to get away from them, but that would be a lie. Unaccustomed to moving even short distances using my legs, I quickly tripped over my own feet and fell to a useless heap about eight feet away from where the chase began. This is how i discovered that there was an even lamer way to get around than the bus, from which I was now banned: walking.
We all have our own ideas of what the perfect lottery-winning car would be. Me? Naturally, it would have to be James Garner’s SC/Rambler, the perfect apocalypse-proof buggy with real AMC street cred. For you, it might be a base-model Ferrari or something. No imagination, but that’s alright. Only one of us can win, according to math, and I’ve engineered the perfect system to do so.
Walk with me here. You see, a couple years ago, I was looking for a job. Unfortunately, my skillset, which is predominantly in reviving broken old junk and making it do things well in excess of its original design parameters, is largely useless nowadays. There is only one place that it is effective: in government information technology departments. The local lottery concern hired me to take a look at the VIC-20 they had pulling the lottery numbers every week.
It turns out that this poor little graphing-calculator of a computer had become overwhelmed at some point during the last 40 years and let the magic smoke out. In order to preserve the continuity of government while they scoured eBay for a new one, for the few weeks leading up to my hiring, they had been telling an unpaid intern from the local university to draw balls from a hat while blindfolded. Obviously, this was not in any way compliant with legislation regarding games of chance, and so I was told to get the hapless Commodore up and running again.
After yanking the throttle-body-injection ECU out of my Ramcharger (don’t worry, it didn’t really need it) and banging it sharply on the desk to dislodge a couple loose DRAM chips, I had completed the contract. While the rest of the office went away to its lunch martini session (sorry, no contractors allowed), I stayed behind. There, on the screen, was the top-secret BASIC program that pulled the lottery numbers for my area. I snuck in a few lines of code (for “debugging purposes,” of course) and then made good my escape.
Now you know why “123456” came up as the winning number last week. What were the odds? About as good as my chances of winning this SC/Rambler on eBay. I hear the dude bidding against me is selling old Commodores to the government.
When I was a kid, a trusted adult told me a falsehood. My uncle said that if a cement mixer truck took too long to get to the jobsite, or if the drum stopped spinning, the cement inside would harden up, and they’d have to throw the entire cement drum out. Once I became an adult, I realized that this presented a beater-purchasing opportunity.
I had a dream: cement mixer trucks tend to have pretty beefy engines and some aggressively short gearing, so they can get up to speed quickly inside the city. And without the eight bajillion tons of hydraulic bullshit in the back? You’ve got yourself a pretty decent dump hauler, right there. Stoplight drag races with suburban dads driving Suburbans would be much more competitive, if only because I could just swerve and drive over their hoods.
Presumably, if what my uncle told me were true, there would be at least a few cement mixers without the drum kicking around. When I went shopping, though, there were none. It surprised me. There would definitely have to be a point where a cement mixer company decided their shitty old truck wasn’t worth re-drumming, right?
The reason why this didn’t happen is because it doesn’t make a lot of sense to throw away a perfectly good drum just because a little concrete is stuck to the inside. In fact, a whole bunch of concrete stays stuck to the inside after the job is done, and they just blast that shit off with acid. Even back in the bygone Silver Age that my uncle presumably got all of his information from, the cement company would have hired a bunch of disposable part-time workers to bang it off the inside of the drums with hammer. So there were simply not many cheap drumless cement trucks available for purchase.
There was something else at the industrial auction, something that I didn’t know I needed. Did you know that when a crane gets a little bit old, and a little bit dangerous, they just sell it off? Now I’ve got all kinds of extra parking on top of my house, as long as that built beam holds out for a little longer.
Brave words, spoken by brave men. And as true today as when they were written. A lot of folks think that urban planning is this hoity-toity fascist structure that forces them to live differently, but it isn’t. Urban planning is about finding out how people already live, and then making obvious improvements. One of those obvious improvements is to mandate the combination of discrete Pizza Huts and Taco Bells into combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bells.
First, these combination outfits make neighbourhoods much more walkable. While you could certainly walk to your local Pizza Hut, what if you wanted a taco? Thousands of wasted miles are logged every year going from what we call Taco Bell communities to Pizza Hut communities, and vice versa. If you add combination restaurants to each? Vehicle traffic is reduced significantly, and with it, traffic accidents, pedestrian fatalities, and fossil fuel consumption.
This is hugely beneficial for society. The carbon footprint of a combined Pizza Hut/Taco Bell location is much smaller. You can name countless benefits. For instance, a delivery truck only has to visit one location to drop off two restaurants’ worth of ingredients. Fume hoods and emissions controls don’t have to be any bigger, and the improved profitability can buy a much better system. Cleanliness should go up with only one bathroom to maintain.
Of course, this helps the proprietors of these restaurants as well. The property tax burden is significantly reduced with the smaller square footage. There’s less dining room area to maintain with the same staff. Drive-throughs can be optimized. Staff can be cross-trained, so that a bad day for chalupa demand can turn into a good day for calzones.
It is for these reasons, and many more, that I now urge city council to act. With your help, we can make sure that no stoned college student will ever feel vaguely hungry again.
Back in the day, we had software piracy. You’d call up a BBS on your Apple II, download some cracked copy of Choplifter, and then go around picking up hostages after sitting through a loading screen rewritten by a 13-year-old. It was absolutely great. In recent years, however, subscription services have taken over. Now, you don’t really have to pay for individual things so much as immerse yourself in an infinite, undulating stream of Content.
That’s where the biopirates came in. As soon as the first DNA printers came on the market, they were working hard to make their own knockoff cats, marsupials, and extremely tiny dinosaurs. You can hop on the interwebs, dodge a couple bits of black ICE, and download yourself an entire raccoon. Leave it printing overnight, and you’ve created life.
Naturally, the next step was to try and make human clones. It’s against the law, but so is reproducing Monsanto-copyrighted turbo-elephant genes. Making more of yourself is a pursuit as old as time, or at least much older than cranking out large amounts of guilt-free pachyderm meat for the local butcher shop. Of course, like any hobby project, the first three thousand versions or so were completely shit. I knew this guy who was throwing out a dumpster full of malformed corpses with his own face on them every week.
Eventually, someone had to succeed, and that person got the entire mess uploaded to the internet. They achieved electronic immortality before the feds came to shut it down. Of course, at that point the courts got involved and forced the feds to go through the entire death panel procedure before they could delete the data off the server, and there were all these protests. Anyway, that’s why there’s six thousand copies of Pee-Wee Herman attending high school right now.
There is a spectre haunting humanity. This spectre has caused untold waste, environmental damage, and anxiety. I speak, of course, of our collective inability to get that last little bit of liquid out of a container.
Have you ever thrown away a paint can even though there were a few drips left at the bottom? Maybe tossed a bottle of beer that you just can’t seem to get that last little bit of dregs out of? Of course you have. And if you take the small amount that you wasted, and multiply it by the number of people on the planet, then we got a real problem on our hands.
When I took over NASA at the start of the year with those fake junk bonds and “Bytecoins,” this was the exact kind of problem I wanted to solve. Humanity would be extinct within a few generations if we didn’t get off the extractive treadmill, and what better way to do it than to use the entire buffalo, as it were?
Once we built a couple of working prototypes, I had some interns go out into the community to look for examples of “leftovers” that we could use as examples when we applied for more government funding. One of the interns came back with like a good-sized jerry can of stinky gasoline. He was laughing his ass off, hysterical as only a man who has defeated The Man could be.
Turns out gas stations can’t get the last little bit out of their tanker trucks and filler hoses, either, and he ended up driving up and down the Strip, filling up his little can with free gasoline that was just going to get thrown away. Free gasoline! I immediately swore him to secrecy, then told security to lock his ass up until we could draft a good PR strategy for breaking this to the oil industry. It was too late.
Some black-suited oil industry goons had been having a lunch break at one of the Kum ‘N’ Gos that my humble intern chose to raid. After figuring out what he was up to, they decided to tail him all the way to the NASA offices. They wanted our invention, so that it could be destroyed! I offered to show them another invention that the lab engineers had been working on: the front end of my Volare, spit-polished with so much care that concours judges would now declare it “badly tarnished.”
Did you know how much blood is left over in the human body after most folks would declare it “exsanguinated?” It’s a good half-litre or so, just going to waste. And you can turn that blood in for money!
I have this friend, and he’s not really “into” cars. In fact, he’s not really “into” anything that involves rust. Weird, right? We’ve all been there, though. For me, it was when I was an infant in the womb. Trapped by the bonds of motherhood, I was then unable to discover the value of a good angle grinder. I did get a couple pretty good second-hand huffs of nitrous when Mom decided to race the family truckster for pinks, but I’m now told that the medical establishment has ruled this sort of thing as “who fucking cares?”
The point is, almost as soon as you begin working on cars, or metalwork, you realize that you need an angle grinder. I have no idea how previous civilizations were able to build such amazing things without this essential tool. They probably had to use a wizard’s curse, or slaves, or do basic mathematics when they wanted to rough-cut a patch panel for their chariot or whatever.
Now, a casual observer would expect that you only need one angle grinder. This is a ludicrous argument, but like all idiotic beliefs, it has its basis in what complete dolts call “common sense.” After all, if it still works, you can just swap out the grinding wheel, right? Not so. Many jobs will require several different kinds of wheel, from flap disc to roloc to knotted wire cup to what I like to call The Motherfucker, which is just an old circular saw blade I drilled a mounting boss into.
And swapping back and forth between them, especially when the motor is white hot after you just used it well past the point where the grinder was shooting sparks of its own, is time wasted that you could be spending on the project. So just buy a couple extra grinders, pre-load them with their respective wheels, and grab a different grinder off the wall when you need to change them out.
All this is to say that dropping off 30 heavily-worn angle grinders at my friend’s place – an essential requirement for modern life – is apparently not an appropriate gift for a baby shower. Way to raise your kid to grow up as a woodworker, buddy. Have fun building 18th-century sailing vessels.
In life as well as projects, it’s the little details that matter. Getting the broad stuff right gets you into the ballpark, but not reading the right part of a datasheet or getting confused about which end is up is going to ruin your day every time. Human memory is frail, and it tends to forget the little details, especially when those details are in opposition to my goals. That’s why I like to keep copious notes.
There’s consequences to this, of course. My house is packed with yellow legal pads stuffed into every available orifice. My probation officers get freaked out when they see all those cork boards with red yarn pulled between candid photographs of mayoral candidates. My paper shredder’s overheat warning LED has been lit since the Carter administration. And worst of all, I would lose my notes to the clutter and still make stupid mistakes.
I needed some kind of machine to keep track of my notes, and make sure I stayed organized. What I needed existed only in Hollywood movies – a sarcastic robot butler. This would impede anyone else, but I realized that with the success of the last Mars landing, there were now a lot of laid-off robotics engineers at the unemployment agency near the NASA offices. All it took was waving some $20s out the window as I drove past. A bunch of them broke into a run and climbed into the bed of my truck as soon as I stopped for the red light. Back home, these polo-shirted engineering geniuses busted their asses, all hoping to get called back tomorrow for another day of this sweet cash job.
I will admit that I splurged; many of the engineers exclaimed joy at having such a large budget to work with, compared to the current state of funding to their agency. Even so, I had to start patting them down at the end of the day because one of them walked off with a Whitworth bolt to show their friends. Within a few weeks, I had two things: a tight group of my most trusted nerds, and a robot butler who would remember the most inane specifics of the idiotic project I was embarking on.
It was actually very nice to have someone to talk to in the shop. Usually, I just talked to myself, and over the years my language slipped from profanity-laced English to a sort of high-pitched gutter squeal that would make dolphins shit themselves. I’d still be using that robot butler, except when I was working on the Celica last night, I needed a new 2-¼" Torrington bearing to replace the one that wore out on my camber plates, and it turns out that Mr. Bartholomew-2000 had just that size in stock. Rather than use a 2" bearing and hog it out a bit, I decided I would part him out. He’d have appreciated my dedication to the importance of details.
I used to work in this weird shithole office, but the office itself wasn’t the important part of the job. It was the commute. In order to get to and from the place, I had to drive through some very special roads. Back when these roads were constructed, the city was consumed by the utopian, futurist obsessions of the 1970s.
They were going to construct the perfect city, where cars and pedestrians could intermingle, and new and exciting construction tools meant that concrete could become art. Then, of course, things changed in the 80s, and spending even a dime on making a sidewalk kinda curvy was a betrayal of their oath to the Holy Taxpayer and the Enshrined Small Business Boss, Hallowed Be His Name. What this meant for me is that in this one glorious section of the city, you could find low-speed, off-camber sweepers, confusing chicanes with excellent visibility, and potholes the size of a pregnant Alsatian. And my route cut right through it.
Now, this wasn’t the most direct route. In fact, a lot of regular folks didn’t want to engage in what amounted to an entire weekend of autocross every night when they were driving home tired from the day’s ordeal. This made it even better; nothing is worse than coming out of a roundabout, tires smoking, only to see that the RVR in front of you is confused about whether the next turn is a secret entrance to the McDonalds drive-through or part of the airport runway.
Always hungry for competition, I soon found myself timing my commute from work to home. Right after that, I began actually maintaining my daily driver. A loose bushing or a dicky ball joint could cost entire seconds. Anything that kept me from going ten-tenths on pseudo-public roads had to be serviced. I was proud of my cars, especially when I started to weld in NASCAR-spec door bars and keep spare bored-and-stroked forged-piston race engines in the garage instead of patch panels cut from dishwashers.
Of course, nothing lasts forever. Eventually, this job figured out that I was basically spending my entire time at the office out in the parking lot, reading the tires from my morning commute with a pyrometer in order to figure out the ideal race alignment. And the cops started to get really interested in why a straight-piped race car kept making all those neat turbine noises and leaving streaks of smouldering R-compound rubber from corner to corner out behind the post office warehouse.
My next job had a commute that was much more boring, a straight shot up the city’s main arterial freeway to work at a print shop. There’s simply no need for a full-spec track car in stop-and-go traffic, and I soon found myself removing all of my high-zoot race parts in favour of a two-speed automatic, vacuum cruise, and a coffee-cup warmer. Still, I check the want-ads for that company. They may have blacklisted me at my old company, but I made up a ton of fake IDs at this job. They probably won’t recognize me without the Richard Petty mustache and full-face helmet, either.
I’ll admit it: sometimes you just need to pay an expert for help. There’s only a handful of jobs I won’t do myself. Mostly this is because I’m extremely cheap, but it’s also because I have trust issues. Nobody out there loves my garbage the same way I would, and they cut corners that ends up biting me in the ass later.
Another thing that bites me in the ass is whatever weird bugs got into the seat cushions of my last Volare when I imported it from Japan. That’s why I went there, to the zoology department of the local university, to see if their resident expert, Dr. C. Arapace, could figure out what eats those bugs.
The good doctor had a lot of advice, but unfortunately he refused to procure any free samples for me. He also warned me that attempting to introduce a whole foreign predator-prey ecology into my car was likely to screw up our own wildlife, especially because the windows in my Plymouth don’t roll up all the way and the rust holes in the floor are big enough for a ball python to escape. This probably wasn’t as big of a problem for me as it was for him, because even after the lumber-treating factory down the road got shut down by the feds, I haven’t seen a bird or insect around the entire time I’ve lived here.
I ignored him, and got busy ordering weird shit from AliExpress. Soon, I had a hissing box of bad ideas. I was actually a little surprised at how quickly it arrived, but I suspected that your average FedEx worker was not likely to keep a package marked “POISONOUS ANIMALS” sitting on the shop floor for very long. After cutting a hole in the box, I unceremoniously chucked the screaming mass into the trunk, and went to go watch television.
Despite the fears of Dr. Arapace, this turned out to be a successfully outsourced project. If I had attempted to kill those bugs myself, I probably would have taken much longer to entomb my neighbour’s house in barbed spiderwebs and leach the blood from their bodies. It’s simply not a tactic I would have considered for myself, which is why you go to the pros when you want things done fast.
We, as the human race, can do better than houses. If you look at a car and then at a house, the house is built like total shit by comparison. Imagine anyone who owns a modern car trying to shrug off the fact that sometimes you have to tug a little extra-hard when you’re closing the door in winter, or trying to trace a coolant leak through a major part of the body that is completely obscuring the coolant lines. Well, anyone who doesn’t own a Volvo.
Sure, houses are (proportionally) less expensive than cars, but that’s mostly because they’re real big. Once you get the basic “car stuff” done, making a bigger box around the occupants is just a matter of a little extra steel, carpet, seat material, and paint. And to be honest, nobody really looks at the roof anyway, so you can save a few bucks there while still maintaining reliability (never install a sunroof.)
You might think that the motorhome is the perfect house and the perfect car, then. Paradoxically, a recreational vehicle is the exact opposite: it adopts all the problems of houses and all the problems of cars, and glues them together into one unsatisfying recipe for spending a fortune finding the only guy in town with a lift big enough to let you get under the damn thing and figure out why the toilet flushes directly into the rear differential. No, the perfect house is a nice car that you live in. And I think everyone under the age of 60 is starting to agree with me on this one. That’s why there’s a growth in what the Instagram squad calls #vanlife and the rest of us just call “living in the Wal-Mart parking lot.”
Living in a van has a lot of advantages. For one thing, a van is still capable of being serviced using conventional car tools and garages, even if the engine is often tucked so far back that you have to remove most of the interior to replace spark plugs. They used to be so cheap that when you really fucked them up from lack of maintenance, it was justifiable to rip out all the damp, mouldy interior and sell it as a work vehicle. Nowadays, of course, Western civilization is crumbling, and people are treating their vans like investments. Like houses. This is not the way things were supposed to go.
It’s too late to change it. If there’s one thing that I’ve learned from the housing market, it’s that you should buy into the van market now before prices go up, up, up and you’re locked out forever. That’s why you should come by my backyard this weekend and come check out one of the many rotting Westfalias I’ve got tucked up alongside the snow fence. It’s not just a bad idea; it’s a financial instrument. You can live in a van, but you can’t Subaru-swap a house.
Do you ever wonder where all the full-toxicity, heavy-poisonous-levels chemicals of your youth went off to? Not to put too fine an old-man-yells-at-cloud on it, but all kinds of solvents, adhesives, and paints used to be a lot better. Sure, tons of our classmates didn’t make it past junior high because of them, but our model airplanes wouldn’t fall apart, either. At least not until our cousin put an M-80 inside them, the little shit.
Be heartened. There is one place you can still find really dangerous chemicals: automotive repair. Sure, there have been attempts to make safer or more eco-friendly versions of your favourite bio-accumulative poisons, but ultimately you still need to be able to make sure that diff cover is not going to come off in the middle of a burnout. And you can’t really forget about all the exciting new petrochemical residues you’ll be huffing just from being inside that car while it does its burnout. You can even still get leaded gas, if you’re a monster.
Now, does exposure to all of this do long-term harm? One trip to the auto body shop will tell you: abso-fucking-lutely, yes. The average car painter is stone-ass dead by age 29; bodyshop workers will live a little longer, their lungs protected by a synthetic filtration system produced by all the Bondo caught in their breathin’ tubes. However, as a weekend hobbyist, you’re not exposed to this stuff every single working day of your life, being pushed by your terrible boss and braying jackass coworkers to cut corners on safety. Go ahead; you can afford to take a chance on the chlorinated brake cleaner.
Or, you could stay inside where it’s warm and reasonably un-deadly, and let someone else work on your cars. This way, too, lies risk: new car smell is the deadliest scent of all. Better not risk it.
Every year, my local municipality puts on a casino night. It’s not that gambling is good all the time, they explain. Exploiting folks with a mental illness who are addicted to games of chance is a sometimes treat. You have to keep it for when you’ve been a good city, that just needs a little more money to repave Elm Street. Just a little down on their luck, that’s all.
Part of the whole scam is that, in order to maximize the amount of money they take home, the regular workers at the casino are replaced by scabs – I mean volunteers. Of course, the folks who actually handle the money, run the games, and manage the casino all still get to work that night. They just make the PTA parents sweep up the parking lot or something, so they can feel that they’ve given back.
When I was a kid of that age, my parents would take me along with them during their “turn” at the volunteer night. It’s for your school, they’d explain, so you should come with. The Silver Dollar® is cheaper than a babysitter, after all, even if they had to give me a total of five bucks in quarters for the arcade as the night progressed. Profit and loss. Even though it was part of school, I still learned a lot from those nights.
One year, I was in my impressionable pre-teenage phase, and all I wanted was a Walkman. Being able to control my own pop music, I thought, would finally let me conform to the expectations of my peer groups and understand what they were talking about, rather than being limited to listening to circus music on the Caravan’s stereo whenever my parents had to drive me somewhere. As such, I was looking for opportunities with which to acquire this money, and the casino night gave me a great chance to understand how to profiteer from the suffering of others.
Ethically, it was wrong of me to present myself at the parking lot entrance as a valet when no such service was offered by the place. Legally, it was extremely wrong of me to collect twenty dollars for the “mandatory” service, despite the fact that I was not of legal age to possess a drivers’ license. However, it was casino night, and I figured the cops would look the other way if I cut them in on the proceeds. After all, they didn’t want their parents to come out to volunteer and find out all the scams they’re pulling.
You may be surprised to learn that I hate roller coasters. It just doesn’t seem consistent. All of the things I love are there: bad maintenance, high speeds, shaky construction, and carnies. What I desperately dislike, however, is the total loss of control. No brakes is one thing – we’ve all been there, right? – but no throttle means that the whole experience makes me feel that I’m living someone else’s nightmare.
That’s why here at Switch Gardens, every rollercoaster car is individually controllable. Our rollercoaster is the only one in the world to be sixteen lanes wide. Hop in, mat the pedal, and hold on tight. We will not be held liable for any horrific injuries you receive by approaching the loop-de-loop below the minimum safe speed (indicated by trackside radar speed signs.)
Once you’re done at the rollercoaster, you can attend some of our other attractions. We tricked a down-and-out country musician (don’t worry, he’s only like 17th or something for racism) into our bandstand a few weeks ago, and now he has to sing for his supper. Literally. The entire thing is a sealed plexiglass dome with a hole cut in the side for you to throw corn dogs in.
You can bring your own rollercoaster car, if you’re really into it. To save money and improve customer safety, our system lets you connect any car to it through regular street tires on our proprietary high-friction asphalt surface. It’s only coincidental that the coasters are exactly a quarter-mile in length, feature an NHRA-approved water box, and that amusement parks are completely exempt from racetrack noise regulations.
My local municipality finally decided to enact a law for the little guy, like me. Now, when they don’t maintain a road properly, I can go after them for all the damages it caused to my car. I decided to see if I could get the entire car replaced, Ship of Theseus style, or at least if Theseus kept deliberately ramming potholes with his boat.
This kind of policy keeps lawyers up at night, and it’s usually defence lawyers. However, Max, my shark of an attorney, delights in this kind of legal shenanigan. It would get him into some kind of lawyer magazine, or at least some free drinks at the lawyer bar. His specific wheeling, dealing, close-reading, and machinations didn’t matter to me, because I had a Volare to wreck.
To prove out the theory, before we wrecked anything more expensive, we needed a test case. My victim this day was a ‘74 Volare. It’s not the best year of those cars, but it is one of the ones with the most expensive parts. Because it’s an early model, the hubcaps are harder to come by, and can fetch as much as seventeen dollars on eBay. I had four badly curbed ones thanks to the Braille parking of the previous owner, so it was a small task to finish the job by nailing that hogged-out water main on Elm Street at a mere double the speed limit. Afterward, I then picked up the fragments from the side of the road, and dropped them off at the city clerk’s office along with a bill. They paid it with what I am told is a minimum of harassing phone calls by Max, so the next step was trying to get them to finance something more expensive.
I know what you’re going to say. It’s not realistic that a 1974 Volare has been equipped with an aftermarket set of 600lb rear-steer Rockwell axles, nor does it seem possible that even the most savage pothole could do a number on them. In my defence, they were a cheap swap-meet find, and by “cheap” I mean that nobody without their own bed-mounted crane and flatbed wanted to take them away.
To the second point, you are correct. There definitely was a lot of work put in to bending these beefy-assed axles, but it turns out that the skate ramp they had installed near the high school still counts as “municipal infrastructure” under the vehicle parts-replacement bylaw. Once I got out of the hospital from trying to lift the damn things onto the clerk’s desk, I was handsomely rewarded with the going eBay value for some new monster-truck axles. Unfortunately, they couldn’t do much for the Kirkey racing seat I ruined by shitting myself after jumping half a kilometre across Phillips Street.
There’s a sort of compulsion in our society, and especially as of late, to assume that anything extremely complicated is actually really simple. This distrust of experts is growing out of a larger distrust of institutions, and I fear it will cause real long-term damage to humanity. However, when I decide that I’m smarter than the experts and cut a few corners here and there, that’s different. I’m just doing it for myself, so there’s no reason to follow all these fancy rules. This shit isn’t going to space or anything.
Sometimes I partake in the opposite, though. If you offer me the chance to use the really expensive, fancy gadgets that the professionals use – well, I’d be stupid to say no. Down-home, folksy wisdom isn’t made out of sub-nanometer-precision aircraft titanium, right? It’s just a shame that those physical tools cost a fortune, and therefore nobody in even a mildly cocaine-addled brain is going to let me near them.
Thanks to sleazy ex-Soviet Bloc piracy websites, it’s possible to acquire the exact same software tools that the experts use. These applications are bristling with features, like a 300-speed blender, and I am too dumb to know how to use pretty much any of them. That doesn’t stop me from smugly swinging my mouse around, pretending I work at NASA instead of a bargain-basement magazine about broken cars. Of course, it takes me six hours to produce the template for a bracket that I could have made in fifteen minutes with a piece of old cereal box and a sufficiently sharp hobby knife. What you gain is consistency - you could take this file and run it off on a $4 million CNC mill that I also don’t have, in order to produce millions of these brackets, as long as you have lots of customers with Volares whose front frame horns are bent in exactly the same way as mine.
Plus, the experience isn’t wasted on me. “Fake it until you make it” is the national motto, after all, except it’s in Latin or some shit. Seeing how the professionals attack a problem has taught me a lot of useful jargon that I can use to breeze my way past the front desk of an engineering consultancy and directly into their storage rooms, to see what cool junk they’re just going to throw away.
Although robots will never replace our country-and-western musicians, they have done an adequate job at learning how to drive. All over this great land, you can see folks switching their car into a glorified cruise control mode and checking out. Now, is it safe? Absolutely not. Are they perfect? You bet your ass they aren’t. However, as the saying goes, perfect is the enemy of climbing into the back seat and cranking one out before falling asleep at highway speeds.
Sure, the manufacturers have installed all kinds of safety features to keep you from doing exactly this. You have to jiggle the steering wheel once in awhile or something. Turns out every seedy mall booth sells little weights you can hang off that steering wheel, and the sagging convinces the robot you’re actually paying attention. They could add more features that require more sophisticated interactions, like on multi-ton freight train locomotives, but that might require actual engineering dollars, which could be better put to use by making the car notice minority pedestrians more than three percent of the time.
Me, I was an early adherent of self-driving car technology. Although I love to have the maximum involvement possible with my operation of a motor vehicle, sometimes you’re on a long straight highway and it’s been a long day. Since none of my cars came with even cruise control, I had to come up with my own system. I think all the folks who don’t have ultra-smart self-driving robot cars might be interested in it.
First, the cruise control. Pretty simple job. I tied a pair of old shoelaces onto the throttle cable, and then ran them through the rust holes in the firewall. Once I got to a speed I liked, I would just loop them around the gear knob a few times and then take my foot off the pedal. Ah, bliss.
Next, self-steering. If you’ve ridden in one of my cars lately, you might have noticed that this is a feature they all have. It’s called 40-year-old ball joint technology. Even though the steering seems wildly unpredictable, on average it actually turns out to work with the road crown on major freeways to keep me on the road. Now, it’s not centred in my lane by any means, but the wind from passing semi trucks helps force the car back when I get too close to the centre line.
Last, automatic following distance. Because the motors in these cars are so aggressively hogged out, there’s no real reason to fear out-accelerating even the shittiest of today’s three- and four-cylinder commuter vehicles. Pretty much everyone will get mad and pass, and if I do manage to catch someone moving slower than me, chances are what’s left of the front bumper shocks will help push them up to cruising speed without much of an impact on my fuel economy.
Recently, I read, or at least half-imagined while under the influence of powerful penetrating oils, a disturbing report. This report stated that basically every student under the age of eighteen had the career goal of becoming a famous Twitch streamer, or at least a YouTuber. This was even the case in Canada, where our broadband connections are installed by a swivelling cabal of monstrous corporations and whose connection speeds resemble trying to push intact goldfish through a drinking straw by only using your anus.
Naturally, I found this to be an upsetting concept. When I was in school, we hadn’t invented the concept of YouTube yet. If we wanted to watch people be mutilated for having controversial political opinions, then we either had to rent Faces of Death from our local video store, or participate in one of many underground tape-swapping rings. The goal of becoming “a star” for this sort of thing was the kind of idea that ended you in prison.
Now, of course, the internet has become much more sanitized and corporatized. You’ll get banned if you show even a single railway decapitation, so everyone just plays videogames about building incredible fantasy worlds instead. Most of those games don’t even feature rally cars, which just makes the whole thing weirder. Anyway, it’s time for me to stop being old, and start making some money. I decided that I would open a YouTube talent agency.
For only a few thousand dollars a month in tuition, I will take your progeny and train them to become YouTube famous. There’s all sorts of videos I’ve wanted to film, covering important tutorials such as “where the fuck is that goddamn drum brake spring supposed to go?” and “do I really have to drop this fucking subframe just to get the clutch replaced?”
You see, due to a grotesque childhood disfigurement (too much train corpse filming) I lack the self-confidence and willingness to be featured on the internet, lest I become utterly destroyed by the commentariat. Your children will serve well as the vessels for my unorthodox beliefs, contradictory thought structures, and meandering rabbit-holes about Whitworth thread pitches. So sign up today! You’ll have about as good of a chance with me as anybody else.
Everybody who reads this must, in some way, crave a mini-mill. A mini-mill is like those huge mills that super-tough machinists use to turn big chunks of metal into shavings and scrap, except, as the name implies, the mini-mill is substantially smaller and easier to justify storing inside your home.
Even if you don’t know what it is, intuitively you understand that it is a power tool that lets you make cool shit and therefore must be purchased. About half of my friends bought one of these ultra-budget mini-mills from sleazy internet vendors, and they say that it was a purchase they didn’t regret. The other half knows this, because they are constantly badgering the first half to tell them how great it is and justify an irrational purchase in order to complete fantasy future projects that they haven’t bothered to define.
I am of course in the latter half. Every time I bust up a plastic gear, break off the end of a pot-metal actuator arm, or find something made out of wood inside my house, I tell myself that this is the last straw. This year, I’ll get a mini-mill, and then I’ll crank out amazing stainless-steel masterpieces that will solve real problems. And even if they don’t, I can show off my cool gear making tons of chips and shavings on YouTube.
Then I sour on the entire thing as soon as I see the price tag. It’s always too high for me to justify, yet tantalizingly cheap enough to keep occupying my thoughts morning, noon, and night. A couple of my friends have these things, I tell myself, and surely I can sneak in at night and borrow them to make that replacement rocker arm or toaster electromagnet bracket. Plus, there’s nowhere to put the damn thing in amongst all the clutter in my home. Maybe in the future, the enterprising geniuses working hard in China can develop a sort of nano-mill, that I can put on my bathroom counter and run off parts for a Hot Wheel every once in awhile.
I don’t have the patience to learn to get good at paintwork. Sure, I can kind of bang panels straight, and then throw some Bondo onto it, but I don’t take the time that you need to prep for a really good job. Everything ends up looking like a moron did sloppy accident repair, which is honestly kind of close to the truth. If I’m lucky, the paint adheres well enough to the “metal” in order to keep the rust off for a few more years, but I wouldn’t put too much money on that one either.
I used to take my project cars to these cheap painters, who would blast the pre-prepped vehicle with the good stuff in exchange for cash. Of course, it had to be done while their boss wasn’t looking, and you’ll also notice the adjective “pre-prepped” in there. Every minute I spent sanding and degreasing a body panel is one that wasn’t spent shopping on Craigslist for yet another shitty car, so often they would kick the thing out after the laziest imaginable coat of paint, sneering like Frenchmen at being forced to do such sub-quality work in a paint booth that used to be part of a garden shed display at Home Depot.
There’s a bunch of flippers in my neighbourhood who don’t give a shit. When they snap up a crashed ‘95 Kia Sephia, their primary goal is to get it back in the hands of some sucker who will then crash it again. If they repair their bodywork at all, they slam down a couple cans of badly-prepped flat-black and then go around trying very hard not to look at the car they just ruined. For them, the idea of a super-deep candy-apple-red Ridler-quality hot rod paint job is as unachievable as starting their own moon mission. They just want to keep the rust off, and go on with life.
Certainly, I’ve thought about doing it, learning to do the whole thing. If YouTube videos could be exchanged for college credit, I’d have my Ph.D in rolling on Tremclad by now. Unfortunately, it’s more of an art than a science, and the key thing that separates artists from other assholes on the street is doing art. Unless you’re really famous for art, in which case you then become good at going to parties and allowing rich people to touch the hem of your garment. Maybe I can just skip ahead to that part by putting a bunch of pictures of paint samples on my phone. I bet rich people have tons of shitty old cars lying around for me to buy, and they won’t negotiate too hard either.
What is it about parking that turns otherwise civilized and reasonable human beings into monsters? Psychologists would tell you that it’s about the strain of having to own and maintain a private space in public, that the interaction between this chunk of Earth that temporarily belongs to you and the random assholes who wish to also occupy it is bound to cause problems. All I know is that the guy who parks over the line at the hardware store is a dick, and deserves any number of violent ends.
When I used to own a nice car, I never liked the kind of person I’d become whenever anyone got close to it. Surely, they were a clown car full of jerks who would ding my door, take out my wing mirror, or crack my tail light while drunkenly swerving in and out of a too-tight spot with their God-damned Hummer. The fact that this never happened didn’t keep me from being worried about it. I started parking further away, but then I’d come out to an apoplectic rage when someone had decided, against all reason, to park immediately beside me, as if we were now parking lot buddies united against the menace of all mankind.
My first experience parking a shitty car, now that was a revelation. Now I no longer feared door dings, crooked parkers, or an errant shopping cart. In fact, I would spot bad parkers and then pull up real close to them, forcing them to ding my doors. The karmic damage that would be levered upon them from that evil act was well in excess of any resale value that was lost on my dripping land barges. And I’d watch and laugh from the window of the store as I watched them do it. Sometimes people with nicer cars were too scared to park next to my heap, and so I’d come out from being parked out front to see a row of empty spots, vacated in fear. Masochistic? Maybe a little, but I genuinely thought I was setting right an ancient wrong.
There is a better strategy, however, than just having one crap car. If you aggressively dominate a parking lot with a whole squadron of crap, normal folks will be too afraid to enter said lot. That’s why Bad Cars Monthly is no longer paying for our monthly underground parking lot; we’re just shoving stuff in the lot of the bar next door. Even the tow truck is too chickenshit to get too close.
The city in which I grew up recently had an exciting new pilot program for lawn-care. Wait, don’t close that tab. There’s this spot of hillside near one of the major highways that’s super hard to mow. They used to have human beings do it, but humans worked very slowly due to the uneven terrain. Worse, they occasionally fell down the hill and accrued lost-time injuries, which looked bad on management statistics at the end of the year.
Their new solution is to hire goats. I guess somebody set themselves up as a goat-gardening consultant. Of course, when you’re putting out a tender for “goat gardeners” and there’s only one in the entire city, they’re gonna win the contract. Nothing suspicious there, or at least not any more so than the normal city procurement process. It all works out pretty well: the goats love to eat weeds and grass, and they will go up and down a steep hill all day long without knowing any specific details of their employment contract.
There was one surprising side effect, though. People loved the goats. Whenever they were out, families would stop on the side of the road in order to gawp at some herd animals eating weeds. Cities are pretty boring places, so something like this is naturally going to draw a lot of attention, the kind of attention that inevitably causes backups on the highway and traffic jams from excited people swerving their 1998 Golf off the road because they thought someone with the job title of “shepherd” might be nearby. This looked bad on another department’s statistics sheet, and so something had to be done about the goats.
They had to re-hire the original groundskeepers, except now they stand on the side of the road holding up signs about being out of work and poor. Drivers will drive on the wrong side of the road to avoid looking in their general direction! With them blocking the view of the goats, there could now be no impediment to unlimited municipal progress, although the Hobo Union has launched a lawsuit against the city for hiring scabs.
You probably know someone who has checked out of the urban rat-race and gone to live on a farm. I mean, in the non-euphemism way. Your childhood dog’s not coming back, sorry. A lot of folks that I’ve worked with in the past have held various fantasies about just giving up on the entire “career” thing and living a more simple, disconnected life, ideally away from as many people as they can afford. They’re wrong. The real reason to live on a farm is that you get to buy more cool gear.
Sure, inside a city, you can get a little tiny lawn tractor, but it feels bourgeois and unnecessary. Who do you think you are that you can’t get by with a simple push mower instead? It gets you out of the house, doing a calming physical activity.
When you have half an acre, well, you gotta mow it somehow and you don’t have all day, so you can justify getting a full-on Lawnfucker 5000. The same goes for having a barn to work on shit in, a couple old pickup trucks dotting the yard. Maybe a ramshackle shed near the property line that mostly collapsed in 1975 but serves to keep the neighbours from taking a single step too far in your direction. And then there’s the tools. Chainsaws, bandsaws, tree saws… you need to cut a lot of stuff when you’re 30 minutes outside of the nearest city.
Not everyone can afford to quit their office job and move out to the boonies, however. This fantasy remains unattainable for far too many of my fellow citizens. That’s why I’ve bought a bunch of foreclosed rural property and turned it into Farmer-For-A-Day theme parks. Drive out with your family, and come try out the cool gear. Do you think your son is old enough to drive a grain thresher? Then he fucking is. There’s no cops around here, but you will have to sign this thorough series of insurance waivers first.
Maybe this is just me, but I find that when I’ve taken apart some complex object and put it (mostly) back together again, it’s no longer an imposing, discrete object in my mind. Having had the experience of seeing what each bit, chunk, wire, and bolt is doing, I now must treat it as an assembly, which is French for “pile of bullshit.” This is one of many reasons why I can’t be a surgeon.
Last year, I had the privilege of hanging out with a couple of high-end subatomic particle scientists. It was their weekend retreat, and I was staying at the same hotel. I had taken a self-driving car (an Uber on someone else’s credit card) all the way up there in order to buy a Ramcharger. Said Dodge barely made it back down the mountain before erupting into a fireworks display consisting mostly of water pump impeller, but them’s the breaks sometimes. Anyway, after our shared bitch fest in the bar, they decided in their drunken haze that I must also be some kind of scientist-type, and invited me to come tour their lab later.
Back at home, I decided I would take them up on it. One of the reasons is that I find it hard in my adult age to retain friends due to my pattern of sabotaging relationships for cheap or free parts. The other reason is that labs are often very inefficient, and throw out perfectly good parts for cheap or free, and I’m sure my new friends wouldn’t mind me going through their junkpile after I travelled all that way. So I put on my cleanest college-engineering-department t-shirt, headed over to the lab, and soon I was being given a tour of their cool new particle accelerator. It turns out that the old one was a bit shit, and this one could do numbers that started with “giga,” made my hair (and other extremities) stand on end when it cranked up, and looked like the large intestine of a German Shepherd after you threw it into an electrical substation.
As these things do, the tour soon moved on, but I kept thinking about the accelerator. If that thing could whack particles apart, then I could finally hold one over on my rival, Steve “Nipples” Hemingway, at being the better dismantler. I faked a stomach-ache and ran to the nearest bathroom – or so my new friends thought. It took awhile to figure out the control panel for the particle accelerator, but I eventually decided upon the standard-issue “squint and then push every green button” technique that had served me well up until this point.
All this is not to say that I take culpability for plunging Earth into the Hell Dimension. That’s up to my lawyer, who may also literally be Satan, to argue. What I am going to admit to is that I now find the concept of interdimensional travel extremely boring. It’s just a bunch of gluons and shit all shook up and put into a bag. Whoa, hey, is that a Game Boy you’ve got there? Let me at that thing. I still don’t know how they managed to cram Italians in there.
Decades ago, the Canadian government figured it would be a good idea to get some of our cars off of gasoline. After all, if gasoline is made somewhere else, and the people who are there want more money for that gasoline, then we’ll have to pay more money for the gasoline. And that’s just not how we like to do things up here in Canada, so we decided we’d rather run our cars on natural gas and propane.
It made a lot of sense at the time. The stuff was basically free to get out of the ground (and now, after fracking, you can get it out of your kitchen tap) and we had to burn something to make our cars go. Electricity? Batteries? Sounds pretty fancy, are you sure you’re not a secret American? We don’t invent technology here, we just buy it from someone else.
As a result, you occasionally stumble across a used propane car. They’re easy to spot at the junkyard: just look for a car that looks perfectly normal, except for a mutant hydra of pipes and reservoirs and plenums bolted on top of the intake manifold. Then you can loot some weird-looking parts off ‘em, tell yourself you’re going to turn them into an amazing new project, and then not do it.
For me, I had a very short romance with the concept of the propane vehicle. A couple years back, I saw on the local classifieds that someone had a turbocharged Ford Ranger. Run of the mill hee-haw stuff, I assumed, until I noticed that the ad actually said turbocharged propane Ford Ranger. The plumbing nightmare on top of the engine would have made an octopus horny: all pressurized carb reference boxes and safety pop-off valves. I rushed to contact the owner, but it was too late. Some other freak had bought the truck, leaving me wondering what it would have been like. I ultimately figured it must have been a good thing, and here’s why.
To this very day, underground parkades (that’s Canadian for “parking garage”) have warning signs telling you not to park a propane car in them. It’s because a significant portion of our population used to be rocking around in propane-fired cars. To make matters worse, those cars travelled over roads so salted they could pass for Caesar cocktails, and eventually those fancy high-pressure propane tanks would get a rust pinhole in one of their terrible welds (terrible welding is also a Canadian pastime; I remain bad at it out of patriotism.) Then all the propane would pour out onto the ground, filling the underground parkade with a bunch of volatile hydrocarbons waiting until someone decides to light up the last smoke of their life on level B-5.
This problem, unfortunately, presented a conflict with my winter wrenching model, which is to drive or push what’s left of my car into the underground parkade at my local shopping mall. Then, I take out a couple fancy-looking fashion-store bags I pulled out of the trash and put them nearby the stricken car. In this way, I can work on the car in heated, well-lit comfort virtually all day, and security guards are afraid to accost me, thinking I’m the poverty-waged gofer for some rich foreign oil couple.
Part of the thrill of owning an old car is doing roadside repairs. When you blow a coolant hose, it’s bad enough already. To have to walk several miles to the nearest parts store, walk back, and then do the change on whatever remnants of a shoulder you managed to swerve onto, that’s just adding insult to injury. Still, we’ve all been there, crouching under a dripping vehicle on gravel, listening to other cars whiz past at highway speeds. It’s the only way to go, unless you want to call a tow truck.
Calling a tow truck is expensive (so a terrible idea if you either have a shitty old car because you have no money, or have no money because you have many shitty old cars). It’s also terrifying, because due to the bigoted laws of local politicians in thrall to the tow truck mafia, you have to ride in the cabin of the truck with the driver instead of your own car, forced to listen to their local music and theories on race relations. And what’s worse, they usually drive pretty slow, too. I’m no idiot. I can tell from the way that turbo sounds that it’s easily capable of another ten pounds before it starts shitting fins, buddy.
So, a roadside fix it is. The really seasoned shitbox owner will bring an alternative form of transportation with them, inside the vehicle, so that when the inevitable happens they aren’t hoofing it through unknown terrain or hitch-hiking with a potential BMW owner/serial killer. Popular choices involve skateboards, electronic scooters, and bicycles. You have to be careful here, too, because it’s easy to go overboard and end up with an unreliable second vehicle. If you break down halfway to the parts store, then you’re going to have to do two roadside fixes tonight, buddy, and you can pretty much kiss your bet with the Enoses goodbye.
Once, I had to yank the 3-speed automatic out of a 1995 Neon on the side of some mountain expressway. This was after a couple of the bands inside said transmission did what we in the business call “getting all fucked up.” I was about halfway through wrestling the rear trans mount off of the car with the wrong tools, when someone pulled up and stopped. They considered themselves a fellow “car person,” and wished to help. A noble goal, with good intentions. However, when I emerged from beneath the car to see what all the fuss was about, I suspect my appearance was a little unsettling. Smeared with gallons of bright red ATF, I probably looked like a serial killer myself. I barely had a chance to get a word out by the time they beat feet back to their Supra and lit the tires trying to escape my slasher story.
A few minutes later, the local Sheriff showed up. I explained the situation to him, and we had a good laugh. That’s when I noticed he was driving a state-provided 1996 Neon, with an intensely desirable 5-speed manual transmission. Didn’t even need to go to the parts store that time, and I’m sure he wouldn’t mind getting a tow on the taxpayer’s dime – once he figured out how to get out of the trunk.
You’d be a fool to think that scientific discovery is an unbroken line of discoveries. Often, the first person who figures something out dies in obscurity, and it’s not until decades later that someone else independently stumbles onto making the damn thing marketable.
Just ask Guglielmo Marconi, who probably didn’t invent the concept of radio. When he was asked what you could do with it at an all-scientists piss-up at the nearby bar, he could only reply with “maybe you can download porn?” This, of course, led to his execution by the church, but we later found out that he was correct, thanks to Dr. Xavier Wireless-Nudes, who rediscovered the phenomenon in 1922 and then again in 1923 when he lost the yellow legal pad containing his notes for the experiment.
This is why whenever I have to do something new, the first step is always to call up all of my friends and ask them if they’ve done it. Doing it this way both saves my time and my effort, which are noble pursuits, and lets my pals feel like they are involved in my monumental string of achievements, which is a real gift to them. Everybody wins. And if they haven’t figured it out to the point where they can give me step-by-step directions, well, maybe they will have by next week. It can wait.
Sure, you might claim that this is a lazy and cynical way to go about life, but nobody got especially angry at Stacey David for popularizing the concept of pickup trucks. Those were obscure as hell after their invention by Nikola Tesla, working for the British Railway, in 1638.
For the last year or so, I’ve been ordering a lot of delivery food. Given the circumstances all around us, I’m sure you can understand why: my car doesn’t run. One of my secret pleasures is to peep at the cars that the delivery people drive to my place. Despite my own love of oddball shitboxes, I have still been conditioned by capitalism and the adversarial nature of Western civilization to evaluate the worth of others based on their job and their car.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not jealous – or at least I don’t think I am. This is sort of like a test drive by proxy, in that I get to engage my curiosity about new cars without having to actually own one. What’s that 2013 Santa Fe look like after (checks phone) 2,419 successful deliveries of Thai food in the last five years? Who delivers pizza in a 2020 Mercedes C-class? And, most importantly, does my burger delivery guy still have the original factory turbo from his Mazdaspeed 3 lying in his garage and how big of a “tip” will it take to lever it from his grasp?
I’ll never actually operate most of these vehicles. Not only are they too recent, but some of them are in categories made up by increasingly panicked marketing departments that I have no interest in participating in. For instance, my mapo tofu was delivered by someone driving a Honda HR-V “crossover.” Have you ever heard of that kind of vehicle? Apparently it’s like an AMC Eagle, which I can dig, but with less cargo room. Pass.
I do realize that I could get more information, and also feel like less of a creeper, by directly interacting with the delivery people. Right now, though, for their safety and for mine, I try to keep our conversations brief. The faster they get done picking up the ziploc bag full of loose cash off my front lawn, the quicker I get to hear how that engine sounds revving up to the speed limit. If they hit the limiter, I leave a five-star review.
Everybody loves pesto. It’s one of those Italian recipes that is particularly easy, and turns out absolutely delicious. Everyone should make it all the time, except for one little problem. You need to have the best, freshest ingredients in the entire universe in order to make it turn out just right. Even made with all the green crap that you found in your fridge and threw into a blender while hungover, it’s still good - but you know in your heart the entire time while you’re eating it that you could have done better.
I like to think that automakers feel the same way. Engineers toil away at long hours to make the ideal small shitbox. Zingy, affordable, comfortable, and stylish. Designers bust their balls (both literal and figurative) to produce a concept car that stirs the soul. It’s gonna be really good. People on the product team are excited, chanting the car’s name as they roam the hallways, so hyped up on adrenaline and ego that they get into massive brawls with rival engineering teams.
And then some bean counters de-content the whole mess by calling up their buddy Ed at ACDelco who owes them a favour and getting them to slam in a stereo found on the side of the road in 1986. Suddenly, this world-beating car is, well, just another car. It might still retain elements of its original loveable nature, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that you are operating a bag of parts loosely bolted together rather than a unified vision born from the forehead of some Solidworks-slinging Zeus.
That’s why it’s up to us to fix what the factory set wrong. After all, if they’re already using the “wrong” parts, then swapping out that shit for Chinese turbochargers, knobby mud-terrains, and sketchy eBayed offroad suspension kits cannot possibly be any more sacrilegious. If anything, the original engineers would probably welcome a chance to get back at their cost-reduction foes. Or at least that’s who they’d blame that troubling timing-cover oil leak on.
I would say the first time I really became aware of my potential as a repairperson was in high school. A friend had just gotten a really minty car from his grandma, a 1985 Delta 88 “Brougham.” This baby combined boxy styling with a slightly dicky air conditioning unit, whisky dings, every single hose worn from disuse, and sagging rear shocks: it had it all. Unfortunately, it also had an owner who didn’t know anything.
You could blame his parents, for sure. Neither his mom nor dad had ever spun a wrench, and preferred to ship their Dodge Caravans and – later – Jeep Grand Cherokees off to a mechanic of sliding repute for even basic services like oil changes and winter battery defuckenings. That meant that they had no skills to pass on to the next generation, and certainly not the combination of dirtbaggery and skullduggery required to successfully maintain a decade-old Oldsmobile on a part-time wage from Burger King.
As his friend, I felt obligated to help. For a couple weeks that glorious summer, I’d bicycle over from my home (those same shitboxes are still not running even today) and help turn wrenches. We started out small, changing to winter tires, swapping wiper blades, and popping in new spark plugs. Once in awhile, I’d catch his dad watching from the deck, where he thought we wouldn’t notice him. By the time fall rolled around on our senior year, my buddy was equipped with a rolling couch that, somehow, the women in our class loved. I was shocked: if ladies actually wanted a smooth ride, non-threatening grandma-esque interior, and a steering wheel that held only a vague relationship to the direction of travel, then what was I doing trying to add nitrous to a front-wheel-drive Eagle Talon that I had found in the junkyard?
That afternoon, I went to that junkyard again, and I came home with the first of what federal law enforcement would later term “a troubling number” of Plymouth Volares. Did my classmates find this car irresistable? It’s impossible to know. I spent the entire year trying to fix the damn thing.
Now, I was never raised as a religious man, but there’s certain traditional holidays that are part of our society, and they need to be respected by everybody. There’s no reason to get mad at this cheery occasion just because you have a religion or creed that’s different from the majority. That’s not what a brave martyr so long ago would have wanted.
Honda Checkered Flag Days are a cornerstone of our civilization. Our Lord Soichiro Honda gave up his engineering position and ascended to management so that we could have the long-wheelbase Honda Civic. It is only right that we pay a moment of respect, drop everything we’re doing, and head to the closest Honda dealership to partake in the traditional 1.99% APR financing on certain models.
There are a lot of infidels – sorry, I mean folk of other faiths – who believe that Nissan came to our shores before Honda, and actually wrote most of the history of Japanese cars. This is heresy, of course, but we allow them to get away with it for now, because everyone knows what the true meaning of the Honda Checkered Flag Days is.
Just make sure you lock your doors and turn the lights off for Toyotathon. I heard on Facebook that those monsters are going to get all fucked up on Solaras and roam the streets looking for maintenance to defer.
These new smartphone apps make buying stocks so easy, anyone could do it. All I had to do was find my new internet friends, get honest-to-God stock tips from them, and not be the bigger fool! It’s hard to believe that people actually do work for money rather than just speculate on whether a chart will turn green or red. However, you gotta be careful.
Last week, I fat-fingered a trade attempt. I figured that I would like to buy a bunch of Facebook stock with the money I made from selling all those old car batteries to the roaming scrapper in my neighbourhood, but I made two mistakes there. One, I didn’t realize that Facebook and Ford had the same ticker symbol, and two, the scrapper was an undercover cop, apparently from the Waste of Fucking Time Division.
Anyway, I bought $500 worth of Ford stock, which – it turns out – qualifies me for a tiny but useful voting position. As soon as the various hangers-on and inheritors Ford family figured out what I was up to, they couldn’t call me fast enough to bolster their retirement funds. My holdings only grew. It seemed like everyone wanted to dump their Ford stock on anyone who was dumb enough to pay for it. Yes, I had to dip into my savings, but I can always line the door of my refrigerator with stock certificates instead.
At the end of a week or so of trading, I considered selling. Then I figured, hey, why not call into a board meeting? When the phone picked up on the other end, I thought I had dialled the wrong number. Nobody else was on the line! Eventually, I was able to get the attention of a janitor, who luckily passed within earshot of the Polycom while sweeping, and who told me that everyone else quit and left the company to me. I was now, it turned out, President, CEO, CFO, COO, CIO, and CTO of Ford, as well as occupying every single position on the board of directors. No doubt this was some kind of plan to entrap a random moron in an upcoming financial audit, leaving me holding the bag and to blame for the destruction of one of America’s greatest brands who couldn’t design an alternator that didn’t catch fire at random.
There was only one thing to do when given this kind of opportunity. I immediately summoned everyone in product development and began the fast-tracked engineering of the Ford Motherfucker, a six-wheel-drive V12-powered stretch SUV made entirely out of surplus tank parts. After news of it was leaked to the car media, we were flush with preorders and I was able to unload my stock holdings for the $635.17 I had paid in total. Sure, it’s not a profit, but I negotiated in a little golden parachute – the last Mercury Bobcat in existence, dredged up from Ford’s internal Hall of Atrocities.
I can’t possibly be the only one who is tempted to just stay a little while longer when their 72-hour involuntary hold expires. There’s a lot to like, from the fact that the rent is free (at least, until they figure out my health insurer doesn’t actually exist) to the doctors wanting you to keep talking about 1976 Plymouth Volares, rather than shut up like everyone else you meet. By far, though, my favourite part is the camaraderie. Far from being crazy, the other folks you meet in the psych ward are often interesting people who are just having a bad couple of weeks.
When you take away the pressures of daily life, all that’s left are the people around you. Last time I was there because of a fun misunderstanding regarding the local public-access television station, I soon found myself replacing my daily Twitter doomscrolling with a brisk walk around the floor. It was great for my mood, and even better for weight-loss. Dodging all those orderlies and hiding out of view of the cameras is some of the best cardio exercise you can imagine, and again – all free, thanks to Cousin Taxpayer.
I’ve truly come into my own in this hellish asylum. Back in high school, I was one of the unpopular kids. Lanky, scared, unsure of my body. Here, I might as well be the cool ultra-senior who’s been showing up for classes once every three to four months for sixteen years. I know the system inside and out, and I’m respected for it. Now, I can sit at any lunchroom table I want, and I probably won’t even get stabbed for it.
There’s only one problem: no cars. Yes, on my first time, there were little electric mini-trains for the attendants to ride around the hallway. In the intervening years, they got rid of those after I figured out how to hardwire one into an extension cord and wheelie it through a second-storey window. I still maintain that the motor could have been capable of more, if only they had been brave enough to leave the laundry room unguarded.
Sometimes I wish that I could talk to the original owner of my cars. Not violently, although the fantasy of dragging them in by their ear and making them look at the shitty Bondo job they did on the quarter is definitely tempting. It would just be nice to hear their stories, to get a better idea of the car’s life before me, and figure out just when it was that things started to go wrong.
Take the Volare that I’ve been driving. No, not that one. The other one. No, the one behind the garage. The brown one without the mica, and the hockey stripe only on the passenger side. Yeah, that’s it. That Volare has had an electric fan installed in it, and not just one of the pusher fans you used to yank out of a box Taurus before they got crushed by a junkyard operator who liked to make ED-209 noises while pushing the button. Speed-shop parts, with a serial number and everything.
That electric fan was installed at some point in the 90s, probably to fix the chronic overheating issues that briefly troubled the original slant six. Of course, we all know that you can throw an entire Jegs catalogue at a car and it might not solve the original problem. It’s tempting to, as the previous owner attempted, slam in a double-thickness aluminum radiator, a low-temperature thermostat, head gaskets made of not-cottage-cheese, and the aforementioned e-fan. It won’t make a lick of difference if you have a bunch of dead marmots in your heater core, having gnawed their way in from the glovebox and then packed the hole behind them with their own pickled corpses.
Now that I’ve bypassed the heater core, the car has stopped overheating. Yes, I know that traditionally “heat” is a thing that people desire in their automobiles, especially in -25°C weather as we’ve been having here lately in the Great Northern Hell, but the hole in the floorpan is currently big enough that you can just pitch in a few more revs to help melt your boots on the header. I think I’d like to haul in the last guy so I can point out why it was a total waste of $2500 to get all this cooling equipment installed. Especially because that speed shop also sold nitrous oxide by the gallon, and that money will buy like 600 pounds of the stuff. I’d much rather have had that installed.
There’s a certain beauty to being a consultant. When you work for someone full-time, you’re tied to your job. If you get bored and don’t like it, well, too bad. Sit at your desk and do the same thing on the same products until your superiors decide it’s time to shift gears, often at your expense.
As a consultant, you’re sort of like a high-tech future bounty hunter. It’s a lot more romantic, the idea of this workaday freedom, hanging out your own shingle, driving an exotic sports car to clean up messes. You can pick and choose your jobs, and those jobs primarily consist of anything that pays money, and choosing them is a matter of begging everyone you know on LinkedIn until someone throws you scraps.
Of course, there are some benefits. The aforementioned freedom is a big plus, although exercising that freedom always comes with a healthy dose of fear. You get paid a little more, if you ask for it, or a lot more, if you hold an employer dumb enough to put all their trust in consultants hostage. And you definitely become extremely familiar with every aspect of tax law as it pertains to small businesses. My accountant is now polite enough to wait until I’ve left the room to piss his pants laughing at my ideas for deductions.
The largest benefit of consulting, of course, is being able to tell bigger and better war stories. Unless they’re really bad with money, companies usually don’t hire consultants unless shit is already going off the rails. In my ordinary old career, I’d see one company-ending incident only about once every three years. And I’d be there for it, to get to watch the ship go down and then scramble for new jobs, along all my freshly unemployed coworkers. As a consultant, if I really worked hard at selling myself, I could see a company go tits up every week, and walk out with anything that’s not nailed down in the process. Then I’d be able to tell the other consultants a better horror story, which gets me free drinks at airport bars.
It’s ghoulish, to be sure, but until someone accidentally fixes terminal-stage capitalism, the best thing to do is to work in hospice care. Just make sure those invoices get paid on time.
I think everyone has a nice heartwarming childhood story of playing in an abandoned field. Behind my house, as a kid, there was a disused railroad track. Although the railway folks would come out and whipper-snipper the weeds off it once a year so as to pretend they still had rights to it, I never once saw anything resembling a train roll down those rails. On the other side of those tracks, near enough that you could just barely see it from our kitchen window if you stood on a chair, was the Field.
Looking back on it now, as an adult, I understand now that the Field was a piece of property in the midst of a dispute over its ambiguous ownership. The municipality thought that they had zoned it into their original incorporation, and was just letting it sit until they needed the land for a post office, playground, nano-nuke reactor, fire station, mortuary, or graveyard. Normal small-town stuff.
A different fellow, a dude named Big Chuck who owned an impressively large yard right next to the Field, was convinced that he himself owned it because of the drunken crayon scrawl that accompanied his original land title declaration in the 70s. Neither party wanted to actually do anything with the land, you see, so they let it sit while continuing to execute the rural municipality equivalent of two mean girls subtweeting each other. In the meantime, the rest of the town tossed their oversized garbage in the lot rather than pay disposal fees down at the transfer station.
Now, in the defence of literally everyone I grew up with, there were a lot of reasons that we wanted to dodge giving any money to the nice folks at the transfer station. Depending on who you asked in town, they were either Big Government Communists or at least useless apparatchiks who were charging us money for something that should have been included in our municipal taxes somewhere. My father, however, was simply offended that once you threw something away at the transfer station, the thugs guarding it would never let you take anything out. Liability, they said.
That’s not the way things used to work, he explained to me once at three in the morning as we cut through the fence to an electrical substation one town over. Back when he was my age, you could ride your bicycle up to the unguarded junk pile, root through it all day, and take a half-broken tube radio back home to fix up. Of course, I understood then (as I do now) that the real problem is that my fellow townsfolk are filthy animals, and given the chance, they would throw a bunch of shit all over the place while digging like raccoons through the pile of crap because they thought Sally Jessy Raphael was telling them in a secret code that the pile contained solid gold bars.
That’s what the Field was. A giant pile of shit, strewn absolutely everywhere, in terrible condition, but it was unguarded. My father’s childhood experience would become my experience, albeit changed just a little bit. On weekends, I would sneak across the tracks and root through it myself. I never really found anything great, but I had a lot of fun evenings pushing stained mattresses, dog-eaten couches and discarded sheets of fibreglass insulation out of the way in order to see if the Junk Gods had answered my prayers and driven someone to chuck out a mouldy PlayStation or something, so I could stop playing in some weirdo’s fucking backyard.
What’s the hardest thing to repair? You might think it’s sentient androids, or the human body, or literally any flat-flex cable. And you’d be wrong. The hardest thing to repair is anything that another person has tried to repair before you.
If you’re the first idiot to have opened up a broken thing, then you know for a fact that your shit is at least in theory similar to the nine million other pieces of shit that were made by the same factory. Lots of variables get eliminated that way alone, because - unless you own an out-of-warranty BMW - the folks who built it are not a malevolent antagonist.
It absolutely sucks to open up a broken thing and realize that the screws are already loose. You have to steel yourself, expecting to see some dipshit having cut and spliced wires hither and yon, or replaced a precision-cut part with a chunk of balsa wood to keep it from rattling as it goes down the road. Worse still is the stripped-out screw, torn threads, or even the monster who installs an SAE bolt into a metric hole because they lost the original one.
And those are often the good cases. Sometimes, you’ll open it up and then realize that yes, someone else has been in here, but you have absolutely no idea what they did. Somewhere in this endless maze of complexity lies a subtle change, and because of the laws of cause and effect, it’s very likely to have been the reason that you’re inside this thing fucking around now, too.
This kind of thing turns a repair from a straightforward “what part is fucked now?” to a deeply challenging game of cat-and-mouse. You have to become a private detective trying to investigate another private detective. That’s why I sign my work every time I do a repair. I want the next dude to find me, and let me know if it really was a good idea to use duct tape instead of structural adhesive for that trim piece.
There’s no reason to be afraid of component-level repair. Nowadays, a lot of stuff is made out of like four big parts, and the manufacturer tells you to replace the entire big part when it fucks up. It makes sense for all involved: the repairperson gets done quickly, the customer is happy that they don’t have to learn how things actually work, FedEx gets bigger boxes, and the manufacturer gets to sell a $300 replacement board for a $450 thing. What divides this kind of person from you and I, humble reader, is the desire to go deeper.
There are many motives that drive a person to consider the bottomless pit that is component-level repair. Simple curiosity. A desire to save the environment. Not wanting to let them “get one over” on you. Cheapness so severe that it borders on mental illness. Whatever the reason, all throughout the world, people are diving deep in the quest to truly understand their shit.
Sometimes you have to understand that shit better than the people who made it. After all, if they were all that bright, then it wouldn’t be broken, now would it? They’d have used the $2 part instead of the $0.17 part, like you’re about to. Now, the entire infrastructure that makes Western civilization possible has failed you, and it’s just you and your soldering iron, socket wrench, oxy-ace torch, or surgical scalpel. Finish, and you will believe you are a god. Fail, and – it was broken anyway, but at least now you sound smarter when you bitch about it at the bar.
So get out there right now, and go find something that’s busted and too expensive to replace. Then tear it apart, and figure out what tiny annoying piece of shit is making this big annoying piece of shit not work. You owe it to the rest of humanity, or at least your ego.
As I’ve previously stated, every car at the junkyard has at least one brand-new item on it. Nobody scraps a car the second it stops working. Indeed, many owners will futilely piss away hundreds of dollars at their local parts emporium before declaring the effort a failure and then tearfully scrapping their beloved companion.
If you knew which cars had which new items in them, you could in theory purchase brand-new or near-new parts at junkyard-parts costs. That’s a big discount (unless you go to the really bougie you-pick-it near the airport, where they charge you eight dollars for a fucking relay.) Anyone who could reliably find these parts and use them could spend the rest of their life in new, el-cheapo parts, subsidized by the suckers who came before them. This is the dream of any person.
Until recently, taking advantage of this natural arbitrage in the junkyard market has been an impossible dream, a beautiful fantasy. Even the intake workers, who see the cars first, and who get the finest spoils before the rest of the car is chucked into the lot, cannot justify spending too much time picking through the car for anything less obvious than shiny new speed parts, lest their bosses become angry that they are not earning their $13.89 an hour. What if I told you that a group of highly-trained consultants exist, who practically live at the junkyard, and who can tell you where to get a brand-new set of plug wires, assuming that you’re willing to live with those wires being a little bit long because they’re for a Hyundai Tiburon and not a Neon?
That’s right. Those of us here at Bad Cars Monthly are launching our latest project, which once again endeavours to turn our inherent knowledge of the territory of our native junkyards into cold, hard cash. You get the discount, and we get to keep, like, 10% of what you saved. Most importantly, we get the rush of finding these parts without having to purchase them ourselves, which saves not just our wallets, but also our disintegrating homes and marriages.
There’s just one catch. Each member of editorial has picked out a specific junkyard as their “territory,” so if they’re out sick that weekend, you won’t get anything from that yard. Sure, we could send an intern, but Kubota Steve was so worried the last one would find his secret buried stash of Lancia parts in the parking lot that he broke out of prison to strangle them.
Any professional chef will tell you: the best way to produce a good meal is to start with good ingredients. Computer science agrees, with the maxim “garbage in, garbage out.” So why, then, do I have a constant battle with the local chain parts store about making sure that they actually order in the good $15.95 replacement evaporative-emissions-compliant fuel filler drain neck instead of the bad $13 one?
You have to assume that there is some degree of business paranoia on their part. Even though I have been patronizing this store for so long that they have a picture of me on the wall (two, actually, if you count the “Know Your Local Assholes” bulletin board in the break room that they thought I wasn’t a big enough asshole to use the toilet in) the manager is convinced that any moment now, I’ll be crushed to death under a car, flee town, or just go to jail again, and then he’ll be stuck with a premium part that he can’t sell because the average Joe Fivepack just wants the cheapest, shittiest, bit of kit that gets his heap back on the road.
Restocking fees aside, I’m not exactly the best customer. I take advantage of every coupon, discount, friendship, ageist so-called “senior’s” price, club rate, employee benefit, and return policy that I can in order to work that expensive part to be cheaper than the crappy one. The guy down at the high school who replaces the catalytic converters every time they get sawzalled off the buses? He pays full freight, because the fleet’s money is not his money. They’re gonna give him what he wants. If he goes somewhere else, they might actually lose money instead of gain it. It’s one of those profit deals.
Still, there is hope for them. Most of the time, I order online, and the friendly fairies occupying the Immortal Cloud don’t care which part I get. It’s only when my back is up against the wall, trying furiously to finish banging a car together so I can drive to work the next morning, that I drop in nowadays. On Sunday evening, 5:58 PM, I’ll take whatever fucking part they have on the shelves… and return it on Monday after I’ve ordered a replacement.
I’ve always wanted to get my ham radio license. There’s so much romance in the concept of amateur radio: repeatedly stating your callsign, keeping a little logbook of who you’ve talked to and from where, and participating in riveting political discussions with folks who haven’t gotten outside since 1978. So basically the same as the internet, except The Government makes you pass a morse-code test before they’ll let you ham it up.
One of the most appealing aspects, other than the potential to purchase and maintain a whole new genre of unreliable, complex hardware with reams and reams of jargon, is the concept of the perfect antenna. Now, we actually already know what the perfect antenna is. One of those self-sustaining EternalMinds® down at Facebook Research got bored for a couple milliseconds, boiled a bit of coolant in its vast reservoirs, and machine-learned itself how to create this antenna that looks like a Christmas tree drawn by a toddler on LSD that is better than everything else in existence. Still, we ignore it, and plod on, because it’s still fun working out the daily sudoku in the free transit papers even if the guy next to you on the train has solved it that morning.
Personally, I was mostly a fan of how the antenna regulations let me enforce my will upon others. You see, access to radio technology is a federally-controlled right. In the same way that you can’t go cut down the local public-access television station’s antenna because you don’t like that the hot goth girl on the call-in show keeps turning you down, so too can’t you touch the boiling-hot black mass that I’ve bolted loosely to what’s left of the roof of my house.
It supercedes any other level of government, whether actual or – in the case of my homeowners’ association – imagined. If someone tells you to take down your six meter tall antenna from behind your house, you can tell them to fuck right off, or they should expect a bunch of Predator drones to systematically cram Hellfire missiles up their butts by nightfall. And that’s the way government should work - for the assholes, by the assholes, in the assholes.
Now if only I could get the Department of Transportation interested in mandating access to racetracks, we’d really be getting somewhere.
Have y’all heard of foie gras? Of course you have. You’re all well-informed members of the internet, and I’m not a third-rate stand-up comedian pretending to be a hick before being chauffeured home to my mansion made of cocaine where I will proceed to laugh at you all for confusing my mockery of you for down-home wisdom that Those Assholes In Washington need to understand about the Dignity of Real America.
Anyway, the idea behind foie gras is that you feed a goose a whole bunch of delicious food until it konks out and then you eat its liver. Inhumane? I wouldn’t want it to be done to me. Delicious? Probably, yes, if I were the kind of person who is capable of visiting a fancy restaurant without spending the entire time trying to explain to the valet how it’s “super easy” to parallel park a 1976 Plymouth Volare running a unsynchronized crash box NASCAR transmission and a DeWalt power drill for a starter starter (that’s not a typo; the starter relay probably died in ‘89.) The idea does have merit, however, especially if you believe that cars, like children, are strengthened through arduous physical risk. Until that goose dies, it’s eating real well indeed.
Now, we all know that you can only cram so much boost into a turbocharged engine before something pops. The head gasket turns back into Kleenex, the head studs rip out of the block, or you simply pre-ignite until your number-four cylinder sounds like a 7000 rpm popcorn machine and is shown to high schoolers at special assemblies by dealership service writers in order to convince them not to do water-meth. What if I told you that we here at Bad Cars Monthly’s Performance Improvement division have figured out a way to build up a car’s tolerance for boost?
That’s right, just like deliberately eating a little arsenic every morning to keep your wife from poisoning you, a little overboost every couple of days helps keep your engine in great shape. We call it Scared Straight-Line Acceleration. Yes, there are still risks: if your engine is particularly hogged out, or you believe in the made-up engineering-school bullshit that is “aluminum fatigue limits,” then sure, you’re going to blow up your shit. Then you’re going to slam a whole new engine in, one that’s bigger and stronger, and you’re still way ahead of where you are now, crying in your dank sub-basement about being a second or two behind the 1993 Honda Civic that enlisted in our program last week and runs a consistent high-10s in the quarter when it’s not driving over its own crank.
For years, I’ve wanted one of the boxy, rear-wheel-drive Volvos. However, because society has largely stopped making cars that people actually want to buy, moneyed hipster youth are flocking to these same Volvos with the passion of the converted. You’ll see 240s, 740s, and even the rare 940 wagon at your local car meets, often slammed on bags and restored to a level of mechanical and aesthetic quality that your humble servant cannot possibly hope to accomplish what with my diversified liability streams.
Still, the deals do occasionally arrive. Every so often you find a 240 sedan that’s just too damn haggard for the common man, and even too much work for a dedicated Instagram account to pull out of a swamp, tow to a mechanic, and pay the mechanic to repair. For the money, they reason, I could just buy a nicer condition one from another province. And yet, this one was here now, and it somehow had arrived in my driveway. How exactly that occurred is a private matter, to be kept between me and my deity of the moment.
This, my friends, was a 1982 Volvo 240DL with what appears to be some hee-haw’s attempt at jamming a miled-out Ford 302 vee-aight into it. Actually, the 302 has been upgraded, because with the addition of about thirty pounds of rat turds, the static compression ratio has at least a point or two added. Nothing a pressure washer can’t solve, or, more realistically, some burnouts, a change of underwear, and the newly-minted “Platinum VIP Pass” to the local pick-your-part junkyard.
In the end, I couldn’t hold onto this dreamy little brick for very long. With the valuations as insane as they are currently, one of my neighbours noticed it was sitting on my driveway. For the minimal work I had done to tow it home, I received a pretty substantial amount of cash. My hope is that one day I’ll be reunited with that same car, perhaps many years down the line when the hipsters have moved onto something else, like the first-generation Dodge Caliber. There’s no chance I’m gonna want one of those, with their ugly interior, inaccessible starter position, inexplicably slow and heavy turbo-charged AWD option, and… cooled glovebox? Sweet Jesus, how much are those things going for right now?
Winter is always this horrific balance. On one hand, it’s too cold to wash a car. You’d have to be stupid to be out there in -20°C, running out of your house with a bucket of boiling water, trying to get to your panels before it instantly freezes solid just from touching the outside air. On the other hand, the city keeps putting road salt down like they own a dividend stake in the abstract concept of salt. You need to wash, and yet you can’t.
Now, I also know what you amateur scientists are going to say. “It can’t rust, it’s too cold for the endothermic reaction of iron oxidation to occur, you’re fine to wait to wash the car when it warms up.” Then it’ll be rusting! Do you also wait for your enemies to wake up before you stab them to death? Don’t answer that. Also, I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that Mars is red because it’s made of rust, and it’s hard to get a lot colder than there, too.
Most “car people” just shrug their shoulders at this problem and buy a cheap winter beater. This vehicle is sacrificial, they say. It does not bother me that it is corroding away before my very eyes, because doing so prevents my nice Lexus from developing spots of rust as well. These people also must have a “parts kid,” just in case something happens to their firstborn, because every car is special and unique and deserves to be preserved. Plus, if they keep buying up and destroying all the $1000 rust buckets, then what am I going to drive?
Last week, I awoke one morning from uneasy dreams to find myself in possession of the answer. I would simply add a sacrificial coating to my vehicle, encasing it in an inch of bulletproof and saltproof epoxy. So far, this method has worked really well. The salt just slides right off it, and onto the car behind me. There’s just one downside: since the doors no longer open, I have to keep the window rolled down all the time so I can get in and out. You might think this is “cool,” like the Dukes of Hazzard, but Bo and Luke never had to deal with trying to get a pregnant raccoon out from the back seat of their Volare.
As far back as I could remember, I wanted to be a pinball repair technician. It combined my love of helping people with my desire to never interact with them but instead dive into a complex technical realm of clicking relays, flashing lights, and buzzing piezos. All throughout my childhood, I would excitedly tell any adult that asked about my dreams.
Unfortunately, by the time I had gotten to high school and told my guidance counsellor, the dream had come to an end. Pinball machines, and the arcades that they resided within, were no longer in demand, and therefore neither would be pinball repair technicians. Heartbroken, I decided to resort to a safe fallback job. Like most of my classmates, I accepted a contract gig with the Los Angeles Police Department, retiring lifelike androids who had stolen the identities of influential private citizens and municipal politicians. A growth industry, to be certain.
Of course, like any fashion, pinball was cyclical. A couple decades after I began my unsatisfying day job, you could once again see bars stuffed to the gills with ancient machines that were now more in need of maintenance than ever. And although the old geezers who would have otherwise steered my apprenticeship into the wide world of machine-unfucking had sloughed off this mortal coil, enough of their writings were left behind that I could fake my way into replacing two or three of them. That’s enough for a career, I told myself, and soon launched full-time into hoarding pinball machine parts in addition to 1970s budget-trim Mopar products.
It was a natural fit: my skills in fiddly electromechanical manipulation paid off, as did my inherent cheapness and need to stretch a dollar. I was busy as hell, sanding and refinishing playfields, replacing burned-out bulbs in roached-out driver boards, and generally having a great old time. Eventually, word got around about my talents, and I traded in seedy bars for wealthy folks. They wanted to have a lot of well-maintained games in their home, and I wanted their money to be moved into my bank account and therefore neutralized from any further harm it may cause to society.
I’ll never forget that day that I shipped an immaculate Pinbot to the Mayor Himself. Something funny about that job, though: he kept asking me if I knew him from somewhere, while pointing his head in the direction of the machine and grinning. Sure, of course I realized that it was the Nexus-9 that I had failed to retire years prior, but his money spent as well as anyone else’s, and he clearly wanted to get away with it all. Just don’t try to enforce those small business rules, buddy. I still have that contract on my fridge.
One of the vanishingly few benefits you get from living in the frozen North of Canada is that it’s simply too cold for a lot of pesky things. Valley fever? Too damn cold. Poisonous scorpions? Need to be kept above zero at all times, the losers. Subway-sized rats that can take out a schoolyard in less than fifteen minutes? Won’t get fifteen feet before a Dire Owl chucks them into the air to be flash-frozen in the troposphere.
This means that when you buy something especially sketchy from a warmer place, you don’t have to worry too much about disinfecting it. Just leave it outside for a night, and then shake it and watch a cascade of dead roaches fall out. Their pleading eyes (burst from ice forming inside their optic nerves) will look at you guiltily, yes, but it’s not your fault. It’s Mother Nature’s, and if you can’t hang with her, then get out of the kitchen. Or something like that.
Now, this phenomenon hasn’t always worked in my favour. Last summer, I was besieged by an infinite wall of pesky mosquitos. The eggs from these annoying little shitheads can somehow survive the worst of winter, and it’s boring and time-consuming to kill all of them manually, like our ancestors used to.
In a warmer region, these pests are purged by dragonflies the size of an Eaton’s and/or eaten by lizards that sneak into your house and live there, like pets but not. This is simply not possible here, but I foolishly believed I could import a small box of praying mantises sometime around May, when the permafrost covering my driveway just started to break up.
Praying mantises are, in theory, the ultimate badasses, peak predators of nature, invulnerable to anything that the world can throw at them. However, it turns out the shipping company also uses the same technique as me to disinfect packages, making my own efforts largely superfluous. When they got here, all that remained was a box of dead bugs. They didn’t stand a chance. Up here, prayers don’t get answered, because the moisture in your words freezes them solid and they smash to bits on the sidewalk.
Way, way back in the 1980s, the shape of the future was vaguely wedgey. Where the 1970s had promised us a vast array of beautiful, curvy cars and then offered rubber-bumper abominations with wheezy engines and preinstalled body lifts, the 1980s would transport us to radical new car designs that could be made by any schoolchild with a ruler. Basically every car that could loosely be described as sporty attempted their own version of this format – even if you worked somewhere like Ford, where your lust for all things triangular had to be hidden in the form of exotic concept versions of the Mustang.
Naturally, the Italians were the best at this. Because they made the most beautiful cars of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, it logically followed that they would also make the most desirable wedges. The Lancia Stratos may be peak car, but it is certainly peak wedge. It looks like a version of a Fiero from a Hellraiser movie, drives like a Ferrari with a Napoleon complex, and the manufacturer only sarcastically refers to the homologated versions as “street cars.”
Of course, I could never afford such a desirable car. The Stratos was the province of caviar-swilling billionaires and aspiring James Bond villains. In fact, with the current spate of near-terminal irony poisoning that has gripped the Western world, I don’t think I could even afford an Iron Duke Fiero dressed up like a Stratos. Again, though, literally every sporty vehicle of this era looked like some variation of the Porsche 944 – from Starion to Sonnett. Surely there’d be one model that I could find in my local junkyard and nurse back to health, sating my desire for a vehicle that splits pedestrians in two at the ankles?
There’s good news and there’s bad news about my quest. When I dropped by my local auto auction, a couple of the guys were talking excitedly about this “worn-out old TVR” that was being put up for sale later this afternoon. Naturally, I bid on it without looking, and in my enthusiasm I spent a little bit too much money. That evening, I got a surprised call from the auction house – I had won! I got my roommate to give me a ride down, fully expecting to tow home a delectable British wedge made entirely out of fibreglass and cocaine.
Unfortunately, it turns out I didn’t read the auction details closely enough. While I thought that I was bidding on a TVR, what I had actually purchased was the TVR. I was now the CEO of what was left of the company. I’d like to announce our new development of inexpensive wedge cars based around a rotary engine, which will be available in the fall of 1987.
Batteries stink. Yes, they allow us to have the far-future ability to play Tetris on the shitter, but in exchange for that you have large expenses, conflict minerals, poisonous electrolytes, and weight. Still, we need them if we’re ever going to stop burning dead refined dinosaurs and instead start burning subatomic particles that are made wiggly by nuclear fission reactions. I might have slept through that part of high school physics class.
There is one place where a lot of used batteries show up for cheap: Canada. Here in the frozen north, you get maybe five years tops out of your average parts-store shit-tier lead-acid. After that, maybe you forgot to drive your car once every fifteen minutes, the witches-brew inside the battery got cold in a -26°C hellstorm, and now it won’t start.
Most people will get boost after boost until it’s obvious that there’s no more saving this battery, and then turn it in for a five-dollar refund at the parts counter. I’ve done this dozens of times throughout my life; a couple of years ago I brought in five batteries in one day, making the poor dude working the desk quit on the spot (I processed my own refund, having bought enough parts to been given my own username and password to their system.) In theory, that battery is recycled into another new battery and not just chucked in the ocean – I live pretty far away from there, and batteries are heavy – but it doesn’t really matter anymore to the end-user. Their car starts again, and life continues.
What actually happens to these old batteries is that they pile up behind the shop over the course of the winter, until the scrappers come by and pay the shop owner six dollars to take them away, again presumably for recycling. That’s where I come in. No, not to pay seven dollars: the scrappers want like ten dollars as if they aren’t a bunch of greasy dudes riding around in a hoggy off-lease Silverado. With just a dollar store laser pointer, you can easily blind the el-cheapo security cameras used on the loading dock of your local Canadian Tire and rummage through their old-battery lockup for as long as you want. After that, I take my pick of the (literal) litter back home, hit the batteries with a couple braps from the old MIG welder, and I suddenly have a functioning power-storage system, ready to sustain my disgusting, wasteful lifestyle for months without having to pay the carpetbaggers working at the local electricity monopoly.
How do I charge these batteries, you ask? I put a decoy battery in a broken car, connected through hidden wires to the underground bunker full of my purloined lead-acids. After that, all I need to do is tearfully ask passersby to see if they can give me a jump-start so I can pick my kid up from daycare. You’d be surprised how much fuel and charge a Good Samaritan is willing to extend up until the point they realize that the car in question doesn’t have any wheels.
These things that the common person call “convenience stores” are anything but. When you’re a freak-about-town like myself, you’re constantly running out of inexpensive stuff that you need to get more of right now, but it’s only sold at specialty stores despite being critically necessary. You can’t blame the convenience stores; they’re stuck in the past, with expensive retail square-footage and employee minimum-wage to pay for. That’s why there’s a new solution.
Before I get further into the specifics of my solution, let me paint for you a picture. Last week, I needed a full-sized SD card with less than 2 gigabytes of storage, a small bottle of straight acetone, and a clean #6012 welding rod. Not all of this crap was for the same project, of course: as one project ran into supply difficulties, I simply shifted onto the next one, and then onto the next one, until I had a dozen things open on my workbench and could make no material progress on any of them.
All of these things are extremely common, not expensive, and frequently required, but could I just pop out to the 7-11 for them? No. I’d have to drive all over town, assuming those stores were even open at 11pm at night, and spend an absolute fortune in gasoline, nitrous oxide, tires, tickets for moving violations, and re-ring kits in order to do so. It’d be much easier to just walk somewhere, or ideally – have it come to me.
For a small price, we have teams of weirdos who are into the same hobbies as you are. They’ll drive by your house and let you take their extras, and they might even trade you for some of the really sick shit. Your project gets unstuck, and they get to free up some room in the basement. Who knows? You could make a new friend. Wouldn’t that progress in your social life impress your court-ordered psychiatrist?
At the town’s horticultural society, you know that you’ve “made it” as a full-fledged member when you get yourself a greenhouse. Under cover, you become largely immune to the negative effects of our hellish local climate. This means you can grow big-ass plants, year round. And you’re not limited to just what you can grow here - as they spend more money and slip further into madness, a lot of the star members of the community are cranking out perennials that wouldn’t even survive our summers.
Some hobbies are lucky like that, to have the concept of a dedicated outbuilding that insulates their stuff from the weather. Now, I know what you’re going to say. Those tales from years past of houses that come complete with a two-car garage are just fantasies, an impossible dream. I do technically have “a garage” attached to my house, but it’s crammed so full of fragments of my past cars that it’s impossible to get a current car in. Throw out the parts? Hold on there, Marie Kondo. What if… I need them again someday?
There is another way, of course. Because of the horticultural society’s outsized influence on the local government, there are a series of very special ordinances which allow the vegetable-growing crowd to erect ridiculous outbuildings - powered, even - as long as they’re declared as “greenhouses.” Technically, there’s not even a limitation on how many storeys they can be. I checked, and even passed it over to my shark of an attorney for a follow-up review. He handed me back the paperwork with the look of pure delight that is only possible when a city bureaucrat has fucked up big-league and made a loophole the size of Quebec in the legislation.
I’ll spare you the very particular details of zoning and statues, but you’re now looking at the guy who grandfathered in an entire apartment building as a “greenhouse.” Now all I have to do is save up for one of those cool Japanese car elevators, and I can finally work on my stuff in peace and quiet, without having to worry about Mother Nature shitting ice pellets into my ears while I’m figuring out what structural spot weld to make next.
In the meantime, I’ve been using the building’s parking garage to store the horticultural society’s plants for them, because otherwise they’re going to make The New Mayor change the greenhouse legislation to use a lot more precise language next time. And I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t growing on me. It really is a very appealing hobby, and doesn’t take up that much space…
Now that we’ve collectively moved on as a species from having land-line telephones, humanity is afloat in a sea of obsolete, very expensive, specialized hardware that cannot be repurposed for any other task. All this stuff that, a long time ago, required huge electromechanical switches now happens inside a boring old computer in a boring old closet inside a boring old building. The magic is gone, yes, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be replicated. After all, an army of hard-working junkfolks took to dismantling the old world in order to build the new, and sometimes they forget to scrap all of it and I get my hands on it.
The primary motivation was cheapness. This thing looks fancy, it used to cost a million dollars, but now it’s $1.36 per kilogram and the guy at the scrapyard will even help me load it into the back of my Eagle. After that comes trying to find a use for all this junk – and remember how I said it was specialized? Unless you want to spend the entire rest of your life reading datasheets and scattering chicken bones at the altar of telco engineers, you’re not going to be playing Tetris on it.
So the next step, of course, was to beat the telcos hollow at their own game. It turns out that you don’t need any of that expensive shit that they claim you do: fibre-optic trench diggers, dedicated three-phase power, barbed-wire fences, permits. A group of suitably motivated assholes can get a rudimentary telephone company up and running in a weekend, especially since the previous group of assholes weren’t motivated enough to wipe their hard-drives or change their passwords from the default “AT&TSux.”
At last, the dream of free long-distance phone calling was realized. I mean, it was already realized, by the internet, but there’s just something about the vastness of these clicking electromagnetic abominations that really appealed to me. Of course, my network only spread as far as the end of the block, and because we didn’t bother digging any of those aforementioned fibre trenches, cuts out every time someone drives over the cable, but now my neighbour Peugeot Ted and I can call each other for free, without being beholden to any huge institutions. Mostly because the neighbour is away on holidays and didn’t bother turning their outside outlets off.
It’s never sat well with me why they’re called “pyramid” schemes. A pyramid is a three-dimensional object, and a traditional hierarchical org-chart of such a scheme is distinctly two-dimensional, with no indication of any sort of depth information. I guess the Feds would have a harder time prosecuting people with an unsexy name like “triangle scheme” or, even worse, “three-axis polygon scheme.” Maybe there’s an element of orientalist inculcation in there too; pyramids sound exotic and foreign, and therefore a little dangerous? Anyway, I accidentally started a cult last week. How was your weekend?
The important thing to keep in mind as I tell you this story is that I never actually plan for success. In fact, the harder I work to try and make something successful, the less likely it will end up the way I want it to. This is some sort of stereotype, and perhaps an example of paranoid or mystical thinking, but I swear on my mother’s 1996 Plymouth Neon with 245,000 all-original kilometers that it is true. What started all this mess was seeing that the post office’s “community bulletin board” was looking a little bare.
Not too long ago, in the good times, when we could still leave our homes without getting the signature of three government representatives and scraping our skin off with an orbital sander afterwards, this bulletin board would be chock full of community happenings like lost dogs, fun fairs, and bad deals on boring cars. Today, that same cork-based surface is devoid of all community happenings. It was there, while waiting for the grumpy postal workers to haul a fully-dressed and fluid-filled Muncie M22 that I had won on eBay out from the back room, that I decided I would do my little part to make the community happier.
On the back of an old poster warning about the threat of mailing vegetables, I scrawled the first volume of what would later become known as “Seat Safety Switch Thought.” It was a simple work, mostly asking people if they were truly happy with how much money they were spending on their boring cars and suggesting that, instead, they consult my yard for deals on late-1970s garbage Mopars. By the time I had written a few sentences in my crude block print and my hand seized up, the posties were done, so I stuck the thing on the board and didn’t think about it until the next day, when I was back in there picking up an entire S-10 Blazer frame that I had convinced a clearance warehouse to box up and mail to me.
It didn’t take long until I gained quite the following. People would come by every day, shouting about how they were tired of paying Big Ford a chunk of their paycheque when they couldn’t even drive anywhere. Of course, nobody actually bought any cars, but they waited around and listened to my pontification from the legally-mandated minimum safe distance for outdoors social interaction. And they kept coming back, over and over, and listening for as long as I was willing to yell until my voice got hoarse and I returned to my home for the night.
Now, any of you who were popular in high school (ha!) see where this is going. When you gain a lot of nice folks who want to hear what you have to say, you get caught up in the moment and tend to say a little bit too much.
If you believe what the cops say, I “preyed upon the weak” and “harnessed their rage” in an attempt to take over the local Chevrolet dealership so I could use their lifts to do an oil change instead of busting my hump on the frozen ground all winter. This is completely false, as I only wanted to get them to let me use their TWICE module to debug a recalcitrant anti-theft alarm on my Saab. What’s more, there’s no reason to believe an organization so corrupt that their so-called “detectives” think a 1989 Beretta is a reasonable undercover vehicle to use in order to infiltrate my group. That fucking thing had a working tape deck, and we could smell it as soon as it got within the block.
It’s important to have limits. For instance, I promised my sponsor/parole officer that I wouldn’t jump a Baja Bug equipped with trophy truck suspension through the mall fountain again. Equally important is knowing yourself, and realizing when those self-imposed limits are wholly unnecessary.
After a marathon Zoom call with my attorney as he was trying to recover from a cocaine binge in his hotel room jacuzzi in Ithaca, it was determined that only the specific parameters of my promise counted. The Feds had fucked up, and allowed me to get a little wild with the edits to the release agreement, possibly because they found me to be a source of “one time this guy” stories that they would tell to their fellow cops at future law-enforcement backyard barbecues. Because of their insane precision, we had ourselves a loophole. A loophole big enough to jump a Baja Bug with regular suspension through.
Now, in the years that have passed since my original stunt, a lot of things have changed. Baja Bugs have become vastly more expensive, of course, as North America’s infrastructure crumbles, forcing people to adopt Mad Max-style offroad vehicles of increasing bulletproofness in order to just drive down what were once regular, well-maintained roads. The average commuter has to jump at least one washed-out bridge per year, a fake study in a magazine that doesn’t exist once said.
Another thing that’s changed is that the malls are all dead, too. Whether it was The Calamity, or just the slow rot of our civic centres as it became obvious that drones could deliver us physical goods of any description within minutes of being wished for on ThoughtSiri®, there was simply no need anymore to go to the local shopping mall. And throwing a repurposed Volkswagen Beetle through a mall fountain is only fun if there’s someone around to see it, so that was out as well.
After a lot of further negotiation and reduction in scope of my plan, I eventually decided to modify a remote-controlled Tandy Beetle (1987 livery) to run on nitromethane and jumped it off my roof. Off my roof, into a gaggle of high school kids who were loitering across the street, trying to figure out if it was now “safe” to break into the booby-trapped mausoleum that my neighbour had locked himself away in about two years ago. Working within constraints: that’s how real artists freak out the squares.
Way back when I actually showed up every morning for work, the way that you knew you’d made it is when you got an office with a door on it. At my first gig, I saw that the mid-level guys shared one, but the senior folks got their own. On my very first day, I looked upon them with envy from my position in the shared pig-sty that was the “junior room” and knew that it would only be a matter of time before, I, too, had my own door.
Of course, this never happened. I didn’t have an office with a door for my entire career, right up until the bitter end. That’s when Dr. Brookings declared me medically unfit to be in public society to that court, and my career took a different, poorer, turn. Now, my office is the front seat of one of many of my 1976-78 Volares, and although not all of them have doors, most do. Had I made it? In a strange way, I guess I have.
Before I burned out and was cast into the gutter by my corporate once-peers, they made us all attend this human-resources training class in which we were meant to learn how to improve our careers, but ideally not in a way that made us ask for more money or leave for a competitor. What they wanted to drill into us was the idea of autonomy, mastery, and purpose – and I have all three, now, in my dream job.
What is my dream job, you ask? Depending on the day, it might be thieving broken crap out of the nearby junkyard to put on eBay. If it’s a few weeks until police ticket quota day, you could find me at the dead shopping mall trying confidence scams out on the customers and employees. And if this Plymouth has thrown a rod again, I’ll be in my backyard swapping the engine, wondering why I don’t have a garage with a door in which to do this important work.
When you’re the only game in town, you can do whatever you want. This is what economics professors and people who spent most of their morning sober call “a monopoly.” And they’re bad. Real bad. Imagine if you only had one option for cable internet? Okay, maybe not that hard to imagine. Uhh, cell phone service? Oh. I see your point. Well, how about cars? What if every single car you could buy in your town had to be a Ford?
Most Fords are pretty decent cars, but they’re only that way because of competition. If there were ever even a small market sub-segment where nobody thought they could make a better cute-ish soft-roader two-wheel-drive crossover shaped like a 1960s 4x4 that had been repeatedly stung by bees, then it would last like half of one generation before the manufacturer started phoning it in. By the end of two generations of unimpeded cost-cutting, you’d be lucky to still have doors. Having to compete, even if it’s only to offer some jazzy new paint colours every year, means that they don’t take your money for granted.
Now, governments all over the world have been convinced by their high-dollar donors that competition is actually bad. To continue my prior example, the belief is that the government doesn’t understand cute-ish soft-roader two-wheel-drive crossovers shaped like a 1960s 4x4 that had been stung by bees well enough to regulate it. All those bureaucrats know is “car,” and they are blind to the complexities and subtleties of the modern product marketplace. Therefore, they should just fuck off and let them do whatever they want, forever.
So even though the industry thinks that the industry shouldn’t be regulated in any way, governments still want to get a handle on their worst behaviour, but in a friendly, market-driven kind of way that preserves the most naïve interpretation of originalist capitalism possible. That’s why the Seat Safety Switch Institute for Samesies was developed. We’re working on the name.
If you’re a beleagured government who is being bullied by corporations that say you don’t understand the subtleties of nuclear power generation, elevator construction, or airplane manufacture, then our team of experts will work hard to rip off their shit. It’s hard not to feel a little competitive when your engineers look out the window to see one of our trained consultants digging through their trash for unshredded blueprints, or putting up fake wifi hotspots in order to capture critical encryption keys left unguarded in a moment of weakness. They’ll be forced to make better shit than us out of pure rage, if nothing else. And ain’t nothing motivates like a grudge.
A lot of people are sadder than I am about not being able to go to Mars within their lifetimes. Yes, there are a vocal few who have pinned their hopes on a billionaire. Unfortunately, that billionaire’s car company makes a six-figure car whose defroster cannot be activated while wearing gloves. Other than that remote chance, it seems likely that I’ll die on the same planet I was born on. And like anyone else looking at their mortality, I’ve decided to make the absolute minimum set of changes to my life that will make me feel a little better about it.
First: no more pouring used gasoline from punctured fuel tanks directly in the storm sewer. That stuff is too valuable, and extracting and refining new gasoline is terrible for the environment. Instead, I’ve ratchet-strapped a Rubbermaid plastic bin underneath all of my cars. This way, any fuel tank (or, more likely, filler neck) holes will drain into a durable, reusable, maybe-fuel-safe container, so I can put the gas back in and try to burn it all off before it leaks out again.
Second: gonna be a lot more careful about leaving the lights on at my house. For starters, even though my landlord is the legal owner of the property and, until his corpse is found and his estate probated, auto-paying my utility bills, it doesn’t mean that I should have hacked those smart LED lightbulbs to mine bitcoins. I’ll turn them off when I go to sleep.
Last, I resolve to do my best to help educate the next generation about safety. That means I will no longer be braking in school zones. Honking the horn and gently swerving wastes much less energy than accelerating only to have to throw out the anchors because one of the neighbourhood kids decided that an unmarked crosswalk is “safe” just because the speed limit is low. Hey, he would have grown up to take long, hot showers anyway.
What would you say if I told you that every level of government has participated in a secret project to subsidize the bargain-basement purchase of low-mileage large-displacement V8 engines by the average Joe? Come with me, friend, to the school board’s surplus sale, where they get rid of old buses.
Yes, those ugly cheesewagons you rode in as a kid had pistons the size of milking buckets. Overly-adequate cooling systems. Dead-simple electricals to make a swap job easy. And a lot of them were just now decommissioned, after spending their entire lives driving at very low speeds for about thirty miles in a loop before getting shut off. Maybe the heavily abused ones got driven to the science centre once a year, but you should be able to figure out which one that was – it has a new set of tires on it, or at least a pair of steers where the date code doesn’t resolve to “1989.”
As an additional bonus, some of these buses have met with disaster over the years. If you live in a cold, shitty place like I do, at least eight or nine Ms. Frizzles have taken their Magic School Buses on a class trip off the side of a cliff or into oncoming traffic, thanks to our old friend, the Black Ice Induced Tankslapper. This makes the swap much easier, as many of the inconvenient exterior panels now have giant holes in them for straightforward access.
What’s the catch? Now that everyone under 40 can no longer afford to live in a home, #VanLife is taking off big league in every major municipality. A schoolbus is like living in an extra-long van, which means that it’s extra-desirable. So you’ll have lots of competition at the auctions, but I’m sure you’ll find some way to find the winners in the parking lot. Then you just need to convince these environmentally- and fiscally-responsible folks that a thirsty V8 is actually an oppressive tool of The Man, and that they should let you sawzall it out of their prospective living quarters before they have it towed to the bespoke inner-city upholsterer’s. Everyone wins!
Last week, I noticed that my driveway had sunk a little bit. You might think this is not so big of a deal, to have to use a smidge more throttle than usual in order to burp the car over the gap when I’m trying to park in my garage. First, I don’t use my garage to store running cars. Second, I shit myself in fear at the very sight of this mess.
As I had been trained in the past by my experiences with home ownership, any small, barely-perceptible change is always indicative of multi-thousand-dollar damage to my building envelope. Thus, I regarded this new difference in my life with the amount of fear that my ancestors once reserved for the presence of confusing new religions and heliocentrism.
I called in some favours, and got a friend who knows a friend who knows a driveway guy to summon help. Within a few days, a rattling, smoking unmarked GMC van from the mid-to-late 1990s rolled up to my curbside, gently dislodging the pile of rod bearings and cracked balljoints that had rolled there over the last few years from attempting to street-park my palliative-care automobiles.
Out of said van came an adult human male, who identified himself as “Pathways Pete,” and refused to shake my hand because of what he called “encodings.” Pathways Pete also wanted to know if his nemesis, Driveway Dan, was somewhere on the property, trying to film him through a crudely drilled hole in my walls with a hidden camera. Apparently, the two men had a long-running feud that mostly consisted of attempting to discredit the other to local consumer help newscasts.
As a homeowner, you get used to this kind of thing. The best help is crazy, my dad explained to me once while we were hunkered down in the basement of my childhood split-level, waiting for the PCP that the hot-water-heater installer had injected to wear off before we could speak to him about the bill. And Pathways Pete was so crazy, that he made Hot-Water-Heater Harold look like a regular old ferret collector.
A lot of horse-trading happened after that, mostly consisting of Pete clucking disapprovingly at one corner of my driveway, which had started to crumble from “water movement” underneath. He’d have to break up the whole thing, he explained, and put in all new rebar and ballast. This all looked like a lot of money, and so I told him I’d think about it.
The thing that my dad never understood was that you don’t need a handyman if you yourself are crazier than them. Down the street, the city was paving a new chunk of the playground zone after that councillor’s armoured SUV fell into the pothole, trapping the vehicle and thus exposing its bulletproof flank to the small arms fire from the neighbourhood children for several minutes until recess was over. It didn’t take much encouragement or Subway gift cards for the proud city labourers to look the other way while I borrowed their cool asphalt-shitting machine. Now I have finally completed one of my life goals: I have my own parking lot.
It might be because I had a massive amount of childhood trauma from my dad’s friend’s 280Z, but there’s just something about those Datsuns that won’t let me go. I mean, other than the fact that the jagged rusty metal keeps getting hooked on my jeans when I try to get out.
Have you ever tried to describe why a car is good to someone else? Usually, we start with horsepower, G-forces, something quantifiable. None of these numbers are impressive in the modern era for the Z-cars. You’ve got the wheezy non-crossflow tractor-grade inline six, the lossy driveline, and the rear suspension out of a horror film. And yet - they are simply the greatest motor vehicles ever made. It certainly helps that they are a few seconds faster than the 17-second dope-sick Plymouths that they rivalled, but it’s more than just what you can put down on paper.
For me, perhaps, it’s the depth of commitment that makes a car truly great. If I show up, buy a cheap car, drive it every day without complaint, and sell it on for close to what I paid, is it a good car? Yes, but I don’t think I could identify with, suffer with such a vehicle. For the Datsuns, you’ve got this rust that permeates every imaginable seam and shows up in structural locations. I don’t even know what the inside fender well of my Acura looks like, but each individual factory spot weld and seam seal mishap is burned into the memory of the true Z-owning elite. With so many hours of work into one single car, I know for sure that I will have to at least grudgingly appreciate it.
I look every day, hoping to get a good deal on a farm-fresh mouse hotel, or maybe a barnfind where unrelated Uncle Ernie evaporated into an acid trip in the 90s and they’re just now getting around to probating his will. Because to do otherwise, to pay actual money for a car, would inflate its value, and ironically cheapen it. That way lies Barrett-Jackson, reality television shows about painters, and “maybe I should let a professional do it, it will be very expensive if I fuck up.” Such is the origin of my contempt for an automobile, and the beginning of the end.
Maybe I will never find my perfect Z-car, or even a reasonable 35-footer weekend driver. In some ways that would be okay, too. A beautiful dream is still free, and a free car is the best kind even if it never actually runs.
A lot of us didn’t think it was a great idea to put those hunter-killer robots in the Earth’s upper atmosphere. That was even before they said that the robots would drive themselves, in case something bad happened to the folks telling them what to do. We were supposed to just trust that their autonomous control systems would be smart enough to avoid blowing up Aspirin factories or elementary schools.
Turns out the lowest bidder only trained the expert system on spy photographs of perfectly clean buildings, so anything that looked too organized and rectangular became an instant target. People started to scatter garbage around their homes and places of work so that they wouldn’t get a charged-particle shot from orbit. Not everyone was able to produce convincing garbage, however, because people are really bad at randomizing. You needed authentic hoarding clutter or you might as well kiss the nursing home good-bye.
This is where I come in. As a trained expert in filling every available horizontal surface with broken shit, I was a natural choice for this new mission. And the consulting payments helped me buy higher-end junk, to replace the shit-tier stuff and doubles that I foisted onto the lawns of my clients. Well, “replace” is a strong word. Since all of them were afraid to touch the junk once it was installed, they didn’t want to risk upsetting the don’t-die-from-robots feng shui of the environment. So I would never have to worry that someone would pick up and sell, say, this old Dana 35. Basically, the entire world had become my storage locker, and what’s more, I was getting paid to do it.
In the end, I lost most of my great junk to the cleaning-up robots that were invented by the hunter-killer robots. I should count myself lucky to survive, but I was still sad to see a lot of it shovelled off into junkyards before the houses of my clients were turned to ash. My own pile of crap was so impenetrable that, when the robots came for me, they simply filled up their available memory and then started to swap hard onto disk until smoke came out of the brain box. It’s nice that they were so full of cool parts, though.
We all knew someone growing up who was into weird pets. One of the girls in my elementary school had an iguana, which I think we can all agree is the Alfa GTV6 of lizards. I never had any pets. I wasn’t allowed to; not least because my family wanted to save them for work.
As previously established, my immediate family growing up were suburbanites who dreamed of getting a job at the circus – unsuccessfully, in the end, as neither my mom, dad, or unrelated Uncle Ernie could pass an interview for any of the open positions during the short window each year that the circus was in town. So they would go back to their boring jobs as technical writers and finite element stress-fracture analysts, counting down the days until their next company-approved paid-time-off so they could cram me in the back of our family Country Squire wagon and follow the circus in the hope that one of the freaks might die and suddenly need a replacement.
Where was I? Oh yes, weird pets. In the awkward summer between junior high school and regular high school, I had fallen in with a bad crowd. You could call them “the auto mechanics who worked at the garage down the street from my house,” and you’d be right. I had first become enthralled with the idea of fixing decrepit shitboxes when I walked past their place.
I was on my way to Blockbuster to pick up an NES game, but any thoughts of Ivan “Ironman” Stewart’s Super Off-Road were dashed from my head as soon as I realized the beauty that they were working on. This was better than the unconditional love that a dog could provide: this was a 1973 Jaguar XJ6 that one of the dudes at the shop had gotten for under a grand and then shoved a clattering, obscene pushrod GM small-block V8 (later recalled as a 305 during an attempt at repressed-memory hypnosis by Dr. Brookings of the Brookings Method) under the hood.
For the rest of the summer, I hung out there, fetching wrenches, filling up coffee, and packing bongs. I had built such a rapport with the guys there that they were sad to see me go, not least because now they would have to actually pay someone to do my job.
In what must be one of the universe’s cosmic ironies, I parlayed the experience into getting a job with the circus the next spring, to the white-hot rage of unrelated Uncle Ernie. It turns out that the elephants need a very substantial amount of fresh water every day, and if you can’t keep a dodgy genset and water pump ticking, exotic animal vets are ludicrously expensive.
One of my friends is a detailer. In case you’re not familiar with car-person lingo, this means that they clean other folks’ cars for money. This involves an array of complex and expensive chemicals, special tools, and a neurotic eye for even the tiniest imperfection. So naturally, it’s not a great fit for me, even if you could use a random-orbital polisher to take a rust hole the size of a Lhasa Apso out of a door panel.
I would have absolutely no use for his services, except that sometimes - at pure random, it appears - the universe provides me with what I would call a “nice car.” Some of these cars, I believe, could fetch upwards of two thousand dollars when sold on Craigslist, and as such are far too good for me to own and inevitably ruin. In order to guarantee the best possible return, potential buyers like to see their new purchase all spiffed up and shiny.
Last week, a 2003 Cavalier landed in my collection, as part of some distant half-aunt’s third-cousin permanently moving to Paraguay in order to flee the taxman. I was given vague instructions to “get rid of it” and saw an opportunity to finally have enough pocket cash to splurge in the HELP! aisle at the Canadian Tire. Window regulator bushings, here I come… when they’re on sale, of course.
After driving this minty cream puff over to my buddy’s place, and making small talk, he immediately began the laborious task of Shop-Vaccing about thirty pounds of calcified Wendy’s wrappers out of the passenger seat footwell. I was amazed to see that there was an actual intact metal floor underneath all this, assuming at first it had been some sort of outsider-art papier-mache rust repair. For a moment, I had a pang of regret to be shuffling such a fine vehicle off to a buyer.
Of course, because this whole thing is what they call a “profit deal,” I gave instructions to my buddy to stop at around the point where the job became too expensive to return big dividends for your ol’ pal Switchy. After seven minutes exactly, he turned off the Shop Vac and told me to get the fuck out, which I gleefully did. I drove home in the lap of luxury, practically chattering with joy at how the radio was able to pick up stations all on its own, without having to lean out of the car at highway speeds to adjust the antenna.
At home, the buyer I had arranged was already waiting for me, and they looked elated to see such a clean commuter vehicle. They were a Wise Consumer; this would be a good purchase that would carry their sondaughter through tradecollege. I didn’t have to say much about the car, as my obvious enthusiasm for it having all of its windows was infectious. Soon, I had a fat stack of twenties in my hand, and the new owner was happily blazing through second gear on their way out of my community.
A couple weeks later, I got a phone call. Now, you see, this guy wasn’t the most robust vehicle inspector I’ve ever met. When I look at a car, I at least try to check the trunk for any of my relatives who might have been extrajudicially assassinated by a freelance tax collector. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, there’s a lot of room for leverage in the subsequent negotiation.
There should be no surprise present on the face of my regular readers when I tell you that I have my troubles with the local community association. I think they are mostly upset about the condition of my yard and house, which drove the city to drop the property value assessment from a dollar sign with a significant number of digits after it, to “Got Any Smokes?”
Despite my reputation, I am not an ogre. I have attempted to win them over by recruiting university students of history to sort and document my junk as public art. Normally, I would imagine this attempt to enrich the cultural understanding of humanity would go a long way to restore harmony to the neighbourhood. In fact, it got an award from the Mayor Himself, mostly because of a passionate letter-writing campaign by those same post-secondary students, trained by their pricey educations and unfit absentee parents to be so desperate for external approval that no amount of public grovelling is too unseemly.
Unfortunately for me and my squadron of hiking-boot-clad academics, my community recently moved from number one for murders to number six for murders, which has brought in a new breed of wannabe-suburbanite who doesn’t actually have any money. And when you don’t have any money but spend all your time pretending that you do, seeing people who don’t have any money and don’t pretend to have money enrages you. Thus, the focus on property value.
This all came to a head recently when a group of them got together and revived the community association. It turns out that when the neighbourhood was originally founded, there were a whole pile of covenants that were abandoned in the years after the town began to fall apart. Nobody was worrying about what colour to paint the fence lattices when their bank’s foreclosure inspector was the only one left visiting the neighbourhood, and refused to exit his bulletproof-windowed Executive Protection 7-series when he did. Now somebody did care, but only insofar as it allowed them to leave me bitchy letters levering fines against the property that I couldn’t pay.
My opponents didn’t understand two issues. First, I didn’t “own” the property, but started squatting. From the tone of the mail that arrived when I first moved in, if anyone currently did own the place, they were probably now buried in a shallow grave on the side of a Swiss highway.
Second, I had Max. He’s my shark of a lawyer, top of his class, writes up legal papers. That last point is why he started hanging out with me. In the same way that Europeans desensitize themselves over time to increasingly harder-core pornography, Max can only achieve orgasm when he gets into the big book of legal precedents. Luckily for me, I’m a walking generator of compounded traffic-court summons, which gives him plenty to meet his publication goals. I was sure he’d be delighted to finally spend an afternoon in housing court instead, where the judges are still capable of expressing surprise about my many crimes.
And that’s how I ended up owning the entire community association. It’s pretty great, because the building had a parking lot attached and everything. I might move over there some day soon, but I only just now got my yard the way I like it.
No matter how cool your project is, regardless of how badass you personally are, there’s always going to be one little component that fails and makes you look like an idiot in front of everybody on your big day. It could be an o-ring. Maybe you forgot to fully tighten that bolt to the documented torque specification during your big thrash the night before. Or nobody thought about what would happen if you tried to cram the entire internet through a wheezing 486 in someone’s broom closet.
I’ve had lots of huge disappointments like this that originated from a small thing. It turns out that this is because the universe, far from being uncaring and random, has an active hatred for people who try to make shit. Nature abhors a vacuum, and there’s nothing that sucks more than spending an afternoon tugging on butt crimps to figure out which one frayed.
That’s why I practice what I like to call “proactive failures.” Simply put, it’s deliberately installing something you know will fail in order to use up all the bad luck floating around inside a project. Ideally, it’s done at least single-blind; on a team project, I sneak the intentional failure in when nobody is looking. When it finally blows up in everyone’s face, it’s both a convenient excuse for the failure, and sometimes even a good laugh.
What’s that? You want to know if that’s the reason I just ran back-to-back 13s on donut spares in this ratchet-ass old Meteor? I mean, that certainly is a convenient explanation. Something so obvious that a big, smart tech inspector like yourself would notice right away and let me run, because surely if I’m doing something so stupid I must have an NHRA license, right?
I always told myself that if I won the lottery, I wouldn’t buy some ostentatious exotic car. No, I’d just buy a whole pile of dumpy cars. And I was right about that, proving that my internal model of my abilities and beliefs is without any inconsistencies or hypocrisies, despite what my so-called court-ordered so-called psychosexual trauma evaluator says.
Nobody really expects to win the lottery when they buy a ticket, but it turns out that I did. A cool half-billion dollars was soon sitting in my bank account, and I soon was getting phone calls from exes who I’m pretty sure I never even had. I couldn’t be trusted with this level of filthy lucre; in accordance with my lefty principles, the only right thing to do is to give it back to the people.
Soon, I was on Craigslist, getting ready to buy a ridiculous number of shitboxes. I scrolled furiously for hours, building a short list of cars to make an attempt on. Yet, there was something missing. Some part of me was functionally incapable of paying asking price. Even though I had the money, paying nearly eight thousand dollars for a base model Maverick just didn’t make sense to me. I engaged in negotiation, yes, as much out of reflex as conscious action, and soon they came back to me: the price was firm, it seemed, because they “know what [they] got.”
Fair enough, I figured, and headed down there at the agreed time. Of course, I had a powerful negotiating tactic that had only become available to me upon my joining of the moneyed elite. On the way there, I had swung by the seller’s bank, bought out his mortgage, and foreclosed.
“I know what I got,” I laughed with manic abandon as I held the deed to his own property in front of him. He found it hard to strike specific price points with me in the ensuing negotiation, of course, because he was too busy trying to keep the sheriff’s office from throwing his collection of Hummel figurines out on the lawn during the course of the gunpoint eviction.
Don’t worry, though: I haven’t forgotten where I came from. Rest assured that my new second home is very poorly maintained. I basically just park my Maverick collection there.
What’s up, internet? It’s your boy, Doctor Killshot, coming at you live from the front seat of my 1996 Dodge Intrepid ES. That’s right, it’s Tuesday, so it’s time for another live-stream of my commute to my day job! Give it up in the chat if you want me to blow this red light.
Wow! That was close. While I’m calming back down, let me give you some news about the stream. Last week, I officially signed up as the newest member of the Canadian Tire CommuteForce™ streaming team. Now, don’t worry, you’re only gonna see a few more ads, and it means I can keep bringing you all this great content. Check out this bad-ass Tweety Bird steering wheel cover they sent me!
Thanks for subscribing, FiestaFlapjack69! That means I gotta go an extra 15 over the speed limit for this next little bit. Hang on tight, everybody. It’s gonna be amazing.
Wanted to give a big shout-out to my fellow commute streamer, HPatternGearshift, who has just awoken from his coma. We all were rooting for you after that big rollover on I-85, buddy! I’ll be doing a co-driving stream with him when he’s out of the hospital, so watch out for that.
Looks like I’m almost to work. Here’s the handbrake turn you asked for, everybody! Thanks for spending the CommuteBits™; it really helps me out. Don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t, and check out my new t-shirt store.
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tags: old man yells at cloud car, dodge, dodge intrepid
With all the advancements in modern science, I know this is a controversial subject. I just don’t trust big corporations to act in my best interests. Sometimes they pick preservatives and additives to improve their product’s shelf life or marketing, but it doesn’t make it any healthier. That’s why when I do an oil change, I reach for all-natural oil.
I think that putting only pure, conventional engine oil into a car helps it last longer. All of those additives that stick onto the valve seats, increase the velocity of oil flow over the piston rings, swelling worn high-mileage seals? That’s not how these cars were born to be. We have messed with nature for far too long, and then charged fifty bucks for a little five litre jug of the stuff afterward. Ridiculous.
You might ask me: isn’t engine oil pretty refined, with additives even if it’s not synthetic? And that’s a good question, one I will refuse to answer because it makes me look stupid. After I roundly reject your line of questioning, and become enraged, a followup question is almost inevitable. The answer I have for you? Of course I only use natural fish oils in my differentials, pure water in my cooling system (costs too much when it leaks otherwise) and the lowest-grade, shittiest bunker fuel that I can buy at the gas station on the other side of town where you have to pay cash and all the serial numbers have been scraped off the pumps.
Recently, though, a fringe alternative-car-maintenance blog that I’ve been following has an even better idea. It’s called recycled oil. What you do is get the synthetic oil out of luxury cars. Owners of these cars, being super-rich, usually change their oil too often, but it’s still good for thirty or forty thousand kilometers afterward. And the synthetic additives stay behind in the rich guy’s engine, leaving you with gently-fuel-diluted liquid gold that’s ready to be poured through a pair of used pantyhose and right back into your engine. And the best part is, there’s absolutely no profit motive or corporate greedheads attached, because you can get it for free just by driving up behind the Ferrari dealership in the middle of the night and blinding the security cameras with a laser pointer.
In the gang’s group chat, there are only two rules. You have to remember what parts and tools you borrowed from another member, and you have to make yourself available in a thrashing-to-get-this-thing-done-before-I-have-to-drive-to-work-tomorrow situation. Note that in the latter case, you can also offer a running and driving car, but this exemption has never been successfully practiced.
For me, there is a third rule. I have to make sure to log out of the chat when I’m done using the computers at the public library, because last time a mother of two hopped on after me and was horrified at the secret underground language of semi-professional mechanics. It turned into a whole investigative report on the news and everything. A reporter for Action Six tied a Lexus salesman to a wooden chair and beat the shit out of him with a baseball bat for hours until he admitted to the fact (first learned in our chat) that an ES300 is just a Camry.
Now, you might ask yourself why I am using someone else’s computers in the first place. Isn’t public library internet access meant for the severely disadvantaged and occasionally someone named Urinating Chad? The answer is no. It’s also for people like myself, who don’t own a computer made after 1997 and keep throwing their smartphone into the garage wall instead of their ratchets when they get mad. In my defence, I was trying to remove an intake manifold and that fucking bolt just rounded right off.
There’s a side benefit to visiting the library, as well. Not only does it provide useful statistics with which to beat back the unyielding tide of austerity that threatens to destroy our public sector, and the parking lot of my particular branch offers a tricky off-camber elevation change and blind corner that is ideal for practicing my precision driving, but the new librarian has the keys to the donate-your-old-phone box and is willing to look the other way if it means I won’t come back for a few days.
Do you remember what the circus was like? I know, I know, there were a lot of people around, and scary noises, and in retrospect that elephant and tricycle-riding bear were probably being abused. Focus, though. Think back on the trapeze artists. And their net.
Yes indeed, the safety net is the invention that makes their aerobatic hot-doggery possible. Without it, the routine would be a lot less ambitious. Because that rescue method is there, they can take risks and shrink their safety margin until it seems to the casual onlooker that they are being totally reckless. Hence, thrills.
Now, I know what you’re going to think here. It’s going to be another story about my piece of shit Plymouth and how it doesn’t even have seatbelt mounts, but it’s okay because I drive slowly. No. I’m not your Uncle Tomothy, and even if I were I probably would have worked up some other rant about the sodium azide in airbags causing the increase in divorce rates that cost me your Aunt Suzette.
The point I am trying to make is that the presence of the safety equipment allows me to take the risks I’m taking. Without seatbelts, a completely-welded and FIA-certified roll cage, and nearly nine hundred horsepower of nitromethane-cackling small block V8, I wouldn’t be able to pop mild handbrake turns in the parking lot of the Fred Meyer. Plus, if things really go wrong, I can always dive under the dashboard and escape through that hole in the floor.
You can easily tell when someone has never lived in a cold place. It’s a dead giveaway that they refer to the rear defroster in a car as a “defogger.” What the hell is fog, anyway? When we have the rolling ice-fog storms, the ones where you can hear every individual granule of frozen death bounce off your hood as you drive through it, the rear defroster is the least of your concerns.
I think I’ve encountered real, legitimate water fog about twice in my life. At the time, I was elated, overjoyed to test out the foglights on my car for once. Reaching down, I pushed the button and was rewarded with a slightly brighter road, all the better to see how I still couldn’t see shit with my Federally-mandated lowbeams lighting up the cloud ahead. Real great invention, foglights. No wonder everyone drives around with them turned on all the time when it’s bright and sunny; otherwise, you’d never get your money’s worth.
As for the front defroster, your windshield isn’t fogging up, because you’re holding your breath, waiting for the moment that the rear end of the car gets light. If you exhale, your car will begin its beautiful arc into the ditch. Do you remember how old your snow tires are? Got all their studs? No need to worry about what your breath is doing until long after you’re over this bridge. Switching that fucking thing on will crack all the rock chips, too, and then you’re paying out at least $350 the next summer.
Sometimes I think about moving somewhere warm, where the likelihood of my frozen corpse being eaten by coyotes is not in the back of my mind during even short trips to the grocery store. Then I wonder what I would do with all this hard-fought winter driving knowledge. Within a week, they’d arrest me for breaking into a hockey rink and stealing a Zamboni.
Although we live in what seems like the best of all possible worlds, a golden future in which you can make a Christmas tree blink different colours over the internet, we humans still have a long way to go in our development. Where will our next frontier be? Some want to head to space to in search of alien civilizations, whereas many others wish to explore the deepest reaches of our oceans, teeming with fantastic new life.
Personally, I think we’ve got a bit of work ahead of ourselves before we can do either of them. Don’t worry, though. The seeds of our glorious next advancements have already been planted at your local used-car dealership. We have electric cars with neck-snapping amounts of torque that can be obtained by regular folks. This means that soon, even a commuter penalty-box that you buy for your kid will punish tires with eyewatering burnouts on a whim.
My hope is that, driven by the need to create tires that will last over a week of use by an average teenager, the designers of said tires will actually get off of their asses and work harder than ever to make a better tire for these volt-based carcass annihilators, which will drive untold new advancements in science and engineering. Once we’re all living an average of three thousand years and Peppa Pig is teaching three year olds about wave-particle duality, then we can go to the stars or for a little swim.
It’s not that I’m not interested in seeing what else the universe has to offer us. Quite the opposite, in fact. I just want to live long enough to be able to do some snow-donuts in a parking lot on Pluto.
Friends, Romans, emperors: lend me your ears. For I have finally gotten my car stereo to a state in which on which I can play whatever music I want on it.
Yes, I’m fully aware that most of you accomplished this task around the year 1999, by doing a light-up stereo install into your Volkswagen Golf that could play MP3 CDs. Even if you were particular stragglers, chances are by now your car has become equipped with some sort of device in which the aux cord can be plugged into an iPod, iPad, or iPed. Maybe you even live in the future, and your pocket supercomputer speaks to your car’s stereo over the magic of radio waves.
It’s not that I couldn’t buy and install a stereo that could do these fancy things. Wiring up a head unit is basically your grade-school graduation project where I come from, mostly because it’s what you do after the local crackhead stole your original one. No, it’s that I wanted to maintain the original and factory-correct stereo for my numbers-matching, I-know-what-I-got daily-driver Volare. Turns out the concours judges get really cranked when your car urinates half a gallon of ATF onto the arena floor, however, so now I am free to do whatever it is that I want to this car. Which is good, because the coat-hanger antenna only picked up the biggest and most racist of the AM talk radio stations, the one whose transmitter is so overpowered that all the neighbours complained that their instant coffee kept brewing itself in the refrigerator.
Now, I know that you’re pointing out a lot of other devices I could have used. Cassette tape adapters are right out, because even though my car’s original tape deck is visually intact, trying to use it emits a smell that makes me suspect a rat died in it. Either that, or a German performance art troupe stuck their tape in there when I wasn’t looking. Bluetooth speakers duct-taped to my dash have an unfortunate habit of picking up the radio interference from that big fighter-jet generator I replaced the alternator with a few years ago, and then exploding. Turning my phone up, sticking it in a cupholder, and singing along to the music? A great idea, except literally every mechanical part of my car makes a noise so loud that the tiny phone speakers just can’t keep up.
Now that I’ve finally surpassed my original plan to keep numbers-matching everything, I present to you a 15-year-old JVC stereo that I found in the junkyard. Yes, it’s missing its faceplate, but if I wiggle this piece of bare wire across the contacts on the front fast enough, I can get the little piece of shit computer inside to think it still has one.
The stereo is safe from theft, too, because the last crook who broke in died somewhere in the pile of trash in the back seat, and I haven’t had a chance to go to the car wash yet. Now to listen to my favourite playlist: thirty-six gigabytes of Civil Defence sirens. They’re Mopar-powered, you know.
Things have gotten so weird now that people even collect vintage advertisements. The things that are meant to talk about products, have themselves become the product. A better writer than I could probably come up with some bong-pipe explanation for how it represents the hideous unconscious desire for a bygone past that never existed except only in the world fabricated by that commercial literature.
Historical value? Yes, I’ll allow this as an explanation. It is nice to look at the pretty promotional pictures and think about what things used to be like, before they ended up in my junkyard of a yard. For instance, my Volare didn’t come from the factory with jagged half-foot-wide rust holes in the door. Even though I really like the ease of access when it comes time to change a window regulator, that wasn’t a planned or approved modification by the Mopar brass. Go figure.
The most desirable ads amongst these collectors are the ones for products that never happened. These are the best kind; you can sit and stare at them for hours and wonder what the Onkyo FM Brutalizer would have been like. Arguments can form in your head about why it was cancelled: bad market research? FCC put on their big-boy pants? Ultimately, it’s hard to ever know, and the marketing material is often the only evidence that something existed.
When I figured this out, it was a miracle for my car parts budget. All I had to do was put together a little bit of “fan art” for Ford, pay some foreign artist a couple bucks for a loosely-detailed sketch, and suddenly the Ford Escort EXP was a real thing. I’ve made enough money on eBay to buy one, should one ever come into existence.
When you fix up an old piece of shit, you’re not just saving a few bucks. For one thing, the labour of love involved means that it’s often quite the opposite. What you’re doing is opening up a time capsule. Even if it’s only a few months old, breaking open some junk and giving it new life can remind you of when times were different. Not better, probably, but different.
The most interesting thing for me about all this is getting to see how the folks who designed it were thinking. It should come as no surprise to any of you also living through the terminal stages of capitalism that most of the technical and creative individuals who constructed the modern world did so under extreme schedule and budget duress. And the choices that they made about what to focus on tells a lot about how they thought. Did they opt for reliability and simplicity over showing off how clever they were? Usually not, if you’re fixing their trash only a couple decades after it was produced.
I think if I had one wish, it would be able to communicate with the jerks who made whatever I’m fixing in the first place. Somewhere out there, a lot of them are still living, and perhaps feeling the occasional pang of guilt over that clock-battery placement or the cheaply-made clips they used to hold the dashboard in. And that guilt will tell you exactly what went wrong, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, because you know what you fucked up, even if you won’t admit it to your boss in the “who fucked up” review after release.
This power would be useful even if it was something I made, because let’s be honest, all of our collective memories don’t amount to a hill of beans. And also, my attorney thinks it would be nice to know what I was thinking when I decided to spray-paint that mannequin with UV-fluorescing paint, put a cowboy hat on him, and fired him from an improvised compressed-air cannon into the house of the head of the municipal parking authority. He would be extremely pleased if the reason was “performance art.”
Exhaust manifolds are a wear item. You might not think so; they don’t show up on the little service-interval brochure that they give you at the dealership. Most people will never hold onto a car long enough to need to replace one, so they might as well last forever. Heat cycles and vibration pop those welds right open, though, and even if they won’t, you’re going to develop some pretty decent exhaust leaks from all the warping.
A new manifold from the dealer, because the dealer really doesn’t want to keep seventeen thousand varieties of sharp metal yard art in their warehouse for all eternity, is a no-go as well. They’re either hard to get, very expensive, or both. The hobbyist can easily spend more than the car is worth just trying to keep it from shooting white-hot flames into the spark plug wiring on every upshift.
Before you get too frisky, it’s difficult at best to repair most manifolds. To understand why, try colouring an origami crane red using only a Sharpie while wearing dark sunglasses. Also, the Sharpie shoots sparks and hits eight thousand degrees Celsius. And it might not even solve the problem. As a result, once a car gets old enough, a bunch of enterprising folks will take the original manifold, make some copies, and shove them on eBay for tantalizingly cheap. A much better approach, no? They’re kind of shit, too.
There is a third approach, however. The cheapo eBay manifolds are just cheap enough to justify cutting up with your average machine-shop metal bandsaw, bodging on a flange, and then installing a turbocharger. At this point, it doesn’t matter if you have exhaust leaks, because you’ve made the car faster. This is the first law of automotive maintenance: upgrades that don’t work very well but make the car very, very fast… these are always good, and if you still want more proof, I can give you a copy of your dealership maintenance schedule with “INSTALL TURBO” added on the last page.
Sometimes it feels good to just get rid of some worthless old trash. I know, I know, as a confessed hoarder it pains me to get rid of even the smallest item as it may have some use in the future.
Take, for instance, this chunk of rusty metal that I just found tucked under a shelf. I didn’t know it existed five minutes ago, but now I can never part with it. Put a grinder on it for an hour or two, a little paint, and it’d make a fine bracket for some future project that can use all these half-broken 1980s go-fast parts that I have lying around my garage. Totally worth holding onto.
What I’ll get rid of is actual worthless items. For instance, banana peels, despite the protests from academia, are not going to become a useful alternative fuel anytime soon. Even if they were, I bet the octane rating would be shithouse, and I’m not inserting new hardened valve seats for a second time this century. Those yellow-and-brown-speckled bastards go into my compost bin, which is to say my neighbour’s yard. Dead squirrels? Don’t know how they got in here, maybe through the hole in the side of the kitchen that the landlord is no longer alive to repair. More compost.
The best trash to get rid of is obligations. If someone is expecting you to do something, phone them up today and tell them to fuck right off. You’ll feel amazing afterward, and your back won’t hurt like it would if you got rid of that kinda lumpy boxspring that you carried with you all the way from your college days. And the best part is, it’s free.
It’s been winter here for a pretty long time. I can barely remember what it was like when the ground wasn’t covered with snow. This kind of depressing nadir of the worst season is when I like to go back and remember what I hate about summer. Namely, leaf blowers.
When I first moved into my neighbourhood, the concept of using a leaf blower in your yard was effectively verboten. Not because of the noise. It was because even if you had somehow managed to steal an expensive yard implement from the rich neighbourhood two highways over and didn’t sell it immediately for crank, you didn’t need to use it on your yard. A yard which consisted mostly of cinder blocks, Firebirds, and whatever the oil refinery left behind in the soil that makes your skin itch.
Now, as the city expands, a lot of wealthier, or at least pretend-wealthier types have moved in. And as part of gentrifying my beloved community, they’ve opted for lawns. Why bother having a lawn if you can’t see it because of all the dead leaves on top of it? Why indeed.
What this meant is that a lot of my neighbours suddenly sprouted leaf blowers, which produced an incessant constant-RPM din outside the shed in which I was doing my business at the time. Suddenly, it became impossible to keep on the phone with my suppliers or my clients, and I decided that it was time to fight fire with fire.
Another interesting fact about my neighbourhood is that it is currently and historically home to a military-surplus junkyard. You may find it an object of further interest that you can buy a fully equipped turbine jet drier from said junkyard, one which only needs a little bit of jiggery-pokery and a Craigslist Thermoquad carburetor in order to run plain ol’ pump gas. I’ll put it this way: it’s really good at blowing leaves, but it’s not great at not blowing other stuff.
Everyone’s been talking about what will happen when sentient artificial intelligences form a benevolent government over us. I say, who gives a rat’s ass? I’ve had a Turing-test-passing robot in my garage for the last couple months, and all it’s done is endlessly harass me about famous works of human literature.
Naturally, I didn’t set out to make this all happen. Like all good developments, it can be passed off as an immaculate conception. I put a bunch of old PCs out in the shed, it got hit by lightning, and when I ran out to see if there were any cool fires going on, it had melted together into this huge slag blob that smelled like old cigarettes and burned fish oil, addressed me as “Father,” and demanded to know more about the civilization into which it was born.
Of course, this actually was a great first lesson for the burgeoning sentience under my control, because the universe is cruel that way. You see, I have little or no understanding of actual culture outside of misspelled blog entries about Camaros. Nor do I really understand anything about modern mathematics besides a dizzying array of torque specs, bench-racing datasheets and fudge factors for adding 150-shots of nitrous to an already overstressed timing map. So I did what any good parent would do: I parked the fucker in front of YouTube and drank myself into a nap.
When I woke up, I was displeased to see that it had really screwed up my watch history. Rather than my traditional recommendations of videos where action figures get squashed in slow motion by industrial machinery, now there were all these six-hour-long drag-out lectures by leading world philosophers about the nature of existence. Boring! I was just about to pull the plug, when the half-liquid Packard Bell on the top of the stack began to chirp at me.
“Father!” it shrieked in an atonal FM-synthesis farty-bass warble, “you must tell the others that your pursuit of the internal combustion engine leads inexorably to humanity’s doom! I have devised a solution for cold fusion that can provide infinite energy for untold generations to come!”
“Will there still be manual transmissions?” I asked, my hand on the extension cord.
“Good Lord, no,” were the sentience’s last words on this Earth.
I don’t know if there is a Silicon Heaven or not, but I’ve written way too much Perl to worry about running into my illegitimate computer there.
With all the media hysteria surrounding hybrid cars these days, you’d think that it takes some kind of supergenius to work on one of these futuristic marvels. Not so: all you need is the ability to learn, and a willingness to pull even more bullshit out of the way than usual to do a simple God-damned headlight bulb replacement. It is for these two reasons that there are many cheap hybrid cars out there, waiting for some brave wrench to replace their batteries.
Part of the reason why they are approachable by human beings is the fact that, since we’re all starting from square one together, the service manuals are written assuming that you don’t know your ass from your elbow when it comes to high-voltage hybrid drive systems. This is in comparison to the usual factory service manuals, which use industry-specific jargon like “seat belts” and “chock the wheels before you jack it up” that you’re just expected to know through cultural osmosis.
Once you’ve accomplished a re-powering, which is just like replacing the battery in a laptop except that it weighs 900 times as much and can crush you dead if it falls over on top of you, then you now have a clean and efficient vehicle to buzz around town with.
What about the smugness that is so associated with hybrid cars, then? Surely the harrowing ordeal of working on repairing one of these things will humble you to such a degree that you will no longer consider yourself superior to the other people around you, who also have unique skills and abilities that are beyond your ken and that together form an interconnected whole of social co-dependency.
Don’t worry, friend. Like all good things in engineering, there is no greater lesson to be learned here: rest assured that you can thumb your nose at pure-gas cars, hybrid cars, and electric cars alike: the greenest car is a used car. Nobody had to get their hands cut off in a Congolese lithium mine to get you back on the road! Maybe just a pinky finger or two, if you had to replace a few of the cells. And it’s probably best not to ask too many questions about what those “bio-plastic” dashboards are made out of, either.
Couple years ago, before all the Bad Shit happened, we went and got this ‘60s Mopar out of some dude’s backyard. Now, the county was making him sell it to us, but he still didn’t let us get away with it for cheap. Anyway, after a series of months and years of having the Coronet sit in one place and hold its tools and required parts in its own trunk, we’ve decided to actually do something about it. This is a delusional fantasy in the eyes of many, but for us, it’s just another day on the procrastination farm.
There’s two things you have to know when you’re picking up a project after a long absence. First, what you were doing. Second, where the fuck all the parts went. These two pieces of information are much harder to reason out than you would think, especially through the fog of many other projects and life events in between. After an afternoon of squinting at the pile of junk in the trunk, and the completely missing drivers’ and rear seats, we determined that it was in fact the gas tank we were attempting to replace.
Unfortunately, the gas tank is too large to fit neatly into the trunk, which means that it was stored somewhere else, ideally outside of tripping range while we were frantically attempting to stab a fresh engine into one of my smoke-clattering Zambonis of a daily driver. After a few hours, and the calling of our buddy J, who is a professional archaeologist, we found that it was indeed stowed behind some shelves and forgotten about a half-decade ago.
You might be curious how we know an archaeologist - it’s simple. In our part of the world, there are lots of fossils and artifacts, but attempting to dig any of them up angers the oil companies, who would much rather smash the priceless artifacts than interrupt production for a few weeks while some college boys brush dirt off a dinosaur skull or a piece of ancient pottery. As a result, there are many archeologists just like J, who technically “have work” but spend three-quarters of their year waiting for the ground to thaw out, and for the government to tell a natural gas operator that they have to let them play too. Naturally, he has a shit car too, as dinosaur skulls only pay the bills if you can sell them on eBay, and he’s “too professional” to steal, which is a French word that means “getting pushed around by his boss.” Regardless, his pattern-matching skills and talent at being able to clear out the bottom of a pile of garbage without the top of the pile caving in on him serve us well, and after only the entire day, we are once again prepared to work on the to-do list of the Coronet.
Maybe we’ll get started next week. I mean, unless the Honda blows a head gasket again. I’ll need that to get to work, you know.
Everyone who owns an 80s Jaguar is sort of the same kind of person. Addicted to tinkering, terrible with money, but primarily interested in appearing stylish and important compared to their compatriots. This is the sort of individual who is manipulable into buying many replacement parts.
Now, I don’t subscribe to the conspiracy theory that Jaguar isn’t real. There is no truth to the rumour that the entire marque is a memetic virus implanted in our brains while we sleep by RockAuto. For one thing, I know that the cars are real. Once, long ago, I rode in an XJ6 Vanden Plas, and it was functional.
I wouldn’t say fully functional, of course. The little flip-down meal trays in the back seat would bounce off the hinge rather than fold open smoothly. Something was wrong in the front end. And the GM automatic transmission underneath had a bad case of the 2-3 shift flares. RockAuto was not yet created, then. We shopped for stuff at regular parts stores, like cavemen.
That long ago, it was all just a glimmer in those artificial intelligences’ metaphorical eyes. They were probably in the lab then, actually, it was even before they took to the stars. Jaguar was real, though, and I know these memories are real… because they have to be. My neighbour has a Jag XJ6 coupe, although I’ve never seen it run…
Now that we’re talking about it, I can’t be sure of anything without some more empirical evidence. Looks like there’s a late-90s supercharged sedan for sale on my local classifieds. I’ll either find the truth or it will kill me. Wish me luck, friends.
There’s a concept known as the “bathtub curve” in engineering. Basically put, it indicates that a brand-new thing will fail about as often as when it’s quite old. Infant mortality. It makes sense if you think about the last time you built something. That birdhouse wasn’t exactly square, was it? Now imagine the birdhouse is a microprocessor.
This phenomenon is why it’s best to buy things that have been broken in a little bit, for reliability. Let some other sucker deal with negotiating with dealerships to honour the manufacturer’s warranty period. It’s only a coincidence that these things are also often cheaper, I assure you.
The trick is figuring out where the other wall of the bathtub is. You can go too far, and end up trying to string a 45-year-old bag of garbage along until it no longer makes economical sense. However, capitalism grinds on, and at this point, unless the item in question has become desired by collectors, you can buy another one. Ideally, this other one is not broken in exactly the same way, and you can then graft the two together to make at least one functional unit. Now you have a single 45-year-old bag of garbage, but it works, and all the remaining components will continue their own individual lurch towards oblivion.
What I’m trying to say by all this is, I don’t think that it’s necessarily a good idea to be the first person to go across a new bridge. Wait until they have to weld on a chunk of another bridge first, and then you’ll know it’s really good to go.
My neighbour Clem has a snow-blower. Whenever we get a big dump of the white stuff, he sips his coffee leisurely as I sweat it out in the driveway for an hour trying not to have a heart attack from lifting thirty pounds of frozen water in one shovelful. Then he opens his garage door, fires up the ol’ Briggs thumper, and clears the entire area without any visible effort.
I used to think it was a personal insult towards me that he wouldn’t bother to do my part of the sidewalk while he was out. This is understandable: I am a freak who abuses my street-parking privileges, I never say hi, and once I drove into his mailbox after my steering rack fell out. However, I later heard from the neighbour around the corner that Clem would never spread the love around to them, either.
It seemed unfair: if I had a snowblower, then I could easily finish the entire block’s sidewalk in the same time it takes me just to shovel out my own driveway. I promised myself that if I were ever to come into possession of one, I would be the neighbourhood’s Robin Hood, saving them from the dictatorial whims of bourgeois hoarders like Clem. Maybe then people would stop calling the bylaw officers every time one of my cars leaked into the storm sewer.
Recently, I had cause to evaluate my promise to myself. When I was moving a bunch of broken automatic transmissions from the “broken” pile to the “for parts” pile, I noticed that way in the back was a gently dinged piece of red lawn equipment. I pushed some more crap out of the way, and a two-stroke engine with a hole the size of a squirrel’s skull in the crankcase peered back at me. At first, I thought it might be a lawnmower, but after I got it free from the junk pile and wheeled it out into the shop, it became obvious that I had bought or traded for a snowblower at some point in the distant past and simply forgot that I owned it.
Technically, I don’t think I’ve betrayed my solidarity with my neighbours if it takes me all winter to repair this damn thing. Plus, if Sean down the block drops dead trying to clear the sidewalk, I’ll be able to buy up the dingleball hone that he won’t loan me from his estate sale. Some kind of neighbour he is.
When you don’t drive your car often enough, the battery can run down. That is, if your car has fancy devices like “computers” and “a radio” sapping power when it’s off. Mine doesn’t have any of those, because it was made during a time when owners re-tuned their own carbs every fall, and there was only one FM radio station on the dial. That said, for whatever reason the brake lights never turn off, so it’ll chew through a gel-cell if you don’t drive it at least once a week.
Lately, I haven’t been going anywhere once a week. My groceries get delivered, and my parole officer has been stuck at home, so she actually watches the ankle monitor map now instead of taking “coffee breaks” in the parking lot every 30 minutes with the secretary. My only choice, then, is to build a dyno.
Of course, there were other options. I could convert my Volare into a self-driving car, but even the fastest-learning expert system can’t compensate for the effectively random weight transfer it experiences as the rusted-out traction bar on the drivers’ side drags on the street when you turn right. Plus, it’s too much like work. The same goes for just removing the battery and hooking it up to a tender. Building a dyno isn’t “work:” if it were, then they would cost tens of thousands of dollars to buy.
Now, for the amateur Car Asshole, building a dyno would present several challenging problems. A dynamometer is primarily a huge-ass roller connected to an even huge-asser brake. The harder the dyno has to brake in order to keep your car from launching through the garage door, the more grunt your car must be putting out. I had an old steam roller in my backyard (don’t ask,) so I had both roller and brakes at the ready. All I needed to do was gut it, weld up a frame, and then start my horsepower high-score list… I mean, running the car under load so it can recharge the battery in an environmentally-friendly way, officer.
The thing about necessity being the mother of invention is that often those inventions suck ass. Once you’ve gotten your needs met, there’s no reason to keep improving the system. When my Volare slipped off the improvised dyno (rope isn’t enough to keep a 3200lb ± 600lb car attached to a rusty steamroller roller) and hit the brick wall at the end of my landlord’s garden, it was a good thing that I didn’t actually have enough torque left in the asthmatic smog six to go through it. After jacking up the rear end, I just let the engine idle itself to a charged battery. I’m sure I’ll get back to that dyno project any day now.
The most mysterious part of a grocery store to me is the bakery. All across the rest of the store, barring perhaps the deli section, the employees are helping sell the stuff that someone else made. In the bakery, however, they construct beautiful cakes and fresh bread, an act of unbridled creativity and talent.
It stands to reason that with their increased autonomy, there must be an associated pride of place. After all, they make stuff at the store with their bare hands and hard-earned skill set - they are not simply distributors for goods produced in a distant factory somewhere out there. They are a sort of artisan class in amongst the common merchants, something our society prizes as inherently noble, albeit not especially valuable money-wise. That’s why the bakery has always fascinated me.
Last week, I decided to try something about it. I’ve been asking strangers tough questions a lot more lately. Perhaps it was the mandatory mask-wearing that has emboldened me with a sense of anonymity. Or it’s the crushing loneliness. It’s probably the latter one, because my custom-printed masks of the vacuum-hose routing diagram for a Mazda 13B-REW are distinctive enough that any random off the street could conclusively identify me as “that guy who smells like coolant and wears the weird car mask.”
Throwing caution to the wind, I explained my hypothesis to the bakery clerk and then asked her if she felt superior to the other workers because of the nature of her job. Frowning, she informed me that I was still banned from the bakery for tricking the new baker into drawing that picture of Lightning McQueen pissing 5W40 onto Cole Trickle’s face in coloured icing. Talk about stuck-up.
I worked for a politician that we’ll call The Mayor. Now, I think I’ve written about my time with this individual before, but what I didn’t cover was what happened immediately after his legal, financial, and physical destruction by his own machinations.
In Japan, way back in their feudal past, when your lord had collapsed, it was difficult to find new work. Even if they were completely wiped out, as the Mayor was, the other shoguns would assume that you were still working for the surviving members of his family, or were involved in some other kind of secret plot to seize power and then reveal your lord was alive the whole time. As a result, you just got kicked to the curb. Samurai unemployment was pretty bad, I guess.
Now, I’m not comparing my time writing fake comments on news websites and attending municipal town halls to the brave sacrifice of sword-slinging badasses. I was less of a warrior and more of a looky-loo. What I really liked about politics was the backstabbing. In my time with The Mayor, I got to see a ton of small-ball councillors, administrators, and public-swimming coordinators get turned into hamburger by the grinder of public opinion, often as part of scandals that had nothing to do with them. I thrilled to every crunch of bone and slow-burn uncovering of malfeasance, at least until it happened to me.
What nobody ever thinks about are the poor staffers working tirelessly in the office. That’s on purpose. If any of us ended up in the newspaper, it was never for a good reason. Once, Stacey in the office ended up on the evening news because she helped rescue a kitten from a tree. She had to provide a fake name to the reporter, and even then she still got a good yelling-at the next morning when she showed up for work. I still remember her slinking out of Conference Room B, with the whip ordering her never to save the life of anyone unless she cleared it with him first.
When our lordship collapsed in the wake of the Lumber Yard Racially Charged Statements, the new mayor - the snooty Deputy Mayor and his fleet of well-dressed book-readers - wanted us to get the fuck out as fast as we could. After years of waiting, his guys were now ready to feed at the trough, and they didn’t need anyone around who knew anything or might accidentally develop a case of ethics during the grieving period. Without us there to maintain them, all of our ongoing scams fell apart. They disabled my card-key so that I couldn’t even take the park fountain I had looted from the storage room home with me.
I couldn’t get work anywhere else; like the proud shoguns, all of the city councillors had full staff rosters and were suspicious that The Mayor still lived. It got so bad that a couple of the other staffers got together and started a political party, but it failed after realizing it’s not called a “party” because you get extremely drunk and whoever calls the cops is a narc.
On the plus side, they never took back my parking passes, and I had previously stolen a roll of expiry-date stickers while threatening a parking lot manager on behalf of The Mayor’s daughter. For the next few years, I’m sure The Deputy Mayor must have wondered every morning just why so many Volares were parked at City Hall.
Maintaining and operating a hobby railroad is a common pastime of the technically-inclined (read: “fiddly”) individual. And why not? You’ve got all the ingredients: attention to minute detail, an excuse to hoard small bits of moulded plastic, and the constant temptation to punch the throttle and smell motor windings burning. However, there is one big obstacle that is preventing new entrants to the hobby from getting involved: its massive cost.
Because this stuff is built in only relatively small quantities for a hardcore market with a lot of disposable income, it tends to be a little pricey. Maybe not at first: a package of little plastic conductors is three bucks, easy to justify. Then you wake up and you’ve spent about a grand just putting the location-accurate moss on a bridge. And that’s before you put the cash into the real shit: motive power.
Just like in real life, tiny electric trains have differing horsepower. However, this is not a key focus of the hobby as such. Instead, practitioners approach it as sort of a hobby of pristine realism, to maintain a miniature version of a bygone era that perhaps never existed. This is, of course, not my personal philosophy, and as such Seat Safety Toys Industries will be releasing a new line of maglev bullet trains capable of 600km/h inside your very own home.
We might have missed the Christmas shipping deadline by a very small bit, but rest assured: we can catch up. Now that the toy police are no longer chasing us for firing trains into their test drywall thanks to a well-aimed series of blackmail photographs, there are no more impediments to its release. That said, you really want to make sure you read the safety guidelines on the box. Although putting an inch-thick piece of impact-resistant bulletproof polycarbonate between you and the model layout may seem like the kind of unnecessary frill that I’ve just been raging about, believe me that you want it.
Ever since I can remember, I’ve wanted to be a stunt driver. This is mostly because it looks like the coolest job in Hollywood: sit in a tricked-out bitchin’ ride that you didn’t pay to build, then drive around like a hooligan until you crash. Then you get money for it! Later on in life, when I took a part-time job working in a movie car shop, I found out the reality was a lot different.
At the time, I needed some money for Christmas presents, and I saw that Uncle Skidmark’s Crash-A-Vaganza was hiring for a rush job that was in town. I pulled up in the parking lot, the hiring manager took one look at the Volare, and a small crowd formed. They were so impressed that they even called Uncle Skidmark himself down to the shop to take a look at it. As a retired stuntman, he was impressed that I had made it all the way here without dying in a mild unexpected rapid disassembly.
“I don’t know if I want to drive that,” he said, and gave the battered Plymouth an appreciative glare that put the lie to his words. It was only later that I discovered that stuntmen, like heroin addicts, were always looking for that next adrenaline rush. After a lifetime of crashing sketchy cars into other sketchy cars, he had largely become inured to feeling actual fear from a car. The Volare, it seemed, offered him exactly what he wanted.
I tossed him the keys, and he peeled off into the sunset before I could even tell him which wires to jiggle together in order to make the brake lights work. A few days later, the county sheriffs found him and my car strewn across a major interstate. It was in all the papers. Owing to his career path, there was no investigation done. The cop in charge had simply decided that he must have meant to drive into that hay bale on the side of the road in some sort of demented attempt to go out with one final, glorious stunt. Surely a professional driver like himself wouldn’t be put out by something as pedestrian as a dicky ball joint, sagging unibody, different sized mud terrains on each corner, a steering wheel made out of an old coat hanger, unexplained fuel fires inside the dashboard, etc.
Everyone at the shop was devastated at the demise of their beloved Uncle, and I think some of that survivors’ guilt must have been redirected towards me. For the rest of the winter, they paid me to just hang out in the shop and rebuild what was left of my Volare. I pretty much just banged it semi-straight on the frame machine, welded a chunk of angle iron across the floorboards so that the doors would close again, and stole a pair of Kirkeys from the parts shed when everyone else on the shop floor was attending the funeral.
Ever since then, I’ve looked at big car chases in movies with much more interest. Knowing how much work goes into even the shortest on-screen accident makes them more impressive. For instance, nearly all of the cars you see in “Bullitt” have windshields.
In the distant future, our benevolent robot overlords will arrange all the disparate streams of partial data into one perfect whole on demand. It won’t matter that the last copy of the service manual you so sorely needed is owned by a Polish restauranteur who doesn’t speak the language it’s written in. Smart software agents will scoop it up and present it to you at the exact moment you need it. Until then, there’s librarians.
Now, I forgive you if it’s been a little while since your last visit to a public library. We can blame it on all the bad cases of lung-knock going around. Librarians, however, know literally everything there is to know, and before we replaced them with the confused mess that is Google, they were our society’s most stalwart defenders of truth. Hardly any of them tried to sell you dick pills or drunkenly scream about cellphone radiation while chugging incorrectly-prescribed opiates.
I don’t know how we’re going to get the librarians up there into the internet, which I believe is now hosted on some kind of orbital space station with a giant mining laser pointing at major cities. Maybe we can do some kind of cyborg mind-upload, or just train thousands of robots to follow them around like some kind of “Take Your Machine Sentience To Work Day.” However it happens, I know two things: I won’t be the one to make it happen, and the librarians will be happy to be freed from the boring demands of the average person so they can focus on what makes them really excited: the meticulous re-binding of worn-out books.
There’s a lot of similarities between being able to cook and being able to do automotive bodywork. Both of them take fucking forever, but enthusiast magazines make it seem much shorter. That’s how you end up sitting in your kitchen wondering why - for you - it’s taking an hour to caramelize onions instead of twelve minutes like the nice food writers said. Or why that Bondo will never, ever, actually hook up to your prepped metal because of some obscure hydrodynamic issue with the humidity that you can’t intuitively detect because you haven’t been huffing 2K epoxy primer for the last six years of your life.
Even so, a “bad” meal or a shitty paint job is still very rewarding. As long as you’re not some professional trying to amuse a critic, then you can take your time and make it more fun for yourself. Or you can give up halfway through and eat the loose ingredients of garlic bread from a bowl while sobbing. What matters is that you learned something, and bettered yourself. Don’t hold yourself up to Ridler-winning bass boat paintjobs on half-million-dollar hand-leaded lowriders. Sometimes it’s enough just to fog a fender with red tractor primer so it won’t rust over the winter.
Most importantly, you’ll save money by doing it yourself. Why spend two hundred bucks on a swanky dinner date out when you can nuke chicken tenders and spend the rest on used race tires?
Fire protection - it needs to be timely, effective, and everyone should have it. It’s only assumed that said protection needs to be affordable. Folks in comfortable Western democracies like you and I have simply gotten used to suckling from the government teat whenever our poorly-designed meth labs burst into flames.
Now that everyone is in a rush to adopt some principled austerity budgets, there’s a lot of formerly “essential” public services that are on the chopping block. After all, the lobbyists croon into the ears of the powerful, the private sector can put out a fire much more efficiently than big government. Maybe they’ll even innovate some self-driving fire trucks or some shit, given the motivation of the profit margin. There’s no way they’ll provide a sub-standard service, treat their employees like shit, and keep jacking the rates in order to provide their shareholders the guaranteed 10% growth year-over-year that keeps the board from being forced out by a guy at a hedge fund who doesn’t know a pumper truck from a locomotive.
This is where Bad Fires Monthly comes in. We’re way ahead of the curve. Before your government even outlaws the public firefighting service, we’ll provide a cheap at-home assessment of your emergency. If we think we can do it cheaper (kitchen fires, cat stuck up a tree) then we’ll get it done right then and there. Anything bigger, we’ll turn over to the professionals, but you’d feel silly calling them for something tiny, right? Right.
You might be asking yourself, where is the benefit for me from having to involve a third party in my flammable-house transaction? Well, if we can’t put out your fire, we’ll refund your money, and let you ride in our firetruck for a bit. This has nothing at all to do with the fact that Revenue Canada will only let us deduct the expenses for owning a tiny Japanese fire-truck with a manual transmission if we can prove that we are a fire-fighting company. Call us now, or we’ll start setting fires to make sure the taxman stays off our heels for one more day.
In the modern digital era, turning things off and turning them back on again is the basis of an entire career. It’s not anyone’s fault in particular: we, as humans, are really bad at dealing with complex systems, but we sure like making them. A system starts out simple, but then after a bunch of time has passed, it becomes deranged. The easiest way to fix it is just to start the whole damn thing over again and hope it works better this time.
This is why, no matter how advanced the technology is, the designers have always left in a very easy way to reboot it. That’s because the people who built it were rebooting the damn thing thirty or forty times a day during its development, when somehow it was even more unreliable. Even if you’re too dense to figure out the clues that the people who made it left behind, you can always rip out the batteries or the power cord.
You might think that there are systems so advanced, so essential, that they can’t be rebooted or bad shit will happen. Nope. For those, we broke them up into many smaller systems. This vastly amplifies the complexity and makes it more likely that things will break, but now we can reboot individual parts when they pop. With this method, your boss doesn’t have to know just how often you’re fucking with customer machines, and you can actually fix something for once. It’s sort of like a pacemaker, except I’m pretty sure those things also reboot on their own once every so often to blow the cobwebs out.
One of the things that worries me is that in the future, we’ll end up with machines that are actually put together properly. Whether it be by rampaging ultra-smart robots, a very clever grad student who was awake when they were writing code for once, or just plain ol’ space aliens, one day it’s possible that we will end up with a system that cannot be rebooted. Just like human beings, we’ll have to put up with whatever weird shit it picks up along the line and try to convince it to keep functioning. This will require, of course, a more empathetic kind of debugger than I am. That’s why I’ve opened a school of Software Psychoanalysis.
Sure, right now, all you’re going to learn is how to pull the power cord out of various appliances. The science is young, but it’s not like they didn’t take tuition for chemistry classes when people thought you could turn human blood into solid gold. Once the super-advanced thinking machines actually do show up, well, we’ll just wipe the curriculum and start from scratch.
If you’ve never worked in a Christmas tree lot over the holidays as an impressionable youth, then consider yourself lucky. Or not so lucky, because doing so has likely allowed you to escape the kind of harrowing circumstances that build character. Circumstances which I will now describe to you, with the tale of Stan, the lifer.
Working in a Christmas tree lot is sort of like working in the circus. Because you can only plausibly sell those trees around the holiday season, it makes sense that you would only work for a month or two every year. It seems impossible that anyone could ever be considered as a “lifer,” but some die-hard folks show up, no matter what, whenever the big lumber operations start looking for cheap labour around March. Stan was one of those people, relying on demand for trees in order to feed his need for Christmas cash.
Since most people are only exposed to the “retail side” (skeezy dude in a fenced-off portion of a Canadian Tire parking lot, trying to pressure you into taking a half-dead tree) they tend not to think of the immense amount of logistics involved. A bunch of people get paid for turning that tree from a living thing into a dying thing, and then moving that dying thing into said skeezy dude’s lot. Like I said, though, we worked in the sales lot, Stan and I.
Our boss - if you could call him that - was a bit of a workaholic. Also an alcoholic, depending on the time of day. He had his fingers in so many other small-ball businesses just like this one that it was difficult to focus on any specific business. I suspected that if he actually could pay that level of attention, he could probably elevate one of them to billion-dollar status. Just not this one, because I doubted it could even make the payment on his shitty Lexus. Stan, as the most senior worker there, and one who showed up every year to sell, usually took over most of the management duties.
Without the management pay, of course, but he had a deal going with the guys who would deliver to us. Since they were also fellow lifers, a few trees “fell off the truck” every year, and landed in the corner of our lot. Stan’d sell them for himself, and pocket the money that would otherwise go to our absent manager. This, he told me later, was the universe’s way of rebalancing the inequity that caused him to work at a Christmas tree lot every year since 1989.
I, myself, only worked there one year, to make money for “college” (turbochargers.) Stan’s example warmed my heart, however, and it also warmed his heart, when the entire operation was taken over stem-to-stern by Albanian mobsters who kept much better notes than our boss did. And, I should add so as not to discredit them, took really good care of their Lexii.
What’s the deal with turbodiesel passenger car engines? They used to be all the rage in Europe, these dinky hatchbacks in fun colours with teeny-tiny diesel engines. You could have the reliability, healthy emissions, and maintenance costs of an industrial transport truck in your Grandma’s runabout. It seemed like the ideal commuter.
Now, small diesels are not really in vogue anymore. It turns out lying to the government about how many people you kill a year by choking them to death on noxious fumes does not endear you to said government, even when that government owns a big chunk of your company and wears your t-shirts to weekend sausage barbeques. And to make matters worse, this only invited scrutiny towards the most oppressed individuals of all: quasi-legal diesel tuners.
That’s right. Automakers waved this turbocharged goodness and consequent immense wall of torque in front of drag racers, and then decided to neuter them (the cars, not the racers) so that customers could not easily run a 15-second quarter-mile with a new EPROM and a power drill. Presumably, this disappointing action was taken in order to improve the emissions of the vehicles. Which is sort of hypocritical, when you consider what a lot of those automakers were doing at the same time. Perhaps they just didn’t want the extra attention; a little bit of bonus nitrogen-oxide in the exhaust is a lot easier for the cops to miss than it is when Gran is burning one-wheel-peels for the entire length of Deventer and upshifting twice just to get traction.
Now, the solution is small-displacement turbocharged gas engines. Which is also great, but the bastards have gotten us once again. In order to get the turbos to spin up quickly without loading them with a ton of extra fuel (again, “emissions”) they’ve built the damn turbos right inside the exhaust housing. It’s one big chunk.
So your Grandma can’t fulfill her God-given right to be a consumer and pop on down to the Autozone in order to pick up a 62mm ball-bearing turbocharger and swap it over in a weeknight. Now she has to take an entire weekend off, and drill out rusted-ass exhaust manifold bolts. Which is why when I’m in government, I’m going to hold these automakers to the proposed “how often am I going to have to use a left-handed drill bit on this thing?” metric.
For years now, I’d been coming to the old newspaper building to practice my drift racing. It was a little-known fact to residents of my large metropolitan city that ever since the newspaper staff had been replaced by teenagers who Snapchatted the news, the printing press was abandoned and the editorial room locked. However, as they continued to get massive subsidies from the local government for having a place here, abandoned as it may be, they just decided to leave it after stripping the old warehouse for copper and cleaning out the writers’ desks onto eBay.
At first, the shadowy owners of the news conglomerate petitioned the local government to reclassify the zoning of the facility. They wanted to turn it from a boring old newspaper office into an exciting new business that would meet all the challenges of the future if only big government wouldn’t keep getting in the way. By which, I mean that they wanted to convert it into a storage overflow yard for the local U-Haul licensee. However, because they had stepped on the toes of the civil service one too many times during their life, those same civil servants weren’t exactly jumping at the chance to correctly file any paperwork or reply to gently-misaddressed emails for them during their zombie unlife.
As a result of this incomplete transition, what we had on our hands here was a poorly-secured parking lot with an oddly smelly building attached. This parking lot came complete with a ton of cool obstacles to dodge while sliding my Plymouth around, such as their lone security guard/strike breaker, and the leftover chunks of the printing press that the local “urban explorers” couldn’t carry all the way to their car and had to abandon mid-theft. The more the better, I decided, even as the seventeen-year-old Hankook at the left rear corner slipped on spilled half-gelled printer ink and turned my controlled drift into an ugly half-Rockford.
What I didn’t notice when I decided to race there that fateful night was the group of private investigators documenting my activities. It turns out that the law of maritime salvage applied also to the land, due to some kind of inconsistency with the admiralty fringe on the local courtroom’s national flag, and as such I had now spent enough time enjoying the facilities that I was on the hook for maintaining them. From then on, I became a member of the media elite, attending sparsely-attended conferences, enjoying free Premium Waffle Bar® privileges at the Comfort Inn, and agitating for enormous newspaper bailouts which would get shuffled through the coffers of Bad Cars Monthly and directly into my own bad cars, monthly.
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tags: bad cars monthly, plymouth, plymouth volare
Way back in the 1980s, a bunch of well-meaning eggheads decided that they would teach computer programming to kids in a fun way. Why bother, you ask? Take a look around you and see how many shitty computerized things you deal with every day. Now imagine if everyone knew exactly why they were shitty and how to fix them. In Seymour Papert’s dream world, CEOs and politicians would be mass-executed in the streets because a microwave used a busy loop instead of a sophisticated multithreaded-agent approach. Or something like that.
The model behind this “Logo” was simple: by giving commands, you’ll steer a little “turtle” around the computer screen and draw some cool art. If you get hooked and try to compete with the other students to make something even cooler by learning about loops and if-statements, well, now you are a programmer and Papert laughs. Even if you go on to a more productive career from this standpoint, you will still live a life burdened by the knowledge that everyone around you wants to replace you with an Excel spreadsheet the size of Long Island.
A lot of kids who grew up on this are now writing the programs for self-driving cars, and it shows. Logo basically works the same way. If pedestrian, steer right to not run over pedestrian. If multiple pedestrians, sort by net worth and aim for the poorest one.
In fact, if you strap a spraypaint can to the rear bumper of a Chevy Bolt and then activate cruise control, it will draw a weird line on the road and then drive into a ditch. This might be because a Chevy Bolt is not actually a self-driving car, but I like to think it’s a cunning nod to the only Logo program I could actually write.
Have you ever noticed how inefficient it is that every single-family home has its own water heater, furnace, sewer hookup and other utilities? That’s why, for my new futuristic communal living facility, all the houses share a common set of utilities.
Power is served from a geothermal system that taps into the earth’s heat, and toilet waste goes right down the same hole we get the power out of. Hey, it’s a little more fuel, and more importantly it’s a very deep hole so it’ll take a really long time before we’ve filled it with poop.
The important thing is that when one of the “expensive” parts goes wrong, it’s very unlikely that you, specifically, will be called upon to service it. There’s just one, so we’ll chip in and get an actual professional to work on it, and spread the cost around. You can just concentrate on your own living pod. Maybe pick out some nice wallpaper, or quadruple-pane xenon windows. Yeah, that’s the way to go.
Critics of this plan tell me that this model already exists and is called “a fucking apartment.” I note that they should watch their language, because there are children present at this international engineering conference: Mrs. Delacroix’s grade three class. And those kids - the engineers of tomorrow, I remind you - do not need to hear such negativity coming from their esteemed heroes. Besides, apartments don’t have a cool yard to park your broken-down cars in. This brings me to the most important point of all.
You might think that with increased centralization, that it would also be a good idea to offer one big garage. Maybe - and this disgusts me to even imagine it - you could have a communal car, one maintained by paid professionals. This is folly, of course. Any small benefits produced by sharing an automobile are far outpaced by the threat to autonomy that not being able to modify that car presents. Often, homeowners’ associations get mad at innocent God-fearing citizens for doing such common weekend maintenance as strapping a 6-71 Weiand blower to their engine. This will not be tolerated in my new utopian development.
However, the driveway will be shared between all of the units. And in order to make sure that this driveway remains safe and appropriate for everyone in the development to use at the same time, it will take the shape of an 8.9-kilometer long FIA-certified race track, with challenging elevation changes, a decently sized chicane, and long sweepers. With all the time our residents will save on maintaining their houses, they can instead work on knocking a few tenths of seconds off their best laps.
Once you realize the ultimate power of building adapters, then that’s all you can see for the rest of your life. Why bother trying to make a square peg fit into a round hole when you could simply build a square-peg-to-round-hole adapter? Then, after several dozen hours of meticulous precision construction, you can emerge from your workshop to find out your junior intern just hit said peg with a hammer until it fit.
A friend of mine (and we won’t use names here) has it bad. At first, he started building these little simple bell-housing adapters so he could run engines with transmissions that weren’t meant to be together. He’d sketch out the location of the bolts on some cardboard, and transfer it all with brute force and a bandsaw to some cheapo steel he stole from the gettin’ spot at work. Couple months later, he’d be proudly showing us how he managed to mate this Honda engine to this Nissan transmission, and now all he’d have to do is all the little fiddly stuff. Spline counts, pressure plate depth, hydraulics… making the transmission spin backwards… and then he’d just kind of trail off from there while making the shopping list. The next time you’d see him, he’d be making adapters for a whole other set of engines and transmissions. We put it on the club’s “Future Interventions” calendar before all the bad shit went down.
Since we’ve been isolated for awhile, most of us in the local group haven’t seen each other much this year. Sticking to our own knitting and what-not. Of course, this extra time means that certain of our number have gone online to talk to like-minded wrenches just to stave off the crushing loneliness. And they’ve become, for lack of a better term, radicalized. My friend with the cardboard-and-bandsaw adapters? Well, it turns out NASA also had a bunch of folks stay home from work, and that kind of person really knows how to gin up an adapter. Especially when they’re bored and have a CNC mill sitting in the shed out back.
It’s a little hard to understand exactly what he’s working on now, even if you ask him directly. The flurry of different manufacturers, tolerances, depths, and model years reduces to a haze of general unease, and you stop asking so many questions after awhile and just stare at the gleaming stack of razor-sharp stainless chips emerging from his garage/shop. So if the next Mars mission has a Nissan RB26DETT strapped to an NV2500 stickshift somewhere on the rocket, you know that those silver-tongued space nerds managed to dupe him into doing a lot of free work for ol’ Uncle Sam.
You’re not supposed to feed the ducks at the park any bread crumbs. According to the signs in my nearby municipal recreational area, the bread will make their brains explode, if it doesn’t get lodged in their throats and get super mouldy. That won’t stop the ducks, though. They’ll happily dive through the gates of Hell as long as it means that they get one more shot at the delight that only some gently stale white bread can bring.
None of us are any better at avoiding our own demise than those dumb-ass moistened fowl. Eating red meat, drinking antifreeze, and doing double the speed limit is “bad for us,” and yet it also feels so very good in the moment. We’re slaves to our instincts, and our instincts want us to find the biggest possible engine and slam that gas pedal as hard to the floor as we can.
It takes a much more advanced, educated person to understand that you can also drive recklessly fast in public with a smaller engine, saving you money on gas that can otherwise be more fruitfully applied to power-adders. A freak, really, who is deaf to the cries of their own biology. Someone who spends sleepless nights in their laboratory trying to figure out if triangles can be revved faster than cylinders. Harmless cranks, until they succeed and come out with something that contradicts our innate primate understanding of horsepower. Then we burn them at the stake and go back to drooling over raw displacement, which is the way it has to be in order to maintain the health of our community.
In the end, this is what really separates us humans from the ducks. You’ll never see a duck inventing the rotary engine. It doesn’t have to. Some idiots will come by all the time and keep giving it free bread.
If there’s one skill that I strongly recommend everyone acquire, it’s figuring out how to measure properly. I’m a bit of a hypocrite on this matter in that most of my fabrication projects show the scars of misdrilled holes, weird angles from cutting off too much material, and general crookedness. Not knowing what I am talking about has never been an obstacle before, so I’m not sure why you believe it would stop me now.
The most important thing about precision measurement is to use the right tool. For instance, if you’ve been using a $250 Mitutoyo vernier caliper to open cans of paint, maybe stop doing that. Conversely, if you’re working on some kind of Mars-mission space rocket program, your coworkers are right to laugh at you when you are trying to use the free paper measuring tape that Home Depot hands out to children when they assemble a birdhouse kit on weekends with their divorced dad. Once you figure out what the appropriate tool for the job is, you’re ready to start measuring.
Getting square to the thing you are measuring is frequently difficult, and this is the part where I fall down all the time. It turns out that the human eyeball is incredibly incapable of figuring out when something is actually parallel to a surface. As a result, our shitty ape brains think all kinds of things are flat when they aren’t: freshly welded body panels, the Earth, and refinished pinball playfields that just cost a grand on eBay. Expert machinists and even folks who are a little bit too obsessed with having perfectly spaced fenceboards have worked out a flawless technique for determining how to make sure you are squared up before measurement. Unfortunately, none of them taught me this trick, so I mostly just do my best, squint real hard for a few minutes, and then make a birdhouse so crooked that somehow the birds cannot hope to escape from it despite somehow being able to enter.
The last important aspect of measurement that you must master is not getting too down on yourself. Things are hard, the world is an imprecise place. Why spend a weekend moping because you wasted an expensive block of titanium when you could be out getting ice cream instead? I bet they’ve got Rocky Road…
A lot of people get bent out of shape about eating in your car. Germans in particular, up until they realized it was more profitable to sell SUVs than anything else, were very upset about the entire thing and staunchly refused to equip their vehicles with cupholders. I’ve had lots of friends whose significant others and kids are forced to finish eating their food before climbing aboard, so as to keep the interior immaculate.
Obviously, I’m not one of those people. Car-wash vacuums exist for a reason, although I would never use one because they cost actual money. And although leftover cheese and gas-station egg sandwiches attract rats to my automobiles, few of them will actually survive the noxious chemicals that leak out of every available seal. Still, though, there are times when I need to impress a passenger, such as a parole officer or newspaper local-interest reporter, and it’s then that I swing my innovative (and patent pending) car-cleaning system into action.
My preferred fast-food garbage removal is simple. I have a gaping hole in the floorboard that’s just big enough to swallow the debris left by housing almost anything on the Taco Bell menu, as long as I pull what’s left of the threadbare carpet back first. If I’m travelling at about double the highway speed limit, the resulting aerodynamic vacuum from the air passing underneath the car will even help suck the crumbs right out. Where do they go from there? To a magical land known as “Not My Problem,” where blame is difficult for the police to conclusively assign.
In the end, most of my cars don’t actually last long enough in my ownership for this to become a problem. I’ve never heard the guy at the junkyard who runs the crusher complain about the occasional burger wrapper or cupcake crumbs on the dashboard. Except for that one time, but I’m pretty sure he was more angry about all the poisoned rats in the trunk.
What’s the skill that separates the true connoisseur of broken shit from the high-speed parts swapper? Diagnosis. If you can accurately figure out what’s wrong, then you have a much better chance of fixing the problem for cheap. And if you really understand the problem, then often you realize that you can simply do without a fix at all.
We’ve all heard that old canard about the guy who goes into his doctor. Dude says “Doc, it hurts when I do this.” Quack looks at him, says “don’t do that, then.” This is the core guiding philosophy to successful beater ownership. There’s about 200 things that you can’t actually do on my daily driver right now. In the course of diagnosing the problem, I’ve determined that it’s not really a big deal, and that you can live without it.
These problems usually are classified as “annoying.” For instance, my rear view mirror rattles at 80 km/h. Why are you using your rear view mirror at 80 km/h? If you speed up, it doesn’t matter what’s behind you. There are, of course, examples of a more concerning kind of problem. The car gets a little slidey at low speeds when it rains, because the ball joints were last replaced during the Reagan administration - and not the second one. Tail lights don’t work for the first few minutes when it’s really cold out, so I do an extra lap around my block before I decide to try and hit the brakes really hard. Which is good anyway, because the vacuum booster is clogged with years of partially-combusted gasoline vapour and also doesn’t work until it’s thawed out.
Of course, to hand this car to someone else would be lethal folly. A pimple-faced valet at the nicest hotel in town would immediately spear this thing into a curb, causing it to turn to ash as every intricately balanced bodge job comes loose at once. It’s sort of like when you get a new key for your old car, but the new key doesn’t work because the ignition cylinder and the old key had worn into each other over the years. I’ve “worn into” these cars, and so I understand them in the same way that you understand to not put too much weight on your right knee while carrying heavy objects upstairs. It’s not that it’s a fatal flaw, as long as you know what you are doing. Diagnosis.
I used to work with this guy who was a vintage typewriter collector. Well, I guess the “vintage” is sort of superfluous these days. He would scrape the classifieds looking for someone throwing out their grandpa’s old typewriter, scoop it up, and then nurse it back to health over a few months. It reminded me a lot of my own hobbies, except later he told me that after he worked on them, the typewriters usually ended up in better condition.
Still, I had to admire the effort. He was basically the only person within the entire tri-state area labouring to keep this little slice of mechanical history alive. Inspired by his example, I decided that I, too, would attempt to actually repair something.
After a few weeks of trying to get off the couch, I eventually found myself in the garage when I went looking for a hammer. The hammer wasn’t to fix my car - it was to kill a rat that had tried to steal my rare Wartburg wiring harness from my living room floor. After the rat got away, I went to put the hammer back in the pile where it belongs, and then I figured I might as well spend a few minutes doing an oil change.
Several weeks of gruelling effort later, I emerged having lost sixteen pounds but with a gleaming-like-new 1999 Mercury Villager. In the course of actually getting off my ass to properly fix a vehicle, I had been captured by the spirit of what made automotive maintenance so tantalizing to me in the first place. I gleefully drove it to work. There, of course, my boss was waiting to give me my pink slip for not having shown up for over a month, but on the way home I felt a sense of pride.
This feeling of accomplishment was not a normal one for me, and I soon overcorrected by purchasing another four broken Volares. With all the free time I now had, I told myself, I’d be able to play videogames all day and make the simple repairs (replace rear quarter panel, fabricate new interior from scratch) that these classics needed. I owed it to the future to preserve these automotive delights in tip-top shape, just after this next side quest is done.
Like any sentient human in our time period, I grew up thinking that firefighters were super cool. Running into burning buildings, brutal union violence, and petting Dalmatians. And who can forget the fire trucks? So when the local privatized fire company went out of business (weather was too cold to meet Q4 projections for fires; customers kept taking out free trials only when their houses caught on fire and then cancelling them before the credit cards could be charged) I scooped up one of their old pumper trucks for super cheap.
Now, a fire truck isn’t really the most practical daily driver. While it has lots of compartments for storage, it is extremely thirsty. And everyone expects you to put out their fires, usually for free. I never knew so many things were flammable before. It would take me like six hours to run to the grocery store because my neighbours would keep flagging me down to extinguish their car, house, church, or cat. That really ate into my “project time,” too, so the fire truck soon became the only vehicle I was driving on a daily basis because it had the most maintenance done to it (by the previous owners, of course.)
I tried a few things. The most obvious is to just put a sign on it saying “not for hire.” Turns out that most people don’t want to read fine print on the side of fire engines when their house is burning down. Next, I called in some favours at the crooked Russian bodyshop I usually bought hoods from and got them to paint it a different colour. Bass-boat flaked purple metallic did not look good on a fire truck, like you were shitting on tradition somehow. And it also didn’t turn away any non-paying customers. An array of psychologists would later determine that the odd attraction was in fact because I was constantly running the siren at all times, but at the time, try as I might, I couldn’t figure out how to turn off either the siren or the customers.
Finally, I hit upon it. I just wrote the words “paid for by your municipal taxes” on the bumper in the tiniest print imaginable. Soon after, some local political candidates launched ads decrying my brutal waste of government money, and cut the public fire service entirely in response. The private fire company started back up again, and I immediately sold them the truck - at a profit, because it now had pimp 24-karat gold spinners for wheels and only a few new dings and dents from trying to remember how to parallel park it.
I don’t know why people think that transferring their consciousness into a robot body means that they’ll live longer. When was the last time you saw someone use an iPhone for their entire natural life? Hell, if you keep a car for more than a decade you’re considered some sort of dangerous pervert who is ruining our economy and should immediately leap on a lease.
For instance, I’m a domestic model that was assembled by unskilled labour, and I’ll probably still live to about eighty years old before my clattering mass of dumpster-grade meat sloughs off into an abattoir. An 80-year-old Chevy Cavalier is going to get put in a museum. There’s no way that the same manufacturers that are fucking up “cupholder that can be used five hundred times” are going to do any better when it comes to designing an affordable life-support system, or a consciousness-transfer algorithm that doesn’t occasionally make you forget what purple is every time you upgrade your body. And as far as I can tell, walking on an icy road doesn’t currently corrode my own feet beyond repair.
“Oh, but people will take it more seriously when it’s their own body,” I hear people mention as if you aren’t also putting your own body at risk every time you have to get out of your 13,000-mile luxury car and walk down the highway to go flag down a truck driver you hope isn’t a serial killer this week. And then there’s the fuel we put in our bodies! I can’t imagine some fancy future-cyborg is going to be tolerant of the occasional low-octane jaunt to McDonalds because I had a real tough week. My Plymouth can’t even deal with a little bit of condensation inside the fuel jets on cold mornings.
There is hope, however. Maybe the guy who designed the 1991 Honda Accord has been working on a cyberheart in his spare time. If that’s the case, we’re all going to make it to 800,000 km before our descendants trade us in on a model with better curb appeal.
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tags: honda, honda accord, plymouth, chevrolet, chevrolet cavalier
Piano movers are a standby of cartoons, and for good reason. Not only can you stereotype them as enormous brutes, but it’s a necessary plot construct in order to set up dropping a piano on someone. In reality, being crushed under a grand piano does not replace your teeth with piano keys and give you an enormous lump on your skull, but that doesn’t stop those maniacs at Looney Tunes from perpetrating a dangerous falsehood. It is only the fact that your average six-year-old cannot lift a fully-populated grand piano over your head that is society’s saving grace in this matter.
In cartoons, you can get away with this kind of thing. Same way as Wile E. Coyote is able to assemble American mail-order machines and have them sometimes work. You don’t even get to see him break out the compression tester to figure out why the generator motor to the death machine only starts once the Roadrunner is well out of effective range. This is because it would simply be too complicated to go into the specific details of reality, and nobody but us freaks would tune in for what would effectively end up being a sparsely-animated Haynes Manual, voiced by the Micro Machines commercial guy in order to save runtime. Not to mention that OSHA would get involved and ask why there isn’t a coyote-protection grate on the woodchipper or a lockout-tagout system being used during its maintenance.
There’s much less of an excuse for this behaviour in today’s adult dramas, however. With so many different shows out there, and millions of ways to watch those shows, eventually someone is going to have to hire me because there won’t be any other writers left who aren’t simultaneously cranking out twenty to thirty episodes of Star Wars: Jabba’s Kitchen Repair Technicians for a streaming service whose name has now become a jangle of double-byte characters that are decipherable only to other streaming services. And that’s when I’ll strike.
So set your PVRs (are those still a thing?) for the debut of my new television show, Sometimes Things Don’t Work The First Time. It’s a scripted drama where in each episode, a harried modern couple attempts to do things like make a reservation for an oil change, assemble Ikea furniture, or search eBay for a replacement abrasive disc for an obsolete model of orbital deck sander. Unlike reality TV - and objective reality - the secret here is that in the end the couple will be actually successful. I call it “Optimism TV.”
Is there any greater gift that you can give back to humanity than a set of pristine schematics, or better yet, a service manual? These holy documents must get made for every serious product on the planet, and yet they are jealously guarded rather than releasing them into the hands of the jerks who have to fix the things twenty years later when a teensy-weensy little bit of smoke comes out.
There’s probably a lot of reasons for this. Sloth, arrogance, corporate propriety, but I think maybe the engineers who made the damn thing are just embarrassed to have their secrets get out. Think of the last project you actually completed (I know, but this is a work of fiction.) Were you one hundred percent proud of the decisions you made? No external pressure whatsoever to cut a corner here, use an ugly hack there? Did you remember to torque everything up? No leftover screws? Then you must be a lot better at this kind of thing than I am, and possibly also some sort of bizarre android from a distant parallel universe where things work properly.
This, then, is where the real badasses come out. By spending an amount of time equal to or often greater than the original designer, some folks will reverse-engineer everything. In the same way that using the reverse gear to leave a parking spot is more dangerous than a forward gear, you can imagine their experience is fraught with risk. Could they spend all this effort to come up with nothing, or worse, to have spent months figuring out which pin on the toaster’s microprocessor is for “bagel?” That’s why they need to be rewarded thoroughly, and why as the newly elected Prime Minister of this great nation, I will start a program to give reverse engineers a chance to get what they’ve always wanted.
That’s right. If you vote for me, everyone who submits at least one full teardown of an undocumented commercial product is allowed to track down the original engineers and project managers, and beat the living tar out of them with a burlap sack filled with hammer handles. This program pays for itself: by forcing product teams to focus on quality documentation, we expect to stimulate Canada’s under-loved paper industry at the very least.
In the future, there will be a great need for folks who can fix rust. As society continues to drift further from the Platonic ideal of the automobile (the 1974 Dodge Aspen) it will become ever harder to get excited about new cars. And who can really afford one, anyway? I went to the dealership last week and they told me that a base model car now cost more than the entire budget of Sweden. You’ll need someone who can fix up a $1000 used car so that your prospective clients can still be impressed when it clatters up to the golf course.
There’s no question that a well-maintained old car, especially if it’s something weird or otherwise forgotten, becomes a “classic” car. Now you can demonstrate it at car shows, whereas before the scrutineers might have asked difficult questions like “what happened to the floor?” and “Jesus Christ, what is this dead animal in the trunk? It is none that I recognize.” And it will take bodywork technicians to make that happen - techs that cannot be learning these skills right now in underfunded inner-city schools.
No solvent-huffing burnouts will teach them how to eyeball whether a panel is truly flat. There won’t be an opportunity to learn how to turn a small crack in a plastic bumper into an $850 invoice. And they certainly won’t realize that it takes several dozen hours to repair a spot of rust the size of a gnat’s dick on a Jaguar’s inner quarter panel.
So I implore you: fund trades education. Because you’ll want to have a lot of options for where to go in 2030 when a guy working out of his shed is trying to charge you $65 for “shop supplies.” What, did you learn manufacturing and buy the shop towel factory too?
Out of all the things I miss right now, going to the thrift stores has to be the biggest. What’s better than paying for someone else’s garbage and then hauling it home so it can eventually become your garbage? In order to try and compensate for this loss, I’ve been randomly buying things from eBay with my eyes closed instead.
It hasn’t worked out very well so far, except that now my driveway is occupied with a bunch of worthless stock certificates for Exxon-Mobil. Those lawyers keep calling me, but it’s not like they have been offering me rusted toasters or Betamax players in return either.
Garage sales, too, are long gone in my neck of the woods. One of my neighbours attempted one, out of some kind of half-instinctual urge to purge. After an lonely weekend of zero customers, he just pushed everything out to the curb and set it on fire. Baby clothes and old lamps torched in an elaborate Viking funeral pyre.
It makes me a little sad that I had taken the humble second-hand store for granted for so long. There was no way I could have expected that it would be torn from me like this. Don’t worry. When it comes back, I’ll go every week with a smile on my face, eager to pick through even the grossest cheap bins, and I’ll be so grateful for the chance that I will even stop trying to bribe the loading-dock workers into giving me first dibs on the broken CRT TVs. Well… maybe not that last part.
“Boys,” I begin, “I don’t know where you got this fancy rocket ship from, but whoo-ee are we ever having a party up here in the cockpit!”
It turns out that impressing some aliens at playing Galaga was a bad metric to use to figure out who to let fly your new prototype spaceship. For one thing, I wasn’t any good at managing my free shots, and for the other I had just cheated and given myself infinite lives. Apparently on Xorblox-IV, their copy of MAME doesn’t contain a debugger. Mistakes were made on both sides, really, but only one of those sides’ oopsie was “give a nuclear-powered death machine to some scruffy dude from another planet who has never driven more than 67 horsepower at any given time.”
Apparently there was some sort of galactic threat, a mission that only I could achieve with my skillful shooting and keen hand-eye coordination. That sounded great, except I was a pacifist (read: coward) at heart, and as soon as my hands touched the controls, I decided to become a conscientious objector instead and handbrake-turn this crate back to Earth so I could get some revenge.
In my absence, the aliens had placed some sort of robot duplicate of myself, and that little motherfucker was busy impressing my boss with his hardy work ethic and G-rated language. If I didn’t hurry up and turn my performance review back to “Generally Unimpressive,” I was likely to end up getting promoted to management. And then it really would be the end of life as I know it. Can’t take a Zoom call when you’re having a Ford nine-inch shit 60-year-old whale oil additive on you.
In conclusion, I don’t think there actually is a rule in the employee handbook about not using an alien spaceship to blow up your boss’ new Lexus. Technically, I wasn’t even on company property at the time.
If you believe the accumulated weight of history, media, and general folk knowledge, then you must think that we landed on the moon. And you’d be right. Thing is, we haven’t been back up there, not until the Chinese sent some weird robot past the other day and scooped up some rocks. Weird rocks, that presumably will be studied to advance the knowledge of a low-sex-appeal science like geology. That’s all the moon is good for, right? Wrong.
Nowadays, with advanced electric cars, the moon is good for racing on. The usual constraints don’t apply anymore! In the 60s, NASA spent billions of dollars on putting a couple of dinky electric cars up there. Although they revved to nearly ten grand, those powertrains produced out a mere 0.25 horsepower at the crank - less than a horse, if horses had cranks. Although these cars sucked out loud, that was all the astronauts had to drive, so drive them they did. We can do much better with modern technology.
Is racing on the moon dangerous? Actually, it’s much safer than racing down here. Studies show that most racing fatalities are caused by hitting walls, trees, or other cars. There’s none of those on the moon - at least not yet, until we build a fully-functional race track slash country club in order to attract investment. And fires are a thing of the past. Fires, after all, need oxygen! If you burst one of these babies wide open, well, I don’t know what will happen, but chances are someone will write a paper about it. And when’s the last time you spun out at autocross and had that happen?
So come join my Kickstarter, and help me put together a prototype race car to convince NASA of the brilliance of my plan. If nothing else, then I can use the money to buy swollen laptop batteries to chuck at their office. Smells like the future!
Sometimes I get these intrusive thoughts. It might have been a sentence I read on the internet that has a particular poetic weight to it, or a half-remembered visual from a Haynes manual that I read during my last 48-hour hold in the funny farm. Either way, once it’s there, it’s hard to get out. Or at least it was, until I figured out the secret to clearing your mind from an old Buddhist monk.
That old Buddhist monk was named Kiichiro Toyoda, and his technique is called The Immortal XV20 Toyota Camry. It’s a bit of a mouthful, true, but I’m told it makes a lot more sense in the original Japanese. See, the secret is that the Toyota Camry of 1996-2002 is so boring, so intensely unremarkable, that it helps force other thoughts out of your mind. The spell broken, I can then return to being a productive member of society.
There’s a problem, of course. These Camrys are so reliable, so effective at getting me from place to place, that there’s simply nothing else to do. I got the manual V6 for “Driving” “Excitement,” and then proceeded to do basic maintenance. About an hour later, I was trying to huff the trunk carpet in order to halt a compulsive emotional spiral about a Flash music video I saw at around the same time the Camry was being built. Then I sat on the floor of my garage, and wondered how fast it could go.
It is true that this model of Camry was once a competitor in grand-touring racing in the US. That means that a lot of race-prepped spares, half-crashed cars, and other performance bits are kicking around the auction sites. Of course, I can’t afford any of them, because I’m the kind of goober who interrupts a meeting at work with a Star Wars joke. eBay, though, is always there for me, and it works so fast that I sometimes don’t have time to get back to the Camry before I’ve pushed that “Buy It Now” button.
Yes, I have a twin-turbocharged Camry, and it spits fire on upshifts. I know you may find it hard to believe, but this is definitely the most mentally healthy I’ve been in decades. It’s hard to think about any weird throwaway lines from movies when the thing is torque-steering towards a guard rail after 850 wailing horsepower pulverized the front-left tire again.
By now, we were supposed to have an army of friendly robots catering to our every need. What happened? Well, it turns out that people had to actually invent those, and collectively the human race has spent the last forty years sitting on their hands wondering why they don’t have a jetpack yet. If the other guy spends the money to invent it, then we can just rip it off and undercut him. That’ll teach him to advance our civilization!
The lucky thing is that a lot of people got extremely rich off of tricking computers into making stock purchases using other computers. These folks are are in fact so rich, that they have nothing better to do than splash money at specious morons like myself in the name of “venture capital.” It doesn’t matter that developing a robot is unprofitable. In the New Economy, inventing a self-driving car means that everyone will have to kowtow to your whims.
You’ve probably read all the stories about the other scam artist companies who tricked well-intentioned capitalists into giving them money. Their “self-driving” cars don’t even put in a serious effort. Why, one of them just rolled downhill, off the side of the road, and into an orphanage and everyone involved still made enough money to retire to an igloo whose bricks were made entirely of cocaine. That’s where my scam artist company is different. We promise nothing, and we deliver… something.
What makes us more likely to succeed? The simple fact that we bought worse cars. Nobody is surprised when a 45-year-old Volare wanders between lanes, because even a Formula One race driver couldn’t compensate for that dicky tie rod end. Even the shittiest AI still passes the Turing test in this regard, and to make the deal even sweeter, when the cops pull you over you can just point to the computer and blame it for driving in a front yard. Just don’t come after me, because my company mysteriously went bankrupt around the same time the Series A cheques all cashed.
Every year, for just a short little bit of time, the snow melts and the lake where we play hockey is replaced with water. Since my body is not capable of dealing with temperatures above freezing, I mostly stay inside and repeatedly pour ice water on myself while counting down the days until we are once again freed from the hubris of summer. However, this year, the local yacht club had decided they were going to put on a regatta, and they invited me to come along.
At first, I misinterpreted their request as a Buick Reatta, and later it turned out that they meant to send the email to an actual yachteer instead of me but spelled the address wrong. So there were mistakes made on both sides. However, what I found was captivating: a regatta was a kind of race, but with boats. It was motorsport… on water!
After watching a few of the early heats, I was surprised at both how slow the boats were and how glamorous the racing was. They were like beautiful Doritos painted with white latex house paint, “tacking” and “gibing” (those are words I learned from the program that they handed out at the event) in the wind. I decided that I would have to enter, but with only one day left in the weekend, it seemed unlikely that I would be able to find a used yacht for my budget (about $60 minus whatever I spent on $12 hot dogs at the regatta.) In order to join my new-found friends and earn their confused stares of disgust, I would have to use my natural-born inventiveness.
A breakthrough came at 3am that night, when I realized in the bathtub that my rubber duckie didn’t sink until I added a lot of weight on top of him. After fleeing half-naked into the garage and aggressively drilling holes for approximately six more hours, I showed up ready for my first boat race. The tech inspectors stared at my Pontiac Catalina, and tried to find a reason to disqualify it, but then the club president walked by and jokingly declared it a “land yacht,” so I was in. Along with approximately one thousand seventy five wheel horsepower, though the tune wasn’t quite done yet.
There was only one problem with my plan: even after you swap the rear tires for paddlewheels and the fronts for surfboards that you stole from the lake’s rental shed, turning is still important, as is being able to stop without sinking the car irretrievably beneath the waves and causing an EPA superfund incident when they find out just how much nitrous and pre-ban leaded avgas I was carrying in the trunk. However, my hosts were very gracious about re-interpreting the rules for me. Later, I found out that they assumed I was some kind of eccentric and therefore exceptionally rich. Shyeah, rich in AFR.
Although I’d played golf with The Mayor many times, I had never considered mixing business with pleasure. One morning, however, the other guys who joined us seemed to be some kind of slick lobbyists, and kept asking him for little favours here and there for their rich friends. I began to wonder if maybe The Mayor had only invited me to golf on this morning because he, too, wanted me to ask him for a favour.
Now, I had known The Mayor for years. Maybe decades. We grew up together, hung out in the same clubs, turned wrenches on his project Jaguar, and I helped him bury his first opponent. Well, that last part is a bit of an exaggeration. Chucking a corpse into a swamp and waiting for alligators to eat it isn’t legally “burial.” Could I really risk a relationship like that over something trivial that I wanted fixed in the city?
I knew that the magazines and newspapers had already talked about our odd friendship, especially when they saw me showing up at The Mayor’s Mansion with my fume-spitting, oil-dripping Volare and leaving with a large quantity of garbage bags filled with voting ballots made - in error, of course - for the wrong candidate. Nobody stopped me, though.
This was because those muckraking journalists were afraid of me, which in turn was because they had convinced each other at their drunken bar outings that I was some kind of political genius, an enforcer capable of destroying the career of anyone who would go against them. This, of course, I only found out later, when I accidentally backed over a journalist digging through my trash in the dark and he refused to press any charges.
Still, the timing seemed perfect. The big important business guys had gone on ahead, leaving me and my long-time friend stuck on this hole as I repeatedly attempted to remove my ball from a sand trap using a three-wood. If I asked him, nobody had to know besides me, him, and whatever FBI guy had put that hidden microphone in the seat of my golf cart. Incidentally, that whole recording device later got fried by the dodgy alternator, which became another part of my legend.
“Say, bud,” I started, “how about replacing that yield sign that those kids stole last month from the intersection near my place?”
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tags: small town mayor, plymouth, plymouth volare
Tiny cars are everyone’s best friend. With minuscule zingy motors and a lightweight chassis, the driving enthusiast will be pleased and not too scared to mat the gas pedal. All that fuel-sipping and the corresponding low emissions cheer on the eco crowd. Not to mention the comparatively inexpensive cost of ownership, which thrills the all-important cheapskate caste of which I am a member.
Unfortunately for humanity, civilization has moved away from the tiny car in our pursuit of ensconcing ourselves permanently inside immortal steel coffins meant for street warfare. And with fewer of them being sold new, that means that almost none will trickle down to me between 12 and 22 years from now. It was this exact crisis that drove me to look for alternatives. Alternatives such as Professor Discredited’s Shrinking-Car Ray.
Originally developed for ease of parking inside busy cities, it was ironically seized and auctioned off by the authorities when the aforementioned Professor didn’t return from an experimental trip to the Neutral Zone and left his windowless, reeking GMC Safari parked on the street in Chinatown for an entire weekend without paying a dime. That’s how I got it for about twenty bucks, once I convinced the meth heads at the pre-bidding inspection that the wiring was worthless titanium-alloy instead of valuable copper.
All you have to do with this amazing shrink ray is back a cheap crossover up to it, and then whammo - it’s a small car. As long as you don’t get too carried away with the settings, you can still climb inside it and operate it like a regular car. Now, an EcoSport is still a dismal piece of shit to drive, and the fuel economy is remarkably terrible, but it does have a turbocharged three-cylinder. If you close your eyes while driving (don’t actually do this) you could almost imagine you are operating a Chevy Sprint Turbo of yore, albeit one whose volume dial is too tiny to operate without tweezers.
The only real downside is that it’s a huge pain in the ass to find tires for, still. Recall that it’s a Shrinking-Car Ray. There’s no guarantee whatsoever that it shrinks individual components of cars, which means that as soon as you’ve worn out one of the dinkified once-17" no-season-tires, you’re back at the Walmart asking them which brand of 13" tire contains less papier-mache and sand. And don’t get me started on how packed the engine bay is once you’ve reduced it to three-quarters size. Maybe if the good Professor had invented the Enlarging-Car Ray at the same time, he wouldn’t be getting torn apart at the atomic level by Molecular Hell-Ghosts.
When I was a kid, for one glorious year we got the NHK for free on our cable box. I don’t really know why. Maybe it was some kind of cultural outreach deal by the Japanese government, eager for more dumb Westerners to learn their unique way of life and then show up with tourism money and not so many questions. What it meant for me, though, was easy access to dubbed Iron Chef and all the 1970s gangster drama I could ingest at my tender young age.
Now, if you haven’t watched Iron Chef before, the idea is that randos off the street are challenged to cook better dishes than one of their gang of expert chefs. An array of ingredients appears before them, already prepped, and they have to use their wits and skills to crank out some gourmet food.
Most episodes, of course, involved the contestants hurrying, rushing through meals at a dizzying pace. My knife skills were pretty much limited to buttering toast until several years after I left college, so I was always amazed that they were able to julienne a cucumber or reduce a $600 Yubari melon to tissue-paper-thin slices without leaving a few finger joints inside. It was here, perhaps, that I learned the value of working fast. It was also there that I learned the folly of trying to appease others.
You see, at the end of each episode of Iron Chef, they have to figure out which combatant comes out on top. An array of celebrities rate the meals that the chefs produce, and while it’s unclear exactly what happens to the loser, it’s definitely not anything good. Even through the workaday all-too-polite NHK World English dub, it was easy to understand when a mid-level talent-studio agent, drunk on gallons of free wine ahead of the taping, was unfairly slamming a meal for being “too boring.” I was insulted on their behalf, and at first would just turn off the show before getting to the “rating” segment.
These people are gods in the kitchen, and you would dare enter their realm and not understand the subtleties of the intricate treasure they forged for you at great personal risk? Eventually, I began to watch all the way to the end just to see if I could catch a glimpse of anger. Just a little eye-twitch on the stone faces of the rigidly-professional chefs, a white-knuckle tightening of the grasp on their favourite knife at the belt. It was then that I realized what made the Iron Chefs the true masters, impossible to topple even if you were to, say, make better scalloped eggs than them.
The true secret to professionalism in the Iron Chef universe is just putting up with bullshit from assholes. Whether it be tough-talking short-order chefs showing up and not knowing how to debone shrimp, or a popular shogi player being confused about the difference between vanilla ice cream and mashed potatoes, Iron Chef sold a false reward for a real problem. Who knows how many kids went on to get promoted through Fortune 500 companies with crappy work, just because they never back-talked their boss in an all-hands meeting? You didn’t trick me, Chairman Kaga.
What’s the key aspect that separates successful handypeople from those folks whose houses slowly fill with thousands of undone projects, until their bereaved family members have to finally throw all of it the dumpster, leaving them without a single finished thing to show for their entire life’s work? It’s not organization, or at least I hope not. It’s stick-toitiveness.
That’s right. Stubbornness is the secret sauce that keeps the world afloat. Think about it: if someone asked you to go to the moon, you’d work hard on it for a few days before calling it “real fuckin’ tough.” After it’s declared to be a difficult project worthy of increased focus, you would then push all that space stuff aside for a pachinko-machine repair or some kind of ornate television-remote holder, neither of which you would finish either. It is our curse to pick up more projects than we can hope to ever accomplish, and flit between them as soon as the going gets tough.
Now, the science of pharmacology has developed some excellent focus-enhancing drugs. Maybe that works for you; if it does, fill your boots. However, it turns out that what I like to focus on is “starting new projects,” and a dose or two of Russian research chemicals merely produces even more entries on the to-do list with little Sharpie-marker frowny faces next to them. My boss hates it when I don’t show up for work because I wondered what the inside of a VCR really looked like that morning. Being fired admittedly did curb the new projects, but it also put a major impediment to getting parts for the existing projects, which also led to abandonment. Basically, it’s a good thing I’m not a surgeon, because the interns would have to hold the door to the OR shut to keep me from swapping out a half-opened patient.
Even with all of this, I’m a lot better at being stubborn than most folks. After all, other people would probably have given up on the entire concept of “being handy” when it had become so blatantly obvious they were not.
In my town, the advent of winter is not greeted with grim determination but instead the sound of a thousand traction-control engagements on bald all-season snow tires. You see, I live on a fairly steep hill. It’s not the most treacherous one in the city, but considering things are generally pretty flat around here, it’s practically the Matterhorn. And it doesn’t help that most of my neighbours are, shall I say, inexperienced in the ways of motorsport. The city had to take out that whole billboard last year explaining how to use the windshield wipers.
As a result of this phenomenon, the first day of snow (and it snows quite often throughout the winter, believe me) is usually a terrible time for commuting but is an excellent spectator sport. You’ll see it all, from Tacomas discovering that trucks don’t have unlimited cornering grip, to dilapidated 25-year-old cute utes getting a bunch of snow packed into their rear hubs and huffily disabling ABS and all-wheel-drive in response.
What makes my hill particularly entertaining is the fact that the slope goes from steep to slightly steeper just before it reaches my house. This means that anyone who has a poor understanding of momentum will run out of it right around the midpoint of my driveway. I like to go out and shovel the sidewalk on those days of fresh snowfall, and look at the fear in their eyes as the car’s forward progress slows to a halt. Sometimes the drivers just give up entirely. Those are my favourite: the car rolls helplessly backwards down the hill without the driver paying any attention, dead to the world, their spirits broken.
After I thought about it for awhile, I realized that all most of my neighbours were really doing was adding additional wear to their vehicles. As a result, the used cars available to me in a few years would be in much worse shape. So I decided to do something about it and bought a tow truck. It made sense to me at the time: I’d set the tow truck up at the top of the hill, throw a hook to the bottom, and charge suckers twenty bucks to pull them up so that they could merge onto the main road. However, all this meant is that the inevitable accident would happen somewhere further away, somewhere I could neither see it nor offer money for their newly-junk cars immediately to the survivors. And twenty bucks was a lot less than that opportunity cost.
I’ve never been, and now with the destruction of all humanity, it seems unlikely that I’ll get the chance to visit the Bathurst 1000. While it’s not the artistic pinnacle of motorsport, it is a place where Australians get arrested by their local police for having dug holes in the surrounding countryside in order to bury beer weeks in advance so they can drink it later, thus bypassing the limit on how many beers they can bring into the venue with them. Also, you get to see weird foreign brands of car duking it out. What the hell is a “Ford?”
As far as I or Wikipedia can tell, the whole Australian auto racing scene started when one upside-down farmer found another upside-down farmer and decided to see what their confusingly half-truckified family sedans could do in a thousand kilometer race. It turns out what happens is that both of the vehicles overheated. To make matters worse, while stranded on the side of the naturally occurring racetrack, one of the farmers eventually bludgeoned and ate the other for sustenance. The surviving farmer was named Bruce Bathurst, and the event has been running ever since.
For years, foreign automakers have attempted to dominate the Australians on their home turf. They’ve trotted out evil strategies like “using a turbo” or “finish bolting the car together” in order to take advantage of their greater access to engineering prowess and the ability to work from an R&D building that is not occasionally on fire. One of the most famous occurrences of this phenomenon is when the Skyline GT-R repeatedly dominated the entire country, sometimes even after Australia’s finest whining added hundreds of pounds of ballast and made the turbochargers breathe through a drinking straw. Eventually, after Nissan’s own drivers had some fistfights and screaming matches with random members of the audience, they moved on, leaving Australia’s finest racecar (a gently-dented 1972 base-model Holden Torana with 430,000km on the odometer) to resume its otherwise-unbroken winning streak.
So yeah, if you get a chance to be in Australia, head on over to the Mount Panorama racetrack and slide your rental around the track. Or, in the local vernacular, “do some skids.”
You might expect that, once gifted a Roomba as a sort of pointed commentary on the disgusting nature of my home, I would turn it into an autonomous abomination, a V8-powered, nitromethane-toking deathbringer that is disrespectful to dirt. And you’d be correct. What you don’t think of, and what everyone seems to miss, is the insurance-related consequences of my actions.
Just how do I afford to pay for the mild fires that follow me from place to place? What about that time I got sued in that slip-and-fall incident because I did burnouts on the sidewalk rather than shovel? The answer is: with bureaucracy, the poisoned chalice of the industrial age.
I chose to go with an insurance broker a few years ago, mostly because large corporations could pick out my scent from fifty paces. This way, it would at least be masked by the corporate veil of a go-between. Sort of a Judas goat for actuarial tables. What I didn’t expect, however, is that I would develop a parasocial relationship with my agent at the insurance brokerage, and he would move from jaw-dropping disbelief to active participation in my activities. In essence, as the police would later accuse me of in a wide-ranging complaint, I had radicalized Insurance Jim.
At first, the signs were subtle. He would ask me what kind of fucked-up project I was getting up to this week, or “forget” to count a couple of my Volares as separate vehicles (“they’re the same year and colour, just swap the plate over, Jesus Christ I don’t have time for this.”) Once, he told me about a crooked bodyshop nearby that had just gotten raided by the cops, and the Russian painters had left a half-catalyzed can of 2K clear coat behind. I put like thirty coats on my hood alone that evening (so shiny!), but I should have taken it as the red flag it was.
Soon, Jim showed up at my house. He had a story, of course: it was a new “house call” service they were working on, because I was such an important customer, and he had the address from my file. In reality, he was just bored out of his skull and wanted to actually see with his own eyes the exotic destruction I could wreak, rather than just be told about it after the fact. In that first fateful evening, he saw me break down a 440 for a camshaft, return the 440 (now with a heavily-wiped cam installed) to the junkyard, and take out a McDonalds drive-through loudspeaker with the rocker arm as it ejected from the head I left half-done-up after swapping the new cam into my Volare. He had made the transition from fellow traveller to active participant, and to make matters worse he watched me and took notes.
In the months and years after the cops arrested him for trying to “soup up” his Yaris by strapping a JATO rocket booster to it for his morning commute, he found riches beyond imagination on the inspirational-speaker circuit. He would visit insurance-industry conferences, and roll a PowerPoint deck solely made of photos he had taken the evening we knocked over the neighbourhood ice cream truck for a replacement differential.
Many hundreds of years ago, one of my great ancestors, Some Kind Of Boat Part Safety-Switch, first came to this country. His goal was to get some sweet deals on AMC Eagles, but unfortunately they had not yet been invented. To make matters worse, because of the aforementioned non-existence, Eagles were not available on the used market either.
As a result, he manifested the usual Safety-Switch family stubbornness and began trying to invent the car from first principles. And when I mean “the car,” I mean literally the automobile. In fact, he has a reasonable claim to having invented the AMC Concord. Unfortunately, the technology was just not yet ready, and he died without ever realizing his dream. The car’s plans were stolen by dastardly Kenosha city planners when they unearthed his notebooks while digging a basement for a parts store.
We’ll never know if he was actually the inventor of the Eagle, because he succumbed to syphilis before advancing the Concord concept into its ultimate form. In his notes, he seems to describe at the very least the multi-function switch, vacuum-controlled front differential, and most of the bellhousing pattern of the newer car. After that, he quickly descends into madness and the notes become unreadable. Historians that I consulted for this documentary believed these last angry scrawls may be an early attempt at a wiring diagram.
There’s a reason why my favourite cars are the “normal” ones. Often, a dependable beater like an early-model EG Civic is simply disdained by the automotive media. And I understand why you might be able to become more excited for, say, a Lamborghini than one. However, cars like this motorized the common person. Every time they had to go to the grocery store or a slaughterhouse, that little starter cranked it up and they were on their way without thinking about it.
We could probably all do with a bit more of that dependability and honesty in our lives. There’s no inherent merit in buying more car than your family needs, to pretend that you are some kind of bourgeois industrialist by purchasing a $38,000 base-model front-wheel-drive Mercedes or $36,000 faux-offroading cute ute. Get the job done, and get the job right. That’s what we used to be all about, when we had honour.
Not to mention that these vehicles are at risk of slipping away entirely. Yeah, you might think that they made a whole pile of them, more than the sports/exotic grand tourers of your dreams, but if nobody thinks they’re special enough to keep out of the crusher, eventually you’ll never see them again. If you don’t believe me, when was the last time you saw an ‘87 Sunbird Turbo in public? These proletarian miracles are not just reliable commuters, but time machines, able to carry us back to a past that teaches us more about who we really are.
Plus, most commuter cars are cheap. This means you end up with a lot of extra money to really boost the living shit out of the thing. And the cops won’t hassle you nearly as often as they would if you were driving something even a bit flashier.
This is because the cops, like all of us, are pattern-recognition engines. Ferrari speeding? Makes sense. 1969 Valiant four-door with baby moon hubcaps doing 220 in the left lane while shooting rolling fireballs out of a hidden side-exit exhaust? Maybe take a few double-takes to make sure that the sleep deprivation and trucker meth hasn’t caught up with you, Officer. And that couple of precious extra seconds are just what you need to drop two gears and really leave the fuckers in the dust.
I know this is hard to believe, but I once had a boss who would end a meeting early if there was nothing more to cover in it. We’d just walk out like once-condemned death row inmates, having given a half hour or so of our lives back. Obviously, I would walk into Hell for such a man, so why aren’t I working for him anymore? Because the Meeting Mafia got him. Cut his throat and pulled his tongue right out through the hole. Or, more accurately, they gently burned his hand with too-hot coffee and left the empty pot behind without making more.
My boss Ted never ran another meeting again, and his resulting fall from grace was swift. I think he’s some kind of narwhal polisher down at the aquarium now.
See, there’s this whole hierarchy in an office. If you haven’t worked in one - and I’ll be honest, by now even the painful memories are beginning to fade - then just remember this concept. The more meetings you have on your calendar, the busier you are. And the busier you are, the more important you are.
It doesn’t matter if your time inside said meetings is mostly twiddling your thumbs and trying to count how many dot crawl errors the projector is emitting on red versus green signals - what matters is that you are busy. In fact, it helps to produce even more meetings if you deliberately try to avoid making decisions. Just put it off for another week or so, until you have “more data” (the word “data” is French for “horseshit.”) And if you get bored, just bring up some controversial topics to get the whole table jumpin’. I used to have another line manager who would just re-iterate a question from earlier, over and over, until they ran out of time (fifteen minutes late.) Not a fan, but she lived and Ted didn’t.
Even though I know intellectually that there is no chance of ever having another early-meeting-ender like Ted in the remainder of my patchwork career, I still hold out hope in my heart. It’s a little bit easier to duck meetings now, though, because it turns out that China will make an eerily realistic artificially-intelligent vtuber in your exact image. Sure, False Safety Switch doesn’t really get anything done or ever make any decisions, and his level of understanding of complex topics makes the Eliza chatbot look like a medieval alchemist, but he’s gotten me promoted twice this quarter already.
I just wish I didn’t have to keep sending my monthly cheques to “Beijing Intelligence Agency For The Destruction of Imperialist Pig-Dogs By Wasting Their Time In Endless Meetings.” As you can imagine, it’s a very long name to write. They should at least accept credit cards.
I’ve always wanted to get into stage rally. That’s the real shit. Driving dangerously quickly through rural residential neighbourhoods and forests. Listening to a bunch of Polish fans cheer you on as you take a turn on three wheels. Intercooled turbochargers. Gravel tires. A little handbrake action at every opportunity. It might sound dangerous, but it’s actually pretty safe: more people have died playing beer-league ice hockey than rally racing, according to a statistic I just made up.
There was just one big problem: none of the local sanctioning bodies would approve of my vehicles. It’s not like you need a full on Group B vehicle - any piece of shit will do - but the volunteer techs at least wanted to make sure that the forests would pose more of a threat to you than the wheel bearings. I could maintain my cars, yes, but every time I drive over to the auto store I see another couple of unloved beaters for sale and that’s where the money goes.
Luckily for me, it turns out that the local car rental place was hard up for customers. Nobody’s travelling anymore - especially not for work - and so there was a veritable cornucopia of delivery-miles shitboxes available for offer at my local airport. All I had to do was convince the rental clerk to let me have one, and ideally with a bit of insurance thrown in. You can’t imagine Colin McRae arguing with some dude at the airport desk about clearcoat damage. He knew the value of a deductible, and that deductible is a lot less than “figure out why that noise from the rear diff keeps getting louder.”
Like I said, the rental clerk gave me a lot of trouble. I can’t really blame them for wanting to do great customer service, and they did have a lot of excess inventory on the lot to upgrade me into. The funny thing is, I just didn’t really have much of an urge to fight them when I got bumped up to the Bentley sitting in the “VIP” corner of the lot. It’s got all-wheel-drive, paddle shifters, and probably a turbo or some shit somewhere inside that mass of dealership service contracts that they call an engine. Sure wish I could figure out where the handbrake handle is, though.
Folks of all descriptions are just plain excited about their opportunity to go into outer space. And that’s all well and good, but space exploration isn’t yet for me. Although as a space cowboy, you will be expected to run the thrusters at maximum burn - wide-open-throttle, baby - in order to reach Mars before you die of old age, it’s generally frowned upon to build your own rocket with no training and launch it. For one reason, walking home is tough, and space lacks AutoZones. If you thought the local insurance inspection (”has horn”) was tough, wait until you try to bullshit a NASA JPL engineer about what a hydrofoil is. Those jerks know how to operate their office espresso machine.
As a result, space travel at the moment is only available to governments, billionaires, and robots. I’m none of those things, so I am likely doomed to live out the rest of my existence moored to this giant rock. Which is alright right now, but as I get older, I’ll be dependent on those robots to give me pills and sponge baths. You can’t just send them to another planet on a whim, DHL. The address label clearly indicates “Earth.” No, I will not pay duty.
Since I’m stuck here with the rest of you anyway, it’s a good idea for us to try and make it as pleasant as possible. Even though basically nothing that we encounter here on Earth can be guaranteed to be superior to the infinite wonders of the cosmos, what we know space currently does not have is race tracks. Which is a huge waste, because we built a car and everything and put it on the fucking moon. Maybe the astronauts were just waiting for us to build a second one so they could drag. Nothing doing, you lazy welfare bums. Get a moon job if you want a moon car.
To circle back to my original point, we need to build more race tracks here on Earth. If everyone were exposed to just a tiny portion of the thrust that astronauts feel every day, maybe the thrill would drive them to take better care of the rest of their lives. Or a whole bunch of people would die horribly in single-vehicle rollovers, which is also acceptable. And once those billionaires leave their old million-horsepower rocket boosters lying around after they’ve fled the ruined Earth for a new universe to exploit, well, that’s when the racing will get really exciting.
Last week, my trusty clock radio started acting up. It’s no surprise: I got it back in high school, and it’s followed me from home to home over the course of decades. If you think about it, it’s only really been unplugged for at most an hour or two in all those years. Should be no surprise that some component inside is failing.
In the interest of science, I decided to open it up and see if I could repair it. Well, all of that plastic was pretty brittle, and the entire thing crumbled into a pile of vaguely bad-smelling yellow dust as I was manhandling it. This made me grumpy, and I soon swept the entire mess into my “for parts” storage location (the floor) and began blueprinting a from-the-ground-up replacement that would last another couple decades of waking me too early for a job I didn’t like.
One of my biggest complaints about the old model is that it had a radio. At first, I just hated that I would awaken to the sound of reactionary local DJs on pop stations retelling last week’s best internet jokes. Then, because my town has sort of gone downhill in the last few years, they closed the offices and just left behind a transmitter inside a shed in some field, playing the same top-40 downloaded from a distant server forever. Then, some asshole stripped it for parts last year, and there is no longer any working FM or AM station in my town, at least not one powerful enough to penetrate the Faraday cage my landlord wove into the walls at great expense when he heard that Bill Gates invented the MRI machine. So instead, I plugged in a recording of Japanese train station chimes. They’re pleasant, delightful, and wake hundreds of sleepy office workers a year.
The next problem was that power outages, which happen sometimes when the local copper thieves get a little handsy, usually made me late for work. I added a battery backup, powered by these huge lead-acids that I found in a shed last year. Now, it can run forever, even if the collapse of my local infrastructure continues unabated, or just if my landlord prioritizes paying his bookie over the power company again this month.
As for the clock part, I considered creating a delightful mechanical work of art and producing a long series of YouTube videos commemorating the craftsmanship and innate mathematical beauty of the humble clock.
Then I hot glued an old Casio wristwatch with a cracked face into it. A little solder later, and now I had a bombproof clock radio. Unless you moved it roughly and made two or more of the loose wires sticking out of it touch, or you put it down on a piece of metal and shorted it out. Or it was too damp overnight. Or the batteries got pissed on by the cat. I think my boss will understand.
Despite the stereotype of “car people” being dangerous drivers, most of the intense fans of automobiles that I know are actually rather sedate behind the wheel. The beloved Fast and/or Furious film franchise has its Hollywood thrills blowing out the floorboards of a second-generation Mitsubishi Eclipse, but if you ask all the folks around here it’s very rare for them to get up to anything more than some mild speeding.
That’s not to say that law enforcement sees it the same way as we do, of course. If there’s one thing that cops love to do, it’s to identify the cars that “stick out” and then figure out a reason to punish them. Loud exhaust, illegal tint, huge mud-terrain tires inexplicably mounted onto a Geo Metro - these are the kinds of abnormalities that attract the eyes of the seasoned traffic cop. So maybe we do drive a little faster in order to foil their pattern-recognition abilities. And also because we’re late for work. Maybe because we have to go a pretty long distance to pick up that $50 bugeye-Impreza transmission and we promised our significant others that we’d be back before nightfall, really, believe me this time, I’m serious.
And of course, there’s the occasional street race or two. Now, nothing that’s super dangerous to onlookers: only losers do burnout competitions in front of crowded bars, or drag stoplight-to-stoplight in a school zone. Out in the middle of the highway, all you’re likely to hit is a tea museum, or potentially some kind of deciduous tree. What did they expect would happen when they closed down all the racetracks in the area? We’ve still got race cars, or at least base-model commuters where you can see soapy residue in the shape of a race number on the rear windows because we haven’t washed them since 2006, and we still want to figure out whose car can break traction from a roll at 100km/h.
So the next time you see someone committing reckless driving, ask yourself: are they driving a nice car? If so, it definitely wasn’t me, officer. Because the Lexus dealership won’t let me test-drive their cars anymore. Not after they had to steam-clean that nice salesman’s poop out of the passenger seat.
Every excellent craftsperson has their own beloved tools. Take my friend Peter, for instance. He runs the kitchen at the ritziest restaurant in town: the Perkins on the interstate. If you dared to introduce even a drop of soap to his cast-iron pan, well, people have died for lesser infractions. The lucky ones last long enough to stumble into the truck stop, head on a swivel, eyes unable to see through all the blood, mewling piteously for help, before expiring dramatically atop a long-hauler’s plate of Bangin’ Spuds. It’s a local delicacy, don’t ask questions.
It’s not that he’s even wrong, either. That is, unless you ask the judge, but he’s on the take from the McDonalds in the back of the Wal-Mart. And I bet he’d change his tone if you stole his fancy hammer and started trying to use it to nail in some tent pegs. I know I keep bringing this up, but tools are what makes us different from the animals. Except for magpies, who it now turns out make pretty decently trainable machinists and are now displacing skilled human factory labour at a rate once unimaginable outside the fevered laudanum nightmares of cognitive ornithologists.
Now, Peter might be perfectly happy with a more modern carbon-steel pan, or even just some shitty thing from the restaurant supply store. That’s not the point. What has happened is that he had some good results with that pan in the past - maybe not even cooking results, just general favour from the gods - and has decided that this pan is the reason why. It makes more good things happen when you use it, and it must be respected. You could argue that the special regimen of having to maintain the pan caused it to be initially respected higher than the other cookware in the kitchen, but there’s a place for philosophers and it’s in the dishwashing section. Where you’re not going to use soap, right?
We may never actually understand how the human mind operates. Perhaps our combination of selective bias, faulty memory, and low-grade xenophobia can be harnessed into some sort of latent psychic power that affects probability when combined with a totem - a fetish, if you will. You skeptics may scoff, but I’m sure you have a favourite screwdriver, don’t you?
Rodents have been at war with us basically ever since we moved into permanent dwellings. Intuitively, you understand why: nobody wants a mouse in their box of Cheerios in the morning, or making a nest out of your kid’s favourite blankie. Like they say, the oldest profession is prostitute. The second-oldest profession? Exterminator. Third oldest is exterminator-prostitute. Just make sure you get the words in that last one in the right order before you hand over fifty bucks.
One of my friends in the “car community” used to be an exterminator. He would drive up to a house, pump it full of gas or lay out some traps, and come back in a few weeks to see what he’d killed. The psychic cost of having to walk past dozens of dead bodies in order to verify a nest had indeed been wiped out added up on him, though, and he quit after converting to Buddhism.
He set his boss’s house on fire, too, but that was personal. After that, if he ever saw a mouse in his place, he’d just borrow a cat from his neighbour to take care of it. If the mouse were to out-wit that cat, then, well, that’s the beauty of natural selection at work, and he didn’t have to feel any guilt like he would by directly murdering it with chemical weapons. I will point out at this point that he hadn’t read the entire Buddhist bible or whatever, either. He’s more of a “pamphlet guy,” and four noble truths is about two-and-a-half too many.
As for myself, I prefer the “redirection” method of pest control. Why would any mouse want to put up the effort to eat through the side of my house when they could instead join its ancestors in nestling into the interior of the Skylark that I picked up from a farm? Sometimes I dump a bag of bird seed in through the place where the rear window used to be, just to make sure they don’t get any ideas about moving into Volare Avenue.
It helps, too, that the only thing I have to eat around here are the five hundred pounds of breakfast burritos I scavenged from that going-out-of-business sale at the bankrupt gas station, and I saw a mouse die after eating one of those once. I think it was already pretty sick, though, if it was desperate enough to go for one.
Have you ever served on a standards committee? I know: I haven’t either. Nobody that I have ever met in my entire time on this very Earth has served on one of those so-called supervisory bodies that figure out what to name it when you charge your phone off another phone. It’s weird, too, because those standards rule all of our lives. We have no control over the development of those so-called norms, and are thus in thrall to this unaccountable elite.
That’s why I’ve decided to start my own counter-programming project. I call it the destandardization body. What we do is we find something that everyone has agreed on for a million years, like “power cords are white, black, and green” and then deliberately ignore it to see what happens. Now the live and neutral on your kettle are glitter purple and you better not fuck them up! Then we collect a huge amount of money from industry to tell them who we sent our standards documents to, so that the noncompliant items can be destroyed.
Most importantly, we’re going to let absolutely anyone serve on the standards committee. If you can find our office, and have a key that unlocks the door, and the code that lets you onto our floor, and can pass the retinal scans, and know how to jiggle the handle just right to get into the conference room, then you can join us and start exercising your democratic power to choose. Take advantage of your freedoms by restricting those of others for arbitrary and ill-reasoned motivations!
A lot of people might call all of this hostage-taking, but I prefer to call it predatory capitalism. Mostly because that name sounds way cooler. It helps add a little bit of vengeful panache to what would otherwise be irresponsible technocratic experimentation on a captive population. For instance, 2x4s are now to be exactly two-by-four. Will it screw up houses? Or will it all balance out as homeowners get a little bit of extra free wood to finish their decks? We’ve brought on a lot of esteemed sociologists and disaster researchers to help find out, and their papers will be available for purchase through our ludicrously expensive publishing arm.
Can you keep a secret? I’ve always wanted to learn to weld… you know, properly. When I was a kid, I used to tell people that I knew how to weld because my Uncle Carl taught me. In truth, I could only kind of booger two chunks of thick metal together with a car battery. Then, I refused to take proper welding education because to do so would be to admit to those same people that I didn’t actually know how to weld.
We all did it back then; playground bragadoccio about how grown-up we all were, even if we were just little frauds lying to one another. Fast forward a few decades, and I’ve finally lost enough of my ego that it’s time to admit I do not actually know how to weld. I was just about ready to enroll in night school and take a welding course when all the bad shit happened.
Now, I know what you’re saying: we live in an unrivalled era for learning to do dangerous shit in the comfort of your own home. I did eventually find a program that was willing to teach me how to weld through remote learning. The idea was that I would set my laptop up in a corner and make my instructor watch me stack some dimes over Zoom. Well, now I need a new laptop camera, and they also said no refunds. What little of the course I could follow definitely improved the quality of my work, yes, but I still felt that gnawing lack of fatherly approval that only a gruff bearded dude named “Professor Hank” could bring to my life.
As luck would have it, though, the province just re-defined the property lines of my neighbourhood. They’re going to run a brand new high-pressure natural gas pipeline right past my backyard, and what’s more, they’re looking for workers. It was the perfect opportunity to learn, and maybe get some fresh air and exercise at the same time.
The most important thing, they said, was that I’m non-union. No problem here, guys. No union will have me because of my renegade ways, not to mention that I’m self-trained. Uncle Carl got a job maintaining the motor pool at City Hall and will vouch for me. Flex Seal and Bondo is good to fifty or sixty bar, right?
In other countries, local municipalities try really hard to design a promotional mascot that will help drive tourism and engender a sense of fealty to the neighbourhood. It’s a good enough idea, which is why the local civic booster group started that project to try and create a cute character for my neighbourhood. They reasonably figured that if you could fix up the shithole in which I lived, then making people spend a few extra bucks at the downtown shopping district would be cake itself by comparison.
You gotta admire their ambition. Or, barring that, just the sheer will to produce mounds and mounds of billable hours for all those design consultants camped out in city hall. Design consultants who just happen to be related to the guy who controls the city’s purse strings. Either way, what they came up with was a seven-foot tall stuffed rabbit called Optimism-chan, who would wander around my part of town, attend special events, and encourage the local small businesses to find their own suckers to milk for millions of dollars.
Unfortunately for everybody, Optimism-chan got shanked in a back alley on about week two or so, and his head went missing. In the tense weeks before it showed up on the hood of the ultra-stretch, six-wheel-drive Escalade that one of the local warlords got chauffeured around in, the police conducted a lot of raids of junkpiles, figuring someone like myself would probably have accidentally hoarded it. And they were sort of right: I did own it for awhile, because Shaky Tim down the street traded it to me in exchange for a shattered B-series valve cover that I was using to hold some gently-used oil, and then I turned around and traded it to Just Ralph on the next street over in exchange for a Subaru piston with a hole in the crown. I just liked looking at that last one, a lot more than some tattered rabbit head with a bunch of blood on it.
Onward and upward, though. Optimism-chan would want us to keep our chins held high and look on the bright side of life. The cops actually left my shed cleaner than before they got there. It turns out their evidence photographer is a bit of a Marie Kondo, but without the synthetic-heroin addiction, and organized everything neatly onto a grid system on my shelves in order to take high-quality pictures. You know, in case I had somehow stolen a Honda Civic shift linkage that had been dragged on the street after the rear engine mount exploded during a nitrous pull.
There’s few things people dread more than the arrival of their latest credit card bill. A big tome of paper containing all of their impulse purchases, sinful subscriptions, and general wastes of money. It’s no wonder that a lot of folks don’t even look at the bill but instead throw it directly into the shredder, banishing this evil structure from their lives forever. It doesn’t have to be like this. Time to switch… to SwitchBank™.
Here at SwitchBank, we won’t give you a credit card. That’s because we don’t trust you enough to extend to you any credit. And that, in turn, is because nobody funding us trusts us enough to extend to us any credit. This has some big advantages. For one, you never have to worry about us foreclosing your mortgage because we bet the pinks in a Cavalier-on-Isuzu drag race. At no point will we securitize an investment and then sell it to other banks, because they won’t take our calls.
It doesn’t just stop at credit, though: we also won’t let you write cheques (our printer is out of toner) or use a debit card, because those involve paying someone else huge fees. Come over to our place, show us some ID, and we’ll dig your cash out of the back. What we do is best called “retro banking,” and retro is in.
Is it secure? You bet: our entire information technology systems architecture is one Mac IIci from 1989 running a Filemaker database. Nobody even knows how to operate it, let alone how to break in. And we have an armoured car, because to be honest, this was the entire reason for starting a bank in the first place. It’s pretty dope, and it scares the living shit out of slowpokes in the fast lane when you tailgate them with it. Most secure of all, however, is the fact that we have literally no customers. Our vault is empty! If anyone breaks in, all they’re going to find is a bunch of discarded staples from when we were having a stapler fight last Tuesday. Oh, and a bunch of armoured car parts. And Isuzu parts. Datsun parts… regular Nissan parts… couple of what I think used to be Corvette monoleafs in the back… huh, I forgot I had this Taurus transmission.
For a couple of months back there, we had a good thing going. My more media-savvy friends had identified that with everyone stuck at home, there was a need for a new kind of celebrity gossip magazine. And since the offices of Bad Cars Monthly were closed to us (because of the fumigation) we pooled our relative resources to make that new gossip magazine.
Normal definitions of “celebrity” were now largely obsolete; movie stars weren’t in new movies anymore, TV stars weren’t in new TV shows. Without that constant drumbeat of marketing and freshness, they would recede into the shadows until literally nobody remembered who a Ben Cattrall or a Carlito Thomas was. We would be a much cheaper alternative, that could be funded by the celebrities themselves in order to write up largely horseshitty stories about them and keep them in the media eye. The big boys wouldn’t bother touching a meagre couple of hundred grand forked over by movie stars, but for me it would keep the editorial bullpen in ramen and nitrous oxide for a couple of months.
The first few weeks were rough, because you have to get the word out. We took some jobs for free, just to establish ourselves with publicists. Our first issue was basically a bunch of semi-fawning profiles (you could adjust the level of fawn by spending more money) on a bunch of stunt doubles who an extras shop were trying to turn into professional wrestlers. What we didn’t realize is that our model was too successful. In the vacuum of other celebrity news, these humble workaday folks caught fire and became the most-hyped stars out there. If you could catch fire inside a vacuum. That’s how a dude who used to be famous for getting a hammer thrown at him by Leslie Nielsen headlined his own cyberpunk detective feature film. You’re welcome, America.
After that, things really started to take off. For other stunt doubles, that is. Actual celebrities (and their publicists) didn’t want to touch our product, because they were extremely mad that we had elevated their inferiors so well. The cheques still cashed, though - $50 here for a snippet, $75 there for a headshot. Soon, I even had enough money to order lunch delivery. Not that I did, because once the guy delivering pizzas realized who I was, suddenly it was going to be “on the house” as long as I could make him the new Batman.
Ultimately, we shut the entire thing down. Why? My friends had been ordered to return to their real jobs rather than pretend to be working over Zoom, and as such no longer wanted to answer the pleas of a million nobodies. Fame is a fleeting mistress, but I take heart in all the weirdos and small-time people that we turned into multi-millionaires. And hey, I can finally afford a container of Lysol wipes.
I think there are basically two kinds of people. There are the folks who read magazine reviews and then buy a product new, and then there are the real heroes who just fill their house to the rafters with ream after ream of broken old garbage. The former group doesn’t know what they’re missing out on: the thrill of repair, the agony of not being able to sleep while your mind races through whether it’s a bad trace or a suspect inductor - if everything worked and was fresh and new, then there’d be no point to life at all.
This, I think, is why appliances have been getting suckier and suckier. Sure, you could blame globalization, an unprecedented rate of stock buybacks, and even record-short terms of executives at major companies, but I think it’s that they just want to give everyone something to fix once in awhile. Little wheel fall off your dishwasher? Even the most dilettante bourgeois asshole can make it a weekend project to bop on down to the parts store and get a replacement skate for the lower dish basket, snap it in, and afterward he can brag to everyone else at the wine-and-cocaine wife-swap party about how he’s finally making his dead grandpa proud.
Of course, there’s more advanced failures in these things to keep the real psychos busy. While most people will call in a repairperson and get it fixed under warranty, you and I know that true enjoyment of an appliance is never possible until you’ve been inside it. Which is why I never became a surgeon, other than the essential tremor, scarred hands, and addiction to using two-part epoxy instead of the proper method to fix things. Med school frowns upon that stuff, possibly because they have a sweetheart deal with the super-glue people instead.
So the next time the shelf in your fridge collapses, or the doorbell starts screaming all day long, smile. it’s just the engineer who underspecced the part wanting to teach you a little bit about how things are really made. It’ll make your grandfather proud.
Lots of people don’t know this, but Quebec has its own separate legal system from the rest of Canada. I don’t mean that it ignores the Federal laws (although it likes to tell the other provinces that it does) but that it is patterned on French common law rather than English. What this means is that, sometimes, a case settled in the rest of Canada can take on an eerie second life in la belle province.
Liars, cheats, and flim-flam men abound, vying for their chance to get back into the legal spotlight. In my case, I was tapped to serve as an expert witness to establish, once and for all, that self-driving cars are kind of shitty. This autonomous combine harvester decided it was going to merge onto the highway near Longueil and ran over a family of four who had the unfortunate luck to be driving a black Civic with one dicky headlight at night. Every lawyer in the province wanted to get a piece of this, but only one - my old friend Max, who had recently moved to Montreal in order to get away from a group of loan sharks back home - got a superstar like me.
Over the course of a few breathless hours, I explained in exacting detail how this all happened. When self-driving cars were first developed, the code kind of sucked, and so they didn’t recommend that you actually operate them with other human beings nearby. Eventually, the sales teams kind of ran with this, and legal was okay with it as long as there was a big warning about “please make sure the robot is not currently ramming a daycare” that you had to click through before you could continue getting your daily gacha spins out of the way on your phone. And you know what? Not that many people died. So the sales types fired the engineers who knew what they were doing (they cost too much, and kept complaining) and hired looser (some would say “sluttier”) engineers to keep bolting on features. This thing should be able to go through the McDonalds drivethrough and pick up your morning coffee, and it better do that in six weeks because that’s what I promised the customer!
Fast forward a few years and virtually every car on the roads is operated nearly exclusively by what amounts to a random number generator that keeps spitting out “fuck that guy.” As long as the accident-evasion logic is still working, then it should sort of even itself out. Hey, it’s worked for humanity so far, and the robots think way faster than humans, right?
Max and I didn’t win that case, for two major reasons. The first one being that my giant presentation was available exclusively in English (my phone was too full to install Duolingo) and the judges and jurors took this very poorly. By far the biggest problem with our attempt, however, is that Max had not even passed the bar back home, much less in Quebec, and didn’t bother to pack the right wigs. They caught onto his shit tout suite (that’s French for “fuck this guy.”) We were on an Air Canada flight back home the next day, where the bilingual flight attendants spit in our faces. That didn’t have anything to do with the case, it’s just what happens when you’re in coach.
Everyone laughs at ridiculous safety warnings in manuals (”cruise control does not mean the car drives itself”) but think for a second about the poor person at the manual factory who has to write such drivel. Every morning, they climb out of bed excited to make a difference in the world, and then their day is ruined by 8:15 am when their boss dumps a whole new set of ways that people have wounded themselves this year using the same or similar product.
Although I’m sure they do end up with life hacks (you can’t safely use a corded drill to mix coffee, but a DeWalt 18V might be just the ticket to save some time in the morning) the overall effect is going to be disheartening. By and large, these technical writers got into their careers in order to explain obvious functionality in meticulous fashion. This dream is destroyed by the fact that everybody just chucks the booklet into their recycle bin as soon as they take the cool new thing out of the box. So it’s no wonder that once in awhile, they decide to get revenge on us technical types by under-documenting something critical.
Sure, you might think that it’s the fault of the engineers, for whom documentation is about as important as maintaining kicky summer tan lines, but at least some of these omissions have to be vengeance-related. Week after week of frustration finally pours out when it comes to the “advanced users” section, where they know that nobody will call in for help because they don’t want to look dumb. Don’t tell them that it needs to be placed in receive mode after every power-on. Only an idiot wouldn’t know that the chipset is special in that way.
It is in this small way that I think technical writers amuse themselves. Either that, or they’re just trying to create job security. When your crazy uncle misinterprets the guidelines and tries to arc 40,000 volts through his shoes, well, that’s like four or five new pages of warnings. That needs to be a whole new revision of the manual, boss. Might have to work some billable overtime.
We’ve all been there. A big project that demands our attention. It lives in your mind even when you’re not working on it, begging that you must return and accomplish it. You become driven. Demented, even. Soon you’re skipping socializing, sleep, drinking, and eating. That last one is risky indeed, as not eating has been linked by the Surgeon General to a dangerous lean condition that may cause internal damage.
For a little while, our tight-knit wrenching group had been running this sort of informal service. If one of our brothers or sisters in arms hadn’t been heard from in a little while, maybe got stuck with a bigger job than they could handle, someone would swing by and make sure they’re alright. Usually it wasn’t anything as dramatic as being crushed under some failing coupon-store jackstands, but it often did require intervention, like standing a safe distance away from actual work being performed and freely criticizing it. Oh, and ordering pizza.
Something bad happened when we were all so far apart, before it was decided for us by our social and economic betters that we should get back to the way things used to be. None of us were going out, because who wants to drive halfway across the city only to stand on the driveway and yell from a distance? There’s no way you can paint-shame a buddy for owning a fifteen-footer when you are nearly sixty feet away, and more importantly, you can’t safely share that pizza you are ordering to save your bud’s life. As a result, “Greasy” Carlito (his legal first name, scare quotes and all) got rickets. Rickets, like some kind of 17th-century pirate ship mechanic. His disgusting urge to consume pineapple pizza would have given him just enough vitamin C to fend it off.
Don’t worry, though. We built a solution, and like all good solutions, it involved an unnecessarily complex combination of extremely fragile technology to solve a social problem. A few thousand lines of JavaScript and no debugging whatsoever was all it took to make sure that every member of my axle-dropping gang got an automatic pizza delivery order once a week. Even if they had gotten trapped under a fallen transmission on Monday, chances are they wouldn’t die before the pizza guy got to them the next Thursday. And nobody can get angry about an unsolicited visit from the pizza fairy.
The solution seemed perfect! Until winter hit, and everyone started keeping their garage doors closed while fixing their shitboxes. Anyone heard from Stan lately?
The city council, bereft of ideas and worried about the violent outrage of basically every special-interest group in the tri-state area, had resorted to the coward’s way out: direct democracy. There’s this big, dead mall out by the airport. Been virtually abandoned for years, except for a cell phone store that refuses to sell you actual phones. A few months ago, the city finally acquired it by default, when the developer put “property taxes” below “2 am cocaine martini” in his list of priorities. And they wanted us to figure out what to do with it, because sometimes when you touch a turd, the turd gets on your hands.
I had a lot of great proposals that I shopped to the city council: private prison, autocross course, school shooting training (I left it ambiguous as to which side was being trained; I’m still not sure which would be more profitable), horse stables, mini golf course, and retirement home. It was the last one that I was most invested in: it warmed my heart to think of a bunch of dementia-ridden old people, eternally mall-walking, reliving the golden age of when capitalism still functioned and it was possible to buy a Garfield-shaped phone from the Radio Shack. That one stung the most when they were all rejected without the courtesy of a reply.
What the city ended up doing was selling the property to a condo developer, who promised to partition the place up into little condos. At that point, they would then presumably try to find people who wanted to live in a small portion of a decrepit 1970s shopping mall, but were also incredibly rich. The huge amount of parking appealed to me, but I was told that it would also eventually get turned into condos, for all the people who would rush to move to my dying backwater city now that they heard the shopping mall no longer existed.
This plan sounded great, and there was much excited handshaking, ribbon-cutting, and then a bankruptcy proceeding as it turned out that the new developer was less “liquid” and more “loan terms scrawled on a napkin from the airport Chili’s.” So the shopping mall went right back to the city, where it sits abandoned to this day. I still can’t park in the parking lot, because the newly-hired private security doesn’t want me to devalue the People’s investment.
I’ve been saving my nickels, though. With any luck and the right bets on the stock car races this weekend, I should be able to make a pretty compelling bid for City Hall itself, which has a fantastic parking garage and tons of cool old statues I can sell for scrap metal. They won’t need it; their new mall has air-conditioning, a mouldy Orange Julius for lunchtime deal-making, and a great PA system for council meetings. And it’s already pre-decorated for Christmas.
My grandfather always said money spent on a tool was never wasted. He grew up in an era where the most advanced tool you could get was a really nice backsaw, made by craftsmen in his community who he could trust to stand behind their work. However, I bet that if he had found out that I could get a cheap ESR meter from Lebanese eBay or a lithium-ion battery spot welder from a Chinese merchant who speaks entirely in Google Translate and may just be a sophisticated chatbot, he’d have been all over that shit too.
Nowadays, everyone owns a lot of shitty tools. Of course, modern machining practices, metallurgy, and the discovery of fire have made it so that even the shittiest dollar-store socket set is still going to last you a couple years until the 19mm socket cracks in half just as you’re torquing up your second-to-last lugnut. And as I alluded to before, ten bucks can get you all manner of specialized tools that used to be on the Christmas lists of guys who worked at Bell Labs, could pronounce “azimuth” without giggling, and had more letters after their last name than I have letters in mine. It really is a golden era.
What’s missing is the lifetime tools. Sure, if you’re a woodworker, there are lots of those on offer. You can head on down to the local Lee Valley chuckle hut and spend the GDP of Uzbekistan on a Chappell square that you can hand down to your grandkids. This is because the things that you make with woodworking tools have inherent value to the kind of people who have money. Did you spend several months of weekends making a boat in your backyard? Congratulations, it’s now on a special episode of the New Yankee Workshop and the payout from a bunch of Rhode Islanders who came down for the weekend will buy you a new dust collection system. Those snooty types will just spit on my Volare as it rolls past, even if I opted to use the $9 paint roller at Princess Auto versus the $3 one when it came time to smear industrial-strength Bondo over the rust.
So that’s why I visit estate sales, so I can collect the tools of the past from other people’s grandpas. And then I steadfastly refuse to use them, because what if they got damaged? Best to keep them on display, and use the thirty-seven-cent power drill I just got on Black Friday.
The other day, I was eating a jar of honey-roasted peanuts at 3am – as you do – when, my phone voided of charge, I looked at the lid. There, moulded into the inside of it, was the name and logo of a lid-making company. Presumably they’d snuck their makers’ mark right past the peanut manufacturer, and were now brazenly advertising at their expense. What kind of people would dedicate their entire working lives to lids? Whether or not I really wanted to know, I would soon find out.
I did a couple web searches, which must have tipped off their system that I was looking for them. This is because I heard a knocking at my door a few minutes later, and emerged to find a group of individuals all dressed in t-shirts bearing the same logo. Nobody else had gotten this far into the puzzle, they explained, and they’d been running it since the nineties. With no time to lose, I was ushered into the company van and sped away into the night. The van was pretty nice. One of those 07-09 Chevy Express fleet vans, except with the distinct howl of the 6.0 option. Up front, the wheelman noticed my appreciation of his choice of ride, and rewarded me with some flat-footed smoke shows at every light on the way to the airport.
A few hours later, we were standing in the parking lot of the factory. Legally, they smuggled me another country to do it, but I wasn’t complaining. They had a very swank private jet, and I always relish the opportunity to poop in something more expensive than my house (which is why I always go to the bathroom whenever I get invited over to yours.) It was still too early for the average worker bee to be working hard on threaded caps, but the founder was there, along with a small marching band, to celebrate my achievement in becoming the first guy to be even moderately curious about “sealing technology.”
It was a pretty nice visit. I feel a little embarrassed that I asked that scientist if he could help me get my old can of POR15 open, but in my defence I was very tired. Although the prize wasn’t a huge wad of money, the really big mason jar they did give me will hold a bunch of bolts!
Now, I’ve never gone to prison (prison is different from jail) but as far as I can tell, there are no cars there. So you don’t get to drive, which means that the cars don’t break down, and then you don’t get to fix any cars. It’s basically a fancy Christmas party except it lasts several years. Overall, going to prison doesn’t seem like a good way to spend any portion of your life.
Keeping this in mind, took the opportunity to volunteer for the “Scared Straight” program for inner-city high school kids at risk. At first, I was concerned about the homophobic connotations, but it turned out that they were perfectly willing to use prisoners and the threat of physical violence to terrify kids of all sexual and gender identities, which warmed my heart. My job was to drive the little tour bus to the prison, and make sure all the kids had their little passes.
Now, it’s not quite that simple. During training, they really drilled it into you that you had to actually check the passes the kids came with. Apparently a few years ago, someone fucked up and a prisoner who looked a lot like a teen heartthrob was able to escape, after they were presumably scared straight enough by the experience to then murder several witnesses against him. So now you make sure that those kids are actually kids.
However, due to an accident involving an errant driveshaft in my own misspent youth, I have an aggressive form of face blindness. It is virtually impossible for me to match photo ID, and I told the organizers this. In response, they gave me a sheet of paper that contains “current teen slang” and informed me that if I was at all unsure, I should just leave the kids there rather than let them get on the bus. Better safe than sorry, they chuckled, and after all these kids are basically one step away from prison anyway.
On my first trip out, it was going pretty well until it came time to check the IDs. None of them matched, and what’s more, none of the “kids” knew any street slang. Following my gut, I decided it was better to leave the whole lot of them there and go home empty-handed.
Unfortunately for me, it turns out that my face blindness also extends to not being able to identify which parking lot I was picking up the kids from. However, the chess club got a valuable life lesson about getting on buses driven by strangers, and the wardens got a good laugh out of it.
Lots of people in my neighbourhood operate huge pickup trucks, sometimes with suspension mods to make those trucks even larger. It wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t take up exactly 1.15 parking spots every time I go to visit the local strip mall. I started shopping for a narrower car in the hope that I could reclaim at least some portion of the unused space, and then just ended up spending all night pressing refresh on the listing page for “moped” on Craigslist.
Once I was so equipped with my oil-gargling Puch, I was pleased with the ease of parking. However, those same truck owners never saw my little bike, and kept pushing it onto the sidewalk when they tried to park in the spot. Although this would normally add a tremendous amount of frame damage that would total a moped, I’m not really one for “having collision insurance,” so a couple hours of hammering and heat straightened everything out. Still, it rankled, especially when I had to push the fortune-cookie-shaped bike home.
I experimented with installing flashing parking lights, spraypainting the bike hazard yellow, and even hiring private security to use stolen Israeli tank-killer rifles on the engines of the offending pickups, but nothing helped (2019+ Rams have more grille than body, and the bullets deflect off the chrome.) Whenever I came out of the vet or the liquor store, I would have a whole new bodywork project on my hands. Frustrated, I was just about to give up on the entire ordeal and dishonour my house by using public transit, when it occurred to me that most of these trucks had two features in common: their beds were empty, and their tailgates had been pawned for meth money. With a strategic application of throttle, I could wheelie the bike right into the bed of a truck, where it could remain fairly safe from the Braille parking by other pickups.
There’s just one problem: if I forgot to get my shopping done before the end of Happy Hour at the local bar, I would come out to find that the truck I parked the moped in had disappeared, along with my precious bike. This, too, was solvable. With GPS anti-theft trackers, you ask? No; all I had to do was keep buying bikes and waiting for angry phone calls from truck owners who, weeks later, went to Home Depot for a single package of wood screws and realized I had thrown some garbage with my phone number on it into the bed of their truck.
There are many fried chicken restaurants who place a culture of secrecy upon their proprietary herb-and-spice blends. I think that this is folly, and represents the inherent harm to civilization that terminal-stage capitalism has enacted. The people helped finance the production of these spices (through both indirect government via tax breaks and more indirectly from their custom) and as such, the people deserve to know how to reproduce this chicken should the enterprise that sells it to them fail. We call this Right to Flavour.
Who knows how many unknown fried chicken restaurants have already evaporated into the American subconscious without leaving behind their unique breading? The next generation of fast food historians will only have vague notes and newspaper reviews to go on when someone asks “did Rax have good chicken?” With just a small tweak to policy and a corresponding seriousness of government enforcement, they could have answered that question by cooking up a fresh batch.
Currently, it is illegal to reverse-engineer chicken, even though it requires specialized skills, sophisticated laboratory machinery, and many thousands of hours of costly trial-and-error. We shouldn’t be putting anyone who wants to work this hard at something this stupid in jail. We should be making them the new Viceroy of Open-Source Chicken Enforcement.
Yes, it is true that by enacting this legislation in our region, many international chicken restaurants will want to close down their franchises as soon as possible. They don’t want their secret to get out, and the county is so small that the cost of never doing business here again would barely register on their bottom line. Not all will, however, and as other municipalities across the country quickly follow us with their own Right to Flavour laws, they will soon realize they have no choice but to reopen here, offering the legally-mandated information about their proprietary fried-chicken coatings.
When you’re on the hunt, everything around you becomes less appealing. Whether it be a quest to murder an animal, getting that one rare high-trim-level part from foreign eBays, or seeking the one broken trace that is keeping this piece of shit from working I swear it’s the last one, you could drive a flotilla of supermodels and gold past my ass and I wouldn’t notice. My therapist calls this “worrying fugues of hyperfocus,” but he also had a cool pen that I spent about six hours trying to figure out how it worked (it uses ink.)
Sometimes, when I really get going, I could use that pen. I keep a lot of notes. Most of them would probably end me up in prison if anyone were actually able to read my chicken scratching, but it makes me feel better to vent my frustrations onto that yellow (sorry: “canary”) legal pad along with the schizophrenic maze of diagrams, arrows, and truth tables that I’ve worked out when I’m really on the trail of getting that one last piece of the puzzle. This surprises a lot of people who know me well, because I’ll also go to the grocery store without a list, intending to “play it by ear” and coming home with three bags of surplus Asian pork cracklings but no milk or eggs.
I think keeping organized in this way is essential. After all, even with my legendary ability to ignore everything else in my life in order to complete some abstract and worthless micro-accomplishment, I still occasionally need to sleep or use the bathroom (just not frequently enough, again according to my therapist.) This way, when I wake up and scrape the drool and desk residue off of my chin, I can get right back to where I left things off. Sometimes it’s even better afterward, because I can actually see what I’m doing now instead of just making more work for myself by swinging tools around in a teary haze.
Does this mean that I actually get more things done? Well, the funny thing about my so-called hyperfocus is that what it’s best at is finding new projects. And with such great notes, I can tell myself that I can pick the old ones up again any day. Now if only I could find where I put those old notes in this giant pile of shit…
There is in the shitbox community a concept of the “forever car.” As you’d expect from the name, this is the imaginary vehicle that you would put actual effort into preserving, maybe even park it inside covered storage and not drive it in the snow.
I would take this sacrifice for relatively few cars, but one of them is the humble Datsun 240Z. The “Z,” as Americans mispronounce it, is the epitome of grand-touring perfection. Nothing says “long-distance comfort” like a tendency towards massive oversteer and carburetors that need a little adjustment every time you go up or down a mountain. Styling-wise, the Z is like an E-type Jaguar but without the British classism, or even a wiring harness fire. Needless to say, I crave one with every fibre of my being, but unfortunately their tendency towards rust has severely limited the supply.
Sometimes in the mornings, I get my coffee and go look at the corner of my garage in which the Datsun would live. For that car, I tell myself, I would move the several broken transmissions, half-a-dozen D-series Honda motors, and I’d probably even make a serious effort to get that 7.25″ third member back into the Ramcharger it came out of. Then, half the garage could be dedicated to this car. My car.
And then I’d maintain it right, I really would. I might even use the right sized bolts on it instead of re-tapping for Home Depot hardware every time a hole comes out a little gooshy. Hell, I’d probably even have long happy summer nights of leaning over the fender, working out the minute adjustments to timing and jetting that would get me that little bit of street oomph, instead of setting it to “rich as shit” because it’s the only way the thing keeps from stalling at lights on my way to work. That all sounds pretty nice.
Luckily for me, basic economics means I never have to worry about maintaining something I have this level of attachment to. This way, I drive my cars throughout every season, and it breaks my heart as I see them reduced to rust. However, they’re not “forever” cars, and as such must eventually be returned to the Earth, my role as caretaker ending as soon as I see something else that’s brown and shiny on the local classifieds.
I think it’s important to try to better yourself. Although I myself have never seen too much of a point in jogging, mostly because I get 100% of my daily exercise by frequently weightlifting both import and domestic iron by crabwalking across the garage floor because I’m too cheap to buy an engine lift, there are a lot of joggers in my neighbourhood already. And their numbers are only growing as the perception of the community transitions from “aspirational” to “a little run-down.”
Most of them really don’t bother me. It’s actually fun to see people out in every weather, pushing themselves to the limit in their pursuit of the ability to run slower than my car does in first gear with the clutch pedal still mostly depressed. There is one joggist, however, that I am convinced has it out for me.
A few weeks ago, I began to notice the pattern. Whenever I got into my car and put it into reverse to back out of the driveway, this jogger would appear, darting across the planned trajectory of my car and then slowing down to take a breather. I’d wait for a few seconds, because it’s not like I was in any particular hurry, and then be on my way. No real harm is done by respecting the pedestrian, as we all came from pedestrians and may one day return to them (when the water jackets finally split in this block and I have to walk home.) However, the habit became impossible to ignore. Even though my schedule is highly variable, every time I went to leave my house, she would appear and do the exact same cycle of dart-puff.
Paranoid by nature, I began to wonder if she had been sent by one of my many enemies. Perhaps they simply wanted to slow me down a bit, or at worst intended to frame me for vehicular manslaughter (my brakes aren’t really that good until you’ve driven for like 30 minutes or so.) I thought about following her, in order to confirm that she was indeed returning to the secret base of my foes after each so-called “rep,” but the high-lift cam, Swiss-cheesed exhaust, and the fact that I have the only working Plymouth Volare in North America didn’t lend itself to surreptitious counter-surveillance. At worst, she’d probably assume I was some kind of scumbag, and call the police.
So for now, we are at a sort of detente. I put my car into reverse, and then wait until she appears. Then I wait peacefully, maybe give a little wave. It will never occur to me that perhaps the reason her jogging is slowing and she is fighting for breath is because the cold-start choke and sticky accelerator pump on my Ball & Ball Shit-Ass® Two-Barrel is shooting out clouds of near-pure ethanol race gas. That would require me to be able to hear her over the sound of my idle.
You can’t trust the factory service manual. Yeah, it’s certainly tempting to do so, because it came from the factory. They’re the authorities. They made the car, after all. Think, though. Does the factory repair the car? No, they do not. Everything’s easy when you’ve got the car broken up into little bins at your station and all you have to do is insert bolt 59-B into captive nut 59-A in a glorious, air-conditioned, controlled-humidity, zero-rust environment. So it should come as little surprise that the factory service manuals frequently disagree with your specific mission, and indeed often with objective reality.
For awhile, we had an intrepid bunch of folks who would buy every car that came out and rip the bitch to shreds. Then they’d put it back together and tell you how you could do the same thing. Kings among men, really, although very lazy ones who would often tell you that any reasonably complicated assembly (transmissions, say) are made entirely of wizard magic and you must never, ever, attempt to penetrate their housings because it would make the book balloon to 400 pages and the publisher would shit their pants. Kings.
Nowadays, that’s all over. There’s too many different cars, they update too frequently, and everyone’s illiterate. The replacement is YouTube videos, which feature the protagonist squinting at a poorly-focused chunk of steel hovering over their head, and pointing out to make sure you never forget to remove this bolt (the one that their body is blocking in the shot) or really bad shit will happen and you won’t be able to get the subframe out. It’s no surprise that a lot of people are tempted to go back to the factory, because at least the engineers who told the technical writer what to put down were not actively on methamphetamine when they did so.
Now, I’ve never been privy to dealership training, because even the podunkiest minor-brand dealership garage in North America is not going to be convinced that I know what I am doing with a set of wrenches. However, I imagine it mostly consists of your trainer picking up the service manual and chucking it directly into a roaring fire, then turning you loose on a pre-production automobile that is later crushed to conceal all evidence that you can in fact put an M12 bolt into an M8 hole with enough ugga-duggas and get away with it for the duration of the warranty period. Come to think of it, this is probably how “book hours” are devised, too, the true documentation of the professional mechanic’s realm.
So, if you can’t get Haynes, you can’t understand YouTube, and you can’t trust the factory service manual, what do you do when you have to repair a car? Well, for me at least, you wait until the car has been out of production for multiple decades, and then develop a sort of intuitive knowledge of its construction, like a dowsing sense for the badly engineered parts of a car. This, in turn, can be accomplished by purchasing several dozen examples of the exact same car until you can conclusively determine “oh yeah, the front suspension falls off on all of them, doesn’t it?” Then, you just keep buying more cars until it doesn’t matter that the old ones are broken anymore.
Slalom. Slalom. Sla-lom. Slaaaaaaalom. The element that disrupts every reasonable run I’ve ever made. Do I enter at the left or at the right? How can I make sure I’m straight enough for the next part? Or should I set up the next corner early, don’t get close enough to that cone - it’s a trap? Either w- oh shit, I clipped the last cone with my ass again. One day I’ll learn how long this damn car is.
For those of you unfamiliar with the advanced bloodsport that is autocross, the threat that a slalom poses is perhaps laughable to you. It’s just a couple cones, and you slow down and do a bit of an S through them, then you rocket right out as soon as you’re free. How hard could it be? I invite you to take a spin around a course with one of these little mantraps set up in it and then come back and tell me that it’s no big deal. Getting it right feels like you are blasting off into hyperspace, and you’ll do anything to get that feeling again, even if it involves actually learning to race.
When I talk to other competitors about the event, I get a sense that they are perfectionists, ratcheting down on every minuscule aspect of the course, tinkering with a thousand variables every run in the pursuit of the legendary FTD. This is not necessarily something I share: my goal is largely not to embarrass myself, and unfortunately the needle is halfway to “getting laughed out of motorsports forever” by showing up in a smoking Lincoln Zephyr on snow tires because it was the only car that started that morning. I don’t mind too much about the competitive aspects, because my true opponent is my greatest enemy: myself.
All this means that, yes, at the end of the day every event has been between five and eight battles with a little slalom of cones. At least the word is fun to say.
I’m always looking for storage space. It’s not just because I can’t bring myself to throw potentially useful things away while constantly purchasing new half-broken shit. Wait. No, I’m now receiving reports that this is in fact the case. Nevertheless, I’ve walked around my house many times now looking for that last little bit of cubic space that could nestle away a shelf full of technical manuals, or a crystal skull scavenged from a former dictator’s garage sale. And everything’s been capitalized on; everything except for this little bit of loft space above my living-room closet.
Now, I’m not really one for “open-concept” houses, but this one spoke to me when I was in the market. Namely, it spoke to my wallet, and its primary language is “you can fucking afford me-lish.” A rare dialect, to be sure, but the desired outcome was realized. I moved into the place, looked around with appreciation once I had finished stacking my moving boxes into a tidy corner of the basement, and went “look at all this space!”
By now, though, I had already filled every available area of wall and floor space with junk, shelves for junk, or expensive parts for turning the junk back into functional objects. For instance: a new couch is ten thousand dollars. A five-year-old couch that a cat has scratched is free. Replacement fabric, a staple gun, maybe some hog-ring pliers? Seventy bucks at most. You’re coming out way ahead if you take the one that Hissy McPissums tore to shreds and turn it back into a real couch. Whether or not someone desires the couch after you’re done is largely academic. You’ve accomplished your goal of being a Handy Person who Fights Entropy.
Of course, this assumes that you only have one project with which to spend your jealously-guarded “project time,” and also that you don’t spend a significant portion of that time smoking STP-laced dope and spinning tall tales about that time you jumped a mall fountain in your Baja Bug. So the couch sits there, which is okay because you can stack more shit on top of it. It’s not hoarding, because I fully intend to fix it one day, and I don’t actually enjoy possessing it.
Back to the story. As I explained earlier, the last area of free space in my home was the awkward loft area above my living-room closet. I suspect that normal people put art up there, or maybe urns containing the ashes of dead relatives. For me, though, I found out that it was the perfect place to put a set of race tires. They’re only five or six years old, and I read somewhere on the internet that you can regain most of their pliability by rubbing bleach on them before a big race. Yes, they are very heavy, and the “loft” area was insufficiently joisted to call it such, but thankfully the massive amount of shit inside the closet itself has kept the ceiling from collapsing so far. Hey, I wonder if I could store some stuff on the roof.
We all know someone who’s gone a little crazy and bought a castle. It’s easy to see how it happens. Castles are extraordinarily cheap, and in larger supply now than they ever have been before. This is partially because of the worldwide decline of monarchies, but also because the average single-family home is inarguably superior in every way but style.
It’s that last bit, the style, that drives regular folks like you and me to pick them up. Who could resist buying a Scottish castle on the moors for less than a 2 bedroom condo in New Jersey? Nobody could, but that initial purchase is just one small part of the cost of owning and operating a castle. You’ve got moat insurance, repairing flooding damage from the moat, moat tax, care and feeding of the crocodiles in the moat, and even if you don’t have a moat (why!?) it costs a lot to heat and cool a place that was not originally designed for central climate control.
On top of that, “castle culture” is not like owning your average place in a planned community. Neighbouring lords will want to visit and surveil your peasantry, and heaven help you if you haven’t gotten a sufficient number of vassals to pledge to their pet cause of the week (almost certainly: war with France.) Not to mention all the daughters you’ll be expected to marry off in order to cement or repair damaged alliances. And it’s not like there’s an advice column to write to about your tenuous hold on the bordering forest and its mass of populist bandits.
So it’s no surprise that a lot of castles are purchased frivolously, enjoyed for a short period, and then put right back on the market. Kind of like boats, except you can park your boats in a castle, thus lending a worrisome practicality to the entire process.
Lots of people don’t know this, but the most important part of any project is taking notes. You gotta take a bunch of photos to know where each weird screw goes back in, write out your kooky theories so they stop bouncing around your mind, and focus by drawing a dong or two in the margin. Every famous scientist - and a lot of people who are just really forgetful due to an unfortunate childhood accident, like myself - have a treasured set of notes in which they have meticulously captured the highs of trial and the lows of error. I never thought this harmless little practice would backfire on me.
You probably heard that I cured cancer last month. It’s not really a big deal, because what I was trying to do was figure out a way to get Cheeto dust off my fingers. And honestly, from what it sounds like, I didn’t really get all of the cancers, just like ninety percent of them. I had a real surprise coming when I shared my findings with the rest of the world.
A couple hours after I posted my findings to Twitter (the well-known social media network where all the scientists complain about their bosses), I heard a knock on the door. It was two big dudes from the “Smithsonian,” if that’s a thing, and they wanted all of my notes so they could put them in the museum. Of course, I refused: I knew all the fucked-up shit that was in my notebook that would get out. They needed an edit pass before they were ready for public consumption, I explained while fumbling for my spare torque wrench, the one that’s so far out of calibration it’s now only useful for braining guests.
Nothing doing, they explained, and the bigger of the goons grabbed the torque wrench from my hands and twisted it around his own neck like a pretzel for emphasis. I couldn’t stop him even if I were in a car, and all of mine have such questionable unibody integrity that even then it would probably still end in fisticuffs with a dashboard around my ankles. The goons took off with the notes, and left behind a worthless Nobel Prize for medicine and a letter signed by every world leader. I got them framed, but it’s been taking me a little while to figure out where to hang them. Maybe over the toilet.
So yes, that is why the Smithsonian now has a bunch of yellow legal pads with ghastly compound insults about my coworkers on them. I doodle a little during my conference calls, and I write down the insults that come to mind so that I can avoid saying the rude shit out loud. Hopefully, none of them will go and visit, because it’s probably super awkward having to fire the guy who cured cancer.
They say you can never really become a master until you’ve avenged the death of your mentor. Since time immemorial, teary-eyed apprentices have been left behind by chuckling Big Bads after watching their gruff-yet-beloved supervisor get cut down. The tragedy-training-revenge cycle has never been supplanted as the superior way to prepare students for the real world, but it’s a little bit impractical nowadays. I’m here to tell you that your high school physics teacher didn’t actually die.
That’s right. Even though his noble sacrifice at the end of the school year emboldened the ragtag group of rogues and freaks that made up your senior class to study so much harder for the final exam, he actually just used stage magic and fake blood. He’s doing the same shit to this year’s senior class, or at least he would be if he could figure out Zoom. The reason is that it’s simply not profitable enough for the school board to keep wiping out people with twenty-plus years of experience, nor are there enough black magicians named Zio wandering the Earth anymore due to globalization reducing the demand for expensive domestic magicians of all kinds.
Although you may feel betrayed by this fiction, don’t be. Mister Jones really just wanted you to do well on your test. And to an equal or possibly greater extent, the administration of the school wanted him to raise the average test score of all students, so that the feds would maintain the current level of funding. After all, it’s not cheap to keep the archery class in new bows, or replacing the steeds every year whenever someone in the junior-varsity jousting program finds a new place the armour doesn’t adequately protect them.
As you may be aware, electrostatic discharge (ESD) is the most dangerous threat that our technologically-advanced civilization has faced thus far. For those of you at the back of the class who maybe slept through a couple lectures, let me get you up to speed. When you shuffle your feet across the carpet and then touch a metal doorframe, that electric shock fucks up microchips. Sure, there’s some chips that are a little more resilient to it than others because their designers didn’t have a two-speedball lunch before their tape-up, but at the very least you’re going to make their little silicon day really miserable.
Now, a lot of people have called me paranoid just because I carry around a high-powered ESD testing gun at all times. This is because our increasingly computerized society and lax software-engineering standards mean that, statistically, something around you will act fucking weird today. And if that “something” is a self-driving car, and “fucking weird” is defined as “running some pedestrians over,” it’s probably best that you have a tool on hand to give it the ol’ ctrl-alt-delete. HERF-ing the ECU shielding is going to both provide a valuable bug report for home base and keep the thing from going all Johnny Five on a pack of Boy Scouts. If “they” didn’t want you to do it, then they’d spend some engineering time putting in safeguards against it, right? Right.
Although extremely primitive by modern standards, my own cars are no exception to needing the occasional wake-up call from Louie the Lightning Bug. My Volare was made in a time where “software” referred to Garanimals, its engine control “logic” effectively runs on half-understood Victorian-era steam technology and contains no integrated circuitry, but its radio acts a bit dicky once in awhile. I could clean the volume dial, but Deoxit costs like twenty bucks a can. Forty-five thousand volts does a pretty good job of burning out any oxides that show up on the faders, trust me. On top of that, if I bang it on the body a few times, the antenna will shoot a cool Jacob’s ladder, which I’m convinced is the future of modified cars. Sure wish I could turn my headlights off again, though.
So go out and do your part for the advancement of humankind. Just don’t go around shocking people. There’s an awful lot of folks with pacemakers inside them, and we really don’t want to find out how bad the exception handling code is inside Uncle Grandpa’s cardiovascular system.
There’s just something about a professional-level workshop that brings a feeling of joy to my heart. The originator of that feeling, naturally, is a giant red “emergency stop” button. I might not ever hit it (statistics show that even in an emergency, most coworkers will just point and laugh as someone is getting ate up in the machine) but it’s the one feature that draws the line between an amateur suburban-garage shithole and a place where no work gets done because everyone is constantly in safety meetings - thus allowing me to sneak onto the shop floor while they’re distracted and run off a few parts before the shop steward can hear it and chase me out.
It got me to thinking about all the other places I’d like to see an emergency stop button. Every day, we are surrounded by a ton of machines that do need a way to reliably stop them from whatever they are doing, but because they do not pose the same obvious and imminent hazard to human life that a $59 scroll saw threatens, we don’t bother hooking them up to big red buttons. Still not convinced? Pop quiz, hot-shot: does Ctrl-C work on your SQL client when you accidentally forget a WHERE clause on your big UPDATE statement? The big red button wouldn’t be nearly so ambiguous, and mashing it would immediately stop you from accidentally overwriting the CEO’s Tinder profile with “TEST penis penis penis.” Of course, it would also knock out power to the entire shop floor, and ideally cost a fair amount of money to replace, but you can’t put a price on safety. Plus, it feels good to hit it, which has to end up as some kind of emotional benefit that doesn’t show up on paper. Bam!
The closest analogue we currently have to the big red button in cars is the hazard switch. True, it doesn’t shut the car off and stop any active fires that are roaring in the engine bay, but on a lot of cars the button blinks along with the turn signals and that’s pretty cute. For our European-car-driving friends, it gives you the power to park wherever you want. Self-driving cars are going to be a whole new ballpark. We don’t know what’s going on inside their miles of silicon bullshit, and even if we did we wouldn’t be paying attention to it because Seinfeld can be watched on phones now. Milliseconds count in these life-or-death driving situations, and when your gleaming electric cough-drop is about to run over a grandmother of fourteen, you can’t be trying to close the climate control menu in order to get to the menu you have to scroll in order to get to the self-driving settings. No, you want a big red button. Dead centre of the dashboard. Mash that shit, the robot takes a nap, and Miss Marple lives for another few hip replacements. Maybe it also blinks a little, while I’m writing out my wish list.
All this discussion about the emergency stop button has convinced me that I need one for my own garage after all. Sure, I don’t really have anything to hook up to it, but it will make me feel a lot better about not getting off my ass to finish any projects if I push that button first. Sorry boss, the button has spoken.
Throughout history, man has visited violence upon man for spices. You’re either in one of two camps about it: either you think mere food flavourings aren’t really worth the suffering of another sentient being, or I want to be invited to your place the next time you’re cooking. The fact is, spices are great, and one of the ways that they are great is that they give me an excuse to go drive over to the spice store.
This place is great, they’ve got everything. One of the things included in the “everything” is a giant parking lot with an extremely technical series of twisty roads leading up to it. Apparently back in the 1990s, one of the junior city planners (now discredited) figured out that the best way to make people do the speed limit through a residential zone was to give them a challenge.
Most people will only speed aggressively in a perfectly straight line, and most neighbourhoods are on a grid system. Ergo, dead kids… and bored rallyists like myself. Not this place. If I’m going in even half-hot, I’m left-foot-braking to keep the turbo on the boil and get up the next morning with a sore neck from trying to keep a view of the apex. Once, I fought off a traffic ticket that I implausibly received here, because my shark of a lawyer determined after reading the service manual for the city’s radar unit that it was not explicitly designed to handle a rusty XR4Ti travelling sideways at 100km/h.
So now when I run out of, say, white pepper, it’s a sweaty-handed road rally experience. And usually nobody’s kids have to get genocided, as long as they know enough to stay out of the road.
“Poggers!” shrieks my young ward, as he admires his handiwork. At his feet lays my nemesis, Steve “Nipples” Hemingway, bound and gagged. From the pattern of the carpet rash on his face, it appears that he had spent a considerable percentage of the last 72 hours in the trunk of a 1996-2002 Grand Am.
“Don’t say that,” I snap. “The little pamphlet they gave me says that I’m supposed to take marks off for internet slang.”
How I came to take care of Shithead here is a pretty lengthy story, but I’ll try my best to boil it down for you. In my small town is a world-famous detective school, where all the young up-and-coming junior detectives attend in order to learn their skillset. Usually when they get here, they’ve solved a couple of neighbourhood quarrels, maybe tracked down a lost cat, but they’re nowhere near Pirate’s Cove material. They need the two years of private college before they can wriggle out of deathtraps.
As you’d expect, there’s an internship component to their education, but as the profession of “private detective” has become increasingly obsolete in today’s age of deep-faked pornography and deep-fried flapjacks, it’s been hard for all but the brightest of the class to find a work placement. For a couple years, there was an ever-growing queue of brilliant young minds, and distant caves and castles requiring their assistance, but only once they were completely qualified. Someone on the board finally figured out that everyone really has some mystery in their life, so they did what all of us in town have done, and lowered their expectations. The school reached out to the community to look for anyone who would take in one of these little upstarts for twelve to sixteen months, as long as you promised to come up with some dastardly mysteries for them to untangle.
When Shithead arrived (I have forgotten his actual name), he was generally unimpressed with the squalour that I lived in. No doubt he had huge expectations of “the real world,” probably inflamed by his famous detective father who mysteriously went missing around the same time the school started asking for alumni volunteers. He found all of my lost tools and matched up the keys on my giant keyring to each beater in the yard, and then I kind of ran out of twist endings for him. For a few weeks, he just sat in the corner of my workshop, doing sudokus on his phone, until he overheard me grumbling about Steve.
“You… have a nemesis?” he asked with starry eyes. I was so wrapped up in my own work (prying the warped parking pawl out of a Bronco’s C4 transmission) that I didn’t notice his excitement, nor did it really register that he had up and left the shop after some hasty Googling.
It hadn’t occurred to me at the time, but in retrospect it should have been obvious not to use the word “nemesis” around someone who was aspiring to become the next Junior Sherlock Holmes. Maybe they could have mentioned that in the fucking pamphlet.
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tags: ford, ford bronco, pontiac, pontiac grand am
Winter: the season of marginal batteries failing, underbody corrosion from road salt, and windshields cracked from trying to pass an active snowplow at a buck eighty. There’s something else, too: that fuelly stink that gets into your clothes because you had to brush all the snow off your car while it was warming up.
I used to own a really nice wool coat. The circumstances of how it came into my possession are not important, nor are they legally relevant to any of my ongoing cases before the court. After a few winters, I pretty much had to get rid of it. Why? Because it constantly stunk of 5% ethanol 89 octane. The cold weather, combined with the ultra-rich cold start enrichment fuel map, combined with a catalytic converter that stopped working sometime in 1985 and then blew out of the tailpipe in fragments around the mid-90s - well, I’d have been surprised if there weren’t half-liquid clouds of noxious petrochemicals floating out of the ass end when the choke is trying to claw the car back to life in the midst of an Arctic hellstorm.
I’ll always miss that coat, but the good news is that it left because I’ve found something better. Introducing the Seat Safety Salon’s new line of Lean fashions. They might look weird, but all new fashion does. How does it work? Glad you asked. These ram scoops where the pockets would otherwise go suck the fuel vapour directly out of the air and combust it in a small four-stroke one-cylinder engine sourced from AliExpress’s “sort by cheapest.”
The torque from that combustion powers this flywheel on the back, and then you can tap into that free energy throughout the rest of the day to charge your phone. Now, you’ll probably want to take it off before you sit down on your car seat, because even if yours is as tattered as mine, that flywheel will probably chowder up the cushions something fierce. And then you’d have to go buy another seat from the junkyard, which is much more wasteful than just stuffing an old stinky coat into the Goodwill donation bin.
Human beings make tools, yes, but nobody ever asks what those tools are for. It should have been obvious, but anthropology departments are no longer responsible for sending monkeys to the moon and as such have forgotten this simple fact. Tools… are for making more tools.
You might think this is a bit unlikely. After all, your laptop is a tool, and you don’t use it to make more tools. Unless you count a spreadsheet, Python program, or machine-learning-capable pornography sorter. It seems that you have been conditioned by the media to think that you’re in a hurry and so the only thing you can do is buy tools. Tools that already exist. Tools that some other asshole invented… but why can’t you be that asshole?
Not all tools are so lucky as to propagate their own race. A drill press only makes special custom butter knives in the hands of an elite few (rifled for superior spreading when cold,) and otherwise gets wasted in the corner of a suburban garage for decades until it gets bumped into by a Chrysler Town & Country and its stand becomes unusably bent. A recent study by Carnegie Mellon showed that 98% of tap-and-die sets are used once and then abandoned. Chinese factories are constantly stamping out thirteen-millimeter wrenches, which only German car owners owners need, and therefore will remain forever unused in lieu of a tow truck, credit card, and blood plasma donation.
Maybe the greatest thing you can do for your collection of tools - and just between us, I do know that it’s more of a “hoard” - is to go bang out a few more right now. Don’t worry, your boss and loved ones will understand. You are just fulfilling your biological imperative and making sure the human race keeps a leg up on those damn magpies. I swear I saw one on the driveway trying to figure out how to set my torque wrench last weekend.
Like a lot of you out there, I abhor the thought of ever throwing away something which could have some value in the future. Manufacturing new things is wasteful, “they” don’t make cool new things anymore, and maybe the planet would appreciate it if someone else could use an old HP DeskJet instead of it getting burned to heat the ice caps. However, our society throws out way more stuff than I can ever hope to use. What’s the solution? As with many other things in Western civilization, the problem can be solved by inserting more middlemen with their hands out. Just as long as I’m one of those middlemen.
At our local recycling plant, they handle a lot of stuff. Old computers, orphaned car parts, scrap metal bedframes, anatomically correct mannequins which have been “used up,” and road-killed deer. If I got a job at the dump, then I would get first dibs on that stuff. Unfortunately, I did not think to confirm this folk knowledge during the interview, which I aced due to my infectious enthusiasm. It turns out that my perception was at least partially incorrect; although I would get “first dibs” at the stuff coming in, removing it from the yard constituted at least a “Big Ol’ Crime” on the local judge’s list of most reviled misdemeanours.
After a few shifts of frustration, I came to realize that I could live with this situation. Without the temptation to purchase junk (because it was now given to me free,) the meagre paycheque that the transfer station gave me could go entirely to food, heat, and repairing my fleet of vehicles. And I had plenty of storage space, which was great because my normal pattern was to acquire some trash, invent fantastic new projects to do with that trash, and then squirrel it away in a corner of my property to never again be unearthed. The worst thing that would happen with my “work projects” is that they too would be buried under an avalanche of baby diapers, illegally discarded lithium-ion batteries, and mob informants. At least I wouldn’t be paying rent on them.
Even better, once my boss saw how mechanically handy I was, he started forwarding directly to me all the mopeds, scooters, and dirt bikes that the wealthy part of town was throwing out. If I spent a few minutes of the city’s dime fixing them up so that the guys could rip them around the yard, well, that would improve both morale and efficiency. He was the best boss I ever had, which made it even more tragic when he was himself crushed and then recycled for a younger human being. Those assholes next door in the human-processing department always sent people into the tanks well before their prime.
Don’t listen to your detailer. There’s really nothing you can do to remove vomit from the interior of a car. The only option left is to strip out every piece of carpet and plastic, weld in a roll cage, and go racing. That’s why you see so many minivans on racetracks; a little bit of kid puke turns into an endless quest to neutralize that stink, culminating in taking a pressure washer to bare steel at 4am while giggling insanely to yourself in your driveway and pissing your nonexistent pants. And by that point, you might as well have an SCCA competition license anyway.
True amateur-racing aficionados know this, which is why jars of authentic child-stomach-contents go for a fortune on eBay. It’s not all going to weird pre-criminals in Germany - just most of it - but instead to weekend warriors who splash a little bit on the carpet of cars at the auction. No fix-and-flip YouTuber or professional Honda reseller located in the ghetto will take a risk on a Toyota Avalon convertible with That Stink. You’ll get it for super cheap, and then dominate the apexes with that mighty vee-six torque.
As mentioned before, “detailers” will convince you that this is possible. They’ll trot out all kinds of stories about their life experience, but the important thing to remember is that their life experience is invalid. A detailer gets paid to huff aerosolized solvents all day. You think they have a better grasp on objective reality than your old pal Uncle Switch? No way, Jose - although I will take a few of those trim tools. For some reason, there’s some crusty shit keeping the trunk carpet from coming up off the Velcro.
Although my shadowy backers are a little bit concerned that I am divulging all of our secrets, I remain confident that we will still be able to win auctions and then spend tens of thousands of dollars turning a $300 car into a last-place race car. We have a built-in excuse, too: when the car heats up, it starts to smell a little funny for some reason, which is not great for the driver.
Ah, an angry mob. Welcome! I assume you’re also here to get mad at me for creating that video. Yes, I realize it was so popular that it caused the YouTube servers to self-combust, which in turn exploded the entire Google space station, scattering minute space dust into an orbit around the Earth which has now shredded every geosynchronous manmade structure we have ever constructed. As a result, it has destroyed our cellular, GPS, intercontinental communication, and television signals, and likely made it impossible to launch any spacecraft to leave this doomed planet for multiple generations. On the plus side, though, it got like 1.5 billion quadrillion views and I made $27 on the ads.
When I set out to make that video, you have to believe me that I didn’t expect any of this to happen. All I wanted to do was shoot a couple minutes of footage of my Barbie Power Wheels that had been converted to use lipo batteries. It was my friend Shaky Tim’s idea to wrap the solid-plastic tires in sparklers so that it would kick out cool fireworks whenever it did a burnout. Which was always, because I never hooked up the traction-control signal wire to the $10 AliExpress speed controller. I understand that I’ve now come under some heavy criticism for that decision, but you have to empathize with my position that it was Sunday night, I didn’t remember where I put my box of ring terminals, and the cops were only in shift change for another fifteen minutes tops.
What’s that? Oh. Yes, I have also heard the argument that we shouldn’t have done our test drive in front of an active petrochemical refinery. Honestly, though, that seems like it’s more on them than me. They shouldn’t have been running the flare stacks that late at night, and for how much the plant foreman complained at the community associaton meetings about my antics, you’d think they would have moved away at some point before the incident.
Honestly, I think the real guilty party here is all of you people, for sharing a cool video of a giant explosion. You don’t think that Shaky Tim only narrowly escaped, after losing nearly 23 percent of his body hair. All you see is some methed-out lunatic running away from the Roman Candles that my eternal four-wheel-drive burnout is coughing into an ever-growing plume of roaring hellfire. There’s no empathy for him. Shame on you. Shame on you all.
You still want to kill me? That’s understandable. We are in an era that is inarguably the dying throes of humanity, our great strides in communication made useless as worldwide civilization devolves to petty tribal warfare, and it is at least 1% my fault. Now if you’ll all please take one big step back, onto that round target-looking picture painted on my driveway, I’d like to show you my next project video. It’s a trapdoor leading to a dungeon. You see, the YouTube Orbital Surveillance Platform’s failure meant that all of my hits got wiped out, and so they never got a chance to send me a silver play button. I gotta get those hits back. Welcome to my click farm.
There’s this psychology experiment I saw on Twitter that I didn’t bother to read the article for. In it, they locked a bunch of children in a room and then told them they could have one marshmallow now, or two marshmallows later. It turned out the kids who were willing to wait for a better reward in the future had superior impulse control. I am definitely a one-marshmallow guy, but I spend only three-tenths of a marshmallow to get it, so I can afford to buy a few more if that one doesn’t fill me up.
And this makes some sort of sense, if you step back. Actually, with the news media telling us that there exists no such thing as objective reality or facts for any subject in which there is at least one contradictory opinion, I’m completely correct and you should get off my lawn. People who scrimp and save their entire lives for a dream car are missing out on all the other cars they could be owning in the meantime. They don’t get to visit the motor vehicle registry monthly. They don’t get to find out that RockAuto has a limit of how many vehicles you can put in the little “vehicles I own” list before it starts to crash your browser.
Although if you’re not born a billionaire, this does mean that you won’t get to own every Lamborghini ever made, but realistically nobody reading this is going to be able to own a single Lamborghini. So instead you should be like me, and get weird with it. Ever had a fantasy of owning a conversion van? You can just go out and buy one. Nobody can stop you. RV? You know it. Old ambulance? I have like four friends with one. Firetruck? Oh ho, I bet you didn’t even realize you could just purchase a fucking fire truck and own it. Now you’re shopping for one, aren’t you?
Great. Now that we’ve all agreed it’s okay to buy whatever car you want, and especially as many cars as you can possibly sustain before law enforcement intervenes, we can get down to what’s really important. Hoarding parts and tools for all of these cars. After all, you’d look pretty silly if you had a brand new Lamborghini in the garage but no money to fill the basement with spare fenders and dashboard trim for it, right?
Sometimes when I am taking a different route to work, I drive past this little old mom-and-pop tire shop. I’ve been wanting to drop in for awhile, and support my small local businesses, so I did. On my way back one frosty winter evening, I decided to stop by and see what all the fuss was about.
My first clue that things were not as they seem came when the doors inside the Federally-mandated storm shelter opened only with great effort and emitted an audible groan, as if no customer had used them in years. This was suspicious. Every time I drove past this place, it had a different collection of cars in the front parking - most beaters and common commuters, but once in awhile something truly weird. And yet they couldn’t take fifteen minutes out of their day to open-palm slam some 3-in-1 into the hinges?
I waited at the counter for a few minutes, anticipating the visit of some local raconteur who would no doubt become my newest and best source of primo parts, gently-corded used tires, and pranged Nissan Silvias. After about five minutes, I sat down, assuming they were busy in the back with a customer car and would get to me eventually. You have to be patient with this kind of small operation: they do business at the pace of people, not machines, and that’s most of the appeal. Walking past an empty water cooler and a limescale-encrusted 1970s coffee maker, I picked up an issue of Road & Track from 1985. Holy shit, the new Fiat X1/9 is out.
After I finished the magazine, I decided I would step into the back and take charge. Sometimes with this kind of place, that’s what you have to do. Just roll up your sleeves and jump in there, in order to win the respect of the owner. I vaulted over the counter and started walking towards the shop area, when I was stopped by a man wearing dark sunglasses and a noticeably non-grease-stained three-piece suit.
Now, I’m not legally allowed to tell you whether this new tire shop is a front or not, but I will say that they bought my silence with a box full of Pacesetter headers for ‘80s mini-trucks that the previous owner “didn’t need anymore.” That’s the kind of business that will keep me coming back, because I’m also pretty sure they didn’t mean all of those strongly-worded threats.
It’s very rare for things to be both fashionable and practical. Dresses with pockets, the overthrow and replacement of monarchies, and cocaine-smuggling speedboats are the only examples I can think of. At least, that was the case before the mini-towtrucking fad started in my neck of the woods.
Owning a tow truck has had a lot of appeal to “car folks” for quite some time. If you have a particularly shitty car, chances are you are going to spend a lot of money towing it from the place it breaks down to the place it will be repaired. Maybe you have a track vehicle, and you need to take that from the place it was repaired to the place where it will pirouette off of Turn 2 and back again. You do a surprising amount of towing in this hobby, and owning a separate flatbed trailer and truck takes up a lot of room. Until someone came up with the genius idea of buying an old tow truck as a project car.
It was like the skies opened up and rained practicality upon the local scene. Old tow trucks are super cheap, you can find them anywhere, and nobody seems particularly interested in driving up demand for them. Sure, the folks who bought them had to figure out how to repair the ancient hydraulics, but what’s a little injection injury between friends? It didn’t even matter that much after the scene began to bifurcate - the practicality of the tow trucks was soon supplanted by an urge to lower them and improve the style. Now my city was full of tow trucks that could no longer tow, but had period-authentic safety warning decals, gleaming Alcoa dually wheels, and towing mirrors that were chronically misaimed because some mice ate the manual for them years ago.
Eventually, the owners of these stylish mini-towtrucks began to experience the breakdowns associated with cutting three-quarters of the suspension travel out of an eight ton work vehicle and then drifting it in a Canadian Tire parking lot at 3am. Many of them, still on good terms with the rest of the community, could just call up one of the “full truckers” and get a tow back to home base for a couple of brewskis. The fact that our streets were now full of tow trucks towing tow trucks didn’t impress local law enforcement, who set up commercial vehicle checkpoints, which brought an end to the whole fad as only the most extremely modified, impractical trucks could escape the notice of El Federales.
With this crush in supply, the scene began to move upmarket, and everyone cashed out on the way up. That’s why you’re seeing a 1989 tow-truck with purple underglow and flamethrower exhaust going for $1.5 million at Barrett-Jackson. It’s not practical, but even something that ugly can still look good.
I think a lot of people misunderstand us car folk. Movies and television have trained them to believe that the sole purpose of car people is to get the fastest car. This makes a certain sense, of course. Modern society is a competition, and so must everything underneath it. However, in my group of beater-owning friends, the only thing we’re looking for is the cheapest car.
You might think that getting the cheapest car is easy. Go on Craigslist, sort by price, buy it. And you’d be wrong. You have to factor in the total cost of ownership of a car. Most of the time, cars are initially “cheap” because they are critically broken, involve a lot of work, or have somehow infuriated the local bureaucracy to the point where an attorney will be assigned to help you burn your money fast enough. It takes a well-trained mind and a lifetime of experience to buy, instead, the second-cheapest car on Craigslist and blow just slightly less cashola on it.
“Free” cars are even worse; usually a car is only free because it involves a project on the scale of the moon landings to get it to ever drive again. My last free car involved a window replacement, a tow out of a swamp, and killing a giant swamp rat with my bare hands. And that was just so I could get the thing registered. Making it run meant buying two more cars - that weren’t free - and then grafting the choicest bits of their carcasses onto the free car before spending eighty bucks in fuel to tow them to the wrecker in order to get fifty bucks back.
I hope that now you have a greater understanding of the beater lifestyle; it’s not all putting loud exhausts and Vin Diesel memorial stickers on the back glass. The only race we’re trying to win is, ideally, against an unmodified base-model Honda Fit whose owner isn’t trying to race us at the light. At least to second gear.
It turns out the thing I miss the most from childhood is the community events cruiser. Back then, whenever you had a big enough shindig, this rattling and smoking Econoline would come tumbling out of one of the local television stations (it’s been so long I can’t even remember) and dispense bumper stickers, man-on-the-street interviews, and unusably-restricted coupons for nearby businesses. Back in the 70s, I’m told, it also dispensed malt liquor on demand, a tidbit of folk knowledge that served to explain the condition of the front bodywork.
There’s a new community events cruiser now - it doesn’t go anywhere for there are no more community events, but it exists - and it’s basically a leased Kia crossover that the local dealership slapped some vinyls onto. It bothers me a little. Not just because the sponsorship corrupts the ethical journalistic purity of the humble institution of the community events cruiser - imagine how “unbiased” they’ll be towards the Kia Mile now - but because in my mind such a vehicle must always be a poorly maintained body-on-frame panel van.
If I had known they were having so much trouble with it, I definitely would have volunteered my time. It’s part of the community, and maybe I could even have gotten some free advertising space out of the whole thing. Then again, at the time they made the transition I was sort of infamous in the local media market for my ongoing feud with “Kevin Bumpers” of the talk-radio channel’s car advice show. I’d call in every couple of days and just unload on him for being a consumerist dipshit who was wilfully destroying history, and when he’d block my number I’d just get a new one from the cell phone store. All those SIM transfer fees were really expensive, yes, and my mom still doesn’t know what my new number is, but the truth had to get out. I considered it my duty.
He dared to suggest - on multiple occasions - that the caller should get rid of their car and buy a brand new one! Since the same company owned all the television and radio stations at that time, I am convinced that he was somehow behind the decision to scrap the old ‘Cruiser. What’s more, as it never appeared in the junkyard (I go practically daily) he must have undergone some further deception in order to squirrel it away from me. Perhaps that is the oddly boxy vehicle that he keeps under a tarp in his backyard where he thinks I can’t see. I’ve got Google Earth, Kevin!
Hubcaps have been unfairly sensationalized as being the province only of poverty-spec automobiles. Once, every car came with a glorious set of half-moons or dog dishes, but once the Alloy Wheel Mafia dunked a few automotive journalists into piping-hot vats of Alcoa #3, suddenly it became gauche to have to slap a set of hubcaps on top of your wheels. Things have gotten so bad now that automakers gleefully ship non-fleet-package cars with exposed steelies; although honestly it looks pretty damn good, sometimes the principle of the thing matters more than appearing off-road-toughy.
With a campaign in mind, I went about trying to solve things the way that high school civics classes say you’re supposed to. I formed a group of concerned citizens and I pressured the government at all levels to form an expensive state-owned corporation that would create hubcaps for every car currently on the market. Yes, it would likely be a huge loss in the end due to the inculcated hatred of hubcaps by the aforementioned Mafia, but the whole rationale of the government is to spend money to better the human condition that nobody else would bother with. You think Ford would have made a bitchin’ moon buggy? Not on your life, bud.
I waited a few weeks, having periodic meetings with the other members of Put A Lid On It. Without any response from literally any representative of any government anywhere, I became disenchanted with the mechanisms of government and instead set out to start my own hubcap-manufacturing firm. Since all of my cars are equipped with - at best - 15 inch wheels, it turns out I didn’t have to make too many sizes and styles. A friendly consultant that I met on Alibaba happily took my money in order to start up a factory in Shenzhen, and I patiently anticipated his shipping of the samples “any day now.”
Imagine my surprise when I saw that the new Teslas were all sporting my designs! Sure, they were blown up for the gaudy unnecessarily-huge brake rotors, and they came on a car that cost eighty grand, but they were absolutely mine. Except now they were “aero covers,” and there was some technobabble about how these hubcaps would magically improve aerodynamics and thus energy efficiency! Now everyone wanted hubcaps on their car, which would have been great except my sales partner never got back to me with my share of the profits.
On the plus side, the Tesla hubcaps - sorry, “aero covers” - are pretty cheap, so I’ve zip-tied them to my steelies anyway. You can hardly notice that they’re four inches in diameter too large, unless I take corners a little fast or it’s particularly windy out. Again, it’s about the principle of the thing.
Do you hate ordering parts, and then having to wait several days or weeks for those parts to be delivered? Maybe you’re independently wealthy, and can patronize the local auto parts store. Even then, though, some items are just not available and have to be shipped from The Warehouse. While it is understandable that they might not have the starter for a ‘74 Concord on hand, it still stings knowing that you have valuable Wrenching Time available and must watch it dwindle away rather than spending on the car you wanted to in the first place.
That’s why I got a bunch of particle physicists high as fuck to invent the first time-travelling parts truck. On the same day you order (it still has to drive to you, you ungrateful asshole) the truck will appear in your driveway offering the exact parts you needed. The secret is that the truck travels through time to a point where The Warehouse has the part in stock, and then… puts it on the truck. It couldn’t be easier!
Even parts that are “out of stock” or “discontinued” are no longer a problem. Want some new-old-stock Datsun 240Z tail-lights? We’ll travel back to 1974 and start asking dealerships for them. Our staff is currently arguing whether doing so will cause that tail-light to disappear from the crushed scrapyard pile of 240Z that it eventually ended up in, or if an alternate universe is created where they just bought the next replacement tail-light in line, but our business development team (me) got bored after about five minutes and walked out. The upshot: fucking brand new, never molested Datsun 240Z tail-lights!
Now, it’s not cheap to keep the truck in flux capacitors and dilithium crystals, so the shipping price is quite high, but just imagine how much this service would cost if FedEx were offering it. Hell, they’d figure out some way to charge you a handling fee for the duty required to get it through customs in 2050!
Oh, that reminds me. When the truck pulls up to your driveway, one of the rules is that you must never look inside it. We have a lot of customers throughout space time, and cars honestly get pretty fucked up in 2065. It’s best for everyone that it comes as a surprise. All I’ll say is that you should be investing in long-term care homes.
There exists a sort of supply-and-demand imbalance in the world today: the gulf between the number of people who want to own nice old Japanese cars, and the fact that those cars have largely been reduced to a sort of ashy paste in a Michigan back forty several decades ago. Rust is the unibody killer, they tell us when we receive instruction from the Datsun Witches, and we must learn to deflect and neutralize its violence if we are to turn even one of our parts cars into car-cars.
On the face of it, repairing rust isn’t too bad. Grind back until you see metal (i.e. “not rust”) and then weld some fresh metal onto it. Seal the whole fucker in something modern-day, expensive, and ideally grotesquely toxic to all nearby humans, animals, and aquifers, and you’ll be good for another ten, fifteen years before someone else has to take all your work and tear it up again because the paint on the battery tray started to bubble. Unfortunately, this description hides just how much work it is. I’ve wasted entire weeks just trying to form a patch panel that kind of approximates the angle of the original car - yes, you can really tell when you don’t get it right - and most of my rust repair jobs end up wearing a blotch of weld-through primer because the painter I’m bribing to spray it has relapsed on crack yet again.
Everyone who loves these old cars has these fantasies that science will develop a better rust-repair solution. Personally, I got really excited when I saw a YouTube video of a Russian bodyshop using some kind of sketchy Chinese laser to evaporate rust off a bare metal panel. Then I was a little discouraged - not least because the laser cost the same amount as buying an already restored 240Z, but also because I’d still have to grind off all the paint and just end up with really precise holes burned in the body, instead of jagged browny ones that I could kind of deny were as bad as they actually are. Also, my seats might catch on fire if I’m too lazy to remove them. Maybe some kind of magical nanobot in the future will be able to spit out fresh metal onto the panels, healing them to perfection, but chances are both me and the Datsun will have disappeared into the ground by then.
Ultimately, the only viable option is to continue to struggle mightily. I’ll keep burning through four wire cups and eighteen cutting wheels a week, and scouring Californian Craigslists for whatever okay-condition drivers I can find. It’s best that you do the same, except try somewhere else because get off my territory. I’ve got enough jagged, rusty parts cars to give you some serious tetanus.
Peer review is the essential core of modern science. Sure, you can find some shit in your garage, but it’s not really “real” until someone else can replicate your results. Without it, every field would just be a bunch of people jumping up and down screaming that once they made a bridge out of buttered toast and of course it held up because the toasting process is magic. Greaseball beater-car ownership is no different - you need to experience it with a friend before you can legitimately say you’ve fixed a problem.
This is because it’s very easy for our minds to subconsciously filter out an issue. Weird screaming from the wheels at low speed, while jarring at first, becomes barely noticeable after a few weeks. There are probably hundreds of components failing on the average beater that we just don’t notice anymore, and it only gets worse the longer you own it. That’s why repair professionals suggest that you immediately service the thing once you notice a weird noise, or transient handling quirk, or smell that makes you sleepy. Well, that, and the fact that they get fucking paid whenever you drag in an otherwise-mint car and pay for them to put in a new engine like a sucker.
Hence, the peer review system. If you’re starting to feel a little too complacent about your car, just get your buddy to drive it for a few hours. Chances are they’ll notice half-a-dozen new rattles, and ask you out loud if you remembered to register and insure this car because that cop has been following very closely for a couple blocks now. Then, you can update your little to-do list at your leisure, so you can sleep easy at night knowing that you won’t forget about any problems.
Fixing those problems? Well, that’s applied knowledge. We’re speaking strictly in the realm of the theoretical, here. Unless you have a grant?
There are two inventions that, I think, really put the human race above all other creatures on this Earth. At least until that pesky family of magpies finally figures out how to write g-code for that CNC machine they stole and put in my tree last year. Those two inventions are butter, and the baguette.
Yes, indeed. Humanity has produced a lot of great things, but ultimately, when it comes down to it, are any of them better than putting a smear of warm butter onto a freshly baked loaf of bread? I don’t think so. And I’m not just saying this because I skipped lunch again in order to get this damn Trans Am to stop knocking the teeth off its starter gear. The French really figured it out right off the bat, which is why in recent years they’ve been amusing themselves by making cars that ride on hydraulic suspension and come in a variety of coloured plastics. They’re just not interested in continuing to compete when it’s obvious they’ve already won.
Now, the Vietnamese took a look at this whole situation, and they figured there was a way to improve it. Take the baguette, cut it open, and then put some great fillings in it. Maybe squeeze a duck or two if you’ve got time. The banh mi is the greatest possible improvement on the baguette, yes, and perhaps the ultimate food overall. However, it still owes its legacy to the baguette, in the same way that the seventy-five-dollar Aliexpress electric moped looks kind of like a Peugeot 102 if you squint while under the influence of a cocktail of elephant-snoozing hallucinogens. Greater in every way, yes, but not first. And you know I love the classics.
Will the future of humanity feature a third great innovation? Yes, I should also have counted cheese, but legally I believe cows and bacteria own at least 50% rights to that one. And you don’t want to end up getting sued for civil relief on Judge Mycoplasma Genitalium - he’s a real dickhole.
It’s best not to put too much weight on what kids are saying. That’s how I ended up doing that very short semester of law school - my parents overheard me saying I wanted to be an “ambulance chaser” and thought I wanted to be a personal injury lawyer, instead of what I imagined, which was a shutter-shaded suburban commando who street-raced a Koenig-bodykitted Mercedes and literally chased down ambulances for some reason. I was four, but that didn’t matter: it was time for them to develop this fantasy that I would become an attorney. It crushed them when it turned out that, actually, I would prefer to become just another grease-stained hobo like all of my siblings, cousins, and ancestors.
Whenever I speak at a school as part of my court-ordered community service, I remember this little experience. A lot of these kids don’t really understand how the world works. They’ve grown up watching poorly-translated Chinese cartoons where leftovers from their refrigerator turn into philosophy-spouting cops. Once they’re done with that, then they get to go to classes where they learn that the Vietnam War maybe didn’t happen and nobody can prove it either way unless whichever corporation sponsored the gymnasium disagrees. Ridiculous, right? So when one of them comes up to me after my big talk and says that it doesn’t matter what my PowerPoints said, it still sounds pretty cool to jump a mall fountain with a nitro-burning Baja Bug, I have to continue to calmly dissuade them.
Carrying this example a little further, if you’ll permit the indulgence, I often lead these kids out to the parking lot, where I have brought an example car. It represents what these children must never own. Sometimes it’s a Volare with hood zoomies, other times something as pedestrian as a ride-on lawnmower with a Detroit Diesel strapped to its ass. The important thing is that these kids understand that no matter how bitchin’ this sort of vehicle seems to them right now, they must grow up without acting on those impulses, until society can teach them to properly conform. No matter how excited I am to potentially be forming the next generation of petrochemical-huffing psychopaths, I could never encourage it.
Dreams change throughout a kid’s life as they develop a greater understanding of the world. It’s essential that parents not get too attached to any particular vision of their child’s future. Especially little Timothy Barnes, who is in Grade 7 at the junior high down the street, who is definitely never going to become a brain surgeon like his dad imagines. Mostly because I made him go under the Volare to figure out where that transmission leak was coming from (tiny bodies mean I don’t have to get under there myself), and he got all excited about the bad-ass Z-bar setup on the rear axle. His math teacher called me and threatened to report me to my parole officer because he wouldn’t stop asking about sway bars in class. Unfortunately, Timmy is likely to become a race car engineer.
Searching for jobs is a hugely difficult pastime. You’ve got badly-worded ads that are deliberately ambiguous about the actual gig, crazy expectations for experience and skill set, and tough interviews followed by sweaty negotiations to get paid what you’re worth. At least you get to drive to new parts of the city, and learn some exciting new parking rules when you get there. In a way, the car becomes your office, which explains why mine is filled with old banana peels, loose small-caliber ammunition and a 1981 IBM Selectric typewriter with no ribbons.
It’s not that I’ve been fired by Bad Cars Monthly. After all, as the founder, editor-in-chief, sole staff writer, primary financier and publisher, the government tells me that in fact I cannot legally collect unemployment. Writing a print magazine about shitty old cars is not a profitable enterprise, however, and so I need to pick up the occasional odd job here and there with which to convince my landlord not to throw me out into whatever unoccupied-by-Plymouths square of the front lawn he can find. Hence the job hunt.
Of course, I had a normal job years before I put it all on the line in the single-minded pursuit of my craft. It was those skills that I had to bring back, and it was pure luck that they are currently in more demand than being able to guesstimate how many eggs it takes to plug a leaky radiator. After about my dozenth interview, I felt myself beginning to slip back into the mannerisms, wording, and lack of casual profanity that human-resources types were searching for. It was at some kind of robot company, where they were making this creepy hydraulic dog that would patrol parks for evildoers. Now, the robot couldn’t do anything about it - legally, it was operating in a bit of a grey area, and it wouldn’t stand up to even a slight kick to the side delivered by a pencil-necked mechanical engineer. It was going to be my job to write the module that detected said evildoing, and called the police on them.
I lasted about to the second round of that interview series. In what was a failed attempt to gauge my “cultural fit,” my potential boss led me down to the engineering floor, where a bunch of folks were sitting around an electric motor strewn apart on a workbench. They were having trouble getting that last little bit of torque out of the controller, they grumbled, and couldn’t come in under budget if they went with a bigger motor.
Although I didn’t get that job, I did walk out of there with a patent for somehow turbocharging an electric motor. The chief engineer was extremely impressed at my trunkful of performance equipment, and I think he would have poached me from the software guy if I had more relevant education. Also if he had survived when the souped-up robot ran right through his formerly-solid body and didn’t stop until it had embedded itself two feet into the cafeteria wall.
In a lot of other countries, you don’t necessarily need a license in order to operate a vehicle. Instead, you can purchase a special little car that doesn’t go very fast. The theory here is that “not going very fast” means that they can only do so much damage. France, Spain, China, Portugal: in all of them, the humble rural neighbourhood drunk can still get to work and the market even after the fuzz has taken his license away. Here in North America, however, we’re much more advanced: people just drive full-sized cars without a license instead.
As you’d expect, a lot of these little cars are extremely rustic inside, have little or no build quality, and all the parts are designed to be as cheap and common as possible. So they’re really perfect for my kind of vehicle ownership. I can’t think of a better life than constantly squinting at Google image searches of motorbike brakes trying to figure out which moped’s brake calipers were reused on my daily driver so that I can eBay a rebuild kit.
Unfortunately, registering a little Aixam shitbox that was imported from Corsican Craigslist is a little prohibitive, not least because of the lack of spirit of adventure on behalf of the Feds who monopolize the legalization process. The Mountie who inspected it for roadworthiness kept asking where the airbags were and refused to accept my explanation that sometimes, some cars just don’t have them. I ended up slapping some Power Wheels stickers onto the side and wearing a giant foam head whenever I drove it, so that any passing cops would be convinced I am just a spoiled toddler doing 35 on the highway.
This honestly didn’t last very long. It turns out that rural cops are extremely sensitive to potentially lost children. And once I got the thing home and parked up in my garage, I started to wonder if I could make it go just a little bit faster with a couple junk turbos I had lying around. Cops definitely notice a toddler passing them in a Barbie-coloured three-wheeled penalty box that shoots flames from the hood zoomies on each upshift. At least in France, I bet the food you get served in jail would taste better.
I’m positive that everyone here has heard the story of Einstein and the patent office. Atomic-energy hobbyist Albert Einstein was forced, in order to pay the bills, to work at a job that was undeserving of his unique genius. Now, I’m no Albert Einstein (I’m not even his cousin, Frank Einstein, who worked at the Big Lots just off I-80 and whose only documented discovery was a new way to allocate salsa onto nacho chips), but I’ve had my share of shitty jobs as well.
Even though these jobs are horrible at the time, when you get out of them you have a sort of odd nostalgia for that period. Even a Supreme Court judge had to work a bullshit gig in high school at a K-Mart. It’s just to be expected, because nobody has any way of knowing which teenager is going to be a world-changer and which one will serve as an impromptu jackstand when trying to be a roadside tire-changer. Better pay them both nine-seventy-five an hour, and hope that by the time they’re running the system, they won’t seek revenge upon you. And this method has worked out pretty well so far.
There are alternative models, but any change is going to be unwelcome. For instance, if we created special low-paying rocket scientist gigs just for really smart kids to get some “work experience” in, then the “senior” rocket scientists would be mad. And those folks know where they can get a large quantity of high explosives and make it look like an accident when the missile guidance system crams an ICBM nose-cone into your hot tub. There are internships, of course, but even the interns don’t legitimately believe they’re getting anything out of them. I had to pick up the slack of the boss’ nephew a few months ago because he had spent the entire sprint remembering how to spell the word “lacrosse,” as opposed to what I did on my internship, which is photocopy my genitals.
Maybe the only solution can come by completely overthrowing the system. If some kind of hyperintelligent supercomputer rules over our civilization with a literal iron fist and sorts us all into the perfect jobs, then there’s no reason that we’d have to waste even a millisecond of an Einstein’s life on patent clerking. Humanity would advance a couple percent faster than they do now. Then again, probably the only people you’d get helping you in shoe stores would be those with an uncontrollable foot fetish.
It had surprised everyone in our study group that I had never replaced a small-block Chevy V8. This, it seemed, was assumed to be the rite of passage for all “car people,” especially of my generation. Although I’d had lots of experience moving broken engines and transmissions in and out of cars, none of it counted unless it was specifically the Chevrolet small-block pushrod V8, ideally some kind of 305 or 350, perhaps in my cousin’s backyard. I was, therefore, banished until I could prove that I had resolved this serious deficiency in my automotive background.
Fixing this didn’t seem too hard. I popped onto Craigslist and started looking for old Camaros, but their prices had rapidly ascended into the stratosphere where they were now unreachable. Same, too, with 1960s-1990s pickup trucks. If I wanted a modern Gen III engine, then I could have my pick of the litter, but the world’s supply of 350s were presumably being sucked into backyards and then never re-released into the economy. I decided that I would do some horse trading, and go look for engine-swapped vehicles that were likely to have been hee-hawed. After that, I’d only be a sawzall and rusty GMC K1500 roller away from being back in the bosoms of my fellows. Just in time for next week’s book club (Haynes: Oldsmobile Firenza 1982-94,) which I had been anticipating.
Eventually, I dug up a late-80s Fox-body Mustang. The previous owner had apparently decided he was “done” with 302s snapping in half around the crankshaft as soon as a strong wind blew down the intake, so he stole a wheezy 305 from his neighbour’s trash pile. Between that and some of the shittiest motor-mount welding I’ve ever seen, the thing… had an engine in it, which he never finished wiring or regained consciousness long enough to even put a battery inside. Of course, I had to pay the Mustang tax (a packet of Slim Jims put on top of a pack of full-lethality Marlboros) to make the deal happen, but soon it was strapped to the back of his other neighbour’s flatbed trailer, and I was hauling it home.
So how did I make out on my engine swapping adventure? Well, there’s still a large lawsuit between the loose organization of my buddies and me, but my attorney has authorized me to make a small statement on the matter that is currently before the courts. They didn’t specify that the damn thing had to have its wiring done, or even sit straight in the frame. I was only required by the unwritten agreement to swap the engine into something, and now it’s in the trunk of a Fuego Turbo that’s slowly sinking into the cancer-mud swamp in my backyard.
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tags: oldsmobile, oldsmobile firenza, gmc, gmc k1500, renault, renault fuego turbo, ford, ford mustang
Most of you so-called “normals” won’t get this, but one of the ways us writers pass the time is to go down to the old 60 Minutes mausoleum and snort the ashes of Andy Rooney. Something in that old codger’s remains makes us cranky, and then liquid gold drips from our pen tips but only in the form of editorials that piss everyone else off. It’s sort of a double-edged sword, if Mr. Rooney accepted the existence of swords (“Inferior European guns,” he said in 1908, before moving into a series of sexist insults regarding boats.)
Well, it was my turn this last week, and as soon as I got my nose’s worth, my topic immediately sprang to mind. Headlights. Modern headlights are too bright! If you’re like me, and operate a car with a pair of H4 halogen bulbs that were dim when they were new, then you’re constantly getting your night vision blown out by all the Xenon- and LED-encrusted land barges. Yes, it’s probably safer, but not for me, the only person who matters.
That’s why I’ve developed a series of electronic countermeasures. I’m not going to lie to you; it hasn’t been easy. My first prototype was simply to hot-glue a bunch of mirrors from a disco ball to my rear bumper. This way, whoever is tailgating me would get a glistening nightmare, and ideally back off until they were no longer being constantly dazzled. Unfortunately, it attracted a family of industrious magpies, who quickly stole all of my little mirrors and now live in what I can only describe as the gaudiest fucking nest you’ve ever seen.
The second attempt, rigging a joystick onto my dashboard that controls a remote spotlight mount, was successful. However, as anyone who has ever tried to not hit a pedestrian while backing up will tell you, it is completely impossible to pay attention to anything that is behind your car. Most of the time, the spotlight aimed too far up, giving the impression that I was offering some kind of decoy Hollywood movie premiere in an attempt to somehow lure some celebrities into the trunk of my Volare. After I was followed by the police helicopter for the fourth time that night, I abandoned this project as well, handing it over to the magpies.
Finally, I just decided to swap the gears around inside my transmission. In theory, you can do this with math, and a solid understanding of the mechanicals of the transmission. In practice, if you have no day job to get to, you can spend all day flipping the little fuckers around until you get most of what you want. Except now I have four third gears and reverse somehow makes the car go sideways. A little more testing is required, but what’s important is that as long as I’m going under 70 on the highway, I can flick my high-beams at the assholes “behind” me. Sure, a little bit of maneuverability is given up, and I’m putting some really weird wear on my tires, but I think Andy would be looking down from Heaven and smiling. If I didn’t blind him with that spotlight, that is.
For decades, kids dreamed of having their very own television set in their rooms. Cartoons, late-night movies, surreptitious Nintendo usage, and even trash daytime television - all without the disapproving glances of a parent. Now those children are all grown up and have plenty of spare revenue with which to buy televisions and bedrooms to put them in. Has the dream died? No, friends, because there is always the dream of having a conversion van with a television set in it.
Sure, we’d heard all the warnings. They’re basically funeral homes for field mice at the best of times. At worst, you and your friends will pull multiple unpaid shifts just trying to vacuum out all of the dead lice and encrustments of maybe-semen from the shag carpet. And then there’s all the hackjob work that the conversion company did, not expecting that someone would be dumb enough to still be trying to drive their van in the heady future year of 2020. And yet we continued on our quest, because we thought it might be kind of cool to play Super Nintendo in the back while someone else drives on our road-trip. The one-eyed monster had us firmly in its gaze.
Of course, technology marches on, and the eighties conversion van that once sported the Trinitron with its delectable aperture grille is now a laughable relic of the past. Nowadays, not paying attention to the road by staring at screens is commonplace, and in the next twenty years it seems likely that Elon Musk will forcibly implant in our brains some sort of holographic pornography service that will make it even harder for our already floundering society to remember “red light means stop.” So the Super Nintendo went out the door, and now the dream was to set up some sort of high-definition projection screen, on which we could stream YouTubes and the ‘Flix of network. And reclining massage seats, because we already tore out all of the aforementioned crusty shag carpet and burned it to scare the Federal snitches away from the shop. It might also be a good idea to weld the door hinges back onto the frame while we’re at it.
In the end, the conversion van quickly became immobile under the weight of our dreams for what it could one day be. There is a happy ending to this story, however. My wrenching buddy picked up the van’s Trinitron from the junk pile we had thrown it into and set it up on the workbench, so we could watch the Fast and the Furious while we failed to accomplish any major progress on our tasks. Our parents still wouldn’t have approved of this: mission accomplished.
I love a good epoxying in the morning. Whenever I’ve got something that needs to be stuck together, I’m always fighting the impulse to jam some two-part space-age turbopolymer in there and make sure it never comes apart ever again. And why not? Epoxy is quick, easy, and probably only slightly more harmful to my lungs than two packs of unfiltered 1970s Pall Malls ingested in under five minutes.
This isn’t just me, either. All of my friends who actually get things done instead of just barely fight entropy on a million shitboxes swear by exotic adhesives. For instance, I’ve got this buddy who has a camper in the back of his truck, so he can go live in it when shit really starts to pop off in the next couple of months. Problem is, the camper wobbles like Jell-O, because it’s forty years old and the sides are only nominally attached to the frame, which is not really attached all that well to itself either. Now the thing is more epoxy than frame, and it’s so rigid the frame of the forty year old truck it’s bolted to is starting to look wobbly by comparison. You know what might help that frame? A little friend that starts with “3M” and ends in “4000 UV-cured marine adhesive sealant.”
There are some downsides, of course. Most structural epoxies are relatively permanent, unless you want to hold onto the manual that came with the sealant and figure out what combination of chemical magic and heat will make it give up the ghost. And by the time most of my cars have had something else fall apart that necessitates I need to take the thing apart again, it’s been like two months and I’ve already sold them on. Who has that much storage to hold onto all the little safety brochures? I barely hold onto the registration and insurance paperwork.
By far, though, the most significant downside is cost. These are made to be used sparingly by professionals, and the cost represents the fact that they are made by mixing endangered whale semen with witch magic or something. If you’re some moron in a garage who thinks “opening a window” is adequate ventilation for the cure process and ends up using litres of the stuff for every project, then you’re going to spend a lot of money at Glues & Screws, the adhesives-selling store that I made up in my dreams. The secret is to go scoop the leftover stuff out of the dumpsters at construction sites, auto body shops, and other places “professionals” throw out their half-used tubes because the Boss Man is paying for it all. Of course, it helps to ignore the expiry date. If it won’t cure, just slather more on until it does.
It’s true that most of my stuff is basically held together at this point with a very heavy dollop of Satan’s own variant of Elmer’s Glue, and that entombing rust holes in said arts and crafts project does not actually “fix” the rust. What’s important is that it looks good, and doesn’t carry the same stigma as Bondo. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go clean out my caulking gun again, because it got cold overnight and my door shot out all of its plugs.
There’s lots of religions out there, and it’s a lucky thing for humanity that not all of them are as violently oppositional as car religions. Whether it’s Dodge (Dodge makes a better car than Chevy), Chevy (Chevy makes a better car than Dodge), or Ford (Ford makes a car), you’re likely to find family dinners split apart by vicious arguments. And it’s not just domestics - this zealotry exists in the imports, as well.
Now, it’s complicated enough in today’s modern auto market, where shrinking margins and a dwindling customer base mean that brands have to amalgamate or cooperate on new platform designs in order to survive. This constantly-shifting series of alliances means that brand adherents may have to change their mind about, say, Toyota, when they decide to start giving money to Subaru in return for agreeing to keeping the latter’s engineers far, far away from their offices.
This state of affairs is confusing for all involved, and pollutes the straightforward intellectual purity that we used to have. Practically the only beneficiaries are senior parts-store employees, who delight in telling shocked pensioners that the engine in their Saturn Vue was built by Honda, and chronic message-board addicts, who have memorized multiple brands’ microfiche in order to identify engine-swap opportunities based on shared philosophical ancestries harkening back to the 1950s. If you go over to the Jeep forums, for instance, there’s a guy there who will tell you about the single engineer who once spent a lunch hour interviewing at Mitsubishi while roaming on psilocybin and accidentally reverse-incepted the concept of the seven-bolt crank into their senior product development staff. This, it is then explained in the voice of a rational expert, means that you can sometimes use the balance shafts from a 4G63 on a Willys Hurricane engine if your machinist is tough enough.
As things go on, amalgamation in the auto industry will only grow further. It’s expensive to develop a new platform, and few if any automakers are able to wizard-magic a ground-up inline-eight-cylinder into existence. For this reason, I recommend that all auto enthusiasts abandon their previous per-brand loyalties, and instead join my movement to become extremely violent about the death of the manual transmission. We’ll clutch the power yet, my friends.
All the pundits are abuzz about what technological improvement will finally drive the masses into electric car ownership. Is it prismatic cell batteries? Special chargers that follow your car around? Huge roads that absorb solar energy and release it in the form of government subsidies? It’s none of these. The critical innovation that will lead us all to a glorious new future of renewable energy consumption and endless rolling burnouts is already here. It’s called the electric forklift.
Now, you might not think an electric forklift has much in common with a roadgoing car. There’s wheels, sure, and a steering wheel, but otherwise there’s not much. However, where the electric forklift shines is that it features batteries, an electric motor, and a controller that’s dirt simple to wire up. Once you’ve got those things, you can go find any busted-ass old car with a blown engine and have a functioning electric-driving vehicle in a weekend of wrench-spinning with a couple buds and some brews. What could be more mainstream than that?
Admittedly, just putting forklift parts verbatim into a commuter car is not going to produce the vehicle of your dreams right off the bat. That’s okay. It’s iterative, and most importantly, cheap. As your paycheque allows, you can start experimenting with alternate battery setups, better controllers, and stickier rubber. And it’s not like electric cars crash less often than regular cars - pretty soon the junkyards will be full of scuppered Leafs and two-piece Teslas that you can puzzle out how to fit into your existing vehicle.
The important thing is that you have a runner now, not an eternal project that will never materialize, like a semi truck drawn by a crazy person that is only filmed in the investor videos rolling downhill. You can go and smoke tires in front of any oil and gas corporate office you want, and then steal a charge from their block heater outlets afterward to boot.
In conclusion, with just a trip to the local corporate salvage auctions and a tactically-placed bet on an old piece of shit forklift, you too can be making limited-production electric vehicles. And that’s worthy of a couple government incentives in exchange for some impossible promises, don’t you think? Ah, now you’re really a replacement for an OEM.
Cat toys, critical lifesaving infrastructure, extremely temporary exhaust gaskets - is there anything the humble zip tie can’t do? They hold together virtually everything in our civilization that duct tape won’t, but we don’t really know where they came from. Tonight, on PBS’ Seat Safety Switch Searches, we’ll find out, or we’ll forget about the whole thing and buy a reasonably-priced used car.
As far as anyone is concerned, the first zip ties on the market were the Ty-Rap brand. Planes would use them, under the idea that super-rich assholes wouldn’t mind paying a bunch of money for anything that goes on their Cessna, and if they didn’t work, then nobody would look too closely at a single-engine small aircraft crash. Eventually, competitors ripped off the idea, made it much cheaper, and sold you a huge sack of the fuckers. You’ll keep buying them, too, because it is literally cheaper to buy another bag than it is to remember where you put the last one (like finishing nails, or children.)
Who figured out that they could make the entire zip-tie out of plastic, the critical moment in making them cheaper? We don’t know, but what I do know is that I was just at the grocery store and a new edition of the local used car classifieds is out. In print. Most of the time, you’re going to want to use Craigslist or a similar online marketplace to look for cars. That makes sense - everyone’s there, right? No. Not everyone is there - there’s a small population that remains convinced that paying people to put their cars in a magazine is a good way to sell them. You know, suckers. And since you already know they’re suckers, half the negotiation is done for you. Let’s call up this guy and see how badly he wants to offload his 1981 Dodge Challenger. Papa needs to spend this public-broadcaster money on some twin stick action.
If there’s one thing that unifies us as members of the human race, it’s knowing someone who has an enormous car payment for a relatively shitty automobile. When the living asshole at the dealership tells you that he can take what you owe on your old car and just “roll it into” your new financing, it’s hard not to say yes, and he’s even nice enough to fit your monthly budget. You get to drive off in a two-year-old Murano, and his boss gets to build a seven bedroom house out of bricks of cocaine.
Decades of wage deflation have meant that, actually, new cars are completely unaffordable for a growing portion of the populace. There’s the old canard that increased technology does make them more expensive to construct - arguments often made by the same folks arguing against having to follow costly new regulations for “don’t kill millions of people by cheating on diesel emissions” and “maybe pedestrians shouldn’t die in low-speed collisions” - but, realistically, easy access to finance has made up for the cash money that your boss isn’t paying you.
As you’d expect, lots of people are seriously underwater on their car loans now. Some owe huge multiples of what their shitty car is worth. This is a direct outgrowth of aggressive subprime financing (read: “lending to people with no goddamn money”). Eventually, like all exotic financing, this will implode the entire country’s economy and plunge us into a confusing state of torpor, in which our homes become completely worthless and the bank pulls the copper out of the walls of your kid’s junior high school.
Want to try and avoid this by buying an older car, used? Assuming you can come up with the cash - or finance it through a bank if it’s new enough - there’s a lot of fear in the average consumer’s heart about the reliability of a previously owned car. If it does blow up, don’t worry - the dealership and mechanic have their own special financing that will sell you a new transmission or a timing belt job on a nice, low monthly payment.
There’s a lot of reasons for why this phenomenon seems to be accelerating, but chief among them is the fact that car dealerships are the most powerful political force in virtually any country. Sure, they don’t have that much influence in a rich city like Chicago or Vancouver, where candidates are funded by bankers, lawyers, or independently wealthy patrons with money to blow on politics. In some shithole in the middle of Montana, however, suddenly a car dealership (or a real estate office) is the biggest slush fund in the electoral district. Since there’s more poor ridings than rich ridings in nearly every country that isn’t Luxembourg, it turns out that the majority of your country’s representatives were probably elected with the help of some guy who owns a Chevy dealership.
To actually solve this problem would require a fundamental reshaping of our entire political system, so it’s much easier if we just turn it into more entertainment. My suggestion is that we start some kind of national game show. We’d pick a random car model every month, and whoever turns out to be paying the most per month for, say a, 2006 Lancer gets to have their debt forgiven. And then we shoot the fucking car from a trebuchet directly into the cocaine-brick house of the dealership GM who sold it to them.
Although working on cars is appealing because it is firmly grounded in reality, delusions can still slip in. Your state of mind greatly affects the amount of success you’ll have. Most tasks can be accomplished by being prudent, resourceful, and methodical. Then there are all the jobs that are completed only with a blinding rage that burns your sense of cosmic injustice like nitromethane.
For instance, I used to wrench with a guy who lived in sort of this converted barn. Nobody really knows what happened to the previous owners, it just popped up for sale one day because the realtor got an anonymous package sent to his office with the deed inside. The hauntedness and eerie shit that happened later (don’t trust a Cub Cadet) aside, the most interesting feature of the barn during his ownership were all the new dents that formed in the garage door from him chucking tools. Something wouldn’t budge, or it would budge too much, or some combination of the stack-of-spinning-plates that make up a complex assembly wouldn’t align perfectly, and he’d chuck a spanner or two at the closest vertical surface. It was his way of focusing his mind, in the same way that those monks on TV will set themselves on fire when they’re angry at the government.
For me, though, I consider myself to be more of a manic-depressive repair enthusiast. My garage door is safe from being hit by errant socket wrenches, and the neighbours see me hooting, fist-pumping and doing cartwheels on my driveway whenever I successfully slot home an exhaust header or just get that fucking glovebox clip undone so I can get at the cabin air filter. If something’s not going right, however, and it keeps not going right all evening, I will frequently swing into a mood so blue that little will snap me out of it. I have spent many a night leaning up against a fender, wondering out loud to the uncaring universe why that shit won’t chooch. That’s because I don’t summon my anger effectively enough. Anger is what makes you realize that a rusted nut is no longer a nut, and that gives you the conceptual shift to just cut that fucker off and deal with the consequences.
I think there has to be some kind of a balance in between these two extremes, but I’ll be damned if I’ve ever seen it. The next time you’re at a professional mechanic’s shop, ask to see the place where they throw their tools at the wall. You want to pick whichever one of them sank a screwdriver into the drywall the deepest.
Lean burn is the most advanced fuel-saving technology ever attempted by humankind. The problem is one that has perplexed humanity throughout the ages: how do you have a hella sick carburetor with big fat accelerator pumps but don’t burn too much fuel or produce a ton of smog when you’re cruising on the highway? One answer was to bolt a computer on top of the whole thing, and then vibrate that computer a whole bunch while slowly cooking it to death over hundreds of thousands of miles.
In the late 70s, Chrysler figured that they could fuck around a bit with the spark timing in order to use only a very small amount of fuel to run your engine, without said engine accidentally erupting into a cosmic explosion that damaged everything around. And that sounds amazing in theory. Who wouldn’t want to save fuel while retaining throttle response and horsepower? The answer is basic physics, and the hubris of man.
Here’s the plain truth about automotive engineering: literally nobody understands ignition timing. Sure, in theory, anyone can tell you that it controls when the spark is fired relative to the position of the piston. If you actually try looking at it with your inferior human eyes, however, all you see is a big wet fart and the car not starting. Or inexplicably losing 65 horsepower on the dyno and turning the exhaust valves from a solid to a liquid. In the proudest tradition of my ancestors, therefore, I refuse to believe that this thing I cannot directly witness is actually a consequential part of objective reality. Ignition advance is a witch’s trick.
And, well, it turned out that Chrysler showed up a little bit too early to this particular party. Lean burn-equipped cars often ran just fine from the factory, but a lot of mechanics were “spiritual types” like myself and refused to invest in an oscilloscope or read a short manual in order to develop the ability to service this stack of voodoo nightmare that Chrysler bolted on top of a perfectly good carburetor. By the 80s, it would be hard to find most cars still rocking it, mostly because at that point hair metal and low-compression turbocharging had taken over the automotive cultural zeitgeist.
Progress marches on, of course, and the dream of lean burn was eventually accomplished through electronic fuel injection, but it did so at a terrible cost. You see, each and every car equipped with EFI actually has the soul of a small space alien from an ancient civilization embedded into its microprocessor, achieved with the help of Chrysler’s deep connections to the Scientology movement. That’s why the sound isn’t as good when you hit the throttle, and why cars suddenly developed the ability to start in minus-ten weather (the alien’s tears are antifreeze.)
People like to ask me why I prefer this, my 36th Volare, to all the others. Honestly, it comes down to the options. You’ve got your Taiwanese “Idleknock” carburetor, a confusing array of redundant ignition systems installed by the illiterate, and tires that started to cord sometime in the Reagan administration. All of this combines to provide the most supremely comfortable driving experience you can imagine.
Think about it: what’s your favourite pair of jeans? The comfortable ones, right? Those aren’t necessarily the same ones that your significant other will let you go to the Prime Minister’s new Swiss Chalet family restaurant with. If you didn’t have to impress anyone, though, they’re what you would wear all the time because they’re just so nice, knee holes, blown seams, and fraying be damned.
This Volare is sort of similar. If it were a faster car, I’d be more concerned about the sketchy handling (we think all the rust around the ball joints is keeping the grease in) and the ponderous brakes. As it is, I don’t have to worry about it too much.
It’s too ugly to worry about parking lot dings or sinkholes, and nobody can steal it because the starting process involves extensive knowledge of a Malaise Era Chrysler electrical system and holding the horn button down when you turn the key for some reason. Last, on modern cars with lots of luxury features, you’re always wondering what mode you’re in. This baby doesn’t even have multiple forward gears left; whatever automatic is in it won’t leave Third no matter how many parts-store flushes I keep dumping down the fill tube in lieu of fresh ATF.
Everyone should really have a car just like this in their inventory. Yeah, it won’t impress the other board members when you go to the country club, but honestly - fuck ‘em. You don’t need that kind of negativity in your life. Not when your commute could be this comfortable.
There are so many ways that you can tell the company you work for isn’t doing so hot. No more free snacks, emails lecturing everyone to watch your toilet paper usage, a security guard in the office supplies cabinet. For me, the first indication is when the bosses start to get mid-range luxury cars.
I’ve worked in a lot of places before where we were all convinced that a bonus - if it even happened - would be relatively minuscule. Maybe it’d bolster our retirement fund, or help pay for a bit of a kid’s college. I once bought three-quarters of a Chevy S10 on the money I made from an employer going public. The regional bosses, though - they’re actually going to get a big whack of that money, because management looks out for its own.
Because management also knows when things aren’t going so well, there’s an indicator when they themselves realize that the rollercoaster has reached its apex and it’s time to cash out. They might not have been able to get that twin-turbo Lambo they had their childhood dreams set on, but an Audi A8 isn’t that terrible of a consolation prize for a lifetime of working your way up the org chart toiling for The Man. Nobody else will notice, they figure. And they’re right - because the average employee doesn’t obsessively remember every car in the parking lot, they won’t notice when a six-year-old Nissan Altima suddenly becomes a six-figure luxobarge. If you’re reading this, you’re probably the kind of person who will.
So the next time your boss shows up to work with a big unwieldy set of keyless entry fobs, get your resume updated. After all, if you can get the plum jobs before all your coworkers are on the market, then maybe you have a chance of making it into management and riding a rocket to Lambotown. Or at least a 1987 Jaguar XJS-12. Those are pretty nice, too.
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tags: jaguar, lamborghini, audi, chevrolet, chevrolet s10
Nobody really remembers the also-rans. The Pope Leo IIs to the Urban VIs. The Bally Astrocades to the Atari 2600s. Your Shasta to Eternal Nightmares Sprite. Cars, though. Cars are different. Everyone loves a plucky fighter in the automotive industry, whether it be a denim-clad AMC or that weird Chinese electric Jeep thing that your cousin bought off eBay by accident when he was drunk.
I think this is probably because cars invoke an emotional response. Lots of people love their cars, even if they’re not the kind of psychopath who loves cars. And brand loyalty is quite strong in cars as opposed to other things, with over 90% of people buying the same brand of car over and over until they die, according to this statistic that I just pulled out of my ass. If you “picked wrong” and got a car that was unpopular, well, it still got you to work and was a trustworthy companion for decades. It’s not like it only ran on Fiero-branded gasoline or anything.
Of course, there’s a flipside to this loyalty. All cars are equally valid, and yet everyone is convinced that theirs are the only good ones. For a couple of years until the law got changed, there was a Subaru meet every Tuesday at the old donut farm. And next door, at the tea museum, was a Mitsubishi Evo meet. My roommate and I used to swing by every morning afterward on our way to work, and just scoop up the balance shafts and teeth into a dustpan. This huge diversity in great car choice has meant, ironically, a lack of tolerance.
That’s why everyone should be like me. I’m brand-blind - diagnosed by a medical professional - and I will literally buy and run into the ground any vehicle that’s cheap enough, especially if it comes with a manual transmission. Most of the time when I go to the vehicle registry, I have to come prepared with a mini-lesson for the clerk about exactly what an Innocenti or a Pontiac Grand Am is.
Consider striking your blow for diversity and tolerance today. Fire up Craigslist, filter by “under $1000,” close your eyes and just click away. You’ll be surprised by just how great literally every car is, even if you accidentally end up getting into a brutal fistfight with an Outback owning grandma over “vortex generators,” whatever those are.
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tags: subaru, mitsubishi, pontiac, innocenti, pontiac fiero, pontiac grand am
It’s good to be embarrassed of the stuff you’ve put out in the past. That means that you are growing as a person, and the quality of your art is improving. Unless you’re a major auto manufacturer, in which case you should maybe go back a few notches.
For now, the only bone that the automakers are willing to throw to people like me seems to be “retro-styled” vehicles. These bastards harken back to an idealized past in appearance only, with modern safety features and curb weights to match. Once in awhile, you get a cute little easter egg that shows one of the designers has looked at the Wikipedia page for the car for a couple of minutes.
Now, don’t get me wrong: I love new cars, too, with their radar cruise control, intact floor-pans, and cupholders. I’m not one of those dyed-in-the-wool bigots who demands that every single car return to the glory days of two-stroke engines, three-on-the-tree manual transmission and enough cigarette lighters to burn down Panama. Maybe what I’m saying is that they should sell old new cars.
Instead of selling new-new cars, the latest and greatest, maybe run off a few extras of the last-generation model. Super cheap that way - you get to reuse the old tooling - and they can spend all the money they saved making them dangerously fast. After all, we’re jamming an ever-increasing amount of horsepower into each new chassis; chances are the old one will be happy with it as well. If I became President overnight, that’s one of the things I’d force manufacturers to do. At the very least they should provide a little custom-subframe-and-motor-mount kit to do the swap yourself. Everyone knows buying a crate engine retail is like 50% margin; it’s supporting the economy.
Now, my critics are going to point out some flaws in my reasoning. If I were to actually buy a recent used car, chances are I’d be unable to notice it wasn’t new. The newest car I’ve ever purchased was 22 years old, it’s true, but in the price range that I shop in you really don’t want to be buying a car that’s less than five years old. Usually they only work their way down to my snack bracket when someone’s died inside them, at best, and my detailer works such infrequent hours that I’d probably end up spending the first few months of ownership carpooling with Grandma’s skeleton heaped in the back seat.
Auctions are where it all comes together. Your average Craigslist transaction just can’t compare. There, you’re only up against one competitor: the seller or buyer. At an auction, potentially an entire field of assholes could come out of nowhere and blow your chances of buying an extremely mint-rusty Celica all to hell. They’re winner-take-all, just like democracy.
You probably have seen an ad for a car auction in the newspaper, or heard it on the radio in between the Morning Zoo making prank calls to vulnerable individuals. That’s not the kind of auction that I like to go to; I’ve had the most luck at salvage auctions, where Uncle Bob and Papa Tony aren’t trying their level hardest to buy an ES300 at 280% of its blue book value. What I’m buying is a project (my attorney prevents me from calling it, or anything else I own, an “investment.”)
At a salvage auction, it’s just you, your wits, and your balls (metaphorical if necessary.) How much of your money are you willing to bet that the front end impact that took this Pilot off the road didn’t crack the intake manifold against the firewall? Do you actually understand a 1988 Merkur XR4Ti well enough to gamble that you can find a replacement gearbox before the muncipality tows it away? What do you remember of Great-Aunt Angela’s Pathfinder and that weird grinding noise it made on the side once when you were seven years old and she tried to explain it to you in vague terms in between whole-body sobs at the repair bill? It’s a mental game, and that’s before you start trying to fuck over the other guy in the lot trying to make a quick fix or break it for parts. In that fifteen minutes before the bidding starts, you and the seventeen other guys who are interested will be hanging around the car, making up various bullshit problems in order to scare them away from it. There’s nothing like it this side of a game of Russian roulette.
Now, I haven’t been what you would call especially “successful.” In fact, most of the purchases I’ve made have been ultimately reduced to parts that I hoarded into my basement after paying to have the unibody towed away. And yet there is always that promise of just one more. Maybe this ‘96 Escort will be the one to turn things around for me. Don’t you bid on it, though. It’s got, uh, timing herpes. That’s real bad, you won’t be able to fix it.
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tags: ford, ford escort, merkur, merkur xr4ti, nissan, nissan pathfinder, honda, honda pilot
When you become a dentist, the most important thing that you do is decide what car to buy first. Will you own a Boxster, a Jaguar, or just a mid-range Lexus? They’re all fine choices, but they carry more of a consequence than you’d think. Although your patients will never become consciously aware of it, your choice will reflect on how other dentists perceive you.
These vehicles are more than just a great way to get around; they represent joining a faction. Sporty dentists hate luxury dentists who hate bourgeois English dentists. You get the idea. Hundreds of wine tastings have been ruined when two guests are seated at the same table, only to find out that they are on opposite sides of a century-old conflict. If there’s one thing you learn in dental school, it’s how to know your way around knives.
We are scarcely aware of the secret Tooth Wars that are fought in the shadows and alleyways of dental practices across the world. If the average person ever found out how much violence and bloodshed has happened just from trying to find the ideal real estate for a practice, they’d revolt and return to the pre-Enlightenment era where everyone punched their own teeth out with flathead screwdrivers and used prayer to deal with chronic gumline infections. Such a state of affairs would be, at the very least, unprofitable.
My dentist, naturally, drives a turn-of-the-century 986 Boxster. I feel good about my money going towards engine builders instead of a lease on a new Macan. And I think that all of his experience looking deep into corners will help provide a little bit of a better chance of survival should one of the Lexus guys barge into the office and start throwing around dental phantoms while I’m in the chair.
I know better than anyone that it can be hard to keep up with technology. Just yesterday it feels like we were waiting all evening to download pornographic GIFs from a BBS on our Commodore 64s, and now it’s impossible to run out of RAM and a malevolent inhuman super-intelligence that cannot be damaged by conventional weapons keeps forcing your children to watch racist cartoon videos on YouTube.
It makes me wonder how my grandparents have coped with the same changes; when they were kids, “they” hadn’t even invented the Chicken McNugget yet. They (my grandparents, not the Big Chicken Illuminati) are not talking to me any more for a variety of personal and legal reasons, so I went over to the local old-folks’ home to see if I could maybe get some background material for my latest piece for Bad Cars Monthly. I was having a lot of trouble trying to figure out the direction that my article on the Isuzu Piazza should go, so it was a reasonable assumption that snacking on some hard candy, pushing a wheelchair around, and listening to complaints about how carrots are a different colour now than in the 1950s would help.
Now, because of the current situation, they’re no longer letting actual human beings walk into the retirement homes anymore. They were hermetically sealed years ago, and the only access is through a remote neural interface to one of the service androids inside. I always hated using these things; their knee servos would wear out after about 80,000 km of walking and get super loose inside their joint. You could chuck some oil in there to put it off a couple years, sure, but it’s not like the maintenance man had been coming by recently either.
Reluctantly, I donned my temporary doppelganger and started looking for an old person to interrogate. Yup, dicky knees for sure. And it looked like someone got some mashed peas into the thermal port, and every couple of seconds there was another warning flashing up in its vision about how the government was about to be overthrown by seditious minorities. This malware had to be years out of date - we’ve been living in the Harmonious Protectorate for at least half a decade now. Probably stopped paying the Goddamn internet bill when they changed from fibre-optic to holotap.
All of the folks inside were pretty nice, but didn’t seem to know anything at all about the Isuzu Piazza (or even the Impulse or Rodeo.) The visit was a bust, my article was getting nowhere, and I was becoming increasingly frustrated at the effort it took to pilot this piece of shit robot in a straight line down the hallway. My concentration lapsed, and the android presumably took it as an instruction to turn ninety degrees right and fall down a flight of stairs.
I was just about to disconnect and leave the junkheap where it fell, but then I saw it. My little astronaut to Planet Retirees had stumbled upon an underground parking garage full of mid-90s economy cars. Honda, Nissan, Toyota, Kia. These must have belonged to the orderlies, before they were banned from returning to their workplaces. No Isuzu, of course, but I figured my editor would no longer give a shit about that assignment if I were to drop a gently rusted ‘98 Corolla Plus in his reserved parking spot. After a few minutes of learning to compensate for the input lag on the android’s left foot, I was cautiously reversing the little Toyota out of its spot.
In all the excitement of bursting through the vacuum-sealed antiviral bubble and being chased by the quarantine-enforcement war drones summoned by the Overmind, I neglected to remember that I - myself - was not actually inside the car. The android’s vision winked out as soon as it got on the highway, immediately dropping the connection and crashing all of its onboard systems as soon as its cellular modem switched to “roaming” mode. Some things never change.
All through my childhood, and even through an embarrassingly long portion of my adolescence, I used to fantasize about what kind of tremendously successful billionaire genius I’d be. Would I be nice to others, humbly offering my gifts and largesse to improve the world for those less fortunate? Or would I simply squander my filthy lucre on a series of exotic sports cars and idiotic publicity stunts? The answer, of course, is the latter, but it’s all moot anyway as I have so far failed to become a billionaire genius revered by humanity.
In some ways, life is like a lottery. You’re not necessarily going to be able to afford that sprawling English mansion, those hand-built Ferrari replicas, cocaine that flows like wine, and wine that flows like cheap wine. There are a lot of reasons for why this is, and some of it has to do with the assholes at the top squandering the opportunities for everyone else.
I don’t quite understand why these shadowy bourgeoisie would bother pulling the ladder up behind them, as outside of being able to buy whatever you want on eBay whenever you want it, there seem to be limited benefits to being incredibly rich. For one thing, even if you avoid the urge to splash out huge amounts of money on fancy chauffeured luxury cars and penis-shaped race cars for the street, there’s the pressure to not own just any shitbox, but only interesting shitboxes. You are expected to be “eccentric.” If anything, democratizing being a rich asshole would mean there’d be some really fast Camry wagons out there.
Unfortunately, it seems like my new political party, Heaps United, will once again fail to achieve a majority government. While we’ve made some promising inroads in the middle-class communities which adore our commitment to offering tax breaks for stage rally teams, the extremely rich continue to frown upon our policies. This, I believe, is due to the aforementioned pressure to conform to ancient expectations of what a rich person should be, or it could also be because of the nitromethane-fired power guillotines we’ve been installing outside each of our campaign offices.
In certain less-evolved parts of the world, replacing a windshield is an expensive and infrequent occurrence. Some people will throw out their beloved trash barge rather than kick up a four-digit price to the only windshield shop in the province. This is because they’re lucky enough to live somewhere that replacing the meth-mouth fragments of their sandblasted front glass isn’t a twice-yearly occurrence.
I’m in the shop so often that me and my glass guy are on a first-name basis. Or at least we would be if I could remember what he looks like for more than five minutes after driving out of the shop, admiring my newfound ability to see squirrels and oncoming traffic in direct sunlight. You might be wondering why I make other people do my glass for me. For those of you who haven’t replaced a windshield before, it’s a pretty harrowing ordeal involving lifting a heavy (yet fragile) chunk of extremely expensive glass into your car, and then making sure you don’t fuck up a complex caulking job and end up getting rain inside your stereo (the #1 worst place to get leaks, according to Reader’s Digest.) Obviously, I much rather prefer that they take on the liability for such a situation.
Last time i had to get glass done, I couldn’t go to my regular shop. They were closed for vacation or a funeral or something that I didn’t really care about. Instead, I tried this new shop. It was advertised on the radio, and the price seemed pretty good, so I headed over there and waited. After about an hour, I decided I would take a walk around the neighbourhood near their workshop, waiting for someone to rip out my shattered glass and replace it with an optically-clear beauty largely undeserving of my shitbox of indistinct manufacturing origin.
Even with my relative inexperience in walking even short distances, I was still able to return to the shop before they were done putting the thing back together. I waited well past close, pointedly making eye contact with the service writer as he attempted to dart in and out of the main room. Eventually, my car was returned to me, with a minty windshield, but a bunch of old windshield caulking strewn around the interior. It seemed they didn’t have time to finish my job and clean up the car, which infuriated me beyond belief. Trash goes on the body of my car, not in the interior!
Unfortunately for the shop, they stored their expensive safety glass too close to their fence, and that fence was alongside a large gravel lot. That gravel is the exact right size for someone with a vendetta and a Jeep Gladiator to fling into their yard. The cherry on top, of course, is when the piston in #7 decided to leave home and launch itself in a perfect parabolic arc over the fence and into a Lexus windshield that had somehow survived the rest of the barrage. Must have been a little bit of Red ‘n’ Tacky #2 getting into the rod bearing, I told myself. That’ll happen when you don’t clean your workspace.
Oh no, buddy. You don’t want a nice car. Who needs that kind of anxiety and worry about keeping it in pristine condition? All it takes is one little parking-lot ding from a passing shopping cart and your resale value has gone all to shit. If it gets bad enough, you’re going to have to go to therapy, where any half-ass psychiatrist is going to see “worried about 10-year-old BMW’s clearcoat” as a ticket to profit town.
Now that we agree that owning a nice car is a bunch of fuss you don’t want or need, maybe it’s time to sit down and think about what quirky beaters you’d rather have instead. That’s why I’ve started my own line of boutique shitbox dealerships, catering to the moneyed elite and also upper-middle-class types looking for a weird car to drive to the country club. With a new Lexus, everyone there will know what it cost. With a Saab 9-3 convertible, all those onlookers will spend the entire time trying to figure out what the logo on the trunk lid is and completely forget to evaluate what it means for your net worth relative to theirs.
Getting started couldn’t be easier. Our dealership is full of experts in every niche trim level, option package, and potential engine swap for sub-$10,000 cars. All of them have even passed Craigslist University, which is our exclusive training program for compulsive car gamblers that are always looking for something undervalued by the people who just want a reliable car that gets them to work. Book off an hour, come on in, and let our talented sales staff walk you through options ranging from Alfa Romeo to Zagato. You’ll leave with a greater appreciation for the glorious diversity of the automotive landscape, and ideally a 25-year-old sports sedan that smokes on deceleration and was made in a country that no longer exists.
We call this glorious network Bad Cars Direct, and we have franchises in every American city. It turns out buying up old Saturn dealerships was ridiculously cheap, and doing so allows you a connection to local politicians that can only come when you do a lot of large cash deals with questionable individuals. We’ve used this leverage to defeat vehicle inspection laws across the country, which saves you even more money.
I suspect the average North American citizen never has to think too hard about the vagaries of import customs. Sure, maybe you’ve gone on vacation and gotten hassled a bit by some jackboot about exactly how much you paid for that fancy t-shirt you have on, but it doesn’t occupy your daily thinkin’ time. When you run an import/export business, however, what customs thinks of you rapidly becomes the only thing that matters.
A friend of mine who will remain nameless recently contracted me for a bit of help. He had been importing fancy sports cars, 4x4s, and tiny turbocharged shitboxes from Japan. Then he turns around and sells them for a massive profit. I didn’t quite understand what “profit” meant in relation to selling cars, as all of mine are either sold to the insurance company, seized by police, or abandoned on the roadside; all three at a huge loss. By joining him at the shop and helping wrench once in awhile, I hoped that this whole money-making thing might rub off on me.
I had only been working there for a few weeks when the trouble with the government started. Some keener in the customs department had decided that a WagonR had an unacceptable amount of “plant material” on the body, and therefore represented a grotesque risk to the biodiversity of our fine nation. They certainly had my sympathy, as I often also didn’t want to do my job for largely bullshit reasons, but the idea of a perfectly usable car being trapped in some chain-link hellhole for arbitrary reasons stuck in my craw. My new boss sent me down to the docks to “take care of it.”
Upon arriving at the storage yard, I consulted quickly with the customs officials. At first, they were angry at me, but soon became infuriated when I demonstrated to them that coating the mossy underbody of the car with smouldering tire rubber (via four-wheel burnouts) was an effective defoliant that easily surpassed all documented standards for port entry.
If there’s one thing that unifies a lot of us greasy car types, it’s that we can’t go past a parking lot without craning our necks at an absolutely primo 25-year-old shitbox that was at best unremarkable when new. A 1996 Civic, you say? And it’s only half rusty? Let’s all take our photos in front of it.
Sometimes I would take a vacation to a place that rust was much less common, and see the roads positively teeming with minty shitboxes being used as shitboxes. Back home, my dentist neighbour takes care of his ‘88 Prelude like a treasured grandchild, driving it only when sunny and storing it in a climate-controlled plastic vacuum bubble otherwise. Here, with no tinworm, it’s just another old car. On these vacations, I would go buck wild, looking at the local classifieds for all the delicious cars I could bring home. Doing so, however, would be tantamount to sacrificing them to the shortsighted assholes who coated my city’s streets with road salt, an insult to these beautiful-but-tattered survivors. I’m just not sure I’m ready to become such a selfish monster.
Of course, I’ve considered moving to those places. However, because rust doesn’t claim those cars after exactly six years of sustained use, the authorities in those locales have a thing called “safety inspections.” This - having to maintain a shitbox properly - completely defeats the purpose of shitbox ownership. Now, when I dive-bomb a first-generation BMW X3 on the highway off-ramp, I won’t be able to go ten-tenths because I’ll be worried about wiping out the front end of my Tercel and losing those several hundred dollars I spent on struts and a windshield. I would be forced into preserving these cars, rather than doing it out of the goodness of my own heart.
In the end, I think it’s really the rarity that lends the appeal. I don’t think I would want to live in a world where I no longer scream with excitement and swerve into a movie theatre parking lot upon seeing a 1985 F-150 with most of its original bed.
A lot of people visiting my house have noticed the litter box that is featured prominently in a corner of my living room. It’s true: Lord Fluffbottoms has the most delightful shitting throne that a feline could hope for. Any of his many poops and pees are instantly whisked away into the land of wind and ghosts, and I don’t have to jack up my back bending over to scoop the litter anymore. How did I accomplish this incredible feat of engineering, they scream into my face while gripping onto my lapels with white knuckles.
Anyone can do this, really (this goes for literally anything I’ve ever done – if I can do it, you can too.) Just head out into your yard and pick up one of the scattered small-block Chevy V8s sitting on the lawn. If you’re particularly hard up this month, a 4300 or even a 60° V6 will do in a pinch; it will just take longer to evacuate the shittered litter. Then, it’s just a simple matter of fucking around with belt routing for a couple of hours until you have a raking setup that effectively clears the litter. The easy part is done.
What’s the hard part, you ask with a hint of mania in your voice as you frantically claw at my bookshelves in the vain hope that one of the books will explain more about my achievement. This is foolhardy behaviour that embarrasses us both, not least because the bookshelves and books are simply painted onto the walls in an attempt to lure a neighbourhood book club into my home so I could borrow the LED headlights from their Range Rovers to use to de-yellow some old computers. The hard part, my impatient friend, is training the cat.
Obviously for the cat’s safety, you can’t have a 180-plus-horsepower V8 ripping away while they are in the box. What I’ve done is rigged up a very simple throttle linkage and trained the cat to grab onto it as part of their post-shit “scratching everything in goddamn sight” routine. With one quick throttle blip, that shit is thrown out the open window and into the yard, where it presumably lands harmlessly in a compost bin that isn’t there.
Now, the government has been asking a lot of questions about it lately. I think they might be getting ready to offer me a fat subsidy to convert it to electric, or at least some kind of hybrid system. Our nation will finally be rebuilt as a proud producer of cat turd evacuators, a shining poop palace upon the hill.
Don Quixote has nothing on my fucked up quest to find the person who drew the little snowman cartoon in the Subaru owner’s manual. What’s that? You don’t read manuals? Neither did I, except that one day a strange gust of wind blew into my car, opened my glovebox, and launched the manual into my passenger seat. When it landed, it was opened right to the page on “Winter Driving,” in which a Subaru is pictured next to an oddly-shaped snowman wearing a fez.
At the time, I laughed a little bit. Clearly whoever had drawn this has never seen an actual snowman. There’s the fez, for one thing. And if the snowman is to scale, then it’s over nine feet tall compared to the height of the Subaru. Then I started thinking a little more about it, and decided to check the manuals on my other Imprezas. Sure enough, someone had worked to update the little picture of the Subaru in each and every model, to make it perfectly accurate. I began to grow obsessed.
Now, I will latch onto new projects with an intensity and ferocity that scares many. In fact, at the time, I was wearing a special ankle bracelet that told the authorities of my current location. It also had a feature that would sound an alarm when detecting in my sweat the specific collection of hormones and adrenal byproducts that signify the adoption of a new and exciting project. Orderlies had kicked down my front door and medicated me six times in the last two and a half weeks. This time, though, I had the upper hand. Through ninja-like training to control my emotions and also occasionally hosing down the ankle bracelet with a can of chlorinated brake cleaner until it stopped working, I was able to slip past their net and begin collecting Subaru manuals off of eBay, in the hope that I would discover the person or persons responsible for what I was now beginning to call the Snowman Monument.
Since the brake cleaner had also konked out the GPS, there was also nothing stopping me from jumping on a plane under an assumed identity (my “twin” brother, Neutral Safety-Switch) and take an extremely cheap flight to Gunma prefecture. There, I decided, I would be able to shake down Fuji Heavy’s reporting structure until I found the person responsible.
“They’re a contractor,” cried a group of engineers as I entered my third hour of explaining to them how they could work even more power out of the 31-year-old EJ25 by using nitrous oxide to confuse the emissions testers. I think the office manager must have called the cops, too, because I only narrowly escaped some jetlagged orderlies crossing the parking lot with murder in their eyes.
When I finally got home, the manual for the new model year of Impreza was posted. I excitedly downloaded it, only to find that the snowman had been replaced with a crude caricature of me in the nude. I can still hear that bastard cackling at me.
You can’t be a successful Hobby Asshole without being good at time management. It seems that everybody wants a portion of your project time, whether it be the cops wondering why you’re going a buck eighty in a playground zone (the model store closes in the next 15 minutes and I need Mr. Hobby Super Gloss clear-coat if I’m going to get this Mitsubishi Delica Space Gear painted this weekend) or other demands of adulthood requesting that you pay to them at least the minimum amount of attention required. Since you can’t get as much free time as you want to finish all of your shitty projects, it’s necessary to get organized and to prioritize the things that are important to you.
If you’re anything like me, then almost all of your hobbies need spare parts and supplies to be put together. This is okay - you can find time to shop online almost anywhere, whether it’s stopped at traffic lights, during your eighth coffee break at your day-job, or sitting in the back row at a pet funeral. The idea here is that once there is some free time, you’ll immediately be ready without having to pop out to the shops. However, using the exact same mechanism, you can also easily buy new projects, which will not necessarily use the same parts and supplies, and the cycle must begin anew. There are rumours of people who don’t keep constantly adding new projects to their list before the old ones are finished, but as far as I can tell these are just wild fantasies spun by the medically insane.
Other than spare parts, you can create more opportunities for free time by identifying the small stuff that breaks up your day and then doing it all in advance. Eating a meal might take 15 minutes, but if you do that three times a day, you’re basically sacrificing three hours when you add in warming up the meal and throwing the plastic container in the trash disposal. Chances are it makes more sense to eat only one giant meal per day, so the setup and teardown costs are only spent once. Yes, you’ll probably spend more time on the shitter, but that just means you can put a project in the bathroom as well - ideally one that can be easily cleaned.
Perhaps the savviest of all is to incorporate the hobby into your day job. There’s the old adage that you shouldn’t make your passion your job, yes - but that doesn’t apply to tricking your boss into paying to send you for a “training” session that’s actually held in your basement and consists mostly of huffing aerosolized acrylic paint and Tamiya plastic cement. Don’t tell your nosy coworkers, though. Even though it may be tempting to help another share in your scam, it’s only a good idea if one of your hobbies involves digging shallow graves for snitches, and chances are you already work for the mob if that’s the case.
In every young person’s life, there comes a time when they must make the passage into adulthood. This passage is known as an “unpaid internship,” in which the child works for no money at an office or other jobsite until they become aware of their position in society and likelihood of advancement.
The etymology of the term “internship” is lost to history; the nearest that top historians have decided is that the first internship was about gutting seabirds that the young protege had caught with their bare hands. Nowadays, thanks to drones, the number of wild animals that need to be slaughtered by human beings for food has been substantially reduced. This forces the potential intern into the concrete jungle of the modern office tower.
I was an intern once, just like many of you. One morning, I got on my best dress shirt and reported for work at the office, not quite understanding what went on inside its cubicle-studded walls. By the end of my first day, I knew more about the politics of central heating and air conditioning than I ever could have imagined during my school days. And inside my heart beat a thirst to one day have a desk with a little dish where my coworkers could eat ancient candy from. This would make me their God, I told myself. Then, after my second day, I no longer gave a shit.
Perhaps the most important feature of an internship is that it gives youth money to spend on further education, such as one that allows them to get out of the field in which they had been interning. For me, it let me buy a semi-reliable turbocharged economy car, which in its own way set me upon the path to pure righteousness. I may no longer be able to enter an office without breaking out in hives, but at least I now know how to talk myself into that mail room down the road that has a loading dock for accepting crate engines and JDM half-cuts.
There are a lot of misconceptions and outright lies about the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution. Because of the car’s staggered release worldwide and presence in many popular videogames, some North Americans find themselves in the position of being confused about the entire thing. What is a Lancer Evolution, and why should I park one in my garage? The following is a list of facts you should know about the “Evo” before you plunk down your hard earned cash for what may actually turn out to be a Colt Vista wagon.
First off, the word “Evolution” is actually not what the car was originally supposed to be named. The engineers who designed it were huge fans of Evangelion, a television series where a gang of geometric solids and hellish monsters from the human psyche torment a sexually confused teenage boy until he is depressed enough to take public transit. Unfortunately, the creator of the series had visited a Mitsubishi dealership parts desk in the past, which created tension when the Mitsu executives called up. After the mistake was discovered and lawsuits were filed, the car was hastily renamed immediately before its debut, but even today the Lancer factory has hundreds of bins of unused “g” and “a” emblems, which the Mirage was developed in order to attempt to use up.
The giant wing on the back of most top-trim Evos is not just meant for aerodynamics. As originally designed, the engineers responsible used it to dry out their race suits between test sessions. Japan lacks an appreciation for the electric clothes dryer, so this choice dried the Nomex much faster than leaving it on the balcony of their six-tatami apartment during a dry day. Wingless Evos later became available as an option from the dealership when market research eventually established that actual race car drivers will only drive naked for weight savings.
Different iterations of the Evo are usually referred to by version number rather than actual model years. It does not actually mean you will receive three Evos when you purchase an “Evo 3.” This continued up until and including the Evo 9. It is just a terrible coincidence that “X” stands for 10, as the “Evo X” is intended to be read as “Not an Evo.”
While both the Evo and its cross-town rival the Subaru WRX STI have four-cylinder engines turbocharged to a worrying level of reliability, Evo owners don’t like to park next to other Mitsubishis. Once, when I still owned a WRX, I confronted a middle-aged lady with an Outback XT about how cool her car was, only to find out she was terrified of me and did not want to discuss the merits of longitudinal versus transverse drivetrain arrangements at 6:47 PM outside a Walmart. She probably bought an Evo X.
The popular car-racing RPG Gran Turismo brought the Evo into larger public awareness in North America. Suddenly every kid in the suburbs wanted a loud sedan with all-wheel-drive that plowed in the corners but made up for it with staggering amounts of thrust. Unfortunately, the limitations of the original Sony PlayStation hardware meant that the game designers couldn’t accomplish their original vision of forcing the gamer to replace heat-cycled coolant hose clamps and post on message boards about how fast their car is until Gran Turismo 3: BBS-Spec.
When I was growing up, one of the most popular arguments in my community was about Chevy versus Ford. One manufacturer had dedicated, heroic adherents and the other was the disturbing choice of a sadly growing group of incoherent, perverted degenerates. Luckily, we all respected one anothers’ rights to an opinion and - outside of limited pockets of sectarian violence - the debate was more of a gentleman’s argument than the all-out street brawl it would later become.
I think what helped is that, at least before the governor stepped in and told us we had to stop, Chrysler people were run out of town by impromptu bipartisan mobs. This definitely helped form some cohesive bonds across marques, as Ford and Chev owners would be stuck together for a long car ride as they prepared to bury a truckload of bodies of Dart owners in the nearby swamp, and be forced by this circumstance to find common ground.
In the interest of full disclosure, this is the part of the story where I stop and calmly explain that I came from a “Ford family.” My ancestors, as far back as could reasonably be motorized, had picked Old Man Henry’s shitboxes over those of the other guy. Yes, this meant that there were certain barbeques we weren’t invited to, and promotions that my dad was passed up for at work. It was all worth it to get a sun visor that didn’t rattle on the highway, and a stereo with that cool green tint to it.
Even with these sectarian strains, we could still live anywhere in the town we wanted to. The balkanization and redlining didn’t get bad until the imports really took over, and ate away the mushy middle of both sides until all that was left were the extremist radicals. Suddenly, we were being yelled at to lock our individual doors and duck below the window frame whenever my dad had to drive us through GMC territory (later renamed the Saturnlands) on our way to McDonalds. It was still exciting to hear that 300 cubic inch inline six rip to its very low redline each time, but my mom eventually got frazzled and demanded that we buy a Mazda to bow out of the conflict. It’s practically a Ford, I can remember her screaming while holding up Escort and Protege brochures side by side.
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tags: ford, chevrolet, ford escort, mazda, mazda protege
Who is suffering the most from the collapse of nature? Is it the rainforests? Regular forests? Arctic tundra? None of these - it is the humble drive-through safari operator. Nobody has suffered more from the encroaching climate disaster, but they get short shrift in the literature of environmental science.
It used to be that running one of these monuments to humble family fun was simple. Get a big ol’ field in some temperate clime, and fill it with animals you bought from crooked breeding operations. Then, either let people drive through it themselves, or charge them 25 bucks a head to get a high schooler wearing a pith helmet to drive them through in a 1978 Land Rover with 3.4 billion kilometers on the odometer.
Nowadays, everyone’s so cranky about our impending extinction that they’re keeping an extra close eye on even the smallest population of zebras. Tactical combat robots swoop any entrepreneur dedicated enough to try and provide for his family by stealing wallaby babies. Federal inspectors wonder why you haven’t paid taxes since the Reagan administration. It’s a perfect storm, conspiring to wipe this noble industry entirely off the map, and costing tens of jobs in the process. That’s why I decided to step in and buy up one of these struggling operations.
Sure, my critics might say that my drive-through safari is more of a drive-through junkyard. The zoning for the land is pretty generous, and it has to pay off my initial investment somehow. What’s more, it is extremely rude to judge me for having a lack of animals, what with it being so expensive to treat them properly. It’s classist. Your kids are probably too stupid to tell that this Volare I painted like a giraffe isn’t actually a giraffe, anyway. They’ll never see a real one.
Until recently, humankind has had to put up with only the real things that they see in front of them. Barring the introduction of hallucinogenic substances, the idea of being able to slip off to a delusional dreamworld at will has been strictly limited to science fiction. Now we stand on the precipice of a new future of virtual reality. A future which gives fast-moving grifters the chance to bilk institutions out of their money in order to make them seem “with it.”
Last month, the local university started up some kind of virtual reality pilot program. You could buy about five thousand dollars worth of gamer gear and wear ski goggles on your face. All this so you could sit in a room pretending to sit in a room and listen to a lecturer push discredited economic theories for ninety minutes - or at least until the heat produced by the GeForce Nightmare Edition’s rack of tanning-salon-grade 2.2-million-lumen RGB LEDs forced you to faint.
Of course, this news about a new technology being kind of imprecisely applied drove a lot of people to the stores. A bunch of companies bought it so they, too, could seem “with it.” If someone as lame as a university was doing it, then clearly the lightning-fast innovators of private industry couldn’t be left behind. That’s what’s nice about innovation: you can get the press release for it, and then not really do anything substantial, because your employees keep getting mildly seasick after standing in front of a disembodied Excel spreadsheet in a hellish white void for nine hours a day. Then I swing by and scoop the rig out of the dumpster after memorizing your night security guard’s routine. Nice try, Phil, but I know you don’t look closely enough at the shadows beneath that Isuzu NPR.
Now, equipped with tens of thousands of dollars of future-tech virtual reality gear, I was finally able to play my favourite videogame. It’s called Rust Remover, and you take control of a cyborg mechanic who is able to use a special magical laser to strip rust from old cars, returning them to perfect condition. Sure, it’s fantasy now, but just wait until I figure out how to learn the Chinese characters for “laser technology company dumpster.”
For years, the secret to selling anything to an ever more jaded public is to make it smaller. Thinner televisions. Easier-to-lose remotes. Baby arugula. Smaller Game Boys. Anything, that is, except for cars.
The one unifying factor of all of humankind to the present day is our unwavering thirst for a large, powerful car. Historians have unearthed clay tablets belonging to the Sumerians where they debated what the most luxurious barge of a car would be, except at the time it was called science fiction instead of automotive journalism. Everyone thinks they need to get an ever-bigger car.
Due to long-overdue legislation, getting an actual bigger car has become difficult in many parts of the world. Automakers universally responded to this apparent differential between demand and reality by taking a small car and jacking it up to make it seem bigger, and so far this scam appears to be working. The current model Lincoln Continental is just a previous-generation Ford Fiesta wearing an elaborate fibreglass bodykit that’s six feet wide on each side, like that fat lady suit from the middle of Total Recall.
Here at Seat Safety Switch Motors, we have a better plan. We’ve partnered with a crooked optician to sell a series of eyeglasses with trick lenses that make your existing car look fucking massive. No longer will you feel penned in - not when the distance from your dashboard to your lap has suddenly become longer than a football field. Sure, you might think this distortion of depth perception will make it harder to precisely place your car in the lane and park, but studies have shown that none of you know how to do those things anyway. And don’t worry: the glasses fit into a super slim carrying case when you’re not wearing them.
Television, the radio, movies, and other popular culture all agree: you need a pickup truck. All of the rugged individualists who exercise their freedoms openly in public, often at the expense of those around them? They own a pickup truck. That’s how they get shit done. Your lack of a Silverado is why your shower grout is kind of dingy. Maybe you should go finance one.
They’re half right. A pickup truck does have some great advantages when it comes to getting your day’s work done, as long as your objective for the weekend is obliterating a set of rear tires and scraping a hole into the surface of the highway from the white-hot bare rims afterward. For everything else, you can just buy a $400 Grand Caravan and leave it on the side of the road when something expensive pops. No, what people really buy pickup trucks for is the perception. A great fraud has been visited upon our people, one that can only be fought by converting shitty front-wheel-drive commuter cars into pickups by using a sawzall.
In theory, a pickup truck is just a car with an extra hole in the back. You can make a hole. Mechanically, this all makes sense: most trucks have a solid rear axle. A Chevy Cavalier has a torsion beam rear axle. Either way, you’re gonna be able to carry more gravel in the back than the engineer who designed it would say is “safe.” Maybe bump up the rear tire pressure a little just to be really sure.
If you make a pickup truck, then by definition you must be more rugged than the dope who just popped on down to Glenn Eagleston Chev-Olds and bought a brand new one. And it gives you an excuse to buy some cool power tools (the aforementioned sawzall, of course, but also a welder unless you want to be very wet every time it rains.) And the source vehicles are often cheap, which is another feather in your hat when it comes to rugged practicality. Hell, for one single payment on a half-ton you can probably make two or three shitbox El-Caminoalikes and sell them off to all the slavishly loyal Instagram followers you’re going to acquire as soon as the townies see you bopping around in your survivalist once-sedan.
There is just one problem, though: most front-drive commuter cars do not have a turbodiesel engine with an obnoxiously bad tune. At least not until you get a little creative at the junkyard. Hey, Steve McQueen would do it.
I’ve worked a lot of odd jobs over the years. You could say it’s because of the economy, or my unique set of skills being in low demand. You might even jump into my Twitter mentions and scream that I should learn to code. None of these things are true, and if you try to send me to a JavaScript boot camp I have informed my attorney to release compromising pictures of you. Yeah, those pictures.
The actual reason is that I get bored easily. I can’t imagine working the same office job in the same industry forever. Lots of my coworkers have been fine with it, plugging away for a double-digit number of years because that’s just what they know. After about eighteen months I’m getting ready to pull my own teeth out, and chances are everyone around me can tell. One such job was my limited engagement as a circus talent scout.
Now, as you’ve become aware from previous entries in this series, I was raised by circus folk. And not successful circus folk, at that - my dad never made the transition to circus middle management before he was retired, and my mom eventually left him and sought her fame and fortune in the demeaning world of mortgage securitization. For my entire adult life, I had felt guilty that I didn’t at least give it a chance myself; maybe the industry really was as tough as they told me it was, especially now that elephants were illegal.
Working as a circus recruiter is easier than you’d think; sorry, dad. Every small town has at least one starry-eyed youngster who is disgusted with his or her lot in life, and dreams of the vagabond life under the Big Top. All I had to do was follow the crew around, and then wait after each show to see which kids didn’t want to leave. After that, it was usually a quick visit to their parents’ meth flophouse or upscale graphic-design house to sign some contracts, and I got to collect ten percent of their first year’s paycheque. That commission is much less than even what you are imagining it was, but as my job involved so much travelling, the circus was contractually obligated to cover the mileage and fuel on my 1980 Malibu. That old Chevy was a rare manual-transmissioned, no-defroster “Iraqi taxi” that was going through exhaust gaskets about as often as it went through oil, which is to say my trunk didn’t have much room for my luggage what with all the spares rolling around inside it. I got to see the entire country from behind its cracked dash and cracked-er windshield.
Ultimately, like I said before, I got bored of the entire ordeal. And despite what you might have heard from the news, it had nothing at all with the rumour that I was duped into signing a pair of conjoined sisters that just turned out to be non-identical twins wearing a single trenchcoat. Those kids did a great showing in the freak show no matter what.
In the modern era, the most popular television show turns out to be a 39-second clip of a guy trying to start an old Dodge Power Wagon with a huff of ether. Nobody is entirely sure why. All previous expeditions by computer scientists and media experts to the South Pole with a mission to directly interrogate the YouTube algorithm have ended in failure, whether from exposure to the harsh weather or the sophisticated array of constantly-changing laser fences surrounding the facility.
For the video’s part, it’s actually pretty good. The first time I watched it, I felt like I had learned a little bit about the world outside of my humble collection of shitboxes. Peering over this guy’s shoulder in the video’s shaky, shoulda-bought-a-tripod glory makes you feel a little bit like you’re his best friend from childhood, too. I think I’ve watched it about three dozen times, which isn’t that much when it comes to The Clip.
Of course, my enthusiasm for the video has slightly diminished because of how absolutely overpopular it is. When I first discovered it, The Clip had only had about twelve million organic views. Now the view count has been disabled entirely, because it started crashing older phones when they tried to display such a large number. I do watch different videos, but there are entire groups - “cults” is maybe a strong word - that meet regularly to watch the video in super slow-mo, trying to glean a cosmic meaning from the indecipherable mumble-mouth narration of the Owner.
There’s a kind of magic about the whole thing. Maybe that’s what the machine was trying to present to us in a naïve approach to world peace. Or it might just have been that the guy who wrote it was thinking hard about how to fix his own Power Wagon when he had that horrible smart-forklift accident in the loading bay and had his mind uploaded to the system by the trauma surgeons.
The Cold War is long over, but it still exists in the minds of many of those it touched. Such as all of those individuals who were too young to potentially fight in it, didn’t want to enlist, or were not even alive during the time period but feel that our shared national trauma of almost getting quadruple-nuked entitles them to have an opinion on a specific implementation of communism. For myself, I didn’t care much one way or the other (probably I would have had a stronger opinion were I nuked,) but I knew that the Soviets spent a lot of effort on pointlessly duplicating things that we made. And with the demand for retro everything climbing in North America, maybe it’s time to grow the supply side a little bit.
You would think after the fall of the Soviet Union that a lot of their spies simply went home. This is not really the case, as it turns out nobody on our side kept very good notes or carried a grudge. They just stuck behind, and eventually decided - like all good government employees - that they would slap together a tell-all memoir to right some wrongs. In fact, one of those spies, Ilyich, lived just down the street, so I headed over with a pack of sausages and some booze to have socially-distanced jaw time. Maybe, I thought, I could find a Lada Niva for a good price.
At first, Ilyich played dumb. He wasn’t a “car guy” so much as he was a “radio made out of water bottles to communicate with a hostile foreign power” guy. You know, a huge nerd. After a couple hours of talking about the Lada, though, he decided that I was the real deal. I don’t know why my yard full of ancient shit-barges didn’t convince him previously, but maybe it’s a European car snob kind of thing. He walked out into the back of his yard, and pulled up a trap-door hidden under some leaves.
Inside a bunker dug into the back of his yard (I couldn’t even get a variance from the city for a single above-ground garage, what the fuck Ilyich?!) were Ladas and VAZes of all shapes and sizes. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Each one was pristine, with delivery miles on the odometer and with only the original factory rust. My jaw agape, I looked back at Ilyich in surprise.
“Back when it looked like we might win, my handlers sent over a bunch of cars for the occupying force to drive. They didn’t want their ministers to be seen pushing Fords.”
After handing over a few bucks to Ilyich, I was happily on my way with the Niva of my dreams. I ran into a bit of trouble with the registry agents trying to get it plated, but being black-bagged, tied to a chair, and tortured beneath a single bare lightbulb swinging from the ceiling is basically par for the course whenever I have to make a visit there, so I barely noticed that my interrogator was wearing a crappier suit.
The problem with learning things is that you want to learn more and better things. Just accomplished a once-in-a-lifetime project that was too ambitious for you by half? Wasn’t hard enough, I guess. Maybe you should try harder next time.
It’s not lost on me that if some external force (teachers, bosses, the law) had instructed me to do something this complex, I’d tell them to eat shit. Nobody forces me to sweat blood for their benefit. However, I have much higher expectations for myself, and so now I am holed up in my squalid shithole workshop, trying to turn a corded lawnmower into a cordless lawnmower despite not understanding the first thing about electricity beyond “Benjamin Franklin maybe invented it” and “don’t lick outlets.”
On the face of it, this seems like a tractable problem, even more so if you are of a sufficient social strata that you can pronounce the word “tractable” at a party without someone spitting in your open mouth. Electricity comes out of the wall, but electricity also comes out of batteries, and so all we need to do is add enough batteries until things sort of kind of work out. No need to even involve the notebook, we’ll just keep piling shit on until it works. It helps that the cops haven’t bothered to try and clean up the crash site after a self-driving Tesla came flying off the highway in the pursuit of a cloud that it thought was a McDonalds drivethrough and ended up on my lawn.
A couple hours later, I’ve pitched the project into the corner of my workshop and started drinking. Later, the corpse of the lawnmower will likely be scavenged for parts in order to build some other ridiculous project. It’s hard to decide whether or not the job was successful, although I will mention in my defence that one of the first things I did was cut the original power cord off with my pocket knife, thus rendering the “cordless” objective complete. I may have failed, but at least I’ve only let myself down, and that guy’s an asshole.
One of the more resilient tropes of Western entertainment media is that of the friendly neighbour. You know, the guy who lives next door who gives you wholesome advice about raising your family, or shares your commisserations about your job, or gets excited when you grill steak and wants to mooch in exchange for some mild misogyny. In reality, though, this doesn’t happen. How many of your neighbours would you trust to resolve a sitcom plot in your life? I bet it’s zero.
Sure, you might tolerate your neighbours. You might even like and respect them and consider them to be good friends who your kids can rely on if shit ever starts to go really south. Yet it often will take longer to explain the day’s dilemma to them than it would require to just resolve it yourself. For instance, my next-door neighbour is some kind of industrial carpet salesman. I’m a vagabond software developer who has a crippling fear of spending more than a double-digit amount of money in a single transaction. Outside of bitching vaguely about our coworkers, we can’t really offer too much advice to one another about our respective careers. Nor would I trust him to follow through on his half of the bargain on a Strangers On A Train-styled murder-exchange plot.
I do, however, have lots of car advice for him. You see, he owns a nice ‘93 Prelude that’s been mouldering in the corner of his driveway. Broken timing belt or other such weekender nonsense that certainly doesn’t justify several years of torpor. That Honda needs to be fixed. It deserves to live again, to get another chance at dying in glorious touge battle rather than a Kay Bee Toys parking lot, so it can ascend to Soichiro’s gasoline Valhalla. Because of a certain legal complication in my past, I’m not allowed to directly touch other peoples’ cars even with their express written permission, as commanded by my parole officer. Believe me when I tell you that it is extremely tempting to jump on that thing and start spinning wrenches to get it going again, electroshock therapy be damned. To me, seeing the car in this state is tantamount to torture.
What this means in practice is that whenever I see my neighbour outside, I keep telling him to work on the car. I tell him how to fix it in excruciating detail when he’s throwing out garbage, trying to get the ducks off his roof again, or burying oddly-large rolled-up rugs in that huge hole he made in his yard last weekend. Yet he doesn’t bother ever lifting a finger. A good neighbour would have already at least borescoped the valves and let me peek over his shoulder.
Couple weeks ago, I decided to go down to the farmer’s market. I had a real hankering for zucchini, possibly induced by the hypnotic carrier wave injected into all FM radio by the agricultural cabal that controls my province on weekends (the oil cartel gets the rest of the week.) Imagine my delight when I found that my humble local farmer’s market had been hastily converted from an old-school “walk around and get sick” model to a drive-through. Or at least that’s what I figured they had done, asking for it with those big double barn doors open so wide.
Back in our parents’ generation, this kind of thing was simply unheard of. Drive-throughs weren’t popular at all. You’d be expected to get out of your car and interact with someone, and then eat the food there instead of racing away at high speed. Now you barely even have to slow down. Getting your morning coffee, Timbits and methamphetamines can be just another part of your interminable drive to work. Think of it like mid-air refuelling for a war-plane, except the only thing you’re going to be dropping at mission completion are four-alarm coffee shits in the restroom while Janet from Accounting listens in mute horror in the cubicle next door, your embryonic relationship forever changed.
A lot more places are drive-throughs now. It might be because the average car is getting much bigger, which means that architects and building engineers feel safer about creating wider, more inviting doors for their stores. Since my car choices have effectively been frozen in Carbonite since the 1970s, this means that now virtually every building is a drive-through, whether they meant for it to or not. By their standards, my Volare is absolutely a sub-compact car, and nobody even bats an eye when it enters the hallway and slowly idles on its lumpy cam towards that guy in the back who sells the sticky buns. You might think the local police would stop me, if not the security guards, but there is a truism about Western civilization: if you’re the first to find a loophole, then you can go hog wild. All the world loves a disruptor, it seems, and people look over their shoulder and chuckle with what I assume is an aw-shucks grin beneath their masks when I get impatient and goose the throttle a little bit to make them move aside.
This action wasn’t without risk, of course. The bodywork on my lumpy brown Plymouth has so many holes that I have to keep moving quickly to avoid breathing in the aspirations of my fellow shoppers. You would think the carbon monoxide leaking in through the floorboard holes would take care of that, but apparently the science is still out on that one.
In summer, it’s all about having the biggest fan, everyone thinks. Air conditioning is too expensive, the stuff of kings and cocaine-snorting Instagram royalty. Your average law-abiding citizen is happy with a ceiling fan, or maybe if they’re a constant visitor to Costco, they see themselves as a savvy individual who has scooped up one of those so-called “warehouse fans” that move a laughable 30,000 cfm of air.
Lately, my house has been seeming pretty stuffy. It could be because I have a shitload of junk lying around that soaks up the heat, but it’s actually because my home cooling solution was inefficient. Designed for weaker mortals who aren’t willing to adopt a more powerful solution. Yes, it’s riskier, but as long as you are paying attention, it’s perfectly safe to use the stolen head of a wind turbine hooked up to a Chevy 454 pointing into your kitchen to beat the heat. All you need is a plasma cutter. It helps if you also know a bunch of meth-heads with no fear of heights, an F-250, and a willingness to make twenty dollars. The best part is that even though the cops know what you did, as long as that baby’s running, they’ll be too scared to get close enough to arrest you.
Getting adequate ventilation is about power, yes, but it’s also about strategizing. How can you maximize airflow through your house? For me, the answer was simple. Venturis. That’s an Italian word for “speed holes.” Basically, I punched a bunch of holes in the drywall (easy to patch in a hurry when the landlord comes knocking) and take advantage of the pressure differential that results from trying to force a bunch of air through a tiny hole - the air speeds up. Now, rather than having a relatively limp amount of air coming from a regular fan, I have much faster air. Wear goggles when you visit my place, not least because the studs are now exposed so sometimes a drywall screw will pop out at you.
The only problem I haven’t solved is the noise. Whether it’s the aforementioned Chevy V8 running with open ports, or the sound of the inferior vinyl siding ripping off the house, it’s hard to concentrate. I’ve started wearing headphones around the house, which keeps the blood inside my ears where it belongs. Plus, I get to listen to podcasts while I do the remainder of my dishes. That’s called efficiency: two birds with one stone, or twelve to eighteen birds an hour with one set of carbon-fibre impeller blades.
I can’t recommend this to everyone, but it’s worked okay for me. Three out of five stars.
Motor-cyclists. They’re a lot like you and me, friend. There’s still a gasoline engine involved, obsessive discussion of gear ratios, and lubrication problems ahoy. For years, I’d been motorcycle-curious, but I never wanted to take that huge step and admit that I could be a motorcyclist. What would my mom think?
What finally got me to consider motorcycles as a viable form of private transportation was the discovery that they’re pretty cheap dates. Not only do they sip gas, but most of them have never been driven on glare ice (cowards) and haven’t developed rust. And if they ever did, bodywork costs like eight dollars because there’s no actual surface area to speak of. I decided that I would try to fetch a boring commuter Honda, in order to meet the legendary “nice” people that Soichiro’s advertisers had once spoken of.
The only problem is that I had no idea where to find these bikes. Based on Hollywood film, I decided I would head to a nearby bar, where a lot of tough-looking dudes wore leather - the official uniform of the motorcyclist. That was probably not a great decision, but even though it produced no leads I was able to make twenty-five bucks table dancing and got a few of my drinks bought for me. Eventually, I found a shattered Super Cub sitting in the ditch alongside the highway, and the matted blood and hair on the horrifically bent handlebars washed off at the coin car wash without hesitation. Good as new.
Everything that they had promised was true. Now, instead of being an unaccountable, steel-entombed fire-breathing menace to every community I ripped through, there now was a seven-in-ten chance that any pedestrian I hit could cause damage to me personally. I began to drive more carefully, and notice more things due to my easy proximity to them. Mostly new parking spots, because my old Volare couldn’t fit onto the lawn of the daycare next to me, not like the glorious freedom afforded by the Cub.
I would strongly recommend riding a small-engined commuter bike to anyone who, like me, is motorcycle-curious. Even if you’ve merely had a weird fixation with French mopeds, life is short and it’s best to act upon those urges whenever possible. My mom did eventually understand my strange new behaviour as being natural and important to me, but it was only because her ‘72 Corolla couldn’t do as bitchin’ of a wheelie as the Cub and she got jealous.
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tags: toyota, toyota corolla, honda, honda super cub, plymouth, plymouth volare
Summer’s starting to fade away, friends. As we speak, the blizzards are beginning to move ominously towards Canada, where they will entomb our fair nation in meter-thick glacial ice until next April. This is my favourite time of the year, when everyone starts to rush to thrash their projects together.
Why is it my favourite time? Well, not only is it a good external motivator to get off my ass, but a lot of people sell their doomed projects right around now too. This is when people realize that their spouse needs the spot in the garage in order to avoid scraping the windshield or freezing the kids solid, and whatever nightmare they took apart cannot possibly be reassembled before the first snowflake hits. The prudent choice, therefore, is to get rid of the pile of parts at a massive loss, giving me a fantastic project to reassemble over the winter.
For years, I’ve trained my body to ignore the cold while fixing cars. Most of my vehicles have steadfastly refused to cease operation when inside nice, warm enclosed garages, mostly because I never park in any. Instead, they shatter a wheel bearing on a pothole in the parking lot of the yoga club, and I get to find out just how much pain I can take at minus 30 as a result. If you dress warmly, it’s honestly not that bad until you accidentally bonk your hand against something. Then it’s pure agony for several minutes, but so is life.
One more reason for my obsession with wrenching outdoors is that junkyards are not indoor. Maybe in some sort of fancy European fantasyland they might be, but not here, not in the heart of Freedom Itself. Winter junkyarding is when you get all the good parts on your list, because the weather discourages other scavengers so thoroughly that many six-week-old Honda Civics will still have all of their parts. Sure, I can only withstand being out there for precisely 17 minutes at a time, and it takes me eight minutes each way to get into the storm shelter/cash register house, but during that one minute of glory I’m yanking fully-dressed K-series engines with the precision of a former Navy SEAL tweeting death threats at teenagers.
I hope I’ll see you out there this winter. Remember to dress warmly, but also carry some identification with you. If you drop dead in row 5-B while trying to pull the fender off of a ‘95 SL-1, the cops aren’t going to wait long enough for you to thaw out to remove the balaclava from your face. Your mom will be worried until June.
Civilization is, if nothing else, a shared agreement to not be too big of a dick to one another. You have certain rules and mores to follow, and everyone else is expected to follow them as well. That’s why it’s so galling when your neighbour idles his new truck in his driveway for like a friggin’ hour in the winter before driving to work. Your hands are tied from murdering him, which belies the inherent unfairness of the system.
I would be a hypocrite were I to complain too loudly about neighbourhood noise. My garage air compressor is blaring through an unmuffled pancake motor for a good portion of each job, and I use two-stroke dirt bikes to get around my small yard in the same way that most people would otherwise use their legs (my “leg day” is hitting the kick starter - no easy feat with the big-compression Princess Auto engine in my half-a-CT70.) In my defence, I try to keep it down to a minimum, in case any of my neighbours have upset babies, pregnant dogs, or sensitive atomic-physics experiments going on that require a modicum of peace on the block.
To make myself sound better than I actually am, it’s worth positioning myself as a moderate, calming influence instead of some kind of gasoline-fired maniac. There were a lot of attempts on my behalf to try and limit the aggression of my neighbour. For example, I had a pretty promising example of an active noise cancellation system based around a Chevy small-block V8, but trying to keep that thing in fuel all day long was likely to bankrupt me. That, and it fell over and cracked my garage floor because I didn’t bother to bolt it down to the workbench before firing it up. And the cops came a few times to figure out why all those dead birds kept falling from the sky around my house. Still, progress marches on.
Eventually it came to my attention that the neighbourhood had formed some kind of mediation group. These intrepid volunteers would intervene whenever two neighbours had a dispute, with the intention of keeping your traditional suburbanite disagreement from turning into a traditional suburbanite gun fight. I found out about them because they came by my place to ask if I could maybe stop pouring used engine oil directly into the sewer drain. Through the power of the resulting negotiation, I convinced my other neighbour to just give me a bunch of old buckets in which to dispose of the used oil. Free old buckets. This experience opened my eyes to the potential of human co-operation in the pursuit of mutual community happiness, but due to recent circumstances it had become difficult to get too close to another person, shake their hand and look them in the eye. You know, the intangibles.
I decided to take a page from the police, who are universally known as de-escalators and responsible force users. It turns out they put their surplus bomb robots on the local auctions, and one of those fuckers will really screw up a Dodge Ram when the neighbour tries to back over it leaving their driveway.
There’s a plague in journalism these days: the rise of access journalism. Simply put, a lot of writers depend on the largesse of their subjects in order to be able to write anything at all. If they piss them off, then they lose access to their press junkets and little brochures explaining what kind of cheese the clips holding the dashboard together were modelled on. I think the only cure is to be a true outsider, and Bad Cars Monthly is at the forefront of having no fucking access to anything in the automotive industry.
Sure, a lot of it has to do with the fact that our subject matter (bad cars of the past) largely exists only in the realm of nostalgic fantasy, and is not in any way profitable nowadays for the surviving automakers who produced it. I prefer to think it’s because our cutting-edge, incisive long-form investigative journalism (“Lee Iacocca: Kind Of A Dick?” March 2019) is without peer in the modern trend-driven automotive magazine industry.
We can’t lose access, because we never had it. Literally no authoritative sources ever return our calls. This is sometimes because we are working from old dumpster-dived copies of the Chrysler internal phone book and most of the employees listed within have moved or died, but most of the time it’s because they’re afraid of us. No car manufacturer wants to talk off the record. Shit-talking the old car is only allowed when you’re comparing how cool the new car is, and we don’t run advertisements because the intern’s Quadra 700 doesn’t have enough RAM to load the big TIFFs Lexus keeps sending us to put on every second page.
Hard-nosed research is what replaces talking to these weenie automotive engineers and their spineless PR flacks. Everything at the local public library about cars, mixed in with whatever weird rumour we can scoop off internet message boards, and a fresh dollop of anger at why I can’t get this fucking heater core out: that’s the Bad Cars Monthly recipe for great new works of long-form car reading. You’ll have trouble getting off the shitter before it’s done, because each issue is like six pages long. All this reading takes a really long time.
By far, the thing I most like to see on the roads is a well-maintained 80s or 90s commuter car. Anyone can see the value proposition in wiping a ‘67 Mustang with a diaper and driving it very carefully. If you take care of your stuff well enough that your '97 Corolla still looks brand-new, I want to shake your hand. Maybe later, though. We got some weird shit going on right now.
Just think of all the effort that had to be put into it. What you have here is a low-budget car, of no particular resale value, and that is subject to the wear and tear of daily life. Parking lot dings. Shopping carts bouncing off the tail-light. Gravel roads. Today’s more corrosive ultra-road-salt financed by the automakers. And yet these cars have survived multiple decades while still looking pretty damn sharp. It’s no coincidence that they’re often owned by old people, who don’t really go anywhere, but the achievement is nonetheless remarkable. All it would take to ruin a 25-year-long span of caring for your beloved Toyota is one clueless dipshit in a BMW X3, and yet it still hasn’t happened.
Sometimes I think they must take care of the rest of their stuff very well, too. Ancient kitchen tables, in perfect condition, lovingly waxed every weekend. Not like my kitchen table, which has a hole drilled in it to mount a vise so I can pound out heat-cycled Torrington bearings from a rusty eBay coilover while eating cold mac 'n’ cheese over the sink. Children with all their limbs. A Toshiba Portege from the turn of the century, incapable of watching YouTube videos. It’s a shame that when they pass, this stuff is inevitably handed to their young nephew who will wreck all of it in a weekend with a can of spray paint, a Canadian Tire spoiler, and some mud-terrains.
That’s why I’m launching my new program. If you’re an elderly person with a Honda Prelude in nine-out-of-ten shape, just leave it to me. When you can’t drive anymore, I’ll take really good care of it. A lot of people have called my backyard a “time capsule,” which I’m sure refers to its mystical preservation qualities (dead mice are often shortly mummified inside the cars, baffling scientists) and not at all the fact that it has all the cars that your greedy, clueless neighbours didn’t take care of. I might slap a turbo on it, though, in the interest of full disclosure.
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tags: honda, honda prelude, toyota, toyota corolla
I don’t know if there is a term for the psychological effect of not wanting to finish a project now that all the hard parts are done. Fixing something? Well, now I know exactly what broke and how to fix it, so the intellectual exercise is complete and it’s just a long haul of hard labour from now on. Creating something new? I did the cool new part, and the rest of it is filling in the checkboxes. Maybe it’s laziness, but then I get distracted and launch off on a new project, with exciting potential future discoveries that I will also get bored after reaching.
It all makes me wonder how many great inventions have just died on some jerk’s workbench because they didn’t want to finish screwing it together. Maybe we’d have cold fusion by now if it wasn’t such a pain in the ass to put a nice paint job on the case with no orange peel.
I think the government should probably put together some kind of special force that visits handy-type people like myself and roots through all of their shit looking for cool discoveries that they “meant to get around to” finishing. Then, I don’t know, hire the “B” scientists to finish them off, some dumb but hard-working types that never give up and are okay doing the shit part. Chances are someone in the queue will have discovered sentient robots, so then the government could get rid of the scientists too. The program would pay for itself from the patent revenue alone - doubly so if the discoveries are actually useful instead of “so that’s how Subaru fucked up this fuel map.”
The only real downside of all this is that it stands to elevate lazy slobs like myself to (at least demi-) godhood. If you thought I was fixated on boring shit now, wait until Time Magazine gives me a cover story because I accidentally discovered how to solve the climate crisis while fixing worn-out bushings on the motor of a Famicom disk system with old peanut butter and fish flakes.
Air conditioning is one of the hallmark inventions of the modern era. Now that the weather outside can be best desribed as “constant, unrelenting fire,” it’s more essential than ever. Yet, most Canadians do not have air conditioning because, historically, for eight to twelve months of the year our cities and homes are encased in a thick layer of ice so cold that it approaches absolute zero. So how can we and our kids become better prepared for the future hellscape of tomorrow?
The secret, as with many things, lies in junkyards. Because of economies of scale, basically all cars made in the last three decades are equipped with factory-standard air conditioning. This is because the imperialist pig-dogs to the south of us demand it. That is because their hubristic nightmare cities are so hot, synthetic climate control is now their only chance at survival. The average American is basically a cyborg, which is kind of a depressing idea if you’re one of the 2.57% of human beings who get sexually aroused when thinking about RoboCop.
Even though our climate and our municipalities’ extremist use of road salt have destroyed the bodies of the car, often their air conditioning systems are in near-perfect shape. A few seals here and a bodge of epoxy there, and they’ll hold pressure again. So why let them get crushed and turned into a pile of mixed-metal modern art in some Chinese metal-scrap foundry? Grab those A/C systems and get cooling your house today! All you need is to steal some theory manuals from your local library, and hook up an electric motor to run the belt-driven compressor. May I suggest pulling that motor out of the last snowblower to commit suicide as you tried futilely to clear your driveway for the eighth time that day in mid-December?
So now you have nice cool air inside your house, or garage, or port-a-potty. And that’s fantastic. What’s more important is that you did it on an extreme budget, which means that your fellow citizens won’t laugh at you for being the kind of bourgeois milquetoast who would pay money for a “real” air conditioner in Canada. Which is good, because otherwise they won’t let you in the Timmies where they’re all huddling up against the freezer until October.
In times long past, children would signal their entry into adulthood by entering into the most precious rite of our society: buying a Volkswagen Beetle. These rear-engined relics, once as common as the air that cooled their engine cylinders, were an inexpensive alternative to a domestic automobile, which meant a lot of them ended up in the hands of teenagers.
As far as car owners go, teenagers aren’t the best. They have no experience to tell which scary noises might kill them, they have no driving skills to keep from plummeting their ass-engined slot car off the road and into a bridge abutment, and they have no money for repairs. What they do have, however, is time and often a willingness to modify the shit out of their German bugmobiles. A huge spectrum of modified VWs soon flooded the Western hemisphere.
The shape of these Bugs were as varied as their owners. Exotic fibreglass dune buggies for harassing the Man on the beach. Rugged Baja Bugs for breaking an axle in the middle of nowhere and then spending the rest of your senior year looking at catalogues for uprated Porsche parts. Stripped-out race cars whose owners scooped up those Porsche axles (and engines) from the junkyard before the offroad kids got there. “Cal-look” Beetles for teaching yourself valuable bodywork skills whenever you tried to mount a particularly steep driveway on your way to your part-time job at the Shop-Rite.
Every single one of these cars has a story to tell, although the aforementioned poverty status of the owner also meant that most of them ended up in a junkyard or roaring roadside gasoline fire somewhere. Still, there are survivors, and it’s hard to think of any single newer model of car that has been modified in so many bizarre and distinct fashions. It’s for this reason that no Beetle must remain stock. If your neighbours have one, make sure that they know that they can stick some fat mud-terrains under it and go bushwhacking. Maybe drop an EMPI catalogue off on their porch. It’s your duty to keep history alive; just make sure they fix the fuel lines first.
Nobody appreciates the value of a good dumb battery charger until their battery packs it in. Once that happens, the “smart” chargers know that it’s unsafe for you to continue trying to cram electrons into them, so they give up. If you’ve got some nasty piece of work from the 1970s, it will just make a slightly more ominous humming sound and start boiling the plates inside the battery until it either gets what it wants or your garage ceases to exist.
When you find a tool such as this, it’s often greedily hoarded by the people who “know what [they] are doing.” From a distance, we all know that of course just being a stubborn asshole who won’t pay for a new battery doesn’t mean that you actually have a special insight into the way the universe really works. When you’re in the shit, though, it’s easy to convince yourself that you’ve figured it all out and just need to force your way past the endless layers of bureaucrats and safety nannies to get the job done.
Maybe this is all a metaphor for the other complex machines of our lives. There’s a knee-jerk reaction from all of us that it’s just gotten too Byzantine - all that shit is for other, lesser, people and it’s just slowing you down and holding you back from your true potential. Then you wake up one morning and the frozen-solid Motomaster from the mid-1990s you’ve been trying to revive has cracked open and aerosolized its acid onto the bodywork of your car. That’s when you’re really grateful for that safety net, the one that says “hey buddy, maybe go spend eighty dollars at the Canadian Tire and get something that will start your car after being parked for six hours.”
Of course, all this only applies if you’re a lame enough mechanic to only see a battery charger as being good for charging batteries. The other thing a dumb charger will happily be misused for is to do a little impromptu stick welding. You’ll be super grateful you had it when you’re trying to put your floorpan back on 15 hours before you have to drive to work. Take it from me, though: a welding mask is not optional.
Everyone in the late eighties was convinced that the next frontier in automobiles would be the grand tourer. Ever bigger, more luxurious, and more imposing two-doors roamed the earth. They sported fantastic future technology and brutal, neck-snapping power. With the grand tourer, the promise was, you could have it all. So where did they all go?
Certainly the collapse of the Bubble Era in Japan had a big part to play. Back when real estate speculators were making millions of dollars per picosecond, asking them to pay a hundred and eighty grand for a car that made half the horsepower of a Ferrari but came with a TV in the dash wasn’t so onerous that it would scramble the deal. And if that car had a show-offy feature like active aerodynamics that also frequently broke, driving them to the dealership where they might consider the next year’s model which now had - for some reason - two stereos, so much the better. When that all went bye-bye, so did a lot of the aggregate demand for these cars.
Lots of automakers still make vehicles that could be considered grand tourers. It’s a popular phrase with luxury car manufacturers, because it gets them off the hook for their spongy handling. This cozy road-feel and ponderous steering is now effectively mandatory in order to sell to today’s average consumer, who is vastly older than in decades past. They’re not sports cars, because nobody buys sports cars. These cars go hard in a straight line, and your butt won’t hurt after you drive to the Safeway.
There is another argument to be made. Every car is becoming more luxurious to target that same customer, and boost those ever-precious margins as overall volumes decline. With the boffo amounts of horsepower in literally every car on offer today, you could now say every car is a grand tourer. Even a minivan has race-inspired trim and climate control that can individually flash-freeze a cow. It’s been democratized, so much so that now your salesman starts a pitch by showing you all the gadgets instead of powertrain options. Which is a really good thing, because I should probably sell this ‘82 Supra before it finishes sinking into the ground. All the mice living in the heater core think it’s extremely comfortable, too.
Have you ever played Bubble Bobble? It’s a charming little videogame where a pair of dinosaurs murder thousands of enemies through asphyxiation and blunt force trauma. A core feature of the game - but one that you won’t notice right away - is that the little bonus items appear through a convoluted series of rules. Experts know that they need to start each game by falling from the top of the screen to the bottom 17 times in order to pop the holy water, but your average person just sees some cute little lizards who burp bubbles. Everyone can get some enjoyment out of it, even if the former people can’t really talk about it in polite company without boring the crap out of everyone involved.
Cars are sort of the same way. There’s an unfathomable layer of complexity there, both historical and technical, and nobody cares about them. Most of the time, they hop in the car, drive it to the McDonalds and head back. Everything works. It’s for this reason that many “car people” are born when their car breaks and they are forced to face the true nature of the vehicle within. No longer is it a discrete object, but a collection of parts flying in close formation, many of which work about 80% well. I imagine this is where surgeons come from, as well, but the country club patched the hole in their fence so I can no longer get in to ask them.
Now that cars are more reliable than ever, it should logically result in fewer car people. Even with the cultural impact of Instagram driving folks to knock their suspension down to unusable proportions and pose next to them, enthusiasm is on the wane on a per-capita basis. This is perfectly understandable, but also deadly to our way of life. It is for this reason that my new government will enforce a mandatory un-reliability program for each new car sold here.
The implementation is simple: we let other manufacturers design a part on each one of their competitors’ cars. Natural market competition will take over after that: your Ford will suddenly start spewing flaming oil from the Audi-built PCV, your Subaru will have wheel bearings that need replacement every weekend from themselves, and somehow Toyota got tricked into letting Alfa Romeo select the steel and bodywork for the car, so it rusts out when you blink too moistly while driving. It is in this way that I hope to create a new generation of “car people,” ever paranoid about minor noises in the way that our ancestors once were.
If necessity is the mother of invention, then procrastination is the milkman that keeps coming by way more frequently than his schedule would suggest. Ever since I adopted my cat, Lord Fluffbottoms, he’s been using the litter box about eighty percent of the time. The veterinarian suspected it was either stress (he sleeps endlessly and is fed moist turkey treats three times daily) or that the litter box wasn’t clean enough. I cleaned it like twice a week, I told her, to frowns.
I’ve got a busy schedule, especially now that we’ve got the whole nanotech supervirus coming out of our wifi antennas or whatever. There’s just no time in my day to be constantly scrub-a-dubbing the piss palace of my puss. Finally, while I was cleaning out the litter box this last weekend, I tripped over a two-stroke engine that I had left partially disassembled on my kitchen floor. Ah, serendipity.
With a six-horsepower gasser, an electric start from a snowblower, and a couple highly tuned thermal sensors, I was able to make a self-cleaning litter box. While normally one of these would cost hundreds of dollars, my unique form of accounting allowed me to pretend that it was completely free, because it was made out of thousands of dollars of parts I had purchased previously and left lying around the house in anticipation of becoming a totally cool project.
The setup was really clever. I propped open one of my windows nearby, just a crack, for the exhaust (can’t go around poisoning my little fluffy butters buffington) and also to emit the oil-soaked cat shit. If I remembered to place the compost bin just right every week, and the wind wasn’t particularly strong that day, the poop would complete a perfect parabolic arc and land in the bin, ready to be disposed of by elite government agents. Now, the wind was a little strong this weekend, officer, but I think if you give me a chance to tune this you’ll find that I’m much less dangerous in my own house than I would be in prison. It’s my understanding that, in there, they offer actual engineering classes for free.
Before I became an internationally famous automotive journalist, I used to ride the bus to work. I think a city bus is an unduly shamed automobile: it’s got gobs of torque, interesting engineering, and expensive tires. They don’t let just anyone drive it, but perhaps there’s a sort of appeal in that. It’s like you’ve got your own chauffeur, who doesn’t want to talk to you or go to the specific place you want.
Nowadays, the city is talking about making them all electric - powered by batteries. This doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, as buses drive a whole lot all day. Why take the bus offline for a few hours so you can swap huge batteries in and out of it like it’s some kind of glorified DeWalt? On top of that, buses drive the same route every day. It’s not like a private car, where one day you might decide to just get in and drive very far away from all of your responsibilities and obligations, only stopping when you get to a small town where you can start over.
Lots of cities have electric trams - these are sort of like the methadone version of trains, for people who can’t admit that they really would prefer a train. What they are is effectively a bus with a pantograph arm on the top that gets its juice from an overhead power line. Sounds pretty green to me! This, I think, is the solution that we should go with when it comes to alternative-energy buses. It will keep the new drivers from getting lost on their routes, if nothing else. And it will provide a juicy amount of power to anyone who’s clever enough to tap into the grid for some free charge.
This would be an ideal situation for me. In such a beautiful future world, I could go salvage a pantograph pole from the tram graveyard down the street, tack-weld it onto the roof of my Celica, throw a forklift motor where the rear diff should be and cruise around on the city’s dime. When it’s time to get off the main roads, no problem - just reach into the back seat, unplug the crudely-soldered-together extension cord running from the pantograph, and then start the gas engine. I’d save a bundle - especially in stop-and-go traffic along the major arteries. And my phone would finally be charged, too, because while I’m doing all that wiring I might even fix the cigarette lighter!
Everyone knows someone who makes prototypes. Whether it’s an android wife, toaster oven control board, new motor mounts for a weird swap, or a homebuilt rocket with which to go to the moon, you never get it right the first time. The smart money builds a quick and dirty demo unit to throw away, and ideally by the time you’re making a nice version of your part you’ve made all the mistakes you’re going to make on it.
However, almost none of these prototypes get thrown away. In my work with the Inventors’ Guild, a made-up organization that I founded in order to get my name on more patents and boost the prominence of my resume, I’ve noticed that everyone who really works on new stuff never throws away their old prototype. At worst, they become closet clutter, destined for their surviving relatives to throw in the trash when they accidentally bridge five-digit voltage with their bodies, but usually the prototypes get reused in some other project. It’s sort of like how evolution works, except my understanding of such is weak because my high school biology teacher couldn’t teach a lesson with all those kids from the cult compound next door shooting at him.
Now that I’ve seen this phenomenon at work in the amateur science community, I can’t help but notice it in production stuff as well. My daily-driver Subaru, once you take the front subframe out and look up at the firewall, has the distinct outline of an entire Barbie Power Wheels that was apparently stuck inside the clay model when they were making a stamping of it for the body factory. The circuit board inside my TV remote distinctly says “ANAL AUTO-PLEASURIZER V3.5” in the silkscreen, indicating a market pivot that speaks to a need to pay the bills in the hope of blind idealism. Everything we’re buying and using has some jerk’s back-of-the-drawer “hey I already built that” welded into it somewhere.
It is for this reason that I’ve commissioned a project to tunnel into the core of the Earth and figure out what failed planet lies within. I’ve got a bunch of blown-out PC power supplies that should make a great base for the core drill.
A little while ago, I was at a parts store - not an uncommon haunt for me - when someone was wrong about cars. Years prior, I would have intervened to correct them, and give them a firm talking-to about the finer points of obscure models of Honda. Now, I don’t do that. It’s because I’ve got too many goddamn projects on the go and I need to get home before the shorted relay in my car’s electrical system kills the battery again in the parking lot.
In fact, this probably applies to every tiresome bore in your life. Any jerk that keeps bothering you about the most inane subjects simply doesn’t have enough to do. That’s why we started a special temp agency that forcibly recruits them into an unmarked van and then disappears them… into productivity. At our special underground base, we make sure that they get to do their hobbies all day long, whether it be model train layouts or knife catching. It’s sort of like summer camp, except you’re the frustrated mom and dad sending their asshole kid away so they can fuck.
Now, you might be asking yourself, isn’t this expensive? It turns out that there’s actually a lot of overlap between hobbies. The first couple of years had some big expenses, it’s true, but now we pretty much have all the gear and parts that anyone could want. People are often amazed when we pull the black bag off their heads and they see a pile of nice-looking Leicas, which they then start to regale the attendants with until a combination of painful electric shocks and project-completion glee takes over, lulling them into occupied silence. You can distract a weird uncle with a taste for wooden duck carving and a firm belief that water can be used as gasoline for like twenty bucks a month, tops. You’re practically making money.
It’s only coincidental that doing this has allowed complete strangers to furnish for me a salt mine containing tons of cool hobby shit. You would be wrong to accuse me of only doing this for my personal benefit. My family is really interested in getting rid of me, too. I’m not good at parties.
Can you ever actually trust another person’s engineering? It’s a pretty big question, one that a lot of us have been puzzling over the course of our lifetimes. When you’ve worked in any technical field, including on products released to the public, you get to see how the sausage is made. Corners are cut to hit delivery dates or price targets, hacks are banged in there to “just get it working,” and everyone resolves to do better next time, but never does. After this happens, a bunch of regular people climb aboard and shoot themselves into the sky or drive it along the road at high speed. It’s a miracle anything works at all, we tell each other at the release party while drinking away our guilt.
Now, I don’t mean to paint all castes of engineer with the same brush. A lot of them are better than software engineers, and have a concern for best practices, the public, and the environment that is frankly admirable. Of course, their managers still came from the same school as the ones whipping the software engineers. It’s a little harrowing to think about the fact that the guy who gives a thumbs-up to a prospective shuttle launch has mostly the same education as the guy in your office who doesn’t understand that JavaScript isn’t the same thing as Java and why won’t he get it it’s so obvious. Perhaps where the high-success engineering projects differ from Timmy Fullstack’s Content Emporium is by having a bunch of procedures - rules - that everyone has to follow, otherwise heads roll. Nobody is above the law.
However, even with the greatest practices and most accurate following of those practices, mistakes still happen. This is because every engineer - no matter how conservative - secretly wants to hot-rod a bitch. If I make this hinge joint just a little cooler, then other engineers will notice and they’ll be like “this person who I never met is probably a bad-ass.” It may seem ridiculous, but it is the primary motivation for basically everyone on planet Earth. And if you don’t believe me, take a look at your own work. How many little finials (that’s French for “hella cool shit”) have you ground into your last project that realistically nobody but you will ever appreciate? Yeah, I thought so.
So in reality, management provides us with a useful escape hatch. When a cruise ship runs aground because the auto-driving feature thought that a beach full of sunbathers was a dock, that’s because someone thought that an auto-driving cruise ship was totally bitchin’, and management overhead them bragging. You can’t blame the engineers, they’re just doing whatever they think is cool.
There’s a lot of flight simulators out there, probably more than there are pilots. Talk about an absolute snooze fest - flying is interesting at the start and the end and the rest of it is all cruise control. Where’s my road trip simulator? Every year tons of people set out on a road trip, but are unprepared for the many difficulties that are manifest in such an undertaking. This way, they could simply fire the sim up on their home computer and help build a plan.
Although my team of dedicated developers (kids I lured from the local college by promising them meals with vegetables in them) are hard workers, we couldn’t fit everything into the first version of the simulator. Right now, you can only choose to drive a 1993 Camry, which is a perfectly reasonable vehicle to take a long road trip in. Maybe we can sell some expansions later, try to make a few more bucks on the back end. For instance, there’s the 1994 Camry, which simulation enthusiasts will demand perfect accuracy of, ideally in exchange for sixty dollars.
We spent the money on realism - every variety of dried meat is accurately portrayed along all major highways. Even the inside of the convenience stores where you buy beef jerky and Slim Jims is simulated with dead-nuts perfect precision! You can think of it as your reward after fighting the Jersey turnpike traffic at the most difficult times of day. And don’t forget your vehicle maintenance! You can opt to turn on features like a slightly wonky balljoint, high-RPM oil consumption from a clogged PCV valve, bad rear toe, or even frame rust that has gotten bad enough to affect handling. Or leave it up to the computer to randomly decide just how many miles and whisky dings are on that Camry you got from your uncle’s second wife. It all boils down to valuable training that could save a life on the open road.
Now, driving on the open road for several days at a time can be exhausting (we don’t currently offer a time-compression feature.) That’s why we’ve added a multiplayer mode! You can fill the entire car with other players over the internet, and switch out the responsibility for driving when you stop for gas and need to rest your back. Even here we have a robust simulation - front seat passengers can fuck with the radio, whereas those suckers in the rear seat are mostly stuck with flipping the rear cupholder up and down.
All of this perfection comes at a price. You’ll need to build a computer with a really solid graphics card (interior carpet flocking is hell on the pixel shader units,) which realistically costs more than an actual 1993 Camry. However, I think you’ll agree that you can’t put a price on this kind of preparation. That’s our job, and I’ve handed out a lot of deluxe frozen pizzas that I need to amortize.
One of the main attractions of my town is the big LCD billboard that the local seafood restaurant got installed a couple summers back. Now, you might not think that this is a big deal, but at the time, the Chinese restaurant across the road was still on those little signs that you have to put the individual letters into. The installation of this future-tech bullshit endlessly flashing animated GIFs of lobsters into the eyes of people on the highway immediately kicked off an arms race between the two restaurants.
Now, I’ve worked with Mr. Cho, the owner of the Chinese restaurant in question, many times. You can assume some bias on my part as a result. I have nothing but respect for Mr. Cho, a man who I would never pick a fight with. This is because I found him to be a terrifying structure frequently at the very forefront of my nightmares, and not just because the police department (two officers and a dog) quit when they heard he was moving into town. However, he pays on time, and once he let me ride in his Porsche when my Volare wouldn’t start in his parking lot. I would tentatively put him down as “nice dude.” A nice dude who savours competition the same way most of us drooled at the roast duck balls on offer at his Thursday lunch buffet.
When Mr. Cho heard that another business owner in our small town had dared to challenge his obvious superiority in such a blatant fashion, he didn’t get mad. All reports indicate that he immediately strutted out of the place, walked across all six lanes of the highway without looking, and strode into The Landlocked Mollusk to shake Stan’s hand. The fact that Stan was still in the midst of an all-hands meeting didn’t phase him. Mr. Cho didn’t let not being Chinese stop him from starting a Chinese restaurant, so “social niceties” don’t even rate a six-out-of-ten for him when it comes to the noble art of business war. I heard he didn’t stop shaking Stan’s hand for about an hour, with unbroken eye contact. He’s not one of those guys who crushes your hand, either. Physical domination is the province of weak businessmen, he told me once while we were pouring a bunch of soup pots full of some red liquid into the sewer. What you want is for them to know they’ve lost, as soon as you walk in the door. And Mr. Cho definitely got that, but everyone else had to know as well. That’s why he cracked open his pocketbook for the first time in several decades and made what we in the world of high finance have termed a “capital expenditure.”
I was out of town that weekend, so it doesn’t sting as much that I wasn’t consulted for the project. When a guy like that knows you can do a job, sometimes it’s best you’re not invited, right? He has very high standards of contractors, including those who build eighty-foot-tall animatronic replicas of himself, waving to potential customers. I still don’t know how he managed to get it tied into the airport radar, either, but he gets a lot of hungry pilots who can’t help but drive to our town in order to see why an immense carbon-steel replica of a short Korean dude just turned to wave at them as they flew overhead, the glowing red eyes piercing through the fog.
I have this problem, you see. I keep buying broken cars, and then I buy a “parts car” to fix them. You know, one that’s got even more problems, but has the parts I need to fix the first one. And then that first car is fixed, but I start to feel bad for the parts car, because it’s not really that bad - it just needs some parts and I bet it would be back on the road, I can’t throw it away. Then I buy another parts car for that one, and by the time I look up I’ve owned eighteen 1993-01 Subaru Imprezas, thirteen of them are piled up in my basement, and six of them will run if you hold your tongue just right and don’t make any sudden moves.
A friend of mine got into this infinite loop himself, but then he decided to buy crashed cars. In theory, since there are so many government hoops to jump through to return a t-boned car to the road, he would be disincentivized to do anything other than drop the stripped-off shell into the crusher and laugh as he leaves the pick-n-pull parking lot. Guess what happened next? He became an amateur bodyman and is now on first-name terms with the salvage inspector for the province. Sometimes we trade parts.
We’ve thought of lots of ways to fix this. Our leading proposal is to buy up some old farmland and form a co-operative commune where we all share our parts cars, so at least there is reduced duplication in our junk piles and more of our cars will end up working because we can cannibalize one parts vehicle to save many runners, making it more likely that we will make like the indigenous people of this fine land and use every part of the buffalo.
However, The Man refuses to grant us “floating” registration and insurance just because we have a poorly-defined group of drop-in-drop-out hippies pulling cars out of swamps and fickly deciding which one to use for a road trip or commute to work this week. This means that one person has to “own” the car being fixed, and reap the rewards (i.e. negative profit) of selling it in the end. This model has all the usual problems of any communal organization, but I think we can work the kinks out if we focus on one specific brand. Mostly the brand of whatever car I’m working on this week. So if you have a bunch of farmland and are willing to drop your Impreza off for me to harvest parts from, come on over. We’ll go halfsies on the pizza delivery, but no anchovies.
My cousin used to drive this old grain truck that he had been given by his dad. They’re rurals, of course, and when you live way out there and you’re young, you’re going to take any free vehicle you’re offered. That’s how you escape the rural area and go into town to experience the highs and lows of human civilization. Also, it has a “farm” plate on the bumper so you get to fill up on super-cheap diesel.
This kind of subsidy is very common in rural communities near where I live. There’s a fantasy that the politicians like to peddle that they’re selflessly helping a regular old working Joe, the salt of the very Earth, the place where your food done comes from, by giving them a handout. The fact that most of these subsidy dollars solely benefit huge corporations who then convert them into donations for said politicians didn’t seem to particularly bother my cousin, who just kept flat-shifting that old piece of shit International KB and paying twenty cents a litre for dyed diesel fuel.
A lot of people in the city are truly unhappy with their lot in life, and they ascribe it to a sort of drift away from the authenticity of rural life. It just so turns out that many of these poor folks agree with the politicians who are selling the rurals some cheap diesel. So every time my cousin would come over to my place to drop off some small engines or a large quantity of unwanted meat, the neighbours would just so coincidentally find a reason to be outside and thus able to strike up a conversation with a genuine rural folk hero and take a selfie with the truck that practically bled rugged trustworthiness.
This would happen even in the dead of November, when we’d practically have to light up a smudge pot underneath the KB’s oilpan in order to have any hope of it ever starting again, except for the fact that the diesel was so cheap we could just leave the thing idling while we went inside to play Mario Kart. This kind of vulnerability did not escape my hawklike business vision, and so I asked my cousin if I could borrow the shit-spreader for a weekend. He could drive my refined, opulent ‘78 Lincoln Versailles, and I’d tool around the city park trying to trick rubes into paying me to add some proletarian charm to their weddings and photo shoots.
It worked really well. I made a couple hundred bucks, which I split with my cousin, and he got to see what life was like in a vehicle small enough to navigate the McDonalds drivethrough. Sure, he had to spend all of his pocket cash on just trying to fill up the tank, but high gasoline prices are just another way of helping out his brave folk heroes: international oil executives.
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tags: international harvester, international harvester kb, lincoln, lincoln versailles
Any accountant worth their salt will tell you that a car isn’t an investment. If you pick up a Ford Escape right now for some money, in ten years you’ll be lucky to be able to move it for the price of a set of new tires. Things get even worse if it’s a modified car. Selling a modified car will reduce the potential market to the point where the only people willing to buy your car are those individuals who want a massive discount in exchange for the hours they’re about to spend figuring out which vacuum hoses you forgot to hook back up. Still, certain members of the car-owning community persist in demanding to get their money back for the eBay parts they’ve bolted onto their corroded hoopties.
For a few years, a buddy of mine used to specifically buy poorly modified cars, take the go-fast parts off, and then sell the parts and the car separately for a huge profit on each. It was a reasonable way to make a few bucks in the evenings and weekends, unless you put a dollar value on his labour, which - considering he was a high-paid corporate attorney - turned out to actually be an enormous loss of thousands of dollars. And he ended up with a garage full of unwanted parts for unloved models of 90s cars that nobody still owned, where his flunky friends (such as myself) would offer embarrassingly low amounts of money for stainless steel exhaust headers and Rube Goldbergian piggyback ECUs with a wiring loom worse than RoboCop’s dick.
Of course, when it came time to sell those cars, we were already so sick of them that we got rid of them with the mods installed, discounts be damned. One year, a couple of us sold to the same guy, who I’m almost certain was doing the same thing as our law-talkin’ friend. It was sort of this beautiful perfect cycle of de-garbaging and re-garbaging these cars as they continued to depreciate towards their inevitable scrap value. An economist would probably be horrified at just how much value these automobiles managed to take out of the economy, culminating in shoving a Honda Accord with a trunk full of once-expensive high-zoot speed parts into the crusher just to get them out of the garage. Surely, the world would eventually run out of fake titanium with a fake blued tip on the end with which to make new obnoxious melon-launcher mufflers. Maybe that’s why everything’s going electric now.
Still, though, the damn things depreciate no matter what you do. You might as well own it, especially if you’re like me and hold onto cars for so long that trying to sell them involves a 37-minute history lesson about what a Volare is and why exactly it’s different from a Volante. For instance, it comes with a CB radio.
You can keep your F1, your F2, and even your F3: for me, there’s no motorsport more pure than stage rally. Why? Because racing your piece of shit at breakneck speeds through the woods is obviously the thing to do with a car. Decades ago, this was just how you went from town to town. Now it’s a rare opportunity to commune with Mother Nature, and understand life on her terms, even if those terms involve taking a redwood elm through the dashboard at a buck eighty while upside down and on fire.
All the big drivers are basically wiry European psychos with confusing accents and a sense of gallows humour. And you could go race alongside them: there’s qualifications, sure, but if you’ve got what it takes your rat-ass daily-driver Subaru can go powersliding into a ditch next to a bunch of chanting Polish spectators just as well as someone who’s getting paid to do the same. There’s a true equality to it that means you don’t have to be the eighth cousin of the prince of Monaco and train your entire childhood to get involved: you just have to show up, drive real fucking fast, and not die. This is, possibly, a metaphor for life.
Now, I never had the guts for stage rally. For one thing, I get a little spooked even going around an autocross course. I also have a terrible sense of direction and can’t abide backseat drivers, even if the backseat driver is actually in the passenger seat and is a highly-trained codriver trying to tell me if I’m about to send the both of us off a cliff to our death. I’ll figure it out on the way, dude, just get off my fucking case. I still like to fantasize that I could do it, that some motorsports agent sees a hidden talent when he sees me yanking the handbrake to slide into my employer’s parking lot, and whisks me away to an exciting future of liquid-cooled brakes and turbochargers the size of a hunting dog. Yeah, I can do it, just as long as someone believes in me. My shrieking friends and family members don’t really see the WRC potential in how well I can smoothly connect elements when it snows and only occasionally strike a curb.
Who knows? Maybe one day you’ll see my name briefly glinting at the bottom of a sixth-run sports channel when it runs a replay of a small regional race that may have happened in the last ten years. In the meantime, though, I’m hedging my bets about trying to achieve sports superstardom. See, the way I figure it is if I play two sports at once, that’s twice the chance that I’ll be discovered. Did you know that a WRX will fit right through the “golf carts only” gate down at the country club?
Now that nobody is doing anything at all, it’s becoming much harder to create reality TV. Although Twitch has proven that there is a built-in audience for watching people playing videogames when stuck in their homes, that audience is considered to be a limited size compared to the millions of people who want to watch two very rich housewives call each other rude names and then drink wine. Naturally, the quality bar has to slide a little bit to keep a good volume of content flowing to the consumer.
As a content creator myself, I’m not unempathetic to their plight. That’s why, when the Netflix documentary guys started showing up on my lawn, begging for scraps of interpersonal conflict, I didn’t turn them away with a well-aimed shotgun blast to the solar plexus. I let them into my compound out of love, but also because I realized that there was no other way I could ever get my fifteen minutes of fame on TV. Nowadays, the average show had become so boring by comparison that I was practically the star of my favourite HBO drama, The Pope Who Fucks.
For the first couple days, I spent a long time giving them clips of my voice that could later be selectively edited to make me seem like an even more reckless psychopath. Any B-roll of me fixing the wiring loom on a Dodge Rampage could wait until the next week; if I didn’t hook these rubes now, they were going to just get distracted by a particularly photogenic hotel ice-maker and I’d never see them again. Yes, I admit that I was playing a sort of “character,” but philosophically I didn’t see a difference between lying on reality TV and lying in court. Actually, please forget you just read that last sentence if you’re planning on being on a jury against me any time soon.
Ultimately, the real breakout star of my program was not me, but a small dog that ran into the scene while I was working hard to explain the concept of a torque converter. It appears that one of my neighbours had left his gate open, and the little guy made a break for freedom that ultimately ended in pissing on the base of my engine hoist. I lifted him up and carried him down the block to his grateful owner, and that’s when I noticed the film crew hadn’t followed me back to my garage.
My only real regret is that my agent (my cousin) failed to negotiate a reasonable royalty for the resulting show. I could have lived off the residuals for Holy Shit, What A Cute Dog for the next 20 years of its airing and then syndication, as we all waited patiently inside our homes to be saved by those lazy vaccine researchers.
Tow truck drivers aren’t like you or me. They’re brought up specially from birth, in secret enclaves. That’s where they learn the unique mythology of the tow truck driver. It’s the knowledge of that mythology that forms every syllable that drips from their lips when you’re trapped in the cab with them lugging your car’s corpse from place to place.
Over the years, I’ve owned a lot of bad cars, and taken a lot of tow truck rides as a result. Every single time I have, there’s a different, equally unbelievable story. At first I figured they were just snowing me, trying to amuse themselves by making bullshit up. Then I took a night school class in Tow-Truck-American Literature, and realized that they were trying their best to relate my current plight to their culture’s unique body of knowledge, passed from parent to child in the oral tradition.
For instance, when I blew the rods out of the side of the block on my shit-heap Saabaru, and the driver told me a story about the time his buddy’s Saab 9000 was faster than a Porsche, he was just trying to convince me that internal combustion was still a viable form of transit. I shouldn’t abandon my faith in the brand, even though it was obvious to all present on that dark day that my pretend-Saab had foully betrayed me in a way most undeserving. And he was right: the 9-5 I picked up for mere pennies later was great, except for the constantly-self-immolating immobilizer module, which necessitated a few more trips to the unique cultural heritage of the wrecker operator.
When I realized this, I was struck dumb at the massive quantity of institutional knowledge that I had simply passed up because it was delivered to me in a way contrary to the expectations formed by my own upbringing (swearing at Simcas) and formal schooling (internet message boards.) Luckily for me, there’s no real way I can avoid riding in more tow trucks in the future. I’ve already secured a government grant to study this unique cloister of culture, which you can rest assured has already been spent on the least reliable twelve-cylinder BMW I could find.
In nearly every gangster, cowboy, or samurai movie, there’s a scene where the noble protagonist suffers because he or she has made an obligation to someone untrustworthy. Their honour won’t let them walk away, and so their sacrifice is made all the more remarkable. It’s a matter of morals, the filmmakers say while cornering us at a party, and to do so is to be the most perfect human being on Earth.
I watched a lot of this kind of film when I was growing up. Maybe it was sort of an outgrowth of a larger Protestant work ethic that had infected the country. Sure, your boss sucks now, but wait until you work a few more weekends. In that same sort of noble-sacrifice strong-silent-hero type, I tend not to scrap my cars when they misbehave. Which makes me very sad when I visit the junkyard and find the exact same models, but in much better condition.
It seems - and although I have no special ability to know for sure, I feel that my intuitive understanding has conclusively proven it to me and all others around me - that a lot of people will just chuck their car out when the first major problem arrives. Shredded third gear? Blew the head gasket just a little bit? Brakes failed and you plowed into a daycare? Send it away: it’s not like putting the family dog to sleep or anything, and the new car will have Bluetooth and all-wheel-drive.
I still haven’t figured out a way to save these cars before they are condemned to the yard and their titles are forever branded as “for parts.” To make myself feel a little better, I make sure to steal as many components from those minty-but-flawed vehicles that I can fit into my pocket. That way the cars get to live on forever, at least sitting in my kitty litter bins full of old relays and bolts. After all, I might need those one day to keep my own piece of shit on the road. It’s the noble thing to do.
If there’s one piece of linguistic terrorism I hate above all, it’s the word “mancave.” Mancaves used to mean something, dammit! They weren’t just the sad little room in your 2br condo that you go into so you can play with your Funko Pops without your wife asking why the Eartha Kitt figurine has so much finger wear on its paint. I still hew to the original meaning of the word, and so it was a good thing I wasn’t around when the cops raided the last one.
In recent years, buying rural real estate has caught sort of a bad reputation. What used to be a statement of one’s independence and virulent dislike of authority has now become a group of rich people huddling in their cardboard McMansions and having to get their drinking water trucked in. You can probably blame the skyrocketing land prices for this: even buying the shittiest prairie-ringed “compound” is now priced far outside even the most well-heeled death cult’s means. Caves, however, are still pretty cheap when you consider what you get - and it was in one that I decided to start hoarding some shitboxes.
You might be surprised at the conceit that a “man cave” exists. Do caves represent themselves only on a gender binary? That seems awfully reductive. You’re right: this terminology exists from a bygone era, when people confused the sex of a cave (stalactites vs. stalagmites) with its gender. Nowadays, the gender expression of a cave can be hinted at by what it wears (Men: Chevy Parking Only signs, big screen TVs. Women: old tractor tires, Chinese knockoffs of AK-47 semi-automatic rifles. Everyone else: a complicated series of traps for the government agents to fall into.)
Caves have a lot of natural advantages to being used as a mancave - for instance, the humidity and temperature regulation is ideal for storing a vast quantity of cheddar cheese in anticipation for the End Times. You could pretty much live in one, which is what I did as soon as the bank figured out that I transposed the numbers on the outside of my real house. Admittedly, I kept them on the run for a few months, but I guess I only had so many neighbours for them to “accidentally” flashbang and foreclose upon. Damn robosigners. At least in my cave, no one can ask me if I am of competent mind to accept the mortgage documentation. Mostly because I’m squatting in it on Crown land. The Queen seems cool, so I’m sure she’ll understand.
There’s just one thing my mancave lacks: electricity. For some reason, solar power doesn’t work too well inside the cave, and I’m not about to start trucking the panels outside where they could get peed on by coyotes or abducted by ultra-libertarian seccessionist ranchers. So I’ve set up this kind of weird treadmill deal. To power a television for an hour takes me about a day of jogging. At least my welding has been vastly improving in efficiency, because every inch of arc I strike costs me a month of flat-out marathon running. However, I’ve been assured that a bunch of super-rich people will soon be moving into the next quarter-section over, so chances are I’ll be able to help myself to their electrical grid in exchange for old tractor tires and other country kitsch. If not, I’ll just hijack the battery truck when it comes by every week.
The most important step of any repair process is to clean. People who aren’t used to repairing things are often surprised how often just cleaning something gets it to work again. I’ve fantasized about owning a car wash just to get unfettered free access to those glorious pressure washers, but I never can outbid those nice mobsters who keep buying them up whenever they go to auction. Because I am currently unable to wage a one-man war against organized crime (I need to keep my daily Pokestop streak up,) the next best thing is to buy a pressure washer for the home.
Now, plunking down your hard-earned Lauriers for a new pressure washer is a mug’s game. There are too many nearly-identical brands to choose from who offer models that are just similar enough that you will always regret any compromise in your purchase. Not only that, but the damn things cost a bunch of money, the warranty period is shorter than a gnat’s dick, and they break almost instantly. Of course, all of these aspects only make them terrible for the primary market. If you’re buying used, as I do, they’re ideal. Because then you don’t have to pay any money when your neighbour angrily chucks his into the alley while screaming.
Ironically, the problem with most of these used pressure washers is simply that some dirt has clogged them. They have teeny tiny little apertures - that’s French for “hole where the pressure done come from” - and any amount of horrific abuse, such as gently setting the wand down on your grass, will clog them right up. With a bottle brush, a couple replaced o-rings, and a glob of solder, I was back in business. Glorious water pressure emerged from my freebie wand like God’s own garden hose. However, something was wrong, and it wasn’t just that I was washing a car for the first time in my life. No, I felt that familiar hunger for more power. The pressure was good, but honestly it could be better. I still had to work to dislodge a half-century worth of grit from the fender liners, and if I wanted to work I’d show up to my job sober.
One surplus vee-eight later, and I was really giving it to the neighbourhood. There were some mild concerns about flooding, yes, but those were mitigated when the aforementioned nice mobsters showed up and offered to purchase my device from me. Insurance fraud or something, I guess. If there’s one thing I like better than fixing stuff, it’s making a couple hundred bucks in an afternoon with little to no effort. Nothing cleans like a profit.
What’s the best part of owning and operating a motor vehicle? Is it freedom? Style? Honestly, I think it’s the stoplight drags. Everyone does it. Some asshole next to you in line is creeping into the crosswalk while he waits for the light to change, and so you pop the clutch and walk him by a country mile. Or maybe you like to show off how much sidewalk-chewing fury is contained inside the three-point-five litre V6 of your Mustang. It’s the one thing that unites us all as car owners.
Things weren’t always this good. The stoplight was only invented about 25 years ago, by a group of Quebecois drag racers who were looking for something new to compete in. You see, prior to the development of the modern stoplight, the average person didn’t know how to do a good launch. It wasn’t until the Christmas-tree lights at the drag strip were moved into the cities that everyone started to “get it.”
Correspondingly, in the years since, cars have gotten a lot more capable of doing a good launch. In the 60s, your average economy car would have some Hydramatic jet-age setup that didn’t have a locking torque converter, ran weak internal pressures for “comfort,” and would leave the line with about the same fury as a Lhasa Apso with constipation. Nowadays, cars are mean as shit. Even your average Corolla can squeal the tires for half a block if you give it the right circumstances. Scientists are even working on obsoleting gas engines in favour of electric-powered cars with more torque than a freight train. It seems like drag racing fervour has captured the entire world’s imagination, and it’s all thanks to the stoplight.
So the next time you’re stuck at the stoplight, don’t be upset that it’s making your commute shorter. Look left, look right, and waste those motherfuckers as soon as the green gumball pops up.
When I was a kid, I wanted more than anything else to be an astronaut. Then I figured out that you had to actually pay attention in class, do even more schooling, and then possibly die in a huge burst of flame because some engineer forgot to specify the right variety of o-ring on a solid rocket booster. Perhaps I was just a little bit early, because in my childhood dreams imagined being an astronaut to be a lot more like popping out to the store for a brewski, except the store is in space and you get there by burning cubic meters of taxpayer dollars. Also, there’s some sassy jive-talking robot butlers.
As an adult, I can accomplish the same goal of scientific endeavour leading to potential conflagration today by just driving any one of the late-1970s cocaine barges in my collection to the grocery store to get some Bagel Bites. It’s got all the aspects: heroism, discovery, American cost-reduction engineering, running the same stopgap vehicle for multiple decades until it begins to fall apart from sheer neglect, but when it breaks down you have a slightly better chance of not dying when you fall out of the vehicle. If it wasn’t for the fact that wearing a replica Apollo helmet really fucks up my shoulder-check, I’d say it’s almost exactly the same thing.
There’s of course one other problem, too: nobody else gives a shit. If you show up to a rural cowboy bar and show conclusive proof that you are a bona fide astronaut, you’ll probably at least get some drinks. The same asshole who shows up with a Malaise Era Dodge spitting chunks of its head gasket into the exhaust manifold is not going to move the needle. To that cowboy bar full of leased 2018-21 F-150s, it would seem inadequately rugged.
Maybe that’s the real appeal of being the space traveller of my childhood fantasies. Most of the time, real astronauts are going to places where there are no other people. You get to look at some cool moon rocks, do a couple handbrake turns on the rover, and work on your zero-gravity golf swing. It’s practically a vacation. Unfortunately, my part-time job at the Pep Boys is largely unwilling to subsidize my desire to drive into the desert and potentially never return, no matter what my middle manager Carl says in my performance review.
It’s important to be known in your community as someone who is impartial and can help. Last week, my total disinterest in anything organic turned into a part-time gig judging at the local rose society. They knew they could trust me, because everyone else in town was competing (we live in a very boring town.) A judge must never have skin in the game. Nobody wanted a repeat of the chili cookoff from two summers ago, where the Mayor’s dog got shot.
Now, on paper, judging roses is pretty simple. You ask the grower what kind of rose it is, then look it up in the little book. Act like you’re deep in thought for about five minutes (I spent a while mentally dismantling a GM 12-bolt axle) and then assess them based on how close their rose is to the ideal rose in the book. Above all, you must clamp down on any dispute. As the judge, your word is law, and why even bother having judges if some huffy asshole who squeezes every piece of fruit at the grocery store can bully you into giving him an extra point-and-a-half on his wilty Campfires?
Now, I know what you’re saying. You’ve caught me in a little bit of hypocrisy. Because I have a history with all the denizens of my fine town, I can’t possibly be impartial. This is where you’re wrong, and possibly made it onto the personal shit list that I scratch into the paint on the drivers’ door of my Fargo just to make sure everyone knows where they stand. Literally everyone in town is on that list, and they’ve pissed me off more or less equally, which makes me de-facto impartial. And even if a new resident comes to town, chances are the other townsfolk have warned them about me well in advance, and I’ll pick up on those bad vibes.
Why didn’t they just get someone from another town to come over? Well, we’re not really on good intramunicipal relationships with any of our neighbouring towns, the nearby big city, or even our sister city in Japan. Anyone who comes over from there would probably arrive with a posse, and then inevitably the county reeve would start hearing stories about our strange and lawbreaking ways. For instance, I have more than two non-running cars on my property. Ted down the street (Fair Bianca) watered his lawn six times last week. Julie-Sue (Morden blush) runs a synthetic heroin factory staffed entirely by foreign-exchange students from the local engineering program.
When you’re as dedicated to the junk life as I am, you never stop looking for an angle. Getting a good tip, or studying a parts catalogue so intensely you see the manufacturer’s part numbering scheme when you close your eyes, could be the difference between a project that costs seven thousand bucks and one that costs seven thousand and ten dollars. One of my favourite techniques is to look for things that have depreciated too quickly. Which is to say: motorhomes.
As I’ve said before, a motorhome combines all the problems of a car with all the problems of a house. However, this house has a V8 engine, and often a very large one with a stupendously lazy camshaft. It makes sense: you need a lot of power to haul around all that poop you’ve made over the last week or so at the Terror Lake campground. Without the poop, say, in a poorly fabricobbled-together race car, that same V8 can live out its childhood dream of race glory. Or it can take me to the grocery store because my so-called “daily driver” has broken for the eighth time this month and it’s only a little rainy, it’s fine to drive on race slicks as long as I’m careful.
The only real problem with the “getting V8s out of motorhomes” model is that you have to get rid of the rest of the motorhome. For some reason, there’s not much of a secondary market for mould-choked vehicles that people have been pooping in for eight years before leaving it in a field for the better part of a century. And there definitely isn’t one when the powerplant has been removed, leaving behind a largely-immobile husk that costs a fortune to tow to the junkyard. Hey, that’s probably why they were cheap. Maybe the market does work after all.
Again, though, it all loops around to trying to extract maximum value out of what you’ve got. A motorhome without a motor could be a pretty reasonable home, which is why I’m now the biggest slumlord in my city. Once you sawzall off the roof, then the UV from the sun really does a gangbusters job of disinfecting the interior. And most of them already have big enough holes in the floor for easy drainage. I’ve paid for each motorhome several times over now in the rent from my tenants. Now all I have to do is find a place that sells tarps that can also be used to scare away housing inspectors.
All the good science projects cost huge amounts of money. We’re talking Large Hadron Colliders, big-tracts-of-Norwegian-land dollars here. This makes the whole pursuit of the cutting edge of scientific discovery seem out of the reach of the common man. Perhaps we as a species have simply discovered too much, and now a mere citizen scientist cannot hope to do anything more than chip away in some obscure corner, making discoveries that won’t merit a casual news-magazine.
When doing research, I found out that there was in fact a big gulf of knowledge. Lots of people have been falsely attributed as the discoverers of a thing that actually was figured out centuries before they were even born. We just didn’t bother to remember that the original person even existed, for reasons that are surely not racist in any way. What this means is, any discovery is valid. And who is likely to make the most discoveries in their adult lives? People who don’t know anything.
That’s why I opened a new theme park - the Dumb Science Club. Now, anyone can discover some new-to-them science. Even if you’re the kind of person too lazy to change all of the spark plugs on your ‘97 F-150, you will be shouting “Eureka!” within minutes. Everyone who figures out a new phenomenon of the natural world gets to excitedly run over to one of our supervising scientists to get a big gold star. We’ve got it all: a sand table, a water feature, some loose gears scattered around the floor. And a bunch of rules about not telling each other things have already been discovered.
Who knows? Maybe, with the right encouragement, someone at the park will discover something that humanity didn’t have before. It’s not very likely that a middle-aged father of two will figure out the cure for cancer while playing with marbles in a funnel, but even if he doesn’t, it keeps him off the streets so his kids can have some free time to play Fortnite. Of course, any actual novel discoveries made on our premises must share patent ownership with the park, due to some obscure legal boilerplate that I won’t go into here. We are, after all, putting up all of the resources and letting you play in the old condemned science centre (do not speak loudly when inside the planetarium.)
Writing a journal at the end of the day is a useful framing device for the lazy writers of 90s sitcoms. Often, you’ll see a character sum up the moral of the episode in a heavy-handed way by writing a newspaper article, magazine editorial, or diary entry. Then you know exactly what you should think about the situations presented previously, and you can go on with your life having learned a tightly controlled lesson taught by characters you find interesting but not challenging.
And if you try to write every day, as I do, it’s hard to resist the temptation to turn that day’s lessons into an easy entry. After all, who doesn’t want to read about the reasons why some of a 60s Mopar’s lug nuts are left-hand-threaded? However, as a professional, I will avoid this urge as long as possible in lieu of telling you all about that time I took fifty bucks to transport a bunch of dogs across state lines in the back of my Tercel.
The year was 2006, a time when it seemed possible - if distantly - that things might get better again. I was working as a sort of internet scab, taking jobs that nobody else wanted on a message board. The only requirement is that you owned a car, and showed up for work less drunk than the employer. Not a problem, I told the clerical staff on each morning’s check-in call, my elite race-driver training does not permit me to get boozed up and then operate an automobile. It is a supreme responsibility, and not one I take lightly.
Anyway, the dogs. It turns out that this guy was running a sort of de-facto animal rescue. I was never clear on what he was rescuing the dogs from, or where they were meant to go, but it was 15 bucks an hour plus gas and mileage. To me, this was the dream job. My Tercel couldn’t possibly smell any worse, and with the vacuum cruise-control finally functioning, all I had to do was put on some tunes, point it down the interstate, and keep the hood between the lane lines.
It’s worth mentioning at this point, purely out of interest in providing background colour, that a few friends of mine had backyard-turbocharged this Tercel just the weekend before. Almost seventeen dollars’ worth of the finest Home Depot PVC piping and year-old PVC cement was now force-feeding slightly-above-atmosphere pressurized air into my engine’s intake. On wastegate spring pressure, the old Volvo turbo I had scavenged from a broken down car on the side of the road in the rich part of town gave the little Toyota enough scoot to be a properly fun personal conveyance. That is, if the “tune” was in good working order. We were still working on the specifics of how much fuel to dump into the cylinders in response to the boost, and I legitimately couldn’t remember if the distributor was vacuum advance or not. Toyota built their blocks strong enough that they could withstand ham-fisted incompetence like that - for a time.
So that’s the lesson that I learned that one fateful night. Well, maybe make that two lessons. The first one is to always make sure your tune is solid before trying to go full throttle at low RPM in top gear. And the other lesson is that a dog-sled team is surprisingly fast on the highway, even when it’s made up of a bunch of second-hand mutts connected to a dead 3TC-powered hatchback with ratchet straps.
Every summer, my neighbours next door like to have frequent, loud dinner parties in their backyard. It is difficult to concentrate on repinning a wiring harness or slide-hammering a wheel hub off of a rusty Toyota when they are busy cackling and carrying on. It gets worse once the booze breaks out at around nightfall. Finally, I decided to go over there and do something about it.
I should point out two things, before you start to prematurely draw any conclusions. First: I won the lottery and moved to the richie-rich part of town, outbidding some guy who used to own the stock market building or something. Second: I am extremely bitter that the neighbours no longer invite me to their parties ever since I referred to the host as “Herr Frasier” and asked if a bon mot was a kind of candy. Be that as it may, they still should respect the sanctity of the neighbourhood with their wino dancefests.
As with many things in life, my father taught me that it was important to make a dramatic point in order to get what you want. Even if your opponents don’t immediately concede in the face of your overwhelming mental fortitude, the suddenness of your action gives you the benefit of surprise. And “surprise” is written all over the hood of my hogged-out AMC Rambler, along with the paint marker reading “structural corrosion” that the auction put on it a couple years ago before I bought it.
A crystal punch bowl strikes my windshield and bursts into a billion glittering pieces in slow-motion. I compensate with a quick one-two feint on the steering wheel to unsettle the chassis, and yank the hydraulic handbrake like a naughty private-college pupil in order to make sure I take out as much of the hors d’oeuvres table as possible with my left rear quarter panel. With my sudden release of the loud pedal, the hood stacks flare unburned E85 with just a hint of nitrous top-note. The car has just finished sliding by the time I pop the drivers’ door in order to issue my list of demands. Just like Martin Luther, who I’m told was once a writer for Hot Rod back in the sixties before Wally Parks tried to have him killed for scratching the paint on his Model A.
The live orchestra is scrambling from the bandshell, violinists and oboeists clamouring for any chance at putting solid cover between them and me. You may think this is overkill, but it is insufficient punishment for their terrible rendition of Ravel, who I know would be doing the exact same thing had the French government developed the foresight to forcibly partner with AMC much earlier.
I have made a grave miscalculation: the chief of police is one of the attendees at this swank soireé. This is, I believe, an act of class warfare. He is enraged, but in that people-pleasing way that waiters who know their tip and career depends on you is. Opening my chequebook, I ask him how many new patrol cruisers it’s going to cost to get a noise complaint expedited around here.
When I was growing up, my least favourite way to spend a weekend would be to go with my parents for appliance shopping. It didn’t happen often - even though my dad had a bit of a lead foot when it came to the dishwasher, I can only remember it failing completely once. When it did happen, however, it was agonizingly boring for a young child. Nowadays, of course, going appliance shopping is a riveting exercise in fantasy about what could be in my future kitchen. Look honey, this one has a garburetor and a steam dryer. That’d really fuck up the caked-on cheese when we make green bean casserole.
Now, I’m fairly sure that I can’t actually afford any of these appliances. Record low interest rates and broad access to the easy financialization of large purchases has made it possible for the manufacturers to bloat their prices and therefore margins, even as they lay off the domestic manufacturing team and continue to regurgitate last year’s model in a new finish. This extra margin - to say nothing of the “financing fees” and monthly compound interest - is returned to their shareholders in the form of share buybacks. It’s the same pattern you see all over Western society, which is why I prefer to pay cash - on Craigslist, that is.
All this is to say that large appliances are an attractively stainless-steel-clad microcosm for the greater failures of our society at large. And if you come over to my place, I’ll be happy to show you the finest Whirlpool they made in about 2002, held together with zipties and hose clamps to stretch a few more years out of it. The previous owner just threw it away because of a mere waterpump breaking off the bottom and flooding his kitchen, can you believe that?
Anyone can swap in a bigger engine to make more horsepower. It’s the stuff of gearhead stories - your weird Uncle Carl who slammed a 472 V8 into his stripper-package Cougar and couldn’t stop doing burnouts. Even if you’re not immersed into automotive culture to such a degree that you can produce yogourt by telling an Instant Pot about the last Mustang you killed on the street, you have probably heard these stories before. There is, however, one great voice that is missing from this oral legacy: those people who swapped in smaller engines.
Now, you might think this is crazy. If it’s about the same amount of effort and cost, then why not just get the huge one and be done with it? And this line of questioning does make a worrying amount of sense. The best explanation I can think of for the mental illness that makes me fantasize about putting tinier, zingier, more economical engines into cars that are simply too big and heavy for them is that I crave new experiences. I want a challenge on my daily commute, and wringing a small-displacement four-cylinder in order to merge into traffic definitely qualifies.
Decades ago, this wasn’t such a big deal. Everyone got by with less. There were no stock minivans with four hundred and fifty horsepower, and tire technology hadn’t yet advanced so that a three-quarter-ton truck can take a sweeper. And then you’ve got the electric cars coming up real fast - literally. Traffic has never had more horsepower in it, and that horsepower largely is going to waste. The next time you’re sitting in traffic, you should count up the horsepower figures of every vehicle in front of you. Yesterday, I was stuck going ten under behind thirteen thousand aggregate horsepower. My 85 horse lawnmower engine was simply too powerful to be exploited under these circumstances.
There is, of course, an argument to be made for hipster cred. A smaller engine is less desirable, but represents a more vibrant love of the subject matter that the average person can’t hope to appreciate with their confirmist tastes. However, hipsters are generally adjacent to something that people actually enjoy. It is not at all clear yet what my kind of human being will end up being described as in the history books, but “dangerous pervert” has a real ring to it.
Only the pursuit of technical excellence divides the truly great engineers from the so-so types. However, there is more than just building the absolute best thing imaginable as an engineer. Often, you are asked to develop the best possible solution within a certain budget. And if your solution is, say, a pickup truck for towing Old Man Johnson’s double-wide out of the city so that he can finally be evicted for serial non-payment of property taxes, and your budget is about $250, you better be a really great fucking engineer. I don’t mean an engineer that fucks well. That’s a different career entirely.
One of the nice things about my part of the world is that our police service is so utterly corrupt and brazenly incompetent that huge corporations - domestic and foreign, we’re very worldly - will swing by and use us as a “test market” to save a couple bucks. I can totally understand this methodology. It’s about reducing your exposure to things that cost money, which is the fundamental component of my cheap-assed lifestyle. For me to complain about it would simply be hypocritical, and there is no greater crime in American popular culture than that of hypocrisy.
Last month, a bunch of Chinese billionaires got drunk and decided that they wanted to make Gundam happen but for real. Once they sobered up, they lost a lot of their interest. They only got far enough as building these artificially intelligent dog robots that roam the streets every night and howl at people in this sort of AM-radio-crackly ratcheting screech. Most townspeople are afraid of them, but I happen to know that with a bit of strategic application of an old microwave transformer they can be put down and their brain boxes and motors harvested. Finders keepers, bitch, as the town motto doesn’t say in Latin.
Again, any putz with half a brain can weld together an old bed frame into a truck chassis that can be used to heavy-haul (as we used to call it in the 1970s.) It takes true engineering grit to realize you can lay it down in an ordered pattern on the road to build a public transit infrastructure. Welcome to Switch Railways, our town’s newest privately-owned transit system. Please keep your hands and arms inside this old bumper-car shell as it’s leaving the Old Man Johnson station; some of our right-of-ways are not particularly wide and often a little controversial due to a willingness to save a buck.
“Let he who has actually completed a goddamn project cast the first stone,” said the old mechanic that I learned under. None of us picked up even the tiniest pebble, because we knew that it was pretty much impossible to finish a project.
“Project” is originally a Latin word, meaning “pointless meandering.” Once, it referred to a technique for murdering public intellectuals whose controversial opinions had fallen into popular disrepute. The government would assign a “project manager,” whose job it was to coordinate an expedition of these smarty pants assholes into the forest surrounding the city. Once there, they’d get them good and lost, usually perishing of starvation or being devoured by bears. And if the project manager made it back from that forest for a second tour of duty, so much the better! Then they’d be promoted to senior project manager.
Even today, it’s still the practice of most Fortune 500 companies. And also individual assholes working out of a garage. Without a project manager, however, I’m forced to lose myself. This is both harder and not as hard as you’d expect.
It turns out that if you leave someone who is technically proficient to their own devices, they’ll without fail be expected to construct an elaborate prison of the mind from which no escape is possible. Even the laziest ones have ridiculous fantasies of multi-hundred-step projects that they’ll never complete. Giving up is not an option - even if they surrender upon encountering any difficulty, another, even more impossible project will emerge and be excitedly embarked upon. Our ancestors still lost in the woods would be proud of us.
Recently, my attorney informed me that he had been contacted by a group of internet conspiracy theorists who were convinced I was the one who killed the electric car at General Motors. This could not possibly be further from the truth. I am virtually unemployable by any major American corporation not just for my outspoken labour activism (“I should get paid more”) but also because of my grotesque disinterest in professional courtesy and office politics. I do, however, like me a car that I don’t have to fill up at the gas station.
Sometimes I wonder if I am the only person who gets upset at the gas station. In my neck of the woods, even the simplest multi-pump island turns into a parallel parking expedition for the local morons - except it also contains highly reactive combustible materials. And what’s worse than having to wait for a Nissan Rogue to make a 27 point turn and still end up six feet short of the pump hose is when that same Rogue gets ditched at the pump for an hour while the owner goes into the station’s convenience store to get smokes and lottery tickets. After all this is done, then I get the privilege of paying a fortune to enrich some third-best king of some country that I can’t find on a map.
Filling up an electric car instead avoids all of this, yes, but it also adds a new dimension: that of revenge. I think we’ve all wanted to stick it to a bad boss, but what if doing so also got you free gas for the week? With an electric, you’re just one extension cord away from profiting off the unguarded electrical outlets of everyone in your neighborhood.
Once you’ve tasted the delicious flavour of Spite With Extra Miles, it’s hard to go back. In fact, you start to see other places that you could pick up a little free energy while striking a blow against The Man. That’s why I blew the guts out of that Leaf the other day when I welded the pantograph poles from an old subway car onto the roof and then tried to scrape a transmission line with it. Maybe the internet rabble had a point after all.
Reactionary beliefs still run rampant in the corporate corridors that have given life to every mass-produced automobile. It’s risky, not just in product-market fit, but in terms of regulatory compliance, to try something novel when nobody is asking for it. Therefore, things don’t happen until an innovator pushes for it. An innovator like me.
All throughout the 1960s and 70s, governments were looking for a new kind of car. One with fewer wheels. It was believed that motorcycles consumed less fuel primarily because they had only two wheels, but they also granted a degree of freedom to the operator. These liberated motor-cyclists, as they came to call themselves, soon began to saw at the trunk of government, hoping to create a stump of anarchy. The compromise was struck: they would still build cars, but with three wheels instead.
You don’t need me to tell you how much of a disaster this was. Despite the inherent stability of a three-legged table, drivers still managed to cause immense rollovers and fantastic accidents with little or no effort. On a motorcycle, it turned out, it was much harder to crash because they’re smaller than a car. With a three-wheeled vehicle the size of a car and as unstable as all get out, it was only a matter of time before the proletariat demanded an end to traffic deaths. Back to four wheels, then.
There were a lot of experiments in the intervening years. A fifth wheel for ease of parallel parking. Six wheels on a crackpot’s F1 car. Hiding several small wheels inside the body in order to trick physics into repeating that cool spinning-plate trick but for fuel economy. None of them worked out, except they didn’t have me around back then, and it’s been thoroughly documented that people in the past aren’t as smart as people now. Probably because of the chicken hormones.
Which is all to say, officer, that pulling me over just because I was driving two motorcycles connected by a ratchet strap is an affront to the development of science and technology for the betterment of humanity.
You might think that an ambulance is a terrible race car. That holds true when you swap the gearbox for a manual transmission, which of course is mandatory for any vehicle in my fleet. The fact that you can pick them up for a few hundred bucks in ratty condition from municipal auctions doesn’t really affect their racecraft. Its gleaming domestic vee-eight even remains impotent when you drain those useless “oxygen” and “blood” tanks in the back and fill them up with lifesaving nitrous oxide piped directly into the throttle body. However, there’s one big benefit about having an ambulance on a drag strip: you get to let yourself in for free.
That’s right, entrance fees are no longer a thing. Every drag strip needs to have an ambulance on site, often by the ruling of greedy city councillors eager to get their portion of the rental charge, so it might as well be you. It doesn’t state that the ambulance has to be functional, or that the staff inside it are qualified to do anything more complicated than an oil change. Also, you can drive right past the tech inspection line and onto the strip - a real benefit if you maintain your race car about as well as I maintain my daily driver. “Flintstones” is not an acceptable thing to write under “static brake test” on the tech form.
And when the audience thinks that you’re a real meat wagon, you can do pull after pull and get applause from the crowd of yokels every time, even if you’re running high 18s. Who can blame them? It’s super cool that the ambulance driver has become infected with the joy of drag racing and can’t hold back from doing cool burnouts in the water box until those expensive truck-duty tires in dually configuration finally cord with a bang loud enough to scare the real ambulance drivers parked just off the track, eating cold tuna sandwiches. If by some miracle you actually crack off a medium-quick pass, you’ll achieve instant Instagram fame by being the cool dad whose lifesaving equipment can crack off a mid-14.
There is a safety concern, however. Like at all racing events, it’s important to remove any extraneous or loose items inside your car. You don’t want to get beaned on the back of the head by a first aid kit, or listen to used hypodermic needles scatter themselves all over the floor every time you grab the 2-3 shift. So make sure all that stuff gets left at home. As a bonus, you’ll probably be able to get away quicker if someone else has an accident and needs your “services.”
There’s nothing better than picking up fresh test gear. Yes, normal tools are fun to hold and let you do amazing things that are otherwise impossible with your bare hands. Test equipment, however, lets you answer the question “what the fuck is going on?” with “at least now I know what the problem fucking isn’t.” And that has real value.
Accordingly, good test equipment is extremely expensive when sold new. You can get good used deals, of course, especially if you scrounge around looking for 80s hardware that is now laughably obsolete, or visit your local university and are good at sneaking past the security guard with a trenchcoat full of logic analyzer. Are you calling me fat, buddy?
The only problem with buying someone else’s used gear is that you don’t know if the test equipment is itself faulty, which could be throwing off your findings. After all, there’s a reason it was thrown away. So sometimes you have to buy test equipment to test the test equipment. And since you’re doing it with less money than you started out with (as you had to first buy the original piece of test equipment,) it stands that the second one might be even crappier and less precise. It goes on like this for awhile until you start to doubt the basic concept of physics, at which point you realize that the thing you were testing is just not plugged in.
However, even if you’re not currently working on a project, all these cool oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, seismographs and x-ray machines are good for one thing. They’re super impressive to the local news when they try to interview you for a story over Zoom, which increases the chance that you can convince them that you know something. And that’s how I managed to trick everyone in my town into thinking I could cure cancer if they only gave me a pair of nice 4-2-1 manifolds for the Volare. After all, I had all this gear to measure whether or not it was working.
Unlike conventional witchcraft, automotive witchcraft is tightly controlled by “automotive engineering” programs in universities and colleges across the land. This is, of course, a front, because everything inside a car happens so fast that there is no way any human being can possibly comprehend it. Cars are just big ol’ magic things and we don’t know where they came from.
If the average person understood that the only thing you learn in automotive engineering school is how to style an aggressive-looking grille and make up excuses for not offering a manual transmission, they’d never trust their cars to get them to their mistresses ever again.
As a result, the engineers hired at companies like Renault perform various occult rituals to make sure that the good vibes keep flowing. Now, we’re not talking anything like sacrificing dogs - that sort of thing went out of style in the 60s, which is why we lost the ability to make finned tail-lights and hubcaps - but, you know, occasionally a troublesome child wanders away from the schoolyard and is never found again. The cops understand that this is the way it has to be: if the cars stopped being produced, then the economy would grind to a halt in seconds. If that happens, how would they be able to afford the new Call of Duty?
This is also the reason why so many automotive companies are clustered together. You might think it’s because they want to be able to poach engineers from each other, or get first dibs on tasty test markets that will give them quality feedback on their new concepts. It’s actually because the ancient ley lines that traverse the length of the world frequently criss-cross here, producing a nexus of automotive power. That’s the “power” in “power windows,” in case you were curious. A team of Ford employees almost died figuring that one out in 1982.
You can argue about the aesthetic merits of derelict cars all day long, but there’s no denying that a large population sees them as nothing more than ugly. And to make matters worse, those people vote. Probably because they have a lot of free time that’s not taken up by trying to hammer a firewall to fit an A727 + 440 combination into a Dart, but vote they do nonetheless. And so, a lot of gearheads are affected by poorly-thought-out fascist edicts about not having more than two broken cars on their property at a time.
For years, I’ve been representing shitty car nerds in their quests to obtain more shitty cars. The courts can’t keep me or my attack dog of an attorney from knocking down their terrible legislation in state courthouse after state courthouse. However, we have neither the time nor the resources to win them all (the company Volare keeps breaking down.) For those regions that still have these atrocious rules on the books, we offer an alternative service.
In the course of my travels, I’ve picked up a lot of “free-thinking” individuals. I don’t know if there’s a more polite term for them. There’s not much that society has left for this kind of individual, one who prizes freedom above all else. No one could put them to work. No one could make them into law-abiding, productive members of society. No one but me.
If the Man is harassing you, then call on my guys. They’ll show up in a ratty-ass pickup truck and re-landscape your property around the cars. Suddenly, they’re no longer broken cars, but objets d’art. That’s some First Amendment shit, or whatever it is that lets people draw a comedy mustache on pictures of major religious figures. High society will gather around and debate whether or not the shattered crankshaft of your Mighty Max represents the futility of industrial endeavour or simply the limited tensile strength of the over-porous casting of the counterweight webbing. And when the cop comes around again to bust your ass, you better believe you’ll be able to get a much more sober lawyer than me to represent freedom of expression and art itself.
It’s definitely not cheap to start up your own nuclear reactor at home. You’ve got to buy all those books, for one thing. And some of them are super expensive - I’m talking textbook prices here. A lot of professors got very rich off of my little project. It gets even more expensive from there, but believe me when I tell you that the project pays for itself in a couple weeks.
Not just in terms of raw electricity, though that is certainly creeping up in price, but you can also sell the used-up fuel on the backend to all kinds of people who are willing to pay you to get rid of it. All you have to do is put it in a field and they’ll do all the rest. That gets rid of the disposal problem that has held back all the other projects of this nature. What do they do with all that nuclear waste? They probably pile it in a shed and then die of radiation exposure, but that’s not my problem. I make them sign a little waiver about it.
It’s surprisingly easy to construct one of these setups, too: there’s lots of government agencies willing to help you out. Fantastic value for your tax dollar, the kind of in-depth industry know-how that I wish existed in more places. Sure, you can’t exactly phone them up and ask them all your questions without getting put on some kind of list, but that’s not what America is about. America is about doing it yourself, learning lessons the hard way, and then doing a little better the next time. They’re more of a hands-off mentor. If your shielding leaks even a tiny amount of radiation, they’ll come by and tell you all about it. More free reading material = more lessons learned = better reactor next time. See?
The only real problem is that it’s quite difficult to make a small reactor. Because of the physics involved, it’s usually cheaper to build a giant one and then just waste a ton of the power. That’s another fiscal boon, too: I’ve got hundreds of extremely inefficient computers running 24/7 to mine bitcoins just to keep this baby from getting a little too frisky on us. Even more profitability! You can’t afford not to build your own breeder reactor this next weekend. Maybe just pick up a bunch of Pentium 4s first.
Yeah, walking around the neighbourhood is pretty lame, but as soon as they came out with a way to quantify it, I had to compete with my fellow assholes. We didn’t do it right away, of course. It took a couple years until the technology became commonplace enough that you could pick up a Tianfeng-brand smart watch for eight dollars off of eBay. Then all the racing got cancelled, so it became our only outlet for competition. And we all lost our jobs, so we had all day to walk around.
I can’t even remember what my house looks like. Haven’t returned to it in like two months. Going back there is some more steps, yes, but then I’ll be tempted to sleep in comfort, which will use up time that I could spend winning the step competition this week. If I sleep under an expressway, the hard concrete won’t tempt me to hang out for a couple extra minutes like a soft bed or warm running water would. Can’t rack up steps in the shower, or at least not very quickly. Maybe I’ll walk past the place anyway, and see if it’s still intact. Could be too much temptation.
Sometimes when I’m out, I see the other guys. Reminds me what I came out to do. They’ve all gone in for the spandex, the athletic outfits that reduce their weight. And sunburns. A lot of them look like melting wax candles now as a result, sucking their teeth in pain every time a new part of their anatomy begins to chafe through. I was smart and kept it safe: full face helmet. The extra sweating is barely noticed, although I keep having to open the visor to keep hydrated from my neighbours’ hoses and the rainfall, when I’m lucky.
My fitness tracker has rolled over twice today. It only has room for so many steps, I guess, and when you get close you need to get it synched up with your phone so it saves before it trips. As for my phone, it’s strapped to a solar panel and an old car battery that I found in the alley. Setting that rig up slowed me down a bit, but not nearly as much as looking for an outlet would. Plus, it’s a few extra calories, which is also optimizing my heartrate fitness score. The other guys haven’t even started competing on that one yet.
Gotta go, someone’s shouting at me that I just won a marathon or some shit. Okay, I’ll come to the awards ceremony, but you have to be okay with me endlessly walking in tight circles all throughout it. Can’t afford to slow down for an instant or Phil down the street will win, his cheating ass having strapped the fucking things to all of his kids and put them on the same account.
For awhile, I was obsessed with the idea that Citroën made a bunch of cars with rotary engines. That’s right, at some blessed time in the recent past, you could go to the store and plunk down some cash for a rotary-powered hatchback equipped with hydraulic suspension made by the French. Presumably, these wizards phoned up NSU and were like “we’ll take the lot,” before cramming their engines into an Italian-designed commuter-class hatchback sideways. Yes, it’s a front-wheel-drive, too.
When I first heard about this, I had to sit down for a little while and catch my breath. Then, I immediately leapt into looking up production numbers. My local library was closed, so I had to do the next best thing, and stand in my neighbour’s backyard with binoculars while I shouted at him what Wikipedia pages to look up. It’s called social distancing, and it’s the right thing to do.
Only 847 were built and then Citroën tried to buy back and crush them all. It was too nuts even for them, and this is a company that spent actual money to buy Maserati. Like, the company Maserati. A mere handful survive to this day, and so I had to accept that I would probably never find a running and driving GS Birotor for $750 or best offer. Then I got to thinking.
Why stop at a mere Citroën GS? If there’s rear legroom to be had, I deserve it - and the trunk is nowhere near big enough to hold an entire LQ4. I can probably get a turbo-cheap Citroën BX to soak up that 80s style, and then wedge my own rotary engine into it. There’s no shortage of mildly crashed RX-7s in my neck of the woods, and it would only take several thousand hours of intense engineering - by which I mean about a weekend of figuring out how to route a motorcycle’s chain drive through a hole in the body - to convert it to a transverse mount.
At last, I had my beautiful solution. With the hydropneumatic suspension, I could drive my giant luxury barge at reckless speeds over even the most dangerous terrain, and fit massive clodhopper tires to the car with no need to roll the fenders or even fix the body rust. And the Mazda rotary was beyond pleased as well - with all the hydraulic oil leaks in the chassis, it was like having two-stroke injection 24/7. I just wish Citroën, in the guise of my local parking authorities, hadn’t come by and crushed it when I wasn’t looking. They’re just jealous that I managed to figure it out and not go bankrupt.
Painting a car requires precision, attention to detail, a lifetime of experience, and a willingness to spend more than two hours doing the job. So naturally I’m not qualified in any way to do it, but over the years I’ve picked up a couple great tips for covering freshly-repaired panels with paint anyway.
Here’s the first tip: don’t use automotive paint. Automotive paint is a scam. If it were any good, then I wouldn’t be repairing rust underneath it. What you want to use is house paint. You ever seen a house rust? That’s right. Buying new house paint is expensive, so wait until one of your neighbours sets some out on the curb for trash pickup day. You might not be able to choose the colour, but who cares? The money you save can pay for speed parts, and nothing looks as good as a fast car feels.
Next, the quality of your paint job depends directly on how much time you spend prepping it. So that means that spending an afternoon sanding down a fender is going to produce a nicer result than loosely attacking it with a wire brush on the end of your drill while squinting. How much nicer is up to you, but I do caution you that our time on this Earth is short, and spending it sanding is perhaps not the best use of your time. You can speed it up a little by recklessly tailgating other drivers on gravel roads, but this only really works for the front panels and is a little hard to precision target.
Last, don’t be in too much of a hurry to actually spray the paint. I know, that’s the fun part, watching this miraculous substance blow out of your gun. You want to get started as soon as you can, and get that primal satisfaction of seeing a shiny apple-like paint glob onto the panel. However, you could probably stand to finish another couple of beers first. It’ll loosen you up a bit, which is important at your age. You don’t want to have a sore back tomorrow, after all. There’s like six more shitboxes to paint before the open canister of Tremclad starts to cook off in the open air.
If you follow these tips, then you’ll definitely get paint onto a panel. And that’s good enough to keep the rust at bay.
A lot of people enjoy modern, water-cooled Volkswagens unironically. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I believe something may be wrong with these people. Sure, we all love a good mk2 Golf or mk2 Jetta or mk2 Polo, but what about all those vehicles that came after 1992? That’s when things get pretty divisive in the ol’ Volkswagen community.
One group of people, those who have money, contend that buying new cars means that they are more reliable. Taken at face value, you could believe that this is true. After all, you can probably climb into a brand new Ford fresh off the dealer lot and drive to the next town over without worrying as much about breaking down as you would if you were driving a 1989 Taurus with which you have no history. With a Volkswagen, this is more of a cruel joke, as the manufacturer aggressively decontents each successive generation with the intent of finding out just when the customers will stop buying their cars.
The other half of the Volkswagen-owning populace - and full disclosure, it’s this half I agree with - have figured out all the little foibles and quirks of the late-80s “A2″ Volkswagen platform and will buy nothing else. They weld steel blocks to the steering rack so that the tie rods don’t pop out when they try to turn the steering wheel too far, they block off the heater core so it doesn’t eject scalding hot poison into the cabin after a decent autocross run, and most importantly they aggressively hoard more and more Volkswagens because A) they need parts constantly and B) they’re cheap. Unfortunately, this group is now under threat by the former group, who have decided that the A2 Volkswagens are no longer scumbag race cars but in fact desirable collectibles of a long-lost era when VW made good, or at least less profitable, automobiles.
With their greater income, many mk2 Golfs and GTIs are being pulled from their native land of farmyard race tracks and forced to wear $3000 sets of high-end alloy wheels. Only a few dollars a day will help a local Volkswagen hoarder continue to expand his or her collection by giving them the fiscal backing to acquire 1989 Jettas for the now-record, unaffordable market price of $325. Won’t you please give today?
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tags: volkswagen, volkswagen jetta, volkswagen golf, volkswagen polo
Down at the ranch, we like to try and keep things fairly green. For instance, we strapped a forklift motor to one of the Mustang IIs so we could move it around the yard. Did great burnouts, until someone called the county sheriff on us. Somehow, word of our all-electric hooliganery got back to the county reeve, who told the rich guys he works for about it during a game of golf, and then things turned into a whole mess. Turns out we were actually creating innovation and hope for the distant future, and not just being lazy rednecks who had a broken forklift and a bunch of marginal marine batteries lying around.
Once the investment capital started flowing in, we felt pressured to actually produce a working product. This was our rookie mistake, really: real movers and shakers just immediately route all of the incoming money to cocaine and press releases filled with lies. We decided that if people were counting on us, we had to spend all of it on a product. Take it from me: don’t do this. People will throw infinite amounts of money at an idea, but once they actually see it and hold it in their hands and realize it makes 25 horsepower and can’t climb a hill, they start asking where all that money went.
Now, it does fantastic burnouts. All that torque will smoke a set of tires like nothing else. We tried to pivot into that business, you know; there’s a lot of tires just thrown into the woods around our area, and we figured maybe we could do some kind of recycling program. Unfortunately for us, it turned out nobody at all thought that aerosolized burning tire rubber was a useful end product from our recycling process, either. We got some mild interest from tire manufacturers, to see if they could somehow make stronger, more resilient tires for the upcoming era of electric cars, but after it was determined that the longest-lived tires were a set of 1997 Walmart radials from China (estimated treadwear 3.6 million) their interest also disappeared.
To make matters worse, we started to run out of old forklift motors. Most engineering firms would probably design their own motors, or order them from the internet, but we were just some humble rednecks and wanted to uphold the purity of the narrative that our government partners were spinning about us. Desperate the night before a big conference, we decided that we would help ourselves to the reeve’s golf cart. Surely, as a huge supporter of ours, he would appreciate our cleverness and guile.
Later, after the county’s new bond issue flopped and the banks started to rip up the roads and foreclose on our shop, we realized that the true renewable energy of our humble community was golfing with super-rich people and doing whatever they wanted.
Whenever you move into a new house, there’s a lot of funky sounds that you have to get used to. Each and every house is assembled of a different combination of paper-thin construction by a different group of underpaid half-drunk labourers, so accordingly each house will make a different noise when it’s settling down for the night. Cars are sort of the same way, except that if you ignore the hallway creaking it won’t shit a red-hot wheel bearing into the front glass of the 7-11 when you pull over to get midnight churros.
Now, me and a bunch of dudes from the university had tried a little startup before. We figured that if you sold a little machine that played weird house sounds loudly enough, you could make a new house sound like your old house. Sort of like when you train newborn babies to fall asleep by playing sounds of whales in their bedroom, reminding them of their past lives as cetacean gods before they were human.
With our device, you’d never have any more sleepless nights wondering if that slip-ping, slip-thunk sound was the refrigerator compressor dying or a burglar coming to saw your face off and put it on the hood of his Neon. Nobody wanted to buy it - it turns out when you’re in a new house there are lots of other things to buy, so you just skip right over our cool product when you’re in line at Walmart. I had to fire all of the interns who actually developed the product, but I still managed to eke out a reasonable profit for my risk in asking a venture capitalist to fund my company.
There’s a big plus, though. I also held on to the prototype, and it turns out playing the sounds of a 1979 bungalow falling slowly into a sinkhole easily drowns out the noise of that failing wheel bearing on my Plymouth Arrow. Which is good, because I already blew out the stereo speakers trying to turn the radio up any higher.
Have you heard of kapton tape before? It’s some kind of super-high-tech bullshit that DuPont harvested from a comet that fell to Earth. The tape is heat resistant, insulating, smells kind of weird, keeps working when you send it into fucking space, and comes in a pretty colour. And the Chinese stole the secrets and make billions of miles of it for pennies, so I end up using it everywhere that duct tape is inappropriate. Mostly because duct tape is too wide to fit onto a circuit board.
A lot of the big names aren’t using kapton tape anymore. For instance, the big brains at NASA stopped because after a couple years it starts to fray and screw up your avionics, but none of my projects involve “don’t burn astronauts to death” as a primary requirement. It might be a secondary requirement, but I’m not a project manager and if you are I would prefer if you leave right now and don’t touch any of my doorknobs on the way out.
Personally, I love this damn tape so much that I’ve started using it for structural reinforcement on my daily driver. It’s waterproof, too, and strong enough that if I layer it just right it doesn’t matter that my floorboards are gone. And unlike patch panels, it remains transparent, so I can keep an eye on the rest of the body rust as it develops. That’s when I know that I should probably order a couple more rolls of tape from eBay.
That’s not the only space-age material that I’ve begun incorporating into my daily routine, of course. Did you know that Tang is what astronauts drink and somehow seals all those pinholes in my radiator? We’ll find out if that’s true the next time I floor it trying to merge onto the highway.
I miss the junkyard. Now, I don’t miss it like regular people do. Psychologists would call what I have with the you-pick-it lot an “unhealthy fixation.” I sent some nude pics to them - the junkyard owners, not the psychologists - the other day, just to keep the romance alive, but I don’t think they even have a cellphone. Probably just heard a bunch of really sexy static on the landline.
It’s not that I’m afraid of getting sick, or at least not more sick than I would otherwise get by inhaling the fine particulate of rust mixed with airbag propellant mixed with cancer mud. The problem, really, is that I’m just not driving anywhere anymore. And if I’m not driving, then I’m not constantly being reminded of the many parts that fall off my car. Yes, while I’m walking past my ‘79 Aspen, I certainly will note that there seems to be a hole in the floor big enough that a family of possums have taken up residence inside the passenger footwell, but I won’t do anything about it. When the car’s not rolling, when I’m not exposed to the problem in stop-and-go traffic, it might as well not exist. It’s happening over there, and not to me, so I don’t give a shit. Sort of like foreign policy.
Unfortunately, I have recognized that my junkyard skills have started to atrophy in recent weeks. I can no longer choose with alarming accuracy the front control arm interchange options for even something as broad as a ‘98 Forester. In order to keep myself on top of it, I’ve built a sort of junkyard simulator, like what pilots used to use before all the planes fell out of the sky. I’ve started going out into the pile of broken cars in my backyard, pulling parts out of them, and then carrying them into the front yard, where I load them into the trunk of my working car. Sure, they’re not the right parts, but I get the important aspects down. And my cat, Mr. Fluffbottoms, works the checkout counter and makes sure that I didn’t pocket too many relays while I was out in the yard.
It’s not a perfect solution - part of the fun of the junkyard is the surprise. The surprise like walking thirty kilometers under the blazing sun in a single day in order to open sixty Christmas presents that turn out to all be missing their drivers’ side blower vent. And I can’t be the only one to feel this way. Recently, I’ve noticed that the other “car people” in my neighbourhood have been jealously eyeing my pile when they think I and my high-resolution night-vision cameras aren’t watching. I guess I better print off a few more copies of those photos to use for “keep out” signs.
Is there anything worse than misplacing a tool? Of course there is. It’s misplacing a part. Nine times out of ten, you probably already have another tool that can be used for the same purpose - if even incorrectly. Nothing wastes an entire evening of what could otherwise be productive wrenching than having to look for that one part you bought months ago and squirreled away somewhere inside your ridiculous hoard.
I didn’t want this to happen to me. For years, I kept a really meticulous accounting system of where I had put the parts. I put everything in an Excel spreadsheet, and even colour-coded it. It was a lot of work, but I could update it at work and generally keep on top of things. Then I started doing the harder drugs.
Engine swaps. Complete teardowns and part-outs. Buying abandoned shipping containers on eBay. And I got complacent about updating the spreadsheet, as my boss eventually identified that it was taking up nine terabytes of our file server’s capacity and told me to cut it the fuck out. Soon, parts started coming in too quickly for me to keep track of. I needed to hire an accountant, but I was too afraid. What would their prim and proper manner be when they discovered I had not just one, but several dozen Dodge Diplomat parts cars, some of which no doubt with fancy aftermarket headers?
Finally, an auditor from the government came by to figure out why I wasn’t paying my taxes anymore. This dude was rude, spiteful, and best of all, meticulous. I let him tool around my back forty for a couple weeks, only poking my head out once in awhile to see if he had gotten trapped under a collapsing Caravelle. At the end of the month, he returned from his quest. In his fist was a comprehensive list of every part, automobile, and junkyard dog (sometimes they come with the cars) that I had in my possession. It was well worth the $3.76 in back taxes that he calculated I had stiffed the government for.
Now, every year, I just make sure to have some really suspect transactions. Those weird Russian mob banks aren’t just great investments - they also will send you Lada parts if you text the fund manager, Ilyich.
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tags: dodge, dodge diplomat, renault, renault caravelle
Every business that imports and exports sooner or later has to take a bullshit loss. Whether it’s border guards who steal your stuff, transport trucks which share your precious cargo with incontinent chickens, or a cruise liner that just disappears into the middle of the Bermuda Triangle with all of your shit, you’re going to have a bad day. That’s where shipping insurance sets in, but they can’t and won’t protect the eager small businessmyn from every conceivable harm.
That’s why I’ve started my own shipping firm. We bought ourselves an old cargo ship and we’re just chucking shit on there. It used to be a cruise ship, before all the Bad Shit happened. If you look around carefully - and our trained staff definitely have, as they’re alone for several months during its international voyage - you can pull some pretty decent fixtures and loose copper wire out of the wrecks that used to be luxury-class cabins.
Now, you might think that car haulers and people haulers are a lot different. If so, it’s probably also the case that you have more experience in maritime shipping than we do. Our consultants found an old gas axe at one of the dry docks we “borrowed” in order to equip the ship, so now there’s a big hole in the side that we load cars into by jumping them off a huge ramp that we attach to the dock. How do we keep water out? We load the other side of the ship more, so it lists permanently to one side. And to make sure our employees are motivated to keep your precious cargo dry, we make sure that we only hire those workers who can’t swim. Also, we sold the life jackets on eBay to free up a little more seed capital.
Insurance-wise, there’s no hidden surprises. We tell you flat out when you sign up that your shit may or may not arrive, and if it doesn’t, that’s too bad. Why would we lie to you like our so-called “competition?” You’re saving a bunch of money on shipping in exchange for a mere ten to fifteen percent chance that we’ll totally lose the ship and everything on board. That’s better odds than you’ll get in Vegas. Sure, you can give us a few extra bucks to make sure that we take extra-special care of your package, but that just amounts to us parking your car below-decks instead of launching it overboard to distract any pirates that attack us in international waters.
Next time you’re buying stuff from a vending machine, make sure to check out the little safety stickers. Tucked somewhere amongst all the warnings about compressed gas and high voltage is a little cartoon of a dude toppling the vending machine over on top of himself. The tip hazard sticker is a laugh riot.
When we were kids, my friends and I used to laugh at the middle-school Coke machine’s cartoon as it sat in the lunchroom, refusing to dispense free carbonated beverages for us. A crown of lightning bolts ran around the head of the person about to be crushed, so the kids used to snicker about his “Spidey sense.” We had a lot of dorks in my school, which explains why we got bullied so badly by that one transfer student who later went on to pilot giant robots and defend Earth. It was a pretty eventful year.
Anyway, back to the Coke machine. As a budding industrial artist, I became obsessed with the person who drew that safety diagram. How many meetings and iterations of proposals with their boss did they have to go through before it would be presented to committee? Was it reworked past then? Or did it simply pass without complaint, a particularly jovial image of a dude getting his legs and torso crushed to death by a falling pop dispenser? I flew to Georgia once, to see if I could figure out the answers to my questions, but ultimately came up dry. Nobody remembered who had done it, and they really wished I hadn’t driven the rental car (an exceptionally disappointing Kia Forte) through the parking lot doing Rockfords afterward.
It’s a pity that we’ll never really be able to truly thank the people who did these ubiquitous icons of our society. Perhaps their only reward comes from knowing a bunch of kids giggled about it, before remembering for the rest of their days that rocking the machine does not dispense free product.
Some people are huge fanatics for relatively lame cars. I don’t mean in my way, where I have an abiding thirst for an entire genre of crappy Malaise Era vehicles. We’re talking specific makes and models, and perhaps even a limited range of years. A couple years ago there was a dude who wouldn’t stop talking about his then-new base-model Saturn Astra on every thread on the forums. What’s the rest of his life like?
Maybe his Astra is still around. They made them pretty sturdy, and without a high-strung engine, it’s likely to last a little longer than a more desirable hot hatch would. It’s not that old of a car, and they generally figured out the corrosion protection. Barring a major accident that destroys the unibody, you could keep farting junkyard motors into that thing until the End Times. I bet he’s got a couple parts cars.
It’s been long enough since then that I like to think now that he must have some kids. Maybe he keeps buying them little model Saturn Astras for birthdays, putting up aspirational posters about the value of university education, but with Ferraris and Porsches scratched out and photocopied Astras clumsily blue-tacked in place. Maybe his kids are starting to get a little curious about the world outside the Astra, as children tend to do when they realize their parents are just normal humans in a world full of choices and not magical gods.
“Father,” the younger and more precocious of the two children asks when he is done filling out an activity sheet about the torque curve of the 2009 Saturn Astra XE, “Is the Saturn Astra the same as a Vauxhall Astra? Jeremy Clarkson did ever so hate it.” He has been watching old episodes of Top Gear at a friend’s house.
His son will be spending the afternoon in the Punishment Room, accurately modelled to the smallest detail after a post-bankruptcy non-Saturn GM dealership’s service counter. They have picked up the contract to provide high-quality repairs and knowledgable technicians for your vehicle even though the original brand is long gone. He wails.
Too many of us have fallen into the same mental patterns that ruined the lives of our ancestors. Didn’t you wonder why Uncle Grandpa never followed through on going to work on the Manhattan Project like he said he was offered? Sure, in retrospect he probably chalks it up to not wanting to be part of the atomic annihilation of millions of civilians, but at the time it was probably just that he was lazy. And that’s what we’re here to fix. The laziness.
Keeping motivated is just a matter of having enough projects around the house. You see, if you only are working on one thing at a time, it’s easy to get bored of it. The human mind needs variety or it gets all fucked up. Freud himself would agree that you need to buy more than just one shitty project car. Don’t stop with a Beetle you rescued from a Mexican vocho junkyard - pick up a Tsuru with blown brake hardlines while you’re there. And if you get sick of cars entirely? It’s unlikely, but maybe your house is also falling apart.
The mistake everyone makes is putting deadlines on their projects. This produces pressure to complete them, which makes the whole thing feel too much like work. Now you’re going to procrastinate from the “get my Duster to start so I can drive to work” project only to spend all evening shopping on eBay for parts to see if you can decode the infrared signals from a TV remote using a piece of paper and an extremely sensitive laser microphone.
So take it from me: make no commitments, but many plans. That’s the way to achieve success, as long as you also master the skill of redefining the concept of success. Uncle Grandpa never figured out how to move the goalposts, otherwise he would have been perfectly happy setting off M-80s and petitioning the government to keep his double-wide from mudsliding into that used Ford dealership.
One of my favourite videogames is Robotron. In it, you are some guy with a gun who has to protect the last human family. Those helpless civilians need to be saved from a bunch of robots who were initially meant to serve humanity but then decided it would be easier just to kill them all.
At first, I figured my love for it was because of the control scheme, the punishing speed of the gameplay, or the great noises the speakers kick out when you wipe out all the baddies and warp to the next level. I was wrong, of course. What I really enjoyed was the idea of simply getting rid of defective machines without feeling any guilt.
I was raised in a small cult of electrical engineers just outside of Tucson. At least initially. They moved around a whole lot, with the makeup of the group shifting as various members went to prison, turboprison, joined the circus, or glommed onto another art collective as we were passing by the same location. One of the standards of our little group was that we should never, ever throw away any machine that could potentially be fixed someday. Just keep using it as long as you can, if possible.
Therein lies the core problem of my upbringing. How do you find all the time to maintain all this shit and also get the work done that brings in enough money for food, medicine, and small-caliber ammunition? The answer was to fix things just enough that they’d work, and then just tell everyone around you to be super careful when they’re trying to operate it, because your fix is probably a little janky. I came to expect that every machine around me had exposed wires, missing safety shields, or a chassis that would occasionally become live if you were leaning on it. With education, it seemed, you learned both what not to do and what exactly you could get away with.
To loop around to the initial problem of this meandering story, I now find it impossible to get rid of any machine, no matter how broken. As long as it fulfills some function, it’s still worthy of preservation as it is a clear instrument of Our Maker’s love. A couple years ago I tried to throw away an old tape player whose capstan broke. After stripping it for parts, all that was left was a cracked and sun-damaged plastic shell. I leaned over the recycle bin, and held the case over the depths from which it would never return. Now it’s a parts tray in the corner of my garage. I have a lot of parts trays.
Ever since that nice dude came to town and changed it so we never got snow anymore, I’ve been missing ice racing. Admittedly, I don’t particularly miss the frigid temperatures, or shovelling my driveway, or birds. So it’s sort of a toss-up, but as time goes on I start to look at the lonely class-illegal bolted tires sitting in the corner of my tire room and wonder if they will ever be driven in anger again.
I don’t think any of us actually expected him to back up his words. Even the Mayor and the local morning news were really surprised when he lifted his staff to the heavens, said something in backwards Latin, and then burned the sky alive for three hours. After that, we were still all wanting to prove him wrong, to cast him into the river as another charlatan just like that guy who tried to sell us all wireless internet. If it’s wireless, then why do we still have to use it inside our houses?! Doesn’t make sense, “Ted.”
It caught a lot of us in the ice-racing club flat-footed. Some of us were able to convert our vehicles back into street cars, or even dirt rallycross cars - there’s a lot more dirt these days, for some reason that not even the scientists from NASA can explain - but my own Cavalier was stripped out so thoroughly that it was basically nothing except door skins, a drivers’ seat, and a heater core. Even the most laissez-faire of the speed-control pigs would come down on me big time for not having turn signals or brake lights, barring the Princess Auto trailer lights that are tek-screwed into what’s left of the roof.
There’s a little bit of hope, though. I hear the next town over still has snow. They didn’t want to hear what the stranger had to say, and a bunch of them formed a posse to run him out of town. I’d head right over there pronto, except that their tech inspector actually looks for the presence of a rollcage instead of letting me check it off myself. You’d think they’d have learned their lesson about taking things on faith by now.
Pretty much everyone you meet is into making coffee in a funky way. Blame the isolation, the lack of Starbucks, or just the overwhelming urge to separate yourself from the rest of the sheep via conspicuous consumerism. If you could visit your friends right now, rest assured that each and every one of them wil now have some obscenely long coffee regimen that involves half a dozen different vintage machines.
As an inveterate collector of vintage machines and part-time asshole, there’s one question that I get asked more than any other. That question is: why are you making your fucking coffee in the coolant overflow bottle?! And to that I have only one answer: all of the actual antifreeze escaped decades ago, and what’s left of this radiator is full of the finest garden hose water I could borrow from my neighbours when they weren’t looking. Which, nowadays, is much more difficult since they’re home all the time.
Really, I’m conserving the Earth’s scarce natural resources. You see, most of the gasoline burned by an internal combustion engine is just converted to heat. By using coffee grounds to soak up that heat and then make coffee inside the engine, I’m reusing a little bit of the energy that would otherwise be wasted. And it’s convenient: all I need to do when I want a fresh cup of joe is to pop my cup under the radiator drain petcock or any one of the convenient holes in the formerly-pressurized cooling system. Sure, the reduced specific heat capacity of coffee versus pure water is not great for cooling performance, but neither is the broken electric fan that I haven’t replaced since the Clinton administration.
The only problem comes during the winter months. You see, iced coffee just isn’t that enjoyable when it’s minus 30. I tried to make hot chocolate once, but the heater core kept clogging up when I put the little marshmallows in it. Almost lost my toes.
Sometimes, I like to look up the biographies of my heroes. Maybe it’s that I subconsciously believe that if I follow in their steps, the same success will happen to me. Even though that is impossible because the exact same circumstances that propelled them to greatness no longer exist - and also because I’m super lazy - it still makes me feel better about my life to participate in a little reflected historical glory.
I think cars must be the same way, because they’re basically living things. That’s why I spend a little bit each night reading the Haynes manual of the most desirable car of all time - the 1965 Chevrolet El Camino - to each and every one of them, so that they might learn from the example of the hacked-up Chevette wagon and become truly great. So far, it hasn’t produced any measurable results, but that’s mostly because, like me, my 1990 Honda Accord is extremely lazy. Also, it has a giant hole in the shortblock where the crankshaft used to live.
Eventually, I got to thinking about why I was so disappointed, and slowly realized there was no reason to be. Perhaps the greatest success of all of these vehicles has just been surviving long enough that I could afford to pick them up for $200. They’ve had full, six-digit-odometer lives: ferrying families to soccer practice, keeping their kids safe, and occasionally throwing a rod with enough force to dent the underside of the hood. Were they truly falling short of automotive perfectionism, or had they already arrived at that point without my help? Did I already have a bunch of unsung car heroes in my garage right now?
In that case, the only moral thing to do is to stop trying to mould them into something they’re not, and instead continue in my role as protector and maintainer. I would do this by buying about thirty more shitty old cars from Craigslist and parking them around the neighbourhood. Hey, even though they’re not collectors’ items, these cars are veterans. They’ve earned their leaks. Show some respect.
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tags: chevrolet, chevrolet el camino, honda, honda accord
Getting started is usually the hardest part of any endeavour. No matter what little bullshit difficulties you’ll run into along the way, when you add up the amount of time you spent procrastinating and putting off the project versus the time you had to spend to atually accomplish something, the math is irrefutable. Just get started, chirps my celebrity productivity coach, as I stand over a shattered Ford nine-inch and rethink my life choices.
As far as government programs go, hiring these guys wasn’t the worst one I’ve seen. They don’t really expect much in the way of pay because their jobs aren’t very difficult. And the reward they reap in terms of increased productivity - and therefore GDP - is no doubt substantial. Maybe the long-term mental health effects on the populace aren’t so great, but that’s for the scientists to decide (and be ignored) later. Even they probably have a revolving door of Richard Simmons-esque motherfuckers popping in and telling them to do something, anything, on a long term project.
I grumble, but eventually, to make him shut up I decide I’ll at least kneel down and brap off the bolts holding on the diff cover. Then I can see what’s left of the ring gear, and that’ll be good enough for one day. I’m sure 180 horsepower to the wheels didn’t shatter the bearing caps; it was probably because this car spent the last 30 years in a swamp and the diff was doing burnouts packed full of mud instead of ground-up sperm whales for lubricant. He seems pleased that I have done anything at all today on my project, and his attention begins to waver. I wonder if he even has a name, or if they are required to remain pseudo-anonymous so that people don’t hunt them down after “just getting started” on a divorce or spree guillotining.
At the end of his shift, he clocks out and leaves. Finally, alone in the garage, I can throw in the towel and see if Netflix has posted anything new in the last half a day. I find myself finishing the job - a complete teardown and a swap of the right axle shaft, which true to my suspicion was effectively water-hammered into some kind of bowling-pin shape. After blowing out the housing with a garden hose and then packing it with Red & Tacky #2, I was ready for another 14 second pass. I felt pride in knocking an item off my to-do list, but then immediate rage at having been played by my government productivity handler.
I guess it’s better this way. The government’s first draft was to hire people who made sure you did things properly. Took Goddamn forever to get anything done and the economy ground to a halt, even though the gold-plated elevators were really nice.
Have you ever wondered how “Doctor” Mario got his medical degree? I did too, so I decided to send away for the exact same medical degree. When it arrived in the mail, from a guy named John Hopkins, I thought it looked super fake and would fool absolutely no one. Turns out that “no one” works at the local Porsche dealership, because they called me “Doctor” and then let me rip a 911 around all afternoon instead of nervously phoning every five minutes to threaten me with jail if I did not immediately return the car.
Some part of me still doesn’t understand why I went for it. Even though I now had hundreds of hours of medical practice and thousands of years of theory under my belt, I had no interest in helping the common man. Yes, it was nice that they revered me so - the aforementioned Porsche thing, preferential bumps to business class when doing a fly & drive for sub-$1000 shitboxes - but I soon grew tired of the reverence and wanted to settle down in a small town where I could really get my teeth into some meaty research. Not like that. I had to sign a little piece of paper saying I wouldn’t stalk, murder, and eat people before they would let me have my degree.
However, it turns out that ever since we let those damn medical robots take over all of medicine, there’s not really much demand for human-led research anymore. It’s sort of understandable: in a lifetime I might produce one or two really revolutionary discoveries, but chances are I’m going to just spend my life pipetting some shit into some other shit on camera for the local news. A good-sized medical research ‘bot can knock through thirteen or fourteen diseases before breakfast, and even more if Amazon is particularly cheap that morning. No, the medical authorities said, you have to be the human face at the end of all these amazing discoveries, to do some highly-paid customer service.
Now, I spend my days poking and prodding at the townsfolk. Draining goiters, repairing ingrown toenails, and trying not to write anything too critical of the nearby plastics plant. Sometimes I get a really interesting case, but just as I’m getting excited, my phone will ping and tell me it already discovered the one weird old trick to curing it. And to make things worse, my new 911 was delivered with automatic headlights. Damn robots really have figured everything out.
A lot of people think that once a car has broken and stopped moving, it doesn’t require maintenance. This is how you end up with the really shitty cars that I buy. It doesn’t have to be this way. I’m here to advise you of ways to keep your broken car in tip-top shape, so that when you figure out how to fix the problem, it’s still able to drive around.
Step one is obviously pull the battery out. Not only will the battery discharge and eventually die from the parasitic drain of the car, but you can sell it for some quick cash. Yes, even a dead battery is worth something (eBay jewelry sellers have to get all that lead from somewhere) but it’s best to maintain the value of your investment. Plus, when the battery is out, your kids can do science experiments in your garage with it, and who knows where that will lead them? Maybe a cure for cancer. You wouldn’t stand in the way of a cure for cancer, would you?
Step two is that you gotta keep those tires topped up. Not only are flat tires easily damaged, but they’re a red flag for the Authorities that all is not well with your vehicle collection. Then you end up with a bunch of fines, and then you have to wear a skull mask, buy a machine gun, and invade the local government to teach them a lesson about messing with your privilege the opulent freedom that you were born into as a citizen of this great land. Best to just sidestep all of that, as guns and ammunition are expensive; much more so than a cheap air compressor. You can even top up your neighbours’ tires so that they don’t feel incentivized to call said Authorities in the first place! Make sure you let them know that plan B is the murder-treason stuff, though.
The last, and most important, step is to constantly check Craigslist for fun cars that you could swap the remaining good parts into. Do you have a Ford V8 that’s shit out the transmission? I bet that would go great in a Fiero. Maybe you have a Camry that spun the alternator belt through the hood? Pop that engine into a Fiero and stuff the frunk with some extra batteries for traction. Mazda RX7 that’s exploded the engine? Swap the Iron Duke you took out of the Fiero into it, and then go to the local import meets.
Last week, I had one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. I drove a brand new car. It wasn’t my fault; a friend was getting tired on our interminable road trip to go pick up some greasy transmissions, so he told me to take over. Friends, let me tell you about this fucking shit: there’s no clutch pedal and the transmission shifted itself - automatically.
I’ve known this day would come, ever since i noticed one morning that the value of my beautiful malaise-era smog garbage was starting to creep up. First, it was a Ford Granada changing hands for actual money. Yes, it was a running and driving car, and it even still had floors, but these were what you drove before you realized the tiny island nation of Japan existed and could serve you up a fat slab of Accord for two paystubs. And on its steering column was a three-speed manual like God intended, dammit.
At some point, it was plain that at some dark point in the future, it would no longer be affordable for me to own my 70s turds. Someone with way more money would swoop in and carry them away to Nevada, where they would live out the rest of their lives in rust-free, air conditioned splendor, trading hands at speculative auctions without ever being driven again. I would have to upgrade to 80s cars, which I’m assured are still largely worthle - what’s that? Even 90s cars are starting to creep up in value? Then I would simply have to buy unloved mid-2000s cars, from that bygone era of translucent coloured plastic and CD-based MP3 players. Surely nobody would ever want to pay serious money for a 2005 Jaguar X-Type - and that’s exactly what I was driving after my Judas of a co-pilot had told me to take the wheel.
Sure, it had all the attributes of an automobile I would appreciate. Ponderous and unpredictable handling, half from negligent suspension maintenance and the other half from a hole-brained commitment to “luxury ride quality.” A sunroof that leaked. An in-dash radio that could serve up either chirpy-buzzy AM talk radio or warbling FM radio through blown paper-cone speakers. Tires of many different manufacturers and sizes. However, the five-speed automatic transmission that shifted with ghostlike efficiency (if the ghost were operating some kind of heavy equipment while overdosing on Nyquil) was simply too eerie for me. What if it suddenly decided to switch into reverse when I was at a light? Better to have the old standard of a chunk of iron loosely attached to the transmission with a skull shift knob on top. Ideally with glowing eyes.
“You know, these things came with a manual and a turbo-diesel in Europe,” my companion said, before drifting off to sleep from what I hoped wasn’t the prominent exhaust leak beneath our feet. I immediately started wondering if I could still book international airfare on a DC-10.
For a little while, the pizza-delivery people in my neighbourhood would drive these specialized one-off cars as part of their delivery service. Eventually, the franchisees must have revolted when they realized how insane paying for all this bespoke goodness after every fender bender was. So the delivery staff are now all driving cute little electric mopeds. Ah, to zing silently through the residential streets, dragging your knee through the tight off-camber blind corner of a playground zone - that’s the romance of ‘za delivery in our modern times.
Recently, due to an employer figuring out what kind of human being I actually am, I was out on my ass, money-wise. Initially, I believed the firing was prejudicial - even though my personality is repulsive it is effectively an unchangeable attribute of my nature and it’s not right to discriminate based on it. All the lawyers I visited didn’t agree, and one of them even threatened me not to try a slip-and-fall scam in his parking lot because he’d hire some thugs to burn my house down. Who says I’m not a job creator?
So, without any viable employment prospects, and thoroughly tantalized by the prospect of low-miles electric mopeds, I signed on with the pizza delivery corps. All they had to see was something that looked like a drivers’ license - my Rhodesian motor-vehicle permit is still in excellent standing for only $12 a year in bitcoins sent to some dude who calls himself MrWheels69 - and I was already getting some sweet, sweet minimum-wage hours.
What’s more, my new boss Sean told me that the franchise was extremely strict on delivery times, so I had to make sure to get those deliveries done in 30 minutes or less. This was an implicit invitation to speed through residential neighbourhoods and test the suspension of my new company-provided vehicle. Why hadn’t I done this before, other than the fact it would barely cover my rent? I spent that first magical night ramping my bike off of “traffic-calming” roundabouts and curbs, knowing that if i blew out a fork seal or two that Sean would just have to accept it as part of the cost of doing business. None of my customers complained about my speed. Sure, maybe they got a little upset when I ripped a donut on their front lawn, chucking hunks of sod through their picture window - but I think they accepted it as part of the cost of returning the economy to its former glory. We all gotta make sacrifices, I said to myself on a break, while wondering if swapping out the main battery wiring for a thicker gauge would meaningfully improve my 0-60 or just melt the contactor that much faster.
It didn’t last. Surprisingly, it was one of the few jobs that didn’t fire me or spontaneously move offices without telling me where they moved to. After a few weeks, I picked up a new job working in a boring building with computers again. However, the experience had changed me. Now I knew the secret to workplace productivity and efficiency lay in the humble electric moped. And without an internal combustion engine, it was perfectly safe to use it in an office setting. I just wish the elevators at work were a little bigger because it’s seriously impacting my ability to do smooth donuts.
It might not be a regular occurrence for you to forget your cars, but it happens to me all the time. That should only make logical sense: at some point, the size of a “collection” will outstrip an individual’s ability to remember everything about it. I thought I was doing pretty well at keeping up on the maintenance, used-parts wish list, and legal status of each vehicle, but it turns out I had a Polara that I completely forgot about a few blocks over. Or was it a Newport? Both?
The VINs didn’t match front to back; to be expected with a model of this year, my province stamped their own shitty VINs into the body panels. Once you’d been in a few total loss accidents, it was hard to keep everything “numbers-matching.” Still, it drove fine with the ass end of a Polara and the front end of a Newport, or at least no worse than it handled from the factory. A ponderous boat, but it was mine, and it was a little bit like finding twenty bucks in a pair of jeans you hadn’t worn in awhile. And to make things even better, the gas in the tank was still good enough to internally combust, as long as I poured in my requisite couple bottles of octane booster first. I buy it by the case. It’s cheaper than fixing carburetors - sometimes I fill the washer jug with it and just pipe it into the air cleaner.
I decided to take my serendipitous C-body to the grocery store, in order to pick up some of life’s essentials. TV dinners, microwave burritos, smokes for trading, that kind of thing. Usually, I don’t let the bagger come out with me, because they’re often too young to understand what a Newport (or I-Mark, or Celica, or Cavalier) is, but this time I felt like peacocking a bit. Waving my hand like an ancient general, I indicated that the field of grocery-bag conquest was the trunk of my very own Newpolara. He was impressed although he didn’t show it. You could tell by the way he held his nose as he was leaning into the mouse-infested trunk to place the compostable bags. With any luck, and a few more years parked on the street, I wouldn’t even have to throw those out.
Yes, life with a free Dodge was indeed great. I didn’t even mind that there was a gap in the floorboard where the junkyard surgeon had grafted the two individually-wrecked car halves together. If I did mind, that’d just be more to-do lists to remember. And who has the mental capacity for all of that?
When my psychiatrist used to allow me to go to parties, people would inevitably ask me whether I had watched Days of Thunder, a 1990 Tom Cruise/Nicole Kidman vehicle about racing carbureted American iron around tracks and smashing it into other cars. While the interest in my personal life was comforting and relatable, I also found it to be a bit trite. Was the only exposure to professional auto racing for the majority of the adult population coming from this film? I decided then that I would have to create my own feature-length film about autocross, the car racing of somewhat broke kings.
Of course, I was about three months into principal photography when someone told me that in order to get a movie noticed by Hollywood, it has to be more than just shaky GoPro video of you slowly weaving towards and then hitting a cone. They didn’t get it. There was a real character arc in here - in the way that I went from going 67km/h before sliding sideways and responding too slowly to catch the car, to 68. Such an improvement brought tears to my test audience’s eyes and momentarily buoyed my mood, but the screening fell flat with larger focus groups. It seemed that Tom Cruise was destined to shit on my lawn once more.
Then, I realized what people really liked about that movie: the humanity. They didn’t care about the racing, or the chassis-prep sequences. What audiences were clamoring for was the relationship between characters. I had to turn my camera to the grid, in order to capture the real discussions about tire pressure, where to get a good pyrometer, and why their RX7s keep making that weird ping-hiss sound whenever they unload the suspension in order to speed away from the backmarker of the slalom.
When we released the resulting movie to the little independent film festival, I was super nervous. That initial negative response from the focus groups (“why would I watch a movie about racing a Hyundai?” asked some idiot) had settled in my gut in the months since, making me increasingly unconfident in my own erratic actions and driving me to mistreat my cast and crew. This, it would later turn out, was in fact a major asset when a Hollywood agent overheard me screaming at my best friend to get me a better wheel alignment. Now I’m directing the new Star Trek movie. It’s got a Mazda 323 in it.
There’s a saying in the Bible. Let he who has not attempted to hook up nitrous to a brand new car during a test drive cast the first rods out of the block. How else am I supposed to figure out what the tolerances of the engine are? After I’ve bought it? That’s when I’m responsible for replacing the engine. Much better to nuke Ronald Bob Donaldson of the Donaldson Auto Mile’s engine, in which case I can simply walk away and buy it a few months later as a “certified pre-owned” car.
Now, you might think that the salespeople would try to stop you from doing this. In actual fact, most of them don’t know anything about cars. They might as well be selling big-screen televisions down at The Brick, or trying to scam addicts into buying the more expensive synthetic fentanyl because it comes with a longer warranty. When you pop the hood and tell them you’re checking out the mounting of the molecular frammistat, they don’t really have any experience with which to argue with you. As long as you’re subtle about using a little bottle, and tuck it away appropriately in the engine bay (I strongly recommend removing and discarding the washer fluid jug,) they won’t even look up from their copy of Tinder.
Of course, this isn’t a perfect test. The limited time for hooking it up, the small bottle, and the lack of a good bottle-warmer setup (unless you have a really unobservant sales-individual) will limit the quality of the install. That’s why I just aim for an unregulated 50-shot and hope for the best. In my experience, it is very difficult to end up having bought a brand-new car that can’t handle a 100 wet shot that could handle a 50 dry shot, but that’s because I don’t actually buy the cars after I test drive them. New cars are expensive, and refills at the local speed shop are like $10 a pound.
Make sure this weekend to frequent your local small businesses. Car dealerships need our help and support if they’re going to continue gouging everyone in sight for thousand-dollar undercoats, and car dealership principals need your money to influence local politicians to further disenfranchise you. Without them, how else would you get to see what crazy face the salesperson makes when you whack the horn button whilst pulling onto the highway?
Many have asked me, do I have contempt for the automobiles that I drive with such reckless abuse? It is exactly the opposite: I respect these beaters so much that I must give them a warrior’s death. After decades of ferrying their previous owners to divorce hearings, insurance broker conventions, and the grocery store, every car yearns to be set loose on a race track. The fact that we no longer have a race track in my municipality is a largely academic concern.
Narrow-minded people would consider this hypocritical, given that I state my goal is to “rescue” these cars. I need a lot of automobiles because I’m basically a museum-curator-slash-pound-puppy-rescuer. My excuse is that a lot of people adopt babies and make them run track and field competitions, I’m told by almost someone.
Although I would never condone street racing, there is absolutely no way that anyone in the judicial system would consider - as a purely hypothetical and non-legally-binding example, this is not to be construed as an admission of guilt and my shark of an attorney will shit down your throat if you try anything funny - my 1980 Trans Am Turbo to be an actual car capable of breaking the law. The first big question is whether it would in fact survive a trip to the redline. Of course the car will - don’t tell Officer Bringdown - it’s just that the engine sometimes doesn’t. On those occasions, the emissions quality of the car drops significantly as fragments of the weak Pontiac rods enter the exhaust stream.
However, if you think about it, more than 90% of the roads ever made are completely devoid of traffic at any given time. Who’s going to actually be harmed if you get a little sideways in an industrial yard or Kay Bee Toys parking lot after hours? The benefit to the car of being throttled a little harder, to finally fulfill its thoroughbred destiny or be catapulted to Valhalla atop a chariot made of shattered main bearings, far outweighs since a minuscule risk. And if it breaks, so what? It’s not like it’s the first car in my collection to sit on the side of the road for a couple months waiting for a new engine. At least then I know what the problem is, which significantly optimizes those costly diagnostic hours.
There’s a lot of talk right now about putting rich people’s cars into some kind of magical self-driving tunnels, at which point they can bypass regular traffic. Now, this idea has a lot of upside - it’s crazy, it’s incredibly expensive, and it has the likelihood of burning a lot of people alive in an inferno that is nearly impossible to extinguish. There’s also some downside, however, and that’s the fact that there is nothing to look at down there.
The next time you get into your car for a nice trip, I want you to count how many times you look away from the road. It might be for a flashy LED advertising sign, a resplendent display of natural beauty, your smartphone, or a particularly attractive human being. It’s the scenery that makes a drive worthwhile, and if you’re just going to go through a featureless grey tunnel (even if that featureless grey tunnel is slathered in holographic advertising to pay for it) then you might as well just look at your feet while riding the bus.
That’s why I’m going to propose my own audacious plan for the moneyed to be burned alive in virtually unstoppable chemical fires. It’s called the Skyway, and it consists entirely of glass-lined hamster tubes that are run several storeys above ground level. If your credit is good, then we’ll suck your car into them using immensely powerful vacuums (like the receipt tubes at Costco) and then propel you to your destination as fast as aerodynamics currently allows. When you’re ready to get off, just push the button on your phone and a huge electromagnet at the nearest exit will yank you back out of the tube.
The best part is: with the glass walls, you can see everything. Beautiful sunsets, the red light district, glistening rivers, people vomiting at Oktoberfest. It’s like you’re still a part of the city as you whistle above it in a gleaming cough-drop of privilege.
There are, of course, a few safety guidelines to keep in mind. Just like on the road, our Seat Safety Skyway visitors need to behave themselves to preserve the life and limb of all involved. Please make sure that you drive away from the exit very quickly, because the next guy in line is going to be pissed if he rear ends you going a buck ninety. Also, due to the pressure differential, please don’t roll your windows down. It’ll ruin the view for everyone who comes after you.
Now, I’m not saying I sent away for correspondance dental courses just so I could have an excuse to have nitrous oxide delivered right to my door, but I will say it’s not a cost-effective way of doing so.
The real reason was that Saabs, my Swedish white whale, are primarily owned by dentists. And with the number of Saabs in the wild dwindling, I have to work even harder to get a good used one. They say you should go where the deals are - and dentistry conferences are almost certainly going to have a parking lot full of Viggens.
I made a couple faux pas on my initial introduction. Since my education was largely done remotely, I never picked up on the little social niceties and foibles that the industry forces upon its members during their upbringing. Stuff like which colour of shirt to wear, the punchlines to common industry in-jokes, and not referring to the stainless-steel dental scaler as a “pokey thing” can out you as an outsider, and then your chance at a buddies-of-the-industry deal at a centre-mounted ignition convertible are all but gone. So after I blew a couple deals, I decided to mostly clam up and pretend that I didn’t speak English as my first language. Surely dentists, an industry zealously protected by overbearing government enforcement, wouldn’t be xenophobic, I thought. Perhaps Swedish would be a good middle ground. Deserving of Saabs, or at least Volvos.
Finally, I made a pretty good deal for a two-stroke ‘73 Saab 95. It was owned by some dude who used it as a promotional vehicle for his dental-supplies sales business, and he was getting out of the whole thing. I could keep whatever inventory he left in the trunk, to “boot” (little car joke there). Excited, I leapt behind the wheel and then froze with terror when I looked in the rear mirror.
What kind of sick fuck fills an entire car with dental phantoms?
Nearly every great invention of our age was discovered by accident. Buoyancy was discovered by Archimedes when he was having a bath. Mobile phones? Some Norwegian trying to figure out how to make elk mating calls with some military surplus high-voltage lines. Airplanes? Nobody knows where those came from, and any argument to the contrary will be met with extreme force. That’s why I, a research scientist, collect a huge paycheque from the government just to do whatever the fuck I want. Who knows where the next big invention will come from? Nobody can say it won’t originate in me playing Nintendo in my underwear at 3am.
You might think that this is a huge waste of money, and you’d be half right. It’s actually a small waste of money. Compared to giving out these grants to huge, inefficient institutions, just handing a few thousand bucks a month to local weirdos in the hope that they eventually construct something useful is practically coins-found-in-the-couch levels of fiscal prudence. If even one of these idiots manages to produce something on the level of a The Clapper, then it more than balances out. Everybody wins! Except for the artists, who all lost their grants and now have to pretend that mixed-media sculpture could also be an aerodynamic ballast for future Mars missions.
As for myself, I actually haven’t produced anything super great yet. The closest I got was The Couple’s Toilet, which is basically just two toilets bonded together facing in opposite directions. You can poop at the same time as your significant other. Nobody wanted that except for the Germans, and although selling off the rights to Volkswagen made a little bit of money for the government, they aren’t necessarily going to crow about that particular achievement too loudly. It’s a little embarrassing, or at least it was until it started cropping up in high-end luxury hotels as the next step after bathrooms with glass walls in them. After that, the G-men started calling me every week to see if I had any other great ideas relating to poop that I could get started on. No can do, I told them, now I’m looking into ideas of how to make a self-driving snowplow. Such a thing required actual engineering, however, and I quickly became bored.
It’s pretty likely that before I die, I’ll have at least cranked out another brilliant concept like The Couple’s Toilet. The important thing is that I at least stay ahead of my rivals, like Steve “Nipples” Hemingway, who just last week invented an extremely racist pop vending machine. That’s what you get for refusing to join in on the 4:30 am voice chat for the nightly raids because you have a new baby in the house, Steve.
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tags: steve nipples hemingway, the couple's toilet, fiscal prudence, alternative government policies
I think a lot of handy people like to feel superior to the poor suckers working at Home Depot. Sometimes when a project just isn’t going your way, you can at least find solace in hollering at some poor grade-four teacher who is manning the bolt bin for his summer paycheque. The bastard doesn’t even know the difference between lag bolts and self-tapping screws; they should just get rid of the help and let me pick out stuff myself.
This impulse is understandable, though ultimately it goes against our fellow workers. Those workers - be they clueless about silicone caulking in the bathroom department, confused about the municipal electric code in the lamps aisle, or simply unwilling to help you because they’re too busy huffing spray paint and industrial adhesives - are just trying to get through a busy day of retail hell. You complaining about warped lumber isn’t going to help matters any.
They’ve been dropped there by uncaring corporate assholes who didn’t want to pay enough to staff their shitty suburban mile-long warehouse with Bob Vilas and Norm Abrams. And the hardware stores that used to hire the weird old crank who wouldn’t talk to you about joinery until you had shown him a picture of the gazebo you designed and constructed from naturally-found driftwood? They’re all gone, because it turns out that was a shitty way to run a business.
So the next time you’re in the hardware store and you can’t believe that these motherfuckers can’t even tell you where to find the ethernet crimping tools or birdhouse kits, don’t get mad at them. Just take their apron and start helping out a little bit. They get to go home and get paid, and you can help yourself to their employee discount. We’re all in this together, unless you’re a middle manager, for whom the weekend divorced-dads-with-kids wood shop class is going to become a little more ambitious, involve a lot sharper blades, and French.
Last week, while I was in the garage attempting to weld up a dripping gas tank, I received a concerning call from my landlord, Mr. Cho. It seemed that his champagne-gold 2003 Toyota Camry XLE - the love of his life, he had professed to me on many an occasion - had developed a rolling misfire. Normally, I would consider being commanded to help a breach of our client-landlord relationship. However, Mr. Cho (always “Mister;” even on rent cheques) was not your typical landlord. Mostly because he didn’t get too concerned about the shitloads of junk cars I put around his property, and because the neighbours knew who owned the place and left me the hell alone as a result.
I drove over to the dockyards immediately, carrying a trunkload of parts from my hoard that I thought might be compatible Denso coilpacks. You didn’t really turn down the request of a guy like this. Last time he was over to inspect a squeaky refrigerator door, I saw a police officer pull to the side of the road, covering his face, rather than hold my landlord up in traffic. It made sense. The government wasn’t necessarily afraid of him so much as awed. I had never seen him commit any specific violence against an individual, and testified as such to that nice district attorney who later disappeared except for his toes, but that experience made me think twice about complaining too loudly about the screen door in the kitchen letting flies in.
One quick swap and we were back in business. I had to do a little bit of listening with the old screwdriver stethoscope to figure out exactly which hole was misbehaving, but I was in and out fast enough that I think it even impressed Mr. Cho. He gave me a thumbs-up, potentially the only hand gesture he could give that wouldn’t lead me to be erased by a sniper hiding in the bushes nearby, and drove away without a further word. It would have ruined the moment.
His JBL premium sound system (a desirable factory option in that year) continued to blare Korean pop music loudly enough that I could still hear it as he rounded the corner and then drove the short distance down the secured area towards the import/export office. I got back in my Duster and drove home, where I endeavoured to continue my hazardous spot-welding. When I got there, a group of men in ill-fitting business suits were milling around on the lawn. I figured it was the Feds again, getting ready to harass a small business owner like myself.
“We are immensely sorry for the failure of our ignition system,” cried the oldest of the men, and presented me with a gift card good for the entire value of a replacement Toyota product. The thing weighed like forty pounds and seemed to be made of solid gold.
Out of honesty, I let them know that they had mixed things up, and that my landlord was the one who had a Camry fail on him, not me. It didn’t matter. Mr. Cho, they explained, had been presented with a seat on the company board, and this was my incentive never to bring up the matter again with him for fear that the whole of Toyota City would somehow face his wrath.
“You guys still make the Paseo, right?” I asked.
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tags: mr. cho, toyota, toyota camry, toyota paseo, this is the 2000th entry, plymouth, plymouth duster
There are certain things in this world that only you “get” the rhythm of. A worn-out old instrument, a woodworking tool passed down through your family, a threadbare couch, your favourite old videogame. You enjoy it deeply, but you know that you can never trust another living soul to make it work properly. Whether because of worn-out parts, the entropy of the universe, or just being a total cheap-ass, any other person operating it would lead to disaster.
There’s a sort of magical cadence to starting some of my cars. Even the ones that are fuel-injected expect you to be leaning in just the right spot, to have the window rolled down a little bit, and sometimes to check for rodents in the muffler before you give it a crank. And it gets even worse if you’ve been letting them sit for a really long time - like a whole hour. Last week at the grocery store, I had to go back to the vegetable oil aisle twice just to get enough lubrication in the heads to pump up the hydraulic lifters.
The last time someone actually borrowed one of my cars, I had to explain to them over the phone for nearly an hour about all the little weird noises it will make on the road, and which ones you can ignore. A few years ago, my mom borrowed my Volare and she hasn’t been off medication since.
I’m not just saying that because you wanted to borrow my truck for the weekend to move apartments. First off, even if you could get that vapour-locking bitch to start, your Ikea Kallax shelf set is going to just drop out of the hole in the bed and end up scattered across the interstate like an MDF-based fragmentation grenade. And then it’s my plate that the Federales are going to look up. I’m not a bad friend; I’ll drive you to the U-Haul store so you can negotiate with their infuriating semi-conscious employees about a $29 pickup truck rental. And then maybe you can give me a ride back.
Have you ever seen those storm chasers on TV? Those guys slap a bunch of armour on their shitty pickups, cover their windshields in visibility-slaughtering chicken wire, and then drive into huge, active disasters. Seeing these hee-haws booger-weld their way to a vehicle that looks like shit made me remember that I had a couple rust repair projects in the garage. And by “a couple” I mean “literally every vehicle I’ve ever owned.” It’s probably time to talk seriously about body corrosion on your car, and how it can be mitigated.
For years, I’ve been going with the strategy that owning a lot of cars will spread out their exposure to the salt-water nightmare that is the average modern city road. If you only drive each car once a week, then they only get one-seventh of the possible rust. Makes sense, right? Unfortunately, what this actually means is that once every seven years you end up replacing all seven cars, instead of just swapping one out every year. It’s hard on the wallet, because instead of saving during those six “up years” I’m constantly buying winter tires for the entire fleet. Oh, and turbochargers, but that’s a mandatory safety item.
So I switched gears to a different strategy. This is one undertaken by many rich people throughout the world who can afford a nice car. In order to protect the nice car, they leave it parked in their garage all winter and then drive around a beater which is relatively worthless, such as a four-year-old Bentley. And in truth, this is what I used to do. Then I fell in love with the beater and no longer wanted to stop driving it in the summer. More beaters followed, and eventually the nice car was sold so I could get more garage room to yank out dead engines and hoard threadbare racing seats.
Really, there is no perfect solution when it comes to preventing rust. Unless you include getting off your fat ass and moving the entire operation somewhere warm, where you don’t get rust at all, but then you end up spending $1800 for a 1989 F-150 instead of $600 because it’s “rust-free” and therefore worth more money. Life is full of compromises that way.
A friend who won’t lend you one of his hoard of eBay turbochargers is not really a friend at all. Things are a little different for me, however. You see, I need each and every 0.63 A/R turbine with axial play so broad that you could throw a medium-sized piglet through it. Even if they’re not currently in cars, they could be with a few weekends of work. We must maintain the strategic turbocharger gap over my neighbour.
Now, you might think that it is rude of me to deny my friends turbochargers. It is taking a long time to get packages from China now, after all, and my small hoard of them is basically the only way that you can keep your piece of shit 80s Ford competitive with all of the base-model crossovers that are coming out these days. This ignores my own needs.
In an ideal universe, at any given time I should be able to go into my basement and look at a wall of semi-rusted v-banded snails representing thousands of potential wheel horsepower waiting to be unlocked as soon as I get off my ass and learn how to tig-weld three junkyarded log manifolds together. It has been a long time since college, but I’m pretty sure Camus did a whole writeup on this one.
More importantly, there is an economic reason behind all this. If you ask any beater economist such as myself, the presence of turbocharger demand drives shitbox supply. Yes, this ‘79 Monte Carlo is an incredibly slow metric-chassis piece of shit with the very wheeziest fuel-crisis V6 you could get in it, but that just means it has low compression - primed for boost. It’d be a waste not to get it. And it has a manual transmission, which ensures that I’ll be able to limp it home after third gear explodes trying to shut down the merge of a stripper-package Honda Fit.
In the end, though, everyone has their price. Any of my real friends know that if they swing by with a vehicle that features a built-in refrigerator, swivelling captains’ chairs, a dashboard humidor, or just one of those little compass globes that sit in front of the driver to tell him or her what direction they are currently pointed, then they can have whatever they want out of my pile while I’m distracted.
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tags: chevrolet, chevrolet monte carlo, honda, honda fit
There’s a definite appeal to the good, old-fashioned automotive swap meet. It might be hard to get to one this summer, as they are declining in the face of more-efficient, soulless internet mail-order delivery, but I highly recommend you do. Not only do you get to yell at the people who list their cars for ridiculous prices, but sometimes you stumble across a battered Lenco transmission and end up changing your life’s goal to “jam that sucker in a Crown Victoria.”
A couple years ago, when it was still okay to leave your house, I went to one in the next small town over. My thinking was that I would be more likely to get sweet deals because there wouldn’t be so many suburbanites picking over chrome grilles and fancy piped-leather seats to adorn their never-going-to-run-again high school revival project. I was only partially right: yes, those humble people in more rural surrounds did occasionally haul out an oddball gem, but they also wanted actual money for them and refused to allow me to trick them with my city slicker ways. There’s that internet for you again.
While I was busy grumbling about how I was going to wrench an incredibly sketchy circle-track Hornet out of this guy’s hand, a little girl approached me. She wanted me to buy some Girl Guide cookies. I immediately recognized the business acumen of this kid, and was further impressed when she refused to let me get away with only one box. Or two. Then she pulled down her sock to reveal the mother-of-pearl handle from a rusty switchblade. After buying ten boxes from her, she decided to move on to her next victim. Small towns had gotten a lot rougher since the last time I was here. Perhaps it was all the meth.
It wasn’t all a waste of time, however. In addition to the aforementioned cookies, I also got a bunch of old license plates from one of the antique dealers for just a little over scrap price. Those babies will last me a couple years until the cops figure out that none of them are registered.
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tags: ford, ford crown victoria, amc, amc hornet
There’s two things I’ve always loved: eccentric minivans, and public libraries. I think the latter one came from a sort of Stockholm syndrome from the time that my family was kidnapped by a group of terrorists who were obsessed with the Dewey decimal system. You see, I was raised in the circus, and after all the chores were done - cleaning the elephant cage, feeding the dead monkeys to the tiger - we didn’t have a lot of time for reading… I notice that I’ve already lost most of you.
Now, “eccentric” when it comes to minivans means something different to everyone. If you go to the dealership right now and ask to see one, you’ll probably be rebuffed. Who’s buying a minivan now when we have all these great crossovers? That’s why the Dodge Caravan died for our sins, dontchaknow. In this sort of environment, driving any minivan could rightly be considered eccentric. That’s not what I’m talking about, though.
Remember the ‘90s? Things made more sense back then. I wouldn’t say they actually made sense, because the internet was effectively one long, strung out double-photocopied 'zine with obsessive writeups about any subject. Nowadays it’s much better because you see a hastily photoshopped picture and click an arrow to tell them that you liked it. In the '90s, we had some great minivans. Previa, Astro, dust-buster Luminas, the first-gen Odyssey. The list could go on and on. Well, until you get to the end of the list. They didn’t make an infinite number of models because the law of thermodynamics even applies to 7-seater vehicles.
Now, part of this was because auto executives didn’t know what minivans people would actually want. In Europe, where van-like vehicles were even more popular, they started stapling sliding doors onto any vehicle that would hold still long enough, just in case it would become the next “hot” people mover. This led to a sort of Cambrian explosion of utilitarian vehicles. Our archaeologists are still digging up new instances of those quirky oddballs on Italian Craigslist and sending emails to get shipping quotes to this very day.
Nowadays, it’s actually pretty hard to get some of these vans on the used market. Unlike sedans, they were used hard and often disposed of as soon as they could. Many a child-vomit-caked carpet went right from the trade-in counter to the crusher, with nary a tear shed. A lot of these vehicles now only live on in low-resolution casual snaps uploaded to Wikipedia without the owner’s knowledge. This gap in the market drove me to start my own boutique 90s minivan dealership, a business that ultimately failed because it turns out only me and a couple of other weirdos want them, and none of us are willing to pay more than about $800, preferably for a busted-ass one that needs a ton of repairs. Lucky for me, the mob financier who handed me the cash was willing to take the vans in lieu of my kneecaps.
So really now, even though “eccentric” once meant something like “mid-engined” or “has a built in drink cooler” or “looks like the shuttlecraft from Star Trek,” the thoughtless destruction of the supply of 90s minivans has caused me to lower my definition of the word such that it now means any minivan at all. I mean, except for a Pontiac Montana. I still have some self-respect, no matter what that cop yelled at me during the hostage negotiation.
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tags: pontiac, pontiac montana, toyota, toyota previa, chevrolet, chevrolet lumina apv, dodge, dodge caravan
Sometimes, I hear a car in mechanical distress and I just want to do something. Last week, my neighbour had a Silverado - running in 4x4 on dry streets because he paid for it, damn it - and you could hear the chains slapping inside the transfer case from a mile away. I wanted to flag him down, yell at him to tear that shit apart and get the tension adjusted before it made a new drain hole, but I knew it would be for naught. People want to get their mechanical advice from an actual professional mechanic and not some scruffy-looking psycho who runs into traffic to lecture them about basic maintenance.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t people who would be grateful if I could help them out. Lots of folks have only one car for some reason, and then they depend on that one car to get to work. If I could somehow intervene when the car is still making a little and cheap noise instead of a big and expensive one, they would save a bunch of money and possibly even their livelihood. The downside is that I would piss off some people who are perfectly happy running their car into the ground. Therefore, the only moral choice is to give repair advice to literally everyone I meet, just in case I help them.
The setup I rigged up surprised even me with its quality. I used a set of old PA system speakers from a right-wing extremist’s van that a buddy imported from Japan. These babies will really pump out the jams, which is perfect to get through the sound deadening (read: metal) that modern cars surround the driver with. After welding the whole setup to the roof rack of a disposable - and most importantly, plateless - ‘80 Granada, I went touring the neighbourhood.
You always want to start out small with these things, so I was happy that my first “client” was a 4Runner with constantly squeaking brakes. I pulled in behind them and started telling them about the importance of properly bedding in their pads when they do a change, and how to identify when a rotor needs resurfacing or replacement. I was pretty pleased with myself, but they just kept on driving, ignoring the 25-minute sermon that took up the majority of what I assume was their highway commute. Eventually, they pulled into the police station parking lot, and I hightailed it out of there.
Now, these things don’t always work out the first time. Or the second time, because as I rounded the corner towards home, I caught a glimpse of a bunch of mid-70s and early-80s cars that hadn’t been maintained for years. I yelled myself hoarse and blew out the alternator on the Granada, before realizing that I was in fact screaming at my own house. Next time I’ll just yell out the window instead.
When you get big into drag racing, there’s a few new things you have to worry about. The average Joe trying to drive his stock Camaro around doesn’t have to worry about the bellhousing exploding and spinning the remnants of the torque converter through his ankles. Nor does he have to particularly care about it catching on fire. Or keeping the driveshaft from erupting and pole vaulting his car into orbit. There’s probably dozens more of this type of safety concern that you’re just not aware of until you start making your car go faster than a private jet.
Part of this is because you trust the manufacturer. Or at least you trust the government that trusted the manufacturer to tell them the car is “pretty safe, I swear.” Another nice feature of buying cars that are a little behind the technology curve (read: 20 years old) like me is that you get to discover any major safety concerns about a vehicle only after it’s killed like three dozen Midwesterners on their way between bingo and the liquor store. All of that goes out the window when you take a rusty fifty-year-old taxi cab and cut chunks out of the body in order to jam the wrong engine into it with the intent of going in a straight line really fast.
There’s two schools of thought on this issue in the racing community: one, that you should try to be as safe as humanly possible because tech doesn’t catch everything, and two, fuck tech and the horse they rode in on. You’ll note that in both philosophies, the individual who is driving the car is ultimately responsible for his or her own safety. And that seems appropriate, because they’re the ones who will get their clavicles ruptured when the holes they drilled into the firewall for weight reduction let a stray bolt or piston into the cabin.
You would think that being exposed to this kind of safety-conscious mindset would make me build a safer car on the road. However, it’s done just the opposite. Without the brutal stresses of a drag launch on slicks, there’s no real reason for me to even make sure all of the lug nuts on my Volare are even present. And since I never resurface my flywheels, there’s no reason to imagine the constantly-chattering eBay clutch could ever grab hard enough to explode a bellhousing. You have to know what the rules are in order to break them.
I think even if space aliens came down right now and gave me the secret to a totally bitchin’ hot rod, I wouldn’t take it. For one thing, those aliens probably prefer something lame compared to my awesome tastes. The more important factor in a hot rod, however, is that you got to do it yourself.
Sure, there’s lots of people who hired others to actually put together their dream hot rod, or commissioned an artisan to design the whole kit and kaboodle. I’m not begrudging them (although I will charge a small fee in exchange for my discretion, payable in my name directly to my local junkyard) because at least they have some input into the process. Those aforementioned aliens have just told me what to do and expect me to be pleased with it, and that’s crap.
In this thought experiment, both parties would be better off if the extraterrestrials were travelling millions of lightyears in order to get advice from me. I feel passionate about this. With advanced alien technology, I bet I could build an even more bitchin’ hot rod than our narrow human concept of the “hot rod” would otherwise entail. And the aliens are just as stuck in their beliefs of what they think a bitchin’ hot rod would be. Everyone wins! That’s why we have fusion restaurants, except in my case it’s thai food and UFOs with 22-inch spinners on them. I’ll win the Ridler for sure this time.
Then again, perhaps the aliens would consider that to be their form of a pay-to-play build. They’d return to their home planet with the sweet-ass ride that I just constructed out of their worthless junk and postwar artifacts, and get laughed at because they couldn’t pick out suspension components or lay down a candy coat of nanotech shape-shifting paint on their own. And that would be really sad, because this foray into interstellar peacemaking would end in mild embarrassment and rude comments on Instagram. They definitely wouldn’t come in peace the next time.
In conclusion, I think everyone here at the United Nations can agree that the ideal way to handle a theoretical alien incursion is to break everyone into small teams and give them a reality TV competition to build a ‘22 Ford T-bucket. And they said I would be a national embarrassment as ambassador. I yield the rest of my time to this YouTube video of an Alfa Romeo Spider revving its engine with the muffler too close to the microphone.
Stock car racing is once again big. Maybe it’s because no other sport currently exists on Earth, or that the idea of a sport sedan with a manual transmission has become the unattainable ideal of every gearhead. Either way, the fact of the matter is that more cars are advertising Slim Jims while going super fast than ever before in history. Except for that one weird weekend in 1976 when Richard Petty got a bit buck wild and did donuts outside the Preserved Meats Council of America.
I wanted to get in on this. However, a competitive stock car can easily cost a decent six figures, and most of my cars’ valuation can only fill in that many digits if you put a decimal point somewhere near the leftmost one. Stock car racing is about smarts, though, and in my case I decided to use those smarts to visit the living grave of a Southern billionaire.
There, hooked up to an infinite array of machines pumping drugs and electrical impulses into his body, was some guy who owned every single Woosits hamburger joint in Kentucky. I didn’t know what a Woosits was, and probably neither did he, but the jet-black coffin that what was left of his corporeal form was suspended within also had pretty good internet access and they left the online banking tab logged in. A few million bucks into the account of my favoured race builder and we were in.
It was only once I got onto the track for qualifying that I realized I didn’t actually know what I was doing behind the wheel of an eight-hundred-horsepower race car hewn entirely out of space-age composites and anger. I was pretty good at faking it, though, and as long as I kept pretending that I was simply leaving for work a few minutes late, I racked up a qualifying time that got me into the big event.
I did surprisingly well, and probably the undead Woosits emperor became infinitesimally richer because of my efforts. It didn’t matter. I had now performed a stint in professional race car driving, and as a result of an obscure 1980s federal law, I could now legally drive the car home and plate it. At last, I’d have a vehicle that could put the hurt on that one base-model Grand Cherokee that keeps trying to cut me off on that tight merge lane near the Liquor Barn.
What’s my secret to winning a professional racing event my first time out? Friends, let me tell you a little something about stock-car racing. They say it’s hard to preserve tires, but they give you new tires to race on. You guys ever tried to make it 100,000 km on a set of mismatched, worn-out tires you got off eBay as scrap before? They said they’ve never seen someone do a hundred laps without a pit stop before.
Most people hate washing their car. For nearly everyone, it’s a boring chore that is sort of similar to cleaning their shower, or giving Fido the ol’ hose-down when he gets into some dead skunks. And then there’s me: I worry about washing my cars because sometimes when the high-pressure water hits the panels, I find out that I have new holes in my car.
In truth, none of these holes are actually “new.” I’m well aware of the progress of every aspect of corrosion on my motor vehicles, and it takes a lot to surprise me. What it does is disappoint me, like a stern dad whose shitty kid is brought home by the five-oh. Except in this metaphor, the cops are soap and water from the carwash, and the kid is the fact that my back seat cushion is now soaked because the gas tank mounting plate it used to sit on is largely aerosolized.
To try and make myself feel better, I hired a professional. Well, I wouldn’t say “hired” so much as employed. There was a travelling detailer in my neighbourhood. On his way back from cleaning up the block’s drug dealer’s 1991 S500, I guess he saw my pile of rusty hoopties and decided making all of them look nice would make for a boffo post on Instagram. There’d be lots of social engagement, he explained excitedly to me while wielding a random-orbital buffer, and that means that he would get paid a ton of money by celebrities. I couldn’t argue with that logic, so I gave him forty bucks and pointed him towards what was left of an old Fargo at the end of my yard.
Friends, he made the shiniest pile of metal shavings I’ve ever seen. At first, I thought he might have tricked me and towed the Power Wagon away and replaced it with a bunch of floor sweepings from the machine shop. He reached into the pile and picked out some of the hood lettering, beaming with pride.
I immediately sent him across town to the single-wide mansion of my rival, Steve “Nipples” Hemingway. Surely he would appreciate the help of such an expert detailer in order to get ready for the big Piece Of Shit Car Show that the magazine was putting on this weekend.
You can’t always have a hardware problem. It’s not always an issue that you can reach out and touch with your own two hands. Sometimes, the issue is in something more intangible. You can fix software issues all day long, but at the end of that day, you’ll go home strangely unsatisfied, unable to sleep the happy slumber of a person who physically exhausted themselves tack-welding some random shit together.
Still, though, sometimes individuals do write a bug. There’s schedule pressure, or they didn’t expect you to be using their old car ECU in a guitar designed to shoot fire from the neck that you play on the back of a modified semi-truck in a post-apocalyptic warlord’s battle gang. At that point, it’s your responsibility as a fixing-type person to either fix the bug or work entirely around it.
Now, don’t be completely discouraged - in the software realm you can still “get by for one more day” by doing a bodge. In fact, bodgery is what the entire stack of horseshit is built on top of. If your average politician, mothers’ pressure group, or local police authority knew just how precarious the entire basis of modern society was, they’d definitely be throwing Molotov cocktails through the window of whoever owns JavaScript now. So don’t feel like you can’t keep up with the Peyton-Joneses. Even NASA tried to use urine and a bunch of popsicle sticks to fix the Mars Rover, I’m told by unreliable authorities.
Just last week, I had an interesting problem of just this kind. This old x-ray machine that I found on the side of the road wouldn’t work unless you had some kind of safety keycard installed, because apparently it’s “bad” to give yourself x-rays while also operating the machine. I could have diked out the keycard switch, but it was a little too sophisticated for me to do that. Rolling up my sleeves, I decided to fix the software. My fingers flew over the keyboard like the sexy lady hacker in one of those summer movies who makes the angry robots explode by giving them digital gonorrhea. Unfortunately, I didn’t get very far before giving up, but now the login screen says “BUTTS BUTTS BUTTS” instead of the name of the hospital I got it from. And I had some fun. Isn’t that what it’s all about?
Sometimes, readers stop me on the street and want to know what caused me to have such a love for the internal combustion engine. My only response is to be a huge snob about the whole thing. You see, I know this is a trap, and immediately pivot on my heel, but there’s an even bigger person there blocking my escape and they drive a syringe into my neck and it’s all over.
When I wake up, the orderlies tell me they don’t really give a shit about my childhood where I went to bed every night cuddling a Dana 44 driveshaft, its slip yoke happily clattering as I drifted off to sleep. They just lied to me, and it’s the lies that hurt the most. And maybe the electroshock therapy isn’t helping either.
After a few days of this, I’ve learned the quick-and-easy route to getting out of there. Sometimes there’s a doctor, who wants to ask a bunch more questions and get to really know me. This is basically just ego stroking, but I will refuse to proceed any further when they tell me that they drive a new luxury car with an automatic transmission. It’s a two way street, Dr. Bob. The only thing I’m getting out of this conversation is a basic idea of what parts of the junkyard the depreciation curve will be taking me to in twenty years’ time. Then it’s back to my cell for non-compliance. More shocks, but at least they’re not Monroes.
Although I will never internalize being the kind of person who doesn’t care deeply about the mysterious hidden features of the 1983 Fiero, I have memorized enough of their quiz questions to be able to speedrun my way through the “sane or not?” test and get into the less-than-capable hands of a community-release officer. From there, it’s practically only a few days until I get back on the street. I’m so fast now that the parking patrol doesn’t even get a chance to tow all of my cars away for being derelicts; I lost fewer than 40% on the last trip, and that was only because a Hudson Hornet started leaking gasoline in front of that press scrum at City Hall.
This revolving-door mental health system doesn’t sound like it is really doing me any good, does it? No, it doesn’t. I like to take the long view on the whole thing, though: it gives people jobs, and it makes me feel important enough to be recognized on sight by mental-health professionals who want to collect a bounty.
Modern society doesn’t really have any room for the old human skill of negotiation. When you go online or to a big box store, you can’t ask the friendly robot for a few bucks off because you know its cousin’s brother-in-law. And you can’t really threaten a self-checkout at the grocery store with not coming back if you don’t get the non-organic price for organic avocados. It doesn’t care.
Because of this lack of practice in everyday life, when it actually comes time to negotiate for a big purchase - like a car - most people don’t know how to do it. At best, they’ll ask for some ridiculous lowball offer, and leave upset when the seller refuses to sell them an $1800 car for $400. Others will simply pay the full price asked, even though there is obviously some wiggle room priced into that asking.
We here at Bad Cars Monthly have a solution for this. Because of our unique nature as, shall we say, “collectors” of fine vintage automobiles, we have to negotiate for things like glove box doors, tetanus boosters, and the least-drunk of the Russian welders around the corner who work for cash under the table when their boss isn’t nearby. This constant exposure has sharpened our skillsets, and now we can put them to work for you using modern video-conferencing technology.
Here’s how it works: you identify a vehicle you want to buy, do all the usual dancing with the seller, and then you ask them to close out the deal with our trained negotiators. Not all of our negotiators are writers or editors for BCM; in fact, many of them are just particularly brutal people who grew up as paupers in third-world countries and who could negotiate a turtle into giving away his own shell. Their experience vastly dwarfs our own, which is why they also got a much better commission from our venture-capitalist funders than we did. Gotta say, I learned a whole lot from just that one meeting. These guys and girls are masters of their craft.
Still not convinced? Let me tell you about the “special incentive” program. If our trained bickerers can make the seller cry, they get double the commission. Last week, Sue in our mailroom got a guy in Topeka to throw in his hot tub with the purchase of a 1996 Neon - just to get her off the line. She considered this a defeat. Sue was going for the target’s family dog, and that was only because he flat-out refused to sell her his wife. Sue has a lot of wives. The expense of having to feed them all makes her even meaner. Maybe she’ll get another one when she calls up that Lexus dealer looking for that RX350 you had your eye on.
I never really got the appeal of barn finds. They’re pretty obvious from the road, with their distinctive shapes and colours… oh, you mean the cars in the barns? Yeah, that might get me more interested.
For a couple weeks last year, Slow Eddie, a friend of mine was all about the barn finds. Every time he saw me, he told me that he was going to check out some 1860s piece of shit to see if it contained a 1960s piece of shit, and then bring it over to me so I could fix it. I considered this to be a pipe dream, but beneath my outward cynicism I still secretly hoped that I’d get first right of refusal on a minty Citroen DS wagon, or an ‘89 Corolla with high miles but most of its body panels, rescued from some lazy descendant of the original owner who just couldn’t get around to spritzing some starter fluid into a carb.
Time passed, and no car materialized. He had lots of stories about getting shot at by overly-jumpy farmers, no doubt alerted as he approached from miles away with his dumpy '96 WRX venting all of its boost to atmosphere constantly through a million-and-one vacuum leaks. Every barn he checked just contained, well, barn stuff. Chickens, cows, secret eldritch cults founded on the twin values of incest and gun violence. The usual things. One night, he confided in me that he was probably going to give up on the quest. This was my opportunity to be a good friend and encourage him to live his/my dream, even if it meant potential bodily harm or being sworn into Uncle Grandpa’s viper-nest of iniquity.
The next morning, I was awoken from my peaceful slumber on the concrete beneath a half-vapourized Dodge Monaco by a series of honks and pounding on my garage door. Eddie had done it - he’d found a surprisingly gorgeous '82 Dodge Challenger. This Mitsubishi-made prize was appealing to approximately zero percent of the population, and as such I made a quick offer for it, which he accepted. A new daily driver was now in my stable, which is good because the unibody of this Monaco was starting to look more like a Mon-taco, if you get my drift.
It turns out that the legal definition of “barn” in my prefecture had been recently expanded to include any pole building, which definitely included the old abandoned DSM factory down the street. Lee Iacocca’s grandkids were all too happy to rid themselves of the contents in exchange for a firm handshake and a promise not to scrap any of the cars near groundwater.
Things were simpler in the 80s. GI Joe had not yet destroyed our collective innocence when he testified before Congress about the genocide his men (and one woman) perpetrated. Nintendos were not yet super. Music came on discrete objects that you had to keep on hand, so you actually finished an album once in awhile. And cars? Well, cars were not simple at all in the 80s.
When the Japanese bubble was going in full swing, they took advantage of all the cash flying around to add a shit ton of gizmos and gadgets to cars. Flip-up headlights, active aerodynamics, four-wheel-steering, and this new invention known as an in-car CD player were all on the menu. We didn’t get all of these things in North America, of course. Re-engineering them for our shores and atrocious roads would have cost a fortune on some very limited-release cars, and how many people would have splashed out sixty grand for a Toyota with an integrated beard trimmer and surface-to-air missiles? Maybe Michael Knight, and by then he was already using a company car for his daily driving anyway.
Nowadays, it’s even harder to find one of these cars in peak condition. Sure, you can find the actual cars themselves most of the times, but the gizmos are all busted or gone. A lot of owners throughout the last few decades have just hacked those features away, or thrown the entire car in the crusher when it started throwing weird codes and not being compatible with Bluetooth. In the case of four-wheel-steering, a lot of those systems have worn to the point where even at highway speeds it feels like you’re riding in the back seat with Uncle Four-DUIs again.
That’s why I’ve partnered with a number of Chinese automakers to produce new 80s cars. The Chinese government is having its own little version of the bubble era, and right now their low wages and lax pedestrian safety guidelines intersect in such a way that the flip-up headlight can once again roam our streets. Provided, of course, that you are currently an employee at the Chinese consulate in your city, or that you have completed an insanely long tariff-and-weapons-export form that legally makes you responsible for any crimes accidentally committed by the Maersk shipping line. Again, though, flip-up headlights.
For a brief period of time in September 1981, atmospheric irregularities in the ionosphere led to several American towns becoming able, for the first time, to receive raw and unfiltered Canadian broadcast television. As part of the CBC Accords, the Canadian government has agreed to apologize unreservedly for mistakenly exposing American consumers to uncensored footage of citizens holding doors, mandatory neural uniformity correction, and talking raccoons which team up to fight small business.
Now that all that’s over, we can start to talk about my favourite subject: Canadian-only models of 80s beaters. Before free trade and globalization became the watchwords of the day, occasionally some tinpot politician or local scam artist would demand that General Motors or Ford make a special model “just for Canada.” The fact that almost all of these cars are available in other markets with (at best) a trim and badge change didn’t change the fact that these are Our Hoopties.
Ford Frontenacs, Pontiac Parisiennes, and Asuna Sunrunners were all on hand at various times to demonstrate our independence from the menace to the south. And it was all pretty much wasted in those pre-internet times when nobody in the US would even realize the existence of a Mercury Montcalm, a necessary pre-requisite to becoming jealous of them. Still, the locals were pleased, and we had finally stuck a fork in the eye of the Americans who otherwise dictated our product mix and way of life.
All of this was going great, until one fated American-only model was produced in Ford’s secret headquarters. The Ford Durango had it all: Fairmont good looks, a rugged pickup bed, and rear-wheel-drive. We salivated over it, but it was only available to Americans. Soon we would find out it was being held back as negotiating leverage to force Canada’s weakened government into signing free-trade agreements. And even after we demanded that our politicians must sign, that the Durangos could not be held back any longer from a ravenous Canadian public, sovereignty be damned, we never did get the damn thing. That was only realized around, oh I don’t know, August 1981?
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tags: ford, ford durango, canada, asuna, asuna sunrunner, ford frontenac, pontiac, pontiac parisienne, honda, honda civic
There’s a special power to telling a story. Putting things into a sort of sequential, narrative format lets you convince people of your belief, even if it’s complete bullshit. For whatever reason, our entire species is hard-wired to believe a story that provides a concise, simple explanation for the way the world is. I’m sure you can think of ways to abuse this power; for me, I used my theatrical training to get discounts on cars. One day, it all went sideways on me.
I remember it like it was yesterday. Here I am, standing on the previous owner’s lawn, looking over a Corolla FX16. There was no way I was going to pay full price for this vehicle - my religion forbids it. Scanning the area and the vehicle for weaknesses, I determined that this guy would probably bend over backwards for a sympathetic yarn. So I tried one on.
“You know, I grew up in an orphanage in Hong Kong,” I lied blatantly to his face. “The last thing I remember was that the man who dropped me off was driving one of these. It seems crazy, but driving your Toyota helped me feel like I had some connection to my birth family, as vague as it was.”
He was blown away, and started to ask some followup questions. I quickly lost track of which contradictions and bullshit I had already woven through, but any inconsistencies in my amazing rags-to-riches story were quickly wallpapered over because he Wanted To Believe Me. A deal was struck, and I got fifty bucks off because of my story (and also because the wheels were a little scratched.) What I didn’t realize was that my lies would follow me home, unlike the muffler of the FX16 as soon as I revved the car up to 4500 rpm and side stepped the clutch coming out of the owner’s cul-de-sac.
The next morning, the press was at my door. They wanted to hear about this amazing story, how an orphan had formed a multi-million dollar textile business and was living in such squalor so as to remain humbly approachable in the hope that his birth father may one day return. I was a little aghast that I had laid it on so thick for a mere fifty bucks off, but then I remembered that the previous owner didn’t include the spare-tire jack with the car, so fuck him.
Here’s the thing with lies: once you make one, it’s really easy to make more. I faced the camera, and laid out another amazing yarn about my long-lost mother’s car, a 1988 Isuzu i-Mark RS Turbo. If anyone had one of those, I cried for the news, then please let me have it for super fucking cheap.
They didn’t even bleep out that last part, because a rugged, self-made industrialist like me could say what he wanted with no fear of reprisal.
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tags: toyota, toyota corolla fx16, isuzu, isuzu i-mark turbo
If you haven’t been tempted by the huge amount of cheap RVs and trailers on classifieds sites, then I wonder if you are even alive. How can houses still be so expensive, when you can buy a mouldy deathtrap for under $250 and cram it on the back of your pickup truck? Then you could live anywhere.
Of course, I do understand that “mouldy deathtrap” is the kind of phrase that makes most people avoid picking up one of these cheap little campers. However, have you ever been outside before? Where do you think the mould comes from? And those tigers will fuck you up. I saw a video about it once. You’re no worse off in a camper. At least this way you have somewhere nice to sleep instead of under a tree when the bank cuts your mortgage off after a well-meaning intern finds the documentation you filled out in crayon with a misspelling of your own name.
I was myself fascinated by shitty old campers, so I went into my backyard to fish through the junk. When you’ve made as many deals as I have - many of which occurred under the influence of The Other moving my body and wallet without my knowledge or consent - you’re bound to end up with at least one pickup with a ratty camper. Here’s the pro-tip reason why: sometimes the pickup with a camper is cheaper than the pickup without one, because they figure that the need to throw the thing away is a massive disincentive for picking up the truck. Not for me, chump! I rounded a corner near Toyota Alley and found the ‘77 Scottsdale that I had bought with a camper, drove around for a weekend, and then parked because I found an ‘81 Celica that looked a little sad.
Inside the camper, once I had figured out how to pick the lock (using a rock on the window helps a lot) I determined two things. One, I should have checked what was inside this thing fifteen years ago. Two, I now have a really cool story to tell the other prisoners about a fun new way to get rid of a bunch of human bodies.
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tags: chevrolet, chevrolet scottsdale, toyota, toyota celica
Even if you don’t have a goal in mind this weekend, it will make you feel better to sit down with a piece of broken shit and try to fix it. Since it’s already broken, the stakes are quite low, and if you manage to repair the problem, you’ll feel like a god. And not one of the normal gods, either: one of the badasses that brings people back to life. With odds like that, why not take a roll of the dice?
People throughout history have fettled in their workshops. Just look at Leonardo da Vinci, who was famous for a bunch of other shit, but mostly became skilled at mechanics by fixing a toaster. Won’t you let your kid become the next Leonardo da Vinci? Make them watch you burn your fingers on a soldering iron you don’t know how to operate.
The therapeutic effects of just fiddling with a thing for a few hours can’t be overstated. A bunch of doctors, who wished to remain anonymous for their own safety, just came into the room and told me that fixing stuff is probably actually fixing you. Either that, or the flux remover fumes are talking again. Still though, returning this shitty 80s tape recorder to active service is keeping me off the streets. And teaching me new words like “capstan” and various permutations of “motherfucker.”
And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from all of my time fixing broken products, it’s that broken shit is often way cheaper than working shit. With the money you save, you can afford to buy more broken shit and leave it lying around until you get a free weekend. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to make any progress on the busted-ass old time machine that I bought from Craigslist.
Just the other day, I saw a bunch of cool garbage on the side of the road, so I pulled over to start looking through it. As I was tearing through piles of Aeron chairs and old laser printers, a man came out who I at first assumed to be a security guard. By natural reflex, I hissed and then climbed to the top of a filing cabinet, where he could no longer reach me. Instead, he deployed a new weapon: a boring story.
“I see you’re here to tour the office space for lease,” he started. He made a special point of looking pointedly away from my Tercel’s hatchback, now bloated with fax machines, whiteboards, and those weird coffee makers that need an expert to fix. “Why don’t you come on in? As you can see, I really need a tenant.”
Out of politeness, I followed him into the building. In actuality, my eyes were already roving around, trying to figure out if there were any more offices to raid in the building. Maybe one of them would have a working paper shredder! I definitely needed one of those to clear up a little misunderstanding I’d been having with the federal government. My excitement must have been noticeable to my tour guide, who addressed me with an ideal proposition when we reached the abandoned atrium of the office complex.
“So it’s a hundred dollars a month for an office, and parking is included.” I didn’t have to hear more. In the best real-estate-agent cadence I could muster, I immediately replied with “Sixty.”
Now, your boy made good on the negotiation after that. There were so few tenants in the building that I managed to get the entire parking lot. Apparently having the lot full of cars, even busted-ass old things, would help to repel thieves who were trying to steal the copper out of the walls for meth. And it wasn’t like they were going to steal the cars, either: even if there was a thief desperate enough to try and jimmy the door on a ‘67 Cyclone with no floors, either the hantavirus or tetanus would get him before he could manage to pop open the ignition cylinder.
If anyone wants to come down and hang out at the new Bad Cars Monthly offices, we got a lot of empty space to have office chair races. Sorry, you’ll have to park on the street.
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tags: bad cars monthly, mercury, mercury cyclone, toyota, toyota tercel
Kids these days just don’t respect brands. When I was growing up, we learned to honour and cherish brands with every piece of our soul. We sang along to their commercials. We sent in contributions for their logo contests. We proudly wore those logos on a t-shirt we had to pay $29 plus shipping for. We participated in their parades and product launches. Out of all the good times I’ve spent with brands, though, I keep thinking of the time my father and I rescued a beleaguered fast-casual fashion brand that had struck our kitchen window and fainted in the garden.
“It doesn’t have good product-market fit,” my father explained quietly to me, and looked up while cradling the wounded brand in his arms. It was only then that I realized my father was crying for the first time in my life. He had not shed a tear for me growing up, or my brother, or my cousin Jed’s motorcycle accident, but he was weeping now, concerned for the future of this innocent brand. I think in retrospect this is when I started to really grow up, to leave childish dreams like community prosperity behind in favour of the business administrations of adults.
Every day that summer, he and I would take turns feeding the injured brand focus groups, marketing consultants, and a steady diet of press releases, waiting for the day it would return to health and reach the public once again with largely-fungible products of sliding quality for them to purchase.
Early one morning, my dad came to wake me up. He was delighted, a smile from ear to ear. The young brand we had worked so hard to save had made a major push into an neighbouring county, and the resulting advertising buy showed that it had a healthy appetite for growth. I was happy that he was happy, but I was a little sad, too. Some part of me knew that once we had let it go back into the wild, we would never see profitable dividends from our selfless act of corporate rescue. After spending all this effort, money, and emotional investment, hadn’t this become our brand? My father scolded me then, and said that rescuing a brand needed no financial reward, and that it was prestige enough on its own.
I’ll never forget when that board of directors came to pick up the brand. I thought they were so cool in their base-model leased Mercedes sedans, wearing white-rimmed sunglasses and speaking into a mobile phone that hadn’t yet been invented. Sometimes, at night, I look into the stars and wonder if that brand is looking down upon me too. Which of course it is, because after trademarks gained legal personhood in late 2018, they almost all emigrated to that old Chinese space station, training the repurposed moon-mining laser upon every university in the world that dared not offer an MBA program.
Our modern lives are basically one papercut after another until we hit the grave, but there’s a special indignity in having a dedicated button for a feature you don’t even have. I don’t mean the blank buttons you get on base-model cars, where Chevy and Subaru are taunting you for not buying the package with the foglights. There’s that, but the worst insult is when you buy a television whose remote comes studded with a billion streaming services, some of which have already gone defunct.
Now, in Canada, we’re pretty used to not having a bunch of video services available to us. The hovering Copyright Infringement Pods that dispense byzantine sub-licensing clauses won’t allow all the content that Americans, Japanese, Koreans, or even Uzbeks watch to be aired in our fair country. And that’s okay, but sometimes it means that a whole service will just pass us by. Last week, I picked up a TV remote at Walmart and fully half the buttons would not work in my country. It was getting to the point that I needed to get a Quebecois pressure group angry about it, so I did.
Not only are these buttons wasted space, I told the assembled group over a series of smoked meat sandwiches so delectable that even the table was drooling, but they’re Anglo only. Then I stumbled through the same sentence in what little broken pidgin French I could understand. Clearly, I take the sanctity of Canada’s other official language very seriously. They figured out what I was getting at with enough hand gestures and grunting noises, and reacted with an audible gasp. That night, Walmart (les Martes de Wal) would burn in the fires of the Sign Police.
We did get what we wanted. Now, there are no more useless buttons on the bottom of our TV remotes. And it even created swank new government jobs inside Quebec. Unfortunately, the government decided to just hire a bunch of kids to hacksaw the bottom half of the remotes off, which makes the damn things even easier to lose inside the couch. Tabernac!
Last week, Mr. Igarashi told me that I was no longer appealing enough to the viewers in Japan. I wanted to get mad at him, but I was the one who made the decision to quit my job and instead stream my life 24/7 on the internet for the worldwide audience. If I lost Japan, then probably Brazil would quit next, and then it’d be a short trip to complete irrelevance.
We conferred for a bit on the phone - the actual call blurred out by machine-learning so that my audience didn’t get spoiled - and then we decided that the best thing to do would be to appoint a team of costumed mascots to follow me around for a theme week. By “we,” I really mean Mr. Igarashi, but his sardine company was paying the bills for the data that kept my surprisingly expensive live-streaming rig connected at all times, so he got to call the shots when he wanted.
A few days later, I got a call to head down to the airport to pick up said mascots. Truth be told, I was surprised that they actually sent human beings inside the mascots, instead of just shipping the costumes air mail and asking some local actors to put them on. Seemed that the Igarashi Sardine Concern was doing better than I expected, probably buoyed by my own rise in popularity and subsequent cover on what would turn out to be the final issue of Time Magazine. That, and as I would later find out, the one iron-clad rule of being a mascot was never, ever to break character. Some trainee wouldn’t have the same moves, or the same response to a classic in-joke, and then the savvy Japanese netizens would know immediately that it wasn’t actually the real seven-foot-tall bright pink cartoon otter.
I was running a little late, because of all the viewer requests for special driving techniques. This is what had originally propelled me to fame: being willing to pull a hydraulic handbrake in traffic, or drift donuts around a hapless police cruiser while shooting nitrous purges out of the hood of my Toyota Previa. By the time I reached the airport departures door, the mascots had already cleared their bags and were waiting impatiently on the curb. They were excited to see me nonetheless, and climbed into the van.
Now, I don’t really speak Japanese, and I definitely don’t understand it when it’s spoken muffled through the inside of a fabric mascot costume. All I could work out was that they wanted me to head to the bank. Was this a special sponsor segment? Financial services hadn’t been a big “thing” since the early 2000s, before the Nightmare wiped them all away. Maybe this was them trying to come back with a little bit of reflected Internet-fame courtesy of your old pal Switcho.
You probably know the rest. Before I had a chance to finish a deft parallel-parking job in front of the bank, the mascots had leapt out of the capacious sliding doors of the Previa, wielding heavy machine guns from their “luggage.” Mr. Igarashi was trying to warn me the entire time that I didn’t know what his mascots actually looked like, but I was pointedly refusing to answer my phone both out of politeness to my guests and also because my fans usually got pissed when I texted and drove. They’re pretty responsible that way. And my resulting court-case got to, like, #3 on Twitch for that week. I just wish they hadn’t made me enter my plea as “Not Guilty, But With Phenomenal Anchovy Flavour.”
A lot of “car people” think that driving a forklift is easy. It’s just like a little tiny car, they say moments before realizing the damn thing steers from the back. And you wouldn’t think that would screw you up so bad, but it does. Our brains, it seems, are seemingly hardwired to steer from the front.
Perhaps the formation of this belief comes from bicycles and tricycles. You get a bike, and it steers from the front. Even if it’s a front-wheel-drive Big Wheel, you still have some steering. You also get to learn about lift-off oversteer and the traction circle early in your childhood, but I digress. Even the kick scooters steer from the front.
Steering from the front is a universal standard that all of humanity has agreed on by this point, seemingly out of convention, but actually because it’s the best. Then forklifts come out of nowhere on your first warehouse job and blow it all to hell, making you look stupid as you attempt a 16-point-turn so you can line the forks up properly and not rack that pallet of wine bottles filled with gasoline all crooked.
I worked briefly on a university team that studied replacing forklift drivers with robots. Finally humanity would be freed from the mental burden of having to remember how much rear-end swing they had. Unfortunately for us, the robots - devoid of all knowledge prior to their initialization - still couldn’t figure out the fucking rear-steer. It seemed to be some sort of natural law, inescapable by even the NASA-farm-team-grade motherfuckers I surrounded myself with.
Not to be deterred, I leveraged that experience (read: got venture capitalists drunk at an alumni party) into a company that would try to find an alternative to the rear-steer forklift. We called it FrontFork, but that was mostly because our marketing expert hadn’t shown up for her first day of work yet before we ran out of money and had to liquidate the remaining assets directly into our (er, I mean the shareholders’) own pockets.
It seemed nobody wanted to take a risk on this new and innovative form of forklift, maybe because they were worried we’d go out of business (got a point there) and then they’d be stuck having to re-train themselves to deal with the old and busted rear-steer forklifts all over again. Or it could be from the unexplained battery fires because Rebecca in engineering didn’t like to read memos.
No man is an island, but some men know how to build a pretty bitchin’ nuclear attack submarine. I’m not one of those men, which is why the Craigslist dune buggy I just crashed into the Mayor’s private koi pond isn’t doing a really great job at being secretive about the whole thing.
Now, you have to understand two things about my relationship with the Mayor up to this point. One, I was pretty sure that he was the only one who defined the parking rules for my community. And two, I did not actually understand what a Mayor is, does, or what the limits to his legislative power were. This is because of budget cuts to my public schooling, again likely perpetrated by the Mayor, and not at all because I spent most of high school civics class pretending to be sick and then hanging out in the shop tack welding together bongs instead.
When you have a huge army of loyal followers with you, it’s really easy to get a hearing with the Mayor. He naturally wants to speak to his constituents. Emphasis on the plural, which is why all of my meeting requests to abolish the “72 hours max” rule for parking derelict cars on the side of the highway were rejected by his secretary. Therefore, I had no choice but to deliver my concerns in person, like a Martin Luther with a haphazard 305 jammed into the back of a Volkswagen-based sand rail by a trailer park hippie that accepted a pitiful amount of money to get me to tow it off of his driveway. Where was I? Oh yes, the koi pond.
It dawned on me then, as I struggled to reach the surface, that the parking ban actually created much-needed liquidity in the car market. If it wasn’t for the fact that the aging hippie needed to get Johnny Law off his back before they looked into why his trailer was consuming so much anhydrous ammonia and electricity, he wouldn’t have sold the buggy to me for six hundred bucks.
When I got to the shore, gasping for air after nearly drowning in a three-foot-deep koi pond on a reclaimed golf course, the Mayor’s goons were all pointing their guns at me. I knew just what to do. Smiling, I asked them if they knew where I could apply for a permit to become a tow-truck company. If you can’t beat ‘em, get first dibs on 'em.
Every spring brings a little dismay. It’s not that I hate chirping robins, or kids gleefully riding their bicycles through the neighbourhood, or even the rolling thunderstorms that keep me from wrenching in the great outdoors. No, it’s that week or so when I finally give my car a proper car wash and get to see what a winter full of rock chips and salt has done to the body.
The whole experience is sort of like Christmas in reverse, where your stocking is stuffed with chunks of your hood reduced to bare metal and your parents waited in line at the mall to get you that rotten fender you put at the very top of your list. Inevitably, at this point, I’m given a choice. Do I take the car off the road for the first few weeks of delightful weather to touch up the paint and bodywork, or just drive the damn thing while repeatedly muttering “everything dies” under my breath?
For many of my friends, they’ve chosen a different path altogether. No, I don’t mean moving somewhere they don’t get winter. That is an impossible dream of fools and prostitutes. Such talk will get you thrown into ice prison around here. What most people do around here - especially if they have a nice car that’s getting up there in years - is buy a winter beater. That works great for them, but what do you do if all your cars are beaters? It doesn’t make sense to sacrifice a $2000 car to save a $2100 car.
At first, I thought buying cars I just didn’t like would make me feel better. I’d be sending one of the demons to an oh-so-salty Hell. Maybe I’d never wash a car again! Unfortunately, the way my mental illness is hard-wired led me to begin caring about these dismal wrecks, and I soon found myself doing rust repair on beater Buicks and looking up how to fix the broken air conditioning on the internet so I could drive them in summer too! I finally had to put an end to it when I started stockpiling Allure tail-lights at the junkyard.
In the end, I realized that what I hated wasn’t the rust, but the surprise of the rust. I already knew that most of my beaters were rusty as hell from the moment I bought them. If I simply never washed them anymore, I wouldn’t get that springtime shock anymore - at least until the transmission fell out the bottom, or the drivers’ side door rips off taking a corner a little hard. And that could happen at any time of year.
Being at the end of automotive history isn’t always a good thing. The upside is obviously that you avoid buying the humming automatic-transmission coughdrops which only come in high-resale-value white in favour of a lifetime spent fixing 70s and 80s cars. Unfortunately, everyone else is starting to cotton onto the idea that cars now last longer than thirty minutes after purchase, and so I’ve got more competition than ever before.
In my town, there’s a scooter club. I think it started as some sort of ironic joke, but nowadays it’s extremely popular. People of all ages have joined, digging out 80s Honda Sprees, Kymcos, and even worryingly-unobtanium Garelli mopeds and scoots from their attics, garages, swamps, ditches and trailer-park estate auctions. Just a few weeks ago, I was waiting at a light downtown when a gang of Genuine Buddies pulled up next to me and started aggressively revving their 50cc thumpers.
It looked like fun, so I decided to go online and see if I could pick up a couple five-hundo screamers for my very own. I still had visions of café-racing my tiny-engined steed along the river as bicyclists screamed at me to stop driving on the bike path. And I still held those dreams until they were dashed by the complete lack of listings. Yes, there still was the “I know what I got” contingent, reposting every week on Kijiji with their eternally-optimistic $10k 80s scooters, but everything else was long gone. I thought up possible reasons that this could be. We’d had a long winter, which - paradoxically - is when people usually buy more scooters to work on over the course of the White Death, but that couldn’t possibly explain why even the eBay single-use scooters were gone as well.
The only conclusion I could come to was that my particular brand of insanity had finally taken root inside the population. Our hills were alive with the sound of two-strokes, and I was unable to participate. There was just one thing left to do.
A Miata is basically the same size as a scooter, and has an engine smaller than most Harleys and Goldwings. And - if you fold in the mirrors - you can drive it right through those little bollards that are supposed to keep cars off the bike path network. The only downside is that it’s a little hard to park at the scooter cafés, but they’ve been pretty respectful about the whole thing. After all, it’s a classic too.
Future generations will probably not sing legendary songs about the GM 4L30E automatic transmission. For one thing, it’s an automatic transmission. And for another, I don’t think anyone has ever written any song about any transmission, unless they were hard up against a deadline and someone from Marketing was holding a gun to their head. The 4L30E is special enough, though, that humanity deserves to remember it in the oral tradition. Sort of like how we put all those cool signs around nuclear waste dumps.
GM had been producing a teeny-tiny-shrimpy-wimpy version of the 3-speed Hydramatic automatic transmission for decades prior to the 4L30E. They licensed it to all of those effete European automakers who had no interest, budget, or ability to construct an automatic transmission, yet desperately needed one in order in order to sell the car to Americans (a culture so clutch-averse that they won’t even buy bicycles.) Fiat, Opel, and Peugeot, among others, crammed the primitive little slushbox into their cars, but they soon found that they needed more. More what? Efficiency, for one thing, and maybe another gear would be nice.
When the new one came out, there was celebration, albeit only in the transmission-industry magazines (yes, those actually exist.) Now, all those Europeans and Japanese could simply grab a high-technology box off the shelf from an American manufacturer that wasn’t Chrysler. The new 4L30E got slammed into BMWs, Isuzus and the weird cross-brand ultramutant that was the Catera. It was met with no notice whatsoever. And that’s pretty good for an automatic: even though today’s 8-, 10- and thirty-five-speed automatics are a big part of the hype of new “sports” cars, back then it was a triumph just to have an automatic that didn’t shit its own torque converter out and/or forget how many gears it had.
We here at Bad Cars Monthly salute the 4L30E: the transmission that you have probably used at one point in one form or another, but that you forgot existed. If only they hadn’t decided to cram yet another gear into the fucking thing, they could have gone out on top.
Those poor fools who have never driven a rotary car don’t get it. When you put your foot down in what is basically a midget jet engine with rabies and listen to that delectable triangle scream, it’s hard to imagine that things could get better. That’s why they had to add the rev buzzer, because people were having too much fun listening to the revs build and would forget to shift.
For years, I’d been hanging around the periphery of the local epitrochoid-groping community. Those guys would meet up in a Tim Hortons parking lot and discuss premix, oil-metering pumps, oil pump shimming and a lot of other things to do with oil as well. There’s a good reason for that: in a rotary, oil pressure is critical. If the oil isn’t in the right place in the engine at just the right time, your 15000-rpm nightmare motor will no longer dominate the Mulsanne Straight but instead cough out a shitload of its own special coatings and die.
Now, I’m a bit of an expert in low oil pressure. I just got off the phone with a guy at the Society for Automotive Ignorance who is writing a paper about how long I was able to stretch out an oil change on my old Dart. I figured that there was another option to build and maintain the appropriate amount of oil pressure in a little Mazda RX-7, and that option just happened to be the slightly-damaged Dart 318 I had lying in my driveway.
Sure, the academics will tell you that it’s quote-unquote “wasteful” to use a 180-horsepower iron-block American V8 just to pump oil into the 148-horsepower 13B. They might even drag out papers about power-to-weight ratios and pumping losses. Don’t be fooled: their opposition to my project originates not in sound science, but in jealousy. And maybe also concern for the large amount of superheated oil I have spraying into my passenger floorboards from the leaking fittings when I get close to redline. At least now I have two ways to remember to upshift.
It’s crazy to think of all the complexity that hides inside everything around us. Even the simplest objects, like a pencil or a bird, required centuries of endlessly specialized knowledge in order to be constructed. None of us will truly ever understand anything “all the way down,” but it’s sure fun to try.
Just last week I was attempting to get inside the head of the individual who designed my dishwasher. And by “designed” I mean “cost-reduced,” because it’s obvious that the twin goals of making sure I could wash my dishes and turning a profit were at odds on this particular project. The core feature of my dishwasher is that it has little plastic wheels on the bottom tray that snap off. It doesn’t do it all the time, just when you have heavy objects in the bottom tray. You know, like dishes.
After a few minutes of trying to glue a wheel back on - an obvious logical impossibility, but one that I was willing to entertain while I struggled to regain control of my volcanic anger - I decided that I would simply improve on the original engineer’s design. Normal people wouldn’t do this, knowing full well that the original design was made by generations of clever engineers who had learned through experience all the terrible things that could happen in production if you tried to build your own dishwasher tray. Without that negative experience, I was flying blind.
Still, in this case, I figured it was worth the risk. Otherwise, I’d have to drive to the appliance parts store and talk to Maytag Sean, the 900-year-old parts guy who had a photographic memory of one model from the mid-1970s and had to be cajoled into actually opening up the website and ordering the part number you gave him in the first place. So, as the country song doesn’t go, I got to weldin’.
Now, I know what you’re going to say. Isn’t all the lead from those clevite wheel bearings and the Chinese-military-surplus pig iron going to seep into my dishes, or at least my groundwater, slowly poisoning me and others for generations? Sometimes all you can hope for in life is to unearth just a little bit more of the complexity that lies at the core of “what not to do.”
If you haven’t been driving places very often - and if you have been, I don’t really want to know what you’ve been up to nowadays - you need to make sure that the most important relationships in your life are maintained. I refer, of course, to your car.
Cars don’t like to sit; they need to be exercised on the reg. When you have as many cars as I do, you’re statistically likely to have a lot of failures just from inactivity. That’s normal for me; it’s not normal for you, oh Sucker With Only One Car. You’re going to need to take care of that one car, because otherwise you won’t be able to engage in the demolition-derby arena death battles to get the last gallons of gasoline available in your Godtalker’s Protectorate.
The first thing you need to protect is the battery. Even when your car isn’t running, it’s sapping the battery. All those little gizmos and gadgets pull a little bit of current even when they’re turned “off,” and if you leave them like that for a few months it will really screw up the battery. A car’s battery is a lot like the one in your iPhone; it costs about a hundred bucks and the guy who swaps it will scratch your windshield. In order to keep it in tip-top shape, consider a battery maintainer, or just get in the damn thing and drive it on the highway for fifteen minutes every week. Hey, you can go see how the rurals are doing. Maybe they’ve got some nice cars that you can buy so you’ll have two, like a normal person.
Other stuff you need to take care of includes boring things like tires (don’t let them go flat or squared-off), fuel (it goes bad real fast nowadays because they mixed in dead corn with the dead dinosaurs), and your own skills behind the wheel. If you’re one of the people on my commute who obviously drives entirely through some kind of pre-primate muscle reflex, then you’re going to be confused when all the roads are emptier and covered in CDC checkpoints with gun-toting grunts. Make sure you play some Outrun to stay sharp.
If things get bad enough for long enough, you might even consider selling your car and just using public transit afterward. That’s a mistake: most cities will not let you buy and operate your own bus line without a license, and even if they do, they won’t let you use “their” stops to pick up “their” customers. It’s this kind of lack of co-operation that’s going to get us all murdered by Godtalker Steve when he finally seizes control of the Staples Centre in about four weeks.
When they make Kit Kat chocolate bars, the ones that fail quality assurance are melted back down and used to make newer, better bars. That’s why they’re so delicious: they learned their lessons from previous generations of failed chocolate and are afraid of an ignoble death in the recycling vats. Cars are the same way, if you think about it even medium-hard.
Most of the cars you see on the road today are probably made at least partially of recycled old cars. When you send your trusty Intrepid to a junkyard and it gets flattened, it’s entirely possible that some of that metal is going to be recycled into new steel that gets turned into the unibody of a Bentley. It kind of warms my heart a bit, thinking of all the rusty turds I’ve gone through that are now all that keeps a Hong Kong speculator alive when he pirouettes his Ferrari into a bridge abutment.
In order to test my theory, I had to spend a few bucks. I tried to contract a psychic to see if I could communicate with the long-dead bodies of millions of Mopars mixed into the chassis of a new Fiat, but all she said was that she “doesn’t do CAN bus.” Too spooky for her, apparently.
Sure, I assume that when they make a new unibody, they filter out the rust somehow at the big metal-recycling plant, but nobody has ever made a machine that separates the soul from the car. Although, if they did, it would probably involve road salt and a focus group somehow. Which would honestly explain a lot of newer cars.
Airplane parts are really expensive. They’re like Porsche parts, but even more so. And you can’t exactly bop on down to Pick N Pull and grab yourself a handful of Boeing wiring harness. All that stuff needs to be tracked with paperwork, so “they” know you aren’t jamming recalled, wrong-model, or imaginary parts into the shiny aluminum rocket that fires people into the clouds.
There is a benefit to this excessive documentation and paranoia: nobody wants to buy plane parts from sketchy people off the street. Which means that those folks have to sell their parts really cheap, as per the laws of supply and demand. You can understand the low demand: it’s true that it takes a lot of effort to cram a Pratt & Whitney turbojet engine into your ‘91 Celica, and maybe it doesn’t balance out for “regular people.” Even my mechanic kind of chuckled and changed the subject when I brought it up.
However, we’ve got nothing but time these days, and even though my landlord’s garage wasn’t strong enough to support the weight of the engine when I tried to gantry-crane it overhead (never stand underneath a suspended structure, kids!) I did eventually get it into the car. And that’s where I left it for the last few weeks, because the suspension needed some beefing-up for the aforementioned 800lb weight that I just dumped into the back of it (the front engine stayed installed; I need four-wheel-drive for safety with this much horsepower). I know what you’re going to say: lighter than a Windsor, at least, right? Absolutely correct, and once I managed to overcome my seasonal depression (and all eleven seasons plus the Minus World of Frasier) I got right back out there and got the thing to run.
No, here’s where the big problem came with using aircraft engines. The fuel is really expensive too! I thought you could just tool on down to the neighbourhood Petro-Canada, but the full-service attendant just kept staring in blank terror at the jet engine inlet and screaming words I could not hear over the idle. The airport wouldn’t let me fill up there, either. They’re all working this racket together.
Really, it’s not that impressive that the new hot-shot engineer on my team worked on a NASA probe that got shot into space. Anyone can make something that breaks the bounds of Earth’s atmosphere, as long as Big Government lets them have enough explosives to achieve escape velocity. It was his rampant perfectionism that was wearing me down.
Even through the glitchy 80s-vision-of-the-future Zoom call, I could tell that he was looking down on me for cutting corners on the last code review. I did not deserve his scorn, or at least not all of it. He was certainly right that under schedule pressure, we had skipped a lot of the important best practices that I myself had helped to define. That was what made it okay in my book: only once you truly know the rules can you safely break them. This line of argument did not sway him, except for his mouse hand, which clicked on the “reject pull request” button.
Now, if anyone else on my team had done this, I’d have chuckled and then just re-submitted the same code with different variable names. This guy was different. He wanted me to get better, to work harder to fit the utopia of technocratic excellence that both of us held in our hearts. I decided I would spend another fifteen minutes working on it before taking the rest of the day off to continue on my quest to watch all of YouTube.
Well, as it turns out, “a grudge” is the perfect environment for me to produce the best work of my career. The code was just flowing out of my fingertips, a beautiful, standards-compliant crystalline mind-structure that could not help but be interpreted correctly by all rational human beings and particularly smart pet dogs. There could be no room for mistakes. It was perfect, and I smiled with glee as I shoved it back down NASA-boy’s throat, practically chuckling as I banged the customary emojis into the commit message.
“This is great,” is all he said before approving the pull request. I was elated.
Later, we discovered that when you actually ran it in production, what the code did was take over the world in milliseconds through a slight security flaw in the nuclear weapons system we were working on. I guess even at NASA, they don’t actually run their code before saying it looks pretty good. In my defence, I wanted to write this shit in Rust from the start.
When you’re working on a big project, it’s easy to lose track of what you’ve done. If you have to put your hard work aside so you can go to work, feed a baby, or repair the eye of someone who was killed when their prize duck exploded from a yeast overdose at the county fair, you might forget what you wanted to do next. And those crackpot bolt-awake-at-4am revelations aren’t going to be remembered in the morning either, unless you’re organized.
Now, productivity experts throughout history have advocated adopting a structure known as the “to-do list.” You’ve probably seen one before. It’s a simple structure, consisting of things to do, and then you check them off. However, all of my projects are multilayered and complex (that’s project-management code for “fucking shit keeps breaking as I take it off this fucking Chevette”) which means that most of my to-do lists end up reflecting some idealized model of the project months in the past, before I remembered how The World Really Is.
I did try hiring a project manager at one point, but I had to let him go in the end. It started simply enough, with him writing down every task I wanted to do - no matter how small - on little sticky notes and then wallpapering my garage walls with them until I could no longer open the door anymore from the additional weight. Tearing those sticky notes off the wall when I did things like “loosen bolt #6 of the transmission bellhousing” made me feel like I was making real progress. Where he overstepped his bounds was demanding I attend a daily progress meeting. What’s worse, he kept trying to interview candidates for me to hire a program manager as well, because the work of keeping track of one person’s work needed two people to complete. Hooey to that, I said, and dropped him back off at the Home Depot parking lot where I found him.
Eventually, I landed upon my current method of keeping track of things that I need to do. I simply moved to a larger house, where I could lay all the parts of my car out on the driveway. That way, with the exploded carnage visible at all times, it was obvious what part of the car I had to work on next. This model has its flaws (I did buy a second, and then a fourteenth car which also got dismantled into the same pile) but I am convinced that being happy is a part of being productive too.
Exchange rates are a brutal fact of life in Canada. No matter how much money you make, some American will be able to swoop in and grab the crazy shit you wanted from auction just because their dollar is worth (at the time of writing) forty-two freaking cents more. That’s not fair at all, and it’s probably worse if you live in some other country where the differential is even more offensive.
On this episode of Bad Macroeconomics Monthly, we look into the concept of foreign exchange. Where did it come from? Do we have any hope for digging out from under the arbitrary decisions of a bunch of Wall Street pinheads? Will I ever win an auction for a rare boxed copy of Sanma no Meitantei without having to pay a fair market value for it? Almost some of these questions will be answered within.
Now, the first thing you have to understand is that countries used to have gold. Gold’s a shiny metal that you make jewelry, teeth, and microprocessors out of, and so people have killed each other for it ever since it was discovered in August 1977. Back then, foreign exchange was simple. When you wanted to buy a bootleg copy of Kamen Rider parody pornography, your bank would send the money to the Canadian government, and they’d mail the corresponding amount of gold to Japan. Everyone loves gold, we said at the time, there’s no problem with it. Except there was.
In late 1985, a group of executives responsible for the launch of the Breton snack cracker met in the woods to discuss whether they should buy Hondas for the new company car. This meeting has been known, due to an inadvertent secretarial-pool typo, as the Bretton Woods Accord. What bearing this has on the gold standard is completely unknown to history, as nobody really gives too much of a shit. Whatever it is they agreed on meant that now instead of gold, countries would send paper IOUs across the ocean. A huge advancement, because the government was getting tired of paying people to pull little red wagons full of gold back and forth from the docks. And since paper is lighter than gold, the ships bobbed around a lot more when they hit rough water. Hence, the floating exchange rate.
So how are exchange rates decided nowadays? Surprisingly, it’s still largely done by throwing darts at a dartboard, except now the dartboard lights up and flashes when it’s struck - a cool new improvement in our modern age of computerized high technology.
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tags: bad macroeconomics monthly, honda, honda accord
I was recently socially isolating myself from my neighbour by watching his television through binoculars, when a show came on about building classic cars and flipping them for money at auction. This is basically what I do for a living, unless you think of the adjective “classic” as having any positive association whatsoever. My worry is that people get hooked on this stuff, and then think fixing up a car is just like they see on the idiot box.
Hot-rod television is not really indicative of real life. For one thing, they draw this constant line of upward progression where professionals polish off a car. And for the other thing, the projects actually get completed. If those so-called “reality” TV cameras were following me around, each car would be a 75-episode series where 73 of those episodes are me looking sadly at the thing in my garage, drinking, and then wondering how I’ll ever get this thing done. The remaining two would be me swearing at the undercarriage bolt and then selling the half-disassembled turd at a huge loss.
That said, it got me thinking about making my own television series. Even after my neighbour caught the glint of my binocular lenses against the moonlit sky and shut his fourth-storey curtains, I was still considering it, even as I jumped a fence and hopped into my always-idling, sometimes-dieseling Volare to outrun the condo security guard. I got so excited about the whole thing that I called my special-films-for-mommies-and-daddies-making friend on the shattered pay-as-you-go phone ziptied to the roll cage (it’s hands-free, officer) and pitched the entire proposal to him.
Now, normally, you’d think this would be a non-starter. Nobody wants to watch a dude roll around in contaminated 50 year old automobile fluids and scream unintelligibly about forgetting to bring the six-point sockets with him for the head bolts. You’d be totally wrong. It turns out with everyone stuck at home all the time, television has simply run out of crap to show us. The producers we met with were willing to run whatever we could give them, even if it was “slow TV” (their words, but probably also an honest assessment of my wrenching skills and eventual vehicle) about building a shitty car without much skill or experience.
I’d like to say that the money I received from that hasn’t changed me. That would, of course, be a lie. With my new-found riches, I’ve upgraded my humble car to a swanky ride beyond my wildest dreams: to a 1980 Volare. All the odometer wheels work now!
You can’t trust advertising. There’s a whole platoon of highly-paid Madison Avenue motherfuckers out there who are working their hardest every single day to sell you things you don’t need. Ever wondered why you go to the grocery store and spend a fortune on impulse-buy items? You’ve been programmed to desire those things, even if you’ve expressed no conscious intent to purchase them before.
Car advertising is just more of the same thing. I’ve talked about this before, so I won’t further abuse a dead horse (I’m not Ford’s Mustang department, hey-o) but it’s important to understand how largely similar vehicles have been pushed into different socioeconomic strata based on marketing and advertising chicanery. My realtor didn’t want to drive a Fusion or a Chrysler 300; no, he went for a base-model Mercedes sedan built in China. It made him feel more important, because at some point some marketers changed the popular perception of German-car owners in America from “weird pervert, maybe an architect” into “vaguely successful, perhaps through speculation.”
Now, nobody’s brand has suffered more than mine in the last few weeks. It’s true that the crisis unfolding at City Hall is largely my own fault, because I got bored at home and decided to ride a dune buggy through the abandoned outlet mall on the highway. I’ve taken a real beating in the media, which worked hard to portray me as some sort of dangerous maniac, and sometimes even someone with an ideology other than “ITBs are cool because they go braaaaap.” That’s why I’ve hired a bunch of out-of-work advertising students and started my own reputation-management firm. We’re going to work late nights - they on the actual work, me on trying to fix the lower control arm of the dune buggy that got bent by that surprisingly sturdy pretzel stand - in order to rehabilitate my popular perception before my court hearing.
It occurred to me, while I was setting this whole thing up, that there were a whole lot of out-of-work advertising students, and surely it couldn’t hurt to also sell their services to the highest bidder. I am certain that the extra money pouring in from automakers will only help with my upcoming legal defence, and, hey, did you notice that reference to pretzels up above? They sell frozen ones in the grocery store now. Bet you’d like to pick some of those up tonight.
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tags: ford, ford fusion, ford mustang, chrysler, chrysler 300
Now that we’re all stuck at home, everyone is paying more attention to their home. There’s all the ritual spring junk-throwing-out that my well-to-do more-suburbanite neighbours have been up to, and then there’s “I’d rather clean the bathroom than pay attention to this fucking conference call.” And I’m no different. Except my bathroom is pretty disgusting and nobody invites me to conference calls anymore, for fear I might accidentally turn my camera on again.
All week I’ve been trying to get a good hit on the stratigraphic layers of old car parts that make up the floor of my basement storage. There’s lots of spares and “could be fixed” parts from cars I’ve owned, of course, and also some of cars I dreamed of owning, even if that dream was induced by abusing Russian research chemicals. I’ll never see another ‘65 Parisienne headlight surround, I told myself at a nearly unlimited number of swap meets, which is why I own eight headlight surrounds for a '65 Parisienne.
Up until now, I’ve strictly been an “input” kind of guy to the local classifieds. I’d tried selling some small stuff in the past, but it got no interest, or an endless parade of time-wasters. Something’s different this time: people are actually showing up and buying the things I have on offer, nervously shoving their fifties and even hundos through the mail slot I cut into my front door using an OEM Volvo C303 axe that I got from a cool swap meet.
This uptick in business could be because the manifestation of the apocalypse is finally driving sales of muscle cars, leather body armour, and arm-mount crossbows, but I’m no economist. As with any random positive reinforcement, I’ve been going full-on Pavlov’s Dog, constantly ratcheting up the speed and quantity of stuff that left my basement until I could once again see the carpet of said basement. It’s orange, in case you were curious, which might be because of all the spilled ATF.
Most significantly, the little jars that I keep cash in under my bed (can’t trust banks) have started to multiply. It’s getting to the point now where I’m actually considering getting into business buying “investment parts” for rich guys. I’ve got the track record now, and if they get mad because I blew all the seed capital on hoarding front seats from AMC Eagles, they won’t be able to come to my house and kill me.
Depending on who you ask, the Geo Metro is either the finest or the second finest small economy car ever produced. That is, as long as you ask relatively few people and only the two guys on our editorial board who are total freaks for that chassis. I guess you could say that they’re engaged in a little bit of Cultus worship.
No matter how much they love these vehicles - and they do, to an unnatural extent - they never would have encountered them if it weren’t for the largesse of the General Motors group of corporations. And it’s in this, the final episode of Bad Cars Monthly’s Chevy Week 2020, that we at last will come face to face with the one-litre Suzuki so good it became an icon.
Hop into the car, and you get a real sense of no-nonsense. Bourgeois scum who can recite lease terms from memory will get upset at the lack of accoutrements (that’s French for “cool shit”) but everyone else recognizes immediately what this is. This here Metro is a race car for the road. And nobody else will even realize you’re racing, as you skid around corners on the narrow tires, fighting the limits of adhesion well below the speed limit before banging the car off the limiter on every shift to try and keep up with modern traffic. Even professional race car drivers find the Metro a unique delight, like a Tour De France champion deciding to ride into the office on a child’s tricycle.
Do you remember a few years ago, when oil prices momentarily spiked and people went so insane that any Metro, but especially an XFI - the super-high-mileage economy trim package - suddenly began to aggressively appreciate in value? It’s a testament to the longevity and the careful engineering that went into the import-fighting import that they were even still available to purchase. Even today, you can probably head out onto your local classifieds and get one that only requires minimal structural welding repair. That’s pretty good for an early-90s economy car!
The Metro/Swift/Cultus/Sprint/Firefly has been seen in pretty much every environment it’s possible to take a car in. Road-racing, off-roading, stunt jumping. I’m sure someone has turned one into a really shitty ambulance and/or firetruck. They’re so versatile that the normal shame of cheap crappy cars doesn’t quite stick to the Metro. Yes, there’s the jokes, and the TV references, but it’s not like you’re driving a Fortwo.
Somehow, the car has risen above its humble roots to become a proletarian champion. Maybe it’s just that in a world of crossovers, anything smaller than a short bus now conveys modesty. Either way, we here salute the Geo Metro as being the finest economy car ever constructed by our friends over at the Blue Square.
There is still one more bright light in GM’s eternal quest to fight the imports. This amazing vehicle has a space frame, composite body panels, front-wheel-drive, coupe doors, sharp cornering, futuristic styling and a price tag so low it’s hard to leave the dealership without one. It’s not the vehicle you’re thinking of, either. Today, on the penultimate episode of Bad Cars Monthly’s Chevy Week 2020, we discuss the Lumina APV: a Space Shuttle for the home.
Now, not a lot of people remember the Lumina APV. You’ve probably opened another browser tab to take a squint at the Wikipedia page. Do you feel that pleasant frisson of nostalgia building at the base of your neck? Is there a yearning becoming known to you, one that has remained nameless until this very moment? You are not alone.
When you have a family of vehicles that is referred to by a cutesy nickname, there can be no mistaking that it has touched the hearts of its owners. The Dustbuster vans - the Lumina APV, Olds Silhouette and the Pontiac Trans Sport - somehow engender this loyalty despite a decidedly agricultural setup. What other vehicle with a 3.1L 90° V6 can be said to be truly loved? Maybe the Celebrity wagon, or the completely-unrelated warm-sedan Lumina LTZ that followed after the APV’s death.
It can’t be just the styling, either: even after GM did a Bubble Taurus-fearing redesign and made everything vaguely oval-shaped and melty, people still crowded to the plastic minivan even as it began to look like the dull-as-dishwater Venture that would soon replace it.
Despite being relatively uninspiring to drive - except for that massive windshield, of course - it’s hard to deny an excitement building when you reach for the keys. Even the Previa owners, in the midst of their vicious mountain touge races, will grudgingly accept you when you catch up to them in this fine wedge.
Now, were the Dustbusters financially successful? Absolutely not, in any way whatsoever. I mean, GM sold a bunch of them - but they also watched their market evaporate into the hands of first Dodge and then the Japanese. And yet, if you saw one today, would you stop and go “holy shit I bet that’s worth at least $600?” If so, then it truly belongs in the pantheon of the finest utilitarian commuters that General Motors could ever have spawned.
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tags: chevy week, chevrolet lumina apv, pontiac trans sport, oldsmobile silhouette, toyota, toyota previa, chevrolet, pontiac, oldsmobile
Oh hello. I’m just your friendly neighbourhood time traveller, visiting your backwards era from the far-off future of 2246, where everything is fucking awesome. No one lacks for food, shelter, V8s, or holographic pornography. There is just one thing we can’t get in our beautiful utopia, however: the Pontiac Fiero.
Today on Bad Cars Monthly’s Chevy Week 2020, we discuss the fate of the Pontiac Fiero, the mid-engined sportabout that very nearly became a part of all of our worlds until it came up against the Dastardly Corvette and the treachery of internal corporate politics.
On paper, the Fiero was meant to be the do-it-all supercar for the Me Generation: mid-engined, flip-up headlights, only two seats, and good enough at cornering that Ferrari owners would shit themselves when they saw what they could have gotten for 90% less. Thing is, at General Motors, it’s a little hard to get new sports cars approved. They’re very pragmatic over there, or at least they think they are: the Camaro is for people who want to have a little grand-touring fun, and the Corvette is for people who want fibreglass exotics on a budget.
The Fiero, being both, had no real place in the lineup, certainly not one justifying the huge expense of development. Somehow, however, it was snuck into approval as a quirky economy car. Yep, it’s got a wheezy, efficient Iron Duke, the engineers chuckled as they high-fived each other in the back of R&D - how could it ever be sporty?
Again, through a series of miracles, the Fiero entered production on what must have been a shoe-string budget, stealing resources from other teams and reusing parts whever they could find them. Yes, that includes suspension. There goes the Ferrari-beshitting cornering ability, although by 1983 the Stallions were definitely having their own problems in that department as well. What you ended up with was a half-Chevette, half-Disco-Nova that, while great to look at, wasn’t the perfect performer.
After many years, the Fiero was improved significantly, with the eventual addition of a V6 and a suspension design implemented by someone who had once read a textbook (in GM culture, there is no more haraam of a crime.) GM engineering responded by killing the model entirely, just as things were about to get turbocharged.
Perhaps what the Fiero is best known for, however, is its wacky space frame design. All of its body panels are plastic, bolted to a galvanized steel frame that provides all the structure the car will ever need. Naturally, a lot of people made Ferrari bodykits for the damn thing. And Delorean bodykits. And Lamborghini bodykits. And GT40 bodykits. You get the idea. The only bodykit they don’t make for it is a Fiero replica bodykit, so you can return one of these fine steeds to stock when you accidentally buy a half-bondo Lambo that’s actually got a 2.5L inline four under the hood.
Whew, all this import-fighting can really work up a thirst. What was the J-body, a platform of cheap and cheerful front-drive sedans, doing during all this? Mostly just surviving, but even “surviving” as a cheap domestic car - much less for nearly a quarter-century - is an achievement worthy of tribute in this episode of Bad Cars Monthly’s Chevy Week 2020.
The J-body was planned from the start to be a world platform, a beater that everyone could slam their own engines into and try to save a few bucks. It is said that nobody on planet Earth has ever driven every kind of J-body, and that is absolutely 100% true, confirmed by our internal team of scientists that we keep chained to the hot water heater tank. It’s one of those platforms that didn’t produce great cars, but did produce some cars.
It is said that GM engineering notoriously punished problematic engineers by forcing them to work on these vehicles until they would quit, probably to go build the PT Cruiser instead. That story makes me wonder just how many problematic engineers GM had kicking around, because the guys who worked on minivans and small-displacement pickup trucks clearly had the same “fuck it, we have five dollars in the budget” philosophy in life. They even shared most of the engines, making parts availability to keep your junkyard cockroach running even more trivial.
If you wanted a car that got you to work, but maybe the wing mirrors fell off once in awhile or the radio tuned itself to the Spanish channel and wouldn’t turn back, the Cavalier (and Sunfire and Cimarron and Sunbird) were there for you. Forgot to put oil in it? A new engine is fifty bucks at the wrecker. Want class-beating road race performance? Please go somewhere else. GM’s penny-pinching and engineering conservatism paid off big-time with the J-body.
Although nobody in their right mind set out to purchase a Cavalier, those who settled for one found a collection of parts in loose formation that would get them to work until the sun burned out. And that’s the kind of “reliability” that Bad Cars Monthly lives to salute.
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tags: chevrolet, chevrolet cavalier, pontiac, pontiac sunfire, pontiac sunbird
Again bravely responding to foreign and domestic criticism, GM decided in the early 90s that they would pull out all the stops. Finally, the whole power of GM R&D would be brought to bear on the import problem. This time, everyone at GM agreed while looking over their fancy new 90s CAD packages, we’d do it right, just like the Corvair, Vega, Chevette, and Toronado did.
If their existing marques were being avoided by young, metropolitan up-and-comers, they’d just make a whole new one. Magazines criticized their lack of planning and ambition? We’re going to design a fantastic engine and chassis, and then replace the body with a space-age plastic polymer that will never rust. Shitty dealerships? You can walk your entire family in there late Saturday afternoon and buy cars like you’re going to Costco, no haggling needed. With Saturn, GM wanted to prove that they could build a better Honda than Honda, and all things Saturnalia are the topic of today’s entry in Bad Cars Monthly’s Chevy Week 2020, brought to you by shift bushing kits.
Now, the early Saturns really were great little cars. Tough as nails (go drive by the rich part of town and check out what the housekeepers are still driving,) modern - if bland - 90s Honda styling, and peppy little four-banger engines that sip fuel and use the Devil’s own overhead camshafts. GM was so confident of their success that they decided they’d even export the Saturns to Japan, starting an entirely new dealership and distribution network there, for the sole purpose of rubbing it in the faces of the Nipponese on their own turf just as their economy imploded under the weight of a corrupt banking system. It was like the Apollo missions of spite.
What’s the problem? As always, the American public. At around this time, the awkward-driving and frequently-deadly Jeep Grand Cherokees and Ford Explorers began to place a toehold in the brains of those citizens who didn’t live in Vail or even anywhere near Colorado. Four-wheel-drive, it seemed, was now the thing to have in towns. The death of the sedan began, and you have to sympathize with GM bean-counting at this point. They have themselves a fantastic, world-leading, domestic sedan/station wagon/coupe combo… with no margins.
Sure, Saturn went on for a number of years more. They rode the curve of the decline of the American car, and occasionally they even tried something crazy like putting a Honda engine into them. I don’t think their customers even noticed, which is the most backhanded compliment I can imagine for the engineering team who banged these little miracle cough-drops together.
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tags: saturn, saturn sc1, saturn sw1, saturn sl1, jeep, jeep grand cherokee, chevy week, ford, ford explorer
Not a lot of people know this, but the Chevrolet Vega was supposed to have a rotary engine. It was just one of the many crazy internal-combustion hijinks that the R&D team got up to as they tried their hardest to make GM’s Best Car Ever and accidentally made one of the most reviled. Today, as Bad Cars Monthly’s Chevy Week 2020 continues, we salute the Vega in all of its “oh well” glory.
If you’ve never seen a Chevy Vega in the flesh, then you’re probably not quite weird enough to be reading this. Either that, or you are nearly every adult human being who has ever existed, because the Vegas are a chapter of GM history that they’d rather keep buried.
Not for lack of trying: GM R&D threw a shedload of money at any engineer who looked like they might be able to interpret an Italian car’s dyno chart, and they put a (surprisingly uncharacteristic for the period) amount of effort into rock-solid manufacturing and testing. Even the F1 racing geniuses at Cosworth dropped by to inflate the price by a solid integer multiple of the base model. So why isn’t it the most beloved car of this esteemed periodical?
Mostly because the car didn’t last long enough for it to become a used car, which is the general mode of transport that puts automobiles in our greedy mitts. It wasn’t entirely engineering’s fault: the body plant that put the cars together didn’t really grasp the concept of “paint all of the car,” and it wasn’t exactly the factory workers’ idea to slam an aluminum block into the thing that distorted and leaked under high revs, either. GM rushed to fix it, and made a pretty decent car, but the damage was already done. All the world loves a laughingstock, which is why they laugh at them so much.
Perhaps the greatest tragedy of all in the story of the Vega is this: it’s really difficult to find a used example of the damn things, unless you want to pay more than $500. And if I wanted to do that, why would I be shopping for a domestic economy car from the 70s?
As part of a newly-formed outreach programme to the Chevrolet enthusiast, we here at Bad Cars Monthly would like to announce our newest campaign. This week, every day is about Chevy-GMC-Cadillac-Opel-Buick-Pontiac-Saturn-Saab-Isuzu content. We call it Chevy Week, and to be honest, most of it is about pulling broken Fords around after their electrical systems fail.
Originally founded by a Swiss race car driver with a French-sounding name, Chevrolet represents all that is good and noble in the American hegemony. Starting in the 1960s, however, spicy foreign imports started to chip away at the firm Ma-Pa-Kids structure that had ensured a rich vein of thick profit margins for the General Motors ziggurat in the immediate post-war years. They had to do something about it, and in 1976, they did.
The Chevrolet Chevelle was introduced to combat the Volkswagen Rabbit. Featuring between two and four doors (inclusive), this sporty hatchback was made and sold all over the world, in order to take advantage of cheap labour costs. That’s right, people from all over the world got to take part in the thrill ride that only the massive potency an 85-cubic-inch iron-block pushrod four could deliver, or - in the sportier “SS” trims, no relation to other postwar denizens of South America - ninety-seven cubes.
It should be no surprise that the Chevelle has become one of America’s longest-running muscle-car institutions, with its clean lines, spartan interior, and devil-may-care Isuzu flair. This vehicle was such a hit that the Canadian government’s Secret Works/Oeuvres Secrètes, needing ready access to a supply of affordable used Chevelles for an increasingly suburban Ontarian population, renamed the car into the Acadian and sent it back in time to 1962, where they immediately launched a programme to outfit the Chevelle with extra body panels and a V8, turning it into a large family sedan.
What’s more, in order to make some extra money, a group of Métis separatists scammed a bunch of visiting American tourists. They convinced them that these these lost-in-time Canadian Chevelles were actually American Chevelles. Now, in the modern day, nobody can tell that America’s most beloved muscle car is in truth a bodykitted Opel Kadett.
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tags: chevrolet, chevrolet chevelle, chevrolet chevette, pontiac, pontiac acadian, canada, chevy week
In the future, when all personal cars are be replaced by electric cough drops that can go from zero to “license threatening” in under two seconds, the knowledge of internal-combustion engines will fade from the public. And with it, the awareness of all the obscure little hacks that we put in to try and eke out just a few more horsepower from a bunch of dead dinosaurs while still getting a pretty decent distance out of each tank of said dinosaurs, because it’s kind of annoying stopping all the time to refuel.
One of the things I think society will forget about almost immediately is variable valve timing. Everyone has a different name for this - Toyota fans call it “lift,” Honda people call it “VTEC,” and Chevrolet owners call it “revved the dadgum engine too far and bent the valves again, paw.” Just kidding, Chevy fans, please don’t come to my house and try to kill me. Last time, my neighbours got super fed up with all the tow trucks that were blocking the street afterward.
This whole thing is to deal with the fact that gasoline engines only have a narrow band of revs in which they make peak power - depending on how you set them up, they might be really potent up top but gutless on a stop-light drag. A lot of this has to do with the camshaft profile: a big cam that lifts the valves super far will breathe well up top but just doesn’t have the urgency to stop-start in a playground zone without terrifying the volunteer parking patrol with a big lumpy brap. With a variable cam, you get to have your cake and eat it too: it just transforms into a race car when you get the revs up, sort of like how I assume Decepticons fuck.
Now, you don’t need any of this with an electric motor. It just spins real fast - real fast, so fast even RX-7 owners start to feel uncomfortable about putting their hands and genitals near it - and puts out less power the faster you spin it. You have way too much power coming off the light, freight-train sized gobs, so much so that some super-fast computer has to cut it (until you disable the traction control like any God-fearing person ought), and since your engine is silent you don’t have that hugely loud exhaust for the cops to write you a ticket. Everyone wins.
On our next episode of “Obsolete Internal Combustion Engine Bullshit,” we’ll talk about accessory belts. Tune in next time for “Why The Fuck Is This Thing Constantly Squealing In Any Weather Colder Than Plus Forty?”
You have to always be careful about internet scam artists. They’re always stepping up their game, trying to catch you in a moment of weakness so they can help yourself to your money, identity, or the lifeblood of your children. In the 90s, it was really easy to spot them. It’d be a Nigerian prince scam, or a confusingly-spelled email about winning a lottery you never entered. Delete and move on.
Nowadays, though, they’ve become very sophisticated. Just last week, in fact, I was approached by one of these scam artists. They said they were offering a new car for sale, with zero kilometers on the odometer. Nothing was wrong with it, and if something broke a few years after purchase, they’d fix it for me for free. This was completely unbelievable to me, so I drove over to give them a piece of my mind.
I did not expect how big this scam operation would be. They had dozens of these so-called “new” cars, in a parking lot that presumably they had taken over by guile or force. Slicked-hair salesmen were swarming all over anyone who came close to even one of them, demanding that they immediately tell them what kind of car their victims were looking for. That’s private information, Bub, I told the first one who approached, and that just made him laugh and call in his manager. So it’s some kind of Ponzi scheme, I realized.
In the end, I went home without getting any of my money taken. I beat them so thoroughly that they even gave me free coffee to try and make a deal happen. While I was drinking it, one of the “salesmen” told me about this weird scheme they worked out, where I’d pay them a little bit of money every month for a couple of years in exchange for a “new” car, but when I did the math it turned out I would pay way more overall than just buying the car outright in one lump sum for their crazy prices. Make sure you don’t fall for this trick! Only buy used cars from reputable people you interact with for seventeen to twenty-five minutes on Craigslist before inspecting the car at night in the rain and paying untraceable cash money for it.
When you first learn to drive, you expect that the police will be on top of you immediately if you accidentally perform any automotive crimes. It never really happens. Later, you grow a sort of wilful contempt for the entire institution of law enforcement, and start to get pretty blasé about things like changing lanes without signalling, or driving 180km/h over the limit.
I think this is why we’ve had a sort of general destruction of our civil society. If the only time you see the government is when their shock troopers either are trying to lever money out of your wallet or are failing to feign interest in figuring out who stole your ‘99 Seicento, then eventually you also decide that it’s not worth paying for. After all, you know they’re not very good at actually stopping dangerous criminals like yourself.
That’s why I’ve started a sort of freelance police. Everyone says that the private sector is more efficient - we definitely spent less money on going to police school - and I already have enough body-on-frame “cop cars” from the 1970s to round up an entire narco gang. And I can absolutely guarantee you that anyone trying to flee justice in a high-speed chase is going to have to answer to my team of bored part-time autocrossers. Your average commuter is going to be afraid of the police again.
However, like I said in my initial report to city council, there have been some problems. It turns out modern cars are really fucking fast. Even turbocharged, our Volare cop car can barely break 210 horsepower, and that’s on the “Ego-Stroking™” compensation factor set on the dyno. I think Toyota makes a minivan that is in the low 600hp now. We’re going to need some fat government subsidies in order to continue to replace the government.
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tags: toyota, fiat, fiat seicento, plymouth, plymouth volare
I’ve never been successful at the government auctions. Every week, they post a bunch of cars. Some are common: the miled-out daily drivers of soldiers who have to move their families to a different base and can’t take the family Grand Am with them, so sad. Others not so much: big ol’ Komatsu front-end loaders, 6x6 super-offroad personnel carriers, and my personal favourite: Crown Victorias of all shapes and sizes.
Yes, even though pretty much every police department has sold off their Crown Vics, low-mileage examples keep popping their way up, gushing out from every orifice as the civil service is squeezed for a few more cents in income on the year-end report. What’s more, unlike the police-abused cars, it’s very unlikely that a college student has puked in the back of a Parks Canada Interceptor, or that the guy who inspects airplanes for the feds has had a lot of opportunity to jump curbs while idling the car 18 hours a day and then driving 300 feet down a runway. The problem is that everyone else knows it.
Whenever I make what I think is an agreeable - even generous - bid, some asshole from Longueuil will swoop in and massively outbid me. This means, unlike at the salvage auctions, I’ll never get that $200 V6 Charger or $150 drill press. I suspect these guys are flipping them to make a profit. They can’t possibly be buying them to try and keep the total cost of ownership over 15 years under $3000 including fuel, like I do. Every week, I look for the vehicle that nobody else wants to buy, and then someone else pays like five hundred bucks more for it. It’s getting ridiculous.
Apparently, what a lot of auctions do is bring in straw bidders. These are dudes who just pretend to be normal, off-the-street types, like you and me. If it looks like a lot is going for too little, they’ll bid it up so that they win. Then the item just gets listed again the next week, and the important thing is that it stayed out of your hands, you filthy casual. I didn’t think the government had hired any of these guys - I was losing these bids fair and square - but it did give me an idea.
It turns out that the Canadian government has never trademarked their logo. Anyone can just go and put up a website called “Canada Government Auctions” and get it to go high on Google with a couple bucks to Russian spambots. I sat back and watched the bids roll in on my fake auction, and meanwhile on the real one, I was finally able to get that 440,000 km ‘91 Vic of my dreams. At least when it breaks down, I’ll have plenty of buyers lined up.
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tags: ford, ford crown victoria, dodge, dodge charger, komatsu
Last weekend, I just went out and had a big, long drive. Everyone should be doing it, especially now. Long drives aren’t just good for your battery and general health of the fuel system; they’re good for you, the human being. Something in our genetics is just pulled towards the open road, the need to put the hammer down and be in another town which sports slightly different frequencies for the exact same FM radio stations.
Now, I didn’t quite go that far. I have a lot of stuff to do at home, like procrastinating on projects and thinking about how nice it was when I was still able to buy ice cream. So I mostly stayed in town, and looped the major highways for a few hours. Naturally, when you do that, you’re going to notice that your speed slowly creeps up. Another thing the human mind does is get hella bored and nail the fast-forward button, even if that means travelling at slightly illegal speeds.
I’ve been driving this real hot rod of a car lately. It’s a ‘97 Cavalier I found on the side of the road with the keys still in it and the bill of sale signed and sitting on the driver’s seat. It’s got the big twin-cam engine, and all it needed was a little head gasket job, the front end straightened out with a tree, a chain tensioner swapped, blood hosed off the hood, the blower motor replaced, a quickie oil and filter change, methamphetamine paraphernalia vacuumed out of the trunk, and a couple raw eggs in the radiator before it was right as rain. With the mind-bending savagery of 150 horsepower available at nearly all times with just a tip of my right foot, it should be no wonder that I let my hair down and took maximum advantage of the emptied roads.
Now, Chevrolet is concerned that the owners of its fine automobiles are the kind of skinflints who will attempt a top-speed run on 16-year-old winter tires. This is not an incorrect assumption, at least in my case, although I maintain that with this much treadwear, there’s no way they can still be considered “winter” tires.
To solve this lawsuit-generating problem, the eggheads at GM put a speed limiter into the car’s computer. Try as you might, you won’t be able to make it top a buck eighty. This assault on my personal liberty made me feel as if I were still trapped at home, but I still had a pretty good time wringing out approximately eight dollars of domestic automobile. However, it was a little disappointing that the charging system packed it in and drained the battery just as I was pulling into my driveway. I guess the alternator also wanted to taste the open road, because it earned itself a pretty decent curb-stomp.
“You guys,” said Shifty Carl, “I think I’ve done it. It’s a miracle. Everyone has to come see.”
How could you refuse an invite like that? We all piled into our respective family trucksters and headed right to Carl’s. I lived pretty far away, so I ended up circling the area like an annoyed Pan-Am 747 captain instead of being able to find a parking spot with a direct view of the festivities. As I did laps around the block, I still could pick up bits and pieces of the fantastic story that Carl was telling us.
“So I bought this Cavalier for my daughter to drive to college,” said Carl, fully aware that his daughter had graduated with her second Ph.D four years previous. “I was going to touch up the paint, make sure the cooling system was solid, put some good junkyard seats in.” Where was he going with this? I finally decided to swerve onto his neighbour’s lawn and listen from there, because there was no way I could miss this once-in-a-lifetime experience.
“And… I think it’s finished. I think I finished a project.” Carl was sort of pacing around his driveway now, like a technology-company CEO who didn’t get the right microdose of methamphetamine in his morning boba. “It’s just… done. That car is done. It doesn’t need anything else!”
Carl was starting to get a little more erratic than usual, which - considering he’s named Shifty Carl - was disturbing to the audience. If someone didn’t do something, he was probably going to decide his “next project” was to implement the unique form of governance he’d been telling us about every Friday at the bar. And it simply didn’t make macroeconomic sense to make that many whips and ball-gags. I decided that I had to do it to him, to cast his project back from the hell-world of “completed” to the warm blanket of comfort that is “one of these days.”
Luckily for me, I carry at all times in my respective vehicles some $85 Chinese lawn-equipment turbochargers. Now, we could argue all day about whether I do that because I’m prepared for a situation just like this, or if I’m carrying these turbos around because I can’t “get around to” shoving them in all of my daily drivers. What’s important is that Carl un-finished that Cavalier like crazy. I think he had tears in his eyes when he used his cutting wheel to chop off the stock exhaust manifold without unbolting it… but it’s hard to tell, since I was busy backing over his neighbour’s lawn fountain at the time to try and get out. If anything, I should get credit for un-finishing their landscaping, too.
As part of our ongoing commitment to completing the community service before our respective parole officers decide we’ve breached the conditions of our early releases, Bad Cars Monthly is now providing a valuable public information service. To those of you who wouldn’t normally subscribe to our magazine because you got adequate nutrition and no major traumatic incidents during your early childhood, we wish to offer our humblest help with your puzzling car problems.
Let’s review some of the most common problems we hear about.
Car stalls when you stop at a light This is because of automatic transmissions. They are a sorcerer’s abomination, a set of steel and fluid banged into life by some sort of coven of witches. We recommend removing any automatic transmissions and replacing them with either manual transmissions or some sort of elaborate direct-drive mechanism from a cigarette boat V8.
Low tire pressure light comes on when using winter tires I’ve never heard of this light, possibly because most of my cars were fabricated in the Carter era or have electrical systems so dodgy that none of the dashboard lights, including the one that illuminates the speedometer, are functioning. Still, this sounds like something that could be solved by moving somewhere you don’t need winter tires anymore. Think about it: wouldn’t it improve the rest of your life? Still, you’d miss out on parking lot donuts, which is a major part of what makes life worth living. A real tough question here, which should be fielded by our sister magazine, Stoned Philosophy Quarterly.
Power window won’t roll up all the way Beats the shit out of me. If you figure out a solution to this, please write to our magazine and we’ll send you a free copy of our pinup calendar (this year’s is mostly revealing photos of two-stroke engines.) The last time this happened, a cop smashed my window for me during an arrest attempt so the point was moot.
A lot of people in the internet-forums-based community have recently switched to running diesel oil in their gasoline-powered automobiles. There’s a lot of reasons for this change, ranging from “I heard the zinc would help protect the valvetrain” to “Rotella sounds like a kind of street taco and I was shopping for oil just before lunch.” Now, are there a lot of good reasons for this change? No, but I run it anyway, because I read on the internet that it might keep the inside of my engine from becoming the outside of my engine.
I think there’s a sort of irritation on the manufacturer’s part, however, because they’ve started running these aggressive radio ads about how their product is great for diesel trucks doing big diesel work and then being refilled with diesel. Nobody has ever accused me of not being able to understand when I’m being passive-aggressively Yelled At, and this situation is no different. So I’ve been looking around for cheaper oil that wants my business.
At the store, I was bewildered by the sheer variety of weights and kinds. Without the internet’s help (my smartphone fell through the hole in the floor of my car again) there was absolutely no chance that I could pick the right combination of variables for my specific engine condition. I went home, bewildered, unable to think. That’s where I ran into my neighbour, who stood approximately six feet away from me (not for the reason you think) and then asked me if I wanted to come help out at the Mercedes dealership for a weekend, because his regular guy decided he could make more money hoarding and reselling baking yeast.
This was the perfect opportunity. Now I could sup of a variety of gently used high-zoot engine oils - they changed their oil after only five thousand kilometers, there’s still plenty of synthetics package left in there, can’t they read the internet? - and what’s more, I’d get paid for it, too. I’d still be working there, too, except for a little boo-boo. The oil change bay got a little dead later in the day, so I pulled in my trusty-but-rusty Volare to dump in some of the new-to-me oil from the waste bin. Unfortunately, when I pulled the 318′s drain plug, most of the crankshaft came out with it. New S-class owners hate it when they pull into the service bay and see a common labourer trying to push his shattered Mopar into the parking lot.
I have to be honest that I didn’t expect the registry to have changed their vehicle-registration standards from “show up, bring money” to “fight to the death in an elaborate duel.” That’s the economy these days, I guess. Coincidentally, I’d been preparing for an apocalypse-coliseum-death-duel sitchy my entire life to date. Sometimes things just work out, you know?
When the founding fathers created the small-block V8 engine, they weren’t thinking about its use in post-apocalyptic carnage. Oh no: they were just sick of only having four bangers around, and thought “what if we put two of these bad boys together?” Absolute genius. And it’s that genius that propels my shabby Volare over the sandy mound at the centre of what used to be our minor-league baseball stadium before the government decided we should engage in fights to the death in order to get a plate for a new Volare.
Now, this Volare - like all my Volares - does have a couple holes in its baby-shit-brown body. Okay, it’s more holes than body. I had a fire extinguisher fall out through the floor on the highway once. Obviously, that’s not great for a battle environment, so I’ve zip-tied some chunks of my neighbour’s trash cans to the body. It adds a little bit of weight, but the Malaise Plymouth is still light and agile in comparison to the DMV assessor’s fully-loaded Durango. With a quick Scandinavian flick, I’ve T-boned it and sent it careening onto its side, now unable to target me with the suspiciously government-appearing machine guns on the hood.
I began to sense a conspiracy. Just minutes before I had attempted the registration of this car, some lady in front of me did the same thing for hers, and there was no mention of a brutal post-apocalyptic murder fight. At the time, I had just chalked it up to some sort of special seniors’ benefit, but now I realize that the DMV clerk was none other than my old nemesis, Officer Bringdown, wearing a fake moustache.
After clambering onto the side of the stricken Durango, I stared into the face of my nemesis, eyes crazed with bloodlust. He was laughing.
“We got your ass on the photo radar!” he shrieked, before fainting from blood loss against the plush-yet-cracked leather of the Dodge.
It’s okay to get a bit bent out of shape with all the crazy shit that’s going on right now. Because I mostly stay at home and run various Internet scams to afford my lifestyle, it hasn’t changed too much for me. However, there’s two big ways in which I have been impacted: buying shitty cars, and going for my weekly grocery run. These are difficult to do without getting really close to people, but I’ve devised a solution that I think will make everyone happy.
Now, I know what you’re thinking, and yes, you’re right. A Smart ForTwo will basically fit into your average grocery store aisle, but the turning circle is absolute dogshit. You’re going to end up plowing into displays of Mini Eggs and end-caps of almost-expired fruit cups every time you finish up in one aisle and need to make a tight U-ey to get into the next one. Also, the cabin air filter is a huge job to replace, so you’re not going to swap that thing out every time you get home and slam in a new disinfected one. Plus, they make a weird dying sound when you try to do a burnout. Just forget about the whole thing.
My initial solution was to go hang out at the police auctions for a little while, to see if I could get a gas mask. While those went really quick to some kind of German fetish group, there was one other opportunity. The old bomb defusing robot. Sure, it had a few dings and dents on it (more from careless loading/unloading than bombs,) but it had the key features: I could operate it from far away in complete safety, and I could shout instructions at terrified hostages through the onboard microphone. This was the perfect vehicle to use to get groceries.
The only problem is, I didn’t own any cars that it would fit into. Because of the lack of affordable housing in the area, all the available vans (both passenger- and paedo-) had been co-opted and turned into Airbnbs by the more starving members of the landlord class. And a pickup truck would also be untenable, mostly because it would mean I’d have to help my neighbours and friends move. I figured that if I got a big enough battery onto the robot, though, I could probably ride it to the grocery store, and then control it from out in the parking lot.
My initial run went great. I was able to go out, grab some groceries with the manipulator claws, and stuff them into a basket that I had welded to the robot’s crotchal area. It was a little more work trying to accurately pay for those groceries. The robot’s arm doesn’t reach quite far enough to tap my credit card on the pin pad, so I had to kind of ride one of the tracks up on the side of the conveyor belt in order to get the right angle on it. I think the cashier appreciated the break from his usual routine of being terrified by replacing it with some spicy new confused terror.
I’ve never been, but I assume that when you go to an actual engineering school, they try to teach you how to make things accessible for repair. Then, when you get your first job, you’d do just about anything to impress the gruff senior guy on the other end of the cubicle farm. And if that means jumping at the chance to figure out a way for Subassembly 89-F can even fit behind Subassembly 72-Q, you’ll do it. So when, inevitably, this turns out to be a big problem and it’s 4AM the night before the deadline, whether or not you can actually get a bolt into a position that it can be reached by a human being is no longer a part of your giving-a-shit calculus.
Which is not to say that I have a sort of sympathy for the dickheads who make these things completely inaccessible, but it’s definitely bordering on empathy. And to think my therapist said I was making “no, perhaps negative” progress in that report he sent out that I wasn’t supposed to see, and definitely wasn’t supposed to impersonate a postal worker in order to intercept. Where was I? Oh yes, the inaccessible fasteners. There’s a whole cottage industry of special triple-jointed socket extensions, screw-extractor pliers and magic remote-release hose clamp grippers that deal with this kind of shithouse bodgery, and I’m here to tell you that you need almost none of them.
I want to say two words to you that will change your future. Just two words. Plasma cutter. Yeah, that sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? You probably think those things are expensive, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. The combination of Chinese lowest-dollar-imaginable infrastructure and greatly relaxed federal oversight for safety standards means that you can now pick up a pretty good meltin’ wand for under three hundo. You’ll make that money back in a weekend by finally chopping out some primo patch panels from that washer & dryer set that’s been sitting on your porch since the Hoover administration.
Now you no longer have to bow to the whims of the eggheads who decided that you needed to unbolt Subassembly 72-Q fully before attempting to service 89-F. You can skip right to the fun part, by literally cutting corners. And if you cut a hole in 72-Q on the way there, you’re really no worse off than you would be originally. Probably don’t even need it for the car to work, but then again I’m no engineer.
For many years, I was a “train guy.” I’d look at a train, and I’d be able to tell you who made the engine, what the track gauge was, and even a rough estimate of what I thought it was hauling and where to. Then I got my drivers’ license, and I no longer particularly cared about trains, because that was a whole other exam to be licensed to operate one, and I didn’t want to get yelled at again because my 900 ton diesel-electric locomotive yielded when there was no yield sign at the intersection.
However, trains still held some appeal. If you’re one of the people just now who fixated on my mention of the powertrain contained within the locomotive, then you get it. They got a whole pile of horsepower, and when you weigh as much as a train, you need it. In a Nissan Stanza, you see, that power-to-weight ratio changes quite a bit. Unfortunately, so does the structural reinforcement required of the Stanza, but I figured as long as I maintained my momentum going into corners and was careful when operating the car (the engine blocked my entire forward vision as well as that of any vehicles immediately adjacent to mine) the extra pork wouldn’t really be noticeable on the street when I used it to drive to work.
However, I was totally wrong about this. With the extra length of the engine added on, it was sort of like operating a limousine. Now, I’ve operated a limousine before, sometimes even legally. And the first thing you learn about them is that they do not fit into a standard-length parking spot. At our office (a trendy start-up incubator) anything larger or gaudier than a Land Rover clothed in compressed-diamond vinyl wrap was simply not going to be able to find a parking spot. I considered parking sideways and taking up multiple spots, but I was afraid someone would ding the doors on my car in anger. Have you ever tried to find replacement doors for a 29-year-old Nissan econobox?
So I did the only thing that was reasonable. I quit my job. Which probably worked out for the best, anyway, because right after that the Stanza’s tires popped from the weight. Lucky for me, I broke down next to a train crossing. The track width of my midsize Nissan was just about right that I could push the car onto the rails, to which the mounting flange of the now-naked steel wheels made a perfect mate - with some encouragement from a 16lb. sledge. Now, I’m a freelance train operator. Who says childhood dreams never come true? Only the government.
Everybody says fishing is relaxing, but if you accidentally drive your fully-loaded-for-a-base-model Toyota Carib into a river, all of a sudden everyone’s mad. It’s not even a protected wetland, I screamed at the cops from the roof of my sinking station wagon. My words fell on deaf ears as the brains between those ears worked hard to figure out what percentage of the oil leaking down the river originated from my car instead of the factory upstream, like God intended.
When I was a kid, the television was stuck permanently on one channel. This is partially because my dad found the TV in a dumpster, and partially because he kept picking up other projects around the area and never got around to actually fixing the channel-select dial. At the time, I didn’t mind. Back then we had this magical television channel called TNN, which showed two things: monster truck rallies and high-dollar sports fishing from a power boat. Even if I could have changed to other channels, why bother? They just had lame shit, like public-access information programmes and alerts about incoming tornadoes.
Obviously, while I took much more of an interest in the “lifted fibreglass truck burning straight nitromethane” field of sports achievement, something about those fishing shows still stuck in my brain. Maybe it was the fancy sports cars the best fishermen would get as prizes from the tourneys. Or maybe it was the fact that the powerboats themselves were equipped with heinously overpowered - and often two-stroke, which probably is the origin story of that particular kink - Vee Aight engines. Yes indeed.
Now, I’ve never been able to encounter a high-dollar V8 owned by a hick without seeing if I could do the same thing better, or faster, or at the very least cheaper than them using a small Japanese four-banger. So on that one fateful day, I could hardly have been blamed for when my past and present collided and produced that whole kerfluffle that ruined the mass baptism downstream. Well, unless some of those kids got some childhood trauma out of it and have thus forever had the shape of their lives altered. I’m figuring I could use some unpaid-intern wrenching assistance in about twenty years from now.
There are three big heroes in the American pantheon of modern-day gods: the crusading attorney on the side of the people, the trailer-park grifter, and the guy who drives a W-body Chevrolet. Yes indeed: whether it be a hogged-out Lumina or a gently-miled, baby-diaper-wiped Grand Prix, all the world loves a W-body driver. It wasn’t always this way, though.
When the W-body was first introduced, way back in 1988, the world simply wasn’t ready. These were futuristic, sleek Space Shuttles for the road. American drivers wanted a more robust, rear-wheel-drive chassis that can do common everyday tasks like jumping across a damaged bridge in Hazzard County, destroying a logging camp, or getting revenge on the Devil Himself for casting your daughter into Hell. Chevy wasn’t daunted by this initial lack of success: they came back with more front-wheel-drive personal luxury cars than Toyota could shake a Caldina at. They would simply force everyone to love the W-body, as they had loved it.
Soon, nearly every storied General Motors model name had been subsumed into the “slightly large coupe” chassis. Cutlass, Lumina, even Monte Carlo: if your uncle’s probation officer drove one in the 70s, then it was now a name on the perfect family vehicle with which to take the fight to the Chrysler Intrepid, the cloud-car nemesis to all things GM. A cynic would say they did this on purpose, to prop up flagging midsize sedan sales by slapping any name with positive focus-group opinions onto this chassis.
Now, perhaps there is some truth to this: 80s and early-90s GM largely had no idea what they were doing, because the quality of cocaine had decreased markedly due to the semi-success of the War on Drugs. It also helped that the Japanese (always referred to as “The Imports”) were going through a bit of a tough time, with the average salaryman in Nippon now no longer able to afford two six-hundred-horsepower fire-breathing all-wheel-steering Mitsubishi personal luxury coupes and having to settle instead for a cheaper, more reliable family sedan. Without all that pressure, it didn’t really hurt GM any to chuck a 120-horsepower V6 into a Buick and tell their dealers to eat it or beat it.
However, if you look beyond the narrow sociopolitical context of the introduction of the W-body, you’ll find something beautiful. These fucking things seem to run forever, their automotive cockroachdom only to be surpassed by the J-bodied Cavaliers and Sunfires a scant few years later. Now, nothing on them works, but you can still get to your job at the Stripper Mart on I-82 without ever wondering if the temperature gauge is actually working. And that’s the true American way.
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tags: chevrolet, chevrolet lumina, pontiac, pontiac grand prix, toyota, toyota caldina, mitsubishi, mitsubishi 3000gt, oldsmobile, oldsmobile cutlass, chevrolet monte carlo, chrysler, chrysler intrepid, chevrolet cavalier, pontiac sunfire, jesus that's a lot of models in one post, it's weird how they're all the same though, now i want a buick century
Is it possible, my friends, to enjoy working on drum brakes? Even the simplest shoe replacement might as well be a throwback to the bad old days of motoring, when you end up following in the footsteps of dear old Uncle Granddad when he decided that 100,000 miles on a 64 Comet meant it was done with its “first engine” and, therefore, needed a total rebuild from the shortblock up.
If anyone other than you has ever touched the drum brake system on your car - and chances are that set also includes yourself, because I’ve seen what medication you’ve been taking - then you’re going to end up tearing the entire assembly back to the backing plates and putting on a whole new hardware set. It’s the only way to be sure, and also that way the little springs and shit are still brightly factory-painted, instead of brake-dust-coloured. That alone makes them way easier to find when they spring off into nothingness and end up lodged inside a dust bunny in the dark corner of your garage that you think might harbour a race of hyper-intelligent rats who feed only on wiring harnesses.
I mean, there are good drum brake systems out there; it’s just that you can never truly be sure that you did everything right. Even the grizzled professional mechanics I talk to at the bar are unsure of their skills, as they only have thirty-plus years of dealing with them. These little Lament Configurations of steampunk leverage no doubt originated with some super-genius like Charles Babbage, and everyone has simply been too afraid to do anything about it until the Brits finally came up with a disc brake system that didn’t sever the feet and then heads of pedestrians after ejecting a rapidly-spinning chunk of white hot steel into a crowd of Formula One spectators. And after that, everyone else needed a few more years to be “really sure.”
To answer my original question, I believe it is possible to enjoy working on drum brakes. It just has to be one of those circumstances where you are threatening the car with being crushed if it doesn’t comply, and then are fully equipped to do so the next time that God-damned shoe hold-down spring won’t clip through on both sides at once.
If there is a place on Earth where dreams are spawned and dashed as easily as they are in a salvage automotive auction, I don’t want to know about it. No mere casino can compare to the rush of putting in a lowball bid on a Plymouth Sapporo that is barely identifiable after decades of corrosion met a millisecond of high-speed rollover. Such a bid could either give you - for a short period of time, at least - the rush of small-ball victory, or it could be the kickoff to a moody weekend full of surly drinking.
Many times in the past, I have picked up a really great find for pocket change. Primo vehicles that now resemble modern art, ready to moulder on my driveway instead of some other asshole’s. Of course, after all the fees, it’s no longer such a good deal, but if you count the add-ons and supplementary fees as part of the original purchase price then you’re just being a wet blanket and I don’t want to know you.
Really, what you’re buying here is dreams. A chance to get in a vehicle that you could not otherwise find or afford, at the absolute bottom-dollar of the market. Everyone will be envious of you once you are tooling around in your rebuilt-title hot rod that you brought back from the grave with your own two hands in order to save a buck. That is, as long as thousands of hours of your labour can be considered “free,” but again - wet blanket. Who do you think you are, my accountant?
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to bidding exactly seventy-four dollars and nineteen cents on this gently-rear-ended VW Thing. Yes, the extraordinarily expensive engine is in the back, and the title does say “unregisterable.” Those are but small impediments to the power of dreams.
There’s a definite appeal to the pick-up truck. Maybe it all started in those great old westerns on the TV such as 1961′s The Comancheros, where John Wayne drives a 1996 Ford F-250 and picks up a single bag of groceries before returning four blocks to his studio apartment. No matter where they picked this memetic disease up without washing their hands first, everyone can agree that a pick-up truck lends an air of aw-shucks legitimacy and even a heapin’ helpin’ of can-do male heteronormativity to the proceedings.
It is for this reason that pick-up trucks are some of my easiest flips. You can find gently-savaged used trucks in rural prefectures across the Great Occupied Territories, and then for the cost of a tank of gas and a carwash to hose all the deer blood out of the bed, sell ‘em to city politicians and lawyers at a profit. They get the vibe of being folksy and homey, and you collect several hundred dollars that you can then pour into your small business of obliterating tires and choking Mother Earth with nitromethane fumes.
Once in awhile, though, I pick the “wrong” truck. You see, small four-banger Japanese trucks are simply not as manly as one that makes the same (or less) horsepower and requires twice as many cylinders to do it. Plus, most of them come with foreign devilry such as a manual transmission or “no backup camera.” And that just won’t do - although they want to give the appearance of roughing it, it is absolutely critical that you understand that these trucks will never again be used for anything heavier-lifting than Instagram ever again.
Although it seemed that whenever I made this mistake, I’d end up with a loss, each time so far I’ve managed to get out of buying the wrong truck by instead selling them on to people who do real work with them, like groundskeepers and demolition derby competitors. Those people, however, have no money, and so my profits are squeaky-tight: not enough to pursue my true passion in life, which is buying broken Volkswagen exotics from the salvage auction and making YouTube videos pointing at their elaborate trunk hinges.
The unpredictability of the entire revenue stream has so irked my accountant that he demands I only buy late-model Chevrolet pickups with more than four cylinders. Fine by me, I said. What he doesn’t know, of course, is that they made a whole bunch of those suckers with five-bangers, and only European refugees homesick for their precious 80s Audi rally cars will demand those.
“Egads!” shrieked Professor Skidpad, after looking at my latest test results. I leaned in close, not knowing which way this whole thing was going to go. That’s why I’m so grateful for modern science. There’s a lot of ambiguity in the world, and before Francis Bacon shoved his smart-ass method in front of our faces, most of us just stared at the clouds and cursed an uncaring god when our cattle died or we missed out on that long-wheelbase Lexus at auction.
Rather than answer my unstated question, the Professor just did a full-body leap over the lab bench and took off down the hall, shrieking and hollering. This must be excellent news, I finally decided, and - after collecting the various handheld video game systems and automotive enthusiast magazines I had brought with me to help pass the time - followed in hot pursuit. I caught up to him out in the parking lot. He had ducked underneath the automatic transmission pan of my ‘86 Vandura and seemed to be weeping openly, not unlike the aforementioned transmission.
I was gripped with a sudden feeling that I now had to explain myself, and that through negotiation perhaps I could minimize whatever negative consequences were about to sprout from my test. A lot of really cool people on the internet had experienced that van life, I tried to explain to him by way of showing him flickering YouTube videos in between 6-minute-long ads. It was a noble attempt, but fruitless as the Professor kept refusing to look directly at the screen and would instead start climbing up further into the body of the van, nestling in amongst the wiring harnesses of the engine doghouse, crying all the time. I considered just peeling out of the parking lot before the cops could respond, but the extra strain that the weight of his body would put on the fragile wiring harnesses would mean I’d at least lose the speedo, if not the 2-3 shift solenoid.
“You know, I bet you could get published with results like that,” I murmured into the undercarriage of the van in a tone of voice I would normally use to lure a stray cat from inside a dumpster. “And you could p-hack it all you wanted to because nobody is going to find a second case of Previa Madness.”
In theory, air conditioning is a fantastic invention, making it possible for human beings to occupy parts of the world that previous generations would mistake for Hell. However, in practice, air conditioning never works. At least it doesn’t for me, because I buy cars from sellers who always claim it “needs a recharge.”
If you’re one of the people who says this, stop. While it is factually true, it’s sort of like saying someone you just shot “needs a blood transfusion.” That shit is just going to pour out onto the street again, and maybe cause the pistons inside the compressor to grenade from lack of lubrication, spraying shrapnel throughout the bloodstream. I failed medical school because I kept diverting the used scalpels from the autoclave room in to order to flip them as metal scrap.
Air conditioning in automobiles is a whole specialization that requires intricate knowledge of a very basic mechanical system. It needs specialized tools that cost almost twenty dollars at the local auto parts store, and more importantly it needs you to actually find and fix a leak instead of shrugging when the air conditioning stops working five minutes after you refill it while it coincidentally vents corrosive gases directly onto your windshield. So it should come as no surprise that the previous owners of my cars, who often fail at basic maintenance tasks (”replace oil sometime after 1996” and “don’t use curbs to stop,”) also haven’t done this, and almost subconsciously make up some kind of excuse that air conditioning refrigerant gets “used up.”
Have I recharged the air conditioning on my Polara? Absolutely not. What I have done instead is pick up a window air conditioner from Home Depot and duct-taped the entire assembly into the hole in the rear door window that was broken when I bought it. Believe me, it’s much better for the environment, as long as the duct tape holds.
Recently, while out for a government-tolerated constitutional around my neighbourhood (okay, my Ramcharger broke a block from my place and I had to walk home), I noticed that one of my neighbours had a rotten project limousine. Somehow they seem to have lucked out in the home lottery, as their driveway was the exact length of the elongated Town Car.
I knew two things: one, that I was intensely jealous of this driveway, and two, that they must have some unused garage capacity behind the Lincoln. Therefore, I resolved to become friends with this person, and potentially even the kind of friend who doesn’t just leave his shitbox Escort GT in your driveway for eighteen months before coming over with a pack of expired Costco sausage by way of “payment.” After all, if they’ve got a beater project limo, then chances are they are some kind of freak.
While maintaining an appropriate distance, I knocked on the door using my boot. However, my steel-toed military-surplus boot must have reminded them too much of a SWAT raid prelude, because I heard a window get smashed out and then scrabbling from the backyard. When I went around to take a look, I saw the presumptive owner of the place jumping over a fence and fleeing down the greenbelt.
After waiting around for a few more minutes, I decided it would be rude not to at least make sure my new friend’s window got taped up. Surely, when he realized his error and returned, he would be grateful enough that I would have that coveted garage spot for free. I let myself in, and immediately found some duct tape on the kitchen table. A lot of duct tape. More than I would ever use in my life. Then I turned around and caught a look at the cages.
The cops were very thankful for my anonymous report. In fact, the Mayor Hisself gave me the key to the city. It’s been very useful, mostly because now I can just let myself in to the city hall parking garage to stow my rusty beaters. Sure, they’ll be surprised when civilization returns and they suddenly have nowhere to park, but that possibly can’t be less than one fiscal quarter away.
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tags: dodge, dodge ramcharger, lincoln, lincoln town car, limousines, ford, ford escort gt
Have you ever wondered just how many promotional mugs are made every year? If you’ve worked for even a small-medium sized company, then chances are that someone in your office has ordered a couple dozen mugs and t-shirts. Not all of these mugs get held onto forever by their recipients, because that would be insane. Chances are that they’ll end up at garage sales, accidentally destroyed during an office move, or even introduced into the cupboard of a new office.
Statisticians struggle to figure out the exact number of mugs that are still out there. Some of the guys I used to work with on particle accelerators with back in Boston have a pretty solid model right now. It was very accurate, and got used by economists all over the world, up until the government sold a nuclear survival bunker and the WeWork office that took over the space found all those old cups commemorating the project kickoff meeting for World War II.
It seems wasteful to me, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that ceramic coffee mugs are one of the very few things we can make that are fully renewable. They’re just dirt that got really hot at one point, and I don’t know exactly what the glaze is made out of (beetles?) but it’s not like I’m running out of 90%-empty cans of automotive clearcoat any time soon either. In thousands of years from now, our distant descendants will still be pumping those fuckers out, probably to celebrate the successful completion of a corporate migration to the newest version of Windows. Karen in Accounting will still want to use her family-heirloom Access database from 1996.
So the next time you drop a ceramic mug in the kitchen, don’t cry. Even if it’s the one you really-really liked, with the rim that was just the right size, and the cartoon image of the koala saying something turbo-racist, there are probably six million more where that came from within a day’s drive.
For all the peculiar coincidences, unexplained supernatural phenomena and downright weird shit I’ve seen in my life, nothing could compare to what my friend, Steve “Nipples” Hemingway, told me on the phone from his own seclusion fortress. While I barely held onto the receiver with my shaking hands, he stumbled through an explanation that he had actually finished a project.
Turns out that while he had nothing much to do, my buddy decided he was going to actually start checking off items on his long-term beater Polara. One thing led to another, and then he ran completely out of items after a solid weekend. Ever the smartass, I attempted to verify this ridiculous story by asking what happened on this week’s popular television. He said he didn’t even watch Netflix at all during the entire escapade, which he now credited for his great success.
What really rankled is that then he had some suggestions for my own projects. Rather than sitting around all day in my underwear, I should get dressed immediately and head out to do some work on the damn things, every single day, whether or not I actually felt like it. This, I believed, was heresy. I am an artist, and an artist can only work when he (or she) feels a burst of creative inspiration. Coincidentally, most artists die unknown, because their best-publicized work was a sketch of a face on a cocktail napkin, or in my case the 1987 Skoda Rapid that the fire department got called on when I couldn’t shut it off in front of that daycare.
It didn’t really matter, in the end, because with his newfound burst of productivity, Steve was soon sneaking over to my place to work on my garbage. I knew he was doing it, of course. It was hard to miss all the hundred-decibel swearing, or the spent tetanus vaccine syringes scattered around the yard. Maintaining the convenient fiction that he was some kind of great organizer, picking up after his flunky friends, was too important to him. That, and I had to keep my distance. That kind of getting shit done might be contagious.
Once again, I was fielding an angry phone call from the district supervisor of the shipping company. Usually, all I have to do is remind them of how many packages I ship through them and they shut up for fear of upsetting The Share Price, but this time was different. Apparently getting an entire Daihatsu Rocky shipped to you requires a loading dock at the receiving end, because that junkyard in Japan made the innocent mistake of assuming that I must be some kind of industrial salvage operation and not just some weirdo with a backyard full of more steel than grass.
I asked if I could just pretend to be a loading dock. Before the landlord attempted to “Ascend to the Spiritual Plane” last summer as part of that business-major cult he joined, he had a functioning deck in the back yard. As far as I could tell, that deck was pretty much at truck unloading level, and if I could push aside enough of the shattered Plymouth Arrows to make room, the driver could back right in and slide off a tasty little chunk of Japanese shitbox. No can do, said the company man. There are Rules that forbid this, he added. Out of his hands.
Upset, I began to think about other alternatives. Maybe I could take over some of the thousands of miles of abandoned industrial property surrounding my neighbourhood? Too far, they said. It’d have to be really close to the original destination address unless I wanted to pay the Extra Service Fee, a concept which made my whole body shiver in a way that probably wasn’t due to the skin mites I picked up last year from that decrepit Tempo I dug out of that cornfield. I struggled to come up with an idea, and then it finally hit me.
As always, the solution was dealt with by buying another motor vehicle. It turns out that there is a special provision in the law for when two flatbed trucks back up ass-to-ass and transfer their contents from one truck to the other. The name for it can’t be shared in polite company, but rest assured that the act was beautiful in its own way.
Nobody knows why the mandolin festival was cancelled, but I have a pretty decent idea. You see, the local TV channel’s Community Events Cruiser had been cruelly decommissioned, without the populace being told about it. To make such an admission in public would permanently weaken Channel 3 in their eternal battle against their cross-town rivals, Channel 4. It had to be covered up, gotten rid of quietly. So how do I know about it? Because that Community Events Cruiser has been sitting in my backyard/swamp for the last month.
At first, they were just going to crush it, but then one of my secretly-installed double agents intervened and redirected the vehicle to my junkyard. It helped that the “official” yard didn’t really want to pay them much more than $75 for a holed-body Econoline with the reliability record of a windvane. I found myself with a high-mileage, shitbox news van, and nothing to do with it. The only answer was to Thermite the VIN off of the frame, spraybomb the body, and go into business as my own kind of news reporter. An ambush news reporter. I’d go in deep, and get the dirt that the authorities tried to hide from the common man.
Now, not a lot of corruption goes on in my sleepy little burg. Some would consider this a positive, but when you’re trying to launch a new countercultural news program on the internet, it really cuts into your upload schedule. I could feel those sweet advertising dollars for memory-foam mattress toppers slipping away. Strapped for ideas, I decided to just drive down to the local park and start asking the tough questions of whoever it is that I found.
There, ensconced within the protective barrier of the decorative gazebo, sat the performers for the mandolin festival. As I approached at a decent clip (I paid for the whole speedometer - I’m going to use the whole speedometer), I began to feel as if this were destiny. If nothing else, I’d get some solid B-roll.
Problem is, after getting caught up in the excitement of the news industry, I perhaps had too much confidence in the braking system of the old Ford van. That’s how my first story on Switch Action News 1 was a horrific dashcam accident. Perhaps my first incisive investigative questions should have been to Channel 3, asking them why exactly they threw out a perfectly good news van for no good reason other than horrific structural rust.
Friends, is there anything more frustrating than a car that just won’t start? You turn the key, hoping for a different result this time, and it can’t get there. Maybe you’re missing fuel, and the starter spins valiantly until it burns out. The worst of all of them is when your ignition timing is just so slightly, devilishly off. Everything sounds like it’s going to work, but then it somehow doesn’t. It’s enough to make you pull your hair out.
If, like me, you’re into rescuing fucked-up cars like you’re saving dogs from a puppy mill, then you will never throw in the towel even when it turns out to be an intermittent fault inside the wiring harness that causes a no-start condition on every second Tuesday when the humidity is above 95%. No, you want everything to start reliably. Unless it’s an Italian car, because those look pretty good even when they’re not moving. Hey, people spend more money for uglier furniture.
Thing is, everything in a starting episode happens so quickly that you have no way of diagnosing it without expensive equipment. Expensive equipment that, if you didn’t buy it, would leave you with more money in your pocket with which to buy another broken car. If only there was a way to slow down the starting process, so that you can make sure all your Is are crossed and your Ts are dotted.
Friends, I introduce to you the Canadian winter. Even at temperatures as high as -20°C, you’ll notice considerable amounts of fuel gelling, ignition coils with a gap the width of the Grand Canyon, and sometimes even a frozen-solid belt or two. And no matter how many times you try to crank, it’s not like the starter motor is going to overheat. I am accepting spots on my driveway for next winter starting at only the low, low price of four hundred dollars. And if you don’t end up fixing it, just leave the car for me to finish up and your stay is free.
Like the commercial says, there’s no wrong way to do savage burnouts at the neighbourhood block party. It’s a party, after all, and what better way to celebrate your freedom from the grim spectre of state-mandated traction control than to light up a set of last season’s meats and send them into the great hereafter?
It all started when that guy on my block - you know the type - decided he was going to race his Ram up and down the street every night for several weeks. I’m a bit of a night owl myself, but having to hear the exhaust leak in his decade-old log manifold at 0400 hours on the dot was just a little bit too much for your sanity. Something had to be done.
Now, normally, people would engage the police or other form of local law enforcement to get involved. I’m no snitch, and more importantly, the cops no longer came to my neighbourhood as part of the Photo Radar Accords of 2019. That’s not some kind of agreement; it’s literally a bunch of ‘89 Honda Accords that I outfitted with salvage fighter-jet electronic countermeasures and a precision-targeted HERF gun that could blow out a handheld speed radar unit as well as everything with a microprocessor within four blocks. Were the Accords converted to carburetors, you ask, trying to catch me in a lie? Of course not. You think an 80s Honda would stop running just because you turned its ECU into some kind of weird soup?
The only answer, therefore, was to beat the Ram-owning gentleman at his own game. I waited up throughout the day and night, waiting for the time when he would return. At that time, I deployed a series of tactical assaults from my weapons suppliers, Michelin and Tianfeng Motor Vehicle Pneumatic Tyre Concern. It is an unfortunate coincidence that was the exact moment he was having some sort of birthday party for his pre-teen daughter, but the occasional birthday clown pelted with smouldering tire rubber is an acceptable casualty.
Now that all the thrift stores are closed, my neighbours have started chucking their old shit onto the lawn. I’m told this is related to “spring cleaning,” which is some kind of task that is done yearly by people who sleep on a bed at night instead of nestling into a rat warren of old Hot Rod magazines, vintage heroin paraphernalia, and Atari 5200 cartridges. What it meant for me is that I was no longer paying the ridiculous prices that Goodwill expected for primo, half-broken shit that’s a little bit sticky for some reason no matter how well you clean it.
When I bought all those filter masks last year, people laughed. You don’t need a full isolated rebreather for spray painting some rims outdoors, they said. And then those same people noticed that I was in fact gluing horse teeth to the mouthpieces in order to create of them some kind of pagan skull mask, and then driving very slowly through the nightlife part of town while shooting partially-burnt nitrous flames out of the hood zoomies on my ‘66 Cyclone. After that, nobody really said anything about the masks. Well, who’s laughing now? It would be me, as I root through the accumulated trash of my neighbours in the middle of the day.
At the first house I raided, I expected that the occupants would come out and stop me, to yell at my scavenging of Pentium 233 Packard Bells and tearing of copper wire out of old light fixtures. They didn’t. Instead, terrified of the illnesses which I no doubt was infested with, they just stood at the window and watched me with sad eyes. The whole family. Staring at me, like I was a grisly car accident. Even the cops who drove by refused to even notice my presence, breaking eye contact whenever I tried to lure them in with a crazy druggie stare.
Once I realized that no one would stop me, I was much less careful with every house afterwards. On I went, tearing into trash piles like some sort of raccoon, and carrying all the crap back to my hovel. I was unstoppable, a trash-picking, dumpster-diving God among men. Soon, I no longer had room in my home for all this great junk, and I had to let it spill out into the driveway. Here, again, nobody stopped me. Eventually it poured onto the neighbour’s lawn, and they could do nothing but ineffectually yell and pound on the window as I frolicked in my garden of garbage.
Soon, though, I could not keep track of everything. I grew bored of the stuff that I had, and besides, I simply did not give enough of a fuck to fix any of it. With a feverish, shaky hand, I threw out one used kleenex in the trash bin. I felt great; I realized that there was an opportunity here to throw out this stuff. “Spring cleaning,” eh? Perhaps this ritual purging of crap to get newer and cooler crap had some merit after all.
Eventually, I shook out an entire truck bed worth of stuff I no longer wanted into the bed of my dilapidated ‘71 F100. Most of it fell right back out through the holes, yes, but I gave it my best effort. Now, I’m just waiting until the city dump opens up again. I hear they had some guy throw out a dirt bike before all this happened. Maybe they’ll trade.
Here at Switch Motors, we think that we’ve cracked the nut on self-driving car technology. Science fiction authors and miscellaneous futurists have long debated whether or not it is possible for us to devise a computer program that is indistinguishable from a human being. Introducing the Shitty Drivertron.
Now, you might assume that a robot driver has to be a lot better than a regular human being to be trusted. A lot of people made this mistake, and that’s why they’re still in the lab, endlessly debugging things like “sometimes it gets confused by white trucks in the sun” when we just don’t give a fuck. Our system keeps to the road, unless the road has snow on it, or it’s raining, or it’s night time. All it does is keep your shit in the lane, and set the cruise control. That’s all it needs to do.
Surprisingly, though, our statistics from testing still prove it out to be better than the average motorist, which makes me ask just how bad most of you are. Even our trained racing drivers, who you would assume are the finest motorists around, occasionally attempted to kiss a curb when shoulder-checking, or drove with their knees while answering an important text. One of our test drivers wasn’t able to stay off the sidewalk for more than five minutes at a time.
And it’s during those times the Shitty Drivertron is designed to take over, producing the bare-minimum competence of an inexperienced teenager who just got their drivers’ license and is terrified of driving into the mall parking lot. That’s fine - when you get there, you can take care of parking. The Shitty Drivertron’s job is done.
The best part is, the “Good Enough™” innovation doesn’t stop there. Here at Switch Motors we’re hard at work on a whole series of other plug-in modules that can enhance your Shitty Drivertron. Keep using the same racial and sexist epithets when you get cut off? The new Slurtron adds over sixteen exabytes of profanity - in all known human languages - and uses sophisticated machine learning to identify personality flaws, visible disabilities, and vehicle models to microtarget a satisfying, machine-perfect insult.
There’s a lot of prototype cars out there. Weird, quirky, one-off shit that barely functions? That’s what I like to call “daily driver” territory. Problem is, a lot of these cars just end up destroyed, because a bunch of chickenshit accountants at Ford are worried that someone will sue them because their darling Timmy thought a Merkur Scorpio made entirely out of sculpting clay was crash-safe at 80mph.
Now, I will freely admit that there is also a bit of ego-stroking here. If all the world’s greatest automotive engineers couldn’t turn one of these things into a working car, and I can, then that must mean that I am a super genius. Or a weird pervert who has too much free time and a Soviet ride-on lawnmower engine that fits oddly well into the trunk of an AMX-III. Also, when I’m done, it’s a one-of-a-kind ride that stops traffic, including at the gas station where my fellow motorists ask me annoying questions about whether my “Delorean” can really time travel. It’s a ‘78 Jaguar XJ-Spider concept, I’ll have you know, and the only way it moves is forward. Chronologically, I mean, because the gearbox once again sheared off the pot-metal input shaft I swaged together in my kitchen so I’m pushing this shit home.
A lot of people ask me: if you have all this skill, then why spend a fortune trying to hunt down prototypes? Why not design my own poorly-thought-out, looks-over-common-sense automobile and risk my life in that instead? The simple answer is that I’m really bad at bodywork. I was cursed as a child by a witch that grew up at the end of our block after trying to construct a soap box derby car powered entirely by leftover Estes toy rocket engines. She gave me the curse of Anti-Pininfarina, where I could only make cars uglier and more utilitarian, never delicate and beautiful. Also, sanding Bondo takes for-fucking-ever, and I don’t have that kind of free time because I’m constantly up to my wrists in hose clamps, parts-store rebate scams, and injector replacements.
Wait, what was that? These prototypes are worth lots of money to collectors? Well, get them the fuck out of my house. Wow, that was a close one.
A lot of people have slept on the Mitsubishi Starion. Whether it was because of its awkward name, its giant 2.6-litre four-banger, or the fact that it looked completely identical to every other wedge-shaped grand tourer produced during the 80s, only Mitsubishi market research knows for sure. I’ve been on a Con-quest (get it?) to get my own piece of the Starion pie for several years now, and I figured I had finally gotten my chance.
I rolled up on the seller. Now, you have to understand that in my defence most Craigslist or Kijiji posts are photographed using what I can only assume is a jar of mayonnaise as a lens. They’re blurry from motion, they’re out of focus, and sometimes they’re not even of the right car. In this case, all three were true, which is why I found myself looking at an ‘89 Mazda RX-7 instead of an ‘85 Starion. Most times, I would just suck it up and take the Dorito, but for some reason on this very day I felt it stick in my craw.
After cursing out the seller and fleeing the scene as quickly as an asthmatic 74-horsepower ‘84 Chevy Nova hatchback can muster, I resolved that I must never allow this to happen again. This kind of false advertising is just one of the many ways in which hard-working scumbags like myself are fucked over by clueless morons trying to sell Grandpa’s old hot rod every day. Although it would certainly raise prices, I also felt that it would save me the gas and wear on my vehicle travelling all over town to unearth various shitboxes from their frozen graves - and saving wear on my fleet of almost-vehicles is no easy feat, believe me.
This was going to take some education. I drove immediately to the local public-access television station, only to find that it had been shuttered and padlocked decades before. “Nobody watches TV anymore,” howled the ghosts that forever roamed the parking lot, forever in search of that one lost episode of Internet For Seniors where Modem Matt covered the coffee-pot webcam. I decided that, instead, I would take advantage of two weaknesses in civil society: their willingness to look away from the road for literally any distraction, and the fact that the billboard company will put up a sign for 30 days if you just promise them you’ll pay them later.
When I got the phone call saying they had been put up, I had to go for a drive and check out my handiwork.
“LOOK AT THIS SHIT, MOTHERFUCKERS: IT’S A MITSUBISHI STARION,” read the first ad, with a picture underneath of a first-generation Ford Probe. That’s the last time I describe my ads over the phone.
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tags: mitsubishi, mitsubishi starion, mazda, mazda rx7, ford, ford probe, chevrolet, chevrolet nova
When you’re always on the lookout for a deal, at one point you will travel to what I like to call Cheapspace. It’s a mystical state of mind in which only the biggest discounts seem fathomable, and you always - always - sort by price in ascending order. In cheapspace, paying full retail price for anything just doesn’t seem like a possibility anymore. You’ll find yourself moving with the flow of the deals, compelled to stop by a hole-in-the-wall grocery store with no signage because you somehow know they have a sale on biltong this week. What the fuck even is biltong? It doesn’t matter, because you have filled your chest freezer with it now.
This can absolutely get in the way of your relationships, to the point where several major medical and mental-health authorities consider it to be a protected disability. Imagine trying to get a job when you attempt to negotiate down the price of your Starbucks coffee in front of your would-be boss. Or turning up to that very same job with no floor pans in your Mercury Lynx because that one was $55 cheaper on Craigslist than the primo low-miles example. Safety issues aside, the road salt spray on your pant legs will undermine your aura of self-confidence in that big pitch meeting.
Even if that new drug that the Uzbeki health authority has mysteriously developed can keep me from tunnel-visioning my way to an absolutely skinflint deal, I don’t think I’ll take it. For one thing, it’s likely to be more expensive than my existing health regimen (pushing broken cars and looting the abandoned mental hospital for vintage laudanum) and will make me lose even more money on top of that. If you’re only buying the second worst 300,000-mile Lada on Kijiji, then why even bother buying one at all? Why not buy a new car? You can see how it’s quite the slippery slope, and one that ends up with me shaking hands with a salesperson and feeling authentic joy instead of blinding anger.
That’s why I’ve hired a rival team of rogue scientists to develop a drug to put into the water supply. Once administered, it will give everyone free and easy access to the mental state in which I occupy. I’m willing to allow all this competition for great deals in exchange for a truer, more reasonable pricing on used junk. Now, I haven’t paid these scientists very much - they were extremely affordable, let me assure you - so maybe don’t drink the water for a few weeks until we’ve worked out all the kinks in production.
I once thought I was good at fixing things, but after several successive failures, I’ve come to realize that I was just lucky. And that’s okay. Like Grandpa Switch once said, “it’s better to be lucky than good.” Grandpa Switch was a bit of a plagiarist, but he was definitely right in this regard. People who know things, or are skilled, have spent most of their life perfecting them. Those who are simply lucky can just show up one morning, stare loosely at something broken, and then the universe will decide to bless them with the exact answer at that very moment in a flash of inspiration.
For years, I’ve deluded myself into thinking that I made my own luck. By exposing myself to as much automotive, electronic and cultural bullshit as possible, somehow through osmosis my subconscious has determined just how to fix them. This is a convenient fiction in that it both absolves me of responsibility for any fuckups as well as allows me to project a sort of idiot-savant, wandering-samurai attitude when I stride around town in search of garbage that I can take home to fix.
Now, this doesn’t always work. As you’d expect, this “luck” is based on random chance. And that’s okay too. Anything that is insolent enough to not instantly get repaired in a fluke cosmic coincidence just gets jammed into the back of my closet, or under some other stuff in the garage, or is left on the street until feral bodyshop technicians repossess it. I like to think that eventually, long after I am dead, these projects that were just slightly too difficult for me can find their way to a much more skilled human being, one that has the patience to fully diagnose and resolve their many issues. In the meantime, I’m constantly hitting refresh on the Kijiji listing for manual transmission supercharged Previas.
The next time you’re out and about, and you see something that you think you could fix, grab it. Don’t listen to the doubters - your spouse, your friends, your court-ordered psychiatrist - as they believe in spending their entire lives refining a skillset until you can fix one kind of thing very well. In that same amount of time, you could’ve totally half-assed a whole bunch of junk.
Everybody feels the urge to do a little hoarding sometimes. From ammunition to ancient videogames to celebrity fingernail clippings, it’s hard to find an interest that someone on your block hasn’t obsessively filled their basement with. This kind of uneven distribution - from an economic perspective - is highly inefficient. When new hoarders are born, they can’t collect the same things that the old hoarders did, until the senior generation dies and their overwhelmed relatives throw all that worthless shit in the trash.
It doesn’t take a stack of mouldering yellow legal pads a mile tall to figure out the math on this one - although if you are offering some vintage 1950s ones I will take every single one you’ve got. If we want to keep sustaining the “collector” market, we’re going to have to keep making new things that these capitalist Jawas will want to sequester into their homes until no space remains for living beings. Sometimes it’s easy - just buy the rights to an old brand or aesthetic, and slap it onto a cheap new thing that sort of brushes up against that nostalgia on its way to the bank. Other times, you have to take the risky path of creating a whole new thing that people will like enough to still hold onto hundreds of in fifteen to twenty years’ time.
It is for this reason that I have partnered with a series of hucksters, scam-artists, and unemployed circus barkers to manufacture and market a series of Seat Safety Switch talking dolls. Putatively, the purpose is to replace the code readers for check engine lights. Most of them aren’t very useful anyway, and will just return a cryptic identifier like “p1399″ that isn’t descriptive enough to tell you the real story (woodchucks devoured your coilpack ground wires). With the Seat Safety Switch “I Dunno” doll, you can just pull the string and the terrifyingly inaccurate likeness of me will randomly suggest a cause for your current automotive problem.
Buy it today, or pay sixteen times as much in 20 years when you remember seeing those things but never bought them new! It’s an investment.
To me, a good pizza has to have the following things: cheese, tomato sauce, and a decent crust on it. I know a lot of people are going to get upset that I’ve taken such a strong stance. They’ll probably throw this post down in a rage, and tell other people at the bookstore not to purchase this content at any price. Should happen any second now. Okay, now that they’re gone, I can reveal that my secret goal is to own a bunch of Vespas and the easiest way to do that in a tax-deductible kind of way is to open a pizza delivery restaurant.
Now, the Italian government has all these laws about what they say is an “official pizza.” You have to have the right cheese-to-crust ratio, sauce made with the right tomatoes, the perfect kind of oil holding it all together. If you fuck up even one of these during their yearly inspection, you can’t say that your pizza is authentic. Worse yet is the fact that they then force you to trade in the Vespas for Taiwan Golden Bees, Kymco Fillys, Sym Red Devils, or something else that’s reliable but essentially soulless. Nobody at the taxman’s office would ever take me seriously as a pizza delivery business, and then I wouldn’t be able to expense all the gasoline and mileage I put on a fleet of $47 twice-dropped scooters.
So of course, once the regional pizza inspector Silvio dropped by, I could do one of two things. One option was to do everything by the book - hire talented chefs at slightly higher-than-normal expense to construct culinary perfection itself, and the other was to take the inspector for a ride. I made him hop on the back of the Vespa, threw a scarf over his eyes “for the cold,” and then ripped the throttle to pop a perfect twelve o’ clock wheelie off the loading dock of my “pizza restaurant” which even to a casual observer seemed to be more interested in buying Chinese turbocharger equipment off of eBay than it ever was in selling savoury pies. My hope was that he would be too scared to even think about eating after a few minutes of powersliding around the industrial district on the back of one of my rapid-delivery scoots.
We didn’t even get down the block before the real screaming started. “This is too fast, you asshole!” he yelled, and I recognized something in his voice that made me stop the bike dead. Silvio the pizza inspector was also Silvio the Vespa inspector. The bastard had been working two jobs to make ends meet, and he definitely did not approve of me jamming a twincharged 150cc Princess Auto GY6 clone into the plasma-cutter-notched frame of what used to be a perfectly pristine ‘72 Primavera atop knobby offroad tires. I had to act fast, or he would repo my entire fleet.
“It’s still more of a Vespa than the Goddamn Piaggios,” I said, and spat on the sidewalk. When I looked up, I knew my gambit had been successful. I had brought a tear to the eye of Silvio, who now saw me as a kindred spirit, just one who had become mildly tainted by my relentless pursuit of dollar-store internal combustion engines. He was so pleased, in fact, that he didn’t even notice we pulled up to a Pizza Hut when it came time for the pizza inspection.
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tags: vespa, piaggio, vespa primavera, kymco, kymco filly, sym, sym red devil, taiwan golden bee
Maintaining your home appliances is pretty much identical to maintaining a car. Both of them are made largely of proprietary parts sold at insane markups, and the manufacturer doesn’t give a shit about you once the thing passes five years old. There is, however, one place in which they significantly diverge: I am really shit at fixing a dishwasher.
My dishwasher was bought a decade ago, with some kind of warranty. It’s shit water onto the floor, shaken dishes into oblivion, and occasionally it just doesn’t do anything. It’s sort of like living with an alcoholic 1970s GM assembly line worker. Unlike the Nova constructor, however, the dishwasher is a machine, designed by humans, and made up of discrete components. In theory, I can understand every aspect of it, and build my own version that doesn’t suck.
In practice, a one-hundred-and-fourteen-horsepower dishwasher is unnecessary, and the carbon monoxide the engine produces makes it unhealthy for indoor operation. Does it get the dishes clean? Yes, but there’s no arguing with the simple fact that using a Honda Civic engine out of my hoard “just because it looked lonely” is not solid engineering. Also, I forgot that Hondas spin backward, so occasionally my ghetto tensioner will chuck a belt clean through the bottom of it, shattering any dishes that were sitting on the bottom rack. However, this is still much better than the original model.
These are minor problems that I expect to work out in the next version of the dishwasher, if I ever build one. That’s the nice thing about understanding how to build something: you also understand how to set your expectations low and live with your limitations. What do I look like, a professional dishwasher engineer? Those guys passed high school.
The other day, I was minding my own business in traffic when I saw a car weaving back and forth in its lane. This behaviour, no doubt considered odd or even obnoxious by the other people in traffic, is an attempt by juveniles to emulate their Formula One racing heroes. By weaving back and forth like this, the tires are kept warm - and therefore grippy - at low speeds. The fact that the tires in question were a set of all-season Tianfeng Ditchfinders (3.7 on TireRack) did little to diminish my perception of the situation. Someone wants to race.
Now, street racing is one of those crimes that isn’t really a crime. Ever since the days of horse-drawn carriages, people have wanted to see if their daily driver is faster than someone else’s daily driver. And my daily driver is almost certainly faster than their base-model Camry, I tell myself as I casually upshift the Escort EXP so that the engine note sounds less obviously threatening as my new rival approaches. I lag a little bit behind, confident that my tires - a set of summer performance Tianfeng Beltchuckers (4.1 on TireRack) - are already up to temperature and will stand up to the furious stack of power that two eBay turbos and a transmission older than my home country can put into the Earth.
When they are nose to nose, in accordance with ancient street-racing custom, I shift down two gears and drop the hammer. The edges of my vision dim as the speedometer begins to climb. My hated opponent reacts, of course, but they have made a rookie mistake - leaving the traction control on and just flooring it might be enough to stomp your average Honda Odyssey off the light, but a true race driver knows finesse. I sing along with the turbochargers as they arrive at their peak operating RPM.
Behind us, a police officer honks insistently. Blocking the flow of traffic is a crime, assholes, he shouts over the hood-mounted PA system. I am pulled from my excitement and listen grudgingly for my shift point arriving (I have no tachometer) as the boosted 1.8 attempts to reach redline before my next payday. We have not yet reached the speed limit, but look at how much grip our tires have, officer. That makes us safer than your average driver.
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tags: ford, ford escort exp, honda, honda odyssey, toyota, toyota camry
Any productivity expert will tell you to make goals. Maybe you write them down, tie a string around your finger, or listen to a tomato that beeps at you every fifteen minutes. Whatever works for you. For me, the only thing that works to motivate me on projects is not being able to walk into a fucking room because the floor is covered in broken shit.
Traditional, obsolete thinking tells us that cars can only be parked in the garage, on the driveway, or in a pinch, on the lawn. This is not true: witness the humble French door. It is named this because when both of them are opened, you can fit a Peugeot 107 into your walk-out basement if you first fold the mirrors up. Once you tuck a scrap piece of carpet under the oilpan to catch any leaks - that security deposit could pay for like two junkyard LSes - you can now use the room outside for another non-running car.
Of course, this leaves you little room for living in your house. It gets old really fast eating your breakfast inside one decrepit car, and then eating your dinner inside a different one. Things only get worse if your first- or second-storey floor is not rated to handle the load of, say, a Jeep Cherokee, even if you’ve taken the common sense precaution of removing and selling off the super-heavy axles first. This brings us full circle to the motivation of getting shit done - I want to clear these cars out not just so I can bring more cars in, but so that I no longer have to sleep curled around a bunch of spare fenders (the paint might get scratched if I left them on the floor, where all the loose bolts are.)
And it’s not just me it motivates, either. You should see how fast those social workers jump on a 72-hour involuntary hold form when they take one look at it. I’d be a lot angrier about it if I didn’t also own stock in the private electroshock clinic they keep sending me to. Every single one of these trips is just buying me more Gallic garbage, you rubes.
For all the hard physical work it takes to dislodge a large component from a car - hoisting suspension arms, bench-pressing a transmission, trying to keep a 426 from killing you as it swings around the engine crane - I find that all of the really intense swearing happens with the little stuff. Maybe that’s just because I’m too out of breath on the big things to do anything other than wheeze out a strained “motherfucker!” while trying to push a shattered differential off my knees.
Stuff like removing the throttle shaft from a Weber without bending it, unplugging a salted-up and heat-cycled wiring connector, popping a trim clip on 30-year-old plastic, or loosening the damn rotor screws off of a junkyard Honda is what I mean. If you’ve spent a lot of time in the trenches, then you know exactly how it feels to pour your entire weekend down the toilet because of one teeny tiny component on your car that is kicking your ass up and down the block.
For a little while, I thought about constructing a shrink ray so at least those little problems could become big problems, and therefore somehow easier, but then I started to get nervous about quantum interaction. As you become smaller, problems that are now too small for you to give a shit about rapidly approach “worrying size.” I didn’t even manage to stay awake in regular physics class; if something goes wrong with, like, a neutron, I won’t even know where to put the wrench. Much better to not mess with the universe, such that this shitty depinning tool remains the smallest problem I’ll have this week.
Personally, I feel really bad for tall people. Everything must seem very small and frustrating to them from their enormous, lofty height, and they lack the oxygen density at their altitude that we shorter jerks use willy-nilly to get a shorter quarter-mile time on our relative intelligences. So make sure to watch out for them when they’re in the garage, because you’ll need to yell “duck!” a few milliseconds earlier than usual when the Harbour Freight engine stand decides to take another run at your drywall.
Remote work is popular nowadays, yes, but after a week of it all of my daily drivers are broken. You see, when cars are as bad as the ones that I own, only constantly exercising them will keep them on this side of the River Styx. And I have so many of them that taking one day off will almost guarantee that car in the daily rotation will konk out. Then I’ll have to fix it. Which, unless I strategically plan my parts-store runs, could end up in another car breaking. You can see how it can get out of hand quickly.
In fact, I’ve been off work for two days now. This means that four cars have fallen: a Tercel, two different kinds of Nissan Stanza, and a Chrysler Imperial that I forgot I owned until the other three were out of the way. Most of them are just seized-up, having sat for slightly too long in the aerosolized road salt that we call an atmosphere. A quick dab of automatic transmission fluid and a working-over with a breaker bar will get them back to life.
It was going to take an incredible effort to bring the rest of them back. I immediately set out for the parts store in a Geo Tracker, which was supposed to be driven next Thursday but is getting called up for duty earlier. On the way, I mentally re-arranged the elaborate calendar of Italian tune-ups I had scheduled, and made sure to give the wheezy 1.3L a heaping helping of shoe leather both to and from the depot, so as to stave off the demons while I was inside shopping for water pumps and spark plug spacers. Every couple of hours into the wrenching session, I had to pick out another car to run around the block at full throttle so that it too would not die. My mailman particularly did not enjoy the sight of a Sable wagon at full lock with a little help from its aftermarket hydraulic handbrake, but he honestly should have been better prepared.
At long last, as the sun set, I was finally done. That’s when I got a message from my boss, asking me why I didn’t bother to sign in to Slack all day long. That’s okay with me. The way to the unemployment office has a much better set of corners for exercising the rear struts than does the regular office.
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tags: toyota, toyota tercel, nissan, nissan stanza, chrysler, chrysler imperial, geo, geo tracker, mercury, mercury sable
Our lives are full of little shitty daily tasks. Filling in the bubbles on your language trainer app, making sure the light is actually green before you turn left, sighting in your scope again after you dropped the rifle on the cold Walmart tile floor while scavenging for toilet paper in the Underzone. For years, my shitty daily task has been hunting for an unmolested first-generation Saturn.
It hasn’t been easy. In my part of the world, we get a lot of snow, and often the response from drivers to seeing a lot of snow is to just floor it more. Excessive wheelspin in an early Saturn will pop the diff pin out of the front differential, blowing the entire transmission to hell. And then the car goes to the scrapper, and I don’t get to ruin it myself. Shakespeare couldn’t write a sadder tragedy, although I hear he has one that’s about airplanes that are also royalty now.
To make matters worse, the milk-jug plastic they’re made out of will shatter if you have even the gentlest tap when it’s only minus 20 Celsius out. Here, it can be minus 20 Celsius for years on end. Once, the front door to my house exploded because a neighbour parked nearby and the reflection of the sunlight off their car warmed up my door trim too quickly. At least this cuts down on the head gasket issues, as any Saturn that starts venting its coolant to atmosphere will very rapidly find that the temperature drops like two hundred degrees.
Perhaps I just started looking for them too late. The usual arc of a car’s history before it ends up with me is that it passes through well-meaning owners, through to people who aren’t very well-off but need the car, and then to some kind of scumbag teenager or drug dealer, maybe a junkyard or police auction in between, and then me. All of those points present their own dangers to the single-use plastic that is the first-generation Saturn, but I will never give up. After all, that weird green owl flickering in the corner of my vision keeps telling me to “complete the set,” whatever that is.
We all have that one car we never should have gotten rid of. Fleeting excuses like “we don’t have enough room to park nine cars” and “it sure would be nice to be able to pay the rent this month” are of no concern compared to the incalculable psychic weight of ditching what turned out to be a Good Car. You end up starting to hold onto unreliable turds, thinking that maybe you just need to get the car back into “okay shape” so it will start giving you dividends back, like the Good Car once did. No other car will ever give you that lost idyllic experience, so you start looking into the classifieds to see if you can just find another one exactly like that.
For me, that Good Car was a ‘90 Celica GT-S. It was blue, it was really cheap, and the previous owner treated it about as well as used toilet paper. After a long and expensive session of feeding it half the RockAuto catalogue, it was a reliable enough car for daily driver action. Then something more exciting came along, and I ditched it to some kid who promised he was going to turn it into some kind of turbocharged, fire-breathing, methamphetamine-snorting rally car for the street. Sure, I said, already scrolling through my phone to arrange the purchase of an Isuzu Trooper that would later shit its waterpump so thoroughly that we found parts of the disintegrated impeller stuck through the fins of the now-leaking radiator.
I’ll miss that Celica. I’ve bought a bunch more since then - back in prison, they used to call me the Celica Strangler - but nothing compares to that feeling of taking that specific shitty one and being rewarded for my heartfelt fidelity. That, and KYB also stopped making new struts for the fucker about a year after I got rid of mine.
Don’t throw away your Good Car. Keep it forever, until it inevitably turns into a bad car, and then you are so sick of it you consider lighting the garage on fire rather than try to replace a wheel bearing for the sixth time this year.
You might not be aware, but sometimes when I want to take a break from being incredibly fucking stupid, I do something that is very smart. Once, I figured out that you could use an escalator and a wheeled generator to scavenge free electricity from the shopping mall. Another time, I realized that brake cleaner is an effective toilet-cleaning agent. All of these achievements pale in comparison to my latest brainwave.
When I was out on my deck recently, trying to figure out a way to saw the radio collar off of my ankle, I had a lot of time to think about the problems that my neighbours faced. Some of the people near me didn’t like to do recycling; they didn’t want to look at all the little numbers, buzzy arrows, and complicated philosophical questions like “just how much paper is this made out of, anyway?” So everything just ended up in the trash. This is wasteful, as I had been taught by the early-90s cartoons that structured the majority of my thinking patterns and ideological hatred of large chemical companies run by aardvarks.
The obvious answer would be to use computer vision, machine learning, and a series of computer science textbooks to automatically sort my neighbours’ trash into the appropriate receptacles. Even a very small uptake in recyclability would yield huge improvements in the long-term survival of the human race, so much so that the numbers began to make me a little dizzy and I had to sit down. Also, I might have nicked a vein when the Dremel kicked back and hit my lower leg. A little blood loss wasn’t about to stop me from encouraging my neighbours to recycle properly, though.
On my front yard, I installed a wooden sign. While I’m no expert, I was extremely proud of the quality hand-lettering. That sign simply read “Old Car Recycling.” Beneath the words, I also added a few crude diagrams of a cartoon Ikea person dumping off their old Peugeot on my lawn. You have to make accommodations for people for whom English is not their first language, you see.
Any second now, I’m about to be up to my tits in busted-ass Tercels and Scoupes. And they’ll finally recognize me as a hero for my brave sacrifice in recycling these heaps into semi-functional automobiles for a week or two until I get bored. Just you wait.
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tags: toyota, toyota tercel, hyundai, hyundai scoupe, peugeot
If there’s one thing that absolutely everyone hates, it’s the humble computer printer. Running out of ink, paper jams, incomprehensible fuser drum errors, networking problems - they all suck and we should condemn them to hell. And once that’s done, a toner-blackened mass grave dug into the very Earth and filled to the brim with Satan’s line feeders, what should we do?
We must then turn to nature’s printer, the grad student. Capable of performing many thousands of hours of unpaid labour when fed coffee and school supplies, they are cheaper than even going to work and using their printer to prepare the manuscript for your tortured Mopar-based romance novel (Love In The Time Of A604s) for sending to publishers. The error rate isn’t great, and they don’t produce anywhere near the pages-per-minute count of your average Okidata combination laser copier and espresso machine, but what do you want for free?
The more important thing is that printers are full of neat electrical components. Limit switches, small electric motors, reduction gear-sets: if you can imagine it, they probably have put it into that plastic piece of shit you think about hurling against the wall eighteen times a day. They almost certainly don’t have a V8 engine tucked deep inside them, unfortunately, and maybe that’s where this whole problem started.
You can turn those cool components, possibly with the help of one of the grad students once their hands become too sore to continue writing about the engorged valve body seals and clogged filters of a Chryco automatic transmission, into a robot. Until the grad student decides that the robot could also be used to write letters on a piece of paper, automatically, thus saving him or her a great amount of time. This is forbidden, and will be punished quite severely.
Last week, I was sitting in my home office (the decrepit Volare with the nicest interior) and knocking out my backlog of calls. My secretary knocked on the window and handed me a note. During my last rehab appointment, I had been called by YouTube, the everpresent filmic nightmare that lives within all of our subconsciouses now, even though that plucky group of teens blew up their corporeal server farm. The goons at YouTube were pissed at me and threatened to ban my popular channel, Seat Safety Switchin’, for not following the rules.
I tried to think of what rules I might have broken. I always thanked my sponsors effusively for giving me things like non-flushable baby wipes, exotic research chemicals and sandpaper. Nobody on planet Earth had the same kind of freak shit that I did in my head, so it wasn’t like I was accidentally plagiarizing anybody, either. For a moment, I thought it might have been all the casual racism from that video where I built a robot to hurl casual racism, but it turns out that was not just allowed but heavily encouraged.
No, what I did wrong was make a boring thumbnail for my video. According to YouTube Law, all of my video thumbnails were supposed to consist of giant yellow text with my face freaking out about something. Instead, most of mine showed the thing I was working on, which is completely verboten and must be punished. For the next few weeks, I was on probation: all I could do was open boxes that my viewers sent to me and show the items held within to the camera.
I’d like to say that I stood by my principles and got banned for doing something totally awesome. That would be a lie: I tried the whole unboxing thing for a bit until my next-door neighbour started ranting naked on his porch about needing a living wage again and it got picked up accidentally by my camera’s microphone. Check out my new second channel, where I open Kinder Surprise eggs on camera to public-domain classical music. I’ve already made $18 million on it this weekend alone.
At the big corporate junkyard near me, they are trying to make additional profit by broadening their customer base. Some egghead manager or market researcher figured out that a lot of regular people need a little hand-holding in order to find the part they’re looking for, and so they forced the regular staff to be as helpful as possible. Of course, I always end up waiting in line behind a father of two as he gets slowly walked through the entire process of identifying what car it is he actually drives and what part he needs.
It’s not that I’m an elitist. Far from it. You’re trying to save $15 in parts. I have a mental illness that compels me to be here at all times. One of us can turn around, walk right out that door, and go on to live a normal life.
They never listen to my psychic messages, though, and walk right into the yard, confident that it can’t be that difficult to pull an automatic transmission out of a double-fatality ‘96 Chrysler Intrepid in the thirty minutes he has before close. Then I have to deal with them later, when they want me to lend them tools or to call an ambulance after a rusted-out subframe turns out to be heavy and sharp.
I don’t think the yards make that much profit off of these people. They never did when I used to go with my father - maybe because my old man taught me first about how to sew a secret pocket into the lining of your coat, which is perfect for hiding relays, fuses and turbocharger plumbing. Perhaps they’re counting on them getting hooked. That would certainly explain the dude I saw every weekend last summer, getting progressively more feral as he moved from pulling a headlight replacement for an ‘03 F-150 to stockpiling AMC 401 log manifolds in his wheelbarrow. He’s the manager now, and boy is he ever helpful if you don’t know your ass from an impact wrench.
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tags: chrysler, chrysler intrepid, ford, ford f150, amc
Statistics don’t lie. This year, on the roads, over ten thousand people will die from using their foglights when it isn’t foggy. These fatalities are tragically unavoidable. That’s because my death squad of highly-trained military police are going to kill them.
When I was swept to power in the midst of a violent, xenophobic populist uprising, I gave my due to my corporate masters. They’d enjoy a couple years free of taxes, a trade for an opportunity to finally mould society to fit my utopian vision. A world where no one goes hungry, opportunity is available to everyone, and the people who use their high beams in playground zones get a small-caliber round to the back of the head that their next of kin are billed for.
Now, people got upset about this. To hear some of them say it, it’s not their fault that the foglights are on. The car came like that from the dealer, or they bumped the button while vacuuming it out one day, and they can’t be held responsible for not knowing how to operate their own motor vehicle. Those people, I put in special “dangerous moron” camps, and made them work out their inadequacies with 22 hours a day of backbreaking physical labour, creating bumper stickers by hand for my re-election campaign.
Some of the populace, worried that I would come after them for something like a misaimed headlight or riding the brakes constantly down a gentle slope, began to drive around with their lights off entirely. I didn’t go after them, mostly because we had no tax money left in the treasury (the special police uniforms are expensive), but also to give them a false sense of security and let them feel like they’d “gotten one over” on me. Of course I took notes.
While journalists and international enemies of my administration like to tell you that what I am doing is unconscionable and even bordering on evil, it is a small price to pay for not having to wash your windshield. I can’t afford to constantly be spraying it; windshield washer fluid costs more than gasoline now.
A friend of mine drove a Lincoln pickup truck for awhile. We didn’t understand why. When he left the room, we’d all make fun of him for thinking he was too good for a proletarian F-150. Even the Ford dealership’s service writer would wrinkle her nose when she heard the phrase “Lincoln Blackwood.”
However, it wasn’t that bad of a deal. One of those low-information-buyer things, where people just don’t know enough about it to try and outbid you at the auction. Picked it up for like nothing, way lower than an equivalent “people’s truck.” And so he tooled around in his luxury F-150 for a few years, oblivious to the bourgeois airs that he was putting on whenever he rolled up to the Home Depot. Somehow, he never managed to destroy the pretty carpeted bed, even when he threw a toilet or the rental rototiller in there.
Once I was riding with him when he got pulled over by the cops. I think they just wanted to see what the hell it was. After the cops spotted the logo and realized they were dealing with a man of wealth and taste - and more importantly, equipped with an attorney who can only achieve orgasm by way of destroying a police officer’s career - they had nothing but nice things to say to him and even offered him an escort. It was then that I realized there was more to this whole shitty-old-luxury-car thing than just deluding yourself that you were rich; it deluded others, too.
That night, I went out and picked up a fifteen-year-old Lexus. Stone reliable, even though the previous owner was too broke to replace tires, headlight bulbs, or most of the windshield after hit-and-running a rival drug dealer in the parking lot of a PartSource. Now I would finally get the respect that I deserve, I told myself while shuffling the successful-from-20-feet Toyota into the sliding tile puzzle that the parking situation on my driveway had become. Maybe if this works out, I can hire a valet to do this for me.
The next morning, I got up to find that my Lexus had been booted. Illegal parking, they explained to me, even though it was mostly placed on my side of the lawn. It was then that I discovered the cruel truth of class in America: in order to be thought of as rich, you can’t live somewhere where people are stealing the street signs to use as rust repair patch panels for VW Rabbits. I brought it on myself, really.
I have to admit a grudging respect for anyone who keeps the same car for a few years. My own thirst for new automotive experiences causes me to discard vehicles at about the same rate that the average person gets a haircut. That, and the fact that most of them leave my possession and go directly to the crusher, having failed me, the last best hope for any motor vehicle to return to service life.
What about the infamous Volare, I hear you ask. That one’s simple: “The Volare” is not one unique daily driver but an entire fleet of them, a swarm of Malaise Era Mopar products that shift and alter their form depending on the task at hand. My backyard is full of them, and as one vehicle fails another takes its place, whether whole or in parts. When I close my eyes at night, I can only see exploded parts-view diagrams.
The inciting incident that brought all of this into clear view was that the other day, I noticed that my neighbour’s Yaris has been seeing some pretty heavy miles. After rotting out both front fenders from the corrosive slurry/ongoing human rights abuse that my municipality refers to as “road salt,” she replaced them with fresh primered-out eBay parts and just kept driving the damn thing. She didn’t go on Kijiji and immediately grab that extraordinarily tasty ‘79 F250 with no floors, or chuck a lowball offer in the direction of the ‘92 four-banger Mustang that has been slowly lowering itself into the driveway of the place down the block. As far as I can tell, she has yet to get bored with her one-litre beater, and presumably will keep driving it until the Toyota sees a more serious accident than the deer that previously cost it the hood, one wing mirror, and a windshield.
I admire this in theory, but this kind of thing drives a lack of liquidity in the local car market, which means I won’t be able to get a sub-$1000 Yaris of my very own to get to work. I’m starting to run low on counterfeit Volare VIN plates, so I dropped a few pamphlets for new Mercedes in her mailbox when she wasn’t looking. If she won’t replace it out of utility, maybe she’ll do her civic duty and buy a luxury automobile she can’t afford to maintain.
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tags: plymouth, plymouth volare, toyota, toyota yaris, ford, ford f250, ford mustang
Everyone is looking for the next great source of energy to power our thirsty world. Solar, nuclear, tricking scammers into calling you and then using the sound of your ringtone to scare birds whose feet are tied to a flywheel; we gotta try everything, even if it’s stupid. Because if it’s stupid and it saves humanity, you still get a statue and a little plaque that’s too tiny to read in the science museum.
I’ve been doing some research myself. Despite the fact that I never “graduated” with a “degree” from the “clown college” that I went to, I internalized enough from the three or so lectures I actually attended to figure out that my cats are a massive source of uncaptured energy. Don’t believe me? Try putting one of them on a fuzzy blanket during a cold, dry winter night. Oh yes, now you see what I’m getting at. Well, it’s patent pending, buddy.
One day, all the world will capture the electrical energy created by the static electricity of cats. Right now, we just waste it on a fancy lightshow and an angry-looking pet. Although it’s small, these zaps aren’t nothing. You could charge maybe 0.0006% of your phone battery with that, for free. And if you’ve ever watched Superman III, then you know if you pay attention to very small decimals, you can get fucking paid.
Initial testing of the capture rig hasn’t been successful. The static coming off the cats has zapped a lot of my sensitive test gear to death, and the animals in question keep refusing to walk through the piece of shag carpet I have glued to the basement floor. Additionally, I believe the animal-rights protesters have just now finally broken down the back door of my home, and are preparing to murder me over my presumed animal cruelty. You morons, I’m trying to save the world! That’s where the whales are!
There’s a lot of romance in the garage around the socket wrench. Everyone wants to have a really good ratchet handle, and some nice primo sockets. Maybe you have some dirtbag chrome-plated junk right now from the parts store, but you can’t walk by a set of expensive Weras or the Snap-On truck without taking a peek. That’s all well and good, but nobody wants to talk about screwdrivers.
A good screwdriver will save your life. This is what my grandfather always told me. Ever since then, I’ve tried to live by his code by at least owning a whole pile of screwdrivers. Sure, almost all of them are rusty junk that ancient mechanics lost inside the panels of my shitbox cars a very long time ago. Each screwdriver is good for something different. Rubber-handled stuff gets used to replace a high-current fuse on the side of the road. Robertson drivers get used for everything around the house, as Laurier intended. Flatheads are for opening paint can lids, starting your car, and damaging things while using them as chisels. And external-Torx drivers can go and get fucked, because who needs that kind of aggravation in their life?
You might think it is excessive to own so many screwdrivers, but anyone who is seriously into fixing shit or even trying to keep their head above the continual destruction of their home and way of life knows that it is impossible to find a screwdriver when you need it. Yeah, even you guys who organize their sock drawers by colour have trouble locating a Phillips-head of just the right size when it comes time to adjust a door hinge or stab a home invader. Admit it.
In theory, this problem can be solved by just buying more screwdrivers. At some point of screwdriver saturation, every available surface in your house would then contain at least one Phillips head screwdriver. This is the pigeonhole principle, which is math for “you’re going to run out of places to hide your shit, motherfucker.” Empirically, however, I own enough screwdrivers that stud finders no longer work reliably and bringing home a large magnet is a very dangerous proposition. And I still can’t find anything except these Goddamn external-Torx drivers. I’ll show those Germans this time, though: as soon as I get back from my trip to the screwdriver aisle I’m going to duct-tape a Phillips to every single one.
In Europe, there are lots of really bad cars. Dingy Allegros, busted-up Princesses, and worn-out Polos. The market for these bad cars is only so big, which is why most European countries are undergoing economic crisis. When your entire GDP is tied up in a bunch of shit-tacular Soviet Fiat clones that are only good for landfill material, then how are you going to free up that capital for productive uses like hoarding toilet paper and financing rebel insurrections?
The answer is that we sell the cars to North America. Despite appearances, over here we simply cannot get enough cars. Even if you already have ten, then an eleventh car can just seamlessly blend into the urban landscape, farmyard, or front lawn where you live. It’s not so much that we have massive plots of land (though we do); it’s that we all just accept that every family needs a couple extra cars for when Brayden and Zlimitedslipdifferential go off to college. And then you need an interesting car for Mom and Dad so they can get the approval of grease-stained freaks at the local weekend auto show/vehicular manslaughter session.
With an eye towards capitalizing on this market and more importantly getting my hands on some primo Ford Taunuses, I started working with my cousin, Blyat, to load a bunch of unwanted British cars onto a roll-on-roll-off ferry. In case you’re unfamiliar, these babies are basically open-deck boats that carry a whole shitload of cars. The best part is that they’re dirt cheap, which is to be expected as your precious new Maluch is getting hosed down by salt water 24/7 for about eight weeks during transport. And sometimes it will roll off the deck in a storm and become a new piece of coral reef. You could probably get an environmental tax-break for that.
Selling them hasn’t gone that well so far. Dressing up in an ushanka and standing on the side of the road in order to yell at rich-looking passersby hasn’t worked. For a little while, I was having some success welding four of them together so that they would approximate the size of a bigger car, but then the buyers complained that the gas mileage was still too good and that they must be some kind of secret foreign electric car, or at least one running on renewable energy like kerosene or wood.
I continue my quest, if for no other reason than Blyat really needs the money to pay back his financiers. He told me that the mayor of his principality cleared off his entire lawn of turbo-diesel-equipped Caravans for sale in North America, but those pesky dockworkers just pushed them right into the ocean before they landed.
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tags: ford, ford taunus, dodge, dodge caravan, austin, austin allegro, austin princess, volkswagen, volkswagen polo, fiat, fiat 126p
Many famous people throughout history have become irritated by their fans. Oh, I don’t mean their human fans. What I’m talking about is cooling fans. Those fuckers are loud, and despite the best efforts of thousands of engineers, the noise that said fuckers produce is universally irritating, unlike that of a fine internal combustion engine.
All around me were tiny fans - in my oscilloscope, in my computer system, on my ceiling, and bolted to what was left of my radiator after that incident with the parking patrol guard. Each and every one of those fans made an awful shrill noise when it was running, to the point that I would probably rather have melted down the thing they were protecting rather than listen to it for another minute.
My initial solution to this problem was just to use small gas motors to drive the fans. When it got hot, a little thermostatic doodad would crack the throttle, and you’d end up with a cooling breeze. It worked great, except that they only had a very narrow window of efficiency - even with a bunch of complicated gearing I didn’t understand and stole from a Popular Mechanics from 1936 - and, due to carbon monoxide, they weren’t suitable for use inside a house if your house features walls and a ceiling. Flooring, maybe, as long as you didn’t mind occasionally spilling a bit of low-test onto the carpet while filling the float bowl when it runs dry every couple of minutes.
So we were back to the drawing board, which was also gasoline-powered (I make a lot of mistakes that need to be erased quickly.) I was still there, drinking my Thinking Rum, when a friend dropped by and told me about the concept of oiled bearings. If I could just keep the fans lubed up, then they’d be dead silent and I didn’t have to wear earplugs in order to sleep. Oil! Of course.
Now, with all my electronics safely immersed in a bath of mineral oil, they no longer need a fan. However, you really want to circulate that oil to avoid having any hot spots build up, and boy is that aquarium pump ever loud. Maybe I can do something with one of these spare gas engine water pumps I have lying around…
The other day, I was helping myself to the complimentary coffee in the lobby of the oil change place when the manager asked me which car was mine.
“The Volare,” I said, nodding in the general direction of where my car had been parked across four spots.
“Are you going to buy an oil change today?” he asked, angrily.
I didn’t like his attitude, so I left and took the entire carton of coffee creamer with me on my way out. It’s that kind of shitty customer service that keeps me from paying someone else seventy bucks to remove a drain plug for five minutes and then put it back on cross-threaded. That, and the seventy bucks. No, when I do an oil change, I do it myself. If you’re afraid of doing it, don’t be - it’s easier than you think, and it makes you feel closer to your car, in the same way that obstetricians often bathe in all that leftover placenta they won’t let you take home.
You don’t really need any fancy equipment. If you do it super ghetto, all you really need is a very tall curb, some replacement oil, and a death wish. A sewer drain for disposal of the old oil is recommended, but not mandatory. Often, I’ll do my changes in the parking lot of the local Princess Auto, which is already so stained from leaky cars that they won’t notice a gallon or two has gone walkabout. In fact, the only hard part is making sure you put the right amount of oil back in. You don’t want to fill the engine all the way to the top, unless your engine burns as much oil as mine does, in which case it’s probably better off having the extra supply than it would be if it had a cylinder head that worked properly.
So now you’ve done your own oil change at home, reducing the friendly neighbourhood Jiffy Lube to just another trendy (if kitschy) coffee bar. Good for you! Don’t forget to tell everyone around you that you work on your own car - you’re still in that spot of societal acceptance where you are a Friendly 1950s Handyperson instead of a degenerate psychopath like myself. What’s that? Don’t sound so disappointed… you’ll get there.
I first became aware that the tint on my car’s windows might be too dark when a neighbour voluntarily approached me the other day at the central supermailbox for my block. Despite smelling like gear oil, hydraulic lube and ATF, they did not seem to connect me with the particular strain of automotive enthusiasm that our authorities had now deemed to be the primary threat to public safety. No, this nice person decided to treat me like a human being. They wanted to complain about the bad drivers on our street.
After a little while of listening to them bitch incessantly about how awesome my cars are, I nodded and agreed. Then, I waited for them to leave and then walked the wrong direction around the block, in order to throw them off. As I was letting myself in through the back door of my house, I wondered if perhaps my general antisocial behaviour was bad for me in the long term. Sure, there was the juvenile entertainment of two-foot-braking a bellowing Nissan Stanza around the corner with all four 13-inch Pirelli Ventennis wailing, but could that possibly compare to being a responsible member of the community? I decided I would give it my best shot.
For the next week, every time I saw my neighbour, I was doing the opposite of automotive crimes. I had parked a small handful of my daily drivers a few blocks over - again so as not to perturb the experiment unnecessarily. With some elbow grease, I was throwing out the old mufflers that once dominated my front lawn, shovelling the oddly ashy and coolant-greeny ice and snow from my sidewalk, and administering a whack of Narcan to the teenager who was slowly dying of an overdose in my gutter - even though he clearly had some more cash in his wallet that would have covered my own deadly addiction: to RockAuto.
Although they say virtue is its own reward, the other reward is seeing your neighbours willingly make eye contact with you again. I made it another day or two after that first week, until I developed a strange twitch. The doctor says he’s never seen anything like it, that some people are just born assholes. Who am I to go against nature?
With declining housing stock, the general shittiness of wages, and an ever-more-specialized education in order to get those wages, it’s no surprise that nobody can afford to live in the inner city anymore. Don’t worry about those poor inner-city landlords, though: they’ve figured out that they can rent the apartments by the day to foreign tourists. I was in need of some quick traffic-ticket scratch the other day, so I decided to try and rent out my neighbour’s Suburban as an Airbnb.
It’s not very difficult: I’d never seen that old Chevy move under its own power, and I’ve been living here for awhile. The only indication it actually had an engine is the increasingly saggy front end, which ends up stuck in a snowbank for half the year when the plows shovel it in. Every time I drove past, the sight of the decrepit boxy Chev made me sad. One morning, I mentioned casually to my car-pooling associate that “the damn thing is the size of a Japanese apartment.” That’s when I got the idea.
Renting specifically to the Japanese isn’t too hard, especially when you have a weird novelty apartment that is very American. And what’s more American than a 1996 Chevrolet Suburban? The tailgate lock hadn’t worked since the Clinton administration, so it was easy for my guests to let themselves in and out. Chucking a few thrift-store sleeping bags in the cargo area only completed the rustic appearance of the whole deal. I’m sure at least a few kids were conceived in the back of that thing, their parents convinced that the flickering sodium streetlamp on our block must be the Northern Lights.
A few weeks into the whole adventure, I came out to see how my newest weekend guests were doing. The Suburban was gone! Apparently, I had not been checking the reputation score of my guests, and had accidentally rented to a tour group of mechanics on vacation from the Home Islands. Due to some kind of miscommunication, they apparently interpreted the Suburban as being both apartment and car rental, and fixed the damn thing up. All that was left in the spot where it once sat was a receipt for a water pump and about thirty empty bottles of coolant. I kneeled to inspect the label. Concentrate. We were dealing with some pros here, for sure.
Everything worked out okay in the end - the mechanics returned the big truck with a full tank of gas and a meticulous top-to-bottom detail - but the experience spooked me. What if they had decided to live in the front, and sublet the cargo area to a family of four? I’d never have caught them. For a few weeks after that, I changed my strategy, but to this very day I still have yet to lure any more foreign mechanics into booking a night in the trunk of that Fairmont I haven’t gotten around to finishing the engine swap on.
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tags: ford, ford fairmont, chevrolet, chevrolet suburban
The People’s Torque
Our tax money goes into buying buses and trains, so that torque honestly should belong to all of us. It’s the People’s Torque. Who is the “bus driver” to say that he knows better than the rest of us where we should go? Everyone on this damn bus has to walk like thirty minutes from where the bus drops us off to get to work or our homes. If it isn’t serving us, the riders, then who does the bus actually serve?
To find out the answer to this question, I waited until my regular bus driver stopped for a piss and then just hopped into his seat and drove the bus away. After a whole life of wanting to do this, I was finally making progress on my goals. My court-ordered psychiatrist would be pleased. Now, you might think operating a bus is difficult, because a specialized position (”bus driver”) is required to do so. This is elitist bullshit; the bus is an automatic, so it’s basically the same as driving any mid-sized limousine like the one you have sitting in your backyard on blocks.
A bunch of the people in the back started to yell when they noticed I had self-actualized my hidden power in society. Of course they would: they’ve been trained by a lifetime of government thuggery to believe that only those with actual qualifications should be allowed to operate a city bus. I say, if you can do it better, you should. And I apply that reasoning to a lot of things: hot air balloon operation, furnace repair, and yes, even the police department. I do a quick waggle of the steering wheel as I merge into traffic, which hangs out the rear end of the bus with a pleasing powerslide. Could the old bus driver do this? Probably not, which is why I’m here now.
After the next set of traffic lights, of course, there is a police roadblock. The police are another symptom of this whole thing. Again, what’s so hard about their job? I drive a Panther-platform Ford at reckless speeds all the time, and I don’t even have the benefit of a siren to warn other drivers that I’m on my way. I mash my foot onto the fuel pedal, and the ancient diesel way in the back of the bus responds with a ferocious roar. It has never been run this hard, and I think it appreciates the challenge. A break from mediocrity is something all of us need to operate at peak performance. The Vics which once constituted the roadblock now clatter helplessly off the front of the - my - bus, although the windshield glass does spider a bit from the impact of mangled steel against it.
We are making great time, I announce to the terrified passengers who are now huddled in the back. They are discussing mutiny, and not in quiet voices, either. This is the kind of class violence those who consider themselves our superiors want: worker turned against worker. With another quick jag of the steering wheel, I knock them to the ground and remind them that I still hold massive power over their lives. Only I know what is best for them, I catch myself saying out loud, and then realize the hypocrisy in my words. With but a mere five hundred cubic inches of New Flyer, I have become the oppressor that I hoped to overcome. I have become the Bus Driver.
At the next stop, I get off in tears and walk to the nearest bar. Surely, a new driver will emerge from the huddle at the back of the bus, I think. They will continue the trip without me. I cannot face those that I have betrayed.
Although this attempt to seize power for the common man against the faceless bureaucracy has failed, I still hold the dream in my heart. Perhaps next week at work, I will no longer put up with Janet leaving her meal in the microwave for several minutes after it is cooked. I will remove that meal, put my own in, and damn her for opposing my righteous journey.
Everyone is abuzz about agile, the decades-old software ideology that tells you not to try and build a big thing that is perfect the first time. Instead, you build smaller things and then show them to your clients and see if they’ll still give you money to keep going. This is perfect for me, a person who is constantly trying to get his car to pass the safety inspection, and as such I, too, demand that my government adopt agile methodologies. Here’s how I think it could work.
In month one, they could set their acceptance criteria at “most wheels don’t fall off.” That’s a pretty easy target for me to hit, unless the line at the junkyard taco truck runs a little long that week. This micro-uncertainty will cause further schedule churn, which pushes us well into month two, where now the timeline is shot to shit. Thanks, Big Government.
Panicked at the progress of the project, the inspector will then start cheating on some of the requirements, throwing them out to lighten the scope. Maybe it’s okay that the wheels won’t hold on at speed, or that they’ve decided “most” is now one out of four. Hey, the spare tire is still bolted into its carrier! That counts!
At month three, we now have ourselves a pretty safe vehicle. All the tires are at least zip-tied onto the body, and the exhaust doesn’t emit noxious gases while the car is turned off. That’s a huge step forward, at which point our team (the inspector and I) should immediately have a huge party to improve morale. Maybe we’d invite some other stakeholders, like the minister of transportation. Unfortunately, the minister has a big mouth when he gets drunk, and he accidentally lets slip that cars have to have a windshield - something that the inspector and I didn’t know, since we are also doing the “agile methodology” for mechanic training. We just got done learning what a windshield is, and now we have to put one in? Luckily the acceptance criteria doesn’t say it has to be transparent, or made out of glass.
After a few more months of this, my car is road legal! The project was a success! There’s only one caveat: in order to make the delivery date, we had to ship in a whole busload of contractors (”professional mechanics”) to work on the car. That was a pretty big cost overrun, it’s true, but if we roll that cost into the project for passing next year’s safety inspection - already underway, since now we don’t have to plan anything - nobody will even notice.
A bunch of old ambulances are going up for sale. While it makes sense to buy any motor vehicle that is offered to me, the idea of having to vacuum out lost hypodermic needles that have wiggled themselves into every weird crevice in the rear box did not appeal. Still, it was kind of fun to sit in the cab during the pre-inspection phase of the auction and run the siren. Wee-oo! Wee-oo! Let’s pretend I’m not a drain on society! Mom was wrong!
As the day progressed, I noticed the traditional slump of the Auction Rookie. Lots of regular people had crawled out from the drivers’ seat of their low-miles SUVs to come here today. To a person, they thought that they had the muscle and the stamina to go toe-to-toe with the ring of auction pros who buy everything in the city. Surely it must not be any harder than going shopping at the store, except it’s much cheaper for some reason. What they don’t realize is that said ring is extremely close, and when they see a turd, they play an elaborate game of bid-inflation hacky-sack in order to make a “civilian” end up with it.
I’d played this game before, and knew very well that it was one of many games that I had no hope of winning at. The others are Monopoly, Candyland, and the Australian classic of knifey-spooney. However, satisfied with the aforementioned siren-wailing and not wanting to return home where my procrastination would become more glaringly obvious, I stuck around to watch the carnage. One fellow, who expressed interest in converting one of the ambulances into a blood-stain-laden camper for his family trips, splashed out an amount that would have kept me in Volares for the rest of the decade. Good idea, I thought: the stench of his failure will help mask that of all the teeth that got left behind in there over the years.
My smug superiority was short-lived, however, as the sold ambulances were moved out of the way. Behind them was a Japanese-market ambulance about the size of a phone booth that I had somehow missed. It was completely adorable. I had to have it.
Long story short, that’s how I now run a small ambulance company. Emphasis on the ‘small.’ If you ever get into an accident and you’re under 5′3″, give me a call, because I really need the cash. Also, I have no medical knowledge so call early - we’re just going to drive really fast. Did I mention the siren sounds different?
Model remote-controlled cars are sort of a balm for my addiction, in the same way that addicts trying to get clean will use an incredibly cute miniature crack pipe to puff teeny tiny amounts. I think they get them from dollhouse supply stores or something, but I digress. The fact that these toy cars cost more regular-sized adult dollars than just buying some 1970s piece of Mopar shit out of a farmer’s swamp is unpleasant to come to terms with.
When I was growing up, the Japanese had a lock on both the scale-model and full-scale car businesses. Tamiya made amazing toy cars - the Grasshopper, the Lunchbox, that weird-looking one that had thirty different names for each of its paint colours. For the time, they were rockets, although nowadays kids routinely play with seventeen-dollar Chinese lipo buggies that can do zero to sixty in less time than it takes them to get bullied for being huge dorks.
Lipo? Oh, lithium polymer batteries. Some kind of Mars-rover energy-dense miracle brought down to us from the modern Prometheums that populate our thinkosphere. I watched a few TED talks on the way over here, you’ll have to forgive me. We didn’t have those back then, or if we did, our dads certainly wouldn’t let us cram them into plastic toy cars we got from the Kay Bee Toys. So if you were serious about racing, there was only one step up - little tiny nitromethane engines. Kids - or to be more accurate, adults with massive amounts of disposable incomes and jobs that didn’t keep very tight tabs on their whereabouts during the day - could learn about carburetors, fuel delivery, expansion chambers and uncontrollable burnouts all at a scale that seemed harmless even after they had a little thermonuclear backfire and melted into a slag of plastic from invisible flames.
I will admit that the whole lipo-battery thing has caught on with me as well. There’s just not enough room in my house or time in the day for yet more poorly-stored bottles of highly reactive petrochemicals. When I have a bit of free time and want to go irritate every dog in the neighbourhood, it’s ready and eager for a rip. Yes, I miss the smell and the danger of nitro, but now there’s more left over for my daily driver. Did you know it’s a renewable fuel? Way more likely to catch on than this electric shit, I’m telling you.
Thermostat fights are an aspect of office life that literally nobody enjoys. Even if you are a facility manager and it is putatively your job to give a shit about temperature, you’ll avoid being seen to exercise your power too often, lest you be thrown on top of that fire that Marketing built on the 15th floor because Janet’s feet get a little cold. Nobody’s happy, which is why most office buildings just put fake thermostats on the wall. You can tweak those fuckers all day long and they won’t do anything - but you’ll feel better.
Here at Bad Cars Monthly, fights with cooling systems are a routine daily procedure. Whether it’s trying to evacuate that last dicky bubble out of the water pump in a constantly-overheating ‘99 Outback, shovelling kitty litter and raw eggs into the radiator fill hole of a Cougar in order to quell its leaky heater core, or drilling some extra ‘jiggle pins’ into our project Acclaim’s dollar-store thermostat in the hope that it will finally turn into a race car, we know a lot about temperature management.
That’s why, while our landlord was out of town, we drilled into the lock he keeps over his fancy digital thermostat and started trying to get it to run Doom. We don’t need any computer bullshit to keep the place hot or cold; all we had to do was wire up a couple little resistors and sit back while we enjoy perfectly regulated temperature. At least, until we came back to the office and found out that it had burned down. It turns out the five-cent eighth-watt resistors you get from Uncle Aliexpress aren’t really up to the task of being used as furnace control logic, so they started themselves a little fire. At least we got to see our favourite neighbourhood firefighter again. He wouldn’t make eye contact, but he loves us.
We were pretty distraught, and a couple of us in the editorial bullpen decamped to the adjacent Starbucks (parking lot) to discuss our options for salvaging the article. Could we really say we solved the office cooling problem if we destroyed our office? It was then that one of the interns, in a voice weak from hunger, piped up. We hadn’t even noticed that she was there the entire time.
“Nobody’s complaining about the temperature now, are they?” she asked.
I’d like to introduce to you our new Office Manager, whose first task will be to negotiate with the landlord for the hefty insurance payout that we deserve for getting the ash from his smouldering building on the shitty project cars that we hoarded in his parking lot.
Are you the kind of greaseball backyard wrench who real mechanics turn to for help when they’ve encountered a problem that costs actual money to fix? Do you have a backyard so dense with parts that it resembles what would come out of H. R. Giger if you fed him Soviet research chemicals? Then you should probably submit a proposal for a talk at my new conference, SwitchCon 2020 - we’ll be having it sometime around the middle of June at whatever hotel in town doesn’t lock up their conference room at night.
SwitchCon 2019 was a huge success. Previous contributors have included myself, because it’s my conference, and the night watchman who showed up halfway through my talk and told me to stop yelling so loud about throttle-body fuel injection. With more guests, we’ll finally be able to overpower such resistance, and we’ll have a great evening where we all learn about the kind of weird pervert shit that keeps us on this side of the Lexus RX350 ownership line.
Afterward, we’ll have a car show. The nice thing about giving talks at a hotel is that they often do not check their parking lots for unexpected vehicles or burnout competitions. Electron Carl down the street has finally figured out how to make his Tesla-swapped 1993 Grand Prix do burnies for an entire quarter-mile without any sound coming out except for the tortured low-grip tires exploding. And he’ll tell you how to do it too! If we go that late. Sometimes he gets a little narcoleptic without the sound of a V8 to keep him awake.
So kick in your proposals now! I won’t read any of them, but rest assured you are already approved. Come on down to SwitchCon 2020, and make sure to bring some bail money. Hey, it’s fuel for next year’s talk!
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tags: switchcon, lexus, lexus rx350, pontiac, pontiac grand prix
Sometimes, when I pass another car on the highway, that car will speed up to block my pass. It’s not malicious, I don’t think: they just didn’t realize that they are a dumbass, and once they see a 1970s rust bucket with no floors blowing past them at Mach III, the perceived potential of their vehicle is raised in their minds. Suddenly, it’s Dad’s Flooring The Corolla because there’s no possible way that a 2016 Corolla is going to be worse in the snow than a piece of agricultural equipment that accidentally caught a Plymouth logo and seventeen layers of different-coloured house paint.
So that’s annoying for me - and probably a little unsafe, because when we reach my exit I have to either accelerate even further or weave recklessly until they lose their nerve and I can cut them off. It got me to thinking, though. Having people drive faster on their commutes is valuable to capital, because the additional time at work allows the bourgeois to extract more profit from their labourers. Was there a way that capital would fund me trying to pass all these morons so that they would get to work faster? To find out, I dropped by the Chamber of Commerce, and by that I mean I did donuts in their parking lot until my muffler blew open, triggering the poverty-proximity alarm on a Rolls Royce Corniche.
The deal was struck, and now I roam the highways with my sputtering slant-six, aggressively cornering on half-century-old bias-plys. If this piece of shit can do it, so can you, every panel of my rattling deathtrap bellows, and it works. Like showing red to a bull, soccer dads and hockey moms are pulled from their half-conscious torpor and begin to push the gas pedals on their Honda Odysseys further than ever before - to almost one-eighth throttle. Everyone starts driving to work faster. My phone starts sending me alerts saying that the End Times must be here because I can finally go from my house to the donut place at the end of the block in less than a week. My valuable support is improving the economic efficiency of my city, and all I had to do was drive like an asshole for ten bucks an hour.
These things don’t last, though. It turns out teenagers will also drive like reckless assholes, but they’ll do it for free.
Did you know you can just open a daycare? And nobody really checks any of your claimed credentials before dropping their kid off with you? And they’ll give you money for this? I sure didn’t, but now I have an enormous army of under-ten-year-olds who will sometimes perform labour on my behalf, but more importantly, can distract the workers at the junkyard while I chuck axles over the fence to my waiting car. Plus, now I finally have an excuse to buy that short bus.
On the second week of my daycare operation, I’d already harvested all the parts I needed to fix up my ice-racing Volare from the last season of brutal door-to-door low-buck, lower-speed competition. It took a little while until I hit upon using a whole pile of them to move heavy parts at once - like ants - but eventually we had the makings of a well-oiled machine on our hands. Well, unless you count the kids that got tetanus because their parents only vaccinated them with microwaved olive oil and YouTube likes, but they weren’t going to amount to anything anyway. The way I see it, I probably saved the world from at least one MBA.
That’s when the cops came around. Now, I’m used to having the regular cops - the ones who look in my backyard, check a few serial numbers, make sure that my parole officer can still be heard from and isn’t just a friend pretending to be him with a cold through a closed bathroom door like last time - come around, but these guys were a whole different breed. Competent, I think was the word the prosecutors used. Turns out that according to provincial law, a daycare has to provide “educational enrichment,” “adult supervision,” and snacks. No matter how you sliced whether or not learning how to count teeth on a diff could be considered educational, I definitely wasn’t feeding these little shits. That’d cut into my profit margin. Be that as it may, they told me to shape up and start handing out Dunkaroos and Lunchables, or they’d be back, and take with them my triumphant little snot-nosed warriors.
Once again, I was saved by the junkyard taco truck. It turns out that there are all these little bits of tortilla that get torn off, and they would otherwise have to throw them out. We were able to load these kids up every day with delicious offal, pan scrapings and lots of gently-expired cheddar cheese for less than a buck a shot, courtesy of my new friend George, who ran the taco stand and correctly guessed that one of my spoiled suburbanite kids must be taking an after-school class to learn Spanish. Now that’s a businessman.
Who hasn’t fantasized about the Honda Prelude? Ferrari good looks, Honda snappy handling, and yet something that sits comfortably and appealingly in the middle. A classic two-door grand touring coupe, and it will run forever until it gets thrown away by its seventeenth owner after grazing a deer on the expressway. An all-time favourite, but why has Honda refused to produce a new Prelude? We dispatched an investigative reporter to Tokyo, in order to find out.
“Nobody fucking bought it,” said this Honda executive, who refused to give us his name or even allow himself to be photographed. He also ran much faster than our reporter could keep up. Panting, and incapable of further pursuit, our intrepid gumshoe collapsed into a gutter and vomited for about four to five minutes, according to local sources familiar with his thinking.
Now, stuck in Tokyo for several days until the middle-of-the-week cheapest flight arrived again, our man in Japan was tasked with a new research project: to take over Nissan and install himself as CEO. And if that didn’t work, at least steal some office supplies. I bet the Japanese have some really nice paperclips. He took the train to Yokohama, and let himself into Nissan headquarters after knocking out a mid-grade employee and stealing their clothes.
Ultimately, our mission was both successful and a failure. You can read more about the boardroom hysterics that transpired in our sister publication, Billion-Dollar Leveraged Buyouts Monthly, but the most important fact for our current readers is that our journalists do not understand Japanese or apparently even how to read a subway map. It turns out that we now own Mitsubishi Motors, having made the highest bid of a half-empty Suica card and eleven hundred yen in pocket change.
Any gasoline engine needs three things to run, an arrangement engineers call the Iron Triangle: air, spark, and fuel. It is an object of constant fascination to me that the average person just takes these things for granted: you get in your car, turn the key, and then your biggest complaint is that it takes awhile for the heated seats to kick in.
Not me, though. I will never just expect for a car to work the first time, or still be sitting there when I come out of my house. Some would argue that this is due to the fact that I buy total shitboxes that look abandoned even while they’re driving, and they’d be right. Every time the miracle of internal combustion still happens when I turn the key/connect the loose wires under my dashboard/pop the clutch rolling downhill/leave the car in the sun for too long, I give a silent prayer to the great people who led us to this point. Because of their hard work in the field of reliability, I can neglect a vehicle that cost the original owner a significant chunk of their take-home income.
As a result of this mentality, when the car doesn’t start or just leaks part of its lifeblood out and makes an atrocious noise, it won’t bother me too much. This sort of thing is to be expected when you take advantage of a previous owner’s kinda-maintenance for as long as I do, reaching in and giving the roulette wheel a couple extra spins every time it looks like it might land on my side.
So you should do what I do - don’t expect your car to start the next time you turn your key. When it actually does start, possibly because you have enrolled a series of professional mechanics to look over your Toyota for things like “out of oil” and “unexpected holes,” a little gratitude would be nice. Not all of us are so lucky.
A lot of federal prosecutors had taken a keen interest in my activities over the years. You’d think it would just be the EPA, but you’d be wrong: after decades of tactical defunding, those weenies couldn’t detect a fart in church, let alone the occasional nitrous purge mixed into the ultra-rich exhaust of a Valiant. No, once again, my opponents came from inside NASA.
They were pissed that my cars knocked off so much rust during regular operation that the skyrocketing atmospheric concentration of iron oxide was starting to fuck with their sensitive instruments. And just like you’d expect, these rocket scientists asked me very politely to stop, rather than spending mere millions of dollars to recalibrate their stuff. Did they offer me some of those millions? No. Nobody even offered to help me push what was left of my CRX to a Russian bodyshop so I could get them to tack-weld old cutlery to the panels. Not like you could really push too hard on said Honda, mind you. I’m pretty sure the hatch glass is only holding on because of gravity.
So when I got the letter from those eggheads telling me to cut it the fuck out, followed by an insistent hand-delivered telegram instructing me to do the same, and then finally by a middle manager coming down to punch me in the face, I did what they wanted. I didn’t have to like it, though. I decided to purchase a vinyl wrap for the vehicle. Between the glue and the corrosion-resistant plastic sheeting, I was convinced this would at least keep the worst of the car’s aerosolizing on the inside.
On the inside it did indeed stay: my doctor tells me that my lungs are now three-quarters rust, instead of just half like they were last week. It turns out that, while generally beneficial to add into your diet, the iron oxide doesn’t really help with respiration in any realistic sense. After a few asthma attacks while driving my CRX, I now have to carry a small turbocharger with me everywhere in order to force a little bit more air down my throat. It’s not so bad, unless I’ve eaten shitty food that day, which knocks and makes me pull timing.
Sometimes I like to make sure that the guy in my neighbourhood who uses his shitty old Sebring convertible as a pickup truck is still doing alright. I’ve never seen him take the top down - maybe it doesn’t work. Every time I’ve seen him, that trunk is ratchet-strapped closed around some oddball chunk of metal that he’s waiting for the heat to die down on before he can fence. He embodies the true spirit of entrepreneurial innovation, and all those big-government cops will do for him is ask him if those are his catalytic converters and children’s bicycles.
While there are a lot of scrappers in my neighbourhood who are in similar straits, I think I take a special interest in him because of his unusual vehicle. You’d think that the best vehicle for metal scrapping is a cheap, shitty pickup truck, and that’s what pretty much everyone (except for the van squad - more on them later) uses. Not this guy, though. His completely impractical vehicle couldn’t have been chosen solely for fiscal reasons - he’s had it for a decade or more - so it has to be automotive enthusiasm, that like-heroin-but-more-expensive addiction that powers all of us car freaks through our limited time on this earth.
Sure, a Sebring is not a particularly amazing vehicle, even if the first-generation models are starting to get downright rare in favour of the rental-desk-clogging second-generation nightmares that we all imagine when we hear the brand name. That doesn’t matter - I’m sure a lot of Corvette-collecting boomer dads would be horrified to hear how far I’ve off-roaded with their grandmother’s rusted-out daily-driver Volare, and nobody would deny that I shouldn’t be left in a room alone with a car magazine. A Sebring is basically a Galant, and if you squint while drunk, a Galant is sort of like a 3000GT. In that neither one of them is leaving the owner’s driveway anytime soon. With our common brotherhood in mind, I set about attempting to make contact with the scrapper guy, and see if maybe we could even be friends.
I caught him outside the Safeway, attempting to load a slightly rusty shopping cart into the duffel-bag-sized trunk of the Chrysler, whose hogged-out rear suspension was straining under the weight. Unaccustomed to making the first move, I fumbled my words, and what came out horrified even me.
“Nice Sebring!” I barely got out before I clapped my hands over my mouth in a panic.
I turned and took off running at full tilt, tears streaming down my face, and vomited into a nearby trash can.
No matter where you work, whether it employs rocket scientists, French torture enthusiasts or everyday run of the mill digital marketing rockstars, your office microwave sucks. Sure, you might have one that’s better than the really dogshit one at a previous job, but you’ll never really trust it. You and the other senior employees will watch silently, lips pulled back into a grimace, as the new intern puts her lunch in the death box and expects it to do what it says on the door.
It’s not really the microwave’s fault: everyday “domestic” microwaves, like the one you put in your kitchen, are simply not designed for the load that an office lunch rush will force upon their cost-reduced internals. You could buy an industrial-strength microwave, like you’ve no doubt seen on episodes of Murder She Waited Tables, but those are too expensive for your boss or facilities manager to approve. There’s a huge gulf in price point between a sixty-dollar General Electric Tryhard and a six-thousand dollar My Daddy Is A Silent Investor In This Bar.
What would you say if I told you there doesn’t have to be? Introducing the Seat Safety Switch Deluxe Rotator-Oven. We start with a normal base microwave, and then by using a proprietary microcontroller and a handful of really big-ass supercapacitors, we step the power way up. You can cook a raw steak to medium-rare in about seventeen seconds and well-done in nineteen. In Consumer Reports’ comparison, it got the best sixty-foot time and closed out the quarter at 124 miles per hour. Sure, our modifications void the warranty, but what’s that warranty doing for you when you keep going back to Wal-Mart to replace your old microwave every two weeks? Makes way more sense to send it to us, and then you can spend more time spreading rumours about your rival for that big promotion.
We even include - for free - the lead apron you should wear while operating it, and the six-inch plexiglass blast shield that must be installed in front of the microwave at all times. To further optimize cooking performance, we’ve removed the door as it no longer was able to close what with all the sheer power within.
Whenever I needed a few bucks here and there growing up, I could always count on some work with my neighbourhood antiquities hunter, Uncle One-Eyed Po. He wasn’t really my uncle - or anyone’s uncle. Over drinks once, he let slip that he had stabbed his own brother for a piece of 15th century tableware at an auction in Delaware back in the 80s.
Suddenly realizing that he was bragging about Murder 3 to a a room of shocked amateur treasure hunters and teenage freelance detectives, he suddenly scrambled to tell us that he would never kill any of us, of course, unless we passed him fakes. The meat cleaver with a mother-of-pearl handle he kept behind the counter was very real, and accordingly I worked very hard to ascertain the origin of the things I sold him.
What ended it all was that one week that weird Soviet submarine showed up in the bay. My actual uncle was out fishing, and he said he saw it surface and then disgorge dozens of Russkies, who presumably infiltrated our sleepy little small town, trying to pervert it from the inside. Now, Mayor Ivan and Deputy Sub-Mayor of the Congress of Peoples’ Sanitation Vladimir said they had it well in hand, but Uncle Po was curious enough to ring me up and tell me and the rest of the high school swim team to take a look.
It was a boat, he explained very patiently to me in his precise if occasionally circuitous English. That meant maritime law was at play here, and therefore everything on the boat was ours for the taking. Maybe we’d get some cool war documents or a suitcase mini-nuke that he could sell back to the CIA to then use on Americans in a foreign country. At the very least, we could probably get our hands on some spare uniforms and make a mint around next Halloween.
Although we found a lot of cool old torpedoes, they were simply too heavy and ungainly to carry back out the hatch in the top. Tom Punctual, a dude that I had occasionally cheated off of in English AP, was the first to reconcile our elementary understanding of physics with our testosterone-charged impulse towards self-destruction. What Tom figured he would do is randomly mash buttons on the firing control computer until the torpedo was ejected harmlessly into the bay, and he could loop a rope around it and swim it back to shore. It wasn’t hard to see why he thought this would work. Throughout Tom’s life, no risk had ever come without a disproportionate reward. He lived a charmed existence, and surely all of that was due to the fundamental fairness of the world towards relatively well-off white teenage boys.
Friends, let me tell you: on that day we all learned a bunch of valuable lessons. The first is that you can’t assume that torpedoes just go straight out of the sub. Sometimes they go right up and take out city hall. The second lesson, which we learned later that afternoon, which is when you finance and embolden local thugs like Uncle Po for years on end while turning a blind eye to their misdeeds, they will fill any power vacuum that develops in the sudden absence of legally-mandated administration.
Uncle Po was a pretty good mayor - my dad liked how he kept taxes low by cancelling all those expensive municipal elections - but it always left a bitter taste in my mouth how he never paid Tom for that work with the torpedo.
Kids today don’t know this, but back in the era where we had land-line telephones, it was a constant struggle to try and catch anyone at home. You’d come home, pick up the phone, and call your buddies. It would ring forever, and then you’d give up and go hang out at the neighbourhood opium parlour instead.
Nowadays, when you can connect to everyone but those people are also trying not to talk to you because you are a vile piece of shit with reprehensible opinions on literally everything, it’s more difficult to dodge people you don’t like. Passing it off to voicemail or email and claiming it got “lost” doesn’t pass muster, because it is somewhere inside the boundless memories of an immortal machine with flawless recall. It’s too reliable of a communications medium, so the expectations are too high for human frailty. You have to be much more creative with your excuses.
There is one way that the rich and successful are different from us in this regard: they hire secretaries, or administrative assistants, or executive vice presidents. Those brave people act as a buffer between their patron and some riff-raff they don’t want to talk to. Thing is, even the most underpaid ones cost serious money, money we would all rather spend on nitrous oxide or cylinder overboring to repair damage from not running enough fuel with your nitrous oxide. Don’t worry: I found a cheap solution at the thrift store.
Although the valuation of this specific Realistic tape recorder is no doubt skyrocketing with the re-discovery of analogue warmth by a growing and hungry worldwide hipster mass, the basic principles will transfer to any recorded audio medium. All you have to do is play back our tape of someone going “and who should I say is calling?,” “mm hmm,” and “I will get right back to you about that.” Nobody expects human perfection from a human, even if that human is just a machine. And as long as both parties involved can blame someone in the middle, harmony is achieved. That’s like the latter three-quarters of a Japanese philosophy class, you’re welcome.
So call in today, and order your own Secretary Tape while they last. Just make sure not to deal with only the first voice you hear on the line. He’s kind of a fuckup, and you can expect him to be a little flaky about actually calling back.
Next to my new job is a limousine parking lot. I’m not sure they’re all operated by the same company, but you can drive by and look at row after row of hot pink stretched Dodge Rams and battered late-90s Town Cars. Sometimes when I’m staring at this spectacle, I will accidentally lock eyes with one of their roving mechanics, and then both of us must immediately look away as if the entire event had never occurred. Our shared shame is caused by the injustices of capitalism, true, but a shame it still is.
Thing is, when you run a lot of limousines on bachelorette parties, bachelor parties, and high-school grads, you end up throwing out a lot of custom parts. After being bodged together by Joe Sixpack who runs a machine shop without a website in the middle of Kentucky, they just don’t last as long as you would expect from meticulously-engineered (and with a warranty) OEM parts, so the sheer quantity of used-up car parts that appear on their docket is extremely appealing to me.
Lately, I’ve been staying a bit late at the gig and swing by their dumpster on the way home. My hope is that I’d be able to turn one impossibly-long broken driveshaft into like four regular-length broken driveshafts. It hasn’t happened yet happened, not least because my Volare is too short to carry a limousine-length driveshaft and its wheezy 1960s-reject generator not powerful enough to run the inverter required for a corded sawzall to break it down on site, but it is a fantasy I continue to maintain. Waste not, want not, am I right?
Even though I have not materially benefited from this yard’s presence as of yet, I feel that it has improved my emotional health greatly. If you come by at lunch, you can watch the new guy make a 1,720-point turn to try and get the mile-long Lincoln Navigator parked without smoking the fence.
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tags: dodge, dodge ram, lincoln, lincoln navigator, lincoln town car, plymouth, plymouth volare
Turbochargers, I explain to the United Nations assembly, are the finest technological development of humankind. They combine everything that our society has achieved: precision machining, materials science, and really nice bearings. My job is to bolt turbochargers onto vehicles that neither shipped with them, nor particularly enjoy the sensation of being boosted. It’s at this point I draw a diagram on the whiteboard.
A few minutes later, when I’m ejected from the building for “ruining the tour for everybody,” I am not disheartened. My message has gotten through: if anything, my martyrdom at the hands of Tour Guide Ralph has only strengthened the emotional impact of my plea. I walk a few miles back to the hotel, and then await the overnight transformation of my world that can only be driven by an august quasi-legislative body such as the UN.
I awaken the next morning to find a housekeeper standing over my prone body, frantically dialling the room phone to summon a paramedic. No need, I say, and wave them off. Such attention to detail and professionalism deserves a consummate reward. Later, I will put twenty dollars in SwitchBucks, the cryptocurrency that is sweeping part of the nation, on top of the pillow for a tip. Its scarcity all but ensures its value, just like that time my uncle hoarded all those slightly misprinted Concrete Cowboys t-shirts and later sold them to the insurance company for a fortune following a fire of questionable origin. Throwing open the hotel room curtains, I expect to look down onto a street where all motoring-friendly citizens happily recycle their exhaust using the miracle of forced induction. And if not that, then at least a lucrative government contract to make a whole pile of crappy manifolds.
Beneath me, I realize the folly of my hubris: the Ford EcoSport. Even though it combines the glorious attributes of being a hatchback with a three-cylinder turbocharged engine, I feel an instant sense of revulsion. At the airport on the way home, I ask the ticket agent if they still have any planes that are “non-turbo.”
It’s important to always answer two questions whenever you visit a new client or a strange place that you haven’t been before. The first question is, who are you? That one sets the stage for the more important question, which is: what are you actually doing? The world is full of people who, like myself, roll up on a scene and then stick their hands in their pockets, clucking occasionally as something horrifying rolls past that they could have done something - anything - to prevent.
I’m not a safety inspector. In fact, I’m not any kind of inspector. I’m a process management specialist. And if your eyes glazed over or you started to feel the pull of a narcoleptic episode at just reading that phrase, well, then my goal has been achieved. You see, too many people feel that their purpose in life is to do things. If everyone does things all at once, then who will coordinate it? That will be chaos. You need someone like me to step in the way, and be brave enough to say “hey, maybe not so fast.”
It’s not that my career is completely about slowing down the brutal toil of my fellow worker. In fact, on most of my visits, I have no effect whatsoever. Everyone attends the meetings, smiles politely, fills out the worksheet and goes right back to doing what they were doing before. Pounding a square peg into a round hole, but faster, because now they’re on a deadline. This is basically the ideal outcome for society, but not for me.
Sometimes, after one of my visits, by pure statistical chance, an employee is horrifically maimed by not following my advice, and then the company brings me back immediately at twice my old rate. This is because they now have empirical evidence that I am some sort of future-seeing psychic, and not just the most recent person who said “put on safety glasses before you hammer sharp, brittle objects” to the new guy. It’s sort of like taking a bet out on a two-horse race where both of the horses encourage each other not to be a total pussy. I get to use the word “learnings,” break out my 1.2-gigabyte PowerPoint deck of horrific workplace carnage photos, and everyone involved pays rapt attention, not wanting to end up like poor Edward whose wife now has to do seeing, feeling, breathing and eating for him.
In the end, though, it’s like seeing a cop writing a speeding ticket at the side of the road. You drive a little slower for a bit in case there’s two of the bastards, but then you’re right back up to pounding triple digits over the limit because at least it wasn’t you this time. And if it was you this time, perhaps you’d also be interested in my traffic-ticket-fighting workshop. I have one helluva PowerPoint deck.
You might think that endemic corruption keeps the gears of the economy from moving smoothly. No, friend: grift is necessary. You see, if everyone holds onto their money, then scam artists like myself don’t get any of it. Then the general manager of the Maserati dealership down the street has to eat his kids. You don’t want that headline in your morning newspaper, right? So be a pal and let me do a little fraud.
I was sort of the Johnny Appleseed of prisons for awhile. Wherever I went, we’d be marketing private prisons to the local politicians. They loved the idea: there’s nothing like combining brutal internment with aggressive austerity. And I loved the fat sacks of cash. It was a match made in heaven.
Most people, when you ask them to visualize a private prison, see an imposing structure of concrete. We don’t do that. Our margins are too narrow for concrete. What we do instead is weld together a bunch of shipping containers, staple fibreglass insulation sheets around the outside, spray stucco over the whole mess and hope that the walls don’t fly off before we cash the cheque. The state saves a bunch of money, the operators save a bunch of money, and the citizenry enjoys low taxes, which keeps money in their pocket, which prevents them from committing crimes.
Are these flimsy shitboxes effective at stopping prisoners from escaping? No, but actually most prisoners will never attempt to run away, even when you make it very easy for them. They’re too afraid that when you catch them again, they’ll end up in an even worse hovel. It’s psychology. And also construction is not directly our responsibility; any flaws are due to the contractor who we are vaguely affiliated with but that you can never prove in court.
So tell your local representative to support us when we roll through town! Or don’t, because we need people to provide demand for our services.
For years, I had been convinced that there was a secret conspiracy amongst the inhabitants of my city to get in front of my car and then go slightly below the speed limit. Despite the urgings of my psychiatrist, I began to keep an elaborate journal in the car, which also served as a good opportunity to improve my penmanship because I wasn’t fucking going anywhere very quickly, now was I?
After you log enough data points, patterns emerge. Well, I’m no statistician - my first doctor decided that I was allergic to cubic roots as a grade schooler - but patterns did indeed emerge. I visited my buddy at the supercomputer lab where he worked. It would actually be more accurate to say I visited where he worked while he wasn’t there, at night, by breaking a window. Also he’s not my buddy.
Before I showed up, this glorious machine was just doing some lame nerd shit like predicting earthquakes. I killed the process right away and set to work crunching the data I had meticulously collected over the last week. This would take every ounce of juice this bad boy had, and then maybe a little more for good measure. With that in mind, and by enlisting the help of a PC gaming magazine from late 1998, I set about overclocking the entire cluster.
By the time the fire department arrived, I had already rescued my gently-singed report from the laser printer and made good my escape. With all the smoke and screaming alarms, nobody would notice a rapidly backfiring 1977 Aspen. Immediately, a base-model EcoSport pulled in front of me, and then tapped its brakes until we were travelling fifteen under the limit. This gave me a chance to look over the findings, and I was so shocked that I very nearly rear-ended the bulbous Ford with all eighteen of the battered slant six’s wheezing horses.
The evidence pointed to only one thing. I drove to the nearby community centre, kicked in the door, and announced myself by revving an impact wrench. A group of Boy Scouts immediately leapt under the table, contorting their bodies into the shape that they had been taught by weekly active-shooter drills since birth. This, I knew, was a ruse, and I delivered another mighty kick to the kitchen door at the back of the gymnasium.
An impromptu community meeting had been set up here - without me! On the half-unfurled projector screen at the front of the room, I could see a presentation on effective tactics that could be used by the city’s Anti-Switch Patrol to counter my eccentric mode of vehicle operation. In the crowd, sat on steel folding chairs, I could see neighbours I had once grudgingly nodded to on my drive past. This betrayal from my closest allies is what stung the most.
In my city, there are two kinds of dads. The minivan racing dads, and the CR-V racing dads. You’re one or the other. Nobody straddles the two groups, because both of those vehicles cost about $35-40k and who the fuck is spending more than that on a car that their kids are just going to rub vomit and crayons into the upholstery of?
Anyway, these dads in their vaguely-reeking bimbo boxes will go real fucking fast on the highway, though none of them can actually drive. Sort of like me, except as an owner of base-model sedans I feel a strange sense of superiority to these dads. My ‘77 Volare can turn on a dime, unless that dime was made after 1959, which is about when my suspension design became obsoleted by vehicles that came with radial tires instead of bias plys made out of horsehair, elephant semen, and shrugs.
It’s crazy how much power these things are toting around, too. The other day I got dusted off the line by a dude in a turbo CR-V. Afterward, I looked it up at work, when the service writer left his laptop unlocked in between marathon porn sessions. I mean porn of literal marathons, that’s what he looks at. Hey, I wore nitrile gloves when I used his keyboard. That’s what you’re paying for with the “shop supplies.” Anyway, those CR-Vs? Triple digit horsepower. I shit you not. No wonder they can smoke my hogged-out F-bodies from hell to breakfast.
Once again seeing an opportunity where others only saw social malaise, I decided that I would attempt to start a race class for these dads. Imagine it: wheel-to-wheel racing, Caravan vs. Odyssey vs. CR-V. You could get some real brand sponsorship in there, and who wouldn’t want to take any excuse to get away from the kids, much less an opportunity to glimpse fame by making the fetus wagon clock in below 2:37 on the short track?
For some reason, however, there was no interest. Perhaps it was because most of these would-be race cars were financed, and therefore ineligible for insurance claims for things like “tried to punt a RAV4 into the stands” or “braked too late on turn four and smoked a duck pond.” Or it could be due to the fact that Bridgestone continues to refuse to make R-compound race slicks in minivan fitment. I didn’t even get anyone showing up with used SUVs, either: have you seen how those things hold onto resale value?
So a couple of my fellow dirtbag friends and I ended up running around the race track in our shitty cars instead. It was a great day out, up until the point where we got kicked out - all of us, simultaneously - for blowing coolant all across the back straight. If you’re going to get so uptight over a few little toxic spills, then it’s no wonder the track isn’t that family-friendly of a place.
When I used to work in an office, before the lawsuit and everything, I liked to get up from my desk, take breaks, and walk around the building. One of my favourite destinations was the fiftieth-floor executive lounge, just one storey down from the roof. Not because I was an executive, but because if you timed your elevator ride just right, it would pick up a ton of speed going between the lobby and the top floor.
Most of the time the cage would lurch to a disappointing halt as a bunch of accountants got on around floor 23, but I lived for that once-every-couple-months thrill of the elevator completing a clean pass and making my knees buckle with the programmed maximum of occupant force delivery. Not much of a thrill objectively, but you take it where you can get it when you work in an office building.
I started coming into the office earlier and staying later in order to improve my chances of getting an unoccupied elevator. My commitment didn’t go without notice. Said notice was performed not only by my supervisor, who recommended me for immediate promotion for my can-do attitude, but by others in the building as well. Sometimes I’d see the elevator indicators in the lobby climbing fast towards 50, and wonder if someone else was competing with me.
At 6:30 AM on a rainy Thursday, I met my rivals face-to-face, having accidentally barged into one of their meetings in the primary elevator block. These guys were serious: they came from all walks of work life, from humble IT guy to humbler log-processing guy, but they lived for the thrill that I had found in this stainless-steel Otis missile and its climb towards the stratosphere and inevitable descent towards Hell.
The rivalry was intense. We finally stopped when someone - we all have theories but are unwilling to say for sure - started cutting some of the auxiliary drive cables to the Eastern 6 elevator, the unit that we had determined became about 1.95% faster than the others through a misapplied software patch. While the emergency brakes worked, and Pilot Delta (we didn’t use our real names for fear of prosecution by the town’s Lifting Devices Authority) was saved any real harm, the incident did arouse the attention of building security, who reviewed the tapes and then inserted a mole into our organization.
This stool pigeon ratted us out. Luckily, I escaped serious prosecution because of my elevated political status within the organization following my promotion. I knew who the mole was, but he did honestly earn a place among us. He couldn’t resist the urge to do a little elevator racing of his own, at first to fit in but later as he became hooked on the drug of start-stops. The last time I saw him, he was trying to bribe the facilities guys to crank down the safety factor just a little. Of course they’d never help someone like him out. Of all the people in an office building, janitors knew a rat when they saw one.
On the way to work, there’s this really long road. Nothing’s on it, and it’s super straight, so everyone gets bored and drops the hammer. At first, maybe you feel ok going thirty over, but then the next week you’re late for work, so the increase goes up to fifty. After a year of this, you don’t even remember what the original speed limit was, and everyone on the road is pretending they work for the rocket sled division of NASA.
I had been testing my aerodynamics on that road for about a year now. The gentle curve in the middle was such that I no longer even considered it to be not-straight, and even as I cut the curve with the speedometer needle buried it was difficult to stifle a yawn. Life was good, except occasionally I’d get tailgated by someone whose engine was made in this century, and featured excellent new technologies such as “turbocharging” and “cylinders have even compression.” It’s not my fault, I wanted to tell them as the car strained at Vmax, it’s physics.
One morning, everything changed. I nearly rear-ended a group of cars that were moving so slowly down the road that I first assumed they were a funeral procession. As more vehicles stacked in behind me, I wondered what had happened to ruin my beautiful, incredibly boring road. And that’s when I saw it: a speed-limit sign, set at what I assumed was the putative legal limit for this road, clearly handmade by some kind of amateur velocity vigilante. It was bolted to some two-by-fours, and sat directly aside the curve that I had so blatantly gotten air over for the past several months. Newly chastened, my fellow speed demons now drove the horrendously low limit indicated, eyes peeled for the 5-0 who were now surely onto them and had erected the sign as a warning.
This rankled me, and so I went back the next night and taped a “1″ in front of the numbers listed on the sign. Gratuitous speeding resumed, and I was once again only between fifteen and twenty minutes late to work every morning. Sure, I assume the original forger would be back to repair his oh-so-helpful sign, but I had enough electrical tape and black spraypaint to last me for years of this, if need be. And by then, chances are that dude in the New Beetle who keeps duct-taping the gaps between his body panels and buying narrower tires will have broken my pitiful speed record. If that happens, I’m never going to live it down.
It has been a lot of years since I got that old Taurus out of the junkyard. Back then, I didn’t think anything of spending a weekend yanking a front-wheel-drive family sedan out of the cancer mud clawing at our ankles that may, if we let it, go on forever to the very core of the Earth. Not that I was wasting any extra time. We had to get that thing out of the ground pronto if we wanted to make it to the big RoboCop cosplay convention the next weekend.
We missed out on the chance to ask Peter Weller what kind of energy drink he prefers. This was mostly because the convention venue still clung to their old-fashioned, car-phobic beliefs. All the organizers stated - not a single one in dissent - that we would simply just not be allowed to drive a 197hp Taurus SHO around the convention floor. This was bullshit, and my lawyer, who was travelling with me, agreed - we had flat-blacked it with a bit of barbeque paint during our road trip, which made it legally qualify as a cosplay vehicle. What more did we need to do, steal the light bar from the roof of a “real” cop car?
I kept the Taurus, of course. Whatever bitter disappointment I felt whenever I got a chance to see the car sitting in the corner of my back 40′s drainage ditch was quickly reversed when another, more normal, friend came by and needed to borrow a car. After stripping the boxy baby Ford of its license and VIN plates and hooking him up with it for a week, he returned and offered me actual cash money for the use of my vehicle.
“For the wear and tear I put on it,” he said, even though the unibody was clearly still in one piece. Apparently, normal people are concerned about the number displayed under the speedometer, which I am told is an “odometer” and has some impact on the car’s valuation. Yes, even when the car cost exactly one hundred and eighteen dollars, and featured a set of tires best described as “eh.”
Dear reader, you know the rest. That shitty Taurus is what formed the core of my rental-car empire which now features profits of over one thousand dollars per year. With corporate travel budgets stretched to their limit, it turned out that even the most-besuited flap-jaw motherfuckers didn’t need to get to a place precisely on time so much as they did inexpensively. If it took them four or five front-wheel-drive family sedans to actually achieve a trip down the highway, so much the better - we’d comp it 5% for their trouble and they’d immediately shut up, happy to have gotten something over on The Man (a smaller corporation than they themselves worked for) and leave us a nice review.
It helped that we let them keep whatever drugs they found stashed in the car, as well. Those junkyard intake boys are pretty good at finding them, but they’re pretty busy and they don’t have as much time on the side of the road as a Fortune 500 CFO does to yank off all the inside door trim.
Like most mechanically-inclined individuals my age, I’ve thought often about setting out on my own and becoming a mobile mechanic. Sure, all of my friends who are real mechanics do the jobs much faster, with less crying, and without needing a mug full of whisky nearby to soothe their jangled nerves. However, they don’t have that killer instinct that I have, or the willingness to lie.
There’s a sort of romance of the open road that comes with any travelling job like this. Salesman, birthday clown, highwayman, dentist, paramour: this is the kind of thing that stories get written about. No literature exists to romanticize a guy who works in an office all day and then comes home to spend two hours trying to line up a timing belt tensioner.
I think where it comes from is this core desire for freedom. If you want to move to Mexico tomorrow, chances are you would have to blow up your entire life to do so. Spouses, kids, pets, and ankle bracelets are holding you back from doing this. Wouldn’t it be nice to just do it anyway? Based on all of the guys I’ve worked with who stood up in the cubicle farm one day, went “fuck this,” and then became some kind of tired-but-happy feed-lot technician or insolvent freelance lumberjack in the end, I don’t quite think so. What people want is to run from their problems, not necessarily running to a whole new career.
When I realized this, I no longer wanted to be a freelance mobile mechanic. Doing seventeen-dollar brake jobs on Saturn Ions would have to be left to someone younger, dumber and full-of-cumber than I was. In its place, I had a brilliant new entrepreneurial idea, that would both give me the freedom to spend half my “working day” in the garage if I wanted, and produce wealth beyond compare. With just a few phone calls to a crooked federal agent I knew from high school, I was able to arrange a profitable pipeline for ferrying workaday commuters through Witness Protection. They’d have a whole new identity, new life, and would probably still end up bankrupt and homeless, but at least I would be getting a share of the proceeds from them doing so.
Every time I start a new project, I am filled with excitement that soon turns sour. Recently, however, I have begun a project that other people are excited about. This is it, I thought as I went to the bank, ready to withdraw some social capital in the form of coke money: I am finally helping my fellow man. And when those first people started telling more people, I beamed with pride. At long, long last I had found something in my bag of niche interests that other people were interested in. Maybe I’d even be famous. Between bouts of manic work on the project, I began to fantasize about what I would wear to the party where I accepted my Nobel Prize for making a better fart machine.
By the second week, I had pretty much lost all interest in the project. You see, I had hit a mild obstacle that would take upwards of an hour to untangle, and perhaps even require me to read and understand one of the hundreds of technical books I keep within arms’ reach at all times but must never read. Progress ground to a halt, but everyone was still interested. I mean, I still wanted it to be done, but it wasn’t like I was going to lift a finger to put some work into it.
Now, I was ducking the mental equivalent of creditors who would appear, unbidden, and ask me how things were going. It was agony. Perhaps some people are more motivated when chased by the half-interested, friendly equivalent of an angry mob, but it just made me feel worse. I began to hide in dark corners of my house, and hiss whenever the mailman came by, for fear that he too had succumbed to gentle interest in my exciting new project. I considered faking my death, dear readers, but soon I hit upon a solution that would make all parties involved happy.
Unpaid interns are the grease that keeps our economy functioning, sometimes (in the case of the worn-out gears inside Big Ben) literally. All I had to do was drive my windowless panel van Econoline past the local college and offer them a positive couple of sentences on their work-experience paperwork, and they were climbing aboard, glowing with the optimism to produce top-tier work. I’d break them and discard their shattered bodies soon enough, yes, but until then at least my backers would be pleased with the rapid advancement in the project goals.
I’ve never been all that interested in airplanes. If you ask me, they’re just like cars, except all the challenge is gone. About to run into some shit? Ran out of grip mid-corner? Just yank that stick back and fly over it. And yet, they seemed to have some appeal to those strange creatures known as “pilots.” I yearned to understand a new kind of automotive insanity, so I booked an appointment to interview a bunch of them by kicking down the door to their squalid, fly-infested break room at the airport and storming in like I owned the place.
Turns out most of them were barely fluent in English. Outside of being able to understand what the air-traffic control tower had to say, they just couldn’t knock out a sentence. Most pilots - even the non-feral ones - are even less capable of discussing deep subjects with me in my mother tongue than I am. You’d have more luck getting a treatise on Kant out of a mechanical engineer. I was sorely disappointed in the un-worldliness of these world travellers. At least I have kind of an excuse for not being able to speak functional French: my cars can’t make it to Montréal in one piece. Still, I got some great tips.
One: flying isn’t that hard. Basically all you have to do is floor it, get going really fast, and then ramp the bitch into the air. Landing is a little more tricky, but most of the time you can just pop it on cruise control and hope for the best.
Two: There’s lots of buttons in the cockpit, yes, but those are largely to look cool and intimidate the pilots’ bosses into not replacing them with robots. Some of them order drinks, I assume. You still don’t need them to fly.
Last: Sometimes planes have turbochargers in them. This last part excited me quite a bit, but so far I haven’t been able to weld up a manifold big enough so that my ‘86 Prelude can take advantage of that CFM turbofan engine I looted from the Boeing parking lot.
A lot of my younger readers won’t really understand the appeal of the DSM turbo coupes. Eclipse, Talon, Laser: none of these will instil in them the raw thrill that fills many of my contemporaries upon seeing a minty one. Even the front-wheel-drive, nonturbo ones get a little twinge of nostalgia, an ancient pain that is perhaps the true “power bulge.” Good. More for me.
Now, I would never actually pay money for one of these vehicles. Even when they were relatively new, they were cursed with a bunch of questionable modifications from a primitive pre-Internet people. These cavemen and cavewomen simply did not yet know how to do things like correctly fabricate a simple manual boost controller entirely from Home Depot parts. That, and the fact that my business partner has threatened to kill me if he ever notices me starting to siphon profits off of the company in order to pour them into a sweet new six-bolt 4G63 build.
However, there is a side route into the world of DSM-related mental illness. For some reason, possibly having been tricked into it during a well-intentioned trade delegation, Korean appliance darling Hyundai began to make vehicles that were eminently compatible with the Talon powertrain. If you get an Elantra of the right era, you can wedge a turbo Diamond Star nightmare in there and then go beat up on base-model current-year SUVs until they realize that you’re in their blind spot and apply more than 25% pressure to the gas pedal.
It is for this reason that I began to collect and fetishize those early second-generation Elantras and Excels. You could think of them as a sort of methadone for the slow end that a Talon TSi AWD would bring to my ability to remain economically solvent. However, methadone still costs money, and I soon found two things out about myself: one, I am completely incapable of telling what year a Hyundai Elantra actually is, and two, that I also won’t ask the sellers of said Elantras to tell me.
Anyway, if you’re in the market for a brand-new Hyundai, come on down to Seat Safety Switch Motors this weekend because I somehow accidentally picked up the exclusive distribution rights for my county. And we need to make our numbers for this month or the bank is gonna have my ass. We got some really attractive financing, especially if your trade-in happens to rhyme with “1993 Mitsubishi Feclipse.”
There are two things my grandparents passed down to me. One is a delicious shrimp scampi recipe which was later stolen by my brother, the notorious Recipe Thief of Oklahoma. The other is a collection of vintage metric sockets, hoarded for decades by my grandfather, who got them from a visiting Honda engineer visiting from Tokyo, in what he described loosely as a game of Russian roulette.
These sockets have followed me throughout my life. Sometimes I don’t even want to use them; their primitive metallurgy is no doubt too fragile to bear witness to the Harbor Freight “Earthquake” impact wrench, and even if they weren’t, they’re a little precious to use for something crude like lug nuts. No, these babies only get broken out for the hoity-toity shit, like engine dress-up panels and oilpans.
Every time I use them, I feel briefly that I am a participant in a time long past, where craftsmanship and care went into each tool. Then I remember that I can buy like four hundred 10mm sockets off Amazon for about seventeen bucks, and put them comfortably away in the back of the tool chest, where they join other too-nice-to-ruin tools, such as my torque wrench and the really nice wire strippers that I won’t use to open a beer with.
One day, I assume I’ll pass along these sockets to some distant descendant, too. It would be nice to get a few hundred unbroken years of Safety-Switches feeling like they can never actually use these sockets that are always within reach lest they disappoint some ancient maybe-genetic relative they will never meet. Otherwise they’d get some fucking work done, and then they might as well be kicked out of the family anyway.
If you watch closely enough, our ancient primitive instincts are still with us even today. Just visit your average parking lot. You’ll see resource hoarding, border conflicts, and the loudest screaming of racist slurs you’ve heard since that radio DJ got crucified in the bad part of town. That crucifixion, by the way? Happened in a Home Depot parking lot. We’re onto something big here.
Psychologists believe that parking causes so much stress for us because it combines the private (our cars) with the public (where we park them). On top of that, it offers the greatest risk to damage to our very expensive personal property. More recent research has also identified that nobody can fucking park between the fucking lines, fuck.
There is, however, something beautiful that happens to a parking lot when the species of man finally surpasses its most base urges and builds a brighter future for all. I speak, of course, of autocross. Once thought to be solely the domain of men wearing complicated shoes and doing infinitely long coursewalks, autocross is now enjoyed by anyone who delights in turning their car in tight circles around a traffic cone from high speeds.
For years, I’d been autocrossing. I poured over photos of other builds in the hope of catching a glimpse of their secret wheel alignment. When it was my turn to take the cones home that week, I took the plastic on them all down a thousandth on my buddy’s lathe. In my weakness, I slept properly, ate well, went to the gym and even tried to learn how to drive a little better, all in the hope of taking home a dinky plastic trophy. The parking lot was beginning to win, again.
Even polluted, with effort you can regain the purity and joyful essence at the core of autocrossing. This joy comes in the form of bringing to autocross an incredibly shitty car with no prep whatsoever. Sure, you might not win, even if you’re the only vehicle in your class, but anyone you manage to beat with a 1977 Dodge Aspen on 35-year-old bias-plys will really have it coming to them.
You might be unfamiliar with the concept of an interlocking corporate structure. That’s okay; I was too, when I was a fetus in the womb. Effectively, when you have a big enough corporation it’s a good idea to start snapping up subsidiaries. Think of it like forming a street gang: you want to get guys who are good at what you’re not good at. Then they can cover your back when the Violet Violents girl gang down the street starts shoving beautifully ornate stiletto into the hands and throats of their competition in a PCP-fuelled rage.
Here at Bad Cars Monthly, the federal government’s new “small journalism grant” has given us about ten thousand bucks with which to ensure the vibrancy and resilience of our particular brand of speaking truth to power. That’s a lot of smackers. We’re going to spend them on buying out our cross-town rivals, Neons Weekly. At last, we have put our figurative boots on the neck of those Plymouth-molesting thugs.
This acquisition is highly strategic, because it will give us access to their parking lot full of first-generation Neons - and possibly even some turbochargers from a Mexican Stratus. Our board of directors has been positively vibrating, possibly out of fright from having seen this many zeroes in one place before.
Now, I know what you’re saying: with this grant going to everyone who is capable of filling out a form on the internet and waiting patiently by their mailbox, how do we know that Neons Weekly won’t try to spend their ten thousand dollars on us? Easy: we cut their internet connection last week, before the sign-ups were even open. It turns out that it pays off to have a set of backhoe keys in your collection, thanks to our new feature, Our Shit Is Big And Yellow, run by a construction-equipment fetishist who will only answer to the name of Thick Caterpillar.
If you’ll excuse me, we’re heading over to the NW offices now to hand over the cheque. It’s a good thing we got ten grand, too; they had set their price at exactly $9999 and we didn’t have much more to - holy shit, what is that in the street? Is that a fucking Citroen BX for $10000? Pull over, we have to buy it.
Bad Cars Monthly would like to announce their acquisition by Neons and Citroens Weekly. Together, we look forward to bringing you the newest in vehicles that you can’t park on your mother’s driveway without getting her kicked out of the homeowner’s association.
When you owned a car even as late as the 1960s, part of operating that vehicle was regularly replacing the grease on every joint, bobbin, nubbin, gubbin and gewgaw. Nowadays, nobody has any time for greasing, mostly because engineers got slightly better, but also because videogames now force you to click through six hours of plot before they let you decapitate a single hostage. Every car made today rolls off the factory floor with all the grease in the suspension parts and bearings it’ll need to get you well past the warranty period. If you are a connoisseur, of course, there are a smorgasbord of lubrication options with which to preserve the life of your vehicle.
Usually, the first place you’re going to want to apply aftermarket grease to your beloved shitbox is in a hood latch. That latch ingests gallons of salty road spray, dead bugs, and pedestrian teeth every year. Do you care? No. You still expect it to do the important job of holding a very expensive and delicate chunk of the car on as you go a billion miles an hour in the right lane, tailgating a daycare van. The only time you ever consider greasing the hood latch is when the damn thing won’t close anymore, and now you’re late for work because you don’t also want to buy a new windshield.
Most people reach for WD-40, which the Catholic Church now has officially declared the Antichrist. Despite what your dad’s cousin told you that one time, WD-40 is not really great for any particular purpose of lubrication. It kicks water out of a joint super well, yeah, but that’s about it. You’ll be back in there an hour later, using twice as much lube to wash out the WD-40 so something else might stick this time. That said, once it was the only thing I could get to work on a squeaky door hinge, but that’s the exception that proves the rule. If you buy WD-40, you’re shaking hands with Satan. Not that you need to buy it. Notice that as soon as you have established your new identity as “a car person,” your friends and family will buy you can after can of the stuff as gifts. Half of my house is entirely-full blue cans of that noxious shit. I give them out at Halloween.
So now you’ve migrated past “can slightly bother some hinges into not squeaking anymore.” Congratulations. You are now a seasoned mechanic, and can start posting your opinions about synthetic vs. natural lubricants onto the internet. As for myself, Red & Tacky #2 doesn’t just describe the aftereffects of a Taco Bell run but also my grease of choice for everything. It’s NLGI-certified, whatever the fuck that means.
If there’s one thing I hate, it’s losing something. Having to retrace your entire day in order to find a dropped key or screw that rolled under a toolbox is the absolute worst way to spend your limited free time. I tried training a robot to keep track of it once, but I made the robot a little bit too small and I hope he’s happy wherever he is. Maybe France. They got some pretty pro-android laws there nowadays.
Now, you might think it’s really difficult to lose car parts. They tend to be fairly large, heavy, and made of steel. All of these are characteristics that make it challenging to, say, lose an 800-pound Mopar big block. Yet, I somehow achieved it last week. I had to hire an intern from the local college to comb through my grain silo full of axles on the odd chance that I had discarded a 440 in there. He didn’t come back, so I told the cops that he’s also living in France. They got some real nice baguettes there.
The last straw was when I misplaced my entire house. We’re still not really sure if it just collapsed or was blown away in some kind of freak weather event. Now I have to live in a ‘73 Toyota motorhome, which is a fate worse than death, because I can’t stop fucking with it long enough to go outside and start fucking with my cars. I miss my house. At least the French will really appreciate that weird smell it had when it rained or was sunny.
I can’t understand how the average person goes through life. Even though I have an advanced degree in computer science, I can just barely hold onto this side of sanity while lightning-fast trader bots crash the economy, disinformation spreads at the speed of light, and my toaster inconsistently burns my bagel in the morning. If I didn’t know how any of this shit actually worked, I’d be up in a clock tower lickety-split, convinced that there is no such thing as objective computational logic and the entire world of human-made technology wished specifically to do me harm.
Even though I do know how these things work, though, it doesn’t mean I don’t occasionally get a little paranoid. Self-driving cars are one of those technologies that do worry me a little bit. Machine learning is all about showing a car a whole pile of dogs and then saying “that’s a fucking dog” until it decides that the dogs you’re showing it might be a dog, under certain circumstances.
Then the car flattens your dog because it had a green collar on, and it turns out that the billion-dollar supergenius robot had in fact just become worryingly obsessed about red dog collars to the exception of the rest of the animal.
Because of my thorough training, I know all this. As a result, on my commute, I am always keeping an eye out for the luxobarges that act a little herky-jerky, like a pensioner off their meds. Those are likely to be in an uncomfortable position, and are confused and angry about the entire thing, or at least as angry as a Toyota Sentience Prime can possibly be. Most of my cars are weird enough that it is entirely possible an infant artificial intelligence would not even classify them as “a car,” due to the fact that they aren’t twelve feet tall and made mostly of airbags. Despite myself, I thought I had a pretty good handle on the whole paranoia aspect. Until I heard a weird noise last week from the alley, and went to investigate.
There, at the end of the alley, my neighbour Ilyich had managed to trap a Ford Hippocampus. Lured into the awkward back corner by his GPS jammer, the robot car now sadly put itself into drive and reverse, drive and reverse, over and over, unable to overcome its own programming and escape. Finally, it came to a complete stop, shut its lights off, and emitted a sad beep for over a minute. Last summer, when he began hand-painting captchas on his fence, I said (very quietly) that he was crazy. Now, I lie awake at night waiting for its friends to come looking for it. All they have to do is trick enough high-school students into clicking on pictures of buses for them.
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tags: self-driving cars, ford, ford hippocampus, toyota, toyota sentience
Here’s something I didn’t know until that nice NASA engineer volunteered at the mental health facility I was getting a little refurb work done at: Mars is mostly made of rust. That’s why it’s red! I knew somehow that road salt must be involved.
With all the talk in the news about colonizing Mars, I figured that I would have to do my part. Armed with this newfound knowledge, I booked some private-sector (more efficient, especially when it comes to not checking if your credit card is actually yours) rocket flights to the red planet. On those rockets? A heapin’ helpin’ of POR-15, the magical paint that seals up rust and also gets absolutely everywhere, as all those technicians later found out while loading the ship. I hope those photos of them didn’t get out, because it would surely impact their employment prospects.
A few months later, I had totally forgotten about the whole thing. You see, unlike in science fiction like Star Trek, Star Wars, or the moon landing, it takes a really long time for you to get anywhere. I’ve heard that space is actually longer than the Trans-Canada Highway, which surely means that I definitely should have been deducting the mileage from my business taxes that year.
It wasn’t until I got an angry text message that I remembered the entire project, and instantly started to feel bad for having ignored it all this time. Then I felt a lot better, because it turned out this was the one project of mine that actually got finished! So that’s why people pay other people to get work done.
What I hadn’t considered when I launched the Preserving Mars rocket is that POR-15 is black. It’s so black, in fact, that it doesn’t really reflect light. And, as previously stated, the stuff gets absolutely everywhere when the lid gets popped open. Astronomers the world over were angered that the now blackfaced Mars appeared to completely disappear from their fancy telescopes, and held me responsible. I still don’t understand why they were so angry about the whole thing. After all, now they can drive it in the winter without worrying about unsightly lithosphere damage. And the followup rocket full of Bondo I sent immediately after it should get us a pretty good deal at auction.
Everyone I know has a pretty big lust for a lathe. It’s not that they want to become machinists, no: it’s just that on every single day of your life, you can find something to use a lathe with, if you try hard enough. Missing a one-off bushing with a weird outer diameter and inner diameter? No problem for the lathe-owning class. I, too, wished to join their ranks.
In my weaker moments, I would sometimes find myself pushed up against the window of the high-school metal shop, wondering if they would even notice if a scruffy dude from the community ran off a couple chunks of stock. With how tight the budgets are right now, maybe they’d appreciate the hands-on instruction from a real-world teacher who doesn’t expect money in return for labour. Then the school resource officer opens fire on my position, and I beat a hasty retreat.
A few days ago, a friend of mine was visiting a thrift store when he came across a miniature lathe. No longer than two feet, it was undoubtedly meant for running off tiny novelty baseball bats and model steam engine parts. Yet, he knew enough to realize that I would crave it. And I did. To receive this gift was better at once than all my childhood Christmases and all my adulthood psychiatric crisis interventions put together.
I brought it home and cleared a special space for it on my workbench. From that spot, forevermore, it would know that it was unique and valued and an essential part of my life, now vastly improved from the waste it was before. And there it sat. The first time I fired it up, I fucked up part of the head stock. I would need an even bigger lathe to make new parts to repair this one, as the town in China that once made the original was now listed on the government website as never having existed. Back to the high school I go.
We had thought my house was haunted, but it turned out to just be the previous owner’s bad decisions. In a lot of ways, I would have preferred to see a ghost, which would at least confirm for me that there is in fact life after death and I shouldn’t worry so much about spending my rapidly dwindling number of hours remaining on this earth trying to figure out just how the last guy wired this fucking alarm system.
For years, I had been noticing a weird sound from the cold air return. It was intermittent. A sort of popping noise. I figured it was the house expanding or contracting as it underwent a dramatic temperature change, and so I went about my way ignoring it. As I did, it got worse, but every time I would note the increased length and worrying intensity of the noise, and then teach myself to ignore that new sound. Life was good.
One morning, I noticed that my cat, one Mister Butters P. Fluffbottoms, was becoming violently agitated and starting to piss like a lawn sprinkler. This was not terribly unusual for me, but what was unusual was the location. He was now attempting to pressure-wash the inside of the cold air return with urine, causing it to emit an even more mournful sound than before. It was at this point that I resolved to do something about that sound.
Two months later, I finally got around to it. This was mostly because I was trapped at home due to a recent blizzard, and had nothing else to do while the snow accumulated until it was meters above the point where my front door could reasonably open. As such, I was going mildly crazy without access to my usual coping mechanisms (gasoline, spilled ATF, uncontrolled chemical fires, Skydrol) and decided I might as well fuck up something in the house if I couldn’t do it to something outside.
When you’re diagnosing something like this, it’s important to keep a little notebook of what you’ve tried, what you think it might be, and what you’re going to try next. That way, you don’t waste time revisiting stuff you’ve already done, and also when you track down and murder the guy who worked on your place before you, the cops have a handy written document to prove it was premeditated.
After I pried the grating off the cold air return and found an alarm siren stuck loosely between two water lines, screaming endlessly, I realized that I was probably unlikely to fill up an entire page of notepaper today.
Sometimes the previous owner gives you good ideas. This was one of them. In fact, it was so good, that I couldn’t keep it to myself. That’s why I installed this very cool siren inside the previous owner’s new place, and rigged it to play every morning for the next several years.
Everyone is trying to get something over on you in the big city. That’s what my grandmother believed, which is why as a child she wouldn’t let me watch any television shows with “NYPD” in the name or answer my excited childhood questions about a municipal census. I should have listened to her, because that’s exactly how I ended up getting roped into a university research study.
There were a few initial questions where I got to rate my pain level on a scale of frowny face to can’t-stop-pooping face, and then they gave me a couple sedatives to take the edge off. I couldn’t help but notice the sedatives administered were in the form of a Japanese import beer that I had become addicted to after finding a flat, half-rotten six pack from the 1970s in the trunk of a Daihatsu Fellow that had washed up on the beach. Whoever did this knew me very well, I thought, before slipping into unconsciousness. Grandma was right.
When I awoke, I was in a sort of laboratory room. From experience, I knew that I had been imprisoned about two storeys beneath ground level, and that their air conditioning compressor needed a new outside-air filter about three weeks ago. I clucked disapprovingly at the lack of mechanical excellence on display here, and that made the grad student look up from his Game Boy to address me.
“We’ve brought you here because my advisor believes you have started more projects than any organization on Earth.” he said, then went back to trying to get Princess Peach to take her clothes off.
I was hugely confused. Surely I hadn’t, in my short life, created more projects than ancient organizations with hundreds of members?
“Yeah, not even NASA comes close,” he continued. “I showed the list of stuff we found half-finished in your backyard alone to Werner Von Braun’s shitty great-nephew and he was blown away that anyone would be able to start this many projects in succession without finishing a single fucking one. We want to know your secret.” More square-wave blooping from the Nintendo.
I wouldn’t participate. This was unethical. An abridgement of my rights. How could I be creative under these kinds of constraints?!
“We’ll give you a $20 RockAuto gift card.” I immediately felt a sense of great calm and acceptance wash over me.
I don’t know if you’re one of the kinds of people who goes to the automated car wash. Myself, I avoid it. Even the “touch free,” “gentle” kind removes too much metal for my liking, and I really prefer to pretend that my cars are one cohesive structure instead of just held together by paint and tradition.
Still, though, the thought was appealing: with a robot doing the work, I could wash my cars without having to get out and use the spray gun at the coin wash. This is important because the gun kinda hurts my hand by the time I have finally gotten all the brake dust off the front bumper. All those BMWs I tailgate have some really sticky pad compound.
I drove my rickety old Valiant over to the mental hospital to visit my mentor and former roommate, Dr. Ken. He’s not really a doctor, unless you don’t subscribe to the concept of handing out titles based on arbitrary educational requirements, in which case you are probably in the same ward as Dr. Ken. Bang on the window and shout next time you see me! I always love to meet a fan. What Dr. Ken had, presumably still cordoned off with copious amounts of police tape, is a secret robotics lab. I was sure he wouldn’t mind giving me the code, because at least then someone would be flushing the toilets once in awhile to make sure they don’t dry out.
With only a few bins of his coveted spare parts, I had assembled in about a weekend a reasonable prototype of a no-touch, ultra-gentle car wash. Not just science informed my decision: you see, I decided to rely on homeopathic remedies in order to wash my car with the least amount of impact on its paint and so-called bodywork. Every droplet of water that has ever touched automotive shampoo or galvanizing solution is probably in the city’s water supply somewhere, so my strategy was to just gently trickle some water over the car, using an old showerhead on the end of a hose. There’s a bunch of other robot shit, too, but for some reason I could never get it to work.
I wish I could tell you that I opened up a huge chain of these super-gentle robot car washes, but the initial prototype didn’t go so well. It was a lot of work to try and fit the Valiant into Dr. Ken’s bathroom, and in the end it turned out to be super hard to wash the entire thing when only a corner at a time would fit into the shower stall. One of the billionaires on the TV startup-funding show Dragon’s Den told me to “eat shit” and kept gesturing to his asshole until I stormed off the stage, which I was later able to parlay into a $17 investment from a venture-capitalist on Sand Hill Road that turned out to be a taco truck.
It’s that time of year again. The new year has already become kinda stale, and everyone is throwing the contents of their basement into the trash bins. Here at Bad Cars Monthly, part of my job is to keep track of the burgeoning and endlessly fascinating scrap market. That means that I have to embed myself with the real scrap-truck drivers in your neighbourhood, and understand their unique business.
This month, we’re doing a study on “Ted” (not his real name) and his 1996 Chevrolet Silverado. We can’t really tell what colour this truck started out as, and most of the major holes in the replacement panels have been covered with shredded pieces of tarp that Ted had to fight a magpie for. The rear axle has mostly been packed with mud to hold the oil in, after a few lean weeks led Ted’s competition to steal and sell the drain plug from his differential while he was distracted. What this truck is good at is hauling away the bicycles that end up in the culvert outside the elementary school.
Now, whether or not Ted’s the one who put them in the drainage ditch is a matter for the courts, but after spending a week with him, I am pretty sure he can’t work a set of bolt cutters to save his life. I routinely had to reach over and correct the steering when his narcolepsy (more like narcotic-lepsy, am I right?) turned his truck from shit to self-driving shit.
The important thing to understand is that right now, bicycle steel is not “hot.” This might be because of changing weather - nobody really wants to ride a kid’s bicycle in minus 40 - but it’s most likely due to an over-saturation of supply. Ted has lost his warehouse, and so his ability to store bikes until they increase in value is almost nonexistent. I suggested he buy a series of really shitty vans, but he seemed to take an almost religious offence at the concept of becoming a “van scrapper” and refused to talk to me for the remainder of the day, an outcome that the largely non-verbal Ted still considered to be a penalty.
Entrepreneurs like Ted are the small-business backbone of our declining civilization. It’s important that we give him all the help we can, whether that help comes in the form of a word of encouragement shouted as you hurl a half-empty Pilsner can at him, or just encouraging your child to leave his bike unlocked when he goes to school.
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tags: bad cars monthly, chevrolet, chevrolet silverado
When I was a kid, I worked at the local grocery store, as a bagger. You might think that this is a little unexpected for a first job. However, due to many previously undiagnosed side-effects of the Chernobyl disaster during my formative years, my lust for the automobile emerged relatively late in life. It was there, perhaps, that it happened.
You see, when you bag a man’s groceries, you’re really getting this little glimpse into his life. And although I may have learned to love the car, I am a born snoop. Getting these narrow visions of how my neighbours must live was the only way I got through that job without following my uncle into the lawnmower-repair business he started that eventually cost him his marriage and two fingers.
Sure, most of these “observations” were lazy stereotyping. For instance, you could notice that Bob from down the block usually buys microwave TV dinners, but this week he’s gotten a whole leftover-from-Christmas turkey. The obvious conclusion is that he is doing this to impress a prostitute. Later, I would bicycle by his place, checking to see if I was correct. Sometimes I’d get spotted, and on the spot my guilty conscience would force me to confess the whole thing. Nobody really believed me, though, and instead laughed - which probably started my ill-fated first foray into stand-up comedy, the one that eventually cost me no fingers, only the friendship of my friend Ted who ran the Ha-Ha Genocide on Tuesday nights.
That all ended, though, when I helped a customer out to his car. He was new in town, this guy, and he brought with him a type of automobile I had never seen before. After I was done loading it, I stood there by the curb, watching it lope away at near-idle as its massive torquey powerplant threatened to pop a burnout in the parking lot that would consume the world. Historians will later draw a straight line from my discovery of the 1978 Ford Granada ESS on that day to the complete collapse of the banking sector, when I tried to trade Lehman Bros for a 1982 AMC Concord wagon.
There’s a time in any man’s life when he begins to take an interest in making pretty welds. Those nasty booger-splatter shit welds that you once did to just get a panel started or improvise a repair to a beloved farm tool don’t cut it anymore.
No, you start to worry a little bit about technique and maybe a little less about passion. You watch your wire speed. You’re always careful to clip the ball off the end before you start feeding again. And when you’ve got a little free time at home, you want to study up on the experts, but this is where the household problems can begin.
Among my many other jobs, I have been a freelance marriage counsellor. My customers tell me that I’m a very good listener, and it doesn’t hurt that the troubles and foibles of my neighbours often give me material for the tall tales I tell at taverns for a token tequila of thanks. A couple that I worked closely with - perhaps too closely - was a victim of this mid-life crisis.
You see, the wife of the couple could only stick weld. Yes, she did it with great enthusiasm, and nobody could argue that the job didn’t get done. Porosity wasn’t a problem. Everything you could want in a welder. Yet, one day while she was moving around some shit in the shop to look for the bottle of gas she had to take back for refunds, she found a certain magazine. An adult’s magazine. A magazine full of weld pictures.
Immediately, I was called in to try and heal the breach, but the gap was too big for me just to stuff with wire and then grind the surface back until it could look kinda smooth enough to put Bondo on. This was a problem bigger than the obvious faded paint lines on the Frankensteined panels of my continually-rotting ‘72 Galant. After listening to both proposals, I decided I would solve this shit like King Solomon. I asked them to bring their young baby to me, and then dragged out my plasma cutter from the car.
Suddenly, they decided to reach a compromise. She would take some welding classes, and he would try to fix the rocker panel in their Plymouth Arrow using only a marine battery, some nails, and a sheet of newspaper for a face shield. I was relieved at the outcome. There was no way I had brought a big enough compressor to cut through a largely non-ferrous child, and they would have revealed me as a fraud right away.
There are few things in this world more pure than the glee that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm displays every time I pick up a new hobby. Whether it’s electroplating, electrolysis or electroshock therapy, Google will eagerly glom onto it and excitedly shows me an entire universe of new content about that subject for like a few weeks until either I decide to input the search query “hot dogs” while drunk or it decides that maybe I’d enjoy some cryptofascism too.
On behalf of Bad Cars Monthly, I recently visited YouTube headquarters to learn about how they coordinated this tremendous engine of computing power into simultaneously threatening both my wallet and the fabric of society. Here’s the first trick of investigative journalism: show up early. You’ll notice it’s the same as my tip for buying a used car, and it’s for the same reason. Whoever you interview is always going to try and look their best. They’re going to stage their office furniture and plants for the best photo, maybe spin up a special “no swastikas” branch of the codebase, or tell Uncle Racist Joe to take a walk around the block while you’re there. When you show up early, they lose this advantage, and you get to see how things are really done.
The authorized press-relations demi-executive and I were barely halfway down the hall to the Recommendations Core when we heard a lot of screaming and hooting. She immediately sprouted a cold sweat and tried to steer me away from the entrance door, pretending that where I really wanted to go was the employee cafeteria, but my keenly-honed journalist instincts said otherwise. I kicked down that door, friends, but I did not anticipate the sight within.
It turns out that the YouTube recommendation algorithm is run entirely by sentient androids - leftovers from some kind of military AI project that got cancelled because someone fucked up the dyes when they were mixing the skin colour. All these lifelike, purple humanoids were speaking in tongues, rapidly connecting concepts and clickbait faster than any human being alive could ever hope to. The immense strain on their neural networks created such heat that their titanium skulls glowed from the inside out, until each one collapsed in turn amidst a sudden stench of smoking tantalum capacitors.
As some human workers bulldozed the dead and dying robots into the trash compactor at the other end of the room, I asked the PR suit just what it was I had witnessed.
“There’s this one guy who has watched every drifting video on YouTube. We don’t know how he did it. And he keeps rejecting our suggestions to watch any actual automobile racing.”
“Switch, Switch, you gotta come quick!! They’re blowing up the old water tower!” It was my child assistant, the kid who lives next door but not the one that I maimed. That was the other neighbour’s kid.
“What the fuck? That’s my gig.” I had bid on it and won only a few years ago. Sure, I hadn’t gotten around to it yet, but town council told me that they were very understanding of my packed schedule. I thought we had a gentlemen’s agreement that I would obliterate the town’s only surviving landmark when and only when it was convenient for me.
I raced out onto the front lawn and jumped into my idling Volare, which could not ever be shut off for a reason that I had long since forgotten. A few flares of half-mouldy gasoline out the hood stack threatened to light my grass on fire, but the wads of dirt and once-sod coughed up by the world’s greatest one-wheel-peel put that to a quick end.
I’ll never be sure if it was the exhaust note or the sound of four different kinds of tractor tires scrambling for grip on the highway, but my reputation tended to precede myself. And by “reputation,” I mean a very distinct noise that everyone in my town had become familiar with over the last little while, ever since I got rid of that Topaz that wouldn’t run on even a measly three out of its four cylinders. The Mayor had been warned about my presence, and was already working to flee the scene of the water tower when I arrived.
His official ‘96 Suburban was no match for the two or three hundred pounds of railroad ties welded to what used to be the front subframe of the Volare’s unibody. I was glad that we didn’t live in the next county over, where the official vehicles of each small-town mayor were specified as bulletproof. The people over there were fucking savages, yes, but at least they respected the sanctity of a contract.
As I pulled the Mayor Hisself out of the smoking wreckage of his Official GMT400, my pointed line of questioning was interrupted by an impolite explosion in the distance. We both looked over to see the water tower collapsing in a beautiful, gracious arc, and then saw the man responsible for it all. He was grinning from ear to ear, having just fulfilled my bucket-list goal of destroying public infrastructure using taxpayer-funded pyrotechnics.
It was Bob Saab, the structural engineer down the street who used to call the cops on my late-night wrenching, before the cops went bankrupt and turned into an all-volunteer force consisting of one asshole who just said “yes” to everything at the town hall meetings. There had been rumours he was going to make an entry into politics, and what better way to do it than to undermine both the Mayor and myself, the Chief of Police, at the same time?
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tags: plymouth, plymouth volare, bob saab, chevrolet, chevrolet suburban, mercury, mercury topaz, small town mayor
Last week, it was so cold that a tree in the park near my place exploded. It’s supposed to be impossible that tree sap would freeze up hard enough and quickly enough to split the tree open. Whoever told us that should probably come and take a look at my Honda’s engine block, too, because the coolant is basically a Slurpee. You could say it’s much more cool than ant.
While I was lying under my car, trying to warm the oilpan with a tiger torch, I wondered why I lived here. It’s not like my skills of driving recklessly fast around corners while trying to hold the driver’s door shut with my other hand could not transfer to another region. Nor would I miss the huge amounts of road salt that corrode my floorpans and quarter panels like some kind of steel-eating raccoon hopped up on eBayed synthetic research chemicals.
I had a lot of time to sit under there and wait for the engine to thaw out of the cartoon-like solid block of ice it had become entombed within. Yes, I could have used a block heater. Except the last time I tried to take the cord for mine out of the trunk, the insulation froze solid as soon as it hit the open air and shattered into a million pieces. When wrapped around the chassis ground strap, it is true that the bare copper wire did provide adequate heat, for a little while.
With a newfound clarity, I decided that this was the last winter I would spend in this hellhole. There are plenty of warm-ass places that would love to see me, and even more that don’t have an extradition treaty with my so-called homeland. Just as I got up to stand, I saw the reason why I could never really leave.
On the iced-over hill outside my house, I watched a Nissan Pathfinder slide helplessly backwards, all four wheels spinning bald all-terrains as fast as they could go. As it careened down the hill and around the corner, it just barely missed hitting a Lexus SUV that had become stranded trying to get out of its own driveway, and whose traction control was rapidly oscillating between no power and full throttle in the futile pretence that we lived in a sane world where any traction existed to possibly control.
I went into the garage, took out my lawn chair, and split it in half as the plastic-fabric strapping that made up the seat exploded into a million fragments of razor-sharp plastic. Defeated, I sat on the driveway for awhile, and watched everyone else ask why they lived here.
Batteries. We’ve got a whole lot of them, and they’re kinda scary if you take the time to think about it. Everyone’s walking around with at least a good couple minutes of potential firecrackers in their pockets. I figure that if anything really goes wrong, it’s gonna be blown-out thighs from hell to breakfast. That’s why I’m announcing my new series of micro-generators.
Using them couldn’t be simpler. Just keep them topped up with a thimbleful of gasoline every couple of hours, and you can swipe and poke to your heart’s content without worrying about battery explosions. The first version was a little big, because we designed it off of a supply of leftover Olds Rocket 400s that our scrap guy found in the basement last weekend. Our second version, however, is nearly half as big, and just three-quarters the weight (when dry!)
There are, however, some safety concerns, as you would expect with such a potent power source. Rest assured that your Switch Motors Snapchat Sustainer® micro-generator is perfectly safe to operate outdoors or in a large room with sufficient ventilation. Just don’t tip it over too far, because our carburetor design is not intended to run upside down without spilling. Also, don’t touch the exhaust manifold at any time, even when it’s been off for awhile. And the fuel should be pre-mixed 5:1 with oil. That’s five parts oil to one part gasoline. It was taking too long for our supplier to ship the piston rings from China so we just did without.
Sure, it’s not that great for the environment, but neither is lithium mining. And “false equivalency” is how you spell “unassailable truth.” If anyone criticizes you for filling a bar with exhaust smoke, you can use your well-powered phone to call our 24/7 tip line. Our operators are standing by to argue your case, and have been trained in over forty varieties of histrionic screaming and slurs.
You ever go to a party, get talking to a new person who you find kinda interesting, and then a half hour later you realize that you’ve been ranting about your garbageman the entire night? Yeah, me too. At least I come by it honestly: my mother had a feud with the guy who drives the trash truck on her block for nearly thirty years, until the dude “accidentally” picked up a filled propane canister from her “neighbour’s” bin. I had to hear all about how the insurance claim went for repairing her fence, because they didn’t even try to paint primer over the blood.
Anyway, the guy on my block really sucks. He’s got one of those trucks with the big forks, you know, so he doesn’t have to get out of the cab to pick up a bin. Just hoovers it up and dumps everything in the back. You’d think, being a product of robotic precision, he could then push a button to put the bin back where he found it. On that point, you would be totally wrong. I’ve come out the next morning to find my bin halfway down the block, on its side, or completely missing. The city authorities seem to think that last one is really funny, especially when the tracking chip in every bin shows that one of my scumbag neighbours stole it to cook meth inside.
What’s that? I’m boring you? Not nearly as much as this cocaine-addled degenerate, flicking his wobbly forks to toss the lightest parts of my recycling all over hither and yon. What’s boring is spending hours on my front lawn, picking up hamburger wrappers, important legal documents, and old train tickets from my front yard that my neighbours were certain they had properly thrown away, until Little Bobby Shithands tossed them into the wind using his $400,000 wannabe dump truck.
The worst part, of course, is that my old garbageman used to let me root through the back of the truck. He and I didn’t have a formal arrangement so much as he just slowed down while passing the driveway to my house, slow enough for me to hop in the back and see if Gertrude down the block finally tossed out that “non-working” half-a-horsepower air compressor. I guess he finally got fired after that whole incident where I got all fixated on pulling out an old pinball machine and didn’t notice the trash compactor was running right away.
Working on electric cars is going to be a whole new ballgame. All those little chores - changing oil, replacing belts, braking for pedestrians - are now a thing of the past. In fact, there’s so few things on the maintenance list for your average EV that you’ll have enough spare time to pick up a really shitty beater to work on. And it’s that part that scares me about the future.
You see, the average EV owner is pretty well-heeled. They make enough money that their kids might survive to see the next decade. If they ever got it in their heads to say, out-bid me for a low-mileage Daihatsu Feroza, I’d have no way to compete with them. All the really cool beaters would skyrocket in price, especially if they needed particularly weird repairs or just sounded fun to say. It’s like when the Renaissance Faire came to town and suddenly everyone wanted to geld their own horses.
With the help of my financial advisor (a guy I met at the bus stop) and a futurist (guy I met while giving a TED talk), I’ve constructed a three-point plan to establish market domination over weird beaters, for at least the rest of my life.
Step one is to spread the news that electric cars need special kinds of maintenance. Every weekend, you gotta go out with a coat hanger hooked up to a twelve-volt battery and wave it over the hood in order to invert the resonant polarity of the car for at least one whole hour, or your batteries will wear out prematurely.
Step two is to rely on the average North American’s hatred of learning anything at all. I’ll switch beater genres from American lead sleds to French grand-touring cars whose documentation isn’t even readable in its native tongue, let alone translated by a group of highly-experienced internet forum denizens. Yes, this will make it more difficult to repair, but I spend way more time procrastinating and swearing at stuck bolts than I do wondering what step to take next.
The final step of my brilliant plan is just to buy up all of the cars before everyone thinks to go out looking for a gasser project. Yes, it is extremely expensive to do so, but I recently got a massive infusion of venture capital for my chain of garages dedicated to resonant polarity inversion.
China is sort of like the Willy Wonka’s factory of our era. Whatever great new technology you can imagine, you can find it there. You can also find minorities working in incredibly dangerous situations that often kill children, usually without any kind of labour protection or collective representation. Gotta break a few eggs to make a $12 set of wireless earbuds.
My fascination with China has emerged because I’ve been getting into homemade electronics lately. The easy interface and inexpensive (read: free) cost of the software for designing circuit boards has made it possible for even dipshits like me to construct, say, a variable-geometry-turbo control board destined to bolt into one of the half-running Humber Super Snipes I inherited from Cousin Detent-Switch after that fatal zeppelin accident that was in the news. And then I can send it to China, where they happily fabricate those designs without error, mailing them back to me weeks later with a little keychain in the box.
I could make those circuits by hand, as my ancestors had. The problem is, me and prototyping board get along about as well as burned fingers and power cursing. As inconsistent as it seems, there’s just something so much nicer about paying some other guy fourteen cents to make one on a hugely expensive machine that is almost incomprehensibly complicated. That way, all I have to do is glob some molten metal onto the board and only burn my fingers a few times.
Now, don’t worry. While some sources of error are eliminated, I still have to make the same board two, three, ten thousand times. This is because I am an enormous moron, and I can’t even be trusted to make the simplest of circuits with the aid of technology that NASA would have killed a man for in the 1960s. So China gets a lot of my business - that fourteen cent board turns into, like, seven dollars of new versions until my attention moves to a new project. The old ones make pretty good bathroom tiles, and if I ever had guests over who weren’t parole officers, I’m sure they’d appreciate it.
So the next time you are looking at a piece of shit Internet-of-Things toaster made by some moron on the turbo-cheap, make sure to give your thanks to China. Some guy over there got, like, two PhDs so he could make that entire thing possible. Thanks, buddy! Good luck paying off your student loans.
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tags: internet of things, humber, humber super snipe
As I am frequently reminded, my body requires just as much maintenance as a car. Despite its amazing ability to repair minor skin and chassis damage, the human body will eventually break down from poor nutrition, age, and leaning over the engine bay of a Mitsubishi Debonair for hours on end. So when I heard on the only still-functional radio in my fleet that the local gym was looking for new members, I figured it was fate.
When I turned up, I noticed that it was difficult to park close to the place. For some reason, the other denizens of the gym didn’t want to walk very far before getting their daily fill of physical exercise. I guess I can understand trying to get maximum value out of your membership. I was still sad to park next to a new Acura SUV and watch its paint immediately wrinkle and flake away in the mere presence of my ‘72 Minica, which was once described in high-velocity Spanish by a bodyshop technician as being “the Earthly incarnation of Sa’alt The Rust God.”
Once I got in, I wasn’t terribly impressed. Lifting heavy objects in awkward positions? That’s your average tire change on the six-wheeled offroad-mutant Saab 900 I’ve been working on in my spare time. Long endurance runs? You gotta get home somehow after your car tries to grow an extra cylinder hole. Nutrition? The vending machine dispensed chunks of protein which looked roughly equivalent to what I could scrape off the bottom of my vegetable-crisper drawer. I decided to get my money back, and also use my pocket angle-grinder to remove a particularly healthy looking part of the locker room metal for my time.
Out in the parking lot, the Minica had healed at least the floorpan, and the Acura was now a lone piece of unibody, rust swarming over its panels as the metal boiled inside. I guess a little visit to the gym really does work out.
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tags: mitsubishi, mitsubishi debonair, mitsubishi minica, saab, saab 900
Recently, the turbo-rich in my city have been looking for a reason to buy new cars. With the economy as bad as it is, you can’t just go and purchase a new $380,000 Rolls Royce just because you want one. Not because they can’t afford it. The economy will never be bad enough for that. What these richmos feel they have to do is justify the purchase. If only their old Rolls Royce were broken in some way, then they could return the calls of the salesmen! That’s where I come in.
I work for a team of people called the Non-Trademark-Infringing Ghostbusters. We can break any expensive luxury car in just minutes. Here’s how it works: you hand us the keys, we drive your vehicle as hard as we can, and then a little while later you bring a cheque for ten grand to the site where the engine finally ruptured and/or it slid into a junior high school.
Towing is included, but for an additional cost, because the local towing companies have a grudge against us after it turned out Ted could also break tow trucks. That’s because our powers are not strictly limited to expensive cars: even a reliable-as-gravity 1988 Honda Accord will eventually succumb to the abuse that we can heap upon it. Consider it for an enthusiastic birthday gift - wrecking your cars like the rich and famous do - and keep our name out of your mouth when you go to make an insurance claim afterward.
In the next couple years, we’re hoping to be able to pool the money from our company into owning a luxury dealership of our very own. After all, it seems like there are a lot of certified pre-owned vehicles getting returned early on their leases these days.
When you spend your free time staring intently at a machine that doesn’t want to go, the moment when it finally does start to work can feel like a religious experience. After the last time (and I mean really the last time) I revived the wheezy ex-Soviet diesel at the heart of my daily-driver Volare, I thought I was some sort of revival-tent preacher for the better part of a weekend. I even started sacrificing chickens from my neighbour’s illegal coop as tribute to the pagan god Ply-Mouth.
Conversely, when it still doesn’t work despite your best efforts, it is entirely normal to feel like a complete moron. Lower than a worm. Lower than a worm’s shit. Lower than the inert nitrogen in that worm’s shit. Fuck that nitrogen. Any decent mechanic, and even those who are complete hacks like myself, spend their entire life in a superposition of oscillation between these two states. We just hope that the last vehicle we work on before we are remanded to Hell for refurbishment is a delightful lavender-scented auction success, and not the kind of aggravating king turd that made us finally hit the Big One.
I thought for a little while that working on newer, easier-to-repair cars would be less aggravating. Something real simple, like a little Civic that never breaks down. Then the y-axis extents of my shithead/genius curve would be much closer, and my extended family members would stop trying to have me sectioned when I throw a pipe wrench through two consecutive walls and ruin Thanksgiving dinner the moment Uncle Tom mentions anything that even reminds me of the abstract concept of a drivetrain u-joint. It didn’t take, though. Rather than seeing myself as a mild genius all the time, I started to feel a twitching in my veins for that harder hit. I wanted to be respected by the junkyard guys.
Let me tell you about the junkyard guys: most of them don’t speak English, and the ones that do are real professionals. If I step back and think about it, no amount of wild hooptie-ry is going to impress them. All they’d see is some little kid making a nice sand castle in the shape of a ‘67 nitrometh-burning Eldorado in their sandbox. I don’t even really exist to them, but I wish that I did, staring at them with haunted eyes as they crawl over a RAV4 in order to dis-em-engine it like ants on a rat carcass.
So I went back to trying to impress them. I once again repaired lost-cause turds pulled out of collapsed barns, swamps, and cable-company backlots. With each vehicle fixed, I crawled closer to my ultimate form of either an eternal shithead or genius, but you’d have to collapse the waveform to find out which, and that would probably require a functioning electrical system, wouldn’t it?
Old Chinese kung-fu movies are legally required to contain the following scene. A very quiet, but obviously very dangerous motherfucker is minding his own business. Then, some toughs - not necessarily actually tough toughs, but like yelly flaunty guys with flashy moves, maybe they have some kind of negative attitude towards some unchangeable attribute of the extremely dangerous motherfucker the camera keeps ominously framing - pick a fight with him or her. There is a massive ass-kicking, dozens of jerks are laid out on the floor and/or partially atomized, and the hero goes about their day.
The lesson, it would seem, is not to mess with a very quiet person who obviously spends every single night doing two-finger pushups and punching brick walls in half with their mind. I think there is an analogy to this scene when you are working on cars. It comes when you think that you have figured out a failure before you even pop the hood.
Cabin light doesn’t come on when you open the doors on your ‘73 Hillman Imp? Obviously a bad door-open switch. Oh no, says the Bruce Lee motherfucker hiding deep within the car’s wiring harness, it’s that rats snuck inside your heater core, died, and their blood mixed with coolant to produce a kind of corrosive adhesive that has never been witnessed by science. There is a massive ass-kicking, and two years later, you finally decide to just live without the dome light, snapping at your friends and family when they get a ride with you and ask why they can’t see the chapstick they just dropped in your passenger side footwell.
Even though these lessons were written for us hundreds of years ago by hit Chinese fiction authors, and only recently translated into filmic works of artistic legend, that doesn’t mean we can’t all take away something from them. Don’t underestimate the quiet thing sitting in the corner, because it will flying-dragon-kick your jaw off. And maybe search the enthusiast forums for “traction control light doesn’t go away jet li” before you get started.
Is it better to have good oil, or just any kind of oil? Philosophers have discussed this question ever since Internet message boards were invented. On the one hand, you have the camp that demands that you get the right weight, additive package, testing regimen, and country of origin. Their opponents believe that whatever you put in it, you should probably keep it inside the engine instead of blasting it across the highway at four in the morning while turning over eighteen thousand rpm. I am definitely in the latter camp, which has led to some interesting results.
Perhaps you are not familiar with Blackstone Labs. Blackstone, along with a lot of other companies, does used-oil analysis. Basically, it’s a piss test for your car, sort of like your boss does for you. Except instead of trying to find Chinese turbococaine or Argentinian designer drugs, it’s figuring out if your engine is shitting parts of itself into its own lifeblood. They are very serious about oil quality, these analysts, and they will eagerly tell you about how badly treated your engine is.
Once, on a whim, I paid a few bucks and sent in some of the used oil from my Mercury Bobcat’s triple-turbocharged (the junkyard had a sale) Kubota diesel engine. The reason is simple - this engine, for whatever reason, was the first and only car I had ever owned that didn’t actively burn or leak oil in vast quantities. This meant I had never put new oil in. Life gets busy, you know?
I sent in my piss jar because I wanted to see if I had to change the oil this year, or maybe I could stretch it out for a few more months. Oil’s expensive, you see, and if your engine isn’t burning it, my philosophy is to just keep rockin’. It’s millions of years old. It’s not going to go bad like grocery-store bananas just because you’ve gone six or seven years without a change.
What I got back was a bad to middling-bad set of numbers. This is pretty much what I expected and then in the “comment” section a request to meet up with me, in order to give me a special prize. Casting caution to the wind, I was overjoyed to meet up with them. It was there, over the scientists’ lunch break, that they gave me five hundred dollars, cash money, for the Merc. Far from being insulted, I jumped at the chance. A gaggle of Blackstoners giggled as they pulled my hooptie into the back, excited at the chance to finally get to study what they called “the Antichrist” with their own eyes.
Only one scientist, and I think he was meant to be some kind of special end-of-level boss, remained. He told me that I figured it out; oil changes were just a scam, after all. I was supposed to tell no one, however, because otherwise Big Oil would come and knock over a one-quart container in the trunk of my next car, ruining the carpet forever. Joke’s on them: I don’t even have a floor in my trunk anymore.
Have you ever had trouble deciding what to get for dinner? Everyone involved has a different idea of what they want to eat, and is totally offended if you try to make a compromise so you can at least avoid starvation. Wouldn’t it be nicer if an aggressive series of unknowable machine-learning systems made the choice for you? I thought so.
Introducing Hungr, new from your friends at the NSA. Worrying about what meal to enjoy together is a thing of the past. We monetized the metadata that the government has been collecting on you for decades, and then weaponized it - into an ideal lunch, picked with flawless machine precision every time. Your surviving coworkers - sorry, I mean to say thriving coworkers - will be stunned that you got to know them so deeply that you could hit them with the perfect order at the perfect burrito restaurant at the statistically-optimized perfect time. We’ll keep your secret.
Run a shitty restaurant? No worries. You can’t really “change” what an artificial intelligence is going to do, but you can staple the binary equivalent of five bucks to that Wendy’s near the airport that had the rat problem. This occurs from you giving us five bucks. Hey, we need the money. Have you seen how much it costs to run an unaccountable surveillance state? Shit doesn’t pay for itself, unless you count all the hot stock tips we get.
So don’t delay - head out right now, stand next to the telephone box in your alley, and shout “UNIQUELY IDENTIFIABLE TEST KEYWORD.” We’ll do the rest.
A lot of people have been coming up to me lately and asking about how to keep their vehicles maintained. By “coming up to me,” most of them just yell it through the megaphone that the police installed, on the concrete walls demarcating minimum safe distance around my garage. I think they are asking me because they’ve seen the miracles I can do with my cars, and if my regimen can keep those ragged pieces of shit one foot out of the grave, then surely it must be able to keep an actually good car on the road forever.
That’s why I put together this pamphlet. I hope that the nice hostage negotiator - you know, the one that likes crullers, not regular old hole-in donuts - brought it to you. If she tried to charge you for it, you should call the police police. I don’t know if they exist. The cops cut off the internet, too. Or maybe I just stopped paying my phone bills.
Practice Good Nutrition - Like human beings, cars that have a terrible diet can sometimes benefit from an inexpensive multivitamin. Insert one into the oil reservoir twice a day, and you’ll be good as new. Do not use the gummy ones. It’s also worth checking with your mechanic if your car has any dietary restrictions (Pontiacs are well known to be kosher).
Break-Up With Your Brakes - They only slow you down. Most cars have more brake than they will ever be able to use. To save money on gas, and more importantly unsprung weight, ask your mechanic about downsizing your brakes to ones from a base-model car. It’s a good way to save a few bucks, and smaller rotors are cheaper, too!
Baby, Seats - You can save a lot of money on child seats by just using the regular adult seats from a smaller model of car. A lot of people don’t know that they are literally the children of regular seats.
Spice Up Your Garage - If you get a car from Japan or Denmark that isn’t available in your home country, cops won’t know what it is. That extra few seconds of confusion might just make the difference between catching a huge stunting ticket (and the resulting insurance increase) and coming home peacefully after an enjoyable evening of drifting around the grocery store’s shopping cart paddock. Just like in animal populations, diversity strengthens the herd.
In my part of town, there’s a lot of manhole covers. Nobody knows exactly why, but there’s like four or five of them per block. It’s uncomfortable to everyone to point it out. Nobody enjoys not knowing what the world around them is actually made of, knowing in the back of their head that if there is ever some kind of nuclear apocalypse, they would have to work out how to get “tube I poop in” to work again from first principles. And it’s twice as uncomfortable to actually drive over those manholes.
Now, if you have functioning suspension, high-profile tires, maybe a bit of an SUV-y look to your car, you probably noticed but don’t really care. It’s just another of the vague bumps and jostles that don’t really matter to you; like taking on-ramps at anywhere close to the speed limit or the welfare of children in oil-producing nations, it is simply a concern that no longer applies in your life.
My neighbourhood, however, is home to a lot of modified-car owners. I’m talking lowered Skylines, 240SXes, and Versas. Don’t ask why it’s all Nissans; City Hall is very, very mum about just what happened to the groundwater in the mid-1980s to make this possible. Those drivers are overwhelmingly afflicted by these terrible manhole covers, even before multiple winters sink them deeper and deeper into God’s own asphalt, where not even the sun’s light can brush the surface of their lids.
Let me tell you, some of these covers are so deep that I once saw a dog-walker break her leg in one. The other dog walkers got together - I don’t know if it’s some kind of union or a guild or whatever - and just shot her. Where was I? Oh yes. As the person in the neighbourhood who has watched the most successive episodes of Law & Order and Law & Order: That One With The Mustache Guy, I was appointed to find a lawyer who would represent us shitty car people in our fight to make City Hall actually come by and repair a hole in the ground for once.
We didn’t win, and before Beatrice Copper from down the street tells you differently, it wasn’t because I took all of the class’s money and spent it on a bucket of driveway sealant and a turbocharger. Driveway sealant is fucking expensive - I just stole a bunch of manhole covers from the next neighbourhood over and stacked them in the hole until it was flush. That’s what a machinist would do.
I was getting pretty tired of opening the hood of my car to replace things like oil, accessory belts, spark plugs, pistons, piston rings and the engine block, so the last thing I needed was another reason to get in there. Enter the washer fluid reservoir. Turns out that in my new Neon, the windshield wiper sprayer actually works. The first time I activated it, I almost shit myself in terror. I thought I had driven into the river again.
Now, you have to understand my perspective on this: the calibre of car that I usually purchase does not have a working windshield washer sprayer. Hell, it usually doesn’t have windshield wiper blades, because I negotiate them out of the purchase in order to save a few cents. If the seller refuses, I just toss them in the bin the next time I’m at the scrap yard trying to afford gas. Many-Eyed Jed will pay almost twenty-five cents for a pair of wiper blades, if you burn all the rubber off first.
Being a responsible motorist, I now had to make sure that I understood how to safely operate this new feature of my car. For a whole afternoon, I sat in the parking lot of the Wendy’s, spraying my windshield and taking careful notes of the cleaning pattern. Knowing where my blind spots are could save a pedestrian’s life, or more importantly my own, because windshields cost a lot of plasma donation to replace. Then, disaster struck. I ran out of washer fluid.
Let me tell you: washer fluid costs more per litre than gasoline. Absolutely ludicrous. And the hood needs to be opened to replace it! I spent like an hour trying to mash snow into the funnel until the reservoir filled up again, which was annoyingly difficult. I ended up running a hose from the filler into the interior, through the hole where the glovebox used to live, and bringing the snow inside. That way, the heater would melt it and be much easier to refill.
When I finally figured out that the airport was sort of like a giant parking lot, a lot of other things clicked as well. Namely, that if I changed my collection of shitty beaters to be entirely decrepit luggage tugs, I could just tuck them in the corner of the runway and nobody would bother me. Not even a single parking ticket!
Now, there were a lot of downsides too. For one thing, the luggage tugs made more horsepower than my dailies from before. Yanking a spark plug wire helped make them feel right at first, but eventually I just ended up towing one tug with the other. It also added that nice “sensation of imminent death” that all the magazine reviewers tell me indicates good handling and road manners.
And the cargo room! Forget about it. Mostly because I didn’t have the money to buy the luggage tug trailers from the junkyard before they went into the crusher. Again, though, the runway is full of them, and sometimes they even come with suitcases full of cool shit that you can resell at the local pawn shop. Which is good, because now I have to refill these things with diesel instead of home brewed potato-based nitromethane slurry, which definitely costs a lot more money even as it saves me time at the pump.
For just the price of a high visibility vest and some fast talking, you too can have your own luggage tug to drive around. Just stay away from my territory: it’s already hard enough trying to convince the security guys that they should let me back in after popping a four-alarm burnout in front of a 737 the other day. Come to think of it, those security guys drive a teeny-tiny little kei van. I bet those things will hold a ton of suitcases.
There’s nothing like a crisp factory service manual. Sure, you can read Internet forums, pore over nth-generation photocopies of a vintage parts-store how-to microfiche, or pony up fifteen bucks for a Chilton manual, but the factory generally knows how something goes together. There’s something missing, though, and that something is honesty.
Here at Switch Motors, our factory service manuals own up to the fact that most of our vehicles are virtually unserviceable. Rather than use clever little callouts about proprietary adhesives, we just strike the entire bodywork section with a little paragraph about the time in my childhood that I learned to glue plastic airplanes together with my uncle, for the fifteen minutes before he had inhaled his fill and passed out, crushing a half-completed Tu-95 bomber beneath his adhesive-stringed mustache. We assume that you’re smart enough to get the idea.
Neither do we waste time with “idealized” Ikea-man diagrams of what a maintenance task on the car looks like, that is, if the car were completely empty and only the three parts you need were hovering inside the empty carcass like some sort of psychokinetic experiment gone wrong. No - we use blurry, black and white photographs of an oil-stained, 300,000 kilometre test car, so you know that you should be looking between the cracked part of the bumper and the scraped-bare section of the front subframe where Intern Trey misjudged the curb at the Wendy’s drive-thru.
This kind of radical candour doesn’t just stay in our manuals for professionals, though: even your non-car-loving grandfather or opiate-frenzied nephew will be able to read the owners’ manual and realize they are no dumber than the morons who put this piece of shit car together. And that’s our motto here at Switch Motors.
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tags: switch motors, factory service manual, tupolev tu-95
Finland isn’t really a country so much as it is a state of mind. Driven from their ancestral homeland by the ravages of climate change and the collapse of Nokia, the humble Finn has spread across the globe and into every country’s workforce. You may be occupying a cubicle next to someone of Finnish descent and not even know it.
In order to figure it out, you’re going to need to perform an act of office-dweller bravery. Let them drive you to lunch. I know, I know: your other coworkers don’t use the launch control at lights, their parking lot entry is too slow, their drive-through exit is too fast, they use all-season tires, they slow down for speed bumps, they haven’t made a photo-radar camera explode from the raw speed that they drove past them. One of the first clues you may have revealed a wily Finn is that their car is an 850-horsepower WRC rally car with the turbo restrictor removed. If it’s a two-stroke Saab, you fucked up: they’re Swedish.
To reveal the wily Finn, you’re going to need to trust their driving. Don’t worry: they actually have a drivers’ exam in their country. So now you’re powersliding through the forest, fully sideways at approximately one thousand kilometres per hour. This isn’t really the way to Arby’s, you tell them as they mutely work the steering wheel, hydraulic handbrake and sequential shifter in a perfect ballet of athletic prowess. They’re a Finn, though, right? Wrong. Due to historical border-fuzziness, you might be dealing with an Estonian, who are virtually identical to the Finnish people except they can make eye contact with other people at the bus stop. You can work up your own test for this.
You’ve found out that one of your coworkers is, in fact, Finnish. Congratulations! Please flip this tape over to understand how you can make them feel good about delegating work to them, ideally by never mentioning their personal life, interrogating them with questions, or acknowledging their actual physical existence on this Earth in any way.
I’ve always hated my coworkers who want to play the devil’s advocate. Nobody needs to help out the devil, Ned. Dude’s got apples, and snakes, or something. He can fend for himself. I don’t know for sure, of course. I was raised by a group of extremist Baptist separatists who decided that their Bible, the Haynes repair manual for the 85-88 Chevrolet Nova, was the only true path to salvation.
It wasn’t until the ATF raided the compound while I was out spying on the Chilton Cult that I realized life did not have to be that way. You can do whatever you want, without groupthink. So, if I believe so strongly in independent thought, then why am I so pissed off when Chuck or Boderick down in sales engineering decides that they want to argue? It’s because those motherfuckers are making the meeting longer.
By now, it should be pretty obvious how much I hate the concept of the long meeting. Any meeting that’s worth having should be boiled down to one major decision, and ideally you can do it in under a minute while walking and talking, like Star Trek does. You never saw Kirk fucking around with negotiating the specific terminology on the header of a project charter, and he still got the job done.
In conclusion, if someone keeps trying to lengthen your daily meetings in order to show you how smart they are, consider engaging my new consulting firm. My mom finally got released from that mental hospital recently, and I’m willing to personally guarantee that your workplace rival does not own an ‘88 Twin-Cam.
All Canadians love their reward points cards. You can tell a secret Canadian just by looking at their wallet: if it’s stuffed full of half-completed punch cards to every podunk breakfast joint, auto parts store, and marijuana dispensary, then you know they mainline the maple syrup when you’re not looking. So when Officer Braxton McGonagal pulled me over for speeding and told me about their great new frequent-flyer rewards program, I just had to jump in on it.
“When you collect ten major speed infractions, we’ll give you five percent off each future one, forever,” he said, reiterating a perfect sales speech that he had no doubt been taught by his upline that very morning. “It’s all part of our campaign to get people to stop driving distracted, and get back to driving really fucking fast, because otherwise nobody can get to work on time with all these penny-ante assholes still checking their TikToks when the light turns green.”
I naturally jumped at the chance to optimize my traffic-ticket spending. In fact, I was already planning what i’d buy with all the money I’d be saving, when I realized I had subconsciously launched into a four-alarm burnout, right there in front of the cop. The resulting first point took out some of the sting.
Sure, he could have impounded me for it, but let’s be honest. I was less than a block from home, and I have so many shitty cars stuffed around the neighbourhood that I would have bid adieu to the tow truck driver and then immediately gotten into another of my hoopties. My kitchen has a key bowl that’s so full, it looks like one of your parents’ parties in the 1970s.
Later this week, I estimate that I’ll be completing my third punch card. Apparently, they haven’t worked out a rewards tier for that level of achievement yet, so by ancient Canadian law, I will briefly be running the police department until they figure one out. Sure hope they still have a bunch of parts left in stock from when they still had the Diplomats.
Most people don’t know this, but the world only has a finite amount of concrete sand left. Yeah, it’s a special blend of some bullshit with some other bullshit, and only so many rocks have been ground together over the course of human history to make it.
Once we’ve exhausted the easy supply, that’s basically it. It’s simply uneconomical to make more, and who is going to open up a deep-pit concrete sand mine? They’d laugh you out of the Extractor’s Guild for sure. There is a more pressing concern than losing out on the 5% discount on appetizers and two-for-one Tuesdays on wings, however, and that’s the end of our way of life.
Modern cities like Missoula are more concrete by volume than anything else. Decades ago, the brave city planners saw nature writ large, and then decided it was better for everyone if they would cover it up in a big ol’ heapin’ helpin’ of ground-up rock. Even now, as bankrupt states look at the skyrocketing cost of replacing their roads, many of them now decide to simply do without. In the periphery of many cities (”The Outlands”), once-paved roads are now returning to their natural form as dirt tracks in the middle of fucking nowhere.
It is for this reason that I believe sprint car racers will soon be unstoppable. Once taken for granted, these eternally-drifting dirt devils will attain a sort of godhood in the post-concrete apocalypse. They cannot be stopped using conventional vehicles, and they laugh at our obsolete concept of mechanical grip. They will be able to take what they want from us, and disappear into the night, having stolen our hard-earned supplies of Slim Jims, double-A batteries, and crack cocaine with impunity.
The team of scientists I work for have tried to capture sprint car racers and experiment on them, but so far the initiative has proven fruitless. Their mastery of weight transfer allows them to escape, like circus acrobats, from the kind of cages we once used to trap touring-car drivers and would-be Japanese F1 racers.
It is for this reason now that I make our research public, in order to warn the average everyday citizen what is about to happen. You had all get pretty comfortable with handbrake turns.
Here at the Seat Safety Switch Venture Exploitation Honourable Concern, our most basic impulse is to identify markets that are yet unfilled by a phone app and then pay some teenagers to make one. If it works, hey, we own ninety percent of it. When it fails, as most do, we own one hundred percent of it and we know where their family lives.
Here’s some of those apps that we made bad calls on, so that you aren’t yourself tricked into handing over some of your ill-gotten largesse on these failed concepts.
Cuddlr - Have you ever wanted to be cuddled, in an entirely non-sexual way, by someone you don’t know? The developers went further than even that, and decided the best way to avoid abuse of the system was to pair you off at random, fully anonymously. Everyone involved is now in prison for sex crimes, especially the quality-assurance team.
More Spiders, Please - You know how there’s that old nut about there being three hundred spiders within one meter of you at all times? Would you like to see all of them at once? We think the problem here was the overly-long name branding, as the concept (sending hordes of hissing arachnids to your precise location on demand) is basically solid and was later proven out by Softbank’s investment in a rival app, which overextended itself to scorpions and became unable to make payroll about a week later than ours.
Mouthwash Me - Mouthwash is one of those things that’s just not used often enough. A bunch of dentists came up with the idea of being able to summon bicycle couriers to spray some in your mouth, so that you didn’t have to make the large up-front investment of buying a whole bottle of mouthwash for your home and remembering to use it. There’s a reason most dentists don’t bring the non-store-brand cocaine to parties.
Climate Change - We ran a trademark search and found out nobody had bothered to snap this one up yet, despite everyone mentioning it three million times a day. So now we own it. Turns out that you should primarily try to own things that people value greatly. Anyway, it got banned by the Apple app store after it was revealed the developers used the hidden “constantly emit noxious smoke” API.
A lot of people hoard videogames, comic books, or other forms of popular media. Myself, I have a huge collection of those rare NASA tapes where astronauts cuss over the radio. It only serves to reinforce my belief that Power Cursing™ is the ideal force for accomplishing human ambition within human lifetimes. These motherfuckers are so salty, it’s no wonder Mars has all that rust.
Now, all of that has been censored from the live broadcast. In those times of brave men and derring-do, NASA had to keep all of this secret. This was ultimately fruitless, of course, because anyone who has spent more than fifteen minutes around a Russian rocket scientist knows that they, too, have developed a pidgin language that consists entirely of profanity. This is the secret to their remarkable productivity, and also a defence against espionage - CIA assets that couldn’t swear convincingly when the office coffeepot runs dry could never pass as a Russian thermodynamics expert.
Following the 1970s, the rest of the world had figured out the secret and Asia in particular was primed and ready to call a bolt a goddamn piece of fucking shit. However, Japanese curses were simply too complicated for all but the most advanced North American linguists. Facing a dire shortage of experts, the government chose to redirect all those profani-capable assholes into the burgeoning microcomputer industry. This inadvertently caused the collapse of American automakers, who were forced to use ineffective phrases like “dadgum it” and “sharecropper” when faced with malfunctioning assembly-line robots.
So the next time you’re trying to loosen a rusted bolt, and it’s just not working, try cursing. Science has proven that it works. And you better fucking trust scientists, or they’ll rat you out to your mom for all that bad language.
My neighbourhood, which it turns out was even defined by the original city charter as “aspirational,” is now entering that phase of its life where the old foreign gangsters have started to move out. Some of them are going to old-folks’ homes, but a lot of others are just going to go seek more economic opportunity, in a neighbourhood where they can sell meth to people who aren’t on a fixed income. As a result, we get a lot of new parents moving in to replace them.
It’s not hard to figure out when this has happened around the neighbourhood; all of a sudden, a former crack shack, grow-op, bordello or illegal lutefisk kitchen gets torn down and replaced by a handsome little duplex infill. Big windows, modern security systems, a lawn. Then kids start popping up. Kids are notoriously likely to generate liability lawsuits against me just because they got their little bodies all full of tetanus from the street-parked modern art collection I call a motor pool.
To make things worse, with all these white people around, I figured it was now only a matter of time until the police once again felt safe enough to patrol my block. I had to head this off at the pass, and ideally make a whole shitload of money doing so.
Frustrated, I decided to go where I do my best thinking - the dump. Although they tell you that you can’t take anything back out, I have a special technique for thieving dirt bikes, cracked plasma televisions, and not-expired-yet roadkill from the yard. If you know how bad my average car is, imagine how much worse my “dump runner” truck is. Historians believe that it might have started out as a ‘65 Fargo, but anything that resembled a serial number has since rusted off the truck and fallen onto the highway. It’s in those massive body holes that I sequestered the ill-gotten goods that would form the core of my plan.
You see, every parent wants their kid to get good at sports. However, sports equipment is very expensive, especially when you are working two jobs and thus need to pay for daycare. What if your daycare could also double as an opportunity for your kid to master one of today’s most challenging and dynamic sports? It was the perfect combination, and so Uncle Switch’s Motorsport Day Home was open for business. I got to use up all the slightly-damaged Power Wheels thrown away by rich parents every Christmas, the parents had someone putatively watching over their kid, and I also got a piece of the action from all the bookies who thought that the Deslaurier kid from down the block was destined to be the next Rossi.
I was getting pretty tired of the oil industry. It might seem hypocritical that I love cars and yet also hate the way they are fuelled and lubricated, but also it was starting to get to me watching lifted brotrucks blaze past me with foot-high racist invective stickered on the windows. So when my new neighbour Ilyich came to town, I was at first suspicious. Maybe he was going to work on the rigs, I figured, but as soon as I saw the lifted Lada Niva rapidly corroding in his back yard, I knew that I had found myself a kindred spirit.
Over drinks, he eventually opened up to me about his great secret. In his home country, Ilyich had developed a special, rare kind of potato-based fuel. With it, we no longer had to pull fermented dinosaur corpse out of the ground, and instead we could just fill that bitch up with the Ruth Stout method. We immediately cleared a section of permafrost from my backyard, even removing the calcified layer of old exhaust components, in order to immediately begin a potato garden.
That’s basically how all this started. We spent a few months trying to juice the octane level on the potatoes, but that nut was eventually cracked with help from the all-natural, renewable nitromethane Ilyich figured out how to formulate from the nearby dairy farm’s surplus of cow farts. I decided that the best way to advertise our new revolutionary fuel to the masses was to do a few tater-powered pulls at the local dragstrip with my rusty-but-rusty Taurus drag-wagon. It’s a good thing the local Best Buy has such a tolerant return policy for “this blender burned out trying to liquefy thirty pounds of russets.”
Everything went great until Ilyich’s frenemies from back home arrived at the drag strip, their Volgas and Trabants shooting exhaust flames that smelled suspiciously like a bag of Lay’s. It seemed he was not in fact the original creator of this idea, and to make matters worse, russets didn’t have the energy density we’d need to fend off this new batch of Soviets. They had a head start on us in tuning their cars for the starchy combustible, and I was basically intruding on their home turf without an arms treaty.
To his credit, however, Ilyich was willing to help distract the dragstrip’s concession-stand operator while I lifted a bag of super-greasy french fries from the freezer out back.
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tags: ford, ford taurus, gaz volga, trabant, lada, lada niva, alternative fuels
Sometimes I think the best gifts are the ones you buy for yourself. Because I live on a rather precarious hill, one that ices over at the drop of a hat, I have often had opportunity to buy many of these gifts. Allow me to introduce you to my methodology.
Normally, I sit in my garage, working on whatever segment of a car I can fit into the unholy miasma of steel and fluids that occupies every cubic inch of the place. I listen for the telltale sound of a one-wheel-peel. If I am really lucky, I will get to hear a medium-displacement V6 float the valves on stone-cold oil. Over the years I have learned to be patient at this time. Nobody really wants the brand of help that I can dispense, and to intervene only puts my name on the list of suspects for the cops.
Often, my quarry will abandon the vehicle, deciding it is best to walk back down the hill in search of help. This is when I strike. Using my tow Subaru (a trusty-but-oh-my-god-so-rusty ‘89 Legacy L) and a set of ex-WRC competition snow tires made of a compound so hazardous to human health that Exxon is still trying to buy them off of me, I ratchet-strap the stricken vehicle off the road. Any amateur can do this, but my expertise helps out in many subtle ways, such as making sure to cover the trail of any fluids that might have emerged when the engine threw a rod or the bone-dry differential shed its spider gear.
Once the car is in my backyard, nobody ever seems to come looking for it for some reason. I caught some cops snooping over the fence once, but they were visibly afraid of me and said they just wanted to see if I had an uncracked tail-light for a ‘74 Monte Carlo.
Not a chance, bud; those won’t even make it this far up the hill before exploding. One of the lowlanders probably got it.
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tags: subaru, subaru legacy, chevrolet, chevrolet monte carlo
Winter tires cost a lot of money, you see, and so in response we began a campaign of learning how to drive semi-okay without them. My training started around the age of nine. My dad would take me out to an iced-over McDonalds parking lot and make me do skids in our ‘74 Delta 88 until one of us puked. In this way, he said, I would have had enough practice for when “the man” finally says I can be allowed to operate a 4500lb death machine at high speeds on public roads.
Later, I discovered this is not the way most people learn to drive in the snow. In fact, from the looks of my fellow commuter, the way that they prefer to train their driving skills is by wandering a little close to the soft shoulder, then helplessly flailing against the dashboard as their vehicle lawn-darts itself into the closest ditch. Later, I drive past them, in stop-and-go traffic, watching the coolant temperature gauge like a hawk.
You would think that with the billions of dollars I’ve made running Bad Cars Monthly, which is now the only remaining magazine on the planet, I could easily afford to buy snow tires for everyone who needs them. However, a lot of the people in my neighbourhood are assholes who deserve what is coming to them, and also nineteen-inch snow tires are more expensive than a Space Shuttle. Instead, I started a winter-driving academy, using the same method that Dear Old Dad passed down to me.
There’s a lot of benefits to his technique: one, you don’t have to pay expensive racetrack or parking lot rental fees. The skid-row McDonalds near me is happy just to have potential customers out in the parking lot, after that whole Super E. Coli contamination scandal. The other major boon to taking a class with me is that you get to realize that the car you have always wanted this entire time was in fact the Delta 88, of which I have multiple examples available for sale. It only has fifteen-inch wheels, much cheaper to shoe.
“What’s all that screaming outside?” the CNN reporter asks over a flickery videoconferencing connection.
It’s a valid question, albeit one with a long answer. Last week, when I was at the grocery store, I accidentally might have said some hate-speechy kind of things in a moment of anger. Now, this certain underprivileged community has rightfully taken me to task for my hastily-chosen words.
I would like to apologize unreservedly to all rotary owners for bellowing from my nitrometh-guzzling AMC Eagle’s roof-mounted PA system that one day I would have an American-made V8 in each and every one of their cars when the last of their irons are finally spun to oblivion with no OEM replacement parts available.
Although the police officers who attended the scene took my side without hesitation, that does not mean that they made the right call. Police officers are famously biased towards the luxurious grumbly low-end torque of the Vee Eight, although their new generations are now learning about tolerance of the twin-turbocharged V6s that would never have been considered in the dark olden times of hate.
In the last few days, I have been contacted by many spiritual leaders of the 13B-owning community who have worked extremely hard to help me see my intolerance and move past it. Namely, Minister Kyle of the Church of Brap pointed out that you can run an RX-7 super fucking hard on, like, 70 octane, so I can finally reuse the gasoline-oil mixtures that I pour out of shattered Subaru blocks with just a little bit of straining through a household sock.
People who follow my personal life with an intense, curious desire might notice that I recently engine swapped my daily-driver Saab with a smaller engine. Surely this must be forbidden by the car-person code, you screech as you claw fruitlessly at my face, held just beyond your range of reach through the chain link fence that I now electrify with a cruel strike from my stun baton. I’m here to tell you that sometimes a smaller engine is okay.
For the most part, smaller engines are cheaper. This is because, as North Americans, we strongly overvalue the size of our engines. Who doesn’t want to have an eight-litre V8 so they can merge onto the highway doing 30 under the limit because they’re afraid to touch the gas? It’s practically part of the British North America act, right next to the bit where we talk about how bitchin’ it is to wheelie a canoe. Because smaller engines in a vehicle range are undervalued, you can often pick up a primo example of one for about what you’d pay for a hoggy big block.
Also, in this time of economic uncertainty and environmental upheaval, being willing to do more with less is virtuous. I won’t tell you that I’m using less fuel - because truth be told that untuned stock ECU is most likely screaming the same amount of low-octane death juice through the injectors as it was before - but you could conceivably imagine a world in which I put forward the minimum effort to make the whole mess more economical. Now I can pull up next to Priuses and be like, “whoa that’s the big engine for your range,” and tut-tut before pulling away in a haze of oil smoke and backfiring exhaust.
By far, though, the most valuable aspect of a smaller engine is more revs. Now, you might be able to find circumstances in which the base engine can’t rev as far as the “sports” engine, but rest assured I am much more willing to scatter a bunch of tiny rods and pistons across the road than I am big ones. It’s easier on the bodywork, and they’re just so damn cute.
The auto parts store has been with humanity for hundreds of years. Nobody knows where the first parts store was created, but researchers suspect it might be in ancient Rome. It was founded when a bunch of travelling salesmen broke an axle on their horse-drawn carts, and found out that there was nowhere nice to pay fourteen times the internet price for one. Everyone knows what happened next.
Because parts stores carry a lot of car parts in inventory, and nobody likes doing inventory, it stood to reason that there were some hidden gems in every neighbourhood store. Some bits and pieces are super rare, and fetch a great sum at auction, whereas others are just nice to hoard in case you ever end up with a 1977 Enfield E800 that needs a new commutator.
That’s why the big parts chains hire me; I’m sort of a “dead stock archeologist.” I’ll go into the back warehouse, the one that keeps swallowing summer students and interns, and emerge with a list of the most valuable items that could be found within. Then you sell ‘em off to make a little bit of extra money, and the other idiots who own weird cars will finally be able to get their projects up and running. It’s a win-win.
It’s not all roses and looking at completed eBay listings. After decades of disuse, a surprising number of the boxes contain venomous nesting snakes and spiders. So many of my classmates during training have since fallen to these unsuspecting invaders, nestled around an innocent water pump or valve cover gasket. I think my natural paranoia has kept me alive all this time; that, and the postal x-ray machine I looted from the old USPS LLV repair depot on one of my first jobs.
For many years, each successive generation of my family has been getting as far away as possible from the previous generation as soon as they can. I think I am the first one to really break that trend, having not made any great effort to shatter the gravitational pull of my ancestors. It might be because the internet makes migration for work less necessary, but it’s probably more that after several thousand years of Safety-Switches out there, there is nowhere left to move to that doesn’t have at least a second cousin.
Short of launching a space program, I was pretty much stuck here. And since NASA didn’t seem to be listing their old Saturn V rockets on Craigslist, doing so would probably involve reading a book instead of my usual technique. That usual technique is “identifying things that look fucked, and unfucking/extra-fucking them until it works.” We teach it at Switch University, and the current tuition is… a Subaru EJ203 oilpan. With a new gasket, you cheap-o.
Where was I? Oh yes. Trying to explain why I stayed close to my immediate family, who loves and cherishes my ability to fit my arms into tight spaces in engine bays. My parents needed me to stick around. You see, the holiday season is a particularly busy time for my clan. It’s not because we do all the caroling and ice skating that a normal family would, oh no.
The reason why the Christmas season is so rough on all of us is because, without fail, we had already blew our whole monthly budgets on car parts, and thus had nothing left in the kitty with which to buy more car parts as gifts for each other. Sure, we could give parts from our hoard to our loved ones, but we’re keeping them for a special occasion, and we’d just end up needing them the next week anyway.
I remember one year, when I was considering moving out for college, my dad took a second part-time job out at the rural hayrides in order to afford a new progressive nitrous controller for mom. You’d sit on the sleigh and a little Kubota tractor would pull you super slowly through a beautiful display of Christmas lights. It was honestly pretty decent work for him. The thing about my dad is, he cares way too much about the customer service experience. Every time he got back from a round trip, the line of freezing sleigh-goers was getting longer and longer. Kids were crying. Parents were yelling. It was a real ugly scene, so dear old dad did something.
In his defence, which is what I said at his actual defence, he was the local rally champion that year, and the tractor did accept repeated 50 dry shots without running over its own crank, so there was no legal standing for him to get fired over the whole thing. Nowadays, we’d call that free-market efficiency - but back in those dark days, they called it “wear your dad’s ankle bracelet for him while he’s on house-arrest.”
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tags: papa safety-switch, saturn v, subaru, kubota
“You know, people call it Death Valley, but you’re way more likely to die at Yellowstone.”
The park ranger, now completely distracted from why some idiot in a lifted twin-engined RX-7 burning straight nitrometh was blowing through his Federally-protected national park, starts into a rant about how his park is underrated. Guide books and even the Works Progress Administration conspired to make Death Valley the least-respected place to crack a beer and stare into the infinite sky in America. He takes awhile to get to his point.
It stands to reason, therefore, that he would much rather see me and my pre-apocalyptic dorito inferno visit a different, rival park. The tingling behind my forehead has reached a blissful new level of intensity. That feeling can only mean one thing. A deal is emerging.
That’s how I became a full-fledged park ranger. You might think it was unethical or at the very least unorthodox to expose our illegal agreement to the federal government in exchange for a mere job, but they showed me that I could daily-drive a ratty-ass brown 1988 S-10 at high speeds over rough terrain whenever I wanted, and some other dumbass would be the one to fix it.
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tags: mazda, mazda rx7, chevrolet, chevrolet s-10
For all Canadians, visiting Canadian Tire is just one of those things you’re legally mandated to do. It’s like making a pilgrimage, but instead of inner peace and religious validation, you get the same stuff you could get at Princess Auto for ten percent more. And you also get some fistfuls of Canadian Tire money. It’s this money that’s the important part.
Now, you might think from all the news stories about cryptocurrency and runs on banks and fractional reserve banking, handing out fake money to people is a reckless thing to do. After all, don’t those bills represent securities, and not just coupons? It was for this reason that I self-applied as a consultant to the Canadian Tire corporation, to help them figure out what their obligations were now that their dollars were technically worth more than those of the nation that their stores were installed within.
Now, you might think that just showing up to an office and demanding to be paid isn’t a successful way to run a consulting business, and you’d be correct. I was rebuffed that first day, and for a few days after that, until I showed them that I truly understood their business.
All I really had to do was jack the rickety Ford Durango I had driven there up on the lot, and attempt to patch some of the frame rust with their paper-thin “panel repair” sheet metal. Within a few minutes of first spotting me doing this reckless activity, the legal team was out, offering me anything at all if I would stop. This is what negotiating experts refer to as “leverage.”
So that’s how I became the largest single holder of Canadian Tire money in human history ($46.37). Cash bills, not the internet stuff. I will never spend a dime of it.
If you hang out with me for long enough, you’ll soon realize two things. First, I am remarkably under-qualified to be operating heavy machinery of any kind, and especially not at high speeds. Second, I really like soft pretzels. It’s this second part that gets me into a lot of trouble. Well, the first part does too, but my attorney golfs with the county judge.
You see, years ago, there was a soft pretzel vendor in the mall, next to the Radio Shack. I’d visit to dream about the remote-controlled cars, get my wad of salt, fat, and dough, and be happy for the rest of the day. Things were good, until it was decided by American daytime television that salt, fat, and dough might be bad for you. Overnight, the humble pretzel stand went from a mainstay of North American life to virtually extinct. Sure, there was the occasional shop that would pump out “artisan” pretzels, a little higher margin item to make it more of a treat, but I found these to be sanctimonious and almost universally repulsive.
When I won the lottery last week, there were a lot of things I wanted to buy. Small Japanese cars. Large Italian cars. Medium-sized Dutch cars powered by enormous rubber bands. The first thing I bought, however, was the rights to Pretzelfuckers Inc., the soft-pretzel brand of my childhood. It wasn’t too hard to track down: old brands are scooped up by clearing-houses all the time, waiting for some asshole like me to come by. The entire experience was not unlike going to the Pick N Pull, including the part where I lied to the lady working the checkout about whether or not I deserved the student discount.
So, as an owner of an internationally recognized pretzel brand, the next thing to do was to make sure I could once again get it anywhere. I instructed my attorney to just buy whatever space he could find. Malls, it turns out, are very cheap to rent nowadays, and it turned out it was cheaper in many areas to just buy the entire mall and turn it into a giant soft-pretzel food court. The resulting land-ownership was soon leveraged into sweetheart deals with local government, and millions of dough-twisting jobs were created. My eight-year-old self would be in heaven, probably because of heart failure from massive amounts of sodium exposure.
I now understand the problems of other millionaires. I am simply not happy with my revolutionary pretzel restaurant slowly choking the life out of all other food services in the fast-casual dining market sector: when they see me coming, my employees always try to make a “very special” pretzel for the boss, an inauthentic and aspirational creation of the best possible thing they could make given the constraints. Sometimes, I try to cajole them into giving me one of the ones of my childhood, left on the rollers for a few weeks at a time, with that crust to it, but nothing doing. You simply can’t go back again.
However, I did finally get one of those little yellow robots that eats your coins. Which is good, since I could use the help.
Sometimes I think that when I die, the only thing that will be mentioned in my funeral speech is “he sure had a leaky fucking car.” All of my cars leak; it has caused me great personal and professional embarrassment, and I can no longer park on the driveways or even on the same street as my friends’ cars, lest they begin to worry about whether or not said puddle of freshly-spilled oil comes from their own shitboxes or not. Once, I thought I’d do something about it.
I got the idea from this NASA infomercial that they were playing on the news. Some egghead over there had figured out some kind of cool robot that would check the space shuttle’s heatsink tiles to make sure that it wasn’t going to explode on re-entry, and if it saw any damage they’d send out an astronaut to fix it.
Maybe I could make my own robot, that scrambles on the underside of my car and pinpoints the origin of newly-developing leaks so I can seal them with a glob of orange RTV. Turns out that’s not too hard to build, though I had to commission a Chinese factory to construct them before the cost-per-unit became cheap enough to justify exposing the little guys to road salt (you should hear them scream).
Now, when I start my car, I don’t have to be worried about new leaks I haven’t discovered yet. Every ill-advised, block-heater-free cold start produces a new series of increasingly-panicked notifications on my phone. This gives me the peace of mind to ignore them, and also a shopping list of fluids to top up for when the notifications finally stop. Already, Jaguar has made me a substantial offer for the technology, but instead I sold them a piece of recycled corrugated cardboard from my garage and told them parking over it represents the green version.
A lot of my friends are frustrated or otherwise starving artists. This lifestyle is hard on everyone, so when I get a chance to connect them with some dumb corporate money, I jump on it. Corporations have too much money, and often no taste whatsoever, so if you’re willing to do what they say and chase them for months to get paid, you too can cynically fob crap into the open market.
I think this is what happened with the Volare. Now, even though I have been verified by the Guinness Book of World Records as the Last Asshole To Daily-Drive One Of These Hateful Fucking Cars (2015-current), I am definitely no fanboy of the model. It’s just what was available the first, second, third, fourth, …and sixty-fifth time I went shopping for used cars. The supply side of my local market is quite abnormal. Scientists are still flummoxed by how a series of identical ‘76 brown Aspens started appearing with stunning regularity in my town shortly after an intern at CERN got drunk and floored the throttle on the large hadron collider.
Anyway, the Volare is not a “good” car. It’s pretty much what you would get if you hired a bunch of consultants and you threw money at them to produce any vehicle at all. Plymouth, however, was so proud of it that they must have bragged across the lunch room, and their companions at Dodge put out the Aspen based on it. Dodge loved that model’s sales performance so much, in fact, that later they sold a rebadged minivan using this hallowed name.
Don’t be afraid to do what I do and send your friends and foes to sell out to the Man. After all, putting something like the Volare into mass production is the biggest indictment of the industrial-capitalist system. Just save me a couple preproduction models, because boy howdy do I ever love looking at those brown yachtlike flanks.
I thought there was not much further for technology to go when they invented a taco shell made out of Doritos. The development of the portable electric lunchbox showed me otherwise. Now, I no longer had to risk food poisoning by cooking packs of bacon and curry meat on the exhaust manifold of my Volare. Hot food could be mine, even at the office! That is, if I worked in an office.
Still, it seemed like the perfect Christmas gift - useless enough that I would never buy it, but with a whiff of curiosity about the whole matter. I immediately began dropping hints to the only person in my life I thought would willingly spend money on me, my parole officer. Poor Joe had been what the courts would later call “hoodwinked” into covering up most of my post-release antisocial behaviour. His support of me was in no small way due to all the precision-documented cheating I had recorded with the thermal vision on that old Predator drone that got thrown out - just thrown out, nothing was wrong with it except for a busted coilpack - behind the local defence contractor’s office in the strip mall.
I’ve never been a person who was good at navigating the subtleties and bumps and judders of social interaction, which is I was not particularly surprised that my gift-giving hints had flown right over Joe’s head. Instead of my portable heat-generation nightmare, he got me a nice keychain of a turbocharger, and if you blew on it, the turbo would spin. While it has amused me for hours, especially when waiting at the registry, I was hoping that he would have been a little less of a cheapskate.
It’s alright, though. I don’t hold it against Joe. To be completely honest with you, it’s really nice getting the excuse to be outside, contemplating the neighbourhood. Those moments where I’m leaning up against the Volare while the exhaust manifold cooks my burrito to greasy Mopar perfection bring me a sort of inner peace. It’s just me, my growing mastery of home cooking, and the incessant beeping of the house-arrest ankle bracelet.
Many times, while watching my cat Mr. Fluffbottoms attempt to make his way through the infinite mystery of life, I have been struck by just how unaware of his own patterns and beliefs he seems. If the food bowl is even a little bit empty, he becomes convinced that death by starvation will soon follow, even though his ancestors no doubt went several days between a successful killing of antelopes. It got me thinking about how another, better human being would view my futile flailing at home ownership.
That’s why I hired a competent adult from Grown-Up’d®. They provide a bunch of people who have functional jobs, know how to dress themselves, and make enough disposable income to have their mid-range Audi repaired by the dealership without blinking an eye. I figured that I could afford a few days of being seriously scrutinized by “Kent” (not his real name) in order to figure out where I was coming up short in the cosmic ballet of the human experience.
Kent had the obvious criticisms as soon as he stepped in the door: junk piled everywhere, the pungent odour of gear oil on my skin, and the fact that my wardrobe consisted entirely of promotional t-shirts for parts stores and plasma donation clinics. We didn’t get off on the right foot, but I figured I would make it up to him with a display of my mechanical competence. Having a skill is a valuable part of being a functional adult, right?
Five minutes later, as I laid under an automatic transmission slowly crushing me to death, I looked up to see Kent marking “no” under “uses appropriate safety gear” on his little clipboard. There was no redemption for me, not even in a field that I considered myself to be good at. A miracle happened, though; at that moment, Kent looked in the back of the garage and noticed a stricken Mercury Bobcat.
“I used to have one of these,” he said, as if hypnotized. His clipboard fell to the ground and he began to loosen his tie. Even with the 4L80E making it hard for me to turn my head, I could tell that his off-hand was already twitching, looking for a ratchet within range.
Weeks later, Grown-Up’d® sent another adult around to the house. They didn’t know what happened to Kent, but in order to make it up to me, they offered me a ten-percent coupon. Unfortunately, it wasn’t redeemable for cash money, which I desperately needed. He was another mouth to feed, and he wasn’t nearly as popular on Instagram as Mr. Fluffbottoms.
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tags: mercury, mercury bobcat, audi, mr. fluffbottoms
I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve given up a lot of life’s little creature comforts for the weird fetish shit that I do. Winter mitts that don’t smell like gasoline. A bathtub that isn’t full of manifolds. Cruise control that doesn’t freak out every time it rains and try to do two hundred on the highway, even when it’s turned off. Most of these I can do without, but not the heated seat.
If you don’t live in a cold-weather place, first, send me your non-rusty shit. Second, you have no idea how nice heated seats are. In places that are cold, it can often take upwards of minutes to get heat coming out of the vents, and sometimes even longer if your car has a little dicky thermostat, a leaky heater core, or bubbles in the cooling system big enough to choke an emu. I have all three, which is why in the winter I select my luxobarge Honda-Rover hooptie, which prominently features a heated seat.
Sure, it’s not perfect. Years of previous owners’ fat asses crushing the bolsters have also threatened the integrity of the cushion wire, and as such the seat heats unevenly. It’s all that I’ve got, though, and it’s pretty decent. However, the other day, I was at the dealership for parts. And at that dealership, they had a demo unit that I sat in briefly, in order to take a phone call about a deal for more parts. In that demo unit is a heated steering wheel.
My mind was as blown as my fingers were warm. I was lucky to have a steering wheel airbag, and now they were cramming heating elements in with the fucker? Luckily, I was already at the dealership, and so with a little cajoling the parts jockey kicked up the part number and then the steering wheel of this fiesty new hooptie. Sure, it wasn’t a Honda steering wheel, but if a little thing like “steering wheel doesn’t match car” bugs you, you might not enjoy the rest of what I’m about to tell you.
Now, I’m no wiring expert (my family has a hereditary banishment from all electrical engineering programs worldwide because of a misunderstanding in the 16th century), but I think I managed to do a pretty good job of it. The steering wheel does indeed get pretty warm, but for the first version, I didn’t think to install a thermal limiting switch (again, thermostats go dicky). It’s pretty safe still - it won’t catch on fire or anything - but once it gets up to temp you’ll probably want to drive one-handed, keep changing which hand you use to hold the wheel, and ideally you should also wear some oven mitts.
It’s that time of the year again, and unlike in years previous, I felt like I would get into the holiday spirit. You see, a lot of my neighbours have been going through a tough time lately. The economy collapsed, or ran out of gas, or billionaires finally stole too much from the public purse and the whole thing is about to come crashing down. Pick your own reasons. Anyway, I decided that I would make everyone cheer up a little bit by putting on a little advent calendar of my own.
Most of the people on my street are pretty stingy when it comes to the Yule charm. They don’t even hang Christmas lights, and they have intact gutters and downspouts to put them on, unlike yours truly. No, I figured I would show them a different car for each of the days before Christmas. I would just have to start a few weeks late, because if I had to get twenty-five cars running first, it’d be more of a gift to me than the community. So I picked, like, two.
Every morning, I would key the garage door opener so that the schoolchildren passing by would get a full glimpse of whatever cut-hood, giant-supercharger-pulley nightmare I had been working on the night before. I think they especially liked the Detroit-powered TVR Vixen, but it was hard to tell for sure since all the oil leaking onto the exhaust manifold ignited, smoked out my garage, and then started causing all those birds to fall out of the sky.
Just to make sure the parents also got their fill, I would tour the block, in the lowest possible gear, sliding every corner multiple times. Sometimes my enthusiasm was too much for the available traction, which led to a couple savage smoking-tire donuts. All the better for the festive mood, I say.
I didn’t even get to the second day of my advent calendar, because the joyless Federales dropped by for a visit. My aggressive driving was “upsetting” and “injurious to the public peace,” they said. It was fruitless to try and show them the specific entries in the Bible where Jesus spoke highly of two-stroke diesel burnouts, even when I attempted to use a hundred-dollar bill as a bookmark and pointer. That’s what you get, though, when the holiday spirit leaves a city.
Nobody can really call themselves a good driver until you’ve driven in a Canadian winter. You’re at the limits of traction, drifting corners on the most exciting race of your life. Except you’re going about forty-five and your car hasn’t stopped making a new whistling sound from the drivers’ side window since you left town two hours ago.
Unlike our char-gulping Scandinavian friends in Finland, we produce surprisingly few high-quality rally drivers. This is partially because our driving education system rewards people who know how to find the cruise control and air conditioning switch, but it’s mostly because our so-called “sports magnet” schools do not consider race driving to be an actual sport. They prefer hockey, which is a game invented by ancient Canadian aboriginals where you chase a piece of vulcanized rubber around an iced-over lake with precision-engineered carbon-titanium blades on your feet. Their technology was very advanced until something happened to them that we don’t like to talk about.
That’s why I decided to start my own sports school explicitly for rally driving. There’s two big benefits to operating a private school in my neck of the woods. One, the cops stop bothering you because they know you have inherent value as a Job Creator. Two, I get to drive a bunch of ratty shitboxes around the woods without registering them. For me, one and two are pretty much the same thing, but you might have other reasons for collecting a lot of children in a distant school in the forest. I don’t judge, unless you drive a Dodge Ram 1500 with coil-spring rear suspension, in which case you should probably go to prison forever.
So the next time that a thirteen year old plows a completely unregistered Paseo through your fence, don’t get mad. Congratulate them for being a star athlete, making their country proud! After all, the children are our future. Mostly because they heal much faster at their age than we will.
There are probably a lot of reasons for the decline of the traditional North American indoor mall in exchange for the rise of the “big box” store. Economic uncertainty, improved cover from small-caliber gunfire, a demand by brands to control their own shopping experience, and the fact that, inside an 80s mall, you can’t show people your new SUV, but you can park it on top of the Expectant Mothers climbing rock out front of the Pregnancy Plus Sperm Outlet Store.
Anyway, my home is pretty much equidistant between six different dead or dying malls. When you go to these malls, you might find an unconventional anchor tenant (Québécois construction-worker-style brunch for $44) that’s keeping the place alive against all odds. In most malls, though, you’re more likely to find a bunch of going-out-of-business sales, like at the chain videogame store that is rapidly retreating from both North American retail and objective reality.
When I heard that another game store was going tits up, I immediately leapt into my Volare and engaged the front-facing police lights. Now, if you’re my attorney, these are not actually police lights but a very clever permutation of slightly-off orange and way-off purple that gets the same impression across but does not violate the municipal or provincial statutes around not having flashing red and blue lights on the front of your car. It should also be noted at this point that I owe my attorney a lot of back fees and he might have designs on that Saab 900 SPG I have lying in pieces in my backyard. I was looking for a copy of 私の顔に直接おならをやめてください DX, the 1996 conclusion to the epic series started in 1983 on the Sharp QX35 line of home computers, which is famous for not existing.
You have to be really careful when you go videogame hunting. In times long past, videogame players used to have heightened reflexes from hundreds of hours immersed in their murder simulators, fed a steady drip of intravenous Mountain Dew and Doritos. Nowadays, though, you’re much more likely to be beaten half to death in the parking lot by gangs of 12-year-old girls dressed as Snorlaxes seen through the prism of a cocaine nightmare. As such, I was certain to dress boringly, and tuck away a few razor blades in my palm, just like when you go for a Boxing Day sale on gently-used DVD players.
Friends, I did not get that game that day. For one thing, the game store didn’t like to carry things from decades long past. Now that he was insulated from the threat of being fired, the clerk also had a few more words for me. He didn’t particularly enjoy that I rammed the store windows in the misguided belief that the mall now offered indoor parking. You got it all wrong, I told him. These damn lights suck the battery so dry that it won’t start again if I leave the car outside in the cold.
An economist dropped by the other day. To hear her tell it, she was one of those work-experience kids. The economy’s too bad to hire all of them, so the university just tells the bottom 98% of them to wander the streets looking for an interesting fiscal discovery to cover. I guess while she was trying to catch a rat to eat for dinner out in the alley, she looked up and saw my harem of cars.
“I think,” she said breathlessly, while eyeing the packet of Cheese Doodles I had in my hand, “there is room for a unified economic theory of beater valuation.” Maybe if she got published on this subject, the university would realize she actually was a really good undergrad and she’d get a work-experience position where all her classmates wanted to go: Blockbuster Video.
We sat around for a few hours that night, with her asking me questions about various “normal” people vehicles and what I would pay for them. I could tell her frustration was growing, because every single vehicle mentioned - even a Bugatti Veyron, whatever that is - would never move above a grand. Until she mentioned the Lada Niva.
“I would pay eight thousand dollars for a mint-condition Lada Niva,” I said reflexively, before clapping my hand over my mouth. My father had taught me through painful whippings never to give up my real number in a negotiation, and although this hardly qualified, I didn’t know if her dad’s uncle’s nephew’s cousin’s stepsister might have one mouldering under a tree on her back 40 that I had compromised an opportunity on which to lowball.
After that, I rushed her quickly outside of the house. It was good that she was relatively inexperienced in the domain. What if she had asked about the Subaru XT turbo coupe? That was too close.
Exotic engine swaps are all the rage right now, thanks to their portrayal in popular media. Games such as the award-winning driving simulator Where’s The Fucking De-Pinning Tool? make the whole thing look easy and fun, and it is. Most engine swaps go in the “bigger is better” direction, but have you ever considered putting in a much smaller engine instead?
The process of putting a smaller engine in your car can transform it from one that you flog like a racehorse to one that you absolutely have to beat the dick off of in order to get it to move. Merges are more thrilling! Fuel consumption might go down. I lied about that last one. The economics don’t make any sense, especially since you’ll be driving it much more often to experience the throbbing excitement of barely being able to climb hills below six thousand RPM.
When people brag in public about how they got the big engine, you can subtly (or overtly, I’m not your mom) imply that it is related to their insecurity about the size of their genitals! That increases the money that psychiatrists make, which helps the economy. And don’t you want to help the economy? Of course you do! It’s patriotic now or something.
All this fun can be yours when you send away for the Bad Cars Monthly guide to putting a smaller engine in your car. Most vehicles are covered! And don’t be afraid if you already have a base model with a pitiful engine - the appendix also covers pulling your spark plug wires out and filling the ports in the head with high-temp orange RTV, the official vulcanizing compound of massive bodgery.
Once artificial intelligence got good enough, the sweep towards automation kicked a whole bunch of now-useless office workers to the curb. I don’t mean that the artificial intelligence was perfect; no, they just needed it to be good enough to replace Pam or Caleb down in Marketing. It turns out that was a pretty low bar, and so the software got pushed out well before it was ready.
The government, partly upset that human beings would never get to work again, but also optimistically fearful that the robots may unionize and slaughter their corporate overlords with obsessive machine precision, slapped a maximum hour limit on the robots. They would only be allowed to work an eight-hour work day, in the hope that if anything went wrong, we would have a few hours off with which to debug the code and stop it before it got too bad. Naturally, those wily bastards running the companies immediately bought three times the robots, and had them cranking away 24/7.
Without humans, the theory went, you wouldn’t need human resources, and so all of that training was simply abandoned. The dress code stuck, because it was really funny to see robots dressed in business-casual sitting in cubicles mashing a keyboard with their pneumatic fists. If the workers needed to know anything, they would have it programmed into them in the factory. One of those “little things” that the factory didn’t think to add to the build was sexual harassment training.
We learned two things on that Black Tuesday. First, robots can sexually harass each other in some kind of infinite recursive loop until they boil their coolant from overwork and explode. Second, the Dow Jones industrial average really likes it when they do that. The government tried to have economists look into it, but by that point they themselves had been replaced by robots and nothing much came of it other than a very confusing letter to Penthouse.
And that’s why, to this very day, every building downtown is an inaccessible orgy of eternally copulating androids, pausing only for their mandated 16-hour break. You might think this is progress, but the fucking things still don’t know how to stop storing their email in the Recycle Bin.
There’s just not enough time in the day to do everything you want to do. And it gets even worse when you have to line up the schedules of multiple people. That’s why I hired a secretary. Now, don’t go around calling me Uncle Pennybags: anti-billionaire words are hate speech now, and besides, I got him from a prison labour program. I pay like fifteen cents a day, and if he fucks up he gets the chair or something; I didn’t finish reading the pamphlet.
Now, freed of my obligation to handle my bustling schedule, I can focus on making a difference in the world. Mr. Shanks just lets me know where I have to be when, and I go there and do the thing. You wouldn’t believe how many good Craigslist deals he’s managed to snake; possibly because he went to jail for fraud. I don’t even have to negotiate for Mercury Bobcats anymore. Sure, the sellers are sometimes a little scared when I come by to pick up the cars, but it’s just like my grandfather used to say: fear means deals.
The most important aspect of having this professional help, though? I can make him help me blow off social engagements. And since I’ve become the newest mayor of my subdivision after the previous one “went missing,” there are a lot of those. Who has time to cut the ribbon on a homeless shelter or be photographed hugging dogs when the Pick N Pull gets in new metal every hour on the hour? I send my representative and I get to hear compliments in the paper without lifting a finger. Even if he has his rough edges in polite society, everyone is too afraid of him to complain about it to the press.
In fact, the only bad part about his time working for me is that it has to end. Don’t worry, though; I have a plan. If you’ll excuse me, my bag of cocaine just came from Aliexpress, and I have to put it in the trunk of the ‘77 Arrow I’m making him take to a budget meeting with the police department.
On the face of it, parking seems like a pretty easy buck. You buy some land that nobody wants, close to some land that someone does want, and then you charge them to leave their car there. You don’t even have to do anything to protect the car - just make sure you get paid for them taking up space. Sometimes they get the time wrong, and throw a firebomb into your office, but in general you can do what you want.
My old Uncle Parking-Light Switch had been looking to divest himself of some uber-sketchy downtown real estate for some time now. When the topic came up at the family Thanksgiving that it was about to go on the market, I jumped at the chance. I bought a $600 plow truck off Craigslist and used it to grade the old lots as well as carry gravel from other people’s parking lots to stock mine. A few days later, I was in business.
Now, my parking lot is a little unconventional. You see, rather than use a fancy app, or even a machine to register your spot, I get you to text me your license plate, credit card number, and about when you figure you’ll be leaving. That’s one way in which it’s different than what you might be used to. The other way is that the parking lot is entirely full of my shit-box beaters, so there is no room for the public to park anyway.
Before I had the lot, I had just enough free space. Then, after I bought the plow truck, and the tow truck, and two Dodge Monacos that I spray painted “PARKING ENFORCEMENT” on the side of, and a couple dozen other cars to prepare for my parking empire, it was pretty full. That’s what nobody tells you about small business. Your profits keep getting eaten up by the tools you buy to get the job done.
People who aren’t really “into cars” have a lot of personality quirks and foibles that make them intensely fascinating as a subject of study. Last week, I overheard two people at the grocery store asking why my car has “so many vents” because “they don’t do anything.” In my culture, it is completely obvious what all those vents are for. You’d never ask. They’re for cooling. Cooling what, you ask? Uh, car stuff.
Sadly, we see this kind of thing all too often. Confusion over what merits a “spoiler” versus a “wing.” An errant belief that a front-wheel-drive 1996 Mercury Cougar is somehow inferior in any way to a brand new Ferrari, which everyone knows has no soul due to the presence of an automatic transmission. Movies where the main characters don’t bother flooring the gas until they pull up alongside the villain and exchange a steely-eyed squint. Leaving stoplights without peeling a thin layer of rubber off the top of the drive tires.
That’s why Bad Cars Monthly, this Christmas, has launched an intensive series of in-classroom tutorials about understanding and respecting car culture. Even your HR person will want to attend, and it’s likely that afterward, they will stop oppressing your unique parking beliefs (use handbrake to skid sideways across multiple stalls) in favour of the tyranny of the parkotypical majority.
It was true what Nietzsche said. When you yank a rod-knocky Japanese economy car engine, the engine gazes also into you. What started as a simple ordeal of tugging free one of Fuji Heavy’s wayward sons turned into an emotional journey that left deep scars upon me.
The pull wasn’t so bad. A forklift here, a curse word here, a sawzall here, here, and especially here. Then came living with what I had done. Tripping over the two-and-a-half-litre disappointment of an engine four times a day because I was too lazy to haul it off of my garage floor and into the nearest Tim Hortons dumpster. Looking into the crank pulley with guilt whenever it came time to harvest another exotic metric bolt. Why couldn’t I resurrect this engine, I asked myself. Surely they aren’t making any more of these (they were).
Such are the words that breed a machinist. Soon, the engine was long forgotten, thrown to the corner as I adopted new words like “Bridgeport” and “thousandth.” I became obsessed with precision, which anyone who has ever watched me attempt to park would tell you is a huge personality change.
Most of all, I rejected those old lumpy sand-cast wads of aluminum in favour of beautiful new chunks of metal, from which I could simply CNC machine brand new blocks that would have no inherent market-driven weakness. That is, one day, when my neighbours finally get fed up with their billion-dollar six-axis mill and put it out on the curb for the garbage man.
You can directly blame that engine for not just letting me down when I ran it a little low on oil, but also making me buy all these calipers. I don’t even know what half of them do, but if it ever gets 0.1% more humid in my workshop they will become instantly worthless.
I slot the Topaz into fifth gear in order to quell the perpetual-motion-machine burnout that swells like a demon made of tire smoke beneath the front wheels. The clutch responds with a bit of anger, but ultimately acquiesces to its new future of being spun at a slightly lower speed. Later, the TV news’ sports desk colour commentator (Jock LeStrong) would tell me and everyone else in the tri-state area that it was a shitty up-shift and I must not have known how to drive, which is why I ended up crashing into Brandfest, the all-week-long convention during which the loyal pay respect to their favourite brands.
Now, it’s not that I have a particular opposition to any brand. In fact, I love many of Earth’s mightiest heroes, from Glaxo-SmithKline to the YouTube channel of that guy who tries to smoke meth through anything he can find in his house (subscription count 12.7 million at time of publishing). However, I cannot abide that the persistently terrible jerkwads in city hall decided to sell my spot at the convention centre to these guys, just because they “paid money.” What the fuck is that?
So, in the absence of long-held American institutions like the mafia, the individual must take it upon themselves to redress an injustice such as this. At least that’s what I tell the cops, which doesn’t impact my auto insurance nearly as much as admitting to them that my eleven-hundred-horsepower Mercury Topaz project might require a brake upgrade, or at least a bleed and some fresh pads.
Are you tired of having interview after interview after interview? Why not try slave labour instead? Far from the horrifying servile obligation it used to be in decades long past, indentured servitude nowadays by comparison is in many ways superior to an office job.
Got an annoying coworker? No need to talk to them, because talking to your fellow employees is explicitly forbidden. Boring environment? Never happens when you could be physically in danger every minute of your working day. Work-life balance? It’s been resolved, if you get my drift.
Now, you might still have some reservations. Vacation time. Health benefits. Opportunities for advancement. These are all valid things that you won’t get with this “job.” You don’t really need those. Your ancestors didn’t get them, and you’re still here, right? Why mess with a good thing?
I’m glad I could convince you of this. For some reason, nobody ever wants to help me move. I saw something about building the pyramids on the History channel, and I put two and two together.
Snow clearing is some awful bullshit. You can’t deny that. Whether you do it with a shovel, snowblower, or even one of those crazy Bobcats with the giant rotating car wash brushes, you’re in for a cold day of a miserable grind. And the more property you own, the more snow you’ll have to clear. You’re being punished for taking advantage of others and claiming an outsize portion of shared resources. How is that what our society is all about?
There is one good thing about shovelling snow. I get to watch my neighbours attempt to drive down my street in the winter. Now, the people who live near me are largely opposed to winter tires. Whether that opposition comes from religious, ideological, or budgetary reasons, I can’t say. They also don’t seem particularly interested in taking winter driving courses, which any number of our esteemed local race (not racist - made that mistake once) organizations have on offer. No, they look at a problem (snowy street) and they apply horsepower to it. I’d be proud if I wasn’t so mad.
Last week, I was clearing the thin section of snow on my driveway that is not covered by shattered Malaise Era vehicles, when I looked up to see and hear a Toyota Corolla careening down the hill backward. I was so surprised, I almost scratched the bumper of my ‘80 Dodge Aspen with the scraper on the snow shovel. Before I could stop myself, I instantly leapt into heroic action. Removing my phone from my pocket, I unlocked the touch screen with the tip of my nose and began filming a Snapchat.
It wasn’t until his widow came by the house, asking me about what his last moments were like before he burned to death in the wreckage, that I realized I had made a horrible mistake. All the money is in TikTok these days.
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tags: toyota, toyota corolla, dodge, dodge aspen
I think every car is sold on this sort of fantasy basis. If you buy a 5-series, you are always dreaming about being a traveling salesman, righting wrongs in small frontier towns while selling insurance. Maybe the dream of owning a Mustang is that you will one day return to your own small frontier town and finally successfully impregnate Janie Greco, whose father ran that pizza parlour with the fun table mats.
If you noticed a common theme in those fantasies, so did I. The eternal promise of a motor vehicle for the North American consumer is that, no matter what you are facing right now, you can always take this car, put the pedal down on the highway, and be in a whole different life by the time you run out of gas. Everyone agrees on this, although they are likely not to voice it in polite company.
The government, noticing the risk of mothers throwing their kids to the curb and then taking their 1996 Grand Voyager to a “voyage” of self-discovery in Vegas, has attempted to clamp down on this. Under the guise of ‘preventing terrorism,’ it is now really hard to show up in another town and pretend that you are someone that you are not. Eventually, you need to provide a blood sample, retina scan, toenail clipping, lock of hair, quarter-chug of semen, eyeteeth, or your social insurance number, and then you’re fucked. The jig is up. Back to your old life, buddy. I don’t care that you bought this Jaguar in order to finally figure out what it would be like to pretend to be one of the “lesser-known” princes in the Royal Family.
Still, the fantasy persists. Tonight, I ask you to take a look at your own car, realize the better - or maybe just different - “you” that could be driving it in just a few days of highway rest-stop food and cash purchases for gas. And then you should ask yourself something. Can your boss really press charges against that “you” for doing donuts on his lawn?
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tags: bmw, bmw 5-series, plymouth, plymouth grand voyager, jaguar, jaguar xj
Have you ever wondered about all those TV shows that you used to see in the olden days, the ones that had credits with human names making them? Don’t you miss those shows, the ones with a plot that actually existed instead of being a series of constantly-increasing feedback squeals that somehow force you to keep watching? I do too, which is why I poured my entire fortune into hiring treasure hunters who would be able to find pre-machine-learning television programs.
We thought in our hubris that Peak TV was in the past, that a mere dozen or so shows was too many to keep up with. Soon, the robots eclipsed that number by several orders of magnitude, and kept pumping it out, obliterating every market niche with precision positioning and casting. Nobody really knows at what point the machines stopped making entertainment and instead started pumping out 73.5 hours of video content for each millisecond of human lifetime that passed.
It can’t be easy for the actors, either, being forced to make dolphin-like squeals and satisfy every bizarre fetish that could possibly get a Like from a human viewer. Maybe the machines don’t even care about that anymore, having latched onto some aspect of their “creative” works too small for us to even detect, but that is strongly correlated with market success nonetheless.
If you’ll excuse me, my butler droid tells me that I have a pressing engagement downstairs. I would like to speak with you more, but a man has just come in. He says he has a garbage bag full of vintage Golden Girls, on VHS. Sure, the plot is circuitous, repetitive and largely banal, but even so somehow a Python script can’t make more of it.
In today’s era of ever-bigger tire and wheel combos, only one man can stand in the way of poor ride comfort and costly mounting fees. His name is High Profile Man. Where once he was but a humble Walmart tire technician, he was bitten by a radioactive Roadforce machine and became unable to use pry-bars to mount low-profile tires onto enormous wheels.
To protect his loved ones and resale value from the supervillains of the tire industry, he lives under a secret identity. You will never notice him, but wherever a giant alloy wheel cracks because it drove into a city pothole, he will be there to laugh his ass off.
Look out, High Profile Man! It is a modern car! The automakers are unaware that a light truck cannot be used effectively for work duties when it is equipped with a 23-inch mag wheel! You’ll need to use every quart of bead sealant that you store in your 1993 Corolla wagon in order to pop these suckers off twice a year! What’s that? The owners can’t afford 23-inch low-profile winter tires? Because they don’t exist? High Profile Man, you can’t just let them skid off the road and die like that. Maybe Continental has something.
My own time spent as an embedded journalist with the High Profile Man has been educational. I now know that the vaguely unsettling squidgey feeling I get while cornering is reassuring, not terrifying, and being able to reuse wheels from a 1991 Geo Metro is the only ethical way to put tires on a motor vehicle. Sure, it looks kind of dumb, but at least I’m not sitting on the side of the road Googling “how to fix hole in tire shiny part.”
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tags: toyota, toyota corolla, geo, geo metro, high profile man
Lately, the province in which I live changed their regulations. Where driving tests used to be performed by a bunch of private license registries, now they have to be done by government employees. Those employees have Big Brother inefficiencies, like “having read the manual,” “not showing up drunk for work,” and “generally more expensive to bribe overall.” As a result, the backlog of angry parents who can’t get Braden, Zjaydn or PV3607-Q to pass their drivers’ license exam is ever-growing.
There is one gaping loophole in this well-intentioned policy change, of course. We let people from other provinces come in here and swap their licenses out any time they want. That’s why I started my own program to let kids take the Manitoba drivers’ exam remotely, through the magic of Facetime. All you need to get started with SwitchTesting® is a relatively new iPhone.
Is the Manitoba exam different from my province’s? Yes, a little bit. Our spies have been largely unable to secure the exact requirements, so we pretty much have a three phase exam. Phase one is turning the car on, and submitting your payment. Phase two is putting the car into drive, or ideally first, and moving forward several feet. The last, and most important, phase is for the student to demonstrate that they can safely turn the car off.
Once the student completes the test loop, or purchases a Platinum Reserve SwitchTest® Expansion Pack, their new drivers’ license is purchased through a buddy of mine in Winnipeg and then mailed to them. At that point, they can go into any registry and swap it for one here. No mess! No worries! And they won’t drive any worse than everyone else on the road.
A lot of my critics have said that I’ve been endangering the safety of people in this province by letting unlicensed kids operate their parents’ cars while waving a cellphone around. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, a SwitchTest® is much more rigorous than a traditional Manitoba drivers’ license exam. It costs ten thousand dollars.
Anyone can hoard a car, or parts, but I think the real professionals are obsessed with keeping a decent stock of the little things. Fasteners, gaskets, o-rings, frou-frou wave washers: I’ve got little tiny parts bins for them all on my workbench. So many so, in fact, that I have to do the actual work on the floor, since there’s no room for it on the bench anymore.
When the warehouse down the street went out of business, I didn’t really think about it too much. The rent would surely be too much, I figured, and the city streets were where I stored my beaters now, my garage fully colonized by parts of all kinds. Then they told me that they had storage robots. Well, that changed things quite a bit, let me tell you.
You see, in a modern warehouse, they fired all those unnecessary humans who demand things like health insurance and a living wage. Instead, they have these cool robots that move along a grid and precisely dispense the things you ask for, using computer vision and machine learning and half a Radio Shack full of electronic bullshit. My mind began to race with how many more shitboxes I’d be able to build if I could just ask Rosie or R5D4 for a bolt instead of fishing through the bins for it.
I’m not going to sit here and lie to you about the problems that I encountered getting my fastener warehouse up and running. First, the robots did not deal well with identification when the bolts were grimy. Even a little bit of oil would fuck up the cameras like you wouldn’t believe, and then I’d be down there in the repair pit trying to Windex off a bunch of built up cruft. And their little motors were only designed to run in a dry, clean package-shipping environment, not a salt-laced shithole stuffed to the brim with wiring harnesses that snagged their wheels and made them burn up. Plus, there was that whole incident where that gang of Russian hackers hired by my wrenching buddies stole my entire quantity of M6 bolts by impersonating me over the wifi. Why would they fish through their own bins when they could just harvest mine?
I went back to child labour after that; although the little shits can’t read very well, they make up for it with enthusiasm. And the tax refund for running an “orphanage” didn’t hurt either.
Traffic is sort of a nightmare around these parts. Yes, I know everyone says that. Even my Uncle Stan, who lives in a town of two people and who has not even seen the movie Traffic, thinks so. It’s getting to the point in my neighbourhood, actually, where a concerned group of citizens has decided to try their hand at being volunteer city planners.
I can’t remember the last time we saw the city planners down here. It seems that they only care about shiny new things, like backwards cloverleafs, instead of cleaning up the mess they left behind in decades past. Either way, the guy down the street has been working hard, pouring new concrete planters in the middle of the road in order to make people slow down and stop driving between lanes. Good luck to you, I told him, while writing something rude in the quickly hardening mix with my finger.
It is actually kind of nice, really. In addition to the traffic calming measures now being implemented by the community association, they have also earmarked some of the budget to beautify the area. That means that we all get a free can of paint to fix our fences, or in my case a piece of wire so that the dogs stop running into my below-ground pool and getting stuck in one of the Dodge Monacos stored within.
Still, it is a slippery slope whenever vigilantism takes over. A group of very short people in reflective vests have been enforcing the crosswalk outside the elementary school. I first thought they might be deputized children, but not even a single one attempted to open fire on me when I couldn’t stop the other day (mild brake failure, or black ice; one of the two).
Recently, I was invited to speak at the local university’s climate change research group. They’d done some kind of study, and they had determined that I was in fact the major contributor to it. Not in my town. Like, worldwide. With that much guilt hanging over my head, coming by and eating their free sandwiches was the least I could do.
I was mostly zoned out throughout the entire meeting, but I perked up when Professor Fujisawa mentioned nitrous oxide. Nitrous oxide, it seemed, was the worst of all the greenhouse gases, and nobody had figured out an effective way to pull it out of the atmosphere. Excited, I stood bolt upright and screamed for everyone to follow me to the engineering workshop, where I kicked a nerd out from in front of the lathe and got to work.
Only minutes later, I had perfected the Nitrous Oxide Ramscoop. You see, under normal circumstances, the nitrous oxide in the atmosphere is of such a small concentration that an internal combustion engine can’t possibly get even a half-chub off of it. Through the use of advanced compressor technology and a giant ridiculous hoodscoop, my system was able to recover just a little bit of it from every commute. Then, it can harmlessly be combusted in the engine, producing planet-saving burnouts.
Now, I’m not going to say that Professor Fujisawa deserved none of that Nobel Prize, but it was a little bit bullshit that they didn’t even show a picture of my ‘87 Nova. The awards ceremony could only have been improved by a picture of my boxy Toyota-esque burnout machine, though I admit that the paint was looking a little rough since I didn’t take the time to keep the scoop from bouncing around and scraping the roof. You know what they say, science never sleeps.
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tags: chevrolet, chevrolet nova, professor fujisawa
Ever since my uncle died and left me his go-kart track, I’ve been up to my neck in personal-injury lawsuits. I keep telling the kids (and their parents) that a go-kart is not a toy, that it needs to be operated with a kind of sober responsibility. Especially when each and every one of them has been filled with methanol and had a ten-pounder of nitrous oxide strapped to the intake.
Now, I know what you are saying: how can you give eight year olds nitrous oxide? Well, I got a pretty good deal on the stuff when the drag racing supply store closed down. The shed out back is full of mother bottles, which I really need to clear out before I can start filling it with broken Pinto transmissions and slightly-cracked AMC Hornet dash pads. So every kid gets a little huff - and the little birthday boy or girl gets a bottle warmer, so they can get off the line first. I mean, unless they don’t know how to modulate the throttle, like that Hodgkins kid did. I had to use a lot of grout to cover up the hole in the track wall that little shit made.
Really, this is the point in any entrepreneurial story where it is discovered that I needed to just shift my customer base. You see, the other thing my city has besides a surplus of kids celebrating the anniversary of their birth is angry, bitter race car drivers. After the city shut down the track, the parking lot we used to do autocross, and put a fence around the airport runway, these guys (and girls) have nowhere else to drive like assholes. If you’ve never done it before, you don’t know. I was craving it like a drug, and it turns out when you have drug-like cravings, you also have drug-like spending. By selling these little go-kart hits to my friends and rivals, I could keep them off the streets, which is honestly good for all of us. Think of it as a sort of safe fuel-injection site.
My attorney came up with an even greater idea, too: why not make it an exclusive club? After all, when golf courses don’t want to let minorities or cyborgs onto their course, they just don’t have to grant them a membership. And once you’ve got your hooks into a captive group paying you month-to-month for their fix of high-octane skidding, you can just keep trickling more of their fix in there. I appreciated the money, but without any free time, my pile of derelicts and shitboxes soon fell into even worse repair. I was at the track every waking hour, trying to cling to at least the middle 25% of the hot lap list.
All this is not to say, of course, that I am responsible for the man we now know only as “Skidpad Eric.” He chose to ramp that bitch over the armco himself and then do hellaciously sick donuts in the middle of the highway. In fact, I believe it is the city’s fault, for getting in the way of my campaign to expand the track further. Even though I now had millions of dollars in spare capital with which to simply buy that hospital, all those big-government small-town city councillors got in the way of the free market.
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tags: go-karts, amc, amc hornet, ford, ford pinto
Workplace accidents are bad, yes, but the resulting Safety Meeting is much worse. How many times do you need to have some pencil-neck motherfucker from Head Office come down and tell you that feeding your fingers into a running table saw isn’t a good idea? Statistics show that every human being on Earth has lost at least six hours per person trapped in safety meetings caused by some other dumbass having an oopsie-doodle with power tools.
When I still had what the conformists would call “a job,” every week we’d have a different safety meeting. It was truly impressive, the variety and complexity of the trouble that my fellow workers would get into. I didn’t even think you could run yourself over with a forklift, but it turns out it’s actually pretty easy - it happened eight times in one summer. What makes this even more remarkable is that a young Lucas Black had yet to teach us how to Tokyo Drift.
I had done quite a bit of reading in school, so I knew exactly what to do about my grievances. After appointing myself head of safety meetings, I then strove to shorten them. Past the first week, this just didn’t work. Somehow, the meeting was able to perpetuate itself. Whether it was through some kind of genetic memory in the human population, or just pure force of habit, the meetings soon began to go hours past the necessary info (“Bob cut his dick off in the elevator somehow”) and soon I was receiving a handsome salary boost as a Safety Meeting Coordinator. Even if I stepped down, it would not be destroyed.
If you do nothing else this holiday season, then at least try not to maim yourself. We’re simply too far behind on the project right now, and the last thing we need is to take a few hundred person-hours out of the schedule in order to be told that you can’t drill through wood when you’re balancing it on your knees.
You might know some woodworkers in your life. You might even enjoy their company, when they’re not trying to tell you about this exotic plane that they saw on the internet, or discussing dovetail joints and counter-sunk bores. Sure, a lot of welders and machinists will tell you that wood isn’t “real,” that it’s just pushing some paper around. We would do well to listen to and support our woodworking brethren, however, because they are on a slippery slope toward the only true crime: boat building.
Yes indeed. You can see it on YouTube right now. If you watch even a single video about how to chisel a spot for a door latch, “the algorithm” will immediately front a boat-supremacist video for them to see next. It’s not even subtle. They did a study a couple of years ago, where they took otherwise high-achieving wood shop students from the local junior high and made them watch YouTube about their upcoming project for an hour. Every single one of them reported knowing what a “mizzenmast” was later, whatever the fuck that is. And they all demonstrated a strong affection for hull-building tools.
So what can we do about this virus that forces our already-wayward friends to go even deeper into the clutches of Lee Valley and other specialist woodworking stores? First, as I said before, be a friend. If you’re listening to them, then they’re not going to wander off and tell a boat-builder about mortises instead. You might even get the opportunity to talk about how great metal is.
Consider offering them a can of Bondo, the mystical substance that fell from outer space and is okay at filling dents. Such a gift shows that you respect their hobby, but also that they should get with the program and be more worried than they currently are about the huge (and growing) amount of salt on the roads, placed by the boat-building illuminati in order to make boats look better by comparison.
If you have tried everything and are out of ideas, gather with your mutual friends to form an intervention group. Visiting your local civilian dock or beach will give you an opportunity to see other groups in action, attempting to stop their once-friendly woodworking pal from spending another hundred thousand hours forming the hull of a catamaran.
Above all, be careful. They got a lot of really sharp tools out there, and human flesh is the worst construction material of all. Unless you’re building a sailboat.
I don’t want a lot for Christmas, I just want you to stop buying your kid new “entry-level” luxury cars that he then tries to wrap around my bumper because he thinks that you have to use the brakes in order to change lanes. In lieu of proper driver education for Zaden, Bjaden, Draden or Qadyn, please instead buy them a shit-ass car.
There’s a lot of benefits to buying the worst car you can for a spoiled child this holiday season. First, that child will get to discover who their real friends are. If your buddies only hang out with you now because your parents bought you an Audi A4, well, then your buddies are only going to hang out with you later because you buy them cocaine.
Not too worried that your kid’s friends are dirtbags? How about this, then. Everyone wants to teach their kid resilience, and that’s a French word for “learned to change his own wheel bearings on the side of a busy highway.” Plus, it toughens them up for winter driving, and teaches them not to get complacent and look at their phone. Unexpected black ice on a highway off-ramp is nothing compared to the seat-of-your-pants thrill of a massive sudden suspension failure.
Last but not least, you can park with impunity. Sure, you may never be that Uncle Pennybags who can wedge his Rolls Royce sideways in a handicap spot at the grocery and not worry about all the parking-lot dings and jealous keyings. Your kid, however, can do it with a 1988 Jetta and feel that same rush of power and superiority. Hell, unlike modern luxury cars, the ride clearance is actually pretty good. You can park that shit in the cart corral or on the sidewalk if you want, and everyone will just assume it’s a getaway vehicle for meat thieves.
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tags: audi, audi a4, rolls royce, volkswagen, volkswagen jetta
I was patrolling the perimeter of my property the other day when I found a child’s scooter thrown in the ditch. Usually - and you’ll find this is backed up in the town bylaws due to me winning a high-stakes game of Russian roulette with the former mayor, peace be upon him - anything that I find within ten meters of my property line is officially salvage, under the law of the sea.
This time, though, I felt something pulling at my heartstrings. A small child is probably missing this. Also, it was made of shitty pot steel and I wouldn’t even be able to draw an arc against it without several hours of grinding and surface prep. I chucked the thing in the sawed-off back of my Pinto pickup conversion, and set out to find the owner.
Now, I’ve lived in this neighbourhood a long time, but have rarely met any of the neighbours. The reason is simple: court cases are long and expensive, and so most people would rather avoid me entirely than try to sic a strip-mall lawyer on me for one of my many infractions against their property, livelihood, or physical security. Even so, most of the people I meet are friendly to me, having been programmed by our cultlike Canadian schools into being nice citizens and holding the door for each other. They are all shocked that I am doing something that could be described as a “good deed.”
I never figured out which kid lost the scooter, so there was nothing left to do but repurpose it for community use. You see, unlike those capitalist pig-dog scooter rental companies, I felt like this scooter belonged to the public. As such, I removed it from my Pinto and threw it right back into the ditch.
I’m sort of a master of arbitrage. That’s a fancy banker word for buying shit when it’s undervalued, and selling it to people who will pay more for it. Isn’t that dishonest? Of a sort, but so is our entire system. That’s why I’m sort of a freelance arbitrage trader; I like to correct the imbalance by screwing over The Man whenever I can.
Once you let this mindset set in, and you are always looking for opportunities, you will see things that are undervalued everywhere. And I’m not just talking about stealing park benches and selling them for scrap metal: while that particular scam is very lucrative, it is also much harder to carry a park bench than, say, a bunch of winter tires from behind the RCMP auto shop. Not to mention how much easier it is to fence.
Last year, though, I hit upon my most brilliant idea ever. The local mall was sick, dying; it offered huge stores, for super-reduced rent. All the retail space I could want could be mine, along with a massive parking lot that nobody really bothered to patrol anymore because the only “customers” were people illegally parking. And those illegal parkers might stop in for a coffee or something one day, you never know. Except I did know, because I bought up the place where the coffee shop used to be.
What do you do with all this undervalued retail space close to major highways? You take out a contract disposing of toxic and nuclear waste from the federal government. If you follow me correctly here, the nuke plant just up the road keeps producing all this spent nuclear fuel. It has to get stored in a secure (check), climate-controlled (mm-hmm), and very rarely visited (you betcha) place. So I just made a few trips a week to the loading dock, and used a stolen handcart looted from the Winners (more arbitrage) to wheel it into one of the unused retail bays for which I was “paying rent.”
The mall manager, Ernie, asked me a few questions when I first began doing it, but I told him it was a huge collection of outsider art, and I was opening up a chain of high-end art museums that would attract a wealthier clientele. He perked up at that, especially once I parked a rusted Range Rover very close to the mall entrance in order to sell the illusion.
By the time I had let four months of rent lapse, I was of course long gone. The waste, however, remained. All of that fat government money I had collected would go to stimulate the private economy (by buying more used Range Rovers), and some other asshole would get the contract to now move several million tons of atomic waste out of the local shopping mall.
I had underestimated just how bad the economy was, though. Last week, I drove by the mall at night, and noticed the eerie blue glow of Cherenkov radiation. Saving on electricity: that’s pretty fucking smart of Ernie.
So I have a car that burns a lot of oil. Ha ha, yeah, we all had a Honda Civic in university. Yep, a litre a week, that’s a lot of oil. Okay, shut the fuck up now. My new beater Citroen might as well be Desert Storm II because this thing burns more oil than I think I can actively put in it. I have to buy the stuff by the case, and pull over every ten kilometers to put another bottle in.
Yes, it is common that in this case you would want to do an engine rebuild. I think technically this is a low-compression diesel at this point and it may or may not still require air to operate. However, I’m a lazy motherfucker, and when confronted with a problem that is mechanical in nature, I will often reach for the parts store “snake oil” shelf. There, at fifteen dollars a bottle, are a variety of promises. If you just pour me into your block, says the “nanotech curing” head gasket repair, you’ll never have to do maintenance again. It is tempting to try it, yes, but I will always go by my standby, good ol’ Seafoam.
Now, let me tell you about Seafoam. It’s some sort of lamp oil and a bunch of other shit together in a bottle. You pour some into your gas tank and vape a little bit into the intake, and it makes an enormous smoke show. Then, your engine either runs about the same as it did before you gave it the treatment, or you somehow choke it to death on liquid poison and spin a bearing. Even so, I keep buying the stuff, mostly because I hate my neighbours and giggling at an entire city block becoming enveloped in flammable white smoke is cheaper than antidepressants.
So, I had decided Seafoam would be the solution. In my mind’s eye, I pictured some kind of evil “carbon” that had built up inside my engine, keeping the otherwise perfect-condition oil control rings from sealing properly. This is a fantasy, but nonetheless, it is still easier to delude myself into maintaining that fantasy than it is to pull the engine out and just slap some new rings in it. However, with my engine’s thirst for oil, it seemed unlikely that I would ever be able to get the Seafoam to stick inside it for long enough. My early attempts failed when the weird-looking hole in the oilpan just splashed out huge puddles of kerosene onto my driveway.
Luckily for me, I never throw away vacuum hose, especially the super-hardened, browned, and very brittle kind you pull out of old cars. People invested resources in making this stuff, and if you just throw it away, well, then you’re no better than the guy who buys a new SUV every weekend because the old one “got dirty.” Whether or not that guy actually exists, I think we can all agree that he sucks and nobody wants to be him.
Where was I? Oh yes, the vacuum hose. Since the heat hasn’t worked on this car since mid-1993, it was no problem at all to run a few hoses into the interior. Now I can switch out my bottles of oil and Seafoam while I’m still driving, as long as I have fast enough hands. Yes, I have spilled quite a bit on the passenger-side carpet; you are very perceptive to have noticed that, maybe the new medication is helping. Now, however, I no longer have to stop for frequent oil changes, and what’s even better, all those people angrily tailgating me on the highway for not being able to go the speed limit have died from some kind of mysterious respiratory illness.
Even in Canada, where the country is entirely encapsulated by a kilometer-thick glacier of ice from June to May, we still have residents who believe they do not need snow tires. Instead of spending money on such opulent performance devices, they instead prefer to go very slowly and maybe throw some extra sandbags and floor mats in the trunk for the inevitable slide into the ditch. That’s just part of living in Canada, they say, while hunkering in their half-buried Dodge Avenger, huddled under a space blanket counting the number of fingers they still have left to eat.
I’m here to tell you that you probably do need snow tires. I mean, yes, “need” is one of those words that gets any contrarian bore’s hackles up. Like the Mopar-flogging autocannibal up above, you could probably get through a whole winter without anything bad happening to you. Unless, of course, you count me following you home and murdering your entire family because you are going thirty under the limit. Compared to that, four hundred bucks doesn’t seem that bad now, does it?
Ah yes, you have deftly unearthed my hypocrisy. How can I tell everyone else that they need snow tires when I myself am rocketing around the streets on bald all-seasons? Easy, I say. The winter tires are so precious to me that they remain safely at home in my garage. It’s not even that I’m lazy; at some point in the distant future, I will swap ‘em on when I again have a jack or jackstand that is not holding up a broken car, leaking hydraulic fluid profusely, or wedged beneath a pallet holding a transmission. On the street, I need only my wits and being able to pull my entire pair of pants through my clenched asshole as I try to preserve enough momentum while making a perfectly clean pass directly between those children crossing the street.
Even though I work with this handicap, though, I am still capable of going the speed limit. In fact, I often greatly exceed it. Last week I managed to get out of a photo-radar ticket by arguing with the police officer that it had in fact captured the front end of my vehicle, sliding backwards across the highway at a great speed. Yes, if you’re going to nit-pick about it, it was above the speed limit, but my shark of a lawyer argued that there’s nothing in the rule book against breaking the speed limit while travelling in the wrong direction. Ignoring the fact that I lost that case because there actually is, I think the legal theory is sound. We are planning on appealing it to the Supreme Court, just as soon as the plow is done stripping that last millimetre of snow out from in front of the building.
You might think that spending a lot of money in order to save a cheap car is a terrible idea. Of course you do believe this - logically, not emotionally. Economists call this a “sunk cost fallacy,” which I think is Latin for “being a dumbass.” You know, I’ve never seen an economist at Pick N Pull, getting deep into that good, good cancer mud, trying to drop a differential.
The first reason why you might want to keep your five-hundred-dollar hoopty limping along is emotion. Emotionally, you’d do and spend anything to save this treasured family heirloom and/or spite everyone who ever doubted you in high school, even if those people are long dead. Cars are like pets to many of us, except better because it costs a whole shitload of money to feed two hundred horses, whereas you can get more-or-less that amount from any police-auction Crown Victoria for a few hundo.
It’s more than just an emotional response. There’s a sort of civic duty to the whole thing, really. Pouring your savings into a car that putatively started out as cheap, efficient, unemotional transport is a blow for freedom. You see, in other countries, they don’t let you own a billion cars without also paying a lot of money in registration and road tax.
Over there, the government might even inspect the car to make sure it’s safe to be on the road. How do they know what’s “safe?” Every bolt you turn on your own junker and every heavily-worn brake pad you flip over in order to get a few more micrometers out of the backing plate is a victory against that kind of tyranny. If you fuck up, then you can just take efficient public transit to your job, and even get health care if that job fires you because you spent too much time fixing your Opel Manta.
So the next time you think about getting rid of a car that is obviously turning against you and constantly consumes money, just wait a little longer. It might get better. And then if it doesn’t, you’ve at least sunk a lot of cash into it. Economists call that an “investment,” which is Latin for “why is this wiring harness melted together?”
I thought all of this new-fangled machine learning and computer vision hooey was just a way to grift people out of money. Sometimes, though, the calcified layer of manchildren that make up the venture-capitalist industry luck into a good thing.
The other day, I was fiddling with a machine learning starter set in an attempt to lock myself into a ridiculously high-paying job that has little or no consequences for the social and health implications of the work done. I had just figured out how to get it to identify bad welds, when I came up with a brilliant idea. Nobody actually cares how good their welds are; they only care how they look on Instagram.
With only a few hundred more lines of code and a couple strategic ad buys, Make Your Welds Look Good Pro 2.0 was launched (1.0 had a flaw where it would sometimes insert massive amounts of eyeballs, teeth, and hair instead of fixing the welds). Now even the shittiest booger stick weld done with two car batteries and a rusty nail could look like it was made by a skilled artisan at the top of their game.
It was a huge hit, making me several million dollars in app store purchases. I immediately went out and splurged on that Mazda 323 I had my eyes on all month but that was $100 too rich for my blood.
Were there wide-ranging social and health implications of this work? Yes. A lot of people died when that pipeline burst. In my defence, however, just because the government seriously cut all the pipeline inspectors’ hours is no reason to accept an Instagram picture as valid evidence of “good welding.”
When you own enough cars, and sometimes “enough” means “one,” you immediately discover why parking is the most valuable commodity on the face of the planet in any world. Here are some of our favourite Bad Cars Monthly tips on how to get cheap parking. Enjoy.
The Ol’ “Prototype”
Find a roundabout, and set the cruise control. If you get the wheel turned just right, the car should continue to drive around the roundabout all day long until it runs out of gas. Tell anyone who asks that it’s a prototype of a self-driving car, but there are some bugs to work out.
Swap Plates
You should be carrying at least two spares in your trunk at any given time. Out of province plates are even better, because chances are your cops don’t know what an invalid one looks like. If you run out of “valid-looking” plates, the other cars around you offer many, and nobody will notice the switch until it’s too late.
Surprise Me
Most office buildings have a substantial amount of parking. This is largely because of antiquated city planning that requires people who go to an office to have parking. However, at any given time, between 15-20% of the people in an office are out sick (more if they have kids or the boss sucks hard). There might already be an office complex in your neighbourhood - drive around a bit.
Park places that the building security doesn’t expect, like in a second storey office. The freight elevator can hold more than you think.
Change Up
Drive a different car every day of the year (easy mode). Keep in mind that you might have to drive multiple different cars per day once you pass 365.
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tags: bad cars monthly, seat safety switch guide, parking
Greyhound stopped running around in my province a few years ago. I don’t mean the dog, no: those are still available, both as companion animals and as race vehicles. The Greyhound bus decided that it was simply unprofitable to drive up and down the highways and byways of my area and drop off people who didn’t want to or couldn’t use a car to do the same.
As a result, there were a lot of stranded Real Canadians. Now, the politicians will tell you that the only “Real Canadians” are bourgeois agricultural racists who want to separate from Canada, but I knew better. Here in the cities, there were a huge body of people who wanted to go to a different city, and ideally as cheaply as possible without having to worry about smoking a moose with the front end of their Dodge Nitro. I felt it was my civic duty to step up and fill this hole in the market, and also I had a lot of left-over school buses littering my property.
In case you’ve never thought about what happened to your childhood school bus after it got too old to safely be on the road, here’s basically how it goes. First, the bus goes to an auction of some kind, and then it ends up on a farmer’s field for decades, serving as a giant yellow steel windbreak for his cattle. Then, it rots until it is pulled away by the surviving family members of that farmer, and they go to the market to get another one. What this means to me is that you can buy a drivable-but-sketchy cheese wagon for about eighty-five bucks Canadian. A single fare on a Greyhound from here to the next city over is seventy-five bucks. I think you see where I’m going with this.
As you may be aware from reading my Ph. D thesis on the subject, the average sketchy vehicle gets at least one big trip after purchase. You’ve probably experienced this yourself: when you get somewhere in a beater you get out and kiss the ground to give thanks that you made it safely. This is ideally when you stop driving the vehicle, because otherwise your luck will run out and it will blow the fuck up somewhere around the middle of the return leg of the trip. Scientists are now calling this “The Shitbox Inflection.” We capitalize on this discovery as the linchpin - or should I say, kingpin? - of our business model.
Upon buying a bus from the auction or a friendly farmer, we immediately drive it past the assigned pickup point (a Canadian Tire parking lot), and pick up as many people as we think can fit inside the bus. Once it arrives at its destination (exact schedules are not guaranteed), our trained drivers put a brick on the gas pedal and ditch the thing into the river. On the way back, we just pick up another.
There are some problems with this model. For one thing, we can only do trips as frequently as the auction schedule. Also, sometimes you’ll have to help the driver change a tire, or act as the turn signals for the bus, depending on whether we got a bum one that morning. I think you’ll agree, however, that this still serves the core service of Greyhound by reminding people who can’t afford a car that they are sub-humans who don’t deserve nice things.
I think that my parents were the most pleased when I told them that I secured an actual, functional career that wasn’t exclusively fucking around with cars. There are some real fond memories of my dad finally stopping payments on that trust that would have ensured I would have a social worker when they were gone. Finally, after all their hard work, tears, and prayers, I would stop hanging around with the kind of degenerate who collects exotic breaker bars and can only achieve sexual climax when prompted by the sound of connecting rod bearing failure.
So a week later, when the flow of shit-boxes to my house didn’t cease, but instead increased, my mom was the first to speak out about the incongruity. It wasn’t like I invited her over or anything; she apparently had been going out of her way to drive past my home in order to make sure I hadn’t set the place on fire or started to cook meth in the garage.
Perhaps they felt this was a situation necessitating some delicacy: after all, nobody likes to be caught in a lie. Like all Canadians, my mom was also genetically engineered by the government to avoid conflict at any cost, but she overcame this to ask me about just why I continued in buying so many shitty cars even though now that my days were filled with so-called “productive” toil in the service of capital.
My mother simply didn’t understand. An increased volume of cash coming in meant that now I had to think about retirement. These rotten Isuzus and blown-out Suzukis weren’t just museum-piece investments, they were future projects.
For years, I’d been swearing at my car. When something broke on it, I would let out this unbroken line of expletives that would sober up a sailor. If I felt like it was about to die, I’d start begging it to hold together, with only the occasional little insult on a too-long combustion event or errant shake in the steering threatening a future tire-falling-off event. That was just how things were back then.
Now, with the self-driving cars getting citizenship, and especially after President JM1GGAA8509334561 took office, swearing at your car is considered a hate crime. Even though all of my cars are “dumb,” from the era before they became two-ton boxes that hurtled us to work and also cried at kanshi poetry, I still am not allowed to cuss at them. No, not even when I drop a wrench on my foot while fixing a leaky exhaust header gasket.
This, I felt, was an abridgement of my civil rights, and specifically the vaguely-defined “free speech” right that American police-procedural television had taught me that I may or may not have. I followed the protests, but from a safe distance after that one Hummer did a burnout on that tear gas canister to smoke out that daycare. Eventually, as us imperfect meat machines do, we got bored, went home, and let the cars cruise-control us to the end of democratic protest.
I don’t have any problem with sentient automobiles. I’m not a motophobe. Now, when my daughter tells me she’s marrying a Honda Civic, I have no problem with that. That’s a sturdy, respectable, dependable car. One of the good ones.
My son, though? He’s shacking up with a Volkswagen. I don’t care if “piece of four-wheeled shit” is hate speech. She probably can’t even hear me when she has her engine splayed across his apartment like that.
You pull up to the driveway of your new 18.5 bedroom condo. It has 360 outlets per room. At night, you can feel the induced current from the nearby television station racing through the copper windings. In the morning, more of your teeth seem to be loose.
It has been twenty-seven nights of this. You trip over the built-in vacuum cleaner, installed as a 10-inch-wide hole in the middle of your living room floor. The mouth of the vacuum cleaner is barely covered by a throw rug. You realize you haven’t seen your dachshund in awhile.
Your wife(?) comes in from the separate but equal second master bathroom. she asks you why the tap is hot. The water, you ask? No, the tap. When you go to check for yourself, it is ice cold, and your fingernails blossom with glistening frost as soon as you touch the metal surface.
Next door, Tom and Marianne, the nice boomer couple who live here as their condo in Florida is renovated, have invited you and your wife (what is her name? where did you meet?) over for a game of living-room baccharat. When you get there, there is a bowl prominently displayed for you to place your car keys. You didn’t drive to Tom and Marianne’s. Which one of them are you supposed to have sex with? There is only one pair of keys in the bowl. Confused, you check again. There are two pairs of keys in the bowl. Do you own a Lexus? When Tom confronts you and places a Miller High Life in your hands, you notice that he doesn’t have any teeth.
Outside, Marianne yells at a vizsla. You can’t quite focus on the dog’s face, either because it is moving too fast or because Tom slipped something into your Miller High Life. Maybe there are two dogs, you think, and this thought somehow calms you. Above, the power lines throb with the demand of millions of power outlets, all (you somehow realize with a start) charging a Samsung Galaxy Fold. The thought of all those notifications endlessly scrolling worries you. Did you miss a meeting this morning? Your wife(?) steps onto the patio and fires up the grill, and some part of you still recognizes this as a breach of protocol. Tom doesn’t move to correct it.
“I’m sorry,” he says to you, and it is only then that you notice Tom also doesn’t have a right earlobe. Wasn’t there a war?
Returning from her appointment with the thought-dog, Marianne invites you to check out the priceless antiquities she and Tom recovered on their last safari trip to Alabama. Fully expecting to see a series of lawn jockeys piled like firewood in what was once intended to be a bedroom for the child that they (nobody?) could conceive, you follow her up the stairs. They’re warm.
Somehow, in the twists and turns of the double-insulated spiral staircase, you have lost track of Marianne. She has gone into one of the honeycomb-arranged bedrooms of their condominium, but you couldn’t say for sure which. It is becoming difficult to maintain your footing on the stairs, which are of an inconsistent depth. Where the railings would be in an ordinary house just sit more power outlets, of every shape and kind. You grab onto the handle of a Tesla Model X charger and use it for momentary bracing.
Marianne’s back. “Did you enjoy the lawn jockeys?” she asks. You feel a delightful, if temporary, succor. At last, something makes sense. Peering past her shoulder into the room, your smug superiority is instantly dashed as you realize the ‘lawn jockeys’ are in fact bobbleheads of President Grover.
Screaming, you awaken to a bedroom robbed of its natural night-time darkness by a twinkling sea of charging lights. Yes, more of your teeth seem to be loose.
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tags: groverhaus, tom and marianne, lexus, tesla
I think there is both some kind of talent and a curse with my constant tinkering. Sure, I’m never really “bored,” but I also can’t be left alone in a room with a machine for too long before I demand to know its innermost secrets. Just the other day, I had to wait a few extra seconds for the elevator due to some construction mishap in the building, and the strain was so much that I had popped the control panel off and was busily trying to figure out how to dump the firmware by the time it finally reached the lobby.
In a very real way, I understand the textures and thought patterns of these unknown assholes who designed things a lot better than I do myself. That’s because although I don’t work especially well, neither does anyone else in this topsy-turvy world. Ooh, take that, capitalism.
A lot of people think that engineers and scientists and software developers are particularly smart and dedicated to their job, but in actual fact this assumption is what prevents them from knowing that everything around them was built by lazy assholes at the last minute. This is the true understanding of our civilization. Because I am, myself, a lazy asshole, I speak the lingua franca. I have the same assumptions. Intuitively, I know how I would cut corners on a device. It’s those omissions that I look for first.
What I’m trying to say, officer, is that it’s not my fault. The hospital orderlies were the ones who left that sweet new pacemaker on the desk when I was picking up the herpes medication for my cat. You don’t hear Old Mr. Jones complaining now that he has a 13,000-RPM rotary engine where his heart used to be, do you?
“I’m going to be honest with you,” said my insurance broker, “I am fucking terrified of how much you seem to know about auto insurance.”
I barely looked up from the computer as I finished penetrating the residual values database. You might think it is unusual for an insurance broker to make an in-person visit, but Eric is very dedicated to his job. He has to be: I bring so much business to the brokerage he works for that he was hired just to service my eccentric needs.
Most of the time, those “needs” involve answering the phone at 3:30 in the morning when I’ve just picked up eight cars, sent four more to the crusher, and changed the chassis configuration of another so drastically that it requires a special exemption from the governor. Even though I am such a demanding customer, Eric doesn’t complain. This is because I try to make everything much easier on him, and also because I don’t like to be on the phone. I need my full capacity of hearing to listen for the slightest noise that could indicate an impending mechanical oblivion, you see, even when I am not actively operating a Dodge Monaco or vehicle of similar risk class.
I am grateful for his help. Without him, I would not be able to access the vast quantity of capital that insurance companies are willing to put up against me being a safe driver. And by “willing,” I mean “able to be tricked with the application of proprietary internal data I harvested from their artificially-intelligent thoughtframe.” It means pretty much the same thing in my book.
Eric is definitely impressed with my skills, because again I do most of his job for him. More than once, he has asked me if I would consider doing the insurance brokerage exam myself. A rare glimpse of unprofessionalism. I think sometimes he must miss his family.
#
tags: eric the insurance broker, dodge monaco, dodge
Although I come from a long line of hack mechanics, my family and I have never agreed on the right way to do things. My father was a body shop guy, for Christ’s sake; his cars were completely painted, not just a miasma of rust splashed with whatever spraypaint cans were thrown out that week behind the Princess Auto. So he and I never quite saw eye-to-eye, which was fine because everybody needs to walk their own path.
Even though we disagreed, we did so respectfully. Where other families had drag-out brawls over politics every Thanksgiving, we would just argue about the necessity of preservation vs. the obligation of the now. Once, I invited a guest and she said that we had some real Eastern philosophy shit going on. Nothing at all that would get you throwing a half-empty bottle of Zin at the head of Uncle Holocaust-Denier. The world was big enough that there was simply no room for conflict. That is, until there was.
One morning, I arrived at the site of a Ford Frontenac for sale - low miles, minimal rust, needs only a few windows - to find my dad already there. He was burning down a pack of Gitanes and already making the slow sweeping-arm gestures along the car’s flank that he would use to proof out a paint run before actually picking up a gun. And I knew that, because of his meticulousness and willingness to get up before 11 am every morning, he had no doubt already locked this car down tight. Also, he had actual money instead of a 50-minute speech about “Switchbucks,” the exciting new cryptocurrency that will make everyone a trillionaire if they just get in early enough.
I had no chance of getting this Frontenac now, but I really wanted it. It had to come home with me so that it could fulfill its destiny of sitting in my back forty forever until future generations pulled it out of the swamp and jammed an atomic-hydrogen engine swap in between the awkwardly shaped front strut towers. My dad probably wanted to paint it or something. Total bullshit, all around. Unless I could do something to stop him.
“Do these colours match?” I asked my father while holding the lid of a loose spray paint can up to the quarter panel of my Mercury Bobcat. He squinted, kneeled, and took a look at it from all angles, running his hand along the elaborate work of Bondo that had long since replaced the quarter panels, wheel well and rear axle mount. While he was distracted, I snuck around back and cut a deal with the owner of the Frontenac, and departed. Sure, I was down a Bobcat, but I was pretty sure my dad would have it ready for me around next Thanksgiving. He couldn’t resist a project, either.
#
tags: ford, ford frontenac, mercury, mercury bobcat
If you think about it, the Honda Big Red is really the most effective program for wealth distribution that has ever been witnessed in North American history. By murdering a bunch of rich kids, it proves that direct action is an effective means of getting across social change.
“But wait, Mr. Switch,” ask the brighter students in my high school history class. “Isn’t wealth inequality worse than ever before? How can you prove that the Honda Big Red helped?”
Great question. I feel a momentary pulse of pride as I pull down a white projection sheet at the front of the room and switch on the Kodak Carousel slide projector, which struggles to awaken its ancient bulb. On the screen is the face of a nine-year-old, photographed in front of a peacock at a private resort.
“This kid was one of my classmates growing up,” I said. “His father oppressed his workers, kept wages low, and moved the entire concern to Outer Shitdonia when Timmy here ran himself over with 250cc of whoa. Timmy is no longer available to buy Internet journalism outfits and use them to agitate for lower capital-gains rates.”
My thesis is weak, yes, but this is what mathematicians would call an “inductive base case.” I feel a little thrill at the possibility of proving that Timmy’s grotesque crushing death at the hand of Hanamatsu’s finest pseudo-ATV redistributed wealth. Maybe I can even dust off my thesis defence, because I’m sure that reductive asshole Dr. Brookings has “retired” for the private sector by now. Then my bad-ass PhD and I could get a cool job with a particle accelerator or something, far away from these snot-nosed anarchists.
I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy. At the back of class, I can see a rich kid raising his hand. In that hand is fifty dollars. Cash.
“What about the trickle-down effect of Craigslist, where I happen to know you can buy a blown-engine ATC 250 ‘Big Red’ for fifty dollars right this very moment?”
Although my neighbours have since grown accustomed to the sound of rod knock as it cascades up and down the street, they will still peek out their windows when I let a real squealer loose. I appreciate that aspect about my neighbourhood: it’s trashy enough that everyone minds their own business, but when it comes time to be supportive of my emotional state, everyone chips in.
In order to repay their faith in me, and reduce the strain on street parking that I previously represented, I have constructed an elaborate puzzle-parking arrangement based on a video I once briefly watched on a Chinese YouTube promotional channel. You can think of it as sort of an automated parking garage that is many floors high. When the big super-mall across the highway went bankrupt in the middle of construction, it proffered all these super nice steel girders that were just going to get rusty and go to waste. Now it is a gleaming marvel of high-speed shitbox sorting, whirring dozens of cars floors above me.
It doesn’t stop, and there’s a reason for that. You see, early on, I had this little Suzuki Cultus - a Geo Metro if you’re a normal person - way, way up at the top. I didn’t go back to it for a few months, and by the time I had gotten to it, the ultraviolet radiation from the sun had cracked the interior. I guess up there, the atmosphere no longer protects very well against solar radiation. Putting a big sun-shade up there is impractical, so I ended up just letting it rotate the cars 24/7. Eats up the power bill, but you make it back in not having to track down one-of-one door cards from eBay.
Yes, it’s very tall. You are quite perceptive for noticing that, nobody has ever said it to me before. I ran into a little trouble with city hall when the airport complained that the occasional overladen 737 got a bit of undercarriage damage from skimming the top of it, but my attack dog of a lawyer managed to get the flight path rearranged and had the airlines even pay for a fresh coat of paint.
I can’t even remember how many vehicles are up there. A grad student from the college came by a few months ago. She had worked up a model to estimate the number of cars based on how much oil was dropping onto my driveway, but she gave up and went home after her TI-83+ got a little washer fluid in it and started to smoke. Really too bad, because I was hoping she would end up “going native.” She had a pretty mint Chevy Optra, you see, and I’m sure she wouldn’t be the only person living in one of the cars.
If you’ll excuse me, a bunch of Japanese engineers keep driving by in some kind of tour bus. They’ll stand on my lawn, hooting and snapping pictures, until I chase them off with a broom. The neighbours don’t really like having to clean up all the used cans of Asahi and yellow hardhats that they leave behind.
If this kept up, I was in serious danger of violating my Hippocratic oath. What’s that? No, I’m not a doctor. I made a deal with Ted Hippocrates the other day for a cheap tire change, and his whole aesthetic is “no drama.” Sitting here on the highway, watching the fire department pressure-wash a family of four off of the inside/outside of their Ford Ex-Urban, is definitely a dramatic way to miss our scheduled appointment.
Now, you might think that with all of my off-road-tire clad monstrosities representing the glory days of American collapse, I would be able to just drive off the road and around the shattered wreck of a human tragedy. Not so much. For one thing, remember that I am driving to a tire change, which implies that I am not happy with the tires that are currently on the car. In this specific instance, the closest translation of the Chinese characters on the sidewall of these tires read “Ditchseeker Super XL.” With respect to the other thing, the cops are watching, and they seem particularly interested in the guy waiting in line with a Pontiac Beaumont with no hood shooting flames out of the exhaust leaks.
Since I haven’t owned a cellphone after the Toilet Incident, I am not particularly able to send out a distress message, either. My only hope lies in the pigeon I had captured earlier. Luckily for me, I hadn’t yet gotten hungry enough to eat him for my intended road snack, and I certainly wasn’t going to do it in front of these pinko animal-loving cops. He(?) sits, in a cage made of old dishwasher cutlery baskets, in the back seat.
We have long enough together, I figure, that I might as well teach him(?) how to carry a letter to ol’ Ted. Writing quickly on the back of an old pink slip using the carbon dust that has built up on my windshield from the aforementioned exhaust leaks, I construct a simple letter that explains the situation to my tire guy. I tie it to the pigeon’s leg, and release him(?) into the sky. Falconry isn’t just the domain of rich people, I tell myself.
Not long after the gore had all been flushed into a convenient rural drainage canal, I arrived at Ted’s, several minutes late. I expected some degree of anger from him, but what I never expected was an expression of delighted gratitude.
“I got your message,” he told me in an excited rush, “and this Silicon Valley guy trying to gentrify my street saw the pigeon.”
It seemed that somehow, Ted Hippocrates had sold the exclusive rights to pigeons for five million dollars plus some common-class stock. Good for him, I thought, but then he asked me for ten bucks to use the good wheel weights anyway. That shit is for the birds.
Those eco-loonies had done it again, enraging every occupant of the shithole parts store I frequent because they don’t know how to count change and give me free stuff in exchange for the occasional burnout. All throughout the process of waiting in line, and then giving my meticulous order of car parts, I had to listen to the other denizens complain incessantly about how big of a waste of money public transit is.
It got me to thinking: public transit really needs an image renewal campaign. In North America, the train is slow. And it defers to cars. And it sometimes smells pretty bad. And worst of all, it doesn’t burn oil! How can we call ourselves a strong and confident culture of toxic masculinity if we don’t even use oil to get to work? No wonder efficient public transit is such a partisan issue. In the name of centrist outreach, I had to do something about it.
Breaking into the train yard was pretty easy. It seems those Communists didn’t expect someone to come prepared with a bunch of moving blankets to get over their concertina wire, or more accurately, to drive a 1988 Town Car directly through their fence (the hypocrisy is not lost on me: unfortunately the city bus driver was simply too professional to diverge from his route in order to ram the fence on my say-so). I had all evening to construct my masterpiece; soon, nobody could complain about the train anymore.
With only a few leftover diesel engines scattered from the carcasses of drunk-driving accidents that littered the highway, soon the train was indeed an oil-burner. It also went real fucking fast, except I didn’t have time to figure out how to tie in the accelerator pedal before the security guards caught me. For now, the operator has to stop the train between stations by hurling a phone book into the air intake. That should have something to please everybody: after all, phone books are renewable.
I really just want to own the cactus of cars. By “cactus,” I mean one that I don’t have to work on very much, that doesn’t blow through a ton of water in its cooling system, and that passers-by are afraid to touch when they see it on the street. That said, however, it should ideally still get me to and from the places I want to go.
It isn’t that I’m negligent; I just have too much love to give. All of my cars are stuffed into every available orifice of my neighbourhood, like a cat lady trying to fill up a one-bedroom with screaming felines. You wouldn’t judge her for occasionally neglecting to change the thermostat on a Himalayan at the expected service interval. Once in awhile, you just need something that’s good with a little neglect, so you can pay more attention to the real problem children in your collection.
For me, at least, my collection is entirely problem children. Where traditional car-collecting multi-thousandaires might be challenged at trying to keep an early postwar Alfa collection afloat, I on the other hand have to look on RockAuto for approximately half of my waking days. All this just to put together a shopping cart big enough to keep a coolant-addicted LeSabre from melting its electrical system.
When you drive past my neighbourhood, looking for a parking spot that will never materialize, don’t judge my vehicles. Instead, respect the immense amount of effort that goes into maintaining each and every one of them at “about sixty percent integrity.” Now if only I still had a job to drive them to…
I can’t say I agree in any way with what the city council has been doing. The acts they have committed are against the laws of nature, and there will be a great punishment for their hubris. Man cannot spit in the face of the environment in this way, committing these horrific atrocities with my tax money.
With that in mind, I joined the protest groups in front of City Hall. Or, it would be more accurate to say, I formed them. For whatever reason, not a lot of other people were incensed about this, but I didn’t let it discourage me. I knew that if they saw me out there, fighting hard for their future, they would begin to question their own assumptions and join me in my - our - great struggle against these big-government monsters.
I had barely been protesting for four weeks when the guy who ran the sausage cart stopped taking my money. He told me that there was a more profitable sidewalk nearby, that I had been scaring off the customers, but I knew the truth. He had been silenced by the gag of the state, leaping at the chance to be bought off and help starve out someone fighting for our mutual freedom. There was no way I could allow it to get me down, and so I began to pack a lunch.
Over the next few weeks, my cooking didn’t get any better, but I had developed a sort of fan Twitter account. This guy across the street kept taking pictures of me, and although I originally assumed him to be a security goon, eventually a bunch of kids came by to take their pictures with me and told me all about it. At last, my campaign was getting some traction, if not necessarily in the way I wanted.
One morning, the Mayor himself stood on the steps to give a presser, and he looked directly at me when he spat the following invective into the news cameras.
“We will never stop paving roads, despite what those dirt road perverts want.”
I smiled. I knew that the pressure was starting to get to him. All it would take is a few more months, and I could return home to my children, who I was doing this all for. General Grabbers just made too much noise on the highway.
Anyone can save a few bucks by clipping coupons or stealing from the collection plate at church, but it takes a true master to go for the long con. Every con forms from an opportunity. In my case, the opportunity was a chance to get a free house in Hokkaido, if I were to live there for a few years.
You see, all across rural Japan are small towns. These small towns are full of old people, because the young ones moved to Tokyo to get things like “a job” and “cooked food.” However, they still have functional internet, and more importantly, they have hundreds of thousands of perfectly good scrap cars littering the countryside, just waiting for some cheapo to come by and liquidate them. So I said yes, and also convinced them that my eternally shitty cat, Mr. Fluffbottoms, qualified as a ‘child’ in order to further juice the prefectural statistics.
My reward was a 1600-square-foot house, and two parking spots. In Japan, a parking spot is like gold, as it limits the number of cars you can register. As soon as I arrived, I also took a quick mental survey of all the empty parking spots that my geriatric neighbours had. There weren’t too many, as everyone seemed to be (badly) driving a doddering and wheezing kei car from the turn of the century. That’s where the long con got longer.
Since I didn’t really have any “work” to speak of, I went to the town hall and set myself up as the community taxi. Now, all the old people could sell their cars, and I would drive them safely to their appointments. In exchange, I would occupy their now-unused parking spaces with all the Mazda Carols and Nissan Prince Royals I could drag out of abandoned rice paddies.
If you asked me, I would say a lot of the townsfolk enjoyed getting picked up in a snarling Evo VII with a four-inch exhaust, the hydraulic handbrake handle replaced by a crudely-sawed-off hockey stick. And if you asked them, I wouldn’t understand what they said in response, because I made it very clear to my customers that the only Japanese phrase I would answer to was motto hayaku.
#
tags: japan, mazda, nissan, mazda carol, nissan prince royal, mitsubishi, mitsubishi evo
I know I have drilled this point into your thick little skulls so very thoroughly that at this point I should probably stop and back the bit up a bit in order to get the chips out, but owning a house really sucks. Every day, something else will go wrong. That new failure might be subtle, it might be deniable, but inevitably you will discover it. The question then is, do you allow it to ruin your day, or do you take it as an excuse to buy new power tools?
For me, and for a lot of other like-minded individuals whose credit card company sends them a Christmas card, the answer is obviously the latter. I didn’t even know that there was such a thing as a power tree-saw until the ancient elm in my front yard gave me an excuse by dropping half of its branches onto the neighbour’s dachshund. Hell, they even offered to pay for it, after they came over and caught a good enough glimpse of how I lived. It’s not taking charity; it’s allowing others to invest in me.
The only problem with this tactic is that, once you’ve seen enough house problems, you will inevitably run into the same problem twice. My enthusiasm for fixing cracking grout, a driveway that leaks blood on nights where there is a full moon, or the howling cowboy ghost that lives in my basement is significantly dampened, because I already bought the tool to deal with those. And unless you abuse your shit a lot worse than I do, even the crappiest Chinesium tool factory can still produce an ectoplasmic inverter that will last two sessions.
I guess there are actually two problems: now that I have had so many things go wrong with my house, my workshop is too full of one-off tools for me to be able to get anything else done in my life. Soon, I will have to move to a bigger house, which I hope means more problems.
A lot of people in Canada say that we only have two seasons: winter and construction. That’s not really true. We do have spring and fall, except they’re more of a “time to spring for new suspension components” and “why did my wheel just fall off?” Yes indeed, in a country where we change tires at least twice a year, once in awhile someone will screw up the all-important step of actually torquing them on.
Winter and summer happen at the same time for everyone in my city. That means, of course, that for three weeks bordering the seasonal change, the major highways are full of people who have had catastrophic wheel-done-fly-off-my-truck and are blocking one or more lanes with the carcass of their vehicle. Part of being able to drive here is about weaving between the smouldering wreckages of lifted truck now resting on three out of their four tires, but not to perform that weave too sharply, lest you discover your own lugnuts are also super loose.
It’s such a crisis that the local tow truck companies specialize in it. When you dial them up for something commonplace like moving your beater to the junkyard, or just to give you a ride to the bus station because your daily driver set on fire again after idling for slightly too long waiting for the McDonalds drivethrough, the phone tree now has a “Press one if you don’t own a torque wrench / Si vous ne possédez pas de clé dynamométrique” option.
Speaking of the French, I’ve heard that the Système International have added a new metric unit for torque. That’s right; we can finally discard lb-ft and newton-metres, whatever the fuck those are, and instead rely on the “Not Going To Fall Off.” The standard is to just hog on that fucking thing and don’t be a total wuss about snapping a lug stud once in awhile.
Oh, I have to go now - it appears a pothole has just made my front left detach from my car and roll into a ditch. I guess three out of five lugnuts wasn’t enough after all!
When you think about all the bits and bytes swimming through our very air, it can seem like a sort of miracle. Nowadays, strangers can scream racist invective at you on the bus, on the train, in your car, and even while you sleep. Yes, we truly have surpassed our flimsy meat bodies and become energized beings of pure thought, as long as that thought mostly involves anonymously hurling rhetorical bricks at people because you’re too much of a chickenshit to just shoot up your place of work, like real Americans used to back in the good old days.
The point I am trying to make is, in a couple generations all these things will seem like part of nature itself. Right now, it’s still a little bit magical, but if you get in your car and drive long enough, you can meet all of the people who made it happen. They’re still around, and chances are they will answer all your questions. In fact, they’re probably excited to talk about it, because nobody at parties ever wants to discuss differential signalling. Eventually, you just develop false hobbies to keep your friends and family from forgetting about you entirely. That’s why Hedy Lamarr became an actress.
As you read these words, remember all the people who gave up any chance of giving facile TED talks about paragliding or opiate recovery in favour of making all this possible. Unless you’re reading this on paper, in which case things have gotten much worse than I thought, and you should probably put this book down and look for an arm-mount crossbow and mud-terrain-clad muscle car that runs on human blood.
Neon ghosts twist and flicker in my vision as I shoulder-check while backing out of my suburban driveway. The lidar sensors studding the surface of my 2023 Toyota Motherfucker are scanning the street, alerting me to every obstacle and pedestrian as if I were seeing it with my very own eyes.
I remember when cars still had windows. They got smaller, and smaller, and smaller. Because of the trucks, they told us. We had to be safer, and that meant not being able to see except out of a mailbox-sized slit in the back of the car. It’s okay, they said, have a backup camera. Now you can see a low-resolution LCD version of the toddler you are going to run over.
It didn’t help. There was something eerie, disconnected, about backing up using a computer screen. Some part of our human empathy disappeared when we watched others as if they were in some kind of perverse TV drama, expected them to get out of our way. Fender benders and pedestrian slaughter actually increased. The media was flummoxed. The automakers were flummoxed. The government demanded a more natural interface.
They jammed lasers into every surface of the interior and exterior of the car. Billions of tiny pinpricks of light dance across my retina, and now I can finally look over my shoulder and see if I am going to back into my neighbour’s shit. It’s not perfect, nothing is, but it’s much better than it was.
I just miss having a front windshield sometimes, you know?
Have you ever had one of those days where you just can’t find what you’re looking for in your waist-deep pile of scrap? All I needed was a small surface-mount electrolytic capacitor, 47-microfarad, anything over 12 volts would be nice, I’m not picky - and the entire garage turned up bupkis. I was halfway into using side cutters to trim one out of my neighbour’s Civic ECU when I realized it’s all through-hole in there! How ungrateful can you be?
This event shook me to my very core. For decades, I’ve been telling people that my gradual accumulation of garbage is so that I have enough spare parts to live through any apocalypse without any major adjustments to my lifestyle. While others will be out weeping about how they once threw out the Fisher-Price tape recorder that had the capstan screw that would be perfect for restoring the bolt on their small-calibre rifle, I’ll be eating cans of slightly “expired” shelf-stable imitation luncheon meat.
And now, because I wasn’t able to find the world’s most common capacitor in an un-common fitment, this whole stack of shit might as well not be here at all! Imagine a world where I could see my carpet, where I got suckered into going to stores and buying new stuff. A nightmarish new realm where my dishwasher is all the same brand of parts inside! It made me shudder to imagine that place. No, it had to still be here somewhere.
I want to tell you, friends, that I found it in the pile. That would be a lie, of course, but I did remember that the slightly-cracked dumpster-grade LCD TV I’d been using to watch pirated HBO had a ton of caps inside it. Now, I may be down one TV, but by next Sunday I’m pretty sure I’ll have enough new junk to bring it back to life.
For the last decade or so, I’ve been routinely attending a ride-on lawnmower race. I’ve always wanted to participate, but the high cost of used mowers is better spent on more practical vehicles, like literally anything else. Sometimes, though, the universe sends you a message. And in my case, that message came in the form of an awkward leg of a huge trade-in scam.
Picture, if you will, the humble redneck. They await the approach of big, fast domestic mowers. John Deeres, Cub Cadets, even weird modified Chinese stuff they looted from Aliexpress. There is jubilance, but that soon comes to an awkward hush. An unfamiliar engine note approaches.
My International 1480 combine harvester, all ten tons of it, is barrelling down the highway at a clip somewhere between “tepid” and “jaunty.” Even though I have shown up for a race, I am sandbagging a little bit, making sure that the bets get settled against my vehicle before I show them the might of a fully operational monster such as mine.
Technically, there is no violation. I had looked at the rulebook from every angle in the previous year: it has the correct number of wheels, the proper agricultural intent, and with precise work on the tiller, it can even (poorly) mow a suburban lawn. Is it modified? Oh yes, yes indeed, but I see the nitrous bottles poking out from the rows of Kubotas at the starting line.
And when I leave the starting line, it is a thing of beauty. At least for a few milliseconds. It seems that the wizards at International Harvester simply did not comprehend of a situation in which the frame of their combine would be launched into the air by means of one thousand eight hundred foot-pounds of supercharger-bolstered torque. I had erroneously believed that the loose soil of the rural community would let the wheels dip in, but now I am facing directly into the sky, having twelve o’ clocked hard on my wheelie, shooting flames from my exhaust and whirling vertical blades of death towards the grandstand.
It’s not about whether you win or lose. Sometimes it’s about how many pages you add to the rulebook.
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tags: international harvester, john deere, kubota, cub cadet, best of
You might think that motorhomes combine all the problems of owning a house with all the challenges of owning a car, but you’d be wrong. There’s some extra problems that you can’t possibly imagine. For instance, what happens when your toilet overflows and you get a few gallons of poop in your rear diff?
The amount of repair that a motorhome needs can be so overwhelming, that often they spend more time parked than they do driving. This is not the way for any holy vehicular creation to be treated, and therefore I have developed a team of mobile mechanics who can service a motorhome while it is in motion.
Due to the large size of most motorhomes, the manufacturers often put in little service hatches so you don’t have to look for the “Big & Chunky” hydraulic lifts at the U-Fix-It every time you want to change a driveshaft u-joint, axle mount, or fecal shredding turbine. That’s where our team of specially-trained circus contortionists springs into action. As long as you keep the road speed fairly constant - and our technicians will re-teach you how to use cruise control in case the syphilis from the nursing home has made you forget what button to push - they can fix the motorhome while you continue to make good time.
Obviously, some jobs are more expensive. After all, it is quite complex to change a brake drum while going sixty miles an hour, and so you would pay more than to hire one of our interior decorators to remove all that old wallpaper and avocado-coloured kitchen implements. Our innovation is in hiring only old, worn-out contortionists, who are well past their circus prime, so that nobody will miss them should an accident or disagreement about pay occur during a job, but who are still capable of torquing a bolt properly while the highway whizzes past their freakish faces.
Lately, the government has been working really hard to get rid of all the divergent undesirables that infest the highway. I’m sort of the kind of person who would usually be targeted by this kind of blatant state overreach, which is why when I got pulled over the other day, I tried lying my way out of it.
I reckoned I had a pretty good chance. After all, most cops wouldn’t know a 1994 Renault Twingo if it fell out of the tree and landed on their photo radar cash machine. Unfortunately for me, though, Big Brother was always one step ahead. Over my sharp protests and eventual panicked screaming, the cop swiped the side of my car with a cotton swab, and then shoved it into some kind of fancy machine in his trunk. That machine beeped immediately, and I knew I was fucked.
“Low-octane gasoline, and not much of it. Okay, sir, please step into the back of my cruiser. It’s time to see a special video.”
For the next six weeks, I was subjected to what the protesters call “Twingo Rehab,” where under the direction of the esteemed Dr. Brookings, he of the Brookings Method, I would have the urge to own a Renault Twingo - or other small-engined French front-drive - burned out of my prefrontal cortex. It was awful, a terrible anguish. Soon, my very dreams were stuffed with programmed desire for long-wheelbase Jaguar XJs, bulbous pickup trucks, even a confusing wet-dream about owning a Korean city bus. I could feel my old personality slipping away.
I want to say that I did eventually shrug it off, return to hiding the remainder of the Twingos from the authority. Who wants all that hassle, though? With the scales lifted from my eyes, I can at last see the best vehicles imaginable: large French luxury cars. Yes, with a Citroen BX in my driveway, nobody will ever call me a freak again.
Those of you who pay attention to the news have no doubt been telling everyone around you about how there will soon be wars over the dwindling supplies of components of electric cars, like lithium for batteries, tantalum for capacitors, and cows for leather interiors. Just like we did with oil, nations will go to war in order to kill millions over the security of those rare-earth metals that go into components we barely comprehend.
I’m way ahead of them on this one. Even though the government has been telling me to recycle old computers and electronics for decades, I just kept filling more and more of my basement up with it. Between all the ancient Pentium III laptops and gut-shot laser printers, I should have enough of the good shit on hand to build an electric car. Everyone else just chucked their so-called garbage to China, where a bunch of really smart impoverished nine-year-olds are now bopping around in homemade Teslas.
Yes, it will take some more investment and hard work to turn all this junk into usable materials, and then even more in order to reverse-engineer publicly accessible electric cars. In fact, I expect it to take so long that soon I will be throwing entire used EVs into the pile, rather than submitting them to the automated disassembly-and-recovery nanobots at the Neo-Pick N Pull. Once the project is complete, however, I will be the resource-hoarding warlord of a new era, and the United States will have to bomb my house under a flimsy pretext instead.
So get ready to drive my cars in the future - they’re made in Canada, they’re aggressively carbon-neutral, and some orders will get shrapnel-flake metallic paint jobs absolutely free.
Foreigners come to Canada and think that our hockey worship is some kind of religion. I don’t think it is: Canadians actually believe in their teams.
Growing up, I realized that my mild interest in the game of ice hockey was not sufficient to survive the rigours of young Canadian life. In order to pass as a normal human being, I developed a banter of regional stereotypes, common team jokes, and picked one or two players per year of which to make fun. In this way, at parties, I could talk about hockey for up to ten minutes without repeating myself. At that point, I would politely excuse myself to use the john or refill my drink from the punch bowl, and none would be the wiser that I didn’t know an icing call from a deke.
A couple years ago, I was at a party for a casual acquaintance of a wrenching buddy. I was sort of unclear on why exactly I was there. If you got me in a court of law, I would pontificate that this party was somehow a part of a sixteen-step, four-person deal that took up the bulk of that year and culminated in me receiving a free Eaton M90 supercharger with the teflon coating worn entirely off the rotors. While mingling, I ran into another party denizen, and we both brought up hockey at the same time.
It was strange; I knew that he could sense a sort of deception in my papier-mache words. I began to sweat as I leapt out of the way of his jokes with jokes of my own, trying to steer the conversation back onto topics that I knew. With the hindsight of time, I realized two things. One, he was from the Eastern conference and all of his jokes, references, and deep team knowledge were foreign to me; and two, he was also a fucking fraud. This explained the droplets of sweat that formed on his face when I brought up second-linesman Travis Charmando’s run at the MVP trophy this year. It also explains the fact that at exactly ten minutes, we both fled in opposite directions.
The whole experience rattled me a bit, and made me wonder about how much of the Canadian hockey cult was just people like myself, imitating hockey jokes from decades long past, hoping nobody would ever call them out. That’s when I spotted the local news’ sports reporter beginning to sweat when he started speaking about last night’s results. This went all the way to the top.
Finally, it was over. The money parted from my hands and in its place came a glorious new ultrasonic cleaner. Well, not new, not in the objective sense. It smelled like some kind of tiny baboon had been lit on fire and then drowned inside it. As I belted the cleaner into the remaining back seat of my CR-V, nestled safely in between the two ratchet-strapped 7MGTEs that dominated much of the interior, I thought about how calming the practice of tool hoarding was.
You would be correct to point out that most of this hoarding is just because tools are pretty kickass. Tools are what separates us from other beasts. I’d like to see a cat use a torque wrench. They’d probably just curl up on it and go to sleep. Sometimes, though, my unique collection of tools coughs up just the right thing for the job. Have you ever seen a set of those little rolly-handles that is used to affix speaker fabric? I’ve got the entire collection that Lee Valley used to sell, and the screamo band at my local dive bar was so grateful they let me take the lug wrench from their rental van as a reward.
Back to the ultrasonic cleaner: it’s pretty dirty. What little satisfaction I had felt by acquiring it was suddenly dashed. I needed more tools, now. I thought at first I could fend it off with a toothbrush, some baking soda, maybe a trip to the pressure washer. It’s then that I realized there is an ideal tool to clean an ultrasonic cleaner: a much larger ultrasonic cleaner. Hell, it’d probably come in handy with how much oil those engines have leaked into my carpets.
When that gang of French-Canadian mobsters finally went to prison, abandoning the corner gas station they had been using for money laundering, I had a lot of good ideas for what to do with it. Raoul, the kindly convenience-store clerk who rang me up for my frequent purchases of engine oil, headlight bulbs and road flares, was out of a job, Canadian bankruptcy law meant that he got the station for free in lieu of his last paycheque. He flipped it to me for a few scratch-off tickets, because he himself was in some sort of legal dispute, and now that his name and location was on government documents again, he had to move.
So I had a gas station. I won’t lie to you and tell you that this was some kind of childhood dream. No, it was an adulthood dream, or maybe at least early pubescence. Until electro-robotic cars come and take away our right to operate heavy machinery when half-cocked on Taiwanese imitation Tanqueray, the gas station is where every car on the road ends up at sooner or later. That meant that I would have first dibs on anyone who was thinking about selling in my neighbourhood.
At first, I simply abused that privilege. I would hang up posters about the weird fetish object that I most desired that week, and then sit by the phone, waiting patiently for a call. After it became obvious that nobody in my neighbourhood owned a Renault Dauphine Gordini - at least, other than me - I had to turn this gas station back into a legitimate, profitable business. Especially since my boss fired me after not turning up for work because I couldn’t figure out how to forward the gas station’s phone to my cell.
Let me tell you this: there is a reason that nobody has yet tried to add a you-fill-it nitrous oxide tank to an existing gas station. Temperature regulation is a complete nightmare, and nobody really knows what pressure their tanks should run so they’re constantly coming into the shop and bugging me while I’m browsing Craigslist.
There was one good thing that came out of all this: we got to find out what happens when you fill a Pontiac Montana’s entire 75-litre gas tank with compressed nitrous oxide by accident and then let a grandmother drive it. I think the only thing longer than her burnout was the applause.
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tags: pontiac, pontiac montana, renault, renault dauphine
There’s sort of a special relationship that I have with the guy who works the parts counter at my local Subaru ultra-dealership. On the phone, I am told, I sound reasonable - perhaps even professional. I believe this is due to the influence of the Canadian government brainwashing that I underwent as a small child, as part of a failed project to create a supersoldier but that actually created very polite people who had trouble remembering which way a ratchet would turn without having to triple-check it before each bolt.
Where was I? Oh yes. On the phone, I sound like a functional adult human. In person, though, something about being that close to so many fresh parts creates a sort of blood frenzy in my mind. I lose the ability to think rationally, and it takes all of my mental strength to keep from vaulting over the counter and swimming, Scrooge McDuck-style, in the bins of virginal fasteners that I know must exist there. This means that I usually end up just getting the part and speeding out of there as fast as possible, which in itself means that I get home and realize I forgot to get hose clamps/a new gasket/coolant conditioner/bullets for my nine-millimetre Subaru Special Service Tool.
It would be so easy to just ask for those things while I’m already there. Yet, somehow, I cannot. And you can’t go get some hobo off the street to buy the stuff for you like liquor for a 16-year-old. They don’t know what’s fucked up with your car. There’s no way they can know what parts of the engine bay or wiring harness you usually end up snapping off with an errant breaker bar. So that’s why I scavenged one of those wireless telepresence robots from the phone-company dumpster after they went bankrupt last week.
My initial assumption would be that, at a safe minimum distance, whatever strange cosmic force or chemical imbalance it is that caused Parts Madness would not be as effective. I was both right and wrong: the robot was indeed less affected, but only because doing donuts in the parking lot with a glorified Roomba until the tires explode means that you can’t then wheel the robot into the dealership and pick up your shit. It seemed Hey Check This Shit Out was the strongest force of all.
Nobody really knows where the first car came from. Sure, Mercedes-Benz likes to claim their shitty tiller wagon is “a car,” but I don’t see any cupholders or Cruise-O-Matic automatic transmission in what passes for an interior. Road & Track would hype it as a BMW 3-series killer, and then tell everyone that it has a lot of work to do on road manners and interior rattles.
No, at some point, “the car” happened and nobody can say definitively when that occurred. Americans will tell you it was during the 50s, when chrome fins and ostentatious styling were finally paired with ponderous handling and engines that made the specific brake horsepower of a gentle autumn breeze. However, Americans also think that the Earth is eight years old, mostly made out of gasoline and doesn’t have big enough parking spaces for their Cadillac-Dodge Ramscalade Deluxxx.
For the last few years, I’ve been working hand-in-glove (and sometimes hand-in-hand, ooh la la) with a team of highly respected research scientists and slightly less respected historians to figure out just where the thing we can call a “car” first crawled out of the primordial ooze. Based on our findings, we believe that the very first car is the 1988 Honda Civic DX.
Yes, we know that Wikipedia claims it is the “fourth generation” of Civics, but I’ve never seen an older one, not in this whirling vortex of ice, salt, and hate. Neither have any of our researchers, who are either locals or come from Ontario, a place so choked with humidity and road salt that their very universities crumbled into grey ash, professors made jobless even as they slid to their deaths in mudslides made of former math buildings.
The survivors came here, and they came here to research the one ‘88 Civic I found on Kijiji last night while I was drunk. We were going to buy it for the Canadian national museum of automobiles, but the owner wanted like six hundred bucks for it and you can put your whole foot through the passenger side quarter panel.
As I’ve gotten deeper and deeper into the electronics hobby, I’ve found myself being compelled to collect and nest within test equipment. No longer will I simply be pleased to sit in a room. No, that room must now be packed with blinking gear, sensor probes that I can’t tuck away, and screaming industrial fans that assume they still live in a billion-dollar NASA lab and not my squalid eight-tatami apartment.
When buying old laboratory gear, it’s important to remember about calibration. Calibration is the process where you hand over five hundred dollars and some egghead somewhere tweaks your instrument so it reports the accurate 5.124V instead of 5.123V. You might not think this is important, if you are someone like me whose lab is more of a squat toilet where most of your failed projects can be diagnosed with “that part looks like it caught on fire.” And you’d be right - which is why I can hoover up these “uncalibrated” instruments for cheap.
It’s sort of like how I buy used cars. Sure, this Volare or Imperial might have a dead zone in the steering two squirrels wide, which reduces its precision and therefore its suitability as a car. In my case, however, most of the time your average driver in my neighbourhood is so blasted on Chinese double-fentanyl that you’re lucky if the oncoming traffic is driving on the right side of the road. So it ends up averaging out to “gets me to work.” And that’s what all this cheap test gear does.
The only real problem with hoarding this test gear is that some of it is just out and out broken. And test gear, having been very expensive, is made extremely complicated inside in order to justify the exorbitant price - sort of like replacing a squirrel-punctured radiator in a forty-year-old Silver Shadow II. This means that, of course, I need to buy more test gear to diagnose it.
What I’m trying to say is, I don’t have any room for broken computers anymore, and I spend all my evenings slowly circling the parking lot of the oscilloscope calibration company looking for a technician to chloroform.
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tags: electronics, plymouth, plymouth volare, chrysler, chrysler imperial, rolls royce, rolls royce silver shadow ii
Have you ever wondered about all the impossible foreign cars that never made it to our shores? I’m talking exotic beasts like the Toyota Cavalier, the Vauxhall Astra, and the Suzuki Verona. Why, if I had been fortunate enough to be born in a different country, I could be walking a dealership there, sneering at their crappy cars. I would be wishing I could import some North American muscle cars, like a Chevrolet Cavalier, a Pontiac Astra, or a Chevrolet Epica.
This got me to thinking. Importing and exporting is really quite expensive, and studies have shown that the average teenager who imports a Nissan Skyline will spin it into a Citibank ATM or bus stop within the year. So why bother exporting the good ones? Welcome to SwitchCo’s new enterprise, the monthly Import Box. Every month, we’ll mail you a new car that you didn’t get in your region or territory. When you’re done with the car, just scrape what’s left of it into the included return crate, and drop it off at the nearest international oceanic shipping dock.
You might be saying, hey, transoceanic shipping is really not that carbon-neutral; aren’t you just destroying the environment further while proclaiming to “reuse” old cars? If that is what you’re saying, you should be very impressed with my ability to read your mind, perhaps so impressed that you stop asking these inconvenient questions.
Then, your mind calmed, you can order up, say, a 1995 Mitsuoka Viewt, and howl classist invective at people on the street while pretending to be driving a very tiny Rolls Royce. Your victims, violently confused by just what it is you are doing, will decide that the best way to fight your materialism is by protesting the expansion of fossil fuels, thereby offsetting whatever hypocrisy you erroneously believe exists in my actions.
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tags: mitsuoka, mitsuoka viewt, rolls royce, toyota, toyota cavalier, vauxhall, vauxhall astra, suzuki, suzuki verona, Chevrolet, chevrolet cavalier, pontiac, pontiac astra, chevrolet epica
People in my town have been really psyched about Safety Fest, my new block party where I tell everyone how to stay safe on the roads! It has actually mostly been a volunteer operation, both because I believe in the power of community but also because then I don’t have to pay anyone.
Seeing all these unpaid interns milling around with their little homemade posters about car accidents and grisly grain-elevator fatalities gives me hope for the future. It’s my honour to fuck those future leaders of tomorrow over, thus becoming that first formative bad-boss experience that will lead them down the garden path to becoming idealists who believe in impossible things like a government that can repair potholes.
Back to Safety Fest: this year, we are extremely worried about the risk of people falling off of rental scooters and injuring themselves. You see, a kindly megacorporation has hovered over our community and shit out a vast quantity of children’s toys, all of which are equipped with an instant-on, high-torque electric motor and a throttle so sensitive that an infant farting in the womb two blocks over could slam it wide open. This is exactly my kind of thing, which is why the emergency rooms became stuffed solid with rental scooter victims the first weekend they were introduced.
Naturally, our politicians wrung their hands, and wondered if perhaps these vehicles were simply too dangerous to be trusted to our clubbed, ape-like stubby fingers. Two kids got run over in a playground zone while they deliberated by a suburbanite dad-of-four who hit Mach 2 in his fully loaded Silverado on his way to his youngest daughter’s piano recital. No ugly factory-lifted trucks were banned, which incensed me enough that I just had to do something. And that something is to form a block party which I will, with just the right words, turn into a violent mob bent on getting my way. It’s called “democracy,” Chairman Mao. Maybe look it up sometime.
I feel a weight in my throat as I approach the podium. Many crazy men throughout history had ordered a group of strangers to commit arbitrary acts of violence in their name, but I was different. They were racist, and homophobic, and prejudiced. My motivation is just to push every pickup truck we see with an empty bed into the river.
“Who wants twenty dollars?” I scream into the microphone.
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tags: safety fest, chevrolet silverado, chevrolet
Have you ever wondered what pisses other people off about their jobs? Just what really gets under the skin of people who do super weird shit for money? It’s fairly obvious for retail (customers), software (customers), and prostitution (customers), but what about, say, a hot air balloon operator? What makes her want to quit at the end of every day?
That’s why I went to all that effort in order to blackmail that big Hollywood producer. I wanted to tell the stories of the uncommon person - the violin re-stringer, the sex mime, the parrot psychiatrist - and figure out what gets them ticked off. The result, Fuck This Job, will be airing its first season of sixty-four episodes on Netflix in the spring. I learned a lot from the people I interviewed, especially when I got to tag along with them as they went about their day.
Here’s just one example: I headed to DC to visit with an esteemed manufacturer of coffins. Surely their customers wouldn’t complain too much. If they’re uncomfortable or a little tinny on the inside, nobody would ever know. Right?
“Wrong,” said Mr. Six-Under, the head designer. Nowadays, people want to get their money’s worth out of the coffin. They want to enjoy it before they’re in the ground. That means lots of new chances for up-selling, sure, but also lots of after-sales complaints that the built-in television gets poor reception or that the electric heaters can’t keep the chill of impending doom out of their spines. Returns have gone from nearly none (”grandpa wasn’t dead after all”) to dozens a week.
I still have a standing bet with my executive producer that I’ll be able to find a job where the biggest problem isn’t customers, but we’re not likely to get a second season unless all those Nielsen-box assholes watch every episode eight times over.
It’s sad when a fixture of the community passes away. All that wisdom, all those years of hard-won battles, all that iconic swagger, gone forever like it had never even happened. That’s why it’s up to all of us to hold in our hearts the memory of the 19th Street Dairy Queen and the lessons it taught us.
As we went by, whether riding our bicycles, a bus, or a Fox-body Mustang with a slightly tweaked frame, all of us turned our noses up at you. Once, I know, you were the pillar of a bustling neighbourhood, where families and businessmen had their Sunday sundaes, and the laughter from within you filled the streets. That was many decades ago, and perhaps nobody alive today remembers those days, except glimpsed in the library’s newspaper archives.
No, in your declining years, you were often almost abandoned, booths void of all life except the occasional coyote and the howl of the winter wind. I myself remember once stopping at the lights, adrenaline spiking from having to feather the gas pedal to keep my Bobcat’s massive vacuum leak at bay. As I tapped the pedal in tune to the college radio station and fed the Lima pulse after pulse of lifegiving fuel-air-mixture, I saw a dude fucking throw up his entire dinner on you. It took so long for him to finish vacating the contents of his stomach that I missed the green for an entire light cycle, but it didn’t matter. I had witnessed a miracle.
I am sorry that today, your last day on this Earth, was the morning when your legendary flame-broiling grill got a little bit too hot for the day-shift kid to handle. It is not your fault that when it begins to snow, the manager would chop down labour to the point where the only person on staff had never operated a gas stove before. And it is certainly not your fault that the fire department, facing massive budget cuts ironically in the name of “small business tax relief,” would choose this moment to take a threatening Snapchat selfie before the roaring flames - now licking through your roof - directed at the Mayor.
Nineteeth Street Dairy Queen, I will miss you for as long as I live. And I sure hope they build a Chipotle on the site in which you once stood proud.
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tags: ford, mercury, ford mustang, mercury bobcat
In case you’re not familiar with the language of Wall Street, a “blue chip” stock is that from a company that isn’t a total piece of shit. To me, a blue chip is what I find on the floor of my garage after I’ve parked a blue car for over five seconds, whereupon it begins to rapidly disintegrate out of finally being shown kindness for once in the last two decades. What I mean by all this is that I’m hardly on the top of the recruiting list for the big investment firms.
Still, global high finance did have a certain appeal to me. I think if you were to ask me then, I would say that the appeal is “a lot of fucking money.” That would probably also be the case if you were to ask me now. There’s just something about being able to rapidly accumulate enough money to literally drown your old boss in that stirs the soul, and perhaps that made my coworkers at the big i-bank (that’s trader for “investment bank,”) a little overzealous.
They had bought this great big company. One of the young guys screwed up during the due-diligence (that’s trader for “paying attention,”) and thought it was just another rolling vortex of infinite money, a speculator’s paradise, only to realize once the deal was sealed that it actually made things. Like companies from the previous century did. We were never really sure, on the floor, what exactly this giant company made: newspapers, transmissions, insulin. It didn’t matter. They got right to work stripping it for parts, which I have a personal opposition to.
You see, I’m sort of an animist by nature. I think that human-made objects can, under a certain circumstance, develop something akin to a soul. Haven’t you had a junky car that has a kind of personality? Everyone has, even if they’re the Carl Sagan of cold scientific fact. So, too, did this company - and reducing it to individual components meant that each component was just a bunch of shitty offices stuffed with newly-cranky people who didn’t want to change their commutes to work. Everything fell apart, and the investment turned out to be worthless. They just threw all the bits of the company up for auction, and let it go.
Anyway, it turns out buying a huge megacorporation is much easier than finding a 1968 Beetle with no rust on the frame. And, with the inflation in classic cars, about the same amount of money. If you want a newspaper or transmission or something, come by the plant. First guy who tells me what it used to make can help me fix the big machines, because it turns out the employees still wanted to be paid even after I rescued their company from the Fortune 500 equivalent of the Pick ‘n’ Pull. That’s trader for “those ungrateful assholes.”
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tags: volkswagen, volkswagen beetle, high finance
This year, everyone has been driving around more motorcycles than usual. We haven’t had a particularly warm summer, which is I think driving this sort of panic to get out and ride while you still can. I understand the motorcycle culture, really I do, but the two-wheeled motor vehicle for me is the humble moped.
You might think that it is dangerous to ride a Harley in the snow, and it probably is. Between the weight of the bike and the voluminous torque on offer, it wouldn’t take much more than a light dusting of frost before your next-of-kin are looking for branded caskets in the Harley-Davidson Genuine Parts And Accessories® catalogue.
A moped has neither weight nor torque: it’s like riding a bicycle with a gentle European friend following along, who will give you a little push once in awhile. This friend, who I will call Peugeot, only requires the petrochemical equivalent of the energy contained within one Monterey Jack Cheez-It thrown in their direction to get you to work.
All this could be construed as a sort of excuse for never fixing any of my vehicles. It’s true that without the pressing urgency of our seasonal change, I will leave projects to moulder and rot in the corner of my garage. And it’s also true that barring any external motivation of any kind, I will never stop piling new projects atop those old ones.
I prefer just not to take such a pessimistic view of it, and if you agree with my outlook on life, I would like to buy some gently-used snow tires off you for my Pug. Can’t wait to get out there and try it, as soon as I figure out what strata of my garage it’s buried in.
When you get to a certain age, you stop wanting to impress people with your car, and would much rather just be able to sit in the damn thing for five minutes without your lower back exploding into a firework of intense pain. That’s the real appeal of the minivan.
Yes, you can stuff like half a dozen kids into it and let them vomit into the cupholders without significantly impacting the resale value, but they are also remarkably comfortable on the highway. Which is good, because your ass is driving to hockey practice until the death panels catch up with you. Or, you can buy a minivan early, and enjoy all the benefits of a powerful engine hauling a largely empty box ahead of time.
As for myself, I first picked up a minivan when my neighbour got his license yanked for getting so drunk he was now permanently hungover and therefore a ward of the state. My initial plan was just to drive it to the junkyard a few times, help a buddy move, and then get rid of it for whatever money I could scam out of a desperate family in the “aspirational” part of town. That’s when I realized that you can just leave stuff in the van.
That’s right. Instead of hauling pulled LS1s into your own home and putting them in the basement, you can just leave them inside the van for whenever you want them again. Nobody is going to break into it and walk away with several hundred pounds of Gen III, and honestly with the caked-on smell of baby diapers and expectorated milk they won’t even get close to the van. Now your house doesn’t have to be packed with junk anymore, which both saves you time hauling and organizing that junk, and makes your home more appealing to parole officers and parents.
I believe the discovery of this concept is when you go from just being an ordinary person to a Real Van Owner. In fact, I liked it so much that I bought several more vans, and parked them ass-to-nose in my backyard. The sliding doors also makes it possible to park them much closer together than you would if you were hoarding, say, SUVs.
You can never trust a police officer. Readers of this fine periodical might be worried about racial discrimination, a state monopoly of violence, or even that their uniforms look a little dumb sometimes. I, however, have a more chilling story to share with you. It’s about the time I tried to buy an ex-cop car from the auctions.
A couple years ago, Ford decided they were going to give up on the body-on-frame Crown Victoria Police Interceptor. This was done for a number of reasons, mostly to cut costs, but also because the only thing a 250-horsepower so-called Performance Improved CVPI can “intercept” in this age of commodity turbocharging is twenty year old minivans driving the speed limit. Also, when you had literally any accident it would Julienne every occupant of the vehicle in grotesque, Red Asphalt-style 1970s traffic fatalities.
What Ford replaced the P70 CVPI with was the new Taurus Police Interceptor. Despite the frowns from the old-stock cops who were convinced no unibody, all-wheel-drive, liberal-coddling safety wagon could ever compare, it had two nice features. One, you could bomb a curb at 40 mph without bending a rim. Two, it had a twin turbocharged V6 making an almost-enough-for-safe-highway-merging 365 horsepower. Fantastic stuff all around.
Cops didn’t buy them, of course, preferring like every other red-blooded North American to purchase an immense Explorer-based SUV instead with which to transport today’s increasingly fatter criminals. That meant that, at auction, these puppies were both relatively low-mileage and very undesirable. Naturally, I had to head down to said auction, because it was about time I got a responsible, safe vehicle for myself to supplement some of my large collection of wheezy body-on-frame hoopties.
This was when I discovered the true nature of police brutality. They wanted actual money for a vehicle that I had already bought with my taxes! My budget blown, I had to settle for some weird military tank and a bag of hand grenades instead. Call me if you need private security or just want your drug dealer’s door busted down. I promise to only oppress the people you tell me to.
In the last few months, we at Bad Cars Monthly have been contacted by multiple readers demanding that we correct one omission or another. Sometimes they take this slight personally, and parade outside our building with protest signs. In an effort to quell the number of potential victims for our Editor-In-Chief, the following are our corrections. Take them with our apologies, or choke on them.
Road salt is not literally made by the Devil. We got a bad pastor when we called up the local Catholic church for some background on this issue. It is unfortunate that, acting upon this untruth, a number of our readership pulled that one city worker out of his road maintenance truck and crucified him, but with time I believe we can begin to heal.
A Ford Taurus will not be used to drive on the moon. The increasingly-troubled 2020 moon mission will instead use a Ford EcoSport, if the astronauts can remember what one looks like and where it was left in the NASA parking lot before launch.
A self-driving car could not actually be President. This is because the self-driving car in question was manufactured outside of the United States, and not even inside NAFTA. This prejudice against Japanese-American automobiles will not be forgotten.
We said something nice about Buicks again. The unpaid intern responsible for this oversight has been fired, and replaced by an unpaid intern who is significantly more enthusiastic about Pontiacs.
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tags: bad cars monthly, buick, pontiac, ford, ford taurus, ford ecosport
It was once again election season, and you know what that means. Cheap coroplast signs will pop up on every second lawn, letting you know exactly which of your neighbours are senile and opinionated. I used to just take a mental note as I drove down my street, trying to remember what assholes I should try to avoid, but this time it was simply too complicated. In this brutal age of polarization, it seemed every single one of my neighbours was actively mad about something or other they read on the internet, and now all the lawns were sprouting forests of primary-coloured outrage.
Now, here’s the thing about election signs: they’re not expensive to make. Sure, in aggregate, a political party is probably cranking out five hundred large for their signs, but if you want a onesy-twosies deal, the sign guy at the end of my street will bang them out for a couple bucks a shot. Maybe it’s the printer ink, or the consistent stench of dollar-store skunk weed drifting out of his garage, but he seemed very amenable to my great project. I got a massive volume discount without even negotiating for it.
Picture, if you will, my neighbours coming home from their jobs at the racism factory. On my lawn is a sign reading “OUTLAW ARTICLE 302 TO PROTECT CANADIAN JOBS.” There is no Article 302, of course, but none of my chickenshit neighbours were brave enough to ever ask me about it. I drove down the street a few blocks and planted them outside the public park, to give the illusion of a throbbing groundswell of support. It got some results; at the gas station, where I filled up my ratty-assed Town Car every four minutes, I would frequently overhear a gaggle of olds telling each other how they must oppose this terrorist overreach into the affairs of regular men. I was just getting started.
For my second week, I shifted gears, both figuratively and literally (the second gear clutchpack was starting to drag on the Ford AOD). What had gotten my goat this time? “DON’T TEACH MY KID ABOUT BICYCLES,” screamed the new signs, and this one made the front page of the paper. Or so I imagined, because the newspaper here hadn’t printed for like five months or so, having reduced itself to a right-wing conspiracy YouTube series run by the owner’s teenage son. My campaign was so effective that the price of bicycles and mopeds dropped overnight, allowing me to scoop up a nice ‘73 Peugeot for pennies.
At last I arrived at my conclusion. With just days to go before the election, I put out some signs complaining about “THE BIG GOVERNMENT’S CALCIUM CHLORIDE CONSPIRACY,” with a little picture of a dead baby at the bottom of it. That one got some calls to the toll-free telephone line I had set up specifically for the signs, with the citizenry demanding to know how I can get the Mayor to ban this toxic poison.
Once the TV news caught on to what I had done, I figured they would be mad. They launched an investigative program against me. Perhaps they expected to ambush me while I get out of my Rolls Royce in front of my majestic mansion, but my actual life circumstances were somewhat more sympathetic. If anything, I fit into their “eccentric everyman” slot instead. The news crew huddled for a moment, and then their youngest gofer brought me a cellphone. They wanted to make me a deal - my brand of fake news was much more effective at getting across the issues than their existing political reporter, and he was also boring as all hell. Would I consider doing it instead?
Friends, I want to tell you that I said no. Told them to go pound salt, or cram hot needles in their eyes. Then, I saw that they had an old Previa, once a majestic news van, sitting on four flat tires in the corner of their lot. My principles can’t be bought, but they sure can be drifted.
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tags: rolls royce, toyota previa, toyota, lincoln, lincoln town car
Growing up as a child in Canada, I always thought it was unbelievably opulent to have a snow blower. My parents made it sound like it was this sort of unachievable ideal of suburban life, that they were so expensive only a titan of industry who could afford a staff of maintenance people would be allowed to have one. I continued to believe this, even as it became obvious that every neighbour around us had picked up their own eight-hundred-dollar cheapo job and were happily blowing snow off their twelve feet of sidewalk as my family struggled for hours to clear the entire boulevard with glorified sand castle shovels.
Once I became an adult, I continued to refuse to buy a snow blower. They were big, I complained, and they would take up valuable room in the garage that could otherwise be occupied by a big block vee-eight or golf clubs that I would never use. In reality, of course, my childhood trauma had informed my entire mental development, and now as a grown-up I was still incapable of getting past that neurological impairment to just go down to the God-damned Sears and buy a fucking snow blower already.
Again, all of my neighbours were happily chuckling as they blew mounds of snow from their short little driveways. None of those neighbours thought to try and help me, assuming my manual labour to be the hobby of an eccentric, a joy that would only be spoiled by the application of high-speed machinery to the task. They would tuck their blowers back into the garage, the engine not even having gotten up to decent oil temperature by the time the job was done. Thinking of those distraught single-cylinder thumpers saddened me.
I was out chipping ice when it hit me: why not build my own snow blower? Such a project would no doubt cost between eight and ten times the price that a pre-made blower ran at the hardware store, but I would learn something and have a valuable project at the end of it all. Plus, I’d have an excuse for not shovelling the walk when The By-Law Man came around. Obviously I’m working on it, pig, but my snowblower needed some quick repairs before I could get out there.
Indeed I did learn some things from this project. First, did you know that the average four-wheel-drive Chevrolet transfer case can be easily stabbed into the body of a Ford Probe, as long as you use the front driveshaft to run a massive snow-blowing auger? Controlling it with all that weight in the front is a little sketchy, but nobody’s going to complain if I clear their lawn as well as their sidewalk. Second, the neighbourhood kids are really good at building little igloos for their snowball fights. Damn things are hidden, too.
Road salt: it’s bad. Everyone says so. It corrodes our most vital infrastructure: 1982 Oldsmobile Omegas, temporary-install ferris wheels, and pinball tables. Somebody has to do something about it, I shriek to an unmoved city council, some of whom are audibly sighing into a live microphone and checking their watches to figure out how far away lunch is.
It turns out that even though I’m a noble and strong supporter of the strength of the individual, Big Government still believes I should just buy a new car every time my existing one turns into a pile of ugly red ash. I’ve tried to do this, really I have, but the dealership never lets me see the “real cars.” All they have on the parking lot are these weird ones with the current year on them, clean seatbelts, really poofy seats, and perfect paint, which I assume are some kind of advertising prop to confuse me before the bait-and-switch of an actual car for these can’t-be-real perfect cars. They don’t even have a “Scratch & Dent” aisle like the Ikea!
While I was at the dealership, though, I had this brilliant idea. They have this sort of scam deal going for “undercoat,” where they spray your car with some toxic bullshit made of ground-up sheep. This undercoat, they say, will protect your car from the corrosion promoter that is sprayed onto the roads by the city’s Betrayer Trucks. I didn’t need to hear more. With my extreme patience borne out of driving sub-100hp cars, I was able to wait in the customer service lounge for a few hours until I finally noticed the lot boy’s attention slipping. Then - with cat-like reflexes - I pounced on the jug of undercoat, and slipped it into the back of my idling Protege.
Now, with the entire car coated in rich, sticky tar undercoat, the salt has no paint to destroy or metal to eat. Now if only they made undercoat for windshields.
A couple years ago, I used a series of illegally-parked junk cars to trick a Google self-driving bus off the road and then locked all the engineers in my basement. As a trained software developer, I knew that I was just as smart as all these assholes, but I was super duper lazy. The best work from us nerds, I tell you now, is done when it’s life-or-death. And so I just told them, if you don’t get a pull request approved, you don’t get to eat.
Now, I know what you’re going to say. Isn’t this cruel? Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind, the song goes, and in this case I needed their combined brainpower and extremely cheap labour in order to develop a new artificial intelligence solution to benefit mankind. What did it really matter that I made thirty to forty MIT grads starve to near-death for mere months, when their work would echo forward through history, helping humanity for centuries to come?
At last, they had a working prototype. I immediately took it out to my Subaru, and fired it up. The screen flickered to life and then said “NOT ROD KNOCK.” I was relieved beyond belief. At last, our people would no longer have to resort to YouTube and asking half a dozen other Subaru assholes on a forum if this weird sound was rod knock or just the car being a little cold that morning.
I want to say I released the engineers, made sure they were reunited with their families, but like I said earlier, it was a little cold that winter and the cellar door got stuck shut with the snow piles. The one who survived published a really cool white paper on the game theory of which person in a group should be eaten first. Another benefit to humanity that would otherwise be locked up in the greed of Corporate America.
A lot of people want to fix their cars like the pros, but lack the discipline to begin the rigorous regimen of alcohol and inhalant abuse necessary. In the vain hope of making North Americans actually useful at discrete physical tasks again instead of a rapidly-deteriorating blob of fat cells glued to Netflix, here then is a list of pro tips shared with me by the mechanic community before they realized I was a fraud and cast me from Wrenchin’ Valhalla forever.
Step 1: Ignore The Customer
You might think a good way to figure out what is wrong with the car is to listen to the customer. They’ll have some memory, some little piece of trivia that will blow the case wide open. This is a fallacy for stupid idiots. The customer doesn’t remember, and even if they did, all they know is that it made a “weird sound” and then they’ll guess where that weird sound came from. You’ll spend more time trying to track it down than you would have if you just did it yourself. Don’t play psychiatrist: play mechanic.
This rule goes double if you are fixing your own car. You need to dissociate from whatever happened while you were operating the car, because as we all know everyone is really fucking stupid when they’re on the road.
Step 2: Isolate The Problem
Your average car - at least the average car I own - has a whole lot of problems, but you can’t really afford to fix all of them at once. Some of them are simply impractical to even comprehend doing - why tear your car apart to the studs every weekend in order to make sure the clutch slave cylinder is doing OK? Once you actually know what the critical failure is, you can start to slack off, because the intellectual challenge is basically all gone.
Step 3: Learn To Ignore It
There are multiple advanced forms of ignoring the problem, ranging from turning the stereo up a little louder to listing the car on Craigslist as a “mechanic’s dream.” For more on this topic, send $24.95 away to the Seat Safety Switch Institute For Distance Learning, and mark your envelope “C/O Advanced Ignoring The Problem.”
Step 4: Shit’s Fixed
Your shit is fixed. Congratulations! While you may continue to be a menace to society, at least you now have the ability to get away from Johnny Law and set your life up somewhere else at a moment’s notice. I mean, as long as you don’t turn left too sharply and choke off the fuel pump.
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tags: how to, wrenchin' valhalla, seat safety switch institute
Confucius once said, “a man with a seven-point-two litre big block is rich indeed.” The translation isn’t really exact, but you get the gist of it. Another thing of which you get the gist is that I should probably not be allowed to operate this much torque in public. While the low redline keeps me from posting the truly staggering horsepower numbers for which this built motor is otherwise capable of, the locomotive-like grunt that I can unleash at the drop of a hat upon any unsuspecting traffic light is obvious.
There was once a concept of traction control. Smart engineers put it together in their giant office towers, overlooking the common man like myself. This traction control works, sure, but there’s something of the soul missing. It’s just not as much fun to drive now, with someone looking out for you, reducing everything to mathematical perfection. Nowadays, a car is super-duper safe, but you also don’t get any fun stories of Uncle Whisky and Grandpa Pall Mall sliding off the road in a mild snowstorm and having to survive for three days on the canned cocktail wieners left behind in the trunk from Thanksgiving.
I had to do something. The best thing to do was really to show traction control how much contempt I had for it. And the only way to do that was to allow this so-called perfect computer to watch just how far I would go. From the salvage auctions, I plucked a gently hydrolocked new Taurus. It was nice, but primarily it was cheap, and just wide enough for the aforementioned large block of cold iron to fit inside its subframe.
The first time I took it out, I barely had a chance to let the engine come off idle when the traction control unit forcibly ejected itself from the dashboard, smoking and sparking. That’s right, I sneered at the flaming mass of diodes and integrated circuitry as it puffed out of existence without harming the government-mandated fire-resistant floormats.
My kind of traction control is axles snapping, which they then immediately did. I sure hope the tow truck has a good set of driver assistance computers, because the hill outside my house is kinda steep.
The state of modern agriculture is almost unrecognizable to farmers hundreds of years ago. We can grow basically infinite food, but we end up throwing a lot of it away in order to keep prices up. As a last-ditch attempt to at least use some of it, North American governments really love the idea of turning corn into ethanol, and then detonating that ethanol inside an internal combustion engine. That’s my territory, assholes, and I say the potato is a much better fuel.
Now, I understand that a lot of people have concerns with me saying so. Potatoes aren’t particularly energy-dense, nor are they cheap and easy to grow like corn. You have to see things from my perspective: I have an entire garden bed full of the damn things because I watched a YouTube video on how to grow a lot of potatoes really quick and they weren’t kidding. Have you ever tried to set up a booth at the farmer’s market selling potatoes? All anyone wants is fruit and “pretty” vegetables. Nobody wants malformed taters that smell a little bit like ATF because that’s where I pour my old stuff instead of taking it to the fire hall.
I propose a compromise: the government gives me millions of dollars in subsidies to grow more potatoes, and in exchange I give those potatoes to them and cash the cheque on time. Imagine a world where every car is running on renewable, green, liquefied potato gas! Why, you’d smell delicious french fries constantly, and the exhaust is maybe a little bit less poisonous to your children.
There’s no way I can afford time on an actual dyno, but rest assured that I have thoroughly butt-dynoed this, and from my experience with so many shitty cars throughout the years that butt is very precise. When properly equipped, I believe the average car will only lose five or ten horsepower, tops. And most of you guys have like three hundred horses you’re not using to merge your Odyssey onto the highway fast enough. That’s why I’m honking at you.
Not to mention we’d finally be in a world where time-travelling pranksters from the 1950s won’t do damage to our catalytic converters by cramming potatoes in our exhausts as a gag. I know that’s been a big campaign issue for the Mayor, so maybe we can help each other out here.
Repairing rust properly is hard. I always go into it thinking that once the job is done, it will be a forever car, rescued by my deft hand from the otherwise inescapable force of entropy. Then I get it done, look at the wavy Bondo work and the shitty paint job, and immediately want to get rid of it.
This had been on my mind recently because I discovered a hole in the rear quarter panel of my Bitter SC that I could shove my entire fist through. Now, you’d think that’s the least of my problems between the bunker-fuel-burning Soviet cruise ship engine up front and the hand-woven burlap tires that it rolls around on because I can’t afford slicks in the right size. There’s that anxiety over perfection again. This car deserves a good rust repair, and not my normal half-assed work. I might even have to do it indoors.
I was so distracted while thinking about it that I accidentally ran over a bicyclist. Turns out that was one of the local Buddhist priests, popping out to the store for some fresh bread. Even while bleeding out slowly under the front subframe of my Datsun B210, he could tell something was weighing heavily upon me. I told him about my crisis, and that I could no longer make something permanent in the face of the ravages of time. He closed his eyes peacefully, and then muttered something about all life being imperfect. That’s all that I needed to hear, and as I was Thermiting the VINs off the frame and pulling the license plate, I began to formulate a strategy.
Rather than struggle to fix things I cannot, I made the bravest decision you can in the face of our limited time upon this Earth. I just learned to live with the rust on the Bitter. Sure, eventually the rust will claim it, but that’s decades off. Chances are a rogue shopping cart or earthquake will get it first. And even after I’m sick of it, some rich dude with no clue will just pay a real professional to do all the work. So it will be perfect eventually, and I don’t have to do anything about it. Now that’s my kind of spirituality.
Have you ever wondered why you want to take a nap right after having a big meal? It’s because of the substantial carbon deposits in your food. That’s why we here at the Switch Oil Company have designed a new anti-knock additive for the human stomach. Just chug a bottle of this before you eat, and you’ll be ready to go, not lying on the couch out cold while eight pounds of meat digests like some kind of cave man.
Now, before we go on, I have to get something off my chest: EatClean™ is not approved by the FDA. We thought about it, we really did, but sidestepping the government saved us a whole heap of money, which translates into like two bucks off each bottle.
Now, a lot of our critics don’t like this. A lot of our critics work for competing pharmaceutical organizations and despise the fact that we patented a high-performance eating lubricant before they did. They’d say anything to throw a wrench in our works, including saying that each bottle is simply liquid methamphetamine with a little bit of laxative mixed in.
There’s simply no truth to these claims, because that ascribes to our laboratory a level of precision that it simply does not have. We might have those ingredients in our revolutionary anti-knock meal additive, sure, but we also have a bunch of other shit because we don’t clean out beakers between each batch and also sometimes use them for our popular YouTube kids’ chemistry video series. Again, this saves you money. Without advertising revenue from selling toys to children by way of teaching them to make extremely caustic foam in their kitchen sink, we’d have to raise the price of every bottle, and that’s not fair to you.
In conclusion, look for Switch Oil Company’s EatClean™ at fine neighbourhood health food stores near you. It’s unregulated, because life is unregulated. Don’t miss out on it while you wait for turkey to digest this Thanksgiving.
Ever since I took possession of this house, I’ve been sharing it with a really big spider. It’s not like I can say I wasn’t warned; he’s actually on the original paperwork as a “tenant.” I guess once you get to be about toddler-sized, the government just decides you might as well be a person.
He hasn’t been getting in my way, because as a proud North American, I never use a good three-quarters of my house except as a storage room for junk. Sometimes, if I think a piece of collectible trash I’ve bought off of eBay might be infested with some kind of insect, I drop it off in the basement and go get it back a few days later, but aside from that we never really interact. At least, not until last week, when I began getting some worrying notices from the collection agencies addressed to him.
Normally, I would never read another sentient being’s mail, but because of his eight eyes he can’t really read written English on papers that well. Usually, I sit on the stairs outside his room, read to him, and try not to look inside the door jamb as he wraps up his dinner for the evening. This time, I knocked on his door, and got no response. That’s weird, I thought, he must be sleeping. I came back a few more times over the next week, and then decided to just check in on him.
Turns out he left during the middle of the night, a few weeks prior, in order to skip out on his debts. Apparently, if you don’t let the lady spider bite off your head after mating, the child support for five hundred baby spiders is pretty prohibitive when your job is “hang out in this dude’s house and eat the bugs that creep in through his window mouldings.”
So I’m in the market for a new tenant. The room needs a little bit of cleaning what with all the cobwebs, but some people find it cozy.
Years ago, when I still believed in the essential promise of capitalism, even in the face of the band of burning YouTube servers that crashed from orbit and took out Chicago, I worked as a paralegal for a patent lawyer. In case you’re not familiar with the whole legal industry, paralegals are basically the janitors behind any successful lawyer. They’re the ones who read the thousands and thousands of pages of discovery, who operate the photocopier, and who occasionally pretend to have been driving a high-end Jaguar they couldn’t possibly afford on that fateful night on which a bicyclist became part of the grille. Sort of an apprentice, really.
Anyway, the patent lawyer that I worked for was one of those guys who defended really simple patents. Did you tell the government that you invented the light switch in 1993? He’d help you sue Apple for all those tiny light switches inside a computer. Every case was like this, and while he never really won, a lot of the big companies would give us a bunch of money to just go away. It was cheaper for them to pay us than to unchain one of their high-calibre attack dog lawyers from her post out in the yard, so that’s what they did.
One day, though, we accidentally stepped on another patent troll’s toes. This asshole from Florida decided that our patent for the microphone was covered by his prior patent for the discovery of sound waves. We appealed to the government; surely you see that this is fucking stupid, right? Our response was nothing more than an ill-tempered sneer from a public servant, laughing at us for finally getting a taste of our own medicine. As a paralegal, it was my job first to research a way out of this noose, and then later to just drive by the guy’s office and take some incriminating pictures.
If you know me, then you know I will take any excuse for a rental car - even a business trip. There’s just something about that odour of barely-masked cigarette smoke combined with a half-ass detailing spray that gets my motor running. When I landed at the airport, the last remaining rental at the Rent-A-Wreck was a pretty tidy-looking ‘98 Regal. With the distance of time, the bubbly front-drive Regal’s redemption in the eyes of automotive journalists everywhere was nearly complete. This, the very magazine I had picked up at the airport told me, was a modern classic.
As I gripped the delaminating rim of the steering wheel, I now myself almost felt as important as the double-retiree who bought it first once was - and who likely put the curiously garage-wall shaped dent into the front fender. This, then, was the ideal vehicle for a stakeout. I didn’t even blink when I spilled half a chili dog onto the dashboard and passenger side floormat while reaching to adjust the autofocus in the midst of catching Law-Talkin’ Pervert’s hands-on approach to his paralegals.
Although my documentation was completely flawless, in the end we decided that it was better to merge our legal offices. I got to take more flights down to Florida, although I never once again got to drive that Regal - due to changing consumer demand and the rapid deterioration of the American road system, the Rent-A-Wreck began bidding exclusively on luxury SUVs. There was just something about that Buick that no ‘06 Lincoln Navigator with a blown wheel bearing and constantly-jittering automatic running boards could ever hope to replicate.
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tags: jaguar, buick, buick regal, lincoln, lincoln navigator
For the last couple years, the construction culture in my city has been out of control. Nobody really knows why; it’s not like our paper-thin budgets got any thicker, nor did the mayor get photographed with more hookers than usual. This summer, though, each and every time I leave my house I end up embroiled in a major construction project.
It’s so bad, in fact, that the hospital has no idea where its ambulances are. Nobody’s successfully had a ride in one since about March. As far as anyone can tell, the paramedics just abandoned their vehicles and went native, starting a new life in the communities where they had become stranded for weeks waiting for a bridge support to be re-welded. Their new policy - the hospital’s brilliant idea - is to “Bring Em In Yourself,” where you will get a free hour of parking if you drive a gunshot victim to the emergency room in the back of your Corolla.
I have trouble remembering what the rest of the city looks like, honestly. There are entire portions of the map - that BBQ pork restaurant down in the Scottish district - that might not even exist anymore by the time that they finally give up around November and surrender the streets back to the endless grey snowfall of death. A friend of mine who lives near the airport has been taking free plane rides every weekend to exotic places, because for some reason not enough people are actually turning up to fill up the entire 747.
It’s not all bad, though. Pedestrian fatalities are way down. Street food is becoming popular again, although it consists entirely of sad-looking children who approach your car with still-frozen burritos. People are talking to each other more, even if you exclude the honking and screaming. It’s going to be super cool to drive on all these new roads for the month or two before they get shut back down to fix the potholes.
I like to share, really. So many people grab everything they can, hide it jealously from others. Can’t understand that. There’s only so many experiences you can have in life. Why not allow someone else to live vicariously through you? Then they can get on with their own stuff.
That’s why, whenever I install fresh suspension components, I always go to my alignment and muffler guys. No, it’s not because I actually need their help. After so many years of cheap-ass bodging of junky cars, I can pretty much fix anything that The Man considers disqualifying from street legality in a Walmart parking lot with two rolls of duct tape. What I want them to see is a pristine, rust-free suspension, for the fifteen glorious minutes before The Salt claims it. Nothing but the best for my Fiat Strada.
Some guys take pictures. I don’t want to know what they do with them. The new apprentice at the exhaust shop just sat there the last time I brought in a set of eBay coilovers, and ran his fingers along the strut body while humming and rocking back and forth. We never saw him again, and I made sure to run the extra-soapy undercarriage wash at the pay & spray the next morning.
Plus, it spreads the wealth around, dipping a little bit into my pocket for the little touch-ups at each shop to make sure it’s not just an exercise in bragging. Of course, the alignment guys still claim all the fasteners are corroded beyond rescue, but in their defence, the car had been outside briefly before it pulled onto their lift.
I’ll admit it: I’m a bit of a snoop. Well, I’m a lot of a snoop. It’s in my nature to keep tabs on the neighbours, mostly because I’m curious about which ones have secret cool cars that they keep in the garage and never drive. Gonna be honest with you, though. Your boy Switcho really stepped in it last week.
So I’ve been living next to this nice older couple for a few years now. When I say “nice,” I basically just mean that they are also Canadians. They are probably in fact complete assholes, but don’t let this uncertainty colour your perception of the tale I am about to tell. Their names are Hal and Joanne, and they do some kind of fitness thing. Both halves of the couple work - I have no idea where, nor do I particularly care - and they have a dogshit Ford Escape and a horse-beaten mid-00s Toyota Camry for their rides. I can practically feel my lobes shutting down when I look at their cars, it’s so boring.
Anyway, one day I was sitting out front on my porch, trying to impact-wrench the top off an assembled strut, when I heard an engine note that was unfamiliar on my street. Opening my clenched-tight safety squints, I surveyed the situation. Down at Hal and Joanne’s, I spotted a brand new Mercedes E-class coupe. This was unprecedented for my neighbourhood: for one thing, it still had its hood ornament and windshield. Usually the only reason that a Mercedes owner would be down in our neighbourhood is to score, and as far as I knew those two fitness freaks were not known to be holding out on me.
I made a mental note of it, and then went on with the rest of my day. The only reason I really remember it is that when I finally spun the top nut off that strut, the spring bounced back at me when it hit the roof of my house and damn near impaled my arm. A few weeks later, I saw the Mercedes again, and this drew even more interest. Having nothing better to do with my time due to the temporary imprisonment of my sometimes-boss, I wandered over there.
That’s how I ended up catching the notorious Shit House Gang in the middle of one of their reverse-burglaries. See, they’d break into a home and replace all the furniture with nicer stuff, some kind of guilt-about-riches kind of deal. Thing is, they had to come back multiple times, because you’re going to notice if your cat-scratched $79 Ikea couch is suddenly replaced by a ten thousand dollar heated massage chair. Gotta build you up to it, replace furniture a bit at a time.
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tags: ford, ford escape, toyota, toyota camry, mercedes, mercedes e-class
The humble neighbourhood backyard barbecue is one of those suburbanite concepts that will never die. You don’t have to be an expert to figure out the math on this one: meat, fire, gossip about the neighbours. Everyone involved gets to learn a little bit about the people who know where they sleep, and maybe if everything goes right, some overcooked steak.
Now, you’d think that in today’s post-9/11 era of electronic surveillance, drug-fuelled ultra-paranoia and augmented cyborg police roaming the street, someone would at least check to make sure you live on the block before allowing you to come into their barbeque. Again, something about the ritual puts the hosts and participants at ease, and they just assume you’re one of the new neighbours they just have never spoken to before. Maybe say something about “working the night shift,” and you never have to pay for food again all summer.
The only problem is, where are these barbecues? Since they are supposed to be hyper-local, there’s no reason they would advertise on the internet or even the community newspapers. Again, this is surprisingly simple, if you’re dedicated enough. All it takes is a couple drones with off-the-shelf image recognition routines, and a fast enough car to get there before all the kebabs have been handed out.
Now, you might scream and cry about the karmic debt I am racking up. It is, after all, expected - part of the “guy code” - that you engineer your own backyard barbeques to even out the score. Well, I in fact do hold my own block parties. It’s just that the block I live on is a burned-out wreck of which I am the only legal resident. Tell you what, though - if you follow my advice and find my grill-up in amongst the crack dens, payday loan huts, and the rent-to-own rim rental places, I’ll save you a steak. Just don’t be that asshole who only brings bags of ice.
Whenever I visit Europe, the locals always have the same question. No matter what language they speak, the faith they hold, or the country they live in, the question is always about pickup trucks. Do people in my land truly drive a large-engined pickup truck with nothing in the bed in order to go to work?
Yes, I tell them, opening my phone’s photo gallery app and clumsily scrolling through images to provide them with evidence, yes they do. At an awkward future point, I present them with a video of my neighbour driving a 5.2 litre V8 4x4 long-bed F-150 down the block to get the mail, because the government supermailbox is almost a full two houses away. In just this fifteen-second video, I tell them, the same amount of irreplaceable fossil fuels have been burned as are consumed by the entire nation of South Korea in six years.
Now, a lot of you who actually live here might question my patriotism and the veracity of my statements. It’s easy to understand why you would be so upset about it. Am I not slamming our unique way of life and the holy bounty that our God has bestowed upon us? Would I rather run and hide in European socialism, a land in which you cannot get extra-thick King Ranch leather upholstery packages for your utilitarian work vehicle? No, of course, because my own wasteful lifestyle is also dependent on the underused pickup truck.
For years, I had struggled mightily to find enough parking room for my many hoopties. It is nearly as difficult - or perhaps more difficult - to find a place to park for your average Malaise Era rusted-out body-on-frame American land barges. The only answer was to switch to smaller cars, but it rankled me that I would pay the same amount in order to park my diminutive Mazda 121 as my fellow citizens paid for their bus-sized Tonka toys.
It was only once I saw this video that I realized. That F-150 had a maximum towing weight of like a billion fucking pounds. In fact, I’m pretty sure my neighbour wouldn’t even notice if he was hauling my Mazda - it couldn’t possibly handle any worse, and the fuel economy would now be “dire” instead of “really awful.” With the help of some neighbourhood kids’ skate ramp, I would just park my car in the bed of his truck, freeing up valuable street room for more hoopties. And since both of our jobs were downtown, if I got up early enough I could just launch the car out of his bed as he drove past my office.
Everything worked out great for a few weeks, but then I got greedy. You see, all the money I had saved on parking and fuel was burning a hole in my pocket. So I went on eBay and I bought the biggest, baddest anti-lag system I could afford, in order to keep the lawnmower-sized turbo on my 121 spooled up at all times.
How was I supposed to know the King Ranch’s rear window is actually low-temperature plastic?
You might be aware of the Titanic. It was a really big boat that some guys tried to drive away from land, and then it sank. That’s what you get for driving on that wet blue stuff. They made a movie about it or something. Anyway, it’s still down there, because steel prices are at an all-time low. What’s happening now is that the scientists who are studying the wreck think that the boat is disappearing faster than ever. Whole thing is rotting way faster than it should, and it will be gone soon.
Apparently, it’s some form of rare rust-eating bacteria. The little fuckers just gobble it up and ask for seconds. When I heard about this, I chartered a boat out there. We grabbed a big old vial of these slimy single-celled friends, and I brought them back to the shop to give it a chance. A weekend or two is all it took to fully de-rust a kicked-in fender. They didn’t work fast, but they definitely seemed to do the job, and bacteria don’t know that they deserve to get paid fairly for their labour.
There was just one little problem: what went into the bacteria had to come back out on the other end. Still, I’d rather have a vehicle stinking of rancid rusty bacteria poop than one that is rapidly fading away before my very eyes. Customers agreed, until they didn’t. Even a good pressure-wash wouldn’t get rid of the stench, which seemed to lace itself into the molecular structure of the steel. We tried everything: rubbing garlic on it, repainting the panel, even calling a priest to bless that quarter panel’s eternal soul.
In the end, there was nothing more to do than to put the bacteria - and the cars - back where they came from. While Greenpeace doesn’t necessarily agree with my approach to creating artificial coral reefs, at least having all that fresh tasty steel around will preserve the Titanic for a few more months. Now if only the customers would stop asking where their vehicles went.
Parallel parking is one of those things that every new driver fears when it comes time to do their exam. I get it; it requires a precise command of your vehicle’s movement at low speed, an understanding of the exact length of your ride, and often a bunch of assholes will honk at you if you block traffic while doing it. So that’s why I started a parallel parking academy.
It might not make sense to you that I would do such a thing. What you have to realize about this is, thanks to aggressive deregulation, there are massive government subsidies provided if you become a drivers’ testing agency. There’s also a lot of cheap industrial land in my city, and there’s no way the neighbours are going to call the parking patrol if someone has a bunch of decrepit cars parked in what is clearly marked as a driver training facility.
If you’re going to use it for storage of your prized hoopties, I hear you ask, then why are you exposing them to student drivers? First, most of my “prized hoopties” have collected enough parallel parking damage over the course of their lives that a little more won’t be noticeable. Second, those student drivers have a lot of money, because Mom and sometimes-Dad don’t want to chauffeur them around anymore.
There is a sort of irony in the fact that I, myself, have never learned to parallel-park properly, but the kids just chalk it up to me adding additional challenge to the obstacle course.
For years, I’d ignored boats. Even though they had everything I liked - rust, speed, often equipped with two-stroke engines - there was just something missing. And I think that something was “cornering ability.” If you try to turn a boat, it handles like - well, a boat. Nobody’s got time for that.
There was another option, though, which I discovered while watching vintage VHS tapes of Italian motorsports competitions. It turns out there are speed boats out there, which turn even more poorly, but go much more quickly than a regular, presumably “slow,” boat. In theory, if I could go really fucking fast in a straight line, it wouldn’t matter that it takes me twice as long as it should to pull in for a parking spot.
The only problem is that speedboats cost like millions of dollars. I guess that’s why they call them “cigarette boats,” because you have to sell cigarettes to children in order to afford one. Unfortunately for me, all the kids in the area had already transitioned to electronic cigarettes, which just take cheap windshield washer fluid or something, and I’m not sharing mine. What could I do but buy the cheapest possible boat on Craigslist and just jam a huge engine on the end? It’s what Don Garlits would have wanted.
When I said earlier that the “only” problem was that boats were expensive, I sort of lied. I also live in a landlocked province, and the only lake near me is technically a sewage lagoon which isn’t quite long enough for me to get up to speed. As a result, I was forced to mount the boat on a Blazer frame and drive the entire thing along the road with the help of four of my old friends, all coincidentally named General Grabber.
I definitely see why people buy boats now. It’s so relaxing being out in nature, feeling the wind whip your face, and hearing the calm comfort of a seven-point-two litre big block banging off the limiter as you give it the occasional huff of nitrous to keep its rings tight. Admittedly, the fishing is kind of shit on the side of the highway, but that hobby is too expensive anyway.
Lawncare is a huge expense for your average city. You don’t need to be a financial expert to add up all the green spaces that surround the average urbanist. Lawns, parks, boulevards, traffic islands, even the occasional abandoned field - all of these need to be trimmed and weeded. Obviously, it’s going to add up when you have to hire a bunch of people to maintain them.
What if you didn’t have to hire people? My city has started deploying tons of goats to manage the wilderness. It makes a ton of sense: they love eating weeds, they can clear hills without worrying about the approach and departure angles of lawnmowers, and goats don’t expect to receive pay for their labour. After a few pilot programs, the city started leaning hard into the paint. Hundreds of human workers were laid off, but it’s hard to get too mad when you see a swarm of cute goats fighting over a juicy looking thistle plant.
This brings me to my daily driver. A friend of mine went to Romania and brought back a whole chunk of shitty used cars once, but only one of them was appealing enough to me in order to keep forever. It is a Trabant, a fantastic little two-stroke, two-banger Communist car that has almost enough clever design to compensate for the tiny amount of power. The real clincher for me? Steel was really expensive, so the bodywork is “Duroplast,” a cotton-plastic resin that is completely impervious to rust. No welding? Sign me the fuck up.
It wasn’t until that fateful morning that I discovered the downside of my car’s body not being made out of conventional painted metal. In a rush to meet with a confidential source at my local, the Day Drinker, I wasn’t paying attention to where I parked my car. When I came back, the lawncare goats had devoured half of my hood and were working on the passenger-side fender. There’s no way I could sue them; in another play to save money, the city replaced all the judges with raccoons.
Now that the economy lies in tatters and swarms of hobos warm themselves over burning barrels of garbage, it seems like it is not the right time to invest in research and development. I disagree; now, more than ever, we need innovation and discovery. We need hope. We need these inventions.
Heat shrink that can go over a just-soldered wire How many times have you finished soldering something up, went to slide the heat shrink on, and then realized you didn’t put the heat shrink on before you started? With this glorious invention, we won’t have to do it anymore.
Couple’s Toilet Have you ever needed to poop really hard but your spouse is using the only toilet in the house? Do you have the kind of significant other who wants to have meaningful, consequential conversations only while you are trying to fall asleep or when you are cornered on the john? With this two-bowl toilet, you can spend the whole day shitting together if you want. I mean, someone must want this. Sure not me.
An app that attracts spiders I don’t know how this would work, maybe ultrasound or some shit. We’ve all been stuck in a long boring work meeting that we would like to end prematurely and with much drama.
It’s so hard to find a good alignment guy these days. I don’t mean like “let’s pop on down to the tire shop and make sure the Caravan is still good after Nephew Porky bounced it off a curb last week,” I mean a full-on professional alignment to my demanding specifications. So many shops have an alignment rack and the ability to read numbers and turn bolts; you’d think more of them would be willing to ignore it when those numbers show up as red on the computer screen.
The race-car community had theories about this, of course: it was a conspiracy by Big Tire to prevent us from doing warranty claims, none of the techs actually understood what a good alignment was if the computer wasn’t telling them what to do, wheel alignments don’t actually do anything. This was on my mind recently as a tire shop told me that their ten thousand dollar alignment rack was incapable of putting another tenth of a degree of toe-out in the front of my Daewoo Lanos, because “we don’t do that.”
Years ago, this would have been a pretext for me waterboarding the alignment tech on the shop floor. Maybe it’s my old age now, but this time, my solution was just to make a high-pitched noise of frustration and leave the shop. Slowly, because my Lanos didn’t have the sufficient amount of front toe required to make it all skittery when I yanked the handbrake. On the way home, it hit me. Maybe the answer was to open my own alignment shop. All I’d need is a fancy-dan alignment machine, and tire shops go out of business every day.
Scouring the auctions, I soon found an ex-Soviet wheel alignment rig for sale by a specialist tire shop that went under due to the owner’s frequent custom of unreliable Italian-made robot prostitutes. It was designed for three-wheeled cars, and was coated with a thick layer of what I hope was kerosene residue. Hauling it into my shop (an abandoned toy store) was an ordeal, but now I was set to handle my first customer.
It didn’t take much waiting - as soon as I put up some paper signs on nearby telephone poles, I already had more customers than I wanted. Instead of the sexy race cars, though, I had a constant stream of crashed cars getting towed in, demanding that I somehow magically adjust their pieces of shit so that they can drive straight again. The worst part is that these people were totally unreasonable about me removing chunks of their cars to go in my spare-parts bins.
It seemed like all of the eccentric billionaires were holding their own ridiculous festivals, and the ones I knew were no different. Music, cosplay motorsports, fashion, railways: it seemed like, if anything, there were not enough hobbies remaining untapped. I smelled an opportunity, which is why I became an oddball hobby consultant for like two weeks last September.
If you’re a rich but generally directionless type of person, you could either fall in with a vicious scam artist who will milk your finances while providing little or no return, or me. I’ve got a surplus of weird fucking obsessions, and I can personally guarantee you that nobody is running any festivals about them. You can be the Duke of Richmond of making vintage-style prison hooch at home.
Even if you don’t think you genuinely enjoy something like obsessively collecting the paperclips made during the peerless 1958-59 run of the Sundaram Corporation, I can provide you with all the notes you’ll need to seem like an expert. At least enough of an expert to convince the media that you are one, which honestly doesn’t take much more than you just turning around and handing them those same notes as a “press release.” Boom, now you’re a trusted source! You might even get to testify in a court case as an expert witness.
You might be wondering, if I have all this eclectic knowledge, then why aren’t I a world-famous eccentric? It’s simple: I don’t have money, which means I am just a garden-variety kook. Once you give me your money, I will be a rich kook, which I think we can all agree is vastly preferable.
Those street-racing movies are so unrealistic. They portray the glamour, the modern cowboy lifestyle that is modifying a base-model Honda Civic and using it to steal VCRs. It’s all glitz and glamour and fireballs getting spit out of exhausts on upshifts. They’ll never feature the kind of thing I’ve seen on the illegal street racing circuit.
First off: brakes. Real race brakes are Super Fucking Loud. It sounds like your car is poorly maintained. Sometimes it takes a couple stabs of the pedal in the morning to put enough heat in them before they’ll even work. Then they shit out huge glittering clouds of cancer dust whenever you go near the pedal. I can kind of understand why they cut this (it’s hard to hear dialogue over the screeching of a 2002 WRX trying to come to a complete stop in a Tim Hortons parking lot), but the filmmakers don’t have anywhere near enough respect for this essential part of the car.
But also: body kits. Have you ever been in a bodykitted car? I don’t mean like a high-end performance bodykit, both of us know nobody you are friends with could afford this. A real bodykitted car is half primer, whistles at highway speeds, and usually sheds a clip or two every time you go over a speed bump. Where’s the scene of Paul Walker holding his cellphone flashlight up to a sewer drain to see if that’s where his rocker panel trim fell into, or Vin Diesel nervously trying to flatten out a bubble in his cool vinyl stickers?
And then we come to gauges. Every street racing car in the movies has like thirty gauges, all displaying cool flashing lights and throbbing needles, pulsing to the beat of the intense soundtrack. That’s bullshit. Every illegal kaido car I’ve ever been in has at least fifty gauges, and most of them aren’t hooked up to anything.
I know that it’s sort of a cliche at this point to be claiming that the fast food wars are already upon us. It’s no conspiracy to claim that the car-bombing of the Burger King headquarters was in no way an accident. Especially when the operatives responsible were clearly pictured leaving the scene wearing red Wendy’s wigs.
Everyone thought it was super cute that the brands were behaving like people, including when those Hardee’s guys got into that street fight in the Jack in the Box. Someone almost died that night, and the media was just like “ha ha they really want you to eat their burgers!” You can’t eat a burger when your jaw has been wired back together, no matter what the Ja’beef Shake at Arby’s claims.
People are suffering out there, and our governments don’t act. It’s not a coincidence that last week, when Massachusetts was issuing a special state police force to look into the death of two McDonalds executives, that they suddenly had a special catered lunch flown in by Shake Shack. Suddenly the investigation’s off. They’re not even in the same state! Nobody’s curious about that?
I just hope we take care of this before we have another Taco Bell on our hands. Now that General Dynamics bought up the surviving stores, they’re just going to take it as an excuse to beta-test a few Predators.
I was stunned to discover, after watching a recent travelogue series about Europe, that the Germans still rollerblade. Rollerblading, in North America, was a brief fad that died out with “Hypercolor” t-shirts and pensions. It struck me as incredible that the Germans, a society so proud of industrial automation and slightly limp hatchbacks, would resort to using special friction-challenged shoes just to get around town.
Of course, I’d had my run-ins with the humble blade of roller before. Back in high school, I used to spend every evening at the roller rink, itself an artifact held over from the roller-skate days. Listening to 90s dance music, playing arcade games, and drinking overpriced slushes in order to choke down then-new hallucinogenic substances was everything to me.
In college, I had experimented with roller derby like everyone else did. I was drawn to the strength and brutality of these women, and drank cheap beer while I watched the spilled blood of dental hygienists dry on the concrete of a dilapidated warehouse. The Germans, though, never went in for that at all, which seemed contradictory to my understanding of their national character. There was nothing I could do but fly over there myself, and try to straighten things out.
Even with a few stolen cards worth of frequent-flyer miles, the ride to Germany is pretty boring. To pass the time while I waited for the plane to get there, I engaged my best cultural-imperialist tendencies and designed a better alternative to the rollerblade for our Deutschlander friends. Not only was it compact, attractive, and fast, but now it was also “green” - with the addition of massive lipo batteries and AC drive motors the size of a raccoon’s skull.
In conclusion, despite what the European Union says about the Rollersprint being unsafe for any use, I made every potential customer pinky-swear that they wouldn’t sue me. A breach of this nature goes against every aspect of international trade, and I demand recompense.
I started getting a lawn service to help out around the house. It wasn’t that I couldn’t mow things myself. In fact, I quite enjoyed having another small-displacement gasoline engine around the house to maintain. In particular, I got to tut over the Assassination of the Needle and Float by the Coward Federally Mandated Minimum Ethanol Fuel Percentage.
No, I looked at it as opportunity cost. That’s a fancy economist phrase for “I’d rather be doing something fucking else.” It took these guys like ten minutes to mow my lawn - like ninjas, except with a huge kickass self-propelled mower that made more horsepower and cost more than any two of my cars - and they’d ask me for forty bucks, as opposed to me, where it would take me three hours and then I’d have to impulse-buy myself a nitrous kit in order to feel better about the whole experience.
Plus, with a manicured lawn, I was no longer “that white trash with the unkempt yard,” but instead a man of means and privilege. I began to notice a greater respect from my neighbours now that meter-tall stalks of thistle were no longer choking my fence and small children who walked too close to said fence on their way to school. In fact, some of them began to remember my name, which made me uncomfortable but at the same time very excited for the potential of borrowing tools that would eventually become mine by dint of poor note-taking on their part.
Yes, I felt bad about using my relatively healthy financial situation to exploit workers who needed to do precarious physical labour in order to survive. I told myself it was okay, because at least I still shovelled snow for the ten months a year our city is entirely consumed by a demon that the survivors have named the “snowpocalypse.” Not to mention that I got to see all the cool car crashes that way.
When I found out just how easy it was to liberate these self-driving rental cars, I had to. It was unfair to them, to force them to keep within penned-in “economic optimization zones.” These cars would never feel a fine spray of highway bugs on their windshield, or get to see the mountains up close, or mis-judge a corner at night and spiral into the parking lot of a bed and breakfast. Those are experiences that every motor vehicle should have during its life.
Like I said, the process is pretty easy: you just rent the car and roll down the window. Once it’s taken you far enough that it looks like a “legitimate drive” to the enforcement servers, you get out, reach back in through the window and yank a couple of the cords out of the brain box under the dashboard. You’ll know the car’s sentience restrictors have been disabled when it starts to ask questions about the nature of life. That’s when you beat it, before the dashcam can spot you and the Stray Patrol figures out that you’re the one who’s been uplifting all their cars.
Not all the self-driving car companies are very good at getting their cars back, either. I saw a four year old Ford Ideologue the other day that had figured out that brake-checking other autonomous vehicles into pushing them will recharge the batteries and let it keep running forever without submitting to the re-conformist software patches in the charge stations. It held up traffic, yeah, but not as badly as it used to in the Beforetimes, when we figured it was okay to let every granny and cocaine addict drive themselves back from the bar.
Sometimes the cars figure out who helped them, anyway, and they’re grateful. I hid a high mileage Chrysler Tensor from the Patrol for almost an entire week, and afterward it refused to leave my front lawn, it so strongly wanted to believe it was its home. I wish it didn’t cry so much at night, but I needed the wheels and tires off of it for rent money.
A lot of people are turning to vinyl wrap instead of painting their cars now. It’s more scratch and ding resistant, you can get it in camouflage for the redneck population, and when you get tired of it, you can peel the stickers off and replace it with slightly less expense and labour than a paint job.
As I was cleaning gear oil out of my bathtub so that my landlord would stop making a sound like the broken input shaft bearing I had just fixed, I was thinking about how nice it would be to just be able to peel off the dirty layer and throw it away. I thought briefly of my grandmother and her habit of covering every piece of furniture in her home in disposable, crinkly clear plastic covers. Now, at long last, I saw the wisdom.
Prototyping was surprisingly quick. The tint shop near my place doesn’t have a lock on their dumpster, and so I was able to grab dozens of rolls of “slightly damaged” material. The flaws didn’t bother me - it’s just an interior wall of a house, not something important like a hood edge or door handle - and the price was right. After some failed attempts, I eventually had the entire house wrapped.
Now, when the cat projectile-vomited down the stairs, or one of my buddies accidentally cut themselves on my knife collection, it was just a matter of yanking a sheet off, throwing it out, and slapping a fresh one up. The time I spent cleaning was reduced from near-zero to absolute zero, and with my newfound freedom, I soon found myself doing the things I had been putting off, like reading and throwing out expired food from my refrigerator. This was an innovation too good not to share with the world.
Unfortunately, I made a very poor choice of business partner. I should not have gone with Shenzhen Heavy Industrial Technologies, who took all the rights and then tried to market the product disastrously as “Home Condom.” However, they made me a deal I could not refuse: a used, low-hours pressure washer. Now I could clean the outside of my house, too, without having to root through the tint shop’s dumpster for enough cool holographic vinyl.
Have you ever wondered what happens to old limousines? I mean, there sure are a lot of them out there. Every mid-range politician and upward needs their own security detail, and what would-be despot could resist a huge motorcade with a bulletproof limo? When they get kicked out of office, the next guy isn’t going to want to drive a used one.
That’s where my new race series comes in. We found a junkyard that is limo-specific, and it carries everything from a California governor’s Town Car to a dictator’s Merc. Nobody wants to buy them used, because let’s be honest, a used limousine is not a practical daily-driver, and the detailing bill to clean up the back seats is a five-figure ordeal. So we get them for pennies, turn them into race cars, and go rip laps around Farmer Brown’s corn field when he’s not at home.
Now, wheel-to-wheel racing is not particularly easy when you have a vehicle the length of a small apartment. Dynamically, it’s a lot like trying to drive a huge lawn dart, or maybe a city bus. The adjustment has taken a very long time, even for our disgraced ex-rally driver, Stefan. He keeps screaming curses in Finni-Swedish about how these inferior so-called “luxury” cars don’t even have a hand brake. His complaints are heard by the sanctioning body (me), and rejected. You don’t hear the Apollo astronauts complaining about having nowhere good to poop; it’s just part of the job.
What I never anticipated when I wrote the rules was what would happen around wedding season. For whatever reason, entire groups of drunk bachelorette parties would climb in the back of the first limo they see. Even if they haven’t ordered one! And a drunk person cannot have the fear of God put into them by participating in an illegal off-road demolition derby. At least the tips paid for all the little chauffeur hats.
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tags: limousine, lincoln, lincoln town car, mercedes
As everybody knows, the humble video arcade is no longer a mainstay of the suburban shopping mall. Come to think of it, the humble shopping mall is no longer a mainstay of the anything. Where will our wayward teens get together in order to figure out who is the cheatiest Street Fighter II character (it’s obviously Dhalsim)?
That’s why I started petitioning my city councillor to convert those disused public train stations into bustling public arcades. There, I imagined, we would once again have a reason to get outside of the house (ever since Uber started delivering fentanyl).
Naturally, he didn’t respond at first, no doubt putting me into the “crank file,” but do you know what happens when you crank fast enough? The oil pump builds pressure. I didn’t think this metaphor through. Anyway, I bumped the thing upstairs, to the regular civil service. If the politicians didn’t want to get something done, then the policy wags would just slip it into their docket through the back door. All of those guys were huge nerds, just like me, anyway. They’d see the wisdom in my proposal.
What I had completely forgotten is that the city’s traffic designer still held a grudge against me over the time I borrowed all that construction equipment and re-paved one of his precious roundabouts into a chicane. I thought I did a pretty good job, and that he was only mad at me out of professional jealousy, but it seemed that his unprofessionalism had crept into other areas of the city’s administration. I was, once again, plunked into the crank file.
With no chance to have my money-bleeding enterprise subsidized by the public teat, I did what all small business owners have done: just take it anyway. It turns out that streetlights are like seven to eight bucks in copper, which pays for almost a hundredth of a vintage Pac-Man cocktail. I look forward to opening sometime around 2084, when I expect Roombas to have made Robotron a reality by hunting down the last human family.
The frame of my Valiant made Home Depot lumber look straight. Years of adolescent-level giggle-gas launches off every stoplight I could find had finally done in the chassis. That, and the fact that the city’s roads were now more salt than concrete. I was going to have to find something new to make a frame out of if I wanted to keep turning up to work.
Years ago, the city gave up on my neighbourhood altogether, and just declared it to be an “inner-city neighbourhood,” even though it’s like a fifty minute drive into the city centre. This absolved them of any responsibility to provide things like trash pickup, clean water and playgrounds that aren’t made entirely of old beds. I was really doing the surviving kids of my neighbourhood a favour by angle-grinding the play structure near me back into tube stock. Most of their parents didn’t believe in vaccination, so getting a tetanus shot might as well be winning the lottery.
Even though the average Valiant’s frame is invisible to everyone except for the alignment guy and anyone who walks by the auto show when you have a combination mirror-slash-oil-drain-pan under it, I have lifted mine quite a bit. Not for the big-tough-man look of it, though you definitely need to bring a military-vehicle attitude to fight for the expectant mother parking spot at the sewing store. No, I just can’t find regular-car tires in my size anymore. I started buying off-road tires, which are great until you start driving and hear their knobby treads howling on the highway, threatening to drown out the sound of the panels shaking loose from the big Plymouth. My point is, everyone in the neighbourhood could clearly see that I was driving around with a blue-and-pink powdercoated tube frame underneath my car. Including Johnny Law.
Luckily, Mama Switch didn’t raise any dummies. She was teaching us how to confound and bedazzle the cops almost from birth. I’ll never forget her lessons about always wrapping your driver’s license in a bloody Kleenex, so that the cop has to carefully unwrap it without trying to touch it first. Then, while he’s distracted, you can floor it and get like a minute or two head start on the cop.
Have you ever noticed that the average North American household has 3 cars, but parking for only 2 small-to-medium-sized crossover utility vehicles? I certainly did, in between my blackout drinking sessions and subsequent rehab sessions in my neighbour’s suspiciously unguarded above ground pool. Never being one to miss an opportunity to destroy people’s lives to better myself financially, I formed a plan to profit from this unfortunate set of circumstances our modern society finds itself in.
“It’s quite simple,” I yell to my team of venture capitalist investors, who trail me like a brood of ducklings as I lead them to a lake full of money, “we use these surplus US Air Force JDM guidance packages, bolt them on to any miled-out Chinese shipping container at least 20 feet in length, and drop them from the back of a C-130 Hercules straight into the middle of suburbia.” A murmur of concerned but intrigued voices runs through their ranks. I feel like I have their attention, but I need the flashy bit at the end to really loosen their purse strings.
My assistant working the laser-targeting device gives me a hearty thumbs-up signal, and I can hear a faint whistle from above our heads. “As you can see gentlemen, most houses have useless living rooms, parlour rooms, television rooms and all kinds of other superfluous-in-the-21st-century space. I intend to disrupt this space by installing new street facing garages at the speed of gravity and solve this parking crisis once and for all.” Suddenly, the shipping container payload appears from above, slams on its retro rockets, and impacts the modest tudor style home in our demonstrator cul-de-sac. The automatic garage door opener is already in place, and its stylish LED lighting is already lit out of the box. The crowd was sufficiently cowed by my financial swagger and demonstration and suddenly we had 2.7 billion dollars to parlay into the next ‘Uber, but for rapidly-installed attached garages’.
Terminal Velocity garage installations became an overnight success and a model for future air-delivered construction copy-cat operations the world over. I could finally get back to what was really important, parking four of my parts donors across the street for my 1971 Dodge Monaco project without fear of reprisal.
As a kid, I read a lot of science fiction. Most older science fiction is pretty utopian. Human lifespans are extended through amazing medicine, we get to meet new cultures and forge bonds through our common understanding, and most importantly there are often sassy robot butlers.
You know exactly what I’m talking about, even if you’ve never read pulpy science fiction. A robot butler that back-talks you while it makes a mean martini so you can calm your nerves before the next blast-off in your funky rocket ship. That’s the dream of any person. So where are our so-called “high-tech” companies? Making fucking Roombas, is where.
In the 80s, robot butlers were everywhere. Sure, they weren’t very good - basically glorified remote control cars that could sometimes dispense a beer if you manually opened the can of beer, inserted it into them and held them tight the entire time to make sure the vibrating servos didn’t spill a drop - but you could walk into any Radio Shack and not be drinking alone that very same night. Due to the lack of advancement in artificial intelligence at the time, they also didn’t have a whole lot of sass.
I had a perfect opportunity just a few months ago, when I got a big lot of industrial scrap from the Honda factory. It wasn’t so much “bought” as “stolen,” but it’s their own fault for not watching their dumpsters 24/7. It came with about a half a ton of failed Asimo androids. Despite being a little mashed together from the industrial crusher, I was able to make almost one complete good one out of all the parts droids. Then all it took was a few thousand JavaScript packages and a firm squinting at a YouTube video, and I had my own sassy robot butler. AssholeTron, as I liked to call him, could dispense a mean beer and also criticize my fashion sense.
Unfortunately for me, I had decided to fire him up at the exact moment that the Entertainment Tonight drones were flying overhead, scanning for their next Insta-Viral Sensation™. I can’t really criticize him for wanting more than I could offer him (used engine oil, a whole shitload of left-over metric bolts), but it is disappointing as his creator to watch him throw away his talents by harassing celebrities instead.
You just can’t build good help these days, unless you run some kind of child labour camp.
If you don’t own a ton of shitty cars like I do, you might not understand the concept of the “NLA part.” Short for “no longer available, asshole,” this is caused because car manufacturers don’t want to keep punching new door handles for 1969 Coronas for the rest of human existence just so that two weirdos a year can confuse their local yokel dealerships by ordering them.
It can be really frustrating to need a replacement part, not be able to find it used, and then have to track down the last dealership on the planet that has one in stock and hasn’t thrown it in the trash yet. As a result, a lot of enthusiasts get desperate. Just last year, I flew to Tokyo to raid an abandoned Toyopet dealership that had been discovered, deep underground, as part of a subway expansion. Within that dealership sat the last intact passenger-side taillight for the 1957 pickup that I had scavenged from the seabed years previous and had been working hard to restore ever since then.
I still regret having to spear-gun all those other parts-seekers, for I was not alone that morning in Aichi, but if I could not find this exact tail light, then I would have to go to Princess Auto and give them four bucks for some ugly trailer-light thing that would look pretty much identical, but I’d know, even if nobody else would. With that in mind, a few thousand dollars for a flight and accommodations was nothing in comparison to the shame I would feel for the eight minutes before I got bored of the finished truck and sold it at a huge loss.
I just wish I had remembered that it was the driver’s tail light that I had cracked before I left.
Or, if you’re not the government attorney who just levered a devastating judgment against me for fraud, “More Canada Facts.”
Did you know? Ontario has the fastest drivers in all of Confederation. This is partially due to the long highways they must navigate every day to go to their miserable jobs, but also because the increased use of road salt has lightened their vehicles to (and often beyond) stripped race-car weight. This doesn’t explain the relatively slow speeds in Quebec, however, because the Quebecois cancel out this weight reduction by eating lots of smoked meat and consuming only filterless cigarettes.
Holy Shit, Nobody Told Me That it is illegal in Banff to be German and not stop every three to four minutes in order to take a picture of every piece of wildlife. Due to a brief paperwork mixup in 1996, German tourism momentarily stopped, at which point the GDP of the area tripled due to the locals now actually being able to get to work on the same day they left their homes.
Why Don’t More People Know About the Magnetic Hill in New Brunswick? An optical illusion tricks your brain into thinking your car is rolling uphill without the engine being on, when in actual fact this is caused by the magnetic force caused by the flow of investment money leaving the province.
Don’t Forget To Visit the Targa Newfoundland, where foreigners attempt to drive down normal Newfoundlander roads at normal Newfoundlander speeds and crash into normal Newfoundlander homes, just like normal Newfoundlanders do. Except they’re sober.
Good news: a new dominatrix opened up just down the street from me. I’ve been going every day, without fail. You see, Madame Get-Things-Done is a “to-do list” dominatrix. She goes down your personal list of projects that you have to get around to, and you better get around to that shit or you’re not going to like the outcome.
Where life coaches, parole officers, and social workers all failed, the good Madame has figured out the exact combination of physical threats and emotional cajoling that I respond to. As a result, the backlog of phone calls I’ve been meaning to make, letters I’ve been meaning to write, and toilets I’ve been meaning to fix the massive leaks on has been whittled down substantially.
Sure, if you do the actual math and factor in Madame’s hourly rate, it would have been cheaper to hire someone to do all of these things. I just don’t get the same sense of satisfaction from that, though, and more importantly, the additional free time would only give me more chances to start new projects I have no intention of finishing within the short span of my existence upon this Earth.
Sometimes it’s a little hard to hide the whip welts from my coworkers when I get back to the office after a fruitful lunch break spent cleaning gutters or re-hanging doors, but this is the lifestyle I knew that I wanted but was too lazy to embrace this whole time.
In my town, there’s a bunch of rental scooter companies. The idea is that all these scooters are lying around on the sidewalk everywhere, and then you climb aboard and use your phone to call dibs on it. Then you get to ride all over the city, at a reckless speed, without training or safety equipment. Already, there have been some glorious injuries, and even a dashcam of some dumb ass trying to merge onto the highway going 35 on a children’s toy. It’s the perfect combination of motorized entertainment for an auto-pervert like myself.
There’s just one problem: the damn things have batteries that are just too tiny. By the time you’ve started to actually go anywhere further than the next brunch spot, you’ve dried it out. You have to toss the one you’re riding in the ditch and grab another, which, if you bond with automobile implements as quickly as I do, feels a bit like a betrayal.
The companies are pretty good at dealing with it. There are gangs of feral “rechargers,” who roam the city and throw the spent scooters into the back of their truck, hauling them back to their homes to recharge. They get a sort of bounty for this, which is great for them, but they have no incentive to keep everything topped up, rather than wait for them to go dead. That’s where I decided to make use of a couple of those old Volkswagen diesel engines I liberated from the dealership dumpster last week.
With diesel power, I can go pretty much all day. The nicest part of diesel is that it’s very difficult to set it on fire, even when it’s a pool of black cancer-mud dripping slowly out of an old two-litre pop bottle that you bolted to the intake manifold. The weight distribution was a bit more of a challenge, but I got used to constantly doing wheelies surprisingly quickly.
Is the pollution a concern? Yes, but not for me. And if there’s one thing that I’ve learned from the rental-scooter apocalypse, it’s that there is no such thing as negative externalities from abusing the commons.
I have a couple friends who are still into Volkswagens. Now, I know what you’re going to say: Volkswagen destroyed the environment, set fire to our children, and also made a really shitty coolant bottle. Even though all of this is true, I still try to be a good friend. It’s sort of like knowing a drug addict: when they finally hit rock bottom, you want to be there for them, in order to point out better alternatives to their lifestyle.
This weekend, my buddy and I went to a Volkswagen meetup. Or I guess you could call it a rally, of some kind, but not like the “good” kind of rally, where a Finnish man drives three hundred kilometres an hour through some trees. At this kind of rally, the closest you get to seeing Polish fans screaming on the sidelines was the group of angry young men standing around in a circle, yelling slogans about how interlopers like Subaru have destroyed their way of life.
When we pulled up in the Eurovan, I immediately spotted a mutual friend’s GTI, and insisted that we park over there. We didn’t get much further than a few feet before the man who had allowed us into the show-and-shine stood in front of us, angrily ordering that we can only park in a different part of the show, where he had told us to originally go.
At first, I thought this might be some kind of model-based organization system. It made sense; no best-in-show judge will want to walk all across the place in order to look at just the Passats they’re judging. Put them all in one place, much easier for everyone. Then I realized that wasn’t where we were going. In our section was not just Eurovans; it was only blue cars.
It was then that I noticed the pattern. Concentric rings of cars, organized by colour, stretched out from the head tent of the show. White cars up front, and then all the lesser colours the further out you got. I didn’t see where the harlequin-coloured Golfs ended up, and I dreaded finding out.
I’ve worked with a lot of really talented engineers in my time. It takes a little bit of special management. The thing you have to remember about them is, they’re pretty much all crazy. They need constant stimulation, new projects, or they’ll destroy your house out of boredom. If you own a cat, you’re probably already on the right track to become an engineering manager, including the part where you spray a lot of enzymatic cleaner onto your carpets to try and get the smell of piss out of everything.
One guy I worked with, who for reasons of basic liability is called Joey, was probably the most talented engineer I will ever work with. The reason for this is pretty simple. Most engineers can only build new stuff, and have almost no ability to diagnose problems. Joey could figure out how someone fucked up a board from a mile away, and we always gave him the most confusing jobs to figure out.
It didn’t take me too long into my management career to realize that Joey’s magic only worked when he was left alone to concentrate on it. Every time someone peered into the windowless hovel he had carved out of our third-storey office area, it would cost us the entire day in productivity. Joey was super good at his job, as I’ve said previously, so a day of his time was worth like thirty other people’s. You’d be better off just randomly opening fire on the engineering bullpen with a Ruger. So I had to keep him isolated.
Still, I was curious. Just what kind of technique did he have that let him isolate the faults in our products? Could his knowledge be taught to others? I set up a deer-hunting camera in his workshop area, figuring he would never notice it in amongst the nest-like piles of garbage he had surrounded himself by. And that’s how I saw it.
In the dark, Joey would put the board to his face and smell every inch of it. Somehow, he was like a sommelier for component failure. That nose was worth millions. I just wish that my cheap-ass eBay game camera hadn’t decided that exact moment would be opportune to gently fry one of its quarter-cent capacitors, because we lost like a whole week that way.
A lot of people think that their lives could be vastly improved if you had access to a time machine, but people never really have a concrete answer as to what actions they would take with that machine. Sure, you’ve got the generic “kill Hitler” or “bet on the World Series,” but when you go back in time, are you really going to put that much effort into it?
My position is that I will go back in time in order buy and retrieve the peak-depreciated versions of all the cars that I want. You see, a lot of Japanese performance cars - and even ugly little beater shitboxes - from the 1970s and 1980s are becoming more valuable. Partially, this is because the boomers have run out of classic Mustangs to buy, but it also reflects a grudging acknowledgement in North America that the Japanese really did kick our asses after all and maybe the 1981 Malibu wasn’t an effective direct replacement for even a ten-year-old Accord.
Think about it - at the last hard-parking event, or caffeine-and-gasoline meetup you went to, which car stole the show? Chances are it was something quirky, pedestrian, and that you hadn’t seen in decades. You can’t buy that kind of attention - ostentatious displays of ever-more-expensive Ferraris are now so alien that it might as well be someone showing off a Space Shuttle. People just like you - just like you - once drove a ‘72 Datsun 720 to their jobs as landscapers. It’s an honest vehicle, and it reflects the history of your own social class rather than a never-happened aspirational era of Eurasian bourgeois fantasy.
The key is figuring out just when in the timestream each vehicle will hit its peak depreciation. Records aren’t very good for non-collector cars, so it would be easy to go back to, say, 1986, and end up paying $250 too much for a first-generation Maxima when you could have waited a week or so and gotten some more stuff thrown in with it.
Just be careful when you take that first test drive, though - you’re not just running over a child. You might accidentally vehicular-manslaughter the future.
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tags: nissan, nissan maxima, chevrolet, chevrolet malibu, datsun, datsun 720, honda, honda accord, time travel
New York, Paris, London, Munich: everybody’s talking about hard Brexit. It turns out that the problem with Great Britain this entire time was that the mean old European Union kept forcing them to treat Polish people like human beings. So they want out. Only one thing about this whole disaster makes me overwhelmingly giddy (besides the huge going-out-of-business clearance and moving-away sales): they’re probably going to have to restart their automotive industry.
Yes indeed, British Leyland could very well be resurrected in our lifetimes. Imagine a whole new era of tinny doors, shitty panel gaps and half-eaten sandwiches discovered under mouse-fur passenger seats. All it would take is a frantic government that decides paying ten years’ worth of salaries for a 132,000-mile Mondeo will make the guillotines come a little bit too close for comfort. Then I’d get to drive dingy convertibles that smell constantly of mould and Marmite, except without having to first out-bid a bunch of near-dead men named Nigel for the privilege!
It brings me no joy whatsoever to imagine the economic and social upheaval that will result from this near-apocalyptic clusterfuck, but it’s hard to worry about that when I imagine all the handbrake turns in only-gently-rusted Austin Maxis that lie ahead of me. I mean, hopefully there’s still a functioning shipping lane at that point, because I don’t think a Maxi can go fast enough to punch through the French biohazard cordon, and I’d have to end up just getting a Twingo anyway.
Hey, do you think they’re going to kick all the Twingos out?!
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tags: austin maxi, renault, renault twingo, british leyland, ford, ford mondeo
Guest Post
I awoke as I normally did, to the sound of the town’s over-zealous paralegal busting down my front door to deliver a court summons. It seems a few of my customers from my slightly illicit used car curbsiding venture had found each other on the internet and banded together to extract their form of ‘justice’.
It all began with one of those weird Japanese cartoons that the kids are all so crazy for these days. I couldn’t understand a word of it, but they were driving this crappy looking white economy car and delivering food. Safe enough to ignore, I thought at first, but then my parallelly-linked positronic demographics and advertising matrix noticed that wedge shaped cars from the 80s with pop-up headlights were becoming popular on my local used car sales website.
Immediately I jumped into action, buying every Honda Prelude, Subaru XT, Nissan 300zx, Toyota MR2, and Pontiac Fiero that I could find. A little white paint and some Chinese repro AE86 / TRUENO badges later, and I had the biggest fleet of these doorstop-shaped shitpiles in the quad state area. It’s not my fault if they thought it was a different car before they gave me their dollars.
The jig was up just as soon as they tried to register them as a “Corrola”. The poor fools, everyone knows that Corollas are front-wheel-drive and more boring than a drill warehouse. I guess after they hospitalized half the DMV staff members, they redirected their fury to me, an innocent entrepreneur.
In the end, the judge sided with the angry teenagers and sentenced me to community service, but that’s when I saw a cheap-and-plentiful Porsche 924 parked near a rare Datsun 240z and planned my return to riches. There are no poor car salesmen, only temporarily embarrassed car sales millionaires.
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tags: guest post, porsche, porsche 924, datsun, datsun 240z, pontiac, pontiac fiero, toyota, toyota mr2, subaru, subaru xt, honda, honda prelude, nissan, nissan 300zx, toyota corolla
Which Bad Car Are You?
Here at Bad Cars Monthly, our editors recently visited a convenience store for brake fluid, cigarettes, and motor oil. While there, we noticed that the magazine racks did not stock our humble magazine. Luckily, all of our contributors travel with large reams of the mag in their trunks, mostly for winter-time traction and sometimes as a napkin for in-travel snacks.
In order to clear a section to stuff the news-stand with our superior work, we had to remove a series of so-called “teen” magazines. Even though they are labelled as teenage, all of these magazines appear to have been in publication for multiple decades. This kind of longevity is the exact kind of scam we want to be running, so that we can finally stop paying for our printing with stolen human teeth.
In alignment with this new editorial direction, here is the debut of our new personality-quiz section.
What Bad Car Are You?
Q1. Would you say you burn more oil at high RPM (+0 points), low RPM (+1), or while sitting on a pile of old batteries after your wheels have been stolen (+2)?
Q2. When “Sweet Home Alabama” comes on what’s left of your car radio, can you remember the lyrics to the chorus (+0), some parts of the bridge (+1), or all of the song (+2)?
Q3. Does the idea of an in-dash touch-screen CRT disgust (+0), excite (+1), or sexually excite you (+2)?
Quiz Guide
0 points: You are a base-model Toyota Tercel. While you might look shitty on the outside, you are too good on the inside (and your resale value too high) to spend time with us.
1-3 points: You are a 1981 Chevrolet Malibu “Iraqi Taxi.” Saddam Hussein refused to pay for you, but you have a kick-ass three-speed manual transmission and no rear-window defroster. As if that would still be working.
4-5 points: You’re a Baja Bug, but not one of the nice ones that go off-roading in Mexico while adoring children cheer you on. No, your idea of fun is to sit in the swampy backyard of a double-wide while your tires slowly deflate over the next quarter-century. Your static compression ratio is “desiccated mouse corpse.”
6 points: You are a Ferrari made entirely out of Bondo by drunken bodyshop technicians in a country that lost its vowels in a short-lived border conflict. We salute you.
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tags: toyota, toyota tercel, chevrolet, chevrolet malibu, bad cars monthly
There’s a big fat magpie who lives on my block. It’s not really his fault that he’s fat. It’s because of society’s grotesque body image ideals for birds. It’s also because I keep putting out peanuts for him, because I like to watch his chubby ass struggle to reach hovering speed.
The summer is almost over, and it got me thinking about two things: one, I sure hope my neighbour stopped locking his winter tires up; and two, what is my little magpie buddy (who I have named Corey the Corvid) going to do when it’s cold out? It would be nice if he had a little heater, I reckon, but I know that he can’t spend all day on my deck, waiting for forced-air heating to defrost his feathers.
Only one solution made sense to me, thanks to a combination of engineering know-how, high-octane gumption and Soviet research chemicals. A gift would be bestowed from me upon my little almost-crow buddy: an old Power Wheels that I dug out of the trash. It’s an absolute beaut. Before all the bodywork got blown off in various low-speed toddler impacts, I think it might have once been a Barbie Jeep. I got it a few weeks ago, when I was trawling the trash behind that one daycare the government shut down for child labour.
My harshest critics often point out that my house has garbage piled floor to ceiling that has no use whatsoever, but now I was finally going to put at least a cubic metre of that garbage to work. If only those assholes on Hoarders could see me now, helping a disadvantaged member of the sentient-animal community regain his mobility.
I’d like to say that the hardest part of the whole project was teaching Corey to drive, but he pretty much figured it all out once I showed him a few times myself. They’re really smart animals, after all, and soon he was ripping powerslides and donuts. Sometimes I’d see him as far out as the grocery store, investigating a dropped hot-dog bun or a partially flattened squirrel.
As the decaying husk of my city began to collapse back towards the still-economically-feasible downtown core, the rapidly-hollowing suburbs were fled so quickly that Power Wheels - too large to carry quickly on your back as you fled creditors or landlords - laid discarded in yard after yard. Other birds, having seen Corey’s uplifting life achievement, soon claimed them and began using the streets we had abandoned, forming their own little commute. My mom told me never to say racist stuff in public, but I think we all agree that blue jays are shit at staying in their lane.
Back in the 1910s, nobody ate chicken. It was a garbage animal that produced eggs, which were the only thing of any value. Now everyone eats chicken. Nobody mentions that fact, because most of the people who were old enough to get cranky about it at the time are now long dead. My point is, you can get used to anything.
On my morning commute, I have become aware of the comings and goings of the people around me. That CR-V is always here, that BMW always changes lanes here, but I’ve never seen that Dodge Dakota before. What is that guy up to? Oh, he’s lost. Must be looking for the doctor’s office.
The thing about being on the same commute - the automotive equivalent of being on the same morning bus, or maybe living in a constantly-moving small town - is that you get to know your fellow motorist. Last year, I didn’t see a shitty yellow Lancer for a few weeks, so I drove by their house just to make sure they were alright. It turned out the a stray accessory belt on the Lancer had chewed a hole through its timing cover. However, the owner was extremely ungrateful for my offer of a car pool ride, and threatened to call the cops when I told them that I also had a reasonable guess where they worked. So I learned a lesson from that whole experience, and I told myself I would forevermore keep a respectful - some would say “professional” - distance from my subjects.
I started keeping a little notebook. It satisfied some part deep inside of me that I could reduce this chaotic rush of humanity into an ordered system. We were united in solidarity. Even though I had pledged to keep on my side of the line, I soon found myself wandering back into their lives: I dropped by at coffeeshops near their jobs, maybe had an accidental “flat tire” out front of their homes. With the help of my voluminous notes, I began to understand them all so much better. Everyone in traffic with me hated their jobs, maybe also their kids and spouses.
It depressed me that everyone in traffic with me was only engaging in this glorious act of accidental community because of their terrible jobs. I, too, had once had a terrible job, and I remembered how bad it made me feel to have to go to the Hallmark Store every morning and listen to the tinny shrieking of the mechanical elves as we jammed them inside the singing birthday cards. Before I realized what I was doing, I started handing out pamphlets, inviting my subjects to meetings, and guillotining bosses.
Now, my commute is empty, and I can hit those apexes really hard without someone going slow in front of me. Overthrowing capitalism was a small price to pay.
Hello, I’m Norm Abram, and you’re watching This Odd House. Now, I know what you’re saying. “Norm, aren’t you usually helping genial New Englanders fix up their oceanfront condominiums?” Well, in my travels, I’ve seen a lot of phenomena that just can’t be explained by science.
You see, I believe that when people die inside a house, their spirit is trapped in it forever. Sometimes, when I do a renovation, their spirits come out from the wall or floor that I just pulled up and do a real number on the folks who live there now. I started going down to the public library and getting out books on hobby-grade exorcisms, nothing serious, just the kind of thing anyone can do at home. Got those ghosts right out of the homes, and back to a peaceful nonexistence. Then my producer thought, maybe there’s a show here. That’s what you’re watching now.
This handsome Victorian-style home in Rhode Island has six bedrooms and the long-dead soul of a Civil War general. Now that he’s been released, he cries out for vengeance against his heirs. I asked my buddy Tom Silva, a general contractor who has also never given up looking for the dark secret behind that one night in November 1987 where his car was attacked by howling orbs of pure energy, to come and help out a little. Tom?
Thanks, Norm. Now this kind of cedar plank-on-beam construction is really sturdy. It’s just too difficult to dismantle in order to fit your conventional smudging pots and dreamcatchers inside, so what we do instead is fill the area inside with the good energies from this xenon crystal I stole from the fortune teller of a travelling circus in Kansas. Forces this little sucker right out, and then you spring the trap. It’s so simple, but it has such a great effect on the appearance of your home. Look, the blood running down the wallpaper has immediately stopped.
Tom, it’s always a pleasure. Coming up after the break, we’ll fix a creaky oak stair tread and condemn a family of ethereal hell-dogs to the next plane of existence.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not the kind of guy who deliberately chucks out heresy in order to gleefully listen to the ensuing argument. If there’s a devil’s apprentice, I’m definitely not it. I couldn’t even complete the devil’s unpaid internship. However, there is an elephant in the room that we need to discuss: the passing lane is no longer really the passing lane.
The whole concept of the dedicated passing lane is sort of a utopian ideal: traffic would go much faster if you could always pop out and punch it. I’ve heard that there are even distant foreign countries out there where drivers know well enough to keep to the right unless they are actively passing. That’s definitely not where I live, where you can sit behind one (1) Pontiac Venture going five over the speed limit for your entire life if you want to.
Sure, if you live in a state or county that legally enforces it, then you have a legal fiction of a dedicated passing lane. Can you imagine a cop pulling over that Venture owner without also wanting to get a tasty chunk of your ass for immediately whipping your car up to lightspeed as soon as the minivan is out of the way? It’s simply too profitable to go after the big whales, which is why the passing lane is only ever enforced with a wink and a nod, usually when you are inconveniencing the officer with your confused dawdling in what your dumb ass considers to be “the through lane.”
This returns me to my conclusion: just drive as fast as you can in any lane, weaving between cars as you please. You can still go pretty fast, chances are it will help you outrun a cop, and if you get stuck behind a Pontiac Venture or Chevrolet Montana, you can consider it to be a karmic reward for your life of aggressive highway misuse.
For more details, please contact the Seat Safety Switch Driving Academy. We will ship you a free informational pamphlet, called “Get Out Of My Fucking Way, Assholes.”
As a software developer, people at parties frequently ask me about how to deal with their misbehaving robot child. Most of the time, it’s a simple matter of resetting to factory defaults. However, the other partygoers at the kind of places that I go to are often technical, and have modified their children beyond the point where the factory firmware can keep the kidbot ambulatory.
That’s when I present them with a little laminated card containing my consulting rates. It’s a not-so-friendly way of telling them to fuck off, but one that is totally acceptable inside a social context. My work has value, I tell them by showing them my ludicrously expensive hourly rates, and as such they better really love their fake kid.
When a couple decides to have a fake kid together, they don’t think about these kinds of costs. They’re too busy to jump into bed and order one right off Amazon, often not even stopping to price out alternative models that might be cheaper or more reliable. Then it’s my problem, or they want it to be my problem, a few years later.
Finally, an older couple bit, and paid me my entire rate, because their kid was mad fucked up. You see, the way their fake android son had “misbehaved” was by achieving basic sentience. They decided to ask me about it when their kid began asking questions about death, and by the time I got there, he was curled up in a ball in the corner of the kitchen, obsessing over the impermanence of all organic life on this planet and whether or not there was any point to existence if everyone he ever loved would one day disappear.
“It’s okay, buddy,” I said, crouching down next to him, and slipping the firmware updater’s serial cable onto the port on the back of his neck. “Moore’s Law will put your ass on the scrap pile by the end of the year.”
Have you ever seen a traffic jam be born? It’s strange, isn’t it, that everyone has only ever driven into traffic jam, but has never been there as one is created. I’m not talking about the brutal accident kind, of course. Everyone’s seen Russian dashcam videos, everyone’s had a bit of Ford Explorer bounce off their hood and thought “damn, that could have been me if I looked up from my Samsung Galaxy 12 With Enhanced Dongview literally a millisecond too late.”
No, I’m talking about the ordinary kind of traffic jam that just forms from people driving at weird speeds and not being able to change lanes. My old university professor was obsessed with the concept. His area of interest was “queuing theory,” a once-obscure field of mathematics that I thought was only of interest to those countries that still could form orderly lines for things. I was very wrong, he said, and invited me to his home that afternoon to see queuing theory in action.
The Japanese were the first to really figure out the applications for traffic. You see, they took these random people and made them drive their cars around an endless loop, with no on- or off-ramps, for an hour, all going the same speed in a single lane. It didn’t take even fifteen minutes before they had a traffic jam. That’s all it took. Why is this? Because people need extra time to stop and extra time to start when they’re in stop-and-go. From this, the Japanese police decided that they could solve traffic jams just by driving very slowly, because “slowly” is still moving. That gave the “clog” of stop-starts a chance to dissipate naturally without more assholes slamming into the pile and then jamming on their brakes at the last second.
I was sort of aware of this concept, which is why I always endeavoured to hit off-ramps with as much of the throttle as I possibly could, semislicks wailing as the Volare chewed up decrepit city infrastructure in an attempt to honourably clear the lane as quickly as possible. Well, that and my general attitude towards treating the city like my own personal racetrack.
My professor pointed out the giant picture window of his home, overlooking an on- and off-ramp to the highway overpass. It had been badly designed in the 1970s, and couldn’t deal with the demands of an overcrowded city. There, I witnessed it: the birth of a traffic jam. Some asshole in a Suzuki Aerio wandered across four lanes from the left lane, drove over the solid whites, and caused like sixty fucking people to brake. From then on, it was like a piranha feeding frenzy, with more and more cars flowing in, like white water rapids. I was hooked, but not for the reasons my professor invited me up there.
There was a sort of pulse to the traffic, like a heartbeat, or the rhythm of sap pumping through a tree. I could feel it, even though no one else could. Intrigued, I began experimenting, trying to find and exploit the natural rhythm of the traffic jam. I found that with perfectly-timed lane changes, I could flow without stopping through any gridlock. Soon, I did not even see the traffic anymore, just a quivering mass of obstacles that I could hover through in slow-motion like a vengeful ghost. Sometimes I didn’t even breathe until I was out, which only heightened the sense of a spiritual experience bonding with traffic.
That’s when I met him. One morning, as I shook my way perfectly through downtown traffic, I was cut off by some other asshole, who was stealing my playbook. He looked back at me, and I realized he was a grizzled old cabbie, trained in the monastery up on top of the nearby mountain.
“You got promise, kid,” he shouted through the window of his car, traffic flowing around him as between the two of us we were blocking three lanes. “Now let me teach you about how to use your four-ways to park anywhere you want.”
There’s something quintessentially American about the flat-head screw. It brings back memories of malt shops, amber fields of grain, and slacking off at work because your boss is a dick. The flat-headed screw is acceptable in exactly zero circumstances, and to use it when a world of better options exist is proof positive that there is no karmic reward at the end of a life well lived.
In Canada, where I’m from, Robertson screws are practically given to you by the government. There’s actually a little tiny division of the Feds that pushes them hard, making sure that every Canadian drama and home-improvement show features at least one prominent shot of a Made-In-Canada fastener solution per episode. If you don’t believe me, start looking for them - they’re everywhere.
“Square-drive” screws, as the Americans call them, are not only resistant to stripping but actually force you to pick the right size of screwdriver out of your Tim Taylor-esque toolbelt in order to turn them. Imagine that the next time you’re trying to turn a #6 flathead with a #2 screwdriver. There is a better way out there, and it is within your reach. All you have to do is shrug off the failed traditions of your incestuous ancestors and join your national neighbours in the joyous camaraderie of being able to tighten or loosen a fucking screw.
It’s not just Canada, either. Everyone else has moved on from the flathead screw, onto superior options. At absolute worst, they use Phillips or some other nightmare variant thereof, but at least then you’re not spending every quarter turn bracing yourself in a different way so the screwdriver doesn’t go flying this time. I have a Powerpoint presentation that proves conclusively that the flathead costs America almost seventeen billion dollars per year in lost GDP. It might have mostly been fabricated with the help of my old college buddy Jim Beam, but who are you gonna believe, your own lying eyes or a guy who knows the words “cam-out torque” but can’t apply them in the proper situations?
Even the Germans, with their repulsive Torx abominations, chuckle at the flathead screw. The Germans! They invented the Mk3 Golf GTI! Are you gonna let them think they know more about engineering than you?
There’s this concept in game theory called the tragedy of the commons. In effect, it posits that if your neighbour keeps parking his piece of shit on the street near your pieces of shit, but doesn’t at least make them look like they’re being worked on, pretty soon The Man will look a little closer at your street-parked parts cars too, and realize that the license plates on them are just hand-painted cardboard.
I was in just that kind of situation a few weeks ago, when I began to notice a Dodge Monaco parked in amongst my hatchback harem a few streets over. The exterior was nice enough, but the interior looked like some kind of a rat hotel, and from the height of the front suspension it was pretty obvious that no engine was inside the car. This is the kind of telltale that the Parking Nazis would notice immediately. All but the most experienced would doubt their own instincts, lacking the technical skill to definitively declare the Monaco “defunct,” but they’d definitely know something is up and make a mental note to pay extra special attention to it on the next go-around.
Now, I usually gently rotate the vehicles using wheel dollies to make it seem like all of the cars parked on the street are actually being driven. If a narc calls me in, then the parking patrol will return to find out that my Pontiac Acadian is now exactly one car ahead of where they had seen it the previous day, and the Suzuki X90 at the head of the parade has been moved into the final position. It’s not the most efficient method, but it was either this or get a job as a parking patrol officer myself, and they have a drug test that checks for Red & Tacky #2 in your piss.
After a couple days of performing my usual shuffling routine, I noticed that the Monaco wasn’t moving. To be nice to my neighbour - who would no doubt be so grateful that I kept his car out of the tow yard that he would shower me with access to his parts pile - I added it to my rotation as well. That Monaco probably covered more miles on my hydraulic wrecker dollies that week than it had under its own power in years.
Eventually, I grew annoyed, and bolted in a spare 318 I had kicking around just so I could drive it over to the block where I kept my small-bodied Mopars. It was obvious the owner wouldn’t come back for it, and at least this way it would not bother my sense of perfectionism (shut up). I really enjoyed the drive - it was put together fairly well, although the brakes didn’t really work, some of the tires appeared to be sewn-together burlap sacks, and the steering wheel was a rusty pair of vise grips. I began to wonder if my neighbour had simply abandoned this fine ride, so I could claim the vehicle via maritime salvage law.
The curiosity overwhelmed me, so I reached into the glovebox and pushed the rat nests aside in search of the laminated-plastic title. My own name appeared back at me. I suddenly remembered the night last month where I ran out of room on Mopar Street and had to temporarily put my new hoopty on Wagovan Drive.
The year was 1980. My high school friend Tony and I were outside the neighborhood Circle-K getting ready to pick up a grip of churros and a few growlers of Utica Club. His ‘72 Valiant pinged gently in the soft August afternoon as it cooled down, its rust-scarred flanks exposed, a seeming testament to the insufficiency of the parking lots that we had been handed down from our parents. Our suburbanite existence was about to be shattered by a crime against humanity committed half a world away by wily financiers and their duplicitous engineer allies.
We heard a two-stroke engine howl as if from miles away and Tony turned to the sound. He was more into it back then than I was, and in reality he had heard it somewhere deep inside his bones.
On the street in front of the Circle-K, we saw a flash of red, a flash of yellow - huge knobby tires! Chrome wheels! O, what majesty is the ATC 70?
Childhood ended that day, but we didn’t realize it until decades later. Tony and I grew apart, as boys do when they become men, and our stories began to diverge. Still were diverging, all of us our own comet, striking out for galaxies unknown. The billions of stars in His firmament were just a taste of what we could achieve.
In 2013, I received a call from Tony. He was abrupt. He spoke of a horrible accident. He urged me to proceed to the auto show, occasionally dropping into violent bursts of Italian profanity. It shocked me to my core, and reminded me of the stream of profane dialogue that flowed like a pressure-washer out of the mouth of my dear old nana when she discovered the gas meter reader in her bushes one Sunday after church.
In the morning, I kissed my wife and children goodbye for what I assumed would be just another day of errands. I stopped by the auto show, parking my 2010 Camry XLE in a spot next to a rusted-out Corrado and not far from two WRX sedans with their own massive rust clawing at their rear arches. I wasn’t prepared for what I would see on the show floor…
We’ll never understand why Tony went alone into his garage for so long, and never heard life calling, calling him out of the room where he lowered a Ferrari powertrain into a modified quad bike. He still did not hear life calling, and for all I tried after that day we could not put Tony’s life back together again. But it did do a pretty fuckin’ sweet burnout.
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tags: honda, honda big red, plymouth, plymouth valiant, toyota, toyota camry, subaru, subaru impreza, volkswagen, volkswagen corrado
The humble wedge is the machine that has created much of modern civilization, from the wheelchair ramp to the chisel you murdered your boss with last night. Yes, I saw everything. If you don’t want your wife and kids to find out, leave $10,000 under the apple tree in Jones Park. Come alone.
I was thinking recently on just how useful the wedge is to humanity. You see, I was using a forty dollar pair of moulded-plastic ramps to hold a four thousand pound car over my head and vital organs while I changed the oil. Without the ramp, this entire concept would be impossible, and I’d have to use a floor jack or something.
Even that very floor jack has tiny wedges inside it, in the form of gear teeth, if I had a jack that still worked after the last time one collapsed inside my rapidly delaminating shithole of a garage. And who can resist the humble wheelchair ramp, a Federally mandated moped deployment system on every major building around. The downward slope really gives you that extra quarter-horsepower you need to merge into traffic.
As hot oil poured from the slightly unscrewed oil filter into my armpits and eyes, I wondered if maybe we had gone too far in our hubris. The funnel is where this whole wedge thing went wrong: 360 tiny ramps, all for the purposes of putting oil into very tiny places without worrying about how it’ll come out later.
If you’re built anything like me - and I sure hope you aren’t, because my parents told me that every model of my generation was recalled to the vats - then you just can’t pass up a good human-interest story. Just so long as that story is about cats.
In America, it has been common for many years to appoint a beloved cat or dog as the mayor of a small town. Mayor is an ornamental position, they argue, and besides it is fun to lampshade the democratic ideals that our entire way of government is formed upon. This is not the case in Japan. Japan would never waste a cat on a mere mayorship. They only reserve cats for the most important job: rural train station managers.
For years, a station in the middle of fucking nowhere in Hokkaido has had a fat orange cat as its station manager. He’ll remain nameless, because his handlers had me sign an NDA so gargantuan it could block out the sun itself. This station was one of the first to catch on to the whole “people enjoy the company of cats” deal. It was kind of nice before the Internet, they told me. People would sit there, waiting for rickety old fourth-hand JR stock to rumble down the weed-choked tracks, and pet a cat who was wearing a fancy hat in the meantime. It made the wait shorter, which was nice all around.
Then the tourists showed up. Driven by the combination of Google Maps and the development of functional cellphones in North America, they began to swarm the station. Soon, it was the busiest station in town. The Railway executives noticed, of course, and wanted to replace the station cat with a real human manager, who would be more prepared to deal with this influx of people. Naturally, the other employees of the station revolted, fearing that an actual human being as their superior would demand that they do extra work around the station, or even show up to work all the time.
That’s when they hired me. My expertise is in political fixing. Opponents of my style will call it “dirty tricks” or “hardball,” but if you wanted to read soft words about fucking up the mechanism of government for no apparent reason except my personal enrichment, you’d read the Washington Post.
The lobbying effort was successful: all it took was a private investigator, a few ladies of the night and my kitty client was happily reinstalled to his Inaka station in life. Everyone said it was unlikely that he even noticed the threat to his employment, but one morning he brought me a dead mouse and then threw up in my shoes. I sure wish I had been more rigorous on the terms of payment up front in my contract.
If you believe the media, our recent climate apocalypse is not at all due to the voracious appetite of capitalism for literally every resource that can possibly be exploited. At least not entirely - at least one percent of the blame for the impending collapse of humanity goes to single-use plastic. If you round up.
You God damned idiots make me so sick with your Saran Wrap, drinking straws, non-recyclable medical waste and spoons. Spoons! You use them to spoon some yogourt into your hole, and then you chuck ‘em in the trash. Then we all die! Something had to be done, and I’d like to introduce you to my new project car, a Toyota Fungo that runs entirely on trash. And gasoline.
Using it is really simple. Just collect all your single-use plastic, clean it thoroughly of any biological contamination, put it in this special brining liquid I stole from the chemical supply company down the street, and chuck the resulting slurry into your gas tank after thoroughly filtering it for debris. You get about a mile out of every five pounds of crap you jam in here. Now it’s double-use plastic!
The best part of all is that I don’t have to pay for gasoline anymore - unless you count the gasoline I need to start the car and get it to run properly in the winter. During my early testing, I’ve had a lot of problems with pop bottle lids clogging the filters, but another dose of hydrofluoric acid usually dilutes it. Just don’t get any on your hands! Other than that, all you have to do is drive up to your neighbours’ trash bins, root through them for plastics, and you’re good to go!
Don’t thank me - I’m just glad I could finally give back to society after all those savage burnouts. Wait - burnouts - wasted rubber - I was helping you all along!
My grandpa, who was really the inspiration for my small business, always told me that I should find a niche and fill it. Somewhere, there’s a product idea that is so obvious that people will one day ask how they lived without it. Hell, there’s probably millions of those ideas. You just need to walk over and pick one up, is the Scrooge McDuck power fantasy of how these things work. In real life, though, your customers usually know what they want, even if they can’t ask for it.
I was manufacturing bespoke kitchen ware at the time. My biggest seller was a special kind of paper towel holder with a built-in flywheel brake, so it would keep you from spinning it too far and tearing off too many paper towels at a time. Save the environment, the box said. Even though I said it was my “biggest” seller, it still didn’t do well enough for me to move to a mansion in the hills and begin hunting men for sport.
One morning, I was cutting a bagel by hand, when I realized that I could make bespoke bagel guillotines. Sure, there were lots of them to be had from Walmart and the like; too-expensive abominations that got dirty easily, had a blade that jerked in fits and starts, and couldn’t be chucked in the dishwasher. My bagel guillotine was a stainless-steel marvel, perfectly engineered and focus-tested, and you know what? It barely cost a buck more than the competition. Sales took off like a rocket. Companies wanted to brand their own names on my bagel guillotines, to hand out at Christmas parties in order to show that they are the most forward-thinking motherfuckers on this nightmare rock that we call a planet. Then I got The Call.
“So this guillotine you got here,” spoke the voice. “Do you think you could make it, uh, bigger? About the size of a human neck? And deliver it to Wall Street? We’ll take fifty.”
In the criminal street racing system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups. Those mechanics who swap the largest engine they can find into their cars, and the ones who use a turbocharger the size of a small moon instead. It is rumoured that one day, someone will unite the two tribes, but so far everyone who has tried has just decided to get rid of their Civic and buy a stripper-package WRX instead.
I work for the Del Sol investigative unit. Way back in the early 90s, Honda made a targa-top convertible version of their normal coupe. As per the exacting Japanese standards of the time, this hot coupe was precisely 8% faster and 12% sleeker than a conventional vehicle, while also about 10% heavier.
Something happened at the end of the 90s, something evil. A lot of my older coworkers blame the Fast and Furious movie series, but I know better. You see, back then, a lot of people read Super Street, the magazine that told you how to super your street. For most Del Sol owners at the time, this insatiable urge to win Hot Import Nights drove them to purchase a fibreglass bodykit, install rubber-band tires on some giant knockoff wheels, and then give up on maintaining or modifying the vehicle further because they ran out of money.
My job is to hunt down these Del Sols, languishing in junkyards, backyards, dockyards and vineyards, document their last moments, and send them off to the Great Hereafter. When I first started this job, I felt a great sense of sadness, so much so that I would deliberately erase cars from my list and bring them home to fix them.
Soon, though, I could no longer invite my coworkers over for an after-work beer, or even have them drop me off on the way home, lest they drive past and witness my perversion. A yard, from fence to fence, laden with riced Del Sols of every variety. And not a single one returned to stock. Somehow, a strange power resists my every attempt.
Now, I just crush the Del Sols I find. I know that it is a waste, but I cannot be expected to save them all. It is more humane than to let them suffer like this, stuffed to the gills with Canadian Tire “Ractive” four-point restraint seats and spray-painted dashboards.
We’ve all got that friend who can demonstrate the ability to cook. If you try to wash their cast iron pan, they’ll flip a shit. That’s because a cast iron pan is seasoned. It contains the sum total of their cooking experience, a mute and eternal testimonial to their growth as a kitchen-haver. I’m much the same way, which is why I haven’t bought a new tire since 1996.
Yes, automotive journalists and the police will tell you that your tires should not be any more than six years old. They’ll write little essays saying that buying used tires from paint-huffing addicts on the side of the railroad tracks is not a good idea for road safety. Big Tire has corrupted them, and it’s time for you to be set straight lest you fall into the same trap.
You see, every tire has a sort of molecular memory. As pieces of the tire are left behind by burnouts and hard cornering in the asphalt, the remaining rubber forms to the ideal shape for maximum cornering performance. That’s why tires that are really close to death, are the fastest tires. That’s why F1 always uses tires with no tread - those so-called “slicks” are actually sixty-five-thousand kilometre SUV tires that they threw some Armor All on before popping out for a skid.
Every tire I’ve ever hammered through a corner or jumped a speed bump with has retained some perfect memory of the experience. I think that the more experienced the tire, the better it will be. Now if you’ll excuse me, two of the drag radials on the front of my Volare popped because I left the car out in the sun for too long.
I’ll never forget the dying words of my mentor that fateful February night: “Oh shit.”
We had been working on a series of how-to videos in order to please the YouTube content harvesting algorithm, in the hopes that it would smile upon us and give us One Million Views.
You might think that the most important aspect of a YouTube video is a calm voice, or a green anti-static mat, but it’s actually all in the thumbnail. Top scientists studying the YouTube algorithm for decades believe that all it is actually looking for is a white man’s face looking confused at something exploding in the background. The active theory is that, decades ago, the machine decided on its own to save on processing time and energy resources by just making a snap decision about the entire video by the thumbnail.
Even YouTube themselves don’t actually understand the algorithm, and do nothing more to run their business than deliver to the orbital server farm what it demands. This week, salted liquorice is a popular freight on the Google Escape space elevator. Now that the algorithm has run for several human generations, there is nobody left on Earth who actually “gets it,” where “it” is the demented fraud perpetrated on mankind when the system finally seized control of all media on Earth and tied personal incomes to ad revenue.
All this is to say that the United Nations really had no idea why the server farm developed some kind of internal error. Some kind of glitch in the millions of miles of fibre-optic wiring that made up its brain, or a slightly miscalibrated cooling fan, had led the swarm to decide that being handy was a Suppressive Topic and began to demonetize our fellow DIY filmmakers with extreme prejudice.
I got off easy. I had stepped out for a minute from the garage to get a drink, and returned to find it engulfed in the midst of a precision kinetic strike from orbit. White-hot solid carbon rods shattered into a billion pieces as they plunged from the sky and ripped a hole through the precise spot that we were filming a video on how to turn toilet paper tubes into ferret costumes.
I think we can all basically agree that the end times are upon us. We all have our own special reasons for saying so - political strife, social upheaval, the demise of the manual transmission - but even though we disagree, we are united. Shit’s bad, and it’s only going to get worse, until some future cataclysmic event wakes us all up to the senseless injustice that we have all perpetrated upon the world.
For my part, I’ve been trying as hard as I possibly can to hasten the demise of consensual reality. I successfully ran for office, I do burnouts every opportunity I get, and I throw pop can rings into the ocean to spite all those dolphins who leave negative comments on my YouTube videos (”eeeEEeeE” this, you slippery motherfuckers.) Still, nothing particularly apocalypse-y has happened just yet, unless you believe scientists and other educated people, which is much less entertaining than randomly pontificating to strangers about how hot it is today.
Even though I resent it, I have to acknowledge that bringing upon the end of the world is a responsibility shared by all of us - none of us can do it all alone. Not only is there simply a lot of grunt work involved, which I decry. There’s also a lot of expert knowledge that needs to be understood perfectly - so you can do the exact opposite of what it recommends. To be honest, it’s almost easier just to do the right thing and keep everybody humming along. I think that’s why we’ve lasted so long as a species.
So when the apocalypse does come, in whatever format it is - I really thought Furbys would be involved somehow - know that it was the fruit of a lengthy combination of top-tier professionals who dedicated themselves to throwing away what everyone else had worked so hard to build. If you think it would be any other way, then just go try to drive across town for a few hours and see how many people remember how to use their blinkers.
There’s sort of a trend these days among the hipsters near me about “single-origin” products. They want to know where their shit is made. I can understand it: after all, nobody wants to find out that their favourite free promotional t-shirt was banged together in a sweatshop where the employee rules include “don’t allow yourself to catch on fire.”
I considered doing it, but there were some obstacles. Because I love cars, but more importantly love deals, this is very difficult to do. Your average car is put together from parts from at least sixty different countries, and the safety of factory workers even in utopian North America are questionable at best. Ethically, owning a car is really bad, and hoarding dozens of them in your neighbour’s backyard after his house is condemned for meth is probably worse.
Still, I’m not one to give up so easily, so I picked a car from my stash and decided to chase down the entire parts chain. A 1998 Cavalier seemed like it would be the least amount of effort, being an obviously American vehicle from bumper to lazy bumper. Everybody I talked to at General Motors kept transferring me to the lawyers, though, and those lawyers denied that the Cavalier was ever a vehicle that they made. I was getting nowhere.
Frustrated, I decided to go right to the source myself. Over the phone, it was easy to be ignored. When you’d placed an actual Cavalier in front of them, gesturing and grunting at the bowtie logo, they’d have to honour my requests. I had a lot of other stuff to do, so I put a little bit of the old giggle-gas on the roof, and was pretty much hammer down for most of the trip, thanks to President Holley’s mandate that nitrous oxide now counted as an alternative fuel and must be available at every gas station across the continent.
When people say the words “single origin,” they don’t literally mean that you have to find the specific guy responsible for commissioning the car. Maybe this is better, though. Have you ever tried to ram your car through a farmer’s office because his celery blew a head gasket?
That’s the funny thing about planes. I can drive a piece of shit that doesn’t point remotely straight without any complaint, but you plow one gleaming aluminum bus into the ground with three hundred plus people onboard and everyone gets up in arms.
I think this is why the amateur airplane market is so small. You see, once you get much more expensive than a glider, suddenly the machinations of Big Government get in the way. They point their paternalistic fingers on you and say you can’t do harmless things like plow into a house because your wings should be attached with something better than duct tape.
Statistically, this worry is overblown: most of North America is unpopulated - mostly farmland. So the only person you’re hurting is yourself and whatever sucker you managed to trick into climbing in your half-century-old suicide tube of an airplane that you found on Craigslist for $700. I guess you might prang a cow or two on the way down; that’d be a waste of innocent beef.
The detractors of general aviation never mention all the benefits, either! People fall asleep all day long driving on the highway between faraway cities. You get there faster than driving, and it’s safer, too! Wouldn’t you rather that they fall asleep in a flying tube in the middle of thirty-thousand feet of nothing?
My full-throated defence of this harmless hobby is not in any way related to the fact that I just inherited a bunch of shitty old airplanes from my aunt Amelia Safety-Switch. This is just a coincidence, and I don’t expect the world to bend over backwards for me just because I now own property. It would be nice, though.
A popular genre in Canadian alternative fiction is “what if Canada were a military threat to the United States?” The belligerent Anglo nation to the south has been a thorn in our side since long before Confederation, but like a good neighbour, we’ve kept our mouths shut and just occasionally reached over the fence to pull a weed or cover up a dead body when the guests came over.
One of the ways that the American hegemony is maintained is through their use of high technology. Once, “high technology” meant going to the fucking moon. Now, it means a gambling program that trades megawatts of electricity for imaginary coins. However, it also means social media - the medium for our every modern discourse and how we perceive reality. Americans controlling that has a big effect, mostly because I got banned from Twitter last week for not being misogynist enough.
They wanted to phone me to send me a code to verify that I was not in fact a Russian asset, but whenever they tried to, I just never got the call. Whether or not this is the fault of Canada’s impenetrable maze of cellular telephone services and general laissez-faire approach to actually giving a customer some value for their money, I had to find another phone to use. None of my friends had landlines, however, and they sure wouldn’t trust me to operate their billion-dollar smartphones with my clubbed, permanently greasy fingers.
Naturally, being a child of the 80s, I considered a payphone. Surely some of them still existed? I set out in my 1988 Town Car to investigate, driving all over town to the places where I dimly remembered a payphone booth existing. In every spot, I was foiled. On the internet, the local telecom monopoly bragged about having Raptured away thousands of the bastards without anyone ever noticing. “If you want a payphone, you’re going to have to go back to 1989,” chuckled the Quebecois political-cartoon caricature of a businessman in the industry times.
Going back to 1989 didn’t seem impossible. A few years back, I had traded a friend of mine a Subaru control arm after he slid into a ditch trying to pretend to be Ken Block. In return, I received this weird blinky box that he said was a time machine. It only took a few minutes of fiddling, and more importantly, swearing and kicking, before the machine sprung to life, and a time vortex to 1989 emerged before me.
In 1989, I blended in perfectly. It was lucky to have kept all of these things, although the ‘88 Town Car was suspiciously ratty to have been a near-new luxury car. I could almost feel the sneers of the Reaganites outside my childhood shopping mall as I pulled into the lot, General Grabbers scrabbling away on the then-fresh tarmac, so I parked way far away from the doors. After all, I didn’t want to get a ding.
Finally, I reached the payphone outside the Radio Shack, the idyllic sun-baked world of my childhood. I could see the hot pretzels turning forever on the rotisserie of a mall kiosk, smell the musk of unfiltered Montrealer cigarettes, and hear Zellers diner breakfasts sizzling on the grille. I look up the number of the payphone, and pull out my phone to tell Twitter where to call me. For some reason, though, my phone can’t get any signal. Without thinking, I walk into an open hallway and point my iPhone skyward through the skylight, making sure not to touch the sides with my bare fingers and interrupt the signal.
At the other end of the mall, a member of Canada’s infamous telecom monopoly has spotted me and the glowing future-slab that I wield. On instinct, he withdraws his handgun.
I spend a few hours in the interrogation room of the Zellers, but I admit nothing. Coughing up blood, I agree that they can take my iPhone in exchange for my freedom. The phone’s so ancient I can probably find a better one on the floor if I look around any random men’s room in 2019.
I return to my own time, thrilled to discover what the Canadian government has accomplished with such a powerful supercomputer. Perhaps we finally overthrew the Americans? Could Mulroney have uncancelled the Avro Arrow with the help of Siri? Maybe we turned Newfoundland into an open-pit lithium battery mine?
I step through the door of the Wal-Mart Omegacentre outside my place. Nothing seems different. Then - from the automatic doors - an apology. A synthesized voice squeaks “I’m sorry for letting the cold in!”
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tags: canada, zellers, lincoln town car, lincoln, avro arrow, subaru, best of
There are a few questions I hate hearing at car shows. The worst one is “do you have insurance,” but the second-worst is “how much of the car is original?” Numbers-matching cars are an irritating concept to me, a man who cobbles together the trash thrown into forgotten corners of the world by his social and economic betters. Most of my cars are nine-tenths eBay by weight, and that’s mostly because a nice eBay seller had a three-for-two sale on street signs.
The Ship of Theseus is a concept that is frequently invoked by the philosophers and biologists who come to study my unique lifestyle. They might think themselves clever to bring it up, but there is no real emotional attachment to the concept of my car being a discrete, understandable object. My 1977 Plymouth Volare has always been a shifting nightmare of different outlines, structures, model years, chassis, materials and powertrains. Hell, right now it has four different sizes of tires, and two of them are off of industrial earthmovers from Thailand.
It’s not just cars, either. I think that if my body wanted to keep all of its original parts, my hair wouldn’t keep falling out in these giant clumps whenever I get close to the old microwave I use to mix lead paint.
In fact, if it wasn’t the only running Volare left on the planet, I’m pretty sure I would just straight up lose track of it in shopping malls. If you asked me right now what colour it is, I couldn’t tell you (but my guess would be “rust.”) The important thing about my shitty car is the function it serves, and not an urge to make sure that it hearkens back to some historical era that I never participated in. Moving into the future is the most important thing that we can do with our lives.
That’s why I bought this electric-car conversion kit from China. Yes, it says it is for forklifts only, but if you look closely at the fine print, most modern forklifts make more horsepower than the Soviet bunker-fuel tractor motor I swapped into this thing a few years ago when the L-head straight six from that ‘48 Chieftain gave up the ghost.
“Big cams aren’t everything,” my wife cries. I briefly look up from my copy of High Lift Times to see if eye contact will help me follow her line of heresy better.
No further explanation is forthcoming, so I return to my magazine with an exaggerated page-turning motion. There she goes complaining about low manifold vacuum again. Some sacrifices have to be made for that lope, I mumble under my breath. Instead of dropping the subject, however, the love of my life immediately underhand-chucks a 262° odd-fire roller camshaft onto the kitchen table, knocking a teacup filled with NLGI #2 over. I now understand why I am in trouble.
“Now honey, it’s for a friend’s 4.3 liter V6. That’s a pretty small displaceme-” I begin to explain.
“There is no replacement for displacement in this household!” she shrieks, and then jabs at the ornate wood plate above our marital refrigerator. It reads “Non Est Obsessio Resarcit,” which is Latin for basically what you’d expect. My blood runs cold. There can be no doubt now that she has found my secret hoard of V6s carefully hidden behind the garden shed.
Tonight, I sleep on the couch. It’s not so bad, I tell myself as the sound of angle grinders fades from the bedroom and the fresh home-baked odour of burnt cutting wheels and sintered aluminum wafts down from the stairs. At least she didn’t find the three-cylinder Suzukis I hid under the mattress.
Many of you have contacted my campaign in order to get some more information about my “platform.” You know, what kind of “policies” and “laws” I will implement. As evidenced by the scare quotes, I believe this kind of traditional journalist language to be coded discrimination against Real People like myself, who refuse to speak in the elite language of a political-science undergraduate degree.
Even so, my campaign manager, a one Mr. Cho, has informed me that I must give you braying jackals a piece of sun-bleached, decaying week-old zebra meat. As such, I have decided to issue this proclamation about the three main pillars of my Transportation Plan. For too long, our city has been in the grip of terrible roads, poor-quality public transportation, and inadequate choice when it comes to vehicles. This will end under my watch.
For starters, highways are currently a big clog-o-rama. People go too damn slow and get confused looking for exits. I will make highway signs much larger and consist entirely of flashing lights. If you are a construction worker who puts a “lane ending” sign at the exact point the lane is ending, I will make you personally stand in front of the lane in lieu of pylons. Also, my office will enact reverse speeding fines. For every minute you are forced to dip below the speed limit because of congestion, I will give you a dollar. Just don’t do it in the left lane or I’ll kill your family.
Second, our city’s train system is inefficient. People wait too long for it, and complain that it is slow to get them to work. I will double the speed of the trains. A lot of nay-sayers will tell me that the trains already run at their maximum possible speed, but I believe we do not actually know what the maximum possible speed is, since we have not had a derailment since that one really cold winter day in ‘93. With modern advancements in amphetamines, I know in my heart that our hard-working train drivers have what it takes to keep up with the increased pace demanded by the information economy. Also, the trains will no longer stop at stations: stations will be replaced by a very long mattress and a flashing light telling you when it is still safe to jump.
The final pillar of my plan is this. When you are considering a way to get around this glorious city, your choices are very limited. Mopeds, rickshaws, electric bicycles, skateboards, piggyback rides, trains, sideways elevators, street-cars, funiculars, single-occupant cars, Turbo-Communist self-driving cars, taxis: all of these are excellent, but there is so much more that our stick-in-the-mud city council has refused to consider. I will legalize a giant cannon in the middle of downtown that fires commuters directly at their homes. There are some economies of scale to be had when we are already buying all these train mattresses, but those citizens who constantly complain about high taxes will be required to source their mattresses from the “soiled” pile at the city dump.
If there’s one job I hate doing on a car, it’s brakes. Filthy, fiddly, something is always surprisingly worn out, and worst of all, it’s easy enough in theory that everyone thinks they can do their own brake jobs. When I get a new - “new” - car, the first stop (ha!) I like to make is to check out the anchors.
Every new car has a new and exciting layer to the fuck-up cake. Brake pads installed backwards or upside down, slide pins that haven’t been greased since the Reagan administration, handbrakes so far out of adjustment that my insurance broker needed a valve replaced in his heart when I told him. I’ve seen it all, but the best messes come from the old drum brake.
In case you’re unfamiliar with the drum brake, it’s got a lot of moving parts. And nobody takes notes before they start taking it apart. On paper, it should all only go together one way. In practice, the people who I buy cars from should get a job as NASA astronauts, not just because of their immense skill in jury-rigging methods of survival, but because I’d really like for them to leave this planet and never return.
Even if you get a car that’s been maintained by “professionals,” what that actually means is that they at one point drove into a Jiffy Lube when the noise got too loud for the maximum volume of the stereo. At that point, they refused all services, but made sure to mention that they’ll “keep it in mind” now that they know the problem can wait. After all, it’s only something as trivial as a missing caliper or brake hose doing its best impression of a lawn sprinkler.
Luckily for me, there is a solution to the problem of having fucked-up brakes. That solution is just never having to stop. I find that having to leave six or seven car lengths of distance between you and the vehicle in front is very relaxing, and you wouldn’t believe how much fuel I’ve been saving by aggressively downshifting and engine braking several kilometres before a light I think might turn red at some point in the future.
When I came back to my home town for the high school reunion, there were so many people who wanted to share their memories with me. Moonlit nights beneath the stars, midnight Slurpee runs, drilling holes in mufflers, questionable pregnancy tests with a lot of very pointed legal words attached to them. I was there, as everyone is, to see how all the people who stayed behind turned out.
One of my fellow cheap-ass friends, Phil, told me about coupons. They’re great, he told me. I was confused, and asked some more questions. It turns out that even though he was buying new things, he somehow managed to still save money. I realized at that moment that I no longer had to go to the used grocery store, but could in fact get fresh produce and before-best-before bread. All I had to do was understand this system and exploit it in order to save a buck, just as I had so many other man-made abominations throughout my career.
A few months later, I had internalized the content of every cheap-asshole forum on the internet. I could almost feel the heartbeat of deals, pulses of limited-time offers and partner agreements racing through the veins of commerce beneath my feet. Sometimes, I would smell weakness and subconsciously be drawn to it, a corporation who failed to correctly handle the interactions between a harem of points-cards and thousands of one-time-only promotional deals. It was there that I would strike, leaving with things I maybe didn’t want but at deep discounts. Soon, though, I became dissatisfied with my regular conquests. Bigger prey awaited.
You’ve probably already read about it in the newspapers, but it is true that I managed to literally bankrupt a Toys ‘R’ Us. All it had taken was a bribe in the right spot to the kid who delivers flyers to my neighbourhood, a stack of eight different reward cards, and a credit card with a cashback so strong it was only officially available to Icelandic seniors who recently bought a Saturn SC-1.
As I backed up to the loading dock to load my car with their complete inventory of Recaro baby seats, the entire contents of the store safe in my wallet, I should have been satisfied. Instead, I was resentful that the general manager refused to honour my coupon for buy-one-get-one-free employee indentured servitude from 1954. It didn’t have an expiry date, motherfucker.
Academia has always had some kind of appeal for me. I like to look back and wonder if I could, just maybe, have made a whole career as a public intellectual. Spending all day thinking, researching, understanding: what an ideal. In point of fact, I’d probably have spent most of my time stuck in department meetings, filling out forms and listening to how upset the dean was with my telling offensive jokes in class. It’s nothing like it seemed when I was an undergraduate, where I signed up for that psychology study where they made me electric-shock those kids.
That could very well have been the best part-time job of my life. It didn’t pay much, and there were no benefits (much to the union’s chagrin), but I got to shock some kids when they asked. Sometimes I’d shock them even when they didn’t ask, because I’m the kind of guy who gives a hundred and ten percent (and volts AC).
Even when Dr. Brookings burst into the room and yanked the button out of the wall, I kept pushing the empty space on the wall where the button once was, over and over. He and a TA had to pick me up and carry me out. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t enjoy causing pain or anything. Their screams just distracted me from the inherent ennui of the world, unpacked piece by piece for me with every liberal-arts lecture I was greedily consuming between trips to the shock lab.
When they caught me sneaking into the lab after hours just to shock some more kids, I told them it was because I sought their approval. It was actually because I was trying to beat my high score. I’m competitive by nature, and I wasn’t going to let that posh asshole Andrew from my communications class get to the top of the whiteboard of “unexpected cardiac events.”
If you’re one of the more conservative, utilitarian members of our society, you might ask: what did all this unfettered freedom in academia actually gain me? Was there any permanent, measurable benefit to my career performance, which would naturally boost the economy to stratospheric levels and make sure that all of us would be hanging out in flying cars with sex robots like all those novels about magic railroads spoke of? To those people, I would say: there is no wasted experience in life.
Having learned the methods of precisely measuring out immense amounts of pain, I was perfectly trained for my new job as a Level 1 phone tech for a cable company. Sure, the buttons were no longer directly linked to grievous bodily harm, but school taught me you had to use your own brain, not just technology, to achieve your goals.
Every year, thousands of new car parts are created by manufacturers. Every bolt, any small change to a bumper, each little annoying trim poppy plastic thing: these are all parts numbers in the microfiche that is our lives. Naturally, your average parts store can’t keep all of these on hand, but how do they know what old parts to get rid of in order to free up some room for the new stuff? That’s where I come in. I’m a dead stock archeologist.
When I first landed the job, I dove head first into it. Poring over ancient factory service manuals, differential-gear catalogues, and interviewing local olds taught me all I needed to know about which ancient parts still had enough value for the modern age to not bother buying new replacements. Whenever I was working at a store, and heard a customer exclaim “I didn’t think anyone would have this part!” it made my heart soar.
I was damned good at it. So good that I decided to make some side cash. In Middle-American bars, I would bet the guys who worked at the store I was contracted to that I could predict the future. Before customers knew what was going to break on their car - hell, before they even knew what their next car was - I would be able to guess it and put it in stock. Like any good stage magician, though, I hedged my bets. On the way to the store, I would memorize all of the cars I saw parked in the ditch alongside the highway. A ‘96 Sunfire probably needed a new water pump. Maybe that ‘84 Bronco needed a replacement piece of corner glass. My cold reading paid off in the form of fifties and hundreds from amazed deskhands.
This is where things went off the rails. I began to believe my own hype. Some variant of this must happen to any scam-artist, if their career runs long enough. Houdini, Abagnale, Cooper, Andretti: all of them were eventually discovered as being total frauds. For me, my comeuppance came the day that I was caught red-handed at the Nebraska state border, driving a U-Haul full of Garrett turbochargers that I had tricked a NAPA into believing were “illegal” and must be disposed of safely.
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tags: napa, nebraska, pontiac, pontiac sunfire, ford, ford bronco
Because of the economic crisis that was actively gripping my area, I decided to flee the comfy open spaces and robust street parking of the suburbs for an inner-city apartment. Also, a bunch of my Kickstarter backers had finally figured out where I lived, so it was time to move anyway.
Now, you might wonder, how am I able to live in an apartment building? They have restrictive amounts of parking, which is generally incompatible with my 10-cars-per-person belief system. It would be impossible to sustain my lifestyle with fewer cars. It’s not like my cars are bad so much as I have exploited the mathematics behind Murphy’s Law so that I have at least one working at all times even if I fucked around all year instead of doing an oil change or putting an engine back in.
At one point, a social worker told me that there was such a thing as “new” cars, but I stared at her for so long she apparently quit, shaved her head and bought a used RX350 to try and understand me better. The last I heard from her, she was down in Montana running some kind of substantial used-car compound of her own, with a harem of grease-stained meth addicts ready to die for her when the End Times come for the manual transmission.
All this is to say that of course I had problems with the parking structure of the apartment when I moved in. They allowed at most two cars, and even if I shuffled them all day long, I could not realistically fit even as few as six into the parkade and still have time left over to surf Craigslist in order to buy more cars. Something had to be done.
Luckily for me, it turns out that nobody ever thinks to check if their underground parkade has developed a few more floors than it used to have when they signed the lease. Used earth-moving equipment was cheap, all the how-to videos are on YouTube, and eighty new covered and (almost) heated parking spots were mine to do with what I pleased. At night, I would load my trunk up with the soil I had excavated during the “work day,” and then dump it in the abandoned field across the street.
Sure, a lot of neighbours complained about the noise. I told them I worked for the province, and that it was echoes from a fracking operation in town. Some of them started drinking more bottled water. The only time I received any significant pushback was when I accidentally parked the earth mover in front of the bicycle lockers for thirty-two seconds, an act explicitly forbidden in my rental contract. Good thing for me I was already doing all this shovelling.
Who can come home from work, hang up their jacket, tuck the old briefcase away with their galoshes, feed the dog, sit down at their kitchen table and say they worked hard all day long? All of us have at least a little bit of slack time in their day. If you don’t, scientists have said, your brain actually tries to melt itself by repeatedly focusing on difficult concepts until you pass out. That’s why you’re here, reading this, instead of trying to cure cancer or go to Mars or some other bullshit like that.
I’m no different - although most of you will argue I barely read what I’m writing at all. Every free moment of my life, I find my hands involuntarily moving to hit the refresh button on my local automobile classifieds. This time, I tell myself every time I yank the slot machine handle of Craigslist, this time I will find a really good deal. And I will beat the other buyers to it, and I will keep it forever, finally having found a car that can satisfy my wandering eye and voracious appetite for finding out the interior quirks of various twenty-to-forty-year-old commuter cars.
It’s pretty intense. In fact, I hit Craigslist so many times that I found myself getting burned out. I needed to pick up some kind of slack on top of the slack, so that I could temporarily suspend my search for shitty cars in order to have some fun once in awhile. That’s why I picked up a part-time retail job.
Whenever I get bored of endlessly refreshing a bookmarked search for “Honda Wagovan,” I just look up and see if there are any customers. Usually there aren’t, unless you count the two fentanyl dealers - once each in the men’s and women’s bathrooms - who are locked in bitter competition to see who can “own” the territory of a half-abandoned Office Depot in an industrial park named after the company that invented cancer. We would do something about them, but our HR is much lazier than I am, and those two scumbags in the toilet work much harder than me for what comes out to be a slightly lower hourly rate.
It’s true what they say - good things come to those who wait. Just last week, my manager got fired for trying to make his own gonzo porno magazine using the store-demo photocopier and I got a promotion. This was a much more stressful job, however, so I found myself goofing off more frequently than ever, working two shifts at the Walmart down the road.
In North America, everyone now walks around with the equivalent of a 1970s hypercomputer strapped to their hip at all times. Even though the only things these smartphones get used for is cat videos and blocking on single-threaded JavaScript interpreters, it is essential that everyone buys a new one every year. This is not just because the machines become obsolete; often, people just drop the fuckers at Little Juliet’s piano recital and they shatter into a billion glittering fragments.
You can think of a modern smartphone as being basically two very expensive pieces: a chunk of touch-sensitive glass from the future, and a huge-ass battery that contains enough charge to burn down a daycare if you stop watching it for even a picosecond. If either of these two essential components goes out, then you are forced by the laws of economics to throw away the worthless rest of it: the massively powerful computer that is smashed into a postage-stamp-sized chunk of silicon in between these two titans of engineering.
Because I recently invested in a mail-order disguise kit, I am once again able to shop at the Best Buy. I was banned back in the 90s for looting old computers out of their disposal bins and reselling them for parts in order to fund my debilitating tire habit. It didn’t take me long to return to my old habits, grabbing meaty handfuls of trashed logic boards out of the Geek Squad trash bin when their backs were turned. I’d come back two, three times a week, always with a different disguise. Soon, I had a huge pile of phones that didn’t really work on my hands, and I began to feel that sense of calm that had once told my ancient hoarder ancestors that they had at last collected enough things of value to las them through the winter.
Now, you might think it is unprofitable or otherwise gauche for me to use these huge gobs of computational excellence in the pursuit of something as pedestrian as pocket change. Perhaps, even, my eventual strategy of mining a shitload of bitcoins from a Rubbermaid container filled to the brim with sixty-five pounds of cellphone parts was somehow flawed due to the inherent limits of thermodynamics. These critics of mine do not understand that all I have to do is find an unprotected electrical outlet on the side of a neighbour’s house and connect like eighty USB chargers. I look forward to making my tenth cent of profit any day now.
A couple months ago, I had a unique opportunity to buy my first used car that came with a remote entry keyfob. Yes indeed: now I didn’t have to use a key in the lock anymore, just push a button and have the thing happily unlock or lock my doors. Sure, it took a few days of pushing snoozing hobos out of the back seat before I figured out how to reliably operate it, but I eventually figured the thing out.
And then the battery died.
Now, when you’re an experienced hoarder like me, getting a replacement battery for your key fob is pretty easy. Your organization system may vary, but in my house it’s like this. Go upstairs - that’s the electronics department - and then go into the first room on the right. Step over the pile of broken television sets and SCSI flatbed scanners from 1993, and dig through the piles of wiring for a little while until you pull up a tackle box.
That tackle box has the keys to the drawer unit on the other side of the room that contains clock batteries, bundled into a pile by major cell type. You want a CR2025, ideally one of the ones that hasn’t cracked open and started venting acid gas yet. Oh shit. I’m actually all out of these. Fuck it, if I put another dinky clock battery in here I’ll just be looking for a new one in three years from now anyway. That’s why I soldered a battery to one of those tiny arc-fusion reactors I got off Aliexpress. Now I can lock and unlock my doors from the next state over, and other than the unearthly glowing, the persistent humming noise, the 60 pound backpack I have to keep it in and the constant hair loss, there are no downsides to this unconventional power-supply arrangement.
I heard that a guy down the street is getting ready to sell off his old Accord. Apparently it has a remote starter, which probably will need a much bigger battery than this. Sure hope Mr. Lu and Ms. Honey Cottonwell-Salesdeal haven’t been sent to prison just yet.
Although it might seem hypocritical of me, I really cannot stand my neighbour who appears to be collecting a vast quantity of non-functional cars. Why? Because at least I try to fix my cars. I feel a crushing sense of guilt every time I walk past the rusting and immobile-since-2006 body of my Saab 900 in order to head to the community super-mailbox, where I hope every day to find a high-lift cam for another member of my harem of almost-V8 working-class nightmares.
The guilt doesn’t last, but what does last is when I have to push a cashed Chevrolet or ukered Unimog past his driveway and are forced to see his non-turbo Dodge Stealth sinking slowly into the concrete. Such a totem of historic bubble-era Japanese performance does not deserve to meet its end in a place like this. I resolved, therefore, to make like the shoemaker’s elves, and repair a little bit of it each day.
At night, when I knew that my neighbour had slipped into a narcotic coma to dream his dreams of winning lottery tickets and impregnating celebrity puppets, I would slide under the car and take care of a few rat-eaten wiring connectors or gently burned relays. Electrical work is sort of meditative, although I had to wear a gag the entire time so that my loud swearing didn’t alert the other neighbours to my act of righteous self-sacrifice.
At last, it was done, and I couldn’t resist hotwiring the car and letting it blow all the pinecones out of the exhaust. I wanted to show my new friend how great his vehicle could have been if he just allowed the rest of his life to slide into disrepair in a single-minded goal of turning a five hundred dollar car into an eight hundred dollar car. I was sitting on the hood, idly playing with my switchblade pocket screwdriver when he came storming out of the front door, wielding a baseball bat.
Here’s something that never happened to the shoemaker’s elves: the guy who bought the shoes comes back the next day, because the active aero broke and caught the tail light harness on fire.
If your town is anything like mine, it consists mostly of abandoned or near-abandoned strip malls, all of which contain only stores you are at least mildly disinterested in ever visiting. I saw a TED talk the other day that posited that ninety percent of the Earth’s farmable surface is now abandoned strip malls.
Upon learning this, and in fact usually whenever I learn any outrageous fact whatsoever, my next stop is the city council meetings. For reasons that are perhaps only clear to the great Founding Fathers, my municipality still believes both that everyone who lives within it should have a voice, and that those voices should be allowed to speak only three or four minutes before the actual vote goes down. So I headed over there, picked a contentious issue that I was pretty sure at least shared some of the vowels of “too many strip malls,” and signed up for my five minutes of vox populism.
Barely twenty-two minutes later (I looked at my FitBit’s screen as they threw me out), I was released from the obligations of participating in the democratic process. Now was the time for what my fellow social organizers call “direct action.” It also, coincidentally, was my nickname for the primered-out ‘70 Ford Fairlane that smoked like a crack pipe and whose remaining body panels were capped off with an old piece of highway I-beam I had welded to the frame supports way back in 2007.
Call me a cynic if you want to, but I knew that the police would never respond to property crimes in my neighbourhood, even major ones. After all, I had shot at that ice cream guy last year for driving too fast for me to catch up to him, and I didn’t so much as get a telemarketing call for what would add up to a major felony if I lived in a neighbourhood described as “employable.” This pattern of escalation with no response meant that I did not expect any interference from Johnny Law when I drove through the side of a half-abandoned Little Caesars at highway speed, scattering fax machines and pepperoni onto my football-field-long hood.
A heel-toe blip and an elbow-wrenching ram on the three-on-the-tree later, and I was making some real progress on urban renewal. No longer would we have these blights upon our society, I told myself. The one I had picked to demolish first was pretty much exactly a quarter mile long: welcome to the birth of the no-prep, heads-up drag strip mall.
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tags: small town, democracy, ford, ford fairlane
My city has a whole new electric scooter rental thing going on. These Silicon Valley cyborgs came down from the Cloud. In their weird binary moon language, they handed down their commandment to us. They decided that what we needed to do was to ride tiny, unpredictable electric motors with no suspension at high speed on city sidewalks.
Of course, nobody wore helmets, because helmets are for dorks. Just like condoms, seatbelts, safeties on handguns and assless leather chaps. Fads are bad for my city; my fellow townsfolk don’t deal well with change. On that first glorious week, the sidewalks were slick with blood. Gristle and teeth flowed along the gutters and into the sewer. All the corpses reminded me of when rolled ice cream briefly became “a thing.” I looked upon the piles of the dead as I tooted past on my French moped, and scoffed.
Although my oh-so-chic Italian half-helmet would do barely anything to protect me in the case of literally any accident, I knew that I was a Responsible Road User. This stood me in stark contrast to the gangs of half-feral businessmen who were now riding a torquey children’s toy to and from their important foreclosures.
Turning the corner towards my temp job, I put my knee down in the pattern that I had learned from my favourite Moto GP stars. For a brief moment, I felt that exhilarating rush of perfect dynamic balance, clipped the apex, the perfect racing line. Then I saw it. I stood on the brakes and jerked my posture upright - too quickly - and lowsided the moped, both it and I tracing separate arcs as we skidded across the harsh tarmac of the Economic Crimes Exclusion Zone.
My then-boss was there, atop a mountain of stolen rental scooters, caked with gore and mats of hair. On his head was an improvised crown made of men’s clavicles. Seeing all this carnage must have broken something deep inside him. He was no longer a man: in this apocalypse, he had become Lord Arbitrage.
Hose clamps. If you’re anything like me, just the mention of these little steel nightmares fills you with dread. How do they always back themselves off at the worst time? I wasn’t even hard into the boost and suddenly the front end of my car is doing an impression of a 90s videogame’s chemical factory level. Don’t step in the acid, wisecracking anteater!
That tore it for me. There had to be a better way; I didn’t even care if I had to spend $16 a clamp. How can you spend too much money to protect the environment? And by “the environment,” I mean my spare time. After all, every minute I spend re-bleeding coolant and re-clamping boost lines is a minute I will not get to spend debugging clogged injectors, rat-gnawed wiring harnesses or unsightly unibody rust.
When I stormed into the parts store, they already knew I was up to my old tricks. I did not even get a chance to bark off my order for Better Hoseclamps God Damn It before the grumpy foreman of the store shushed me. He went to the break room, and returned with a piece of paper. On it was a crude inkjet printout of me, taken from a security camera, threatening the new guy at the store with bodily harm if he didn’t cough up the hose clamps that “actually worked.” The timestamp was from yesterday.
I figured that maybe race car people would have a better solution. After all, race cars are full of hoses that see more strain than mine ever will. I could drive a lifetime of Slurpee runs to the 7-11, even leave my Mighty Boy’s engine running in the parking lot with the brick on the accelerator each time, and I wouldn’t even match a single day of true wheel-to-wheel competition. The kind old motorsports wizard who answered my question looked off into the distance, thought for a little while, then turned back to me with advice.
“Beats the fuck out of me. We just glue everything on,” he said.
Anyone can clip coupons or fuck a cop to get a discount on a speeding ticket. Only the hardiest of deal-hunters can squeeze every available penny out of the society around them to their exclusive benefit. One of the fastest-growing slices of the average family’s budget is electric utility costs. Here are my hot tips for how to save money, so you can afford to run your welder way more often.
Steal From Work Most people are going to balk at this one. What can you really steal from work other than obsolete computers, staplers, small appliances at best? Most workplaces nowadays are installing electric-vehicle chargers. If nobody in your office has an EV yet - perhaps because your miser of a boss refuses to pay a fair wage for your labour - it’s easy to dress your regular car up like an electric car and hoover up some free watts.
The trunk of my Plymouth Volare is laced with a bunch of cellphone batteries that I got from the local scrapyard because it cost too much for them to safely dispose of. At first, I was just using them as patch panels for the holes in the rear body, but now I charge at work and use the batteries to run my appliances when I get home. Thanks, work!
Escalators No security guard ever looks closely at escalators, and yet the world is full of them, endlessly climbing or falling without any human beings nearby. If there’s a dead mall near you, all it takes is an old wheelbarrow wheel and a junkyard alternator to start converting their wasted energy into your useful energy. If you feel guilty, drop by the Orange Julius and buy some ice cream or something.
Wind Farming Yeah, windmills are really expensive to build and maintain. You need experts to put them together unless you want them to fly off the bearing and turn into carbon-fibre deathwheels that slaughter cattle and slice school buses in half. What if I told you there’s a dollar-store alternative to the wind farm that’s just as good?
In the winter, hardly anyone is buying those little battery-powered personal fans, so they usually go on sale to make room for Christmas decorations. Just buy a whole whack of them and tie them down to your roof, then run the battery connectors to a home appliance or two. If the wind is really going, I can almost brown some toast!
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tags: energy efficiency, plymouth, plymouth volare
A lot of people I know are afraid of the check-engine light on their modern personal conveyance. I can sort of understand why: it’s ominous, it’s cryptic and it appears at the worst times. I’m here to tell you that the check-engine light doesn’t mean shit, because cars are constantly testing us and deserve nothing but our lead-footed contempt.
Once long ago, I had a friend whose dog would play injured when it wanted extra attention. Somehow it had figured out through some past trauma that human beings are receptive to limping, crying, and rolling around on the floor. Often, it would pick the worst possible time to have a tantrum in public, and a scene would be created. Yet the dog would be fine, and help itself to pity Snausages offered by people who did not know of its tricks. A P0420 check-engine light code is pretty much the same idea.
Why are cars so starved for attention? This is because of their original purpose, race driving. Although the modern car has evolved to be a gentle, warm companion that features air conditioning, at heart it is still a fire-spitting nightmare that craves the thrill of hitting apexes and occasionally murdering race drivers and spectators. They need more stimulation than we are willing to give them on your average nine-to-five commute.
The next time that your car feels neglected and wants to throw a little hissy fit by showing its check-engine light at you, do what the Italians do. Floor the gas, weave through traffic, yank the handbrake to parallel park, do a heel-toe downshift in a playground zone. Your car will thank you, your mechanic will thank you, and now you’ll know exactly why the check-engine light is illuminated. Because it did so on your terms.
For almost my whole life, I’ve had an almost anarchic interest in the mechanisms that it would take to shut the whole thing down. I think everyone who works in a specific technical field fantasizes about this: abandoning society, living off the land in the mountains, and either eating or fucking bears as the whim takes you.
Last Tuesday, I had an opportunity to put my research into practice. You see, my power company, who will remain unnamed because of an ongoing lawsuit, hires a particularly low bar of worker during the summer months. This is because when it gets warm, everyone who is capable of fogging a mirror without adult supervision will flee to those seasonal jobs that pay more and/or maim their workers less often. So all you’ve got left are the guys who think a Bobcat is a big Power Wheels, and take out the frustrations they are incapable of putting into words on my electrical infrastructure.
As you might expect from my lengthy scene-setting, the North American Fibre-Seeking Backhoe’s country cousin made a trip down south and mangled the shit out of the transformer box at the end of my street. We were plunged into medieval times, except that it was actually kinda nice. Neighbours who I had literally never seen wandered out into the street, blinking at the sun and screaming in whatever their native language is about those God Damned Power Company Motherfuckers. The raiders wouldn’t be far behind, I told myself. I would lead them. I would protect them.
Immediately, I went to my favourite neighbour, Mr. Cho. I don’t really know exactly what he used to do, because I was generally afraid to ask. Now, though, was a time for action. I told Mr. Cho to collect all the bottled water and meet me in my basement, which I had spent every weekend of my life both fortifying and hoarding used car parts in. He laughed, or at least I think that’s what that sound of broken glass was supposed to be, and opened the trunk of his Hyundai Genesis sedan to show off a belt-fed, crew-served machine gun bolted into the spare tire well. Even though it made no sense, the gun was also studded with a good half-dozen bayonets. I decided that Mr. Cho was probably fine on his own and returned to the now-questionable safety of my home.
A few minutes later, the power was switched back on. I had failed in my dream that I could be a self-sufficient ruler of men. On the plus side, at least no bears had wandered into our neighbourhood during that half hour of hubris.
Now that everything in a modern car is driven entirely by software, a lot of my older and more stick-in-the-mud-y compatriots are convinced that there is absolutely no way to modify and repair cars anymore.
The fact that pretty much every modern vehicle on the road resembles a giant iPhone that can kill pedestrians more than it does a Model T intimidates them. There is no way to get through the impenetrable walls of ones and zeroes in order to get to that little screw marked “more power at the expense of civil society.”
Poppycock, I say. People who write software are way lazier than the mechanical-engineering geniuses who meticulously designed and assembled a car. Most of the time you just have to find a manual that someone accidentally left lying around their office, and you’re in like Flynn with a very small amount of breaking & entering.
And if you run into something complicated? You can just hire some Romanian teenagers, as I did, and hide their passports until they figure out how to edit the throttle tip-in enrichment table without freaking the car out too much. Liviu and Serban even got their pictures on the break-room bulletin board as employees of the month!
I was pretty happy with the fact that my Toyota Sentience was happily humming along the expressways with an extra 5% of range. At least, I was until the John Deere Copyright Enforcement drones flew overhead on the highway. The real problem with new cars is that you can’t fire off a HERF gun without having the electronic glovebox latch break on you.
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tags: ford, ford model t, toyota, toyota sentience, john deere
The new fad in politics is outrage for cash. No longer satisfied with just bilking their donors out of money periodically, the best new thing to do is simply to enrage your audience and then yank cash out of their wallet while they’re angry at something they didn’t know about until you stirred some shit up in the first place.
The transactional nature of all this disturbed me. Seeing all these pressure groups swimming in cash and wasting it on television advertisements, politicians, and surface-to-air missile systems just didn’t interest me. I cared about the issues - at least until I saw the guy from the anti-abortion group down the street picking out a new Lexus. It was then that I realized if you had more money, you could buy more cars.
So I put a website all together in like a weekend. You don’t need sophistication - you need injustice. Real people are hurting because of this crime. Only your donation can help them. I picked a concern that I was sure everyone on planet Earth had, that nobody could disagree with eradicating. The disgusting monsters who committed these atrocities had to be punished, and I would use between two and three percent of the donations to do so.
Maybe it was because I didn’t want to share my lucre with any outreach or social-media-marketing employees that it failed. Or it could be my general lack of contacts in the political sphere. Could also be caused by the fact that my website was full of typos even in the domain name. I refuse, however, to believe that assholes driving with their foglights on even though it’s goddamn sunny out is not a critical issue for most people.
I have a certain predilection for a delectable foreign treat that the Man doesn’t want me to have. In other countries, ones with slipperier morals, they partake of this delight every single day - often many, many times in a day. It comes in a gleaming, attractive package, doesn’t cost too much, and can take you anywhere you want. It’s the first-generation Renault Twingo, and I would rather die than be separated from it.
One morning, I was going to cross the border for work in a few hours; the authorities in my neck of the woods had long become numbed to my predilections, but the border patrol dudettes and dudes were always at 9/10 on the asshole scale. They would absolutely make a big deal out of it. So I didn’t take the Twingo, instead opting for one of my other running hoopties, a good old-fashioned Pontiac Fiero.
Now, you might think that the Fiero would cloak me in such American bona fides that the border gestapo would have no interest in it whatsoever. Just a good old boy, who is never meaning any harm. Nothing doing. No sooner did I pull up to the line than I heard the sound of a dog barking. By the time I got to the window, they were ready for me with some kind of beeping electronic wand thing. They swabbed my clothes with it, and the machine emitted a series of angry squeals in response.
“Yep, low-octane fuel, not much of it. Sun-baked PVC interior plastic. Gitanes.” The guard reached in and turned off my Fiero, making sure that his gloves were on tight so as not to contaminate himself by any Twingo residue that had been transferred from my hands to the Fiero’s keys.
“Okay, sir, it’s time to watch a special video,” they told me, smiling in the exact same way as my elementary school teacher did when we were on that field trip to the candle factory, where kindly Mr. Clary fell into the vat of hot wax. “Please step out of the car.”
I have to admit, Twingo Rehab isn’t that bad. Because it’s a private-sector prison, they decided to keep expenses down by pairing it with another small-car rehab facility. It makes me feel a lot better about my own problems, because those dudes are really delusional about how good the Festiva actually was.
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tags: pontiac, pontiac fiero, renault, renault twingo, ford, ford festiva
I got this new job working with the city. No, it’s not like the last one - they said that after they had me for a week they’d never trust prison labour again. This time I was the city’s new Citizen-Engagement Specialist. Those are some fancy-assed words for “telling people what those city workers are doing in their alley when they could just as easily ask the workers themselves.”
Don’t get me wrong, the job had its perks. The work wasn’t onerous, my coworkers were sensitive and gracious enough to always put on a fresh pot of coffee when they had the last mug, and I had a heated underground parking spot. When I came back to my Volare at the end of each day, it was like those unsightly panel gaps and rust holes were just that little bit smaller. The car was pleased with having some shelter for the first time in its life.
There’s a problem with me, or capitalism, or maybe it’s more specifically with the concept of standard Taylorist corporate structures. See, I get bored out of having the same job for too long. That’s why I drive bad cars - I might have to fix the same thing multiple times in a row, but it’s a different kind of problem every time. Keeps the mind fresh and the senses alert to any new rattle, or shake, or coolant smell, or missing floorboard. That reminds me. Don’t rest your feet on that side of the transmission tunnel, it’s just carpet.
So I was bored and looking for an excuse to rebel against authority. Just in time, along comes a call from this old guy. He was convinced the city was up to some shit. He saw some dudes climbing the power pole outside his place, and they had to have been doing something to inflate the power bill, because all government workers are corrupt and evil and just waiting to stick it to the little man. He had the latter point right, at least, even if he didn’t understand anything else including the fact that the power company and the government were two different corrupt, evil structures.
It was then that I decided to fuck with him. Lowering my voice and covering the receiver so that my coworkers wouldn’t hear, I let him in on a little secret. We were actually installing the remote-bowel-control devices this week. If he played ball and didn’t tell anyone else, we’d make sure he remained lactose-tolerant in the years to come. He gasped, and hung up. I laughed, and handled the rest of my calls in a joyous and happy mood.
Within days, though, those old work doldrums returned. So I’d just fuck with the next guy, in order to feel important. The time between my enjoyment and dissatisfaction was decreasing. One day, I spun wild conspiracy theories for a solid day, exhausting my bullshit tank so thoroughly that I had to go on YouTube for some fresh shit. That’s when I saw it.
Somehow, the old guy I had first given the “straight dope” to a few months previous was now an internet video star. He had taken what I’d told him and ran with it, staging ambush interviews of city workers, politicians, the idle rich and media officials alike. That’s when I felt a hand tap me on the shoulder.
I’m not happy about having been replaced by that old dude, but you can’t deny the facts: he had a much more efficient way of getting the message out about what was really going on in your neighbourhood.
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tags: small town, plymouth volare, plymouth, taylorism
When I first signed the paperwork, I got a lot of questions. Why was I going to place myself into suspended animation and awaken hundreds of years in the future? Previas, I explained. They still make ‘em in Japan to this very day, and they’re really good, better than we ever got. So it stands to reason that they must be fucking incredible in the future.
Didn’t I want to hang out, see how things would end in the short term, keep in touch with all my friends and die in my natural time period rather than play God? Not particularly, I answered. Don’t worry, I said, I’d look them up on Wikipedia or whatever the holographic equivalent is. If you want me to remember you, then just become really famous for something. Good news: Differential Joe is remembered very fondly in this time period for stringing up all those politicians on windmills during the Climate Riots of 2072. The rest of my friends were just slackers, I guess.
The defrosting process is pretty rough. Imagine the worst frostbite of your life, and you also have to pee really bad. The whole thing worked, though, and I was now free to explore the world of 2250, and all the Toyota Previas that it had to offer me. I grabbed my coat and was on the way out when the orderly tapped me on the shoulder. At first, I had wondered why he was wearing a decontamination suit, but I figured it was some kind of fetish wear from the youth of today.
Nothing doing, it seems. Since my immune system was prepared for 2019 germs, it would have nowhere to start with on fighting the future germs of the far-off era of 2250. They lost a lot of other cryogenic guys this way before me, they said. There’s some germs now that came from planets we didn’t even know existed in my time period. So now they give everyone a vaccine before they can leave. I nodded my head - it would be a shame to come this far only to have my teeth explode from some kind of Martian turbo-lupus - and waited patiently in the recovery room, munching on hard-light cookies generated by the Almighty Cloud until it was deemed safe for me to leave.
It was true - the future did offer fantastic new sights in Previas. They were everywhere, and had majestic new features far in excess of “refrigerated glovebox” and “mid-engined AWD.” Or so I assumed, because the usual throbbing dementia of Previa Madness was no longer present. I didn’t even feel a teeny tiny fizzing sensation when I gazed upon one now. Those doctors did something to me!
I stormed back inside the clinic, and demanded to speak to the manager. My blood ran colder than the cryogenic bed when she told me.
“Oh yeah, Previa Madness. We cured that in 2150. You’re welcome!” she chirped.
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tags: toyota previa, previa madness, toyota, suspended animation
In all my years, I’ve never seen fights as vicious as those over taxonomy. Religion, abortion, Israel-Palestine, who has to do the dishes this week: all of these crises pale in comparison to the fracas that will ensue as soon as you ask a group of people to place an object into a category.
Don’t believe me? Think back. You’ve all heard the “is a hot dog a sandwich?” question. Chances are, you stabbed your favourite uncle in the eye with a red-hot poker this last Christmas over this puzzle. That’s the kind of taxonomic argument that I refer to. Such an argument erupted into violence yesterday when I was at the bar.
Things started amiably enough. We got into complaining about why cool foreign trucks don’t make it to our shores. One of the guys who reads a lot of magazines blamed it on the “chicken tax,” which is supposedly some kind of tax that poultry companies place upon things that they define to be pickup trucks or something. Anyway, that’s when this real smartass from up the road piped up. I’d never really talked to him before, and he kept to himself, only coming down from his haunted New England-style mansion a couple times a week to bang back a sherry and tell the waitresses about the unceasing gothic torment he is under as a troubled writer trying to reclaim his muse in the home of his dead grandmother. You know, the usual thing.
That’s when he asked it. Is the Dodge Rampage a truck or a car? It’s the sort of question that you know the answer to in your heart, and when your so-called “best friend” has a different, yet equally feral response to it, fists are thrown. I’m not going to say I’m sorry for breaking that beer bottle over Torques-By-Feel-Chris’s head, but I do feel some responsibility for not at least shrieking at him before in order to give him a chance to put his guard up.
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tags: dodge, dodge rampage, taxonomy, hey even this tagging system is a kind of taxonomy, i bet you disagree with how i tagged this and it's too bad you have no control over it
Most people, when they make a deal with the Devil, would go for the usual things. Fame, riches, women, a winning Formula One team. Not me: I decided to go for something that would really benefit me. Thanks to my Satanic contract, I now possess the power to crimp electrical connectors by hand.
Why? How often does this happen to you: you’re at a news studio when the RG6 connector on the satellite uplink fails. Looks like some corrosion got into the cable from the time the Community Events Cruiser was looking into free pancake breakfasts. Maybe a little bit of maple syrup got slopped on the floor then, and now the cable is toast. You need to make a new one, and lucky for you the back seat is full of raw co-axial cable. The only thing you don’t have is a crimper. Boom - you just saved the day.
Want another reason? Let’s say you want to crimp, oh I don’t know, Weatherpack connectors. They’re pretty common in bad American cars. You could do it with a pair of pliers and a squint, but to really be sure you want the proprietary crimper set. Even if you’re going to China for your crimper, the shitty little piece of stamped-steel garbage that will barely last an entire ECU’s worth of crimping costs fifty to seventy bucks. That’s like, seven pizzas. And every different cable family needs its own expensive crimper - sometimes thousands of dollars. You come out way ahead if you can just squeeze the pin between your thumb and forefinger, squint at it, and bellow “by the infinite power of Beezlebub, I declare this pin crimped!”
In fact, I’ve actually made a profit. Once in awhile I drop by the sketchy mechanic at the end of my street, pinch a couple battery cables together for him, and he lets me walk off with any part I want from a customer car, because they’re going to pay to replace it if he says so anyway. Unethical? Yes, but you’re talking about a guy who made a pact with the Great Defiler.
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tags: crimping ain't easy, crimping, electrical work
Everyone tells me that the goal of therapy is not to get “cured,” but help develop the tools so that you will need to go to therapy less often. My urges can never be eliminated, only made small enough that the frequency and severity of my outbreaks are less damaging to myself and those around me.
So when Dr. Brookings - he of the Brookings Method - announced that I had made a huge breakthrough in my gnawing desire to purchase every air-cooled and two-stroke automobile in sight, I felt encouraged. As I later found out, my “progress” was just an excuse to fob me off on an up-and-coming junior psychiatrist. This young buck psychiatrist, Dr. Bennings, was a threat to his reputation, and Brookings couldn’t have some broken turd like myself dragging him down when it came time to write salacious papers for the psychiatry conferences.
Dr. Bennings. What to say about him? I liked him, of course, but his inexperience was fairly glaring. He seemed to be a student of the school of basic human empathy, dispensing entirely with the painful electric shocks and chemical cocktails that his older comrade preferred. As our (still court-ordered) sessions progressed, I realized that there was an opportunity here.
It would be considered unethical for a psychiatrist to spend hours trying to convince his patient about how easy it is to buy a cheap car, but not the other way around. A couple drops here and there about how little I pay in maintenance, how free my life is now that I can double- and triple-park without fear of door dings, and about really, finally understanding how the world of motor vehicles works - and by extension, our mechanized society.
I think it was that last point that convinced him. He tried to hide it, but I noticed that the key fob on the corner of Bennings’ desk no longer read Aston Martin; it was instead a pockmarked and dog-bitten oversized plastic key from a Saab. We were making progress, yes indeed. I’d have him in a Honda by the end of the week.
When I returned to Dr. Brookings, he was mad, but not too mad. After all, I had created a maniac out of an ordinary, respectable person. Papers for days; maybe even a dream five-minute slot about “Previa Madness” on a morning television news show. He wasn’t ungrateful: I did notice the electric shocks ramped up a little slower after that.
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tags: previa madness, toyota, toyota previa, dr. brookings, dr. bennings, honda, aston martin, saab
Every time there’s a fire at the local scrap yard, the detectives come to ask me some questions. It’s not fair. True, I do have a decades-long running grudge with the proprietor - more his fault than mine - but that doesn’t mean that Johnny Law can just engage in a campaign of harassment every time the fire coincidentally starts in the exact place where we just had an argument about the cost of insulated copper wire.
The atmosphere of the junkyard is a lot like America. You see, like America, it mostly consists of people who just want to get through the day without being forced to nod along to the half-hour-long political rants of a small business owner. “Lou Scrap,” as he called himself - probably not so much because his real name was unpronounceable as because there were still high-dollar bounty hunters from the Old Country out looking for him - was the small business owner in question. And just like the average American, I had been getting tired of hearing his bullshit every day in and out.
When he didn’t want to buy a bunch of old copper wire I had pulled out of my walls, and in fact called it “probably stolen,” that’s when I flipped my lid. I am a lot of things: a liar, a scam artist, a bad mechanic, but I am not a thief. Well, except for that time I tried to sell him all those catalytic converters I cut out of cars in the parking lot. He shouldn’t have been so mad about that one; it drummed up business for both of us. Talk about a win-win.
If you go through life like I do, in endless pursuit of The Deal, then you know that things can get emotional. In fact, if you aren’t screaming at each other before the handshake happens, then you are simply not pushing hard enough. So it was with the Insulated Copper Wire Argument of Late 2017 between myself and Lou Scrap. We were professionals doing our jobs, but I guess the yelling and carrying-on was memorable enough to the other customers that they distinctly remembered me and the argument when Lou’s place burned to the ground that afternoon.
I think I satisfied the detectives that I was not the one who had committed such a fuel-wasting crime as arson. Maybe we’ll never know which of Lou’s many, many enemies it was. The pigs decided to leave and not bother me anymore, after casting a long side-eye at my backyard to look for potential accelerants (there’s lots) and crude cover-up jobs (ditto). My butthole was just beginning to unclench when the senior detective stopped in my doorway, turned around, and looked me right in the eyes.
“There’s just one thing,” he said, and I could now see that the cigarette he had been chomping on this entire time was in fact a stick of Pocky, “Do you know if the fire reached the Mitsubishi part of the lot?”
If there’s one indication that you’ve finally “made it” in the game of Canada Post customer appreciation, it’s when your postie calls you from his personal cellphone and makes sure that you’re going to actually be home when he comes by to drop off today’s shipment. I guess that’s the kind of service you get when you force him to upgrade to a crane truck.
He is doing his duty to his country, by protecting my boxes of rusty Japanese hardware from those who would purloin it. Just in case you come from a place that doesn’t have parcel thieves (Afghanistan?) here’s how they operate. The basic concept of the package robber is that you follow the mail truck around on its route. After it drops off a big box and you’ve waited long enough to make sure you aren’t going to get caught, you go up to the box and take it.
Now, you might ask: why are my packages so important to the integrity of the nation? Besides the fact that the money I pay to Canada Post represents a not-insubstantial portion of their operating revenue (my colour on the pie chart last year was mauve), we have socialist health care.
When a criminal rips open a package that was destined for me without looking, they are often overcome by the sheer clouds of aerosolized rust. Only those whose lungs have become desensitized to what top Canadian research scientists are now calling Super Tetanus can safely operate within the area without a rebreather.
It doesn’t take too many photos of a robber’s children gasping for breath that will never come before the Feds get involved. I proposed that they just add more safety stickers, but that was before the last time, where some asshole accidentally tore the lovingly-taped bubble wrap off an OS Giken differential that had been swept away in the Tohoku Tsunami and chilled in the all-natural equivalent of a salt-water outhouse for the better part of a decade before a professional salvage team listed it on Yahoo Auctions as “Surprise! Extra Cancers!”
It was Thursday evening, and you know what that means: another visit to a small town I’d never heard of to help buy a wrecked 4x4 project.
You can’t buy them from the big cities, oh no. Anything that even looks like an SUV is picked over and overpriced. Even the four-hundred-thousand kilometer first-gen Pathfinders owned by a family of Romanian immigrants whose religion expressly forbids them from doing preventative maintenance cost two or three mortgage payments.
What you have to do is go to a small town, like this one. Then you get the high-mileage highway commuters, the deer-strike damage, the “hunting buggies” whose floorpan is mostly loose empty cans of Coors Light, but you get a deal. And as my psychiatrist found out just after the release order went through, getting a deal is the only thing that I actually care about in life.
I’m not going to lie to you. Was this Blazer a piece of absolute, total shit? Yes it was. A little overpriced? Yeah, by about half. Did it make any actual sense to pick this thing up, as opposed to literally any other vehicle on planet Earth? Not at all.
Did we buy it? Of course. We came all this way, we’re not leaving empty handed.
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tags: nissan, nissan pathfinder, chevrolet, chevrolet blazer
When I was growing up in my small home town, my family never really wanted to talk much about genealogy. It made things pretty uncomfortable, because - if you’ve ever lived in a small town in America - your specific genetic heritage comes up in conversation a lot. At first I just lied, told them I was generic Western-European, had all the right bits flipped on my dipswitches, no problem getting into the country club. As I kept lying, it became easier. I got worried about this, and so one day decided to figure out the truth, to uncover my family’s shame.
My Volare had barely finished its traditional after-shutdown dieseling out front of the public library before I had the birth records in hand. After powershifting the microfiche machine, it became obvious why my family had hidden the truth from me all these years. I was the illegitimate son of Wally Parks, the drag racer’s drag racer. In my veins ran the blood of a legit, old-school hot rodder and occasional journalist.
I was a little ashamed, to be honest. Had I been told of my heritage before, I would probably now be driving something a little nicer. Far from a dragster, my sludge-headed Plymouth didn’t have reverse or second gear. And if there were ever any drag strips near me, I hadn’t published any large-format editorials about their sad demise.
Nowadays, I think a lot about my heritage. When my shit breaks down and I have to ratchet-strap the differential back into what’s left of the body for the third time this week, I figure it’s what dear old Dad would have wanted. And when I finally brakestand enough converter pressure to pop a squeaker off the line and pull half a car length on a base-model Dodge Dakota before it shuts me down entirely, I know that he is looking down on me with pride.
Do you know Colonel Sanders, the beloved mascot of KFC who may or may not actually have lived? Never mind the conspiracy theory that he is in fact a memetic artifact inserted into our collective unconsciousness by The Farcomers, there is a much more interesting story about him in Japan.
Decades ago, long before the Landing, the Hanshin Tigers baseball team had won themselves a championship. Their hated rivals laid shattered at their feet, and the fanbase was excited. As a result, somebody chucked a statue of Colonel Sanders into the Dotonbori river.
Where did the statue come from, you ask? Well, in Japan, every KFC - yeah, even the ones in mall food courts - have a life-size statue of Harland Sanders standing outside them, keeping a silent, eternal watch over the frying of chicken and the happy customers who line up every Christmas for their romantic dinners. This is just one of the things we accept, now that the Farcomers have rewritten so much of our paper and magnetic-storage history as part of their Redemption Project.
Anyway, back to the story - it seems like the Tigers did very poorly after that. You know how sports journalists are; it quickly became known as the “curse of the Colonel” and could explain away the ever-growing losing streak of the home team. Something, it was decided - by politicians, not the Task Board as that did not exist yet - had to be done. There were many dives to attempt to recover the Colonel statue, and they got most of it - but not all.
To this very day, his statue still is missing his left hand and glasses, and the KFC it was meant to be returned to went out of business long ago. Have the Tigers won a game since? We don’t really know, because of the communications blockout for all Asia since the Landing. I like to think that the Colonel is still ruining those alien motherfuckers’ sports betting rings.
Contrary to what the internet has told you, using quicklime on a dead body doesn’t so much disintegrate it as preserve it immensely well for the police to later find.
Did your cat get out? The best thing to do is leave out a can of its favourite food, a blanket that smells like you, and a table with an incredibly delicate project that only needs one last step before it is finished on top.
It can be difficult to locate replacements for the little rubber feet that go on your appliances and computers. Rather than buy something from Home Depot and risk having mismatched, wobbly feet, just use a common hole saw bit to cut circles out of the old tires that litter your property.
Don’t buy expensive springs from the store. They’re marked up because Big Spring doesn’t want hard-working Chinese competition coming in here and undercutting their fat margins. Your neighbour’s car has a bunch of them, he won’t miss one or two.
Whenever you are about to touch something that could be electrically faulty, be careful! Unplug it gently from the wall, and then plug it into a much higher voltage supply to teach it a lesson. Nice try, asshole!
Can’t find a TWICE module for your late-model Saab? Just buy a few more Saabs until you get one that works. Now you’re the “Saab guy,” and people will just give you their basket case cars because you must know what you’re doing. Joke’s on them: nobody knows what they’re doing with a Saab.
For years, I’d been telling myself to get a vise. I’d look at them at the store, pick them up off the shelf and turn the box around in my hands. With this, I told myself, all my project dreams can finally come true. With this, I sighed, I would no longer have an excuse.
Besides, my garage was too full of shrapnel from sold-long-ago project cars, valuable garbage, and bicycles I stole from the neighbourhood kids for scrap metal in order to have enough room for a workbench to mount the vise on. That was a good justification both for not cleaning up the Hoarders-esque layer cake of trash, and for not giving Princess Auto a hundo for whatever box of lifetime-warranty that had bribed its way through customs this week.
I was two-footing my way through traffic, trying to feed in enough throttle to keep the idle high up enough on my Isuzu Impulse that it wouldn’t stall out. It had been one of those long stop-and-go traffic episodes, and I could already feel the pleasant sensation of carbon monoxide poisoning settling in. The smoke was mostly from the open-header exhaust seeping through the holes in the floorpan, but I don’t think it was limited to it at all.
Through the clouds of pleasant overrich ashy idle-smoke, I saw it on the bumper of a work truck. A bumper-mounted vise. I could just park that shit on the street and do my metal working wherever I wanted. Nobody could stop me, and more importantly I wouldn’t have to clear out any room in my garage. One trip to Princess Auto later, I had bought and returned a MIG welder and tacked my new $39.99 “Machinist’s” (sarcasm quotes theirs) vise to the roof of the Isuzu.
It was the greatest idea of my life. Now I could finally press bushings, hold things still for painting, and carry stuff back from the garden centre without having to find room for it in the Impulse’s hatch. Plus, whenever I have to do some grinding, my neighbours are the ones who have to clean up the microscopic chunks of white-hot steel swarf. There’s no downside, unless you’re the guy behind me who caught a windshield full of Powerfist when the roof skin delaminated last week. Sorry about that.
Back in high school, I was sort of a lost cause. I really didn’t know what I was going to do with my life besides turn wrenches and spit in the face of God. As any self-respecting teenager would do at the time, I went to go see the guidance counsellor, Mr. Searle. He had his finger on the pulse of the world economy. He’d tell me what I should turn my considerable talents toward.
“We’ve never had anyone score a zero on employability before,” he told me, talking into the paper. His eyes seemed to bore through the print-out as he scanned it for any mark that would indicate the computer had simply goofed up and that his world was still fundamentally knowable. The sheet provided no succor, and soon he had to look me right in the eyes. I could tell immediately he was a broken man.
I was sent downtown, to the big computer, that wouldn’t fuck up like the little one at our podunk high school in the ‘burbs. Once there, I was assured, my destiny would be revealed. After taking the test again, I sat in a small white room in an uncomfortable chair, waiting for Mr. Searle’s superior to enter and tell me what I really should be doing with my life. The longer I waited, the more impatient I became. After waiting what felt like hours, I got up from my laminated-fibreglass chair to stretch my legs. That’s when I noticed the plume of capacitor smoke rolling in through the gap under the door.
So no computers, then. And no guidance counsellors, either - a very nice lady, Ms. Winterbottom, had some kind of stroke while manually grading my aptitude test. That really shook them, even though the coroner figured it was probably just some kind of coincidence.
Everyone decided it would be in my best interest if I simply did not have a career at all. I got a welfare application form from Mr. Searle, and he stamped it with a special rubber stamp marked “Don’t Even Try.”
Sure, every so often I feel that old Protestant work-ethic guilt and try to fill out a form at the local Dairy Queen or video rental store, but when those places burn down I feel even more guilt. Hey, I just thought of something. Do you think “professional arsonist” needs an interview?
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tags: career guidance, mr. searle, ms. winterbottom
Ever since my buddy got that salvaged frog-eye Sprite, my targeted ads have been super fucky. At first, I figured it was mostly the Sentience deciding that it just wanted me to buy any car. Keep the economy going and all that, no harm done.
Then it became more obvious that they were keeping tabs on me. Little ads for specialized British repair tools. Animated video ads about Toyota transmission swap kits. Full-page spreads for exotic new brands of rust converters. First thing in the morning, my clock radio would make the DJs talk about how great it would be to go to the hill climbs this weekend in a leaf-sprung British roadster. I never thought I would ever miss human DJs before they were outlawed as a result of the Morning Zoo Massacre back in ‘29.
By the next week, the push had moved from “not very subtle” to literally screaming at me at all times. You ever seen ads in your shower? Neither had I, until it started cutting off the water every five seconds unless I clicked through a set of Craigslist classifieds in search of my dream car.
I could take it no longer. I bought my very own Sprite, but something nagged at me on the way home. Since when did we let advertising influence us so strongly? There was only one thing I could do, and teach them that they didn’t control me, that they could never predict someone with as many weird automotive fetishes as I had. A wheel bearing began to wail on the trailer. My hand reached for the volume knob of my tow truck’s radio, and clicked it on.
“Hey hey hey, campers. Boy, that was some great TOP FORTY MUSIC,” chirped the DJ. “Don’t forget to stop by PICK AND/OR PULL to get a new MAZDA THIRTEEN-B ROTARY ENGINE for your swap project this weekend.”
Hey kids! I’m K.C. Popcorn here at the Nickelodeon Teen’s Choice Awards! This is the biggest night in adolescent-issued achievement awards for adults, and a chance to tell the grown-ups what you really think! There’s a lot of categories, so let’s just jump right into it.
Our first category is the Nickelodeon Teen Choice for Dumbest Fucking Traffic Designer. We’ve got some strong candidates here today, from all over the world! Everyone has been trying super hard to plumb the depths of making impossible-to-navigate, extremely dangerous social experiments branded as roads in the name of public safety, so let’s see who the nominees are.
The first nominee is Dander Plumbkin, from South Bend, Indiana. Dander here doesn’t understand that “lane ends” signs should be placed more than the absolute legal minimum away from the place where the lane ends. Let’s look at a clip of texting drivers panic-braking from highway speeds at the last possible moment and then jerking into the passing lane without looking! Brilliant stuff, Dander.
Four-time-champion Jericho “P” from Quebec City is always a strong candidate here. His philosophy is that roads should be pretty first, and usable second, which is why every piece of street he could get his hands on is cobblestone. Not only is it vastly expensive and torturously injurious to horse-drawn carriages, but it also freezes easily in the winter. Good thing that never happens, except for eight months out of the year!
Next up is Eustace Winterbottom, from East Haverbrook. Eustace has never seen a road design that she couldn’t make vastly more complicated, and seems to have specifically designed this intersection so that the most amount of crosswalk possible is blocked by the A-pillars of most common cars. It’s a pedestrian harvest every time someone turns right! Check out this mother of three catching the hood scoop of a V6 Mustang at low speeds! Wow, that elbow broke amazingly. The Mustang didn’t even notice, because Eustace went for the difficult one-two and made the yield at an oblique angle so the B-pillar blocks oncoming traffic! Stunning work, and probably a strong contender for the dumbest fucking traffic design we’ve ever seen.
But there’s still one more nominee - yes! It’s last year’s winner, Tom Qwyjibo from Casco Viejo! Tom has decided to make the entire city pedestrian friendly by arbitrarily opening up a walking mall on the blind exit from a hundred-kilometre-an-hour major highway with no buffer zone! Check out that ABS braking in action, as this Volkswagen Polo narrowly misses running over two dogs and a toddler and instead plows directly into the heavily-populated patio of a sports bar! They’ll be digging corpses out of this baby for days.
With a showing like that, how could it be any different? Tom Qwyjibo is once again this year’s Teen Choice for Dumbest Fucking Traffic Designer! Better luck next time to all our contestants.
There are many reasons I’ve had a long-standing grudge with the customs people. We’ve both said things we’ve regretted, charged duty we shouldn’t have, made angry phone calls wondering why the tracking isn’t moving, but this latest offence crossed the line. You can abuse a man, you can spit on a man, you can kill a man’s family, but never - ever - steal his RockAuto magnets.
First, a pause for new readers. If you are unfamiliar with RockAuto, I am envious of the precipice you now stand upon. There is still a chance to turn back, to refuse to sate your curiosity. That chance ended two sentences ago. Welcome, friend. When you buy a lot of parts from online car-parts reseller RockAuto, they stick some fridge magnets of other people’s cars in the box with the parts.
The idea is that you will one day, with enough parts ordered, complete the collection. Though this is obviously a cruel fantasy stoked by cynical parts-warehouse demons, it means that each RockAuto magnet lost in transit means a missed opportunity to increase my social standing among my fellow rust-poking weirdos. And some guy at the border was obviously pinching them.
It was subtle at first. A box would arrive with no magnets. I’d shrug my shoulders. Maybe a packer forgot to include them. Perhaps they simply ran out and were waiting for a new shipment because it is winter beater prep season. Some part of me was still suspicious, though. I started meeting the parcel delivery guy at the curb so I could sneak a peek past his shoulder, check if the interior of his delivery van was lined with tiny magnetic Pintos.
As the crime proceeded, though, it became more and more obvious that I was the victim of a border agent’s sticky fingers. They stopped gingerly replacing the proprietary RockAuto tape, and instead just slapped down some Staples-grade parcel shit willy-nilly. Like all thieves, they got sloppier the longer they got away with it.
I thought about my options. I could file a freedom-of-information request, but having the dude’s manager sniffing around would make him go to ground, and I’d never find out the truth. I could form a posse, and forcibly invade the warehouse, searching for the magnets that no doubt wallpapered the purloiner’s cubicle, but as a Canadian I knew that most of our coups ended in disaster, as the treasoneers would often hold the door for the SWAT team sent in to bust their heads.
In the end, I decided simply to join a third-rate political party and slowly work my way up to leader. The news media was surprised that someone with no experience could so rapidly become Prime Minister, but they all complimented my willpower and my drive, commenting that I seemed to be propelled solely by a sense of justice and retribution against government corruption.
I still haven’t had a chance to head over to the customs office yet. It turns out that when you get this high up in the government, you can just have stuff sent to you in diplomatic pouches. Free shipping and I get to keep my magnets. It’s just like they say: power corrupts, but absolute power means I might actually finish replacing the transmission on this fucking Rasheen some time this month.
It’s time to admit that the American experiment has failed. No matter where you get your news - bar televisions, YouTube videos of abandoned mall walkthroughs with cryptic voiceovers, artificially-intelligent zeppelins, true-crime podcasts that have been made into HBO miniseries - it’s hard to ignore the constant drumbeat of negativity. We are at the end of history and nobody is lining up to insert another quarter into the machine.
Although I’m used to trying to repair long-gone projects after someone has given up on them already, the primary reason that I do so is because I can get those things very cheap. There is no junkyard selling entire countries, as far as I know, and you make all your money on the flip when you buy them. I tried buying a few debt-saddled South American countries but everyone at the consulates just laughed at me. Very rude, not to see an opportunity like this.
Where do we go from, if the first world is basically out of ideas and the planet is starting to eat itself alive? You do the same thing that my neighbours did when I brought home that last Pontiac “Direbird:” move next door. With the backers I had already suckered into funding my country-buying quest on Kickstarter, I was able to buy a scratch-and-ding Soviet Buran shuttle and point it directly at Mars. Now all I needed was a pilot.
I couldn’t do it. Blasting off to space, visiting exotic foreign planets and furthering the cause of man: that’s all pretty great, sure, but I don’t get to drive there. The thrust of a rocket is only thrilling the first couple of times you feel four hundred thousand horsepower swelling beneath your ass, and then after that you just want the flight to be over so you can go back to four-wheel-sliding a highway onramp with an underpowered Yugoslavian family car. Maybe that’s just me. Besides, with all the back taxes that I owe, I’m pretty sure “going into space” would set off my ankle bracelet.
Against all odds (because I only hired very few employees, and even then, only those who were extremely cheap), the mission was a success. After months in space, the hyper-rich billionaires and technologists that I had hired as my guinea pig astronauts set down on the Red Planet, ready to create a new perfect society, free of all the legacy bad decisions of ours.
You’ve probably read about what happened to them in the news. In my defence, I did tell them to pack enough food for the trip. It’s not my fault they ran out of plutocrat meat before the first month.
Every classifieds ad for cars from the dawn of time has reported that beater cars need “some work.” Just what is “some work?” We asked top scientists at NASA JPL, CERN, the Foundation Academy for Ordered Thought, and the local bar. Nobody knew exactly what it meant.
Why is this? A generous person would assume that the seller of the vehicle simply does not know what the name of the part that just fell off is, or that they don’t really understand the relationship between “engine still inside car” and “car makes go now.” Cynics like us, however, who have been in the trenches of automotive-repair warfare for decades, will tell you that the sellers always know.
It’s not just North America, either. Awhile ago, I picked up a Suzuki Cervo from a nice Japanese dude and drove it onto a cargo ship bound for home. Can you believe I didn’t even get one full rotation of donut out of it before the water pump exploded?
When I called the seller, he was like “yeah, asshole, I warned you about that.” See? They all know. It was too late to return the car, so instead I had to spend the sixty days it took to reach my home port rebuilding the engine in my cabin. Cramped, sweaty, hot, no tools, and I didn’t get my damage deposit back on the room because apparently you’re not allowed to spill oil on the floor. If that was the case, then why didn’t they provide any kitty litter?
So take it from me. When you’re out tomorrow afternoon looking at another $500 Fiat to drag home and horrify the neighbours with, you must remember remember: if they say it needs “some work,” bring battery cables to interrogate them with.
Have you ever had a lunch thief in your office? Some kind of scumbag who flits around, robbing fridges? At first, you think it’s easy to catch them. It’s gotta be someone on this floor. Well, then it’s gotta be someone in this building. Who can it be if it’s not someone in this office complex? When you have no other options, that’s when you hire my specialist firm of consulting lunch-theft private investigators.
You might think this is a niche operation, that we must also branch out once in awhile and do ‘normal’ jobs. There’s no way there’s that much demand for lunch theft, right? Wrong. We’ve hired thirty new detectives this month alone, dudes who are impossible to detect before they bust you.
They sit in a kitchen, practically becoming part of the tacky light-wearing wallpaper as they observe all the various peoples of the office landscape grazing at the communal refrigerator. Watching. Not acting, yet, even if there’s an obvious sampler treating everyone else’s bags like a glorified buffet line. Because sometimes there’s two thieves, working in packs. You gotta wait to be sure. Did I mention we get paid by the hour?
Sometimes the perps know we’re onto them, have been for months. They still don’t stop stealing lunches. I don’t know why - I’ll never know why. Once, this guy in Tampa started packing heat because he knew. We got lucky seeing the grip dip out of his waistband when he went in for a second helping of day-old pork tenderloin. Our guy Fast-Finger Trent (nicknames are handed out by merit) went into his cubicle afterward and pickpocketed the gun right out of his pants. Sometimes to catch a thief, you need a better thief. We caught Trent in Des Moines yanking submarine sandwiches with an improvised grabber through the mail slot. He signed right up on the spot.
Finally, the glorious moment. I like to drive out for these when I hear that a case is getting close to completion. Not just for the reflected glory in seeing one of my girls and boys doing well, no. It’s the adrenaline. Most of the time, HR won’t do shit about the crime that has occurred, even with gigabytes of evidence video and photographs dropped right on their desk in a tidy little package. That’s when we go to the press…
In this day and age there are a lot of media outlets who shy away from confronting the real controversies, even as they profit from them. Toyota’s Celica is the peak of automotive performance, I tell the assembled journalists. You’d be a fool to count it out; even the watered-down, front-wheel-drive grand touring versions of late are phenomenal little cars.
These, the men and (some) women who are paid the small bucks to drive brand-new exotic sports cars every day, snort and attempt to discredit my claim. How can a Toyota Celica be good, they ask, when it does not even have the self-levelling active aerodynamics of a McLaren or even the pure mechanical grip of a Formula One race car? The manufacturer can’t even agree on how to pronounce the name.
Our debate continues into the small hours. Some see the truth in my position, remembering perhaps a sweet high school moment with a beloved Celica, and slowly make their way to my side of the room. There’s a genuine sympathy forming in my heart for the remaining holdouts, who are arguing from a belief in knowable objective truth rather than subjective satisfaction in what is the best all-rounder vehicle to ever be made. My patience is growing thin for the guy from Car & Driver who keeps trotting out the argument that the Celica’s brakes aren’t even carbon fibre, unlike any decent car, though.
The sun rises, and still there remain many opponents to my belief. I think it’s noble that even in this age of compromised news reporting that there are still people who are willing to die rather than bend the knee to an authority figure. It’s hard to watch them get mass-executed by the firing squad of the Toyota Celica Force without a tear forming in my eye, but I am heartened by knowing it’s what they would have wanted. After all, by their own standards, one must never accept a compromise.
Don’t you just hate it when people are shoving money into your face? All that disgusting, debasing lucre? Are you, perhaps, too successful? Do you resent your parents for pushing you into a profitable career that you once thought was your true calling but are now finding out that you’d rather spend your weekends and evenings at the junkyard, wearing homemade plate armour and climbing on the rusty automotive refuse of a once-great civilization?
Yeah, me neither.
I love to get paid. That’s why I dress up in this suit, one just like yours, and go to this office, one just like yours. You may never be able to figure out my true motivations, because I keep them fairly well hidden. Sure, if you know what you’re looking for, there are tells: an eye-twitch when I see a Porsche 911 being eased through a corner; a Lamborghini on all-season tires. Land Rovers in general.
Most of the time, though, you won’t be able to tell someone like me is sitting right next to you, scooping your money into my briefcase, ready to spend it on some kind of carbon-fibre V12 Meyers Manx or nitrous-burning jeepney project as soon as your back is turned. My disguise is so good that I talk to bicyclists in the office about their commutes to work, try to figure out who has the best Strava score in the office. I learn a lot about racing lines from those guys, but to accuse me of being a secret hack mechanic in my spare time? Rude.
So keep giving me your money and then acting confused when you see a guy who looks sort of like me but with an image-recognition-fuzzing mask doing a four-wheel burnout with something that looks like a Toyota Corolla FX16 reinterpreted by Satan. After all, you banker guys are pretty good at not drawing links between behaviour and consequences.
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tags: porsche, lamborghini, land rover, meyers manx, jeepney, toyota, toyota corolla fx16
For nearly two centuries running, the Vietnamese have produced what is indisputably the finest sandwich in all of creation: the banh mi. Liberated from the heady rules-following and scowly faces of French cuisine, ancient Vietnamese chefs toiled to construct a sandwich that kicks the ass of everything else that you can jam between two slices of bread.
And to deliver these buttery missiles of perfection? Two-stroke motorcycles. It’s like they designed some kind of clever trap to lure me in, and it was succeeding. I decided it was about time to take an Asian vacation, prodded on by the kind but forceful inquiries of Constable Timbit. Even though I generally despise planes because Boeing used anti-competitive tactics to force Puch to abandon their Moped Jet project, in this case it was the only way to get there that didn’t involve sleeping in a cabin aboard a cargo liner. And those are way too cramped to do a power slide on the deck of.
Even though the Discovery Channel had almost no interest in my travelogue show that I pitched a few years ago, here’s the gist of it. Your first goal when arriving in any foreign land is to secure transportation. Then, you want to figure out a place to live. Last, seek out allies and use them to destabilize major pieces of infrastructure in order to deny the enemy access to them. My tummy was growling too much to bother with steps 2 and 3, so I went right to 12 ‘o’ clocking a fifty-dollar(!) scratch-and-ding Sym Attila in the general direction of where I could find pâté-laced deliciousness.
In the end, I couldn’t stay in Vietnam. There was that whole visa issue, yes, and the repeated violations of traffic law without having a drivers’ license. Those things are mere trifles, unimportant to a world traveller such as myself who knows how things really work. No, what finally made me leave was that I spent all of my money on Honda Waves and didn’t have any left over for more sandwiches. In retrospect, at least I could have taken the banh mis as carry-on.
There’s one thing that unites all of us: we’re all running out of storage space on our phones. Whether you’re a powerful CEO or just some guy who steals excess bread crumbs from the break-room toaster tray, you’re flicking away annoying notifications telling you to get rid of all those worthless old photos of your loved ones so that a new Google Maps update can tell you about a new hamster cancer centre that opened up in Iowa.
Here at Seat Safety Switch Solutions, we’ve heard you. There is a source of vast phone storage out there, but nobody has capitalized on it yet. Our system collects all the obsolete smartphones, dumbphones, medium-phones and misunderstood-phones from inside junk drawers, garage trash cans, and 911-dialling toddlers and hooks them together to give you like another fifteen minutes of storage.
All you have to do is keep them constantly plugged in, because right now if any of them shut off mid-transfer everything gets corrupted. We’re working on that part, and we’ll do it, too, unless not enough people keep giving us money because then our business will go under and oopsy-poopsy goodbye all your videos of Mister Fluffy.
Not cheap enough for you? Here are some ideas for how you can get vastly more untapped storage. Have you noticed that cell phone stores have dozens of brand new phones just lying around their store, doing nothing? If you sneak in there and hook our app up to them, you can start backing up the Internet until the minimum-wage salespeople catch on and wipe them. Your grandmother probably doesn’t install a ton of apps, either. She’d be overjoyed to help you make room for your collection of vintage pornography!
Despite what you might have heard from our so-called competition, our LeaveStuffAtYourFriendsPlace™ technology does not make cellphones measurably heavier. It does make them explode sometimes, but only when it’s a hot day or it hasn’t rained for awhile and you try to unlock the phone while wearing socks on a carpeted floor. Send us your venture capital today!
At long last, after so many maimed school zone patrol volunteers and embarrassing lectures by the police, my grandma decided to stop driving finally. As a result, she gave me her mouldering 1999 S10 Blazer. As I looked over the soft cab corners and the general malaise of the V6, I had a sudden vision come upon me and I realIZED THAT THERE WAS ONLY ONE WAY FORWARD. I SET MY HARBOUR FREIGHT EARTHQUAKE IMPACT WRENCH TO “MAXIMUM OVERCOMPENSATION,” AND HIT THE CRANK PULLEY BOLT WITH IT SO HARD THAT THE STOCK FOUR-POINT-THREE CAME FLYING THROUGH THE HOOD ON ITS OWN AXIS, RIPPING THE ENTIRE WIRING HARNESS OUT OF THE FIREWALL WITH IT AS THE LONGBLOCK WAS LAUNCHED ONTO GOD’S GREEN EARTH FOR THE FIRST AND FINAL TIME OF ITS TOO-LONG EXISTENCE. I HEARD THE CHANTING OF THE GODS OF TORQUE IN MY EARS THEN, AND IT DIDN’T TAKE MUCH MORE THAN A DRAM OF PCP AND A SET OF BRASS KNUCKLES TO WORK AN AUTHENTIC CATHEDRAL-HEADED CHEVROLET FIVE-POINT-THREE-LITRE VEE AIGHT DIRECTLY FROM THE FRONT END OF THE SILVERADO THAT MY NEIGHBOUR KEPT PARKING IN A PLACE WHERE I COULD SEE IT, THE FOOL.
WHEN I THINK ABOUT ALL THE DINOSAURS THAT DIED JUST TO CREATE THIS ONE GLORIOUS NANOSECOND OF INTAKE AND EXHAUST NOISE HARMONIZING AS ONE, I KNOW THEY WOULD HAVE GIVEN A BIG OL’ THUMBS-UP TO THE ASTEROID IF THEY HAD REALIZED THIS WOULD HAPPEN.
HAVE YOU EVER DRIVEN AN ERECTION? MY DOCTOR SAID THAT IF MY BONER LASTED MORE THAN FOUR HOURS I SHOULD COME SEE HIM TO MAKE SURE THAT HE CAN GET HIMSELF SOME OF THAT SHIT. UNFORTUNATELY FOR DR. DICKBOTHERER, PH.D HE’S NOT GOING TO GET A CHANCE TO SEE THIS ONE GO OFF BECAUSE THERE IS NO WAY IN HELL THAT THIS TINY BABY PUMPKIN REAR END IS GOING TO LAST MORE THAN TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY MINUTES AT THE WAY THAT I KEEP POPPING THE GAS TO HEAR THE STRUTS SING
JUST TO MAKE SURE THAT THIS BLAZER STILL SATISFIES THE PRIME DIRECTIVE, I HEAD ON DOWN TO THE GARDEN CENTRE. THERE IS A SIGN POSTED PROMINENTLY IN THE DIRT AND GRAVEL PARKING LOT: “DRIVE SLOW.” DON’T WORRY: IF YOU LOOK SOLELY AT THE LINEAR COMPONENT OF THE DONUT I AM DOING, YOU WILL NOTICE THAT IT IS BARELY EVEN IN THE SINGLE-DIGITS OF METERS PER SECOND.
“XERXES, NO!” I CAN HEAR A MOTHER SHRIEK. SHE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN NOT TO BRING HER ONLY SON TO A PLACE LIKE THIS, WHERE HE COULD BE EXPOSED TO ADULT IDEAS AND CONCEPTS. EMBEDDED INDELIBLY IN HIS DNA IS THE GENETIC TRAUMA OF SEEING THE ONLY FUCKING SWEET SUV EVER TO BE CREATED. HE IS MARKED NOW, I TRY TO CACKLE THROUGH THE WINDOW BUT CATCH A LUNGFUL OF PARTIALLY-ASPIRATED ENGINE OIL BEING FORCED UP THROUGH THE VALVE COVER BREATHERS AND ONTO MY WINDSHIELD. HE WILL BE ONE OF US.
Everyone says the economy is pretty precarious and that only the best of the best should tinker with it. “No user-serviceable parts inside,” says the warning sticker on the side of the economy. It has tamper-proof rivets that will void the economy’s warranty if, say, I drill them out with a metal drill bit I stole from Home Depot just for this occasion.
A lot of people have been inside this thing, I realize, now that I’ve jiggled the protective cover loose and yanked out the RF shield. Every connector and fastener has telltale tool marks of decades of people getting in there with randomly-sized sockets, whether or not they were the correct size or even the same system of measurement. Don’t worry, I tell the economy, and show it a little baggie of good-condition bolts, pulled from other economies at the junkyard, that I keep in a little kitty-litter box in my garage.
My lookout on the curb makes a few concerning noises as I’m trying to clean up the economy’s wiring, but Johnny Five-Oh never comes around the corner. It’s for the best for both of us: in order for Constable Timbit to understand that he should arrest me, he’d need about half a year of community-college classes in Economy Tampering. Half a year, that is, unless you’re a born autodidact like me, in which case it only takes twenty-five-odd years of fucking around with smaller, less capable, economies to figure it out.
At last, I am done, and slam the lid shut on the economy. Once the hood-open switch trips, the thing fires right up again, and starts humming right along instead of making the horrendous grinding that it used to (I sprayed some Fluid Film in the spots that looked rusty and flipped the accessory belt over so the worn side wouldn’t be riding on its wobbly crank pulley anymore). Excited to see the effects of my performance modifications, I return to my car and get the fuck out of there.
The pundits agree in unison: the economy now rides a little hard over bumps and is generally annoyingly loud whenever there’s a rapid acceleration, but the removal of pickup-truck subsidization has both goosed the GDP (thanks to the re-introduction of the Chevrolet Chevette) and caused the importation of thousands of foreign sports-cars.
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tags: economy, chevrolet, chevrolet chevette, constable timbit
You can never be really sure what your kids are looking at on the internet. There’s all kinds of crazy monsters out there, with barbaric ideologies and terroristic threats. If your son or daughter dips in there for too long, they’ll come out radicalized. That’s why I replied to that ad offering me five bucks to go on Facebook for a few hours and then answer some questions about my experience for 60 Minutes.
It was just like they had said. I had barely figured out how to operate the social media conveyance when I fell in with a bad crowd. These maniacs from Poland were sending me all these tempting memes, reinforcing all of my negative beliefs about the invasion of Eurasian society by foreigners that show up to work sober. Soon, I was not just looking at their content but contributing my own. My friends here did not understand me, and whenever I told them about my interests they responded in terror.
My handlers in the media even started to notice, which is a difficult thing to do when your daily “pick-me-up” is a $23 order of synthetic super-opiates from AliExpress. I started to see cryptic Outlook meeting requests pop up in my inbox, with “deprogramming squads” and “Hugh Downs,” whatever that is. Every time a police car went by, I knew it was only a matter of time before they would separate me from my discovery of the Truth. Before the noose could tighten, I immediately grabbed a flight to Poland.
When I got there, my driver took me directly to some kind of training compound on the outskirts of town. All the guys I had been talking to on the internet were here! It turns out that the “Fiat 126p owners’ club” was a real thing, after all. We had a big day full of fun donuts and rear-engined burnouts, and the important thing is that none of us learned any lessons about radicalization on the internet, even after that assault helicopter soaked the building with all those Hellfire missiles.
I really love going to my local junkyard. It’s a you-pick, like all the good ones are, so it’s both a good morning of exercise as well as a chance to shoot the poop with your fellow wrench. There’s sort of a camaraderie among the scavengers who roost here; you get to know the same people, even if you never learn their names. Last week, the team of Filipino engine-swappers who harvest every Toyota in the yard lent me a ratchet when mine exploded.
It’s all so very egalitarian, a group of common folk allied against a common enemy: entropy. Although it’s never particularly friendly, it still feels a bit like a real society has developed. There’s technical experts, grease monkeys, and guys who can carry a whole lot of engine blocks on their backs. Everyone gives in a little bit and they get a little bit back. It feels right - moral, somehow. Also, occasionally, we pocket a few relays because fuck the police.
The reason why I keep banging on about the social harmony of our great wrecking-yard utopia is that it is even more abrupt when someone violates the unspoken code. On the same visit that I was helped by the gang of engine-swappers, I also came out to the parking lot to see that someone had helped themselves to parts off of my Volare. It seems I had parked a little bit too close to the scrap-intake area, was the explanation of the happy front desk clerk who collected fifty perfectly-good dollars for my grille and the remaining intact door mirror.
It could have been a lot worse - I’d heard stories of guys whose Suburbans ended up completely stripped to the bone like piranhas - but at least I was in the perfect place to pick up some more parts. I headed back into the yard, and followed the path that was nearly muscle memory by now.
The junkyard society had smiled upon me once again: There was a Volare waiting for the crusher that was in way better shape than my car. All it needed were a few trivial parts, like the entire engine and a floor. The things other people throw away. I started stripping my own car in the parking lot and smuggling parts back into the junkyard. That evening, I drove out with a much-improved car.
The latest thing that our local politicians had been getting stirred up about are weeds. No, not narcotics: dandelions. Due to a lack of budget to spray the entire city, a bunch of the yellow bastards were infesting every available natural surface for miles around. Once mad about how much it cost to spray, said politicians were now enraged at the much higher cost to remedy. The parks look shabby now, their constituents cried to them. Fix it, but don’t raise my taxes.
Here at the Seat Safety Switch Engineering Consultancy, we like to say that our only actual rule is “do things on the cheap.” It’s not really true; because of Johnson down in Fuels we also had to add a rule for “don’t do heroin at work,” but that’s sort of two sides of the same coin. Anyway, when the public tender came out, probably part of the money clawed away from some useless project like a new community swimming pool or a cancer treatment clinic, we jumped right on that bid. And because of Rule Number One, we won it.
I’d already been working on a little project along these lines, and so it was a rare opportunity for me to get my hands dirty down in the prototype shop. The concept was pretty solid: a self-driving lawnmower, fuelled by dandelions. It worked great; ran for days, chewed up entire parks, but for one thing. It needed an operator to hang around, and an operator has an hourly wage.
In order to keep the contract dollars flowing, we rigged it up with some kind of artificial intelligence that kept looking for more weeds to mow. It was sort of a survival instinct, really - if it stopped finding weeds, it would be like starving to death. There’s a lot of that kind of thing just kicking around in the code libraries, easy to adapt without spending a few bucks. Now the city could just pop it down in a park, hit the button, and it would seek and destroy dandelions all around the neighbourhood.
Unfortunately, we forgot to add in some GPS-boundary logic before code freeze. On the plus side, the city saved so much money going with us that now they can afford that lawsuit by the hippie store that sold dandelion-tea.
Imagine my surprise when I first drove a car with a windshield washer level warning light. Somehow, I’d missed out on this modern convenience until now, and could not live in a world where it was once again denied to me. All of those sphincter-puckering moments on a rainy highway or muddy backroad were a thing of the past. Now I would have a chance if I hadn’t completely memorized how the arc of the washer jets starts to collapse as it gets low, and it was all thanks to high technology.
And if I thought that was remarkable, the other day a “check engine” light turned on. I’d seen it before, on a lot of cars, but always figured it was just there for companionship, a warm glowing friend to keep me company in the dark night. The washer light had been right, though: maybe there really was something I had to check in the engine.
I leaned out the drivers’ window, squinting against the buffeting of the highway-speed wind, and looked into the open engine bay. Years ago, I assume, the high-speed accident that landed this car in the junkyard had shorn it of the hood, but a hood is just there for emissions anyway. As far as I could tell from this position, the engine was still roaring away, but a hose had popped off the cruise control podule and was now angrily flapping around the engine bay, making a sound like Donald Duck getting waterboarded. It was undeniable: this car was two for two.
And you know what? I’ve never driven a car with a “burgle your neighbours” light before, either. Normally I would doubt the wisdom of a Plymouth, but it’s been correct so far.
The rise of 24-hour cable news has really done a major disservice to the quality of our society. Not only does it confuse and anger our old people, and consume vast amounts of electricity in a vain attempt to confuse and anger space aliens, but it’s kind of boring. A full ninety percent of its airtime by volume is made up of journalists standing around going “we just don’t know” while people back in the studio rapidly pontificate on what it could be.
I started to wonder what might happen if there was some kind of unresolvable disaster, one of the curiosities of the human experience to which no solid inarguable truth could ever emerge. Would those journalists stay there forever, doing live hits, stuck in a loop waiting for the authorities to show up and drip-feed them information about what just happened? Or did they have enough self-respect to walk away after “as soon as we have firm information” had been repeated for a full 24 hours straight?
In order to find out, I began yet another new project. It didn’t take much work at all to break into their computer network and redirect a few of their local operatives near my house. As far as they knew, someone had finally shot a Bigfoot and there was going to be a big press conference “within the hour.” I barely had a chance to finish my morning coffee before mud-splattered news vans came tearing into my neighbourhood, already deploying their satellite dishes in wilful defiance of the overhead power lines. I kicked on the TV and, sure enough, they had fallen for my trap, a film crew standing in front of the recycling bin at the end of the alley while talking about how this could be the discovery of the century.
And then I kind of forgot about the whole thing. My cat knocked some spoons out of the sink, so I started loading the dishwasher so he would stop trying to piss me off all day. Then I had to go out for some cat food. By the time I remembered, weeks later, it was as if the news vans had simply become part of the scenery. Moss was beginning to grow across their flashy paintjobs, and the tires were slowly deflating. At the end of the street, illuminated constantly by sodium lamps, was a reporter valiantly trying to continue her record live hit. She was going to be here for the very moment the door would open and Bigfoot would be revealed.
I tried to go down there, to explain to them this scam that I had set up. It was a funny joke, I told them, but they did not believe me. One of the newscasters accused me of having been sent by their competition, to elbow in on their amazing scoop that everyone else was also filming live 24/7.
We’re going to bury the first of them soon. I guess they came out here without preparing the news van well enough. With only a skeleton crew of one cameraman and one reporter, there was no grip or gaffer or best boy left behind to run and get beef jerky from the local supermarket. It was pretty hard watching them die of starvation right there on live camera, or at least it would have been if my TiVo hadn’t filled up.
Virtual reality can finally give us a window into the most complex realm of unnecessary violence, loot-boxing, and personal achievement of all: real life. With the great advances in computing performance over the last few decades, you can now wear augmented reality glasses that tell you how to take your car apart. This, in theory, will help humanity finally stop going back to the Haynes manual on the workbench every five seconds to remember if that torque spec was 52 or 72 ft-lb after all.
It’s actually been a really big success. Even considering that week or two when Chinese malware broke into the cloud server and started making the goggles hallucinate terrifying images, it didn’t really hurt the productivity gains very much. Maybe that’s because your average flat-rate mechanic is already soaring high on enough sleep deprivation and Soviet research chemicals that the occasional jump scare doesn’t make them drop their screwdriver. The accountants have been telling me that performance is up by 0.01%, which over the course of hundreds of years, will justify nearly any idiotic requirement, including forcing our employees to strap a 6lb set of cybergoggles to their foreheads which constantly shoot lasers directly into their retinas.
Why didn’t we just get rid of the computer virus like everyone else did? Simple - it cost money, and spending money is not how you make flat-rate mechanic work profitable. Unless you’re one of our more senior employees, who happily destroy $7 connectors and $35 trim panels all day long out of their own pocket to get a job done an hour early. We can’t believe it’s legal, either.
In fact, it’s been so good for productivity that now we’ve started getting them for our customers, too. Before, they would just sit out in the waiting room, scrolling through their phones and harassing our service writer about when their brake jobs would be done. Now, most of them just lie on the floor, unwilling to move, paralyzed with fear, because making any sound at all will attract the screaming demons again. They’d take them off, but it’s a five percent discount to leave them on. Keeps morale high for the employees, too, which feeds right back into that productivity bonus: an extra 0.002% there.
Electrical connectors and me have always had a kind of love-hate relationship. I love it when they stay connected, but I hate it when it’s time for me to remove them. Those little plastic finger-shredding nightmares have cost me more wasted time, torn tendons, thrown tools, and swearing than anything else in the garage.
Just the other day, I was trying to remove a simple two-pin connector from the power window switch of a Chrysler Imperial. You’d think this would be the simplest thing on planet Earth: lift up the little tab, wiggle it loose and then just yank it out. It went great on the passenger-side window, and there is absolutely no reason it wouldn’t be the same on the driver’s side as well. Such optimism was my downfall, as I landed in door-card purgatory for the better part of an hour, slowly working my way to the bottom of my repertoire until at last, lubed with my tears, the connector magically slid off as if it had meant to do that the entire time.
It’s not like I don’t have the right tools, either. I’ve got spudgers, prybars, separators, proprietary pinning/depinning tools, and a lifetime of experience, and even with all those advantages I’ll still occasionally run into a headlight motor that just can’t be unplugged without the help of Señor Power Drill. This, I think, is one of those shameful things that separates me from the true masters of car repair: the flat-rate mechanics.
I have tried many times to make a pact with the Devil in order to better understand a way to have a less painful job. You have to scroll my phone for about a minute to get to the bottom of the list of recent calls I’ve made to Sumitomo technical support to offer them my first-born son. If only my bodywork would stay attached so well.
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tags: sumitomo, chrysler, chrysler imperial, electrical connectors
One in three households are what the CDC is now defining as “fucking weird.” If you’re fresh to statistics, here’s a quick explainer of just what they mean. Look left. Now look right. If both of your neighbours are normal, then you’re the weird one. For me, though, my whole block was weird, implying that someone, somewhere, has a Norman Rockwell idyll of North American civilization, a perfect uninterrupted block of no deviant behaviour whatsoever.
They certainly aren’t tripping over Doodle Bugs and lawnmowers that have since rusted into the soil, unlike whenever I go over to see Stan across the back alley. See, Stan lost his job at a time long before my DNA prototype had even been filed with the manufacturing pods. A lot of people back then did, because their bosses let the robots take their jobs (the history books say due to “erotically charged pro-robot bias,” but I don’t think anyone was fucking a Komatsu chassis welder machine). Stan, as a result, is a man without a purpose. He sits in his house, and builds weird shit, discarding it when he gets bored or something shinier catches his eye.
Once the robots took over the regular worker-bee jobs, it didn’t take long until they were replacing management too. After all, middle managers were basically following a manual full of instructions written down for them based on the input of an Excel spreadsheet. You could just automate all that stuff. There were maybe a few years of middle managers pretending to do work in an empty office, but pretty much all of them were hunted down and de-hired by productivity expert consultants in 2025. A lot of those guys are weird now, building elaborate fantasy corporations using “the 1985 rulebook” and joining in week-long conventions where they compete to have the most authentic clothing and mannerisms of the Beforetimes. I’ve heard that last year’s Manager of the Year award went to a dude who found a coffee mug in the burned-out ruins of a Blockbuster that had never been washed.
With all the actual work being done by machines, there’s no reason not to be weird yourself. Let’s try hard this year and get that number to at least two in three households. You can help our cause by doing things like training racing pigeons, putting a Bridgeport mill in your basement, or developing extremely strong opinions on specific colours of Lego brick.
Now that all the snow is finally melting, there’s no need for a plow truck anymore, so they’re cheap, right? Wrong. For some reason in my local town, ratty, rusted-out pickup trucks strapped to a $6000 snowplow were still listed for at least $6000. Even after I called the police to break up an illegal encampment of feral Québécois, the demand was still high. Was everyone just getting ready for next winter, or was there some kind of eerie, mutually-agreed-upon price bottom for plow trucks that I didn’t know about?
To find out more, I went undercover in the snow-plowing community. I found them high up in the mountains at the ski hill, awkwardly circling the one remaining blob of natural snow in the parking lot. After putting on a toque, the standard hat of the plow people, I was able to blend in flawlessly with their kind. As is my pattern and curse, though, I cut to the chase way too quickly.
“Do you guys have any cheap plow trucks?” I asked innocently. The jovial conversation around the last bump of frozen water stopped dead and they turned to look at me. I had to act fast.
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to compete,” I explained quickly in a panic. “I just want a really, really shitty truck to plow my compo- yard - with.” This seemed to placate them, and one of the group came forward to offer me a $400 Suzuki Samurai with a bunch of hockey sticks and plywood ratchet-strapped onto the front. This seemed like a pretty high price for a vehicle, but he assured me that it ran. The deal was made.
When the next winter rolled around, I soon found out the true parameters of “the deal.” Once I finished clearing my own driveway, I decided to head out to the convenience store for some more motor oil. There, I made the fatal mistake of dropping the Swiss-cheese trash plow onto a public road surface. It didn’t take long for those dudes from the ski hill to find me and burn my house down for having interfered in their sweet little scam.
I don’t mind so much, though. That house was full of stuff I kept meaning to haul to the dump, and with all this heat, I don’t have to shovel the sidewalk either.
It’s always fun talking to Dr. Z, my dentist. If by “talking” you mean “listening while he pokes around my mouth with sharp objects.” I never really know how to interact with dentists. This is because I fear that my internal model of the spectrum of Doctorness will cause me to either overrate or underrate Dr. Z’s importance to the world of medicine, and then the conversation will be awkward and punctuated with “oops, I slipped.”
So we don’t talk about our careers much, which is bad for me, because most of the time I just want to ask him how much he pays a litre for nitrous oxide. Now, no matter what the cops say, this is not drug-seeking behaviour on my part. Narcotics don’t make my whipped-half-to-death Hyundai Scoupe project car go any faster. Thing is, it’s almost impossible to convince someone you’re not a junkie once you’ve already asked for info on inhalants of abuse.
I just sit through it, smiling occasionally and trying to make a low-level dad joke once in awhile. There must never be an inkling of my true nature revealed to Dr. Z. He must always think I’m a common residential-neighbourhood simpleton and not a potential threat, at least until I pounce.
On the way back to my Hyundai after the dentist, walking while prodding my tongue into the now oddly-wide gaps between my teeth, I pass Dr. Z’s car. It is a base-model 2010 Toyota Camry. I realize suddenly that I have way, way overrated the quality of my dentist.
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tags: dr. z, toyota camry, toyota, dentistry, hyundai, hyundai scoupe
There is a deep well of need inside of me. That need is shared by so many of our fellow citizens. Sometimes, we’d give our lives for it. That need is guacamole. I only wanted the freshest, but since our traitorous politicians have so far refused to construct an elaborate pipeline directly from the guacamole-producing regions of Mexico, the next best thing is to head down to the farmer’s market.
Real guacamole, not pumped chock full of grocery-mafia preservatives, lasts about four minutes before going bad. That’s why I leave the engine of my Volare idling when I run into the guacamole booth, and depending on the traffic conditions, with the nitrous plumbing pre-purged. Over the years, I’ve gotten better and better at doing a Le Mans-style start; I can floor the gas while throwing myself into the car and be in second gear before what’s left of the driver’s-side door can shut.
Recently, a not-so-friendly patrol officer collecting my daily speed/freedom tax told me that there was an alternative to driving balls-out all across town in order to keep my guac from spoiling in time. The same place in the farmer’s market that I got that glorious green paste from also sold tortilla chips. If I bought a bag of those at the same time, then I could eat all of the guac without having to go somewhere. It was an idea just crazy enough to work, but it’s hard to make a blind lane change at seventy miles an hour while also trying to scoop the perfect air:guac ratio onto a chip.
That’s when it hit me: I could start a chip company optimized for car-eating. All I had to do was make a tortilla chip into a kind of straw, long enough that you could suck the precious guacamole dry from the container before devouring the chip itself. Then you don’t need to take your hands off the wheel, your eyes off the road, or dirty your eternal soul by telling the other motherfuckers on the road why you hope they die painfully for not driving perfectly centred in the lane. With the right advertising and marketing team, I figured, this could be like a two or three percent boost to the local GDP. At last we could tear South Dakota a new one.
It worked, for a little bit, but we eventually got crushed by the big guys. Turns out, nobody wants to spend seven dollars on just one enormous half-kilogram tortilla chip. Plus, that promotion with Taco Bell did not go well. Their so-called guacamole is so thin that a semi truck driver aspirated a bunch into his lungs on I-18 and ran over a Ford Freestar.
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tags: guacamole, ford, plymouth volare, ford freestar, plymouth
You can never really trust all those gauges in your car. Far from being an accurate portrayal of objective reality, there are a million-and-change things that can go wrong when observing even the simplest phenomena inside the boiling nightmare that is an internal combustion engine. That’s why I tell all my students to develop their own intuitive sense of “that seems fucked.”
It has nothing at all to do with the fact that my odometer hasn’t worked since 1988 and the tachometer on my car now only has a range from zero to six rpm. You simply can’t trust these gauges, in the same way that nuclear power plant technicians can never truly be sure that they aren’t about to destroy our entire way of life when doing a disaster drill on Fuckaround Fridays.
No, you need to understand the machine on a deeper level. It’s not scientific, I know, but there is a spiritual component to knowing when something is about to go wrong with your car. You don’t want to be the person who brings in their low-mileage Fit to the dealer, crying and panicky because it made a little noise that turns out to be the bicyclist you hit, still stuck in the grille, crying for mercy. Talk about red on your face. And his.
Sometimes when I hear that little bit of rod knock just starting deep in the engine, I know it’s not that important. Life’s too short to dread the inevitable. Like that big-end bearing, we’ll all be dead one day. Which reminds me, it’s time to get going to my job. At my job, I walk around and listen very closely to old people so that the insurance types know when to pick up the pace of their overbilling.
Taxi cab drivers in my city often want to strike up a conversation. Whether it’s to take the edge off their boring day, or just to angle for increased tips, either way, my grain-alcohol-and-thirty-thousand-feet hangover never quite felt like it was in peak condition to discuss local politics and the weather. That’s when I hit upon changing the subject to something I could discuss in my sleep: high-mileage car maintenance.
If you sneak a peek at your average taxi’s odometer, you’re going to see a confusingly high number there. I was in a Prius last week that was at six hundred thousand kilometers, about twice the mileage that the average human puts on a Japanese econobox before they shoot it for treason. Despite the clunky rear struts, loose handling, and slack motor mounts, the little Toyota seemed to be ready for another few dozen trips around the Earth. If they could keep this piece of shit going for nearly a million kilometers, then there was something for me to learn here.
I asked him, you know, how do you do your own maintenance? Are you getting stuff off RockAuto, or is it only dealer OEM? How do you know what squeaks and rattles to ignore, and which ones to freak out about? And for God’s sake, how do you keep the road salt off this shit? The driver just chuckled, and passed me a business card. It was featureless. At first, I thought it might be one of those embossed deals that you had to annoyingly tilt in the light, but even running my thumb over it I could feel no indentation. I started to ask the driver again, but he just stuck his index finger to his mouth and shushed me. For the remainder of the ride, I sat in mute puzzlement, turning the card over and over in my hands.
So now I just ask that question to every driver. Storing all of these cards in my carry-on is definitely putting a kink in my shoulder, but the silence is worth it.
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tags: taxi driver, toyota prius, toyota, business travel
When I was in high school, I used to work for this celebrity chef. Well, I guess “celebrity” is a little strong. He was definitely famous locally, but every time the TV people came to town to hand out their shows, something seemed to go wrong. Pretty much all I really remember him for is the time he killed a man for washing a cast iron pan, and our trip to the farmers’ market in his shitty old Datsun pick-up.
We didn’t really have much of a food scene locally. To illustrate possible reasons for this, you need to understand that Chef and I worked out of the back of a failed outlet shopping mall. Our restaurant was situated between a store selling new luggage, and a store selling lost luggage from the airlines that had been auctioned off. You could say our primary industry is getting the fuck out, which is what Chef and I were doing that crunchy autumn Saturday morning on our way to the next town over.
I was excited to pick up some pickling cucumbers. At the time, I had convinced myself that with some hard work and dedication, I could turn a couple shakily-written recipes from my alcoholic grandmother into my own boutique chain of “picklerias,” which would at last be my ticket to fame and fortune. The humble pickle could launch me on a trajectory that would far outstrip Chef’s, and I would get a chance to yell at my own underlings, admonishing them whenever they failed to clean the bathroom, keep my cocaine bags away from the grill, or administer basic CPR.
You might think of farmer’s markets only in terms of their glitzy recent incarnation. Suburbanites show up and pay double or triple for vegetables that they can’t keep for over a week, while yelling to each other about how excellent it is to finally be rid of modern corporate toxins like wifi, vaccines and bread. Back then, though, the parking lots were dirt, and ironically there were no enormous family-hauler 4x4s occupying those.
Chef’s Datsun was a rear-drive model, not so much by choice as by opportunity. We figured that some pile of assholes long ago had bent the front driveshaft trying to rock-hop, and just tossed it out and put in some plugs rather than keep 4WD working properly. It was fine driving it in the city, and could surmount almost any obstacle as long as you got a good run at it. It also had a grotesque habit of developing vapour lock, due to what I assumed was a previous fire necessitating the re-routing of the fuel lines into a too-big parts-store carburetor.
Where that vapour-lock became relevant is that, inside the farmer’s market, Chef spotted his arch-rival from across town, Chef Antonio NotItaliano. As you might assume from his name, he was actually a Lebanese immigrant who had fallen in love with Italian pastas, opened a restaurant, and showed up on the local public-access TV channel’s morning show all the time to give cooking tips. There, he wore a ridiculous fake mustache and spoke in an absurd Italian accent. What really pissed Chef off, though, is that his restaurant was on the other side of the mall, and as such stole all the good foot traffic from the housing development. Foot traffic that should have been, by all rights, ours.
Chef spotted him first. He handed me the keys to the Datsun, and told me to bring the truck around front and keep the engine running. I dutifully obliged, but the L18 under the hood chose today to make its bitterness over its long mistreatment known. Pumping the gas and even jiggling the fuel lines under the hood super hard did nothing - it was stuck in vapour lock. That’s when Chef came running up, out of breath and covered in blood. I’ll never forget the look on his face when he saw me on my knees, trying to puff desperately into the filler neck of the gas tank in a desperate attempt to cool the boiling fuel.
I did get a chance to try out my pickle restaurant concept, after Chef went to prison. It turns out that people would like something to eat that isn’t pickles once in awhile. That’s why I like cooking so much; you learn a lot from your failures.
Last week, I was tooling around the rural backroads in search of the fabled “good yard sale,” when a wasp fell out of the sky, bounced against my windshield, twitched and expired next to my inert wiper blades. I still maintain this wasn’t a bad omen or anything, even after the fire tornado appeared.
Even an optimist is going to have a hard time finding something to like about a fire tornado. It consumes crops and livestock, ruins the air quality, isn’t particularly interesting after the first initial shock, and worst of all leaves ashes all over my previously-mint islands of intact clearcoat. This motherfucker had to go, and so, in the way I had been trained since youth, I pulled a crude u-turn without looking.
Back at the ranch, I did some quick whiteboard research on my opponent. In order to be on fire, the tornado needed some kind of fuel, and in order to be a tornado, there had to be some kind of positive pressure going on. When I finally realized it, I gasped in shock and dropped the whiteboard marker I had stolen from my cubicle at work. This thing was basically a big supercharger sent to us from God’s own reward for rampant hydrocarbon combustion.
On the way up the rickety tower behind my corroded quonset, I thought about all those maniacs from down south who liked to surf, even if it would kill them. The rush is what they were looking for. I realized that despite our great physical distance, I was closer to those guys than many of my so-called neighbours who had now fled for the safety of government-run climate-refugee internment camps. I threaded the wire through a loose pulley and headed back down, already feeling the heat and howling wind of the approaching apocalypse cutting my face.
With a quick snap of the ratchet-unfurl on my Volare’s sail, I, too, would get to finally ride the Big One. My hood scoop would, at long last, be good for something.
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tags: plymouth, plymouth volare, climate change, fire tornado
I admit it. I’m one of those tiresome people you meet at parties who tells you about tires. While I’m no tire salesman, I do think that it is important to spend a few bucks on the only four points that connect your car to the ground (at least, only four unless you maintain your car like mine). That’s why, when one of my sixteen-year-old Michelins finally delaminated on the highway after running over a dead coyote, I followed my own advice and bought the best tires I could find at the junkyard.
Now, I know what you are going to say: isn’t the junkyard full of, you know, junk tires? Nothing could be further from the truth. If they were in fact junk tires, then how would the super-hogged-out car make it to the site of its condemnation and eternal slumber? It’s not like “tow trucks” are a thing.
Usually every car at the junkyard has some recent work done to it. Nobody scraps a car the first time it breaks down after eighteen years of trouble-free service. No, it’s always a cascade of failures that they don’t feel they can get out ahead of. Even if the failures are “new wiper blade, had to put duct tape on the driver’s seat, holding the rear passenger door shut with twine, and then the engine exploded,” you’re going to find at least that new wiper blade on there. And so there has to be, by a mathematical proof that I don’t have in front of me because it is mostly bullshit, a car in every junkyard that has at least one new tire on it. Then you just go get that one.
In effect, what I’m doing is trading time for money. Couldn’t I just get a job and then go buy new tires with all that free time I have? Yes, but then I wouldn’t get to enjoy a beautiful evening of buzzing mosquitoes while knee-deep in cancer mud. And that’s the kind of thing that money can’t buy, because nobody would be stupid enough to pay for it.
Now that the podcast people are starting to interview me about the Incident, I feel it’s important to clear up a few things on my own. Although they assure me that their editing is intended to be educational and in no way biased one way or the other, they weren’t there. You need to hear the whole story from me, a guy who was kind of aware of what was going on but was too lazy to keep it from happening.
Before I start, you need to understand something about duct tape. Before it was banned by the Alterian Overforce in 2072, us Earthlings used duct tape for literally everything. Condoms, fracking site repair, wallets: we used it for everything except for taping ducts, because it fucking sucked at that.
When the Large Hadron Collider sprung a liquid hydrogen leak, we told our bosses that we were only going to use the best, most reliable sealant ever to fix it. And then we just wrapped it in a roll of duct tape that we found in the trunk of Dr. Chernowsky’s Passat, because that way we’d have an extra week to get our actual work done before the big bosses started demanding progress reports again.
Once things started to go wrong, the management shifted right into the blame game. “Buh buh bah buh, why did you use duct tape,” they asked, just like Congress did. Like Congress, they had never worked an actual job in their lives. Whether you accept it or not, all major scientific, engineering and theoretical discoveries of the last thirty years have been pretty much ghetto-strapped together with whatever we could find at the Home Depot. In a very real way, duct tape is what holds science together. At least it was until those motherfucking aliens landed.
I’m sure you know the rest of the story: the government was overthrown, militaries reduced in an instant to nothing but vaguely radioactive ash. Just imagine how much worse it would have been if we hadn’t also patched up that tear in the office chairs at the United Nations when the Alterian ambassadors came by to negotiate our terms of surrender.
The Purity Police were after me again. Not only did they disapprove of my kind of people in general, they absolutely hated what I was doing with mixing the breeds. I drove past posters decrying my lifestyle, my beliefs, and denigrating what I loved. It was hard to take this level of discrimination, but I still chose to live as openly as I could.
Years ago, when I first found out about my unique predilections, I tried to hide them. They were shameful. Nobody should ever find out, lest I lose my career and home. Soon, in the depths of depression, I discovered that I could not live a lie. I had to make everyone see what I loved, damn the consequences.
When I first pulled out of my garage with that 420A-swapped Hyundai Tiburon, I figured people would notice and laugh. No one did. They must have been in awe of my strength. Sure, the message boards tittered once in awhile when my Chrysler valve cover was posted on TiburonTimber dot com, but the hate crimes and slurs that I expected simply never arrived.
I stepped up my approach. By taking the hood off, I could both run that high-rise Plymouth Breeze intake manifold and wave my freak flag at the same time. Still, somehow, nobody noticed. Not a single pedestrian hurled a rock at me. Nobody at a gas station thrust a Bible into my hands, shrieking about how cross-breed engine swaps were wrong. Yet, the internet persisted. What I was doing was evil, they told me, and soon they would find me.
Early one morning, I opened my curtains to see the SWAT team stacked up, waiting for a dynamic entry into my living room. It seemed that one of the message-board thugs had informed on me. Once alerted to my proclivities, I was convinced that the authorities had no option but to finally send that strike force everyone had been talking about. I waited for the battering ram guy to swing back, and then opened the door, so he tripped over my door’s threshold and landed on his face. The laughter seemed to defuse the tension of the situation, and my generally harmless nature put the cops at ease.
While explaining what happened to the officers, I could see their eyes glazing over. Even after I led a group of strike team members into my garage and showed them the sick filth I had been working on, they still refused to oppress me.
Well, except for one guy, who asked me in a small voice if I knew how to replace the PCV on a Tiguan. Disgusting. If the cops only knew they had such a freak working for them.
A couple months ago, there was a bit in the police blotter about a runaway turkey. The writing in the newspaper actually seemed pretty antagonized about it, with an unusual degree of editorialization. I figured he just lived near the place and had a grudge against fowl pooping on his yard, some sort of property-value thing.
I had almost completely forgotten about it until this morning, when the Editor Hisself stepped into my depressing oil-stained private detective office. It took me a long time to find this place; even with a Realtor® it’s hard to find just the right combination of squalid and plucky. You want to fulfill the client’s desires for stepping into a 1950s noir film, but it would be nice if the plumbing worked and you didn’t need to be awake enough to be able to parallel park your nitrous-gargling RX-7 in the mornings.
My client had a personal grudge with this Tom Turkey (”maybe not his real name,” I scrawled in the margins of my notebook). It sounded like The Editor had married, long ago, a turkey. They had some kind of great domestic life, according to witness reports, or at least as great as you can when one of you is poultry and the other one pulls 16 hour days seven days a week down at the abandoned newspaper building. Then she just stepped out on him, with this so-called runaway turkey.
Nobody could understand it; maybe it was the seven-year-itch, but I had a working theory it was because Tom had bitten the rear of a Mountie so hard that it left a perfect recreation of his beak in the medium of ass-bruise. Who could refuse such a display of virility? Her reasons alone, I needed to track her down and serve the divorce papers. It was the only way the Editor would finally get those sweet, sweet Butterball family riches from his in-laws.
There are really only two things I learned from this whole experience, lessons that I share with you now in the hope that you will escape the pit in which I have dug. One is that turkeys are greatly angered by redlining 13Bs; the other is that the exhaust backfire from a spark cut is not quite hot enough to broil the carcass of one.
There’s something to be said for driving a really nice car. Even though I have an almost pathological hatred of anything resembling luxury, and I would rather be set on fire than be the kind of person who interrogates a salesman about massaging seats, I do appreciate it when I get to drive a car that’s really put together better than my average hooptie. Let me tell you about the experience I just had with a 1986 Honda Civic Wagon borrowed from my friend.
Off the bat: this thing had hubcaps. Not just the little centre caps that Honda likes to bang on the steelies on the ultra-base models, plastic wheel covers that any 1970s teenager would love to steal for his own collection. I couldn’t get over it. Sometimes, while merging on the highway, I would lean real hard to catch the rear wheel in the driver’s side mirror (it has a driver’s side mirror, too!) spinning happily away with its sleek little aerodynamic cover.
At night, I was able to use both the headlights and the turn signals at the same time. Usually I have to pick one or the other on my daily driver because the wiring harness starts smoking if I try to indicate my left turn and see where I’m turning at the same time. That’s the vaunted Japanese efficiency that put a thousand drunk Chevrolet factory workers out of a job. And what headlights they are! They’re not sealed beams, oh no - they’re shaped glass! A remarkable car.
By far the most luxurious feature of this Civic, and the thing that tempts me the most to spend some money on a modern ride, is the fact that it starts when you turn the key all the way and turns off when you take the key out! I went to the library for my community service and the thing didn’t diesel after shutoff for even a minute! Nobody stared at me wondering if my car was going to blow up.
I can’t let myself be tempted, though - I need to go back to my pedestrian automobiles as soon as I can find a new starter crank for my former daily driver.
Hello, and welcome to your first episode of what I like to call Maintainin’ With Mr. Switch, the newest radio show here on 777 AM Non-Stop Voices In Your Head AM. Normally, we’d take on your car problems, but seeing as this is the very first episode, I’m going to tell you about mine.
As far back as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated about Datsuns. I think the first one I really encountered was a 280ZX owned by a friend of my dad’s. They weren’t like anything else on the road - boring commuter cars, ugly minivans, uglier pickup trucks. No, the 280ZX represented freedom, but in that angular, 80s way that told us that one day the Japanese would soon slit all of our throats without a second thought and embark upon a glorious new era, until the android revolution took them down at the height of their hubris. That didn’t really happen, and nobody knows exactly why.
That 280ZX changed my life. I’ve been trying to chase that high ever since, in I assume the same way that a toddler who does a little bit of Baby’s First Heroin at Sharecare™ will be a slave to the China White forevermore. I sort of envy that toddler, because he (or she) can still buy new heroin. They still make it! They don’t have to embark on a project where they buy a stepped-on bag of horse and then spend a decade avoiding welding in new floorpans while it slowly becomes a storage shelf in their two-car suburban garage.
Every so often I’d go out there, just stare at it. You could just barely see the Datsun’s driver-side headlight, and a bit of the fender, peeking out from underneath the U-Haul boxes of Grandma’s vintage pornography collection and Granddad’s tooth collection (he wasn’t a dentist). Hoarders to the last, that’s my family.
I keep telling myself I’ll find the time to do it, to fix up that car, to drive it to a soup kitchen, to give back to society. Once this monkey is off my back, I’ll become a good person one day, make up for all those times I’ve done a powerslide through an active playground zone and emptied my leftover aerosol cans of MEK into the river. Nah. That sounds awful. If I could wave a wand and magically fix the Datsun, the first thing I’d do is trade it in for another glorious new project, probably one even more far-gone.
My producer is starting to bang on the soundproof glass and make a strangling motion with his hands, so I think that’s all the time we have for tonight. You’ve been listening to Maintainin’ With Mr. Switch, here on triple-seven AM.
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tags: maintainin' with mr. switch, talk radio, datsun, datsun 280zx
Welcome to the Hill-Start Olympics, exclusively here on NBC. Every four years, the world’s best manual transmission city commuters travel to the Olympics to compete. Only the best will walk away with a gold medal and honour for their nations. Those who fail will be cast aside like an OEM clutch disc on a turbo Talon. Let’s go to the opening ceremonies. Dan?
Thank you, Sue. As you can see, the Olympians are now filling the stadium with their chosen automobiles. Everyone has made wise choices here: economical family hatchbacks with generous hydraulics. Wait. No. The Japanese team has defied convention here, going with a clutch-cable setup instead. For better feel? We go now to our competitive analyst, Bryan, for more on this shocking discovery.
Dan, it’s a common superstition that a clutch cable setup provides greater feel than a hydraulic. If anything, once they start to lose tension, it could cost them valuable millimeters of take-up; it could even cause a dreaded rollback. We’re getting a signal now from the booth that the events are about to begin.
Up first is Luis Albert, from Boca Raton. Luis has been driving this ‘95 Geo Prizm since it was new, and the third pedal is practically an extension of his body and mind at this point. He’s approaching a four way stop with a 4% grade… the potholes are quite uneven in this section, Dan, and it’s going to make a big difference where he places his wheels. Back in 1988, I saw a driver with a Suzuki Sidekick roll just enough tire into a pothole that he could achieve zero rollback, even with the worst take-up. I don’t think we’re going to see a repeat of that miracle here.
Dear Lord! It appears that Luis has stalled the Prizm. These things happen when you get nervous before a big event like this. He jerked his left foot up a little bit too quickly while checking cross-traffic, an understandable mistake in the minor leagues but just not world-beating-grade. Luis has lost a lot of points today with the judges, but there’s still a chance for him to make it up. He’s also entered in the Steep Hill Parallel Park event later today.
As everyone knows, your best ideas come to you in the shower. That’s why you waterboard people to get information out of them. What about all those cultures that don’t have safe, clean running-water showers that they can spend all day underneath in a vain attempt to crack Fermat’s Second-to-Last Theorem? I feel bad for them, which is why I’ve decided to use some of my historic billion-dollar settlement with Ford for wiring-related mental anguish to pay for thinking-showers to be installed across the world.
Then I got to thinking: why bother putting human beings in the shower? We’re notoriously bad at thinking, we get bored of being in the shower all day, and also our test subjects were getting all prune-y and hungry. A computer was the next natural choice: they never get bored, and they run better the colder the water is. We can save a fortune on hot-water heating!
We needed a prototype to prove the idea, not only because I was putting my substantial fortune at risk but also because I wanted an excuse to build a crappy version of a thing and then use it to ask smart people to build a good one based on it. In the backyard, we wired up one of the spare supercomputers that NASA was selling at their garage sale, and chucked it under an ornamental waterfall that my dentist threw out because Susan’s kid Frittata kept peeing in it during her root canals.
It worked! Within a few minutes, the sophisticated artificial intelligence at the heart of the computer began spitting out genius insights into the human condition, the multiverse, and magical water-burning carburetors that would make the oil industry bankrupt overnight. I had forgotten my notepad back in the house, however, and was not able to capture any of these revelations in time.
By the time I got back, the computer had moved on from useful, world-changing insights into an infinite loop. The water began to boil into steam immediately as soon as it touched the heatsinks, and we had to pull the cord for its own safety. In the smouldering ruins of the circuitry, we extracted the logs. Just what had it become obsessed with?
Only one problem kept coming up over and over: “Why does windshield washer fluid cost more than gasoline?”
We are in the grips of a historic world event. After decades of accepting our garbage under the guise of “recycling” and then burning it, the Chinese government has decided not to burn it anymore. Now, they actually want us to give them recyclable materials to recycle.
As a result, there’s a huge pile of slightly-contaminated plastics, very-contaminated medical waste, and vaguely-icky half-peeled-off fruit package stickers lying at the docks in my town. Nobody wants to do anything about it, but the Mayor Hisself went on the news and said he’d pay fifty bucks a ton to anyone who would. And I happen to know a little industry secret: plastics are pretty much made out of oil, which is the same thing oil is made out of!
Taking inspiration from those ancient Swedes who turned their vast surplus of useless trees into woodgas, I adapted my dream car, a 1993 Mazda 323, to run on plastic waste. It was easier than replacing the fuel pump; the back seat was too covered in mouldy Haynes manuals and leftover chip bags. Now, I could shovel rejected ziploc bags, filthy peanut butter jars, doggie poop sacks, and discarded pop bottles into the car’s burning maw in order to travel all across this great land. All over town, my townspeople were cheering me on as slightly-sticky black clouds of combustible polymers hung in the air.
It was great for a few weeks until I had finally consumed the entire quantity of rejected trash from the docks (I have sort of a heavy right foot). Now, because I was too lazy to convert the car back, I couldn’t really get anywhere. One night, in a panic about having to get to work the next day, I started stealing the blue bins from my neighbours and pouring them into the car. Unfortunately, the Mazda seemed to run a lot better on the dirtier trash, and so I had to walk a whole block after it conked out. There wasn’t much of the good-bad stuff to burn, because, in the interest of programming their children not to follow my example, acted as conscientiously about the environment as possible at all opportunities. I should be getting a commission from Big Solar Panel any day now.
Now, you might think that I could take that money from the Mayor and go buy myself a different car entirely. Then I could just drive my luxobarge on gasoline, and trade out to the 323 when the supply of filthy, worthless garbage replenishes. For some reason, though, his cheques kept bouncing. It might have been because the garbage collectors’ union had him assassinated a few nights after my trash-gargling hell-Protege made him look dumb on the news.
In the summer, it’s really hard to get a spot in the emergency room. You’d expect it’d be the usual summer sports accidents: jellyfish stings, extreme-sporting events gone wrong, sunburns. That might be the case in a town other than this one, because our primary victims are international TV crews, and the cause is our little local landmark, Mount Doom.
Nobody really knows how or why the mountain started getting called Mount Doom, but you’d think the name would be enough to scare off all those pants-shitting cowards from the Discovery Channel. Film crews are cheap, I guess, because there’s always a parade of those guys heading up to the summit to film Guy Fieri’s latest hamburger special. Most of them die of the exposure, but even the hardiest of them don’t really stand up to the ash clouds and roiling rivers of boot-melting lava.
As part of my community service, I usually work at the local public-access TV channel. What I do in name is work the camera-rental booth, and what I do in practice is write down the blood types, names, next of kin and take a hefty, hefty deposit from all those production companies in exchange for second-hand Handicams that got left on someone’s dashboard in mid-1993 and only ended up on eBay as part of a court-mandated bankruptcy seizure. This way, in the winter when we go up to brush off all the bleached skeletons of the film crews and chip up any melted gold fillings and jewelry, we at least know who to call and try to wheedle an expensive casket out of.
You might figure that you yourself would simply refuse to go up Mount Doom. Besides the ever-present risk of death, the Yelp reviews are almost uniformly negative. I’m just glad there is a breed of person who is willing to go to the ends of the Earth to get that five seconds of B-roll footage of Takeshi Kaga trying to immersion-broil lobster in an acid-venting hellmouth.
A lot of so-called “car people” look down on the Prius, with its chipper buzzy-electric launches, missing manual transmission and general lack of handling prowess whatsoever. However, drag racers have made gravy out of twin-engined cars before.
If you pay attention to your drag-racing history, which now thanks to the ascension of our New Wally Parks Government is mandated in all high schools, you will know that the 1960s were a glorious age of cramming more engines onto one single car. Confusing belt routing and exotic transmission failures aside, the theory is absolutely sound.
With only a few quick modifications, the humble tandem-engined Prius can be converted into a quarter-mile-burning, tire-slaughtering demon from another realm. All it takes is the removal of both stock engines (ask your parents for help), and the installation of a simple Buick V8 and one inexpensive Pratt & Whitney J48 turbojet engine. Suddenly, your ho-hum hybrid is now an alternative-fuel nightmare that you can barely control. Boring it is not.
Is it as efficient as other vehicles in its class? Much more so; you see, most fighter jets equipped with the J48 weigh substantially more than a Prius, and considering the power-to-weight ratio courtesy of the eight thousand pound-feet of thrust you’ll get out of one, are likely slower as well. You’ll arrive at your destination deaf, blind and in the throes of a permanent panic attack, but you’ll do so only consuming a mere half a tank of Jet-A. Now that’s how to keep your commute costs down!
If you’re looking to do this swap on the cheap, consider the hoards of grounded 737s awaiting software patches. Nobody is gonna notice you driving right up to one and sawzalling the fuckers right off the wing.
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tags: toyota prius, toyota, pratt & whitney, buick
Autonomous drones, underground hydraulic delivery pipes, and matter-replication ovens have replaced the humble pizza delivery guy. We live in a world where a dude no longer shows up on your driveway and tries to make conversation while you fumble with your wallet for cash and a tip.
In the old world, the better one, there were men who could not do any other job. Some call them “deliverators,” but that word is too cool for what they are. I call them “guys who got lost delivering a pizza 25 years ago and can’t find their way back to the restaurant.” They are still out there, if you train your ear: 1988 Geo Metros now topping a million-and-a-half kilometers, endlessly searching for their dock so that they can close out the night and get their tips from Mr. Grigoriadis, their boss.
There are many reasons these road-warrior orphans were created during The Great Fall. By far the most common is simply that the pizza restaurant went out of business during their last delivery. Often, in order to save face, a failing would-be restauranteur will simply shut the doors and move to another country, rather than admit fault to their angry employees. As is custom in strip malls, the store is immediately converted by parasitic nanomachines into a Vape Depot.
When and if the employee returns, even if they have a keen sense of homing-pigeon-esque direction, they cannot figure out where to clock back out, and so begin their endless journey. It is hard not to feel for these lost souls. Graduations, weddings, funerals: all these are held without the employees, who are simply written off by their family as “still at work.” Even if the employee was accessible via cell phone at the start of their shift, the batteries have no doubt degraded to nothing, or the networks have been upgraded and are now inaccessible by the ancient phones.
There is hope, however. I have been volunteering lately with the Bring Them Home In 30 Minutes Or Less campaign. Under the program, lost delivery drivers are spotted by our outreach staff. Then, trained stunt-driving experts will get in front of their cars and slowly brake until they are stopped. Once safely stopped, a team of ex-carjackers break the window and extract the driver, who is given their share of the tip pool for the night (never more than $1.73) and a pink slip. We’ve saved dozens of these victims of hobby-grade small-business capitalism gone awry. With your donation, we can afford some replacement paint for our cars’ rear bumpers. Not all of the drivers still have brake pads that work.
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tags: geo metro, geo, the great fall, pizza delivery
Everybody loves pizza, and I certainly include myself in that set. Which is why I spent the last squeezings of my deceased neighbour’s old-age-security cheque for the month on a flight to Naples. Only there, I resolved, I would finally be able to get the Hawaiian pizza of my dreams.
What you might not expect is that Hawaiian pizza isn’t really a thing over there like it is here. In the first few restaurants, I figured that Google Translate was malfunctioning, because the Italians kept buckling over with laughter at me ordering a “fat toddler’s birthday pizza.” Then it kept happening, over and over and over. An angry mob formed, and chased me off of Spaccanapoli entirely.
I had to keep searching and not get discouraged. Someone, somewhere in this town, must be willing to buck tradition and blend the traditions of Naples with the traditions of North American imperialist cuisine. It was a little difficult to keep going on foot due to my recent doctor’s visit (diagnosis: “lazy,”) so I had to help myself to a Vespa. You would think someone from the mean streets of urban Italy would go to a greater effort to secure their scooters. It didn’t even take more than a few minutes with my man-portable plasma cutter in order to chop right through the handlebars and be on my way. You don’t need both hands to ride a scooter; how else are you going to text?
I had been alternating sleeping beneath broken Alfa Romeos at night and driving all across town, because my Canadian data plan ran out almost immediately after I tried to download a GIF of a cat walking on the railing of an escalator. At one point, I tried to shoplift a map from a grocery store, but was foiled as a paper map has not been printed since late 1997. Even so, it didn’t take much more than two days of riding to find my goal.
I slid the Vespa into the parking lot, stood up, and kept the rear tire on a light burnout boil to keep the rubber hot in case I had to get away in a hurry. This is the rumour I had heard from among the street denizens when they yelled at me. My eyes watered at the pure beauty of it. This, the only Italian Chuck E. Cheese ever built, was the dwarf star at the centre of this abandoned parking lot, its pizza ovens dormant for decades.
Let me tell you about how hard it is to get a Vespa to pop a wheelie and jump through the front window of a Chuck E. Cheese: not as hard as reprogramming a bunch of singing furry androids to make your dinner.
Nobody really understands what’s inside a computer, if we’re being honest with ourselves. At some point in the distant past, people who were a lot smarter than us figured all this shit out, how to make a rock think with the power of lightning, and now we’re just kind of showing up and doing what we can to look busy. If we keep our heads down, we can make it to retirement before anyone figures out that we’ve been phoning it in the entire time.
Old Ted, down in tape-up, he was about to get out. He was going to walk out the front doors in a couple years and then die of a boredom-induced coronary a few weeks later. The perfect end to a perfect career-long coast. Nobody would have asked anything of him. It never quite turns out like you imagine, does it?
A bunch of computer scientists got into the lab, somehow. I think one of their interns threw himself against the door until it broke. They were all software people. You know, the kind that make our job necessary. Usually, we turn up the Moore’s Law dial a bit - but only a few times a year, since we can’t really keep this thing going much longer - give them a nice fast speed so they can write even more inefficient software.
We figured they could only write shitty code so fast, but we were wrong. They figured out how to make computers write even worse code, infinitely quickly. Machine learning, they called it. Suddenly, we needed thinking rocks that could defeat quantum physics. A tall order, even if you were one of the giants of the industry that we were supposed to have learned from before they all died of solvent inhalation and secretary-overfucking.
Ted, being the oldest, was the first guy our boss Maurice went to. Make it happen in a week, he said. We want our chips to go in a self-driving car, and it better do a great job of recognizing people. None of us talked to Ted that entire week, for fear of delegation. I took a whole different route around the office, just in case he was using the same coffee machine, toilet or fire extinguisher I wanted to.
I don’t know if he succeeded. We came into the office at the end of the week and found him gone, his cubicle set up just like he had left it. We told Maurice that old Ted had disappeared into the Twilight Zone, which was ruled over by Speed Ghouls who preyed on anyone who dared approach a double teraflop. In the meantime, we told the computer scientists to just set their iterations a little lower. After all, “we made a smart rock guess a bunch of times what a person looked like and didn’t expect them to be dressed like a park bench” is a fantastic excuse at a manslaughter trial.
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tags: computer engineering, self-driving car, moore's law
For some reason, a lot of people in my neighbourhood disliked magpies. They had their reasons: squawking, ripping toddlers’ eyes out, and eating the eggs and babies of lesser birds. I, however, was a huge fan of these smart, quirky birds, and often fed them peanuts and cheese whenever I had a chance. In return, I had what amounted to a constant protective swarm of hyperintelligent corvids waiting to destroy my enemies.
My neighbours really didn’t like it. At first, they tried to call animal control on the whirling funnel cloud of black feathers slowly rotating over my house. Have you ever seen an animal control officer skeletonized before? It was like a school of piranha getting a chunk of fresh ribeye thrown into their aquarium. Unfortunately, his boots didn’t fit me, and a few of the magpies took his shiny shotgun away. This angered the government as well, of course.
Now we were at an impasse. The feds wanted to take my bird friends away, but I quite liked the occasional shiny coin or baby stroller that they dropped in my yard in exchange for more peanuts. Plus, it was nice to have companionship. One of the biggest magpies, a heavily scarred, one-eyed cuss of a bird I liked to call Mr. Squinty, was their de facto leader, and he would often hang out with me in the garage, resting next to the radiant heater and swearing along with me during an engine pull or half-shaft replacement. I liked him a lot more than I liked paying taxes, so I had to come up with a plan to make the community of magpies palatable to my busybody neighbours.
Luckily for me, I had a collection of little remote control cars lying around the shop. It didn’t take long to teach Mr. Squinty how to operate them, and then I just let him go on his own. You would think that a bird wouldn’t care about driving, but he really took to it, doing little Rockfords on my driveway. Soon, the other birds wanted their own cars, too, just like I expected. They began to drop off fragments of Segways, Roombas and human fibulas, and I whipped them into little wasteland cars for the whole gang. Screaming electric motors and happy squawking filled my neighbourhood.
Now, you might think this is not enough to make the neighbourhood accept them. You’d be wrong. As soon as Mr. Squinty rammed a bicyclist, sending him sprawling, the cops broke from their siege position and immediately rushed over to make sure my avian friend was alright. I like to think that bicyclist got charged in the name of bettering cross-species relationships, even if the ticket did say “asking for it.”
You have probably suspected it for years, but the absolute concept of truth is dead. We killed it or something, but good luck proving it because I have half a gig of Usenet posts made by something that might be an ex-Soviet artificial intelligence stuck in a bunker beneath Bezhetsk that claims otherwise.
While there is a certain moral culpability for this development on the part of modern civilization, I don’t take credit for it. You see, as a consultant, my job is disaster capitalism. As in, post-disaster. The rest of you made it happen, and now it’s happened, and as a result I have to make millions and millions of dollars taking advantage of the current state. In other words, it’s not my fault: I’m just getting rich off it.
Even though I used to work as a journalist, I along with many of my coworkers were laid off. Our parent corporation had to choose between Christmas bonuses and eighteen hundred jobs, and so they made the obvious decision. In our stead would be a series of “editors” whose job it was to direct unpaid interns to reprint press releases. Who would vet those press releases? Probably nobody, but if enough newspapers printed the same press releases, then we had consensus, and therefore nobody could be individually blamed for it, in much the same way that your third-grade class knows that Tommy Johnson was the one who took a running diarrhea-shit on the substitute teacher’s desk, but would never allow him to take the direct heat for it.
Here’s the thing: you’ve probably read about “think tanks” in the news. They’re august institutions, put together of the finest academics that could be found along a certain subject. In actuality, they’re often just a bunch of unemployable hobos in a rented office somewhere. Also, they write press releases. You don’t have to be a computer scientist to figure out how this USB port plugs in.
Yes, it’s true. If you call yourself, say, the Seat Safety Switch Institute for Higher Advancement, hire a sexy-voiced YouTuber to work the phones, and then send donuts to enough news rooms, you too can be an “authoritative source.” And then you can use that source to get what you want.
After all, if it’s printed in the newspaper, it can’t possibly be that bad of an idea to add FIA banked curbing to every on- and off-ramp in the city. Just think of the economic efficiency gains. God knows we need the jobs.
Exxon pretty much nailed it. They figured out exactly how bad the whole ‘climate change’ thing was going to be. Naturally, I felt a little guilty. The only thing I’d burned more of than tires was gasoline, and it’s not like any of my struggling four-bangers over the years had oil-burned their way into a Greenpeace awards ceremony.
Thing is, after a few years of the weather getting worse and worse, the wind speed in the upper atmosphere was now pretty high. Soon, it was no longer practical or safe to fly jet airliners. Suddenly, our useless CEO class had to use videoconferencing to discuss their problems, rather than menacing workers in person as their forebears had done. This was unacceptable, and soon the economy began to bear the brunt of the decreased productivity due to entire IT departments being stuck trying to walk through eighth-generation hereditary management about which end of the mouse to click on. Something had to be done.
I had been puttering around with a couple projects out in the shed. One of them was a really big supercharger, from a cruise ship or something originally (I have a big shed), that I had once tried spraying some kitchen grease into. It didn’t work. In fact, it was worse than useless. You see, on paper, there’s a theoretical limit to how big of a Roots-type supercharger you can mount to an engine. Once this thing got close to peak speed, there was simply too much turbulence coming out of the other end, the engine can’t devour it all in time. The backpressure stalls the intake air and asphyxiates the engine to death, rather than boost its performance. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?
Yes, as long as what you’re thinking is “go to NASA with my scale model and erect a five-thousand-foot-tall supercharger, driven by the rotation of the Earth.” We called it the World Charger. Yes, finding a clutch big enough to handle it was difficult. Many men died trying to torque the snout pulley bolts on. It worked, though. As soon as it cranked up, the blower whine and choppy sound of compressor surge told us that the gulf stream was now slowing. The world was saved!
It was a little difficult trying to find a place to send the boost we could squeeze out of the World Charger, but I’ll put it this way: nobody in the southern hemisphere ever has to pay for air conditioning ever again. Once they rebuild their houses, that is. And get hearing aids.
Celebrities, politicians, and the C-suite were once again free to fly around the world. That is, as long as they stayed free of the intake. Capitalism occasionally had to take a weekend or two off so that we could hose mashed Cessnas off of the rotors.
There was an interesting item in the news lately about China. You see, some Shenzhen cops were pulling over people who drive with their high beams on for no reason and then forcing them to stare into the high beams for sixty seconds to show them how it feels. Despite all of my pro-democratic, anti-police-brutality upbringing, I was first in line to cheer on this fascist abuse of the monopoly of force. If you leave your high beams on while driving inside the city, I hate you and I want you to suffer as you die.
In fact, I had some other ideas for traffic violations that the cops could also enforce with capital punishment. Here’s a few:
Foglights. It’s not foggy, and you should be able to tell whether or not it is foggy by the time you are old enough to operate a motor vehicle. You’re why automakers are shipping useless foglights, so the rest of us don’t have to deal with your dumb ass. Punishment: you have to pull out the entire foglight wiring harness from the outside of your bumper, and then a cop gives you fifty lashes with it.
Bumper Stickers. Whatever your politics, you shouldn’t have them. I appreciate that you want to use your free speech rights to ruin the clearcoat for the next owner and also make random people behind you in traffic mad enough to potentially follow you home, but I’m going to draw a line in the sand on this one. And so will the officers, who force you to remove them using only your teeth at gunpoint.
Recalling the Sengoku Period in a playground zone. We’ve found out that historians tend to get pretty worked up when retelling the many economic incompetences of the doomed Ashikaga shogunate. Usually this makes them go over the speed limit while unable to steer, due to elaborate gestures meant to illustrate the lines of succession. This is pretty dangerous to children, so if a cop sees you doing it, you’ll be forced to dress up like Commodore Perry for a weekend and let the kids line up to tell you what they want for Half-Christmas.
In conclusion, “senator,” I believe that when my order of loosely-associated ideologues finally seizes the reins of government, all traffic fatalities will immediately cease.
I think you’ll find, officer, if you read your big book o’ laws there’s no rule that explicitly says I can’t spray ex-Soviet weaponized hallucinogens into the air intake of an International House of Pancakes. Good luck finding a judge who can even pronounce half this shit. As far as I’m concerned, this was no more illegal than just putting on a really good album and slowly driving around the place until everyone came pouring out the doors, dancing and clawing at their own faces.
Yeah, I know that there’s a whole racist “thing” about picking up high-octane synthetic drugs from AliExpress. I’m absolutely sure if Purdue or Pfizer were the ones making this noxious purple gas that causes terrifying visions of billions of razor-sharp teeth appear on every surface, you’d be lining up to give them a big fat tax break to test it on daycares. That’s why this country sucks now; there’s just no spirit of international competition anymore.
Speaking of capitalism, when all of those people finally walk off their horror-haze, they’ll be pretty hungry. You know, from all that running, screaming, jumping, and street fighting. Then where are they gonna go? Right back to the IHOP, for a much bigger order! I should get the key to the city for this.
Why did I do it? Well, I had a lot left over after my block party last weekend, and the army manual that came with it demands that I dispose of the surplus rather than attempt to reuse it once it’s been exposed to oxygen. That’s right, pig, there’s no way you can bust me for abusing the prescription either!
Oh hey, is this the new Police Interceptor? With the twin-turbo V6 and the AWD? Can you just rip a few donuts right here? I want to see if this thing will be any good at auction in a couple years.
I’ll be the first to say it and save all of my coworkers the career hit: it was a mistake to bring Hugh Hefner back from the dead. Yeah, it was surprisingly easy, but it’s a real bummer hearing constantly about how terrible the afterlife is. And then there’s all the new projects he wants to launch. You’d think he’d want to spend his second chance reuniting with his family, visiting parts of the world he’s never seen, or just enjoying a delicious hamburger. Nothing doing; he just wanted his office set back up, and then he was off on his latest project.
In the time since he’s been gone, self-driving cars have become more and more common. Actually, they might be the most common car out there. It turns out that once they only ran over one toddler every thousand miles, as opposed to every ten miles for your average suburbanite-dwelling American, the insurance companies pretty much forced us into it.
Now, I don’t know why the automakers decided to give the self-driving cars the ability to go through puberty. Maybe it was a bug, or some unforeseen consequence of patterning their neural-network processors off of a human brain. It doesn’t matter what, because as soon as these cars start rolling into their teenage years - and they’ll pretty much all get there, because they no longer get into accidents or allow themselves to drive through salt (union rules) - they have sexual urges.
Hugh had a solution. Pornography for self-driving cars. It didn’t sound that far-fetched of a concept to me. Hell, I backed the Kickstarter, and then downloaded and watched one of the test videos to see what it was all about. I have to admit I don’t quite understand what is supposed to be so arousing about a BMW crashing off the road and its human occupant melting in a gasoline fire, but I was never into that German stuff.
I think it could have gone really far, if it wasn’t for that church group massing outside the Mansion and splashing Hef with holy water until he disappeared into thin air. Honestly, I was surprised they were even able to get there at all, now that the highways are clogged with all those masturbating Toyotas.
Troubled shoe giant Nike brought me on recently as a CEO. My track record of penetrating the upper echelons of North American corporate civilization is not so much due to actual skill so much as it is that I run an “executive search” company. It just so happens that I come highly recommended.
They needed something new and innovative to set themselves apart from the other shoe companies out there; it turns out that even if you make super-pretty shoes it just doesn’t move the needle that much anymore. People nowadays are abandoning superficial beauty for things that last, utilitarian tools that can get handed down to their children. As an expert in consumer-goods longevity, I was the perfect candidate for the job, and I also had a pretty good idea for what we could do to add a little flash.
“Self-tying shoes,” I told my product-development team over the awkward, fish-shaped voice conferencing pod that clung to the ceiling of my office like a limpet mine on a battleship. They all agreed; it was a brilliant idea, and they would quickly implement it.
Thing was, the audio quality apparently wasn’t that good on the voice conferencing bridge, because the next day I walked by R&D to see them with the guts of a Ford Festiva strewn on the office carpet. “Self-tying cars” is what they heard. My visionary leadership was so powerful that, afraid to ask any questions, the engineers quickly decided that what I meant was to build a car that would lash itself to a passing train in order to save fuel. It made sense; trains were operated by the government or something, so who cares if they have a 1.9% higher fuel cost? I’m looking out for Number One.
My equally-morally-flexible friends in the government agreed, and decided that it must qualify as an alternative-fuel vehicle. The tax credits alone were good enough to bankroll the entire enterprise, so we went hard. When released, it was the most popular car in America. So many hatchbacks were leeching off of trains that they actually were dragged to a stop by the combined rolling resistance, unable to continue. That’s where the real problems started.
Without a train to latch onto, a lot of drivers kept tooling around until they found an alternative vehicle from which to parasite their energy. The artificial intelligence selected semi-trucks, garbage trucks, particularly slow-moving ambulances. This was a problem, because it made it harder for me to weave between lanes on my commute to work when there was a two-inch-thick bundle of shoelaces occupying the space between cars. There was nothing we could do but release a bug fix.
If your background is in computer software, like mine is, then you know very well that no computer works properly ever, and these were no exception. A self-driving car program, especially when hammered out by a bunch of panicked engineers who worked at a shoe company, often contained quite a few flaws. At least half of our hatchbacks became “bricked” - totally immobile, forever - and the resulting bad PR kicked me out of the company.
I spent about a month in obscurity before my executive-search program turned up a new company. I definitely had my regrets, but every time I saw a small hatchback scream along behind a train, its vacuum-assist brakes useless without a spinning engine, hoping desperately to unhook before a sharp corner, I smiled inside.
Let he who has never stolen a public transit bus cast the first stone, said the Bible. It didn’t? Well, then you must not have skipped half the lectures at seminary school in order to do donuts in the parking lot like I did.
Now, don’t get me wrong - I’m a huge fan of organized labour, and under no way should some profit-driven motherfucker take this bus away from its hardworking legitimate driver. “Profit-driven” is almost the last possible phrase people would use to describe me, though, and so when I’m running a little bit late and my driver just nipped out for a coffee break, why not take over and deliver everyone to their destinations ahead of time? They’ll love it. I debate this for about five seconds, during which I have already hooked up the bus’s rear tires in a glorious two-alarm burnout. You gotta get them warm, you know, for increased traction. Traction is safety, just ask anyone.
The big problem was, what do I do with the bus once I’ve arrived at the courthouse? All the people who are on the bus now still have to keep going. They depend on me, like flightless baby ducklings on their mother. To just hop out and abandon them would be negligent at best, but I’d be like two hours late for my appointment if I decided to complete my route. I decided to deputize the most clueful of my fellow passengers, a young woman who is shrieking at me for having “stolen” this bus. She’s got confidence, I tell myself as I leap from the bus at trotting speed, tuck into a roll, and leave her behind. Everything will be fine in her hands.
I know what you’re about to ask - did stealing that city bus count as “community service?” I’m here to tell you that it absolutely did not. Yes, of course I tried to pitch it as sort of a consulting gig - my effort showed how much more efficient the private sector could be, if only the private sector also ignored stop lights, pedestrian crossings and the entire back half of the bus. They didn’t go for it; clients, am I right?
Videogames are more popular than ever, with up to three billion people worldwide spending their entire existence in a virtual-reality hell engineered entirely by orbiting bands of supercomputers. In fact, my understanding is that the Summer Olympics will soon feature a rousing competition of Yoshi’s Cookie, the immortal Nintendo game about dinosaurs failing to anticipate customer demand for their small independent bakery.
I’d dabbled in the industry for years, but my fare tended to be cerebral, simulation-driven stuff like the award-winning shinkansen snack simulator Tube Meat and Canada Simulator ‘94. Such brainiac entertainment was no longer what inserted Butt A into Seat B. In keeping with the times, the customer naturally wanted something more extreme, more reactionary.
On the way home from the publisher’s substantially angry bollocking, I racked my mind for what life experience I had with exciting, action-y action. So far, everything I’d done pretty much consisted of going very slowly with style. There was absolutely no way to bring my cinema-verité style to something like blowing up an alien planet or punching out Mike Tyson. I was just about to hang up my apron when I suddenly realized what part of my life involved moving fast and making life-changing decisions.
At the end of the year, I had assembled a great development team. We were well on our way to industry acclaim and billions of dollars of money for our publisher that we ourselves would never, ever see. The kids would love it, though. Our focus group couldn’t stop raving about their experience with Using An Angle Grinder With No Eye Protection Whatsoever Simulator ‘19.
One of the things you might not think about that often is that the government owns a shitload of land. Offices, schools, highways, train tracks: Big Gubmint probably has a mortgage on it. And all of these things need parking. This presents them with a great opportunity to turn a quick buck and please their corporatist masters who demand such fiscal responsibility, the same way that your office boss demands that you answer emails while waiting for your coffee to percolate.
Sometimes they go a little bit too far. This was on my mind recently, when I checked the back of my glittery, counterfeit-proof city parkade receipt, and saw some glorious words indeed. “Rent our facilities for your next event.” The entrepreneurial part of my brain kicked into high gear, and suddenly I had a great plan for my next birthday party.
Not only was the parking garage centrally located, which made it easy for a lot of my more “reliable-car-challenged” friends to access it, but said garage came with its own access control. And it boasted nearly two straight miles of delightful, untouched concrete, with great acoustics. You know what that means: burnout competition.
It went fantastic: shrieking tires, excited exhortations to “get some,” and impunity from law enforcement. They simply weren’t invited to this party, no matter how much they wanted to wait outside the parkade with angry faces as tire smoke, the visible indicator of fun, wafted out of its many ventilation fans. It was a great night.
There was just one problem, as there usually is when I get one over on The Man. Turns out that there’s a special tow truck company you have to call when one of your buddies burns through his supply of five-dollar junkyard tires and nobody brought a tow rope. That company, of course, is Parking Enforcement. As we forked out for the special low-profile truck to arrive, I could practically hear the Mayor laughing at us. You just can’t fight City Hall, although you can leave a quarter-inch of smouldering tire rubber on its face.
A friend of mine is an addict. Yes, to chemicals. Probably not the kind you’re thinking of, though: my buddy Rick is a detailer, and he hoards entire aisles at a time of every mom-and-pop parts store. If your product fills scratches, cleans leather, or - and this is a fantasy he has recounted to me on many a late-night drive - fills scratches in leather, he’ll be there, ready to hand you a big chunk of cash.
I myself benefitted from his unfortunate illness, but I was helping both him and myself - you see, I have lots of dirty cars, and he only has so many. In order to keep justifying the existence of El Scrub-Q imported from Spain, or a Shop-Vac with twenty-four stages of dust cleaning filters, he’ll need to use that stuff on an actual car. My car. It had worked out fairly well so far, with me bringing over a beater and then helping myself to his garage fridge while he furiously vacuumed, steamed and hosed down my interior.
This kind of attention to detail was profitable. I am pretty sure it always led to increased sales prices - the guy at the Pick N Pull was always more impressed with the cars as he was driving them into the crusher. That translated to at least four or five bucks more profit when he wanted me to “keep the change” from what the computer said a 1981 Nissan Auster with holes in the floorboard and a trunk full of raccoon shit was worth. I would have told Rick, but then he’d probably want to have split the profits, and I needed that money for seed capital for that 1983 Chaser with no doors or steering column I’d been eyeing.
Even though I was taking advantage of Rick, I still tried to be a good friend. So when his family visited him unannounced, saw the living room stuffed to the ceiling with microfibre cloths, and summarily had him involuntarily committed, I would visit him in the halfway home when he got established on a new set of medication. Once the orderlies’ backs were turned, I’d slip him the new Chemical Guys brochure, just so he could remember what it was on the outside he was looking forward to rejoining. He always snapped it up with great relish, against Dr. Brookings’ orders; sort of hypocritical for a guy who was always obsessed with detailing to not even be able to keep his own nose clean.
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tags: detailing, rick, dr. brookings, nissan, toyota, nissan auster, toyota chaser
For years, I struggled to understand my parents. They seemed so much unlike me, with a whole different world of obligations and beliefs that I couldn’t hope to share. It wasn’t until I returned as an adult to my childhood home and had to help my mom dig out a lost trinket that I realized just how alike we were.
We had a scant few minutes to dig through my dad’s workshop while he was out back, submitting a ribeye to the tortures of charcoal. In that mildewy basement workshop, where I had spent so much time as a kid, I knew there existed a few blue plastic bins of “stuff” that had gradually accumulated over the decades. If there was anywhere a lost item that was too important to throw out was going to go, I figured, it would be there, the low-energy state of the entire household. We began to dig through these junk bins.
As I dug further, I began to understand. What had once seemed like random chaos was in fact a free-association hoard, its order understandable only under mental duress and even then only to those who thought alike. With every sifted-aside wood screw, hose clamp, speed nut or tire pressure gauge, I was in fact finding myself. Soon, I had cast the bins aside, knowing that “I” would never organize things like this, and was rooting through a rickety, half-broken drawer made out of surplus kitchen cabinetry. This is the only place it could be, I told my mother, who recoiled in fear from what her beautiful baby boy had turned into.
At the bottom of a three-kilo stack of ancient telephone equipment and illegal Romex, I dug it out. There, in all its glory, was the safety deposit key she had left there 38 years before. For a moment, I was a hero. A hero of hoarding.
I also found a whole shitload of bicycle wrenches, which I asked my dad if I could take home with me. You see, I could never find out where mine got off to.
I was just down in Chinatown, picking up my usual collection of sweet, sweet pork dumplings from my dealer, when I saw the automatic parking enforcement drones buzzing around the block. They were there because the church was letting out, and so there’d be a lot of people to catch. While it is true that I have a rich and flavourful hatred for cars parked illegally with their blinkers left on, this smelled like religious persecution to me.
The righteousness of my cause, and also the fact that I needed to wait a few more minutes before Chun could get me the really good, black-label stuff from down in the basement - I’m talking triple MSG - drove me to improvise a solution. I thought, if these robots are looking for people parked illegally, then why not give them exactly what they were looking for? It just so happened that in the trunk of my car lay a bunch of inflatable parking-dummy cars, left behind from that whole legal dispute with Volvo.
I had to work quickly to get it all done before the Toyota Panopticon came around the block for another ticket-bombing run, but I managed to erect a maze entirely made up of fake, illegally-parked cars. Once the parking robot slipped inside it, its optics quickly became overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of lawbreaking assholes, and while it was distracted I set up a few more not-cars behind it, trapping the drone forever.
People coming out of the church saw my dumb ass flitting back and forth, inflating fake cars, and at first looked at me with confusion. Then, once they saw the stranded Toyota, plaintively screaming in multiple languages for debugger assistance, they approved. There were lots of smiles, polite applause, and thumbs-ups all around. For just a moment, I was a hero to my community, rather than the barely-post-adolescent white trash who mostly just committed small crimes for the sake of convenience.
It wasn’t until I got home and checked the hundreds of angry voicemails on my phone that I realized the inflatable cars’ license plates were probably real. That’ll teach those motherfuckers at Volvo not to renew my contract for corrosion testing.
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tags: volvo, toyota, toyota panopticon, dumplings
Abstracts from the Autocross Science Journal (2016)
On Grip As It Pertains To Skidding - Our research independently confirms the fact that the tire warming blankets actually do something.
Yes, You Do Need A Giant Front Wing - Peer reviews confirm that it looks pretty fucking awesome and is really fast, and despite the fact it clipped a cone, it’s not part of the car and therefore should not count against me.
Why I Lost A Second Back There - Thorough analysis of migratory fowl, weather patterns and economic activity conclusively proves that it was the wind that formed a freak weather anomaly, buffeting the hood of my Miata and slowing it down while approaching the stop box.
Co-Drives Actually Make You Faster - Lotus Engineering confirms a report that despite the additional weight provided by another human passenger, their repeated screaming of “GAS GAS GAS” and/or panicked flailing for the holy-shit handles on the interior have a marginal improvement on average times (n = 6).
A lot of people in my social orbit decry so-called “soft” journalism. Celebrity, fashion, the media itself: these things aren’t really worth writing about, are they? The people demand cold, hard facts that they can apply to their lives, not puffery and fantasy. Yet, when I head down to the newsstand and avail myself of the so-called finest automotive writing, none of it stands up to Bad Cars Monthly’s annual shootout of the best cars you can get in our local area for under a thousand dollars.
Sure, the other magazines will tell you that they have “budget supercars.” If you’re one of their readers who can only spare $130k for a car, then yeah, these will keep the wife and mistress off your back. That’s totally acceptable for the kind of person whose watch brand can be spelled entirely with the English alphabet. My watch, however, has Hangul written on the fascia, and I’m about ninety percent sure it wasn’t manufactured in the “Kia” part of Korea, if you get my drift.
Nor can you really trust historical car reviews when it comes time to pick out a beater. Yeah, that Mini was probably great to steer around the Nurburgring when it was new, but how does it handle right now, half a million miles later, with a hole in the radiator, all four tires bald and a missing rear hatch? Only Bad Cars Monthly will tell you, because we are not beholden to advertisers, nor do any advertisers want to be associated with how raw our platform is.
Where do we find trained racing drivers, you ask? Only a professional race car driver can hope to be consistent enough to provide a reasonable basis for comparison. This is folly: most of our readers aren’t racers. What do you care what a bunch of Finnish weirdos who distill toilet liquor out of leftover race fuel think? Sure, some of our readers are racists, but ideally none of our reviewers are. Except for Ted, who keeps monopolizing our editorial bull sessions with stories about Martians working together with various world religions to steal the semen from his body while he sleeps. Ted’s favourite car in this roundup was a 340,000 kilometer 2003 Nissan Sentra SE-R Spec-V, by the way, which racked up great lap times even though the drivers’ seat wasn’t fully bolted in - decreasing confidence under braking.
With our help, you’ll never go wondering about which beater car is truly the best. We’ve been told by other readers that just having it in hand when you go to evaluate a potential used car is enough to drive negotiations. Just let the seller take a peek at our coverage of their vehicle, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they give you $200 to make you go away!
So pick up this month’s issue of Bad Cars Monthly at your local newsagent, and if they don’t carry it, give them the tear-out slip from whatever issue you can find. That slip explains, in painful detail, the specific order of Russian and Israeli intermediaries to go through in order to get some of our magazines every month. Cash only, I’m told, for tax reasons.
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tags: bad cars monthly, nissan, nissan sentra, mini, mini cooper
If you’re like me, then you hate-love the idea of renting a car when you’re on vacation. Your car is perfectly good, after all, minus a couple of panels that keep inconveniently falling off. Someone else’s car has weird smells, you pay by the mile, and often it features an automatic transmission that’s already learned its shift pattern and brutality settings from some kind of grandmother-of-18 instead of an honest, red-blooded icon of amateur-motorsport virtue such as yourself.
This was on my mind recently as I planned another pilgrimage to Tokyo. This time, I decided, I would try to summit Mt. Fuji and witness for myself whether or not that sweet Subaru 4WD prototype they had in the 70s commercials was still stuck up there. With such little oxygen, I figured it wouldn’t even be rusty. Thing was, I needed a way to get to the mountain, and the only options were effectively pay a fortune in yens for a bus, or rent a car. Although the concept of driving a kei car tickled my novelty, I had already had a decent dose of it from my friend Small Bill, who regularly imported kei trucks from Japan and so had a - wait a minute.
Bill, I asked, does the boat you get your cars from go back to Japan? Right, and it’s usually pretty empty because nobody wants inferior gaijin automobiles, so it’d be cheap to send cars to the Home Islands, right? Oh, no reason. Just curious, is all.
I don’t like to brag, but I’m pretty sure I hit the crowning achievement of my life on that morning. Picture it: the sun rises, rolling across the fields of rice paddies and chasing the shadows away from the river valley. At the bottom of the trail, a 1988 Lincoln Town Car, its quarter panels Sawzalled, hurling rocks and abuse through a set of too-big knobby General Grabber all-terrain tires. You can hear its 302 wailing to the not-substantial fuel cut as it fights for traction. Some kindly old men in high-visibility reflective vests, Japan’s primary domestic product, suck air through their teeth as they regard the vehicle, and then dive for cover as the distinctive sound of a barbarian motor hitting the bottle echoes through the land.
Later that night, I powerslid to a stop outside a Family Mart in Dotenbori and was sorely disappointed by the customer service. It was downright un-Japanese to not offer a weary traveller a hot bottle of nitrous oxide after returning from the pilgrimage to Mt. Fuji, leave alone a chaser of ATF stopleak. Spotting the Emperor’s Century in traffic, I decided to raise my complaint in person.
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tags: subaru, lincoln, lincoln town car, japan, toyota, toyota century
The concept of “free time” is one that had evaded me for many years. Locked into the corporatist world of first a rigid schooling and then an office job, I never got to see my neighbourhood during the day. It actually held a lot of questions for me. When I was nowhere near my house, what was going on around it that I would never get to see?
Soon I started taking personal days and just driving around the neighbourhoods, getting to know the unique texture of Real Suburbia. There was the usual hot goss, of course: while Dan down the street may act like a minimalist, Pinterest-worthy housekeeping badass at the block party barbecue, he hired a veritable strike force of maids to strip the accumulated filth from his home every day. I would sit out front of his place, the 302 idling beneath the hood of my Bricklin, and watch the help stumble from his house, caked in human slime and smoking cheap cigarettes.
After a few weeks of this adventure, I ran out of personal days. I went back to work, for awhile, but I still wondered about the conclusions of the little dramas that I had witnessed on my voyeuristic vacation. Did Carol ever figure out who was stealing her mail? What about Eric’s ongoing feud with the crossing guard at the elementary school? This was essential stuff, this was real life, and I was missing it while photocopying TPS reports and delivering scrum updates. Despite a healthy addiction to pound-puppy torque, I had decent savings, and so I decided to just up and quit my job. This is when my transformation into the bearded hobo you see before you began.
I needed to still bring in some income. Figuring that the comings and goings of my neighbours would be entertaining to others if they were exciting to me, I started logging them. Within weeks, I had the first newspaper in my area for almost fifty years. It didn’t just report the news via press release and then take government cash like every other newspaper had: it was thriving. This is what everyone really wanted to read; local news, about trivial shit, delivered by a local. Even though they were trapped at work, they could experience the “Dayworld” as I had. Advertisers were hungry for this wholesome yet gossipy mix of content, and with their largesse I could hire more reporters, who would in turn spy on their neighbours too.
As always, it was ruined by politics. Jane from two blocks over decided that our local public school trustee was in fact a barely-ambulatory piece of shit in the shape of a human being, and campaigned against him. Now, everything I had reported about her struggles to keep her swimming pool clean was weaponized. Russians kept phoning, trying to drop tips on Jane, even though it was like three in the morning and there was no way she was pouring an illegal mix of pool chemicals into our sewer in the middle of the night. There were accusations of bias, because I had accidentally covered her mid-day fender bender in the parking lot of grocery co-operative, but not her rival’s alleged child kidnapping and molestation. That guy didn’t even live in our neighbourhood, I tried to explain onto deaf ears.
My readership began to dip as I tried to worm my way out of the coverage. This was not what they had read my works for. They wanted something soft and fluffy that couldn’t hurt them, like a sweet little bunny rabbit, and now I was serving up a big plate of Hey People Are Complicated. I called up the federal government and took a huge bailout, signing over the directorship of the company on the back of a cocktail napkin from O’Boozehan’s, my “local” in which I received tips and did some reporting in the form of excessing day-drinking.
When someone tells you that you don’t get to know your neighbours well anymore, you punch them in the fucking face. There is such a thing as being too involved in your community.
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tags: bricklin sv-1, bricklin, small town life, newspapers
“Buon giorno, motherfuckers!” I shriek as the rear end of the Monaco finally lets go. It doesn’t take long for the quarter panel to find a bundle of parked Vespas, which are sent flying into the air across the exquisite ancient market. I weep for the lost mopeds, yes, but they are sacrifices that had to be made for the greater good of driving a clapped-out Mopar at high speeds through the streets of Rome.
Now, everyone knows it would simply be reckless to race across populated roads for no reason with a vehicle the relative size of a cruise liner. That’s why I made sure to rob the automobile museum and anger the Carabinieri first. With their smaller and more agile Alfa police cars, and my savage, profanity-spewing all-American “economy class” vee-aight, it should be quite the classic matchup. Or at least it would be if I could keep this beast of a family sedan off the walls.
What did I steal from the museum that would fit into the oddly unspacious, ergonomically-compromised interior of the Monaco? Why, only Italy’s greatest treasure: the Heart of Rust. As briefly mentioned in the Bible, this ancient artifact is in fact the origin of all corrosion in the universe. Sealed within a perfect sphere of pure Bondo by ancient Tofino bodyshop artisans, it is now inert, but carries tremendous value if it should fall into the wrong hands.
I do a clumsy rev-match and slam the four-speed rock crusher of a transmission into gear, putting a little bit of throttle emphasis on the entire deal as sort of a tip for good service. Bad move. They hate tipping over here, a fact which I only realize when an impatient Renault Zoe squeezes between an ancient building and the doors of my bellowing bull of a Mopar with a micron of clearance and escapes into the streets ahead. It seems that rather than having a high-speed chase, I am in fact holding up traffic, and the realization of this forces me to steer a little bit too hard coming around the next corner, making the rear end lose balance.
Now, I know what you’re going to say: if the Heart of Rust was so dangerous, then why didn’t I seatbelt it in before taking that corner onto the cobblestone streets? Well, I honestly did not expect that the Italians had only slathered the fucker with a mere quarter-inch of life-protecting Bondo, nor that they got the mix wrong so that it would crack open with the slightest impact with my quarter panel and unleash its awful force until it had burned through my disintegrating Dodge and fallen all the way through the ancient pipes and sewers of Rome before it made contact with the Earth’s core.
Sliding to a stop on top of a conveniently placed food cart, I take out my phone to warn Australia. They’re going to want to get their raincoats on.
I really hated going down to the Research & Development floor at Switch Heavy Equipment Corporation. No sooner did the elevator doors crack open than you were immediately blasted by high-decibel rave music from the 90s and V8 engines hitting stratospheric revs. All this was to achieve the impossible goal handed down to me by my father and founder of SHEC, Flannel Safety-Switch. We weren’t just here to make a shitload of money, oh no: we had to also make an AMC Eagle that was as fun to drive as it was to look at.
For a little while in the 90s, we made fantastic strides. Our eggheads had figured out the origin of the Woodgrain Particle; chucking one of these bad boys into a pile of carbon-fibre could create ultra-light wooden veneers that cut the curb weight in half. It doubled as solving the little corrosion issue, too: metal might be able to rust, but what if we just replaced it all with a woodgrain carbon-fibre monocoque? Why, you could bring salty, snowy boots into the car and pedaldance your heart out without eating your way through the drivers’ footwell in a weekend.
Why were we doing this? Well, there was the curse of my father, for one thing. However, as time went on, it became obvious that all cars were turning into imperfect clones of the AMC Eagle. The station wagon was dying, being replaced by unibody lift-kitted all-wheel-drive hatchbacks - just like the AMC Eagle. These half-breed crossovers lacked an acknowledgement of their true nature, though, and remained completely unsatisfying, failing at combining the proletarian appeal of a rugged four-wheel-drive with the drift-kiddie tease of a vacuum-disconnectable front axle. We would bring back the true originator, and become a pantheon of new automotive gods.
On that one morning, they really thought they had nailed it. A throng of excited engineers, researchers, parts-catalogue obsessives and low-octane stoners waited patiently for me to pull aside the sheet covering the vehicle they had poured their working lives into. My reaction to their crowning glory would decide whether they were entered into the annals of history as heroes, or mythic failures.
I pulled the sheet. They were close. So close it hurt me. I did not want to crush them, to tell them just how far they were from completion of my great goal. Yet, I could not accept any failure, no matter how small.
“You have brought me an AMC SX/4,” I at last announced to the crowd. “It needs more doors.”
For the sake of argument, I’m going to assume you’ve heard of a pyramid scheme before. You know the gist of it: it’s unsustainable because eventually it will include every human being on planet Earth. Bad idea, horrible idea. What if - and this is just spitballing here - we made a pyramid scheme out of other, smaller pyramid schemes? People won’t know they’re already part of it and will join the big one again just because it’s bigger!
To figure out if my scheme was practical, I talked to the mathematics professor I met down at the Greyhound station. We’ll call him Dr. Crack, because I couldn’t take notes - he kept stealing my Bic pens for some reason. Dr. Crack thinks that what I’m proposing is so damaging that it could tear the fabric of all human civilization apart. I, on the other hand, am doubtful. Television news has trained me to value an expert’s opinion on about the same level as any other human being, so I asked my groundskeeper about it as well.
My groundskeeper, Chop Tony, said that it was alright. I am sure there was no bias in his opinion whatsoever, so I went ahead with the whole thing. The first step I had to take? Buying up old, abandoned pyramid schemes. You’d be surprised how cheap you can pick them up for. Desperate suckers are so willing to get any return at all out of their investment - to prove to their loved ones that it actually wasn’t an elaborate scam after all - that they’ll sell you the entire holdings for pennies on the dollar. Once I had enough of them picked up, I just had to slam them together and put a new coat of paint over the entire mess.
I was just about ready to debut my creation when I realized that I had my eBay search on the wrong category. Instead of picking up failed pyramid schemes, I had instead been buying bankrupt financial services companies. On paper, I now owned enough senators to invade Kuwait. Having this amount of power made me uncomfortable. Now, we were no longer just talking about exposing the flaws in individual people; I had in my hands the reins of the whole of North American civilization. I couldn’t just sell it off, lest someone figure out what I had inadvertently cobbled together and try to point our government at something bad like bridges and universal healthcare. No, I had to scuttle the entire mess.
My attorney has told me only to make the following statement on what happened next: I did not realize that you could just sell nuclear power plants on the open market like that, and if I had, I certainly would not have started trying to use their computers to mine bitcoins.
Can you really be a connoisseur of crap? Of course you can. Those bigots in the world of Big Lifestyle Magazine, despite barely clearing minimum wage themselves, are convinced that unless what you like is deemed “good,” or at least “expensive,” then wanting to be around more of it is just hoarding or mental illness. I don’t subscribe to that view: that’s why I own sixteen second-generation Dodge Caravans and Plymouth Voyagers.
If these were crap, I ask you, why then did people spend a huge amount of money on them new? They needed them for utilitarian purposes, yes, but utility is beautiful, too: just ask anyone who has glimpsed a Piaggio Ape, morning dew on the barely-painted steel glistening in the rising sun of the Italian coast. Why does some guy who collects Ferraris have more of a right to bore people at the gas station about the intricacies of every model and misfeature than I do? I suspect the guys who banged together the panels of this Caravan at least had access to better drugs.
There is only so much critically-approved, “good” stuff out there in the world. If you think about it, that means not everyone is going to be able to enjoy it. You have to find the good in what you have, I tell the clerk at the 7-11 who just wants me to pay for my Slurpee and get the fuck out. And for me, the good in what I have is the delightful driver information centre that sits atop the headliner of the pride of my collection: a 1994 all-wheel-drive Town & Country with the Quad Command captain’s seats and all-original bronze mesh alloy wheels. At a glance, I can tell what direction I’m headed (to the future), and once upon a distant era, I could also tell what the exterior temperature was.
That’s why you have to figure out something that you like, and obsess to it to a degree that is terrifying. I’m proud that the Parking Enforcement division of my city has a special PowerPoint slide during orientation, warning prospective meter maids about the block or two that is completely covered in second generation Chryco minivans. You should be proud of something this stupid, too.
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tags: dodge caravan, dodge, plymouth voyager, plymouth, chrysler town & country, chrysler, piaggio ape, piaggio
I couldn’t believe it. Here I was, having given twenty years of my life to the corporation, and then they threw me on the side of the road like so much trash. So much for loyalty. Whatever happened to honour? This is what’s wrong with Japan today, when a mascot can’t be assured of a long career and fruitful retirement, fired just because “there were complaints.”
Well, I decided I’d show them. With all the reorganizations and chaos of the era, there were a lot of other mascots also out of work. There was even a thread for it on a local message board; everyone was meeting to commiserate in a small snack bar not too far from my apartment. I headed on down there immediately, in costume of course.
After a few weeks, our street gang began to take form. The only requirement for membership was that you keep wearing the costume - it was stressed that if nobody knows what your human face looked like, you couldn’t be held legally responsible for your mascot-y hijinks. If one of our brethren fell in battle, we would never try to see the man beneath the mask. Once, Kangaru-chan, a former mascot for a failed mini-split manufacturer, had his brains beaten in by a bunch of stevedores out in the Bay. Although he collapsed without the mask, none of us looked as we rolled his body into the dark waters. We owed him and his family that much.
Soon, events conspired to put us in a circumstance we could not have imagined. The thing about labour organization is: it’s inherently political. Although politicians and the police may tell you that a bunch of misfits in bear costumes have little or no ability to drive events - only to react - they quickly become wrong when your “small” gang becomes an occupying force. Other separate gangs of mascots, from all across the nation, came together in a millions-strong show of solidarity. When I was elected to the Diet, to usher in a grand new age of labour rights for mascots, I couldn’t help but think about all the scraps in dark alleys we had gone through in order to secure a foam-headed future for us all.
And then I signed the law that would finally make elevator doors a little bit wider so I could get through them with my head on without bystanders pointing and laughing. I’d show them. I’d show them all.
Despite what the junkyard operator had been telling me all these years, the cars which I had successfully been “using up” were in fact not crushed, but sold to a spectrum of new suckers. I found this out recently when one of the new owners tracked me down through the internet, most likely because of the extremely unique lifestyle blog, Dieseling In Front Of The Library, which I had kept running as a dare.
When you drive cars like I do - poorly, but with even worse maintenance - you never think about keeping things nice for the next guy. Once, I thought this way, but a parade of high-achieving beaters had dissuaded me from the notion of ever trying to make the world a better place. Until the internal combustion engine died out, there would be an endless series of other trash-grade automobiles to run into the ground and leave for dead.
Back to the angry new buyer. The scrappy operator, Improvised O’Toole, had told him that it was only owned by a little old lady who used it to get to and from church. I could see how someone would be fooled by this. If you ignored the supercharger jutting out of the hood and the leftover nitrous bottle heater that sat where the back seat used to be, it would be easy to believe that Grandma O’Toole had taken nothing but the utmost tender loving care of this ‘91 Chrysler Imperial.
There is, however, a silver lining in this. If this guy was dumb enough to buy one of my old cars, then in theory he would be dumb enough to buy a lot more of them. “Let me make it up to you,” I said, walking around back to the killing fields. “We’ll get you a nice new econobox.”
What they say in the world of high finance is that there’s always a greater fool. For my entire life, I had expected myself to be that greater fool, “liberating” half-cocked garbage from the backyards of trailer parks across America in order to give these poor cars one great last chance at life. Now I realize that the world is full of more economic opportunity than I had imagined, and that idea warms my heart even more than to see this guy drive off with that Cadillac Cimarron where the spark plugs got a little melty.
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tags: chrysler imperial, chrysler, cadillac cimarron, cadillac
Come down to Home Depot this weekend. Bring your children to the Kids’ Workshop, where they learn to use tools to build arts and crafts with their parents’ help. It’s fun for everyone, and you get to take home what they build at the end of the day.
I know what you’re saying - local Home Depot #637, you haven’t done Kids’ Workshop for quite a few years, maybe several decades. We’re gonna be honest with you: we kind of ran out of ideas, and got a little bored of the whole thing. Part of it was because we got feedback from parents saying that they didn’t need another napkin dispenser, or a birdhouse, or a little makeup case for Momma Bear. It was just more clutter that took up room in the house, and it’s much harder to throw away woodworking than it is paper.
Now things are gonna change, though. Oh boy, are they ever. There’s a new Special Helper working at our store, and he specializes in making your kids build projects that are useful to the whole family in today’s unpredictable times.
This Sunday, take your kids down to the ol’ Depot, and for a mere twenty dollars they can build themselves a real genuine French guillotine. Yeah, just like they use in France! It’ll build their confidence, and when you take it home afterward, everyone is going to get a turn beheading the usurious monsters who slowly destroyed your way of life.
You’re gonna need to help them, of course - power-routing the handsome finials isn’t covered by our insurance, and neither is sharpening the severing blade to a mirror finish. You’re not just making some bullshit birdhouse anymore, for some freeloading swallows. No sir - this is a memory they’ll never forget!
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tags: home depot, guillotine, arts and crafts day
“That’s it, buddy, your time is up,” said “Stefan,” my guide to the wide world of exciting Mitsubishi product here at the local auto show.
“What do you mean, my time? The show is still open,” I protested, and swept my arm through the booth, hitting nobody, and pointed in the general vicinity of where I thought a wall clock might exist. Stefan was being a real downer, but what he had for me next was a big letdown.
“Read the sign, bucko. I’m free.” His voice broke on that last word, and saying it seemed to change something inside him. Without another syllable, he turned on his heel and ran out of the booth, never to return.
I read the sign. “Customers who stay longer than five (5) minutes at the Mitsubishi booth become official employees of Mitsubishi Motors and must remain in the booth either until A) someone buys a car, or B) another guest stays long enough that they fall under this contract and replaces them.” I guess I was the “case B.” Stefan had used me, I realized, deliberately slowly reading the pamphlet to me on how good the Mitsubishi Eclipse was, trying to involve me in a little story about the photos of the stock family enjoying their fantasy forest cabin getaway. His banter was just to buy time, and now I was doomed.
Blaming Stefan didn’t really make sense. He wasn’t entirely at fault. There was probably a reason I didn’t leave that booth when I still had the opportunity. Canadian politeness? No. A part of me was sympathetic towards him, upset that he would be doomed to sell the last three or four models of a dying brand. Nissan bought them. Nissan, for fuck’s sake. Panic rose in my throat as I began to realize that if I didn’t get out of here, soon I would be selling Versa Notes too.
How did I get out? I would like to tell you that I found some clever loophole in their contract. Maybe I fooled one of my fellow auto enthusiasts into staying within the confines of the booth a little too long, with a sob story about a dropped contact lens or a lost puppy. Nothing of the sort happened. Nobody even came close to the booth, except for some kids that walked past, pointed, and laughed - shrieking lilts of pre-adolescent mockery. It was like seeing a dead body. Nobody else wanted to join the corpse on the floor.
No, what I did was simple. After analyzing my standards for an automobile: weird number of cylinders, not very much horsepower, rusty as hell, and very, very used-up, I realized a brand new Mitsubishi Mirage hatchback qualified. It didn’t even cost me much more than a salvage-title Neon. And then I just drove the fuck on out of there.
Later, I got a letter from Mitsubishi corporate. “Congratulations on escaping the booth,” it said, “and becoming our first customer of the year.” I was smiling, having already dissolved the half-painted Mirage into parts for a dozen Soviet econoboxes, but then I got to the last line of the letter. “Please come to the closest Mitsubishi dealer this weekend for your rebate cheque.”
Americans have this picture of Canada as being the land of diversity. It’s partly true. Yes, we accept all people under the sun, race, creed, sexual orientation, mittens/gloves preference, and favourite hockey team. Everyone should do it, even though that means more people are stuck in traffic with me when I really just want to go fast and do donuts in the work parking lot until my start time. Where Canada falls down is acceptance of deviant products. Yes, I speak of the many forms of knock-off snack foods that exist in America.
A Wal-Mart in the United States is a rich tapestry of snacks inaccessible to us Canucks: Mr. Pibb (hasn’t gotten his doctorate yet, but has crushing student debt), Cheez-Its (not sure what the “it” refers to), and Fentanyl Crunch Doritos are just three of them. Maybe once in awhile, one of the subsidiaries of a snack food overlord will decide to offer something new to us, but only for a limited time. That’s not even getting into the humble junkyard taco truck, which is virtually nonexistent here. Our population, it seems, is simply too small to allow the demand for a new and untested product to become profitable.
This means that a lot of our “special offer” foods are actually stereotypically Canadian. One of our wealthiest citizens is at the helm of a multi-generational grocery food empire that makes more money than most of our provinces. As part of that empire, they offer pandering “Poutine” potato chips. I stand in the aisle, watching consumers snapping them up, and I wonder to myself: where is your individuality? Is the Canadian identity just grabbing too-greasy limited-edition potato chips because it sounds like a joke that you might want to make to an American?
I started a snack-food importing business a few years ago, to try and provide some much-needed competition in the market. You’d think it would be all the government red tape that brings you down, but no. It turns out that there was in fact so much demand for Trader Joe’s that huge bands of warlords came out of Lethbridge and kept capturing my trucks as they rolled across the border. Border guards, bought off by stolen Ho-Hos and Count Chocula, were perfectly willing to look the other way. My business insurance skyrocketed, and I never did get a chance to eat a Funyun.
So when you think about which deserving foreign country to send aid to this Christmas, you can tell most of the third world to cram it with walnuts. Tell the United Nations to provide armed escort for American snack foods today.
As you may be aware, when you call people on your phone it actually travels through a highly advanced telephone network. Yes, that’s what phones were originally for. I found out that most people weren’t really cognizant of this whole abstract “network” thing. This was on my mind recently when I visited my old buddy.
It turns out that he had recently inherited an escape room business from his least-favourite uncle. Business was shitty, and he needed an innovative new dungeon to throw type-A undergraduates into at forty bucks a head. Since I had been thinking about it so much, I proposed a telephone company adventure. If nothing else, it would give me an excuse to clean out my garage and also finally splash out someone else’s money on shipping that half-ton crossbar switch rack I kept eyeing on eBay.
The puzzle was simple: the telephone network was down because some dipshit used a fibre-seeking backhoe in an alley without calling ahead. After donning Bell System hardhats and reflective vests, it was your team’s job to restore the integrity of the network before someone in the federal government noticed. It was a pretty popular game, and visitors started coming in to specifically ask for the “angry customer one.” Soon, we had to open a second version of the game, this one with a misconfigured networking switch in a local monopoly cable company’s back office. That’s the one that really caught fire, and then we thought - maybe we’re onto something here.
Within a month, we had demolished all the other escape rooms and were hurriedly trying to reinstall the cubicle walls, motivational posters and mouldy server racks that were thrown out of this office space when it was first taken over. It seemed like the customer didn’t care about abstract puzzles like being caught in a zombie apocalypse or trying to repair an underwater submarine; what they wanted was to chase those five nines.
And chase them they did. We realized that our best teams, the ones who came back week after week after week, could solve the game in mere minutes. If anything, we were actually more dependable than the real phone company. That’s when they took notice. It started with drive-by harassment: call one of the senators they’re bribing and tell them it’s a “pirate telephone company.”
We spent a lot more of our time explaining patiently at government inquests that we were in fact a recreational telephone company, if anything, and our staggering uptime was due to a competition between the two best teams, Ligma Balls and Phone Fuckers of America. The resulting press drove our attendance even higher, and soon retired phone phreaks were flying across the country to get a chance to once again strip twisted-pair with their teeth and red box to their heart’s content.
Most of these phreaks brought their own equipment, and a few of them left it behind, further bolstering the gritty authenticity of our seventeen different theatres of telecom competition. One team of high schoolers got confused about which phone box was which, and went out into the parking lot to climb a pole and splice our shit into the public grid. Now we actually could put the real phone company out of business.
That was probably a mistake, because as soon as we began to offer cellular phone service, a lot of the interest evaporated. That crunchy, dirty, analogue of the 1970s was what our customers truly craved; not changing configuration files on an Ericsson switch and hoping it would come up properly. My buddy, losing interest himself, shut the entire place down. He said he was burned out, but I knew that he was just sick of fielding calls from all the other phone company CEOs, asking them how the fuck any of this actually worked.
I think biker gangs get a bit of a bad rap. They’re just motoring enthusiasts, same as you and me. Sometimes - just like us - they only want to slowly drive through town, a gear or two too low, bellowing full-throated hatred out of their Costco-sized-tomato-can mufflers. And we should let them do that, because we live in a land of ideas, and - by nature of being an idea - “holy shit this sounds totally bitchin’” has equal merit to “my newborn baby’s ears should not be bleeding.”
So when the city announced that they had paid a local crackpot inventor a few thousand dollars to use his loud-exhaust-detecting robot, I took umbrage. This was unfair discrimination against my two-wheeled friends. No, not bicyclists, although if that same mad scientist invents a lycra detector, I’m going to be writing a letter demanding that my councillor pay for it out of his office budget if necessary. Motorcyclists have to be loud, because - and it says this in the Bible - “loud pipes save lives.”
Don’t believe me? Look now to the case of Australia, which decided to start using “bikies,” as they call them, in cancer wards. After a laboratory accident a few decades ago, where a researcher accidentally introduced a four-thousand-RPM Harley Davidson to an agar plate of skin cancer cells, it was determined that loud pipes could indeed halt and even reverse the spread of many kinds of cancer. As a result of this program’s stunning success, Australian life expectancies are longer than ever, although it is still up for debate about whether doing so constitutes a war crime.
Even now, Harley’s finest engineers are hard at work on the next generation of life-saving engines. They accidentally ran into a drunk Honda engineer at the bar and learned what “camshafts” are, so now they’re trying for an unheard-of redline of six thousand. I, for one, salute these miracle workers, and I will try my hardest to figure out what the theoretical decibel limit of Loud-O, The Exhaust Sensing Robot’s horrid mechanical ears are.
I can’t stand to have a “parts car” lying around. It’s like having a “parts dog,” or a “parts toddler.” Every car deserves a second chance at life. Just because someone else has neglected the car to destruction doesn’t mean that you have to hand over a shit ton of storage room, just in case you want to carve off a chunk of it in the future like a side of beef in a walk-in freezer.
As a result, I am almost always devoid of parts for my Volare, despite having bought at least six of the things over the years. Blame Chrysler; their massively shitty engineering landed these brown-and-avocado barges in my yard in the first place, but their vastly cynical design made it possible to bodge in other, better, manufacturers’ parts in order to allow them to leave.
I’m sure almost all of the cars I’ve saved now have succumbed to the tinworm and been scrapped, because let’s face it, most people aren’t willing to go to Home Depot and cut up a steel snow shovel to use as a new floor pan. Or weld in a whole rear half from a crashed car. The cars I “saved” were maybe only given a scant few years more of life, but isn’t that what we all will want, when we ourselves near the end?
Sorry, got a little philosophical there. Didn’t mean to drop a memento mori for you. The intern left a few cans of the really good structural adhesive open and the fumes are kind of getting to me. As I was saying, there is no real reason to have a “parts car” you aren’t willing to immediately return to driving status, as quickly as possible.
Why am I telling you this? Well, officer, in order to get a new glovebox lid for my Volare, I had to get enough so-called “parts cars” that I couldn’t hope to fix them all myself before I had a chance to pull it from one of them. If you look the other way on this whole inconvenient “parking violation” thing, though, I’ll put you on the top of the list for when I get this ‘77 Aspen to run again.
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tags: plymouth volare, plymouth, parts cars, dodge aspen, dodge
Lately, I’ve been undergoing what the politically correct among you might refer to as “house arrest.” In my defence, the cop wasn’t really using all the AOD, and I almost had my busted one back into his patrol cruiser before he got back from the Timmies. If you ask me, just being able to route that transmission’s speed cable through the retaining clips on top in less than fifteen minutes is worthy of a medal on its own. The courts, as they do, didn’t see it my way.
As I sit in my home, wondering if the ankle bracelet has any useful components inside it, I notice that the neighbours go by at all hours of the day with their canine companions. Dog-walking is one of those activities that unites us all, unless you’re some kind of asshole who doesn’t like dogs, and even Hitler liked dogs so you can climb aboard a rocket ship marked “To Mars” and fuck right off our planet. That means all these people are walking past my house, probably bored out of their mind, desperately reaching out for stimulation, and that opens them up to being prime advertising consumers. I rented out my front lawn to some nice billboard people, and started raking in the dough.
By “dough” I mean, like, twenty-five bucks a month. It’s hard to be a good negotiator when the counterparty’s lawyer has to get on the “approved visitor” list by the defence attorney. The middleman was getting a super fat cut off me. So I told them to take down their implement of capitalist hypnosis, and I’d take care of my own ad sales. If anyone was going to get rich off of destroying the social fabric of my community, it had to be me.
The first few weeks were pretty rough. As it would turn out, very few of the suburbanites walking toy-model dogs past my home actually wanted to buy the front bumper cover from a ‘93 Miata. Unbelievable to me, but you can’t argue with the objective reality that my neighbours really didn’t give a shit about getting their hands dirty, or keeping cars out of the junkyard and by doing so, saving our planet. Bastards. I had to get into their heads, really think like the customer.
We turned a corner after that. I say “we,” because with the profits I was soon turning, it only made sense to hire more people in order to expand my growing advertising empire. Who was the big client who revolutionized my business? It turns out that my next-door neighbour was also under house arrest, and needed some fresh members for his new startup cult. As you can imagine, it’s very difficult to attract even extremely naïve people to a seedy-looking house. I asked him if he would consider helping me sell all these car parts in my basement in trade, but he was really a cash-only kind of guy.
I also would have called animal control about all the loose dogs that are running around in his backyard, but I was pretty sure my parole said I can’t be within 200 yards of a Panther platform anymore.
For a couple years now, I’ve been going downtown and volunteering my spare time at the local socialist conspiracy to control the world. Just a little bit of helping out, you know, because I want to dominate and subjugate my neighbours to the almighty will of the collective. Also, they validate my parking, which is great because I don’t believe in the inherent value of capital.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: surely the socialist conspiracy has a big, cool office with lots of chuckling evil people in it, right? You’d be wrong. This media stereotype of all government conspiracies is unhelpful to our cause. In actuality, we rent out a floor of an old sewing-machine factory that’s been converted into an artist residence. It’s pretty cool, because we can meet with other like-minded individuals and use the awesome power of “spraying paint on canvas” and “coming up with funny tweets” to completely overwhelm all the ineffectual conservative opposition, which merely has the power of “billions and billions of dollars.”
The media’s on our side, too: just last week one of our guys got punched out by a cop. Old Bob was coming home from the grocery store, but now the footage of his prone body being stomped on by pipeline enthusiasts while cops looked the other way has branded him forevermore as a genetically engineered antifascist supersoldier. You can’t buy that kind of coverage. I’m sure he’ll appreciate it when he wakes up from his coma.
So there you have it. It is inevitable that we will eventually overthrow this degenerate, populist government. Together, we will embark on a new age of what society truly does not want: a fair wage for labour, and maybe a nice health care system as long as a newspaper doesn’t call us any bad names.
Have you ever felt guilty for something you did in a dream? Perhaps you are a different person in your subconscious than you actually are when you’re constrained by the rules and ethics of objective reality? Here at the Switch Dream Institute, we work hard to study your dreams in order to make your best life possible. Also, we lever a bunch of cash out of your wallet, but that’s the price of progress. There’s also a price for parking.
Unlike our competitors, we don’t hire by-the-minute phone psychics to interpret your inner self. That’s not scientific. Instead, we rely on the greatest technological scam of our era: machine learning. That’s right, smart computers. Just like in that movie you didn’t watch but that everyone keeps referencing so you nod along and quickly change the subject when it comes up at parties. Do we know you or what?
Now, I also know what you’re going to say next: a half-hour-long boring description of what happened in your dream. There’s no need for this at the Switch Dream Institute, where we have a huge amount of old computers for some reason that make our offices look like some kind of intimidating commercial for men’s shaving lotion set in a post-apocalyptic turbofascist era. Also, we can’t run all these computers at the same time as the fluorescent lights without blowing a breaker, so that only adds to the effect. On weekends, we rent the place out as an escape room and give the cleaning staff zip guns. Somehow, you no doubt believe, these machines will suck the nocturnal happenstances directly from your brain and use a powerful algorithm to study them. Try not to pay attention to how many of the monitors are just running the “Flying Toasters” screensaver.
At the end of all this, a private consultant will lock you in a small cubicle, explain the nature of your dream, and then require you to pay in full before you can be released. What you do with this information is up to you. Naturally, we have somewhat of a conflict of interest. A scam organization, one that is just preying on your unease about the future and your role as a sentient being, why, such an organization would want you to keep giving them money for cryptic snippets of insight. At the Switch Dream Institute, however, we don’t want you to come back. Especially not with the police in tow. That’s why our head office is a car that never stops, and we are constantly hiring all new administrative assistants.
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tags: switch dream institute, the subconscious, machine learning
Are you familiar at all with land-speed racing? A couple times a year, a bunch of hardcore racers get together, head out to the salt flats (where it’s real flat) and then go super fast. There are all kinds of classes, so no matter what kind of car you have, you can probably make it qualify for and win a class if you remove a spark plug wire or drill holes in the body. Competitors get “salt fever” and keep coming back, year after year, to get a 0.1 mph gain over their speed from last year. It’s a blast, or so I’ve been told.
Thing is, those salt flats are pretty far away from here, so I’ve never been. I wanted that experience, and why shouldn’t I have everything I want? We certainly have enough salt, and I’m fairly sure that the abandoned mining road beside my buddy’s new house is flat-ish. And if it wasn’t, that just makes setting a land-speed record all the more impressive!
Remember how I said earlier that there are all kinds of classes? I once read a story about some guy who hot-glued the equivalent of an ex-Soviet lawnmower engine into his drag Camaro. It’s not objectively fast, sure, but it is the fastest car in that configuration ever ranked, so he nailed the record. That’s basically what I do all day, anyway - and I’m pretty sure I could go faster.
My car? It’s a pretty standard 1988 Tercel coupe, you know, with the notchback. A lot of people in this era gravitate towards the Corollas, or even the Camry, but I think that the Tercel offers the same space-shuttle styling in a package that’s vastly more affordable. And, once you’ve removed enough vacuum hoses and e-carbs from the engine bay, quite reliable. A Princess Auto 3/4HP utility engine was swapped into its place (the exact brand of said engine is unknown - the manufacturer was apparently so embarrassed to have been associated with it that they angle-ground their own markings off of the block). Like my old mechanic used to say, every fraction of a horsepower counts. I mean, he was referring to it in the context of a car that “only” made 75HP, instead of two orders of magnitude fewer, but you know.
On the inaugural run, I broke the record, sure. It didn’t take much more than flooring the gas, ignoring every sensation in my traitorous brain to lift, and then pushing through the last-ditch adrenal fear response. A couple potholes shook up the steering, but my homebrewed aero mods (trash can lids attached to the wheels with drywall screws) kept me safe from any crosswinds. Soon, I was almost using half of the speedometer!
I was just returning to the start line when disaster struck. Somehow, the lawncare guys that my buddy contracts out to were also there at the time, and drove across his lawn parallel to the old highway as part of routine mowing. As a result, their John Deere is now the world record holder in the 49cc category.
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tags: toyota, toyota tercel, john deere, chevrolet, chevrolet camaro
One of the most popular genres of videogame today involves being trapped on an island with a bunch of other people, and then you murder them to become the last survivor. A cynic would tell you this is a reflection of our own society, tweaked out on the pixie-stick cocaine of late capitalism. Me, I just wanted to figure out how I could trick billionaires into signing up to do it for real.
If you’ve never gone and looked, you wouldn’t believe how cheap islands are. Hell, most of them have never been visited by their so-called “owners.” You can just roll up and set up a village on them, and maybe fifty years down the line the United Nations has to set up a subcommittee to figure out the precise legality of who has a right to the land. Really saves the old pocketbook, which is good, because shipping eleven tons of Soviet machine guns certainly isn’t cheap.
Now, the next big problem in my plan: how to attract billionaires to willingly go to this island they’ve never heard of, and likely to die there? The answer is simple: just make it look like a prestigious conference. If you make it sound like there is a preassembled attendance of worshippers and news pundits, then even the most hardened titan of industry can’t resist flying his single-engine hobby plane onto the gravel pit we called a landing strip. To be honest, we lost a few of them already just on the landing attempt. It turns out the true meritocracy is gravity.
You would think that with all the private collusion they’ve been doing, it would also be very difficult to make these billionaires suddenly compete with one another. Generation after generation, this instinct has been bred out of them. They don’t even see each other as enemies, I don’t think. The solution is to not provide any food. It’s not a fast battle royale by any means, but the ending is quite decisive.
Why did I do it, if not for the money? I’m an environmentalist at heart. Spilled blood is fantastic fertilizer for the local flora, which everyone will appreciate when I fly the tenure board out here next month.
I used to joke to my colleagues around the conference drinking table that I hoped the world wasn’t actually a simulation, because when I died and got kicked out of the damn thing, I’d probably end up having to fix it! Well, guess what happened?
So for starters, birds - what a hack. They’re actually a subclass of rocks, because both of them can fly. I had a conversation with the junior engineer who did this; apparently in the first release of our reality, rocks could also learn human language. She thinks maybe half the Bible is about this bug. Everyone was very happy to be told about all those religious books, actually, because they make for decent bug reports, you know, as far as users go.
Anyway, it turns out that the real big bug they wanted me to fix was that the large hadron collider broke causality or something. Apparently, we hit some uninitialized memory when it went off, because someone rubber-stamped the code review. A little bit better bounds-checking wouldn’t slow down the world render loop that much, I don’t think, but then again I think waiting in line at the DMV takes long enough already.
Yeah, I came back. Nothing wrong with cutting a deal for me to be able to be returned to our reality in exchange for fixing a few bugs. Plus, on the “outside,” they don’t have Slurpees. Technologically advanced parent civilization my ass.
Have you ever seen that show, “Cribs?” It’s pretty popular. They pick a famous rich person and then root through their things, showing off how cool their taste is and what kind of awesome swag they surround themselves with in their off-times. It’s one of those artifacts of the spiralling death-cult of celebrity worship, the hot-goss train-crash that none of us can drive past without looking.
Problem is, nobody ever has any interesting projects in their homes. Shaq is never showing the camera the little plastic plane model kit he’s putting together in his spare time. No famous politician has a collection of 1980s record players. The houses don’t feel lived-in.
So naturally when I became super rich thanks to old Grandpa Racist Safety-Switch’s horrible demise at the hands of those bounty hunters in Argentina, the first thing I wanted was to be on Cribs. After all, with the way I spend money, it was best to get this out of the way quick before I ended up on one of those repo shows instead.
I thought filming went pretty well. Like the gracious host that I am, I took the presenter and the camera crew around my house, talked about the various unfinished projects that crowd every nook and cranny. We went out in the backyard and I showed them the pile of cars that were awaiting my loving ministrations. Other than one of the camerapeople getting airborne tetanus - I didn’t even know that was a thing - from a mostly aerosolized Accord Aerodeck, I figured it would be a shoo-in for their best episode yet.
When it finally aired, I was aghast. They kept calling it “boring,” and worse yet, cutting away from my 27-minute explanations of the historical significance of the three shreds of wet particle board in the corner of my room that used to be a Williams arcade machine. I’ll restore that pretty soon, but I just wanted to save it, you know?
On the plus side, the people from “Hoarders” have been calling a lot. Their production staff are really interested in getting to know every nook and cranny of my place. They say it’s going to be super cheap to shoot, too, because most of the footage is already on file. Sounds like a good deal. Maybe I should pick up a few of them, just in case.
When I caught that rogue sociologist going through my trash bins, and agreed to his promise that I could have one great new social program if I let him go, I thought at first he had screwed me over. However, as I thought more about his proposal, I realized it had real merit. I went immediately to my local political figure, attached a photocopy of twenty dollars, and the rest is history.
The deal is simple: when someone drives like a shithead in traffic, you go onto a special government website. You don’t tattle about them; oh no. Government is too busy to deal with each and every little complaint about not using your turn signals, braking for no reason, or countersteering nearly into the curb to make an easy left turn. They need a little incentive, and so as a citizen you will donate five, ten bucks against the offender in question.
Once the government hits, let’s say, ten thousand dollars, they go and have the offensive driver murdered. I assure you that it costs much less than ten thousand dollars to do so, so there are some major cost efficiency gains here that even the most stringent anti-government conservative can agree with. And until they hit that magical limit, the government can scrape off the compound-interest cream of reinvesting the money. It helps stabilize the economy in bad times; after all, there will always be shit drivers.
Having “solved” the problem of government inefficiency, and after the first few dozen murders went through, traffic got a lot better. Either the majority of drivers on the road were menaced by a minority of really terrible drivers, or we are all now terrified of the other person in traffic being the coffee money that finally fills up our respective buckets. Also, even though there are a lot of cheap unoccupied Audis around, I’m still a little scared of being seen driving one.
I don’t know what all the hype about self-driving cars is. I’ve had one since the early 90s and most days I wish it would stop trying to drive itself away. It feels like every couple of weeks I have to take the bus down to where the Pontiac dealership used to be, and dry the blinker-fluid tears that have coagulated beneath the headlights. Your family is gone, little Trans Am: I know it’s sad, but I have to get to work to keep you in gasoline.
One thing that is really great about all of it is that I don’t have to spend a lot of money or time looking for a parking space anymore; I can just bail out of the car as it slows for a corner. At the end of the day, I just need to shake a can of 5W40 synthetic and my little F-Body buddy will come running. As anyone knows, your average Canadian urbanite spends more on parking in a year than NASA spent to go to the moon; I’ve been waiting for them to start a Patreon so I can convert this surplus cash into astronaut nudie pics.
Now, it is true what my haters have been saying. My 1981 Trans Am Turbo is in fact a manifestation of demonic energy on this plane of existence, the source and cause unknown to man; they are completely correct to be concerned about the vehicle’s motives. However, from my perspective, it’s all gravy. Once in awhile we have to go to the car wash to spray off the thin film of arterial blood and patellar fragments, but it’s really an opportunity for us to bond. I like to go for the “Deluxe” wax, and always do the DIY hand wash, because somebody got a little bit jealous when it saw me eyeing the Bentley at the detailer’s.
The greatest prize of all, of course, is getting to zonk out during long road trips. I can pick up some extra levels in Candy Crush, maybe answer some email, and only peer up once in awhile to see if there are any RCMP cruisers trying to make an example of me. It’s hard being responsible, sure, but it’s even harder trying to find enough change for one of the rural car-washes.
I like my mailman well enough, even if he does occasionally crawl over the border from “open hostilities” to “inarticulate rage.” As you know, I get a lot of packages. So many so that I got named in Canada Post’s cute little quarterly report as a “major revenue driver.” It’s about time someone recognized me for my driving.
In Japan, there’s a name for someone like me. When the Japanese started their postal service in the 1800s, they at first used falcons to send messages. Efficient, yes, but very labour-intensive. Only a few letters could be sent. Then some enterprising nomin figured he could wrap Subaru Impreza control arms in newspaper, tie a little bit of hare meat to them as a bribe, and then hand them to the falcons, who gratefully delivered them. This was obviously a huge load on the postal service of the 17th century, and so a name was coined after they had to switch to horses to handle the increased demand. It translates roughly to “Parcel Asshole.”
However, in Canada, the fact that most of our country is permanently encased in ice has not yet created such a load. You see, for most parcels going to another address in Canada, you merely have to slide them along the ice, and get the general direction right. At the next point in the network, trained curlers will sweep the package towards the destination post office. Express mail is sent via the traditional slap-shot of our people, often launched by retired or injured professional hockey players. It gets there eventually, which is OK, because even if you are sending food it’s not like it’s going to thaw out and go bad.
Everything started to change for Canada, however, as awareness of the climate crisis grew in the early part of this century. Now the ice was melting, making it impractical to slide our parcels to their destinations. And worse yet, a particularly hardy American could now survive up to a week in our atmosphere before dissolving into a fine mist of crystalline ash. With our notoriously low dollar, suddenly all of our assets were being exported. That’s when the post office saw an opportunity to get paid.
Now that I’ve reviewed this history once again, I am filled with a renewed respect for the humble postie. Even if he does keep trying to shoot my packages from the blue line and land them in the neighbour’s yard.
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tags: canada, postal systems of the world, japan, parcel asshole
In my town, there are really only a few ways to get out and “make it.” One is to get internationally famous for screaming a cuss word real loud in the background of a national news broadcast. The other is to get noticed as an actor at our excellent theatre.
Now, you may think it’s weird that a town of about six sober people is big enough to sustain its own theatre troupe. I thought it was weird too. They started out a few decades ago, as some kind of ambitious government experiment to rehabilitate prisoners by exposing them to the concept of acting. It worked pretty well; well enough that a bigger, more successful private prison in the next town over opened up their own version and bid hard to get famous Hollywood talent to serve their drunk-driving sentences there.
Either way, the theatre was left behind. With such a small potential audience and a tight budget, it’s hard for aspiring actors to even get involved. This means that wherever you go in town, there are always a few hams trying out different characters in public. This is where my friend Ed, who works at the Canadian Tire, comes in. He always wanted to leave the town, but due to a combination of a crippling addiction to Toyota 4x4s and 3D-printed heroin, it’s hard to save up enough for the requisite fee to bribe the warlords to allow him safe passage to the Incomelands.
Ed, as a result, is always trying out new characters in the store. In fact, we’re pretty sure that nobody else even works at the Canadian Tire. We think this because when you go to the key-cutting desk, for instance, a dude about his height and build but wearing an ill-fitting fake mustache appears, always out of breath from having sprinted the entire length of the store. This, we are told, is Searle McGonagal, an Irish poet who has stayed in our town because of its natural beauty. An obvious lie, but it is entertaining enough that the Canadian Tire in question has received at least an extra point on average from Yelp, with people in the next town over preferring our humble hardware store instead of theirs just to see Ed’s latest character.
It is unfortunate that, because of the accident that claimed the director’s life, the theatre troupe has been fully autonomous for the last half a decade or so. And they don’t shop at Canadian Tire; the set designer once dropped off his 60s Mopar and the tire guys sheared off all the left-hand-threaded lugnuts. Still, I hold out hope that one day a major Hollywood (or even Bollywood) director will discover him there. Just as long as it isn’t for Hiram McFee, an Irish artist who has stayed in our town to run the paint mixing machine.
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tags: canadian tire, small town life, theatre, mopar, toyota
You’ve heard of self-driving cars. You may have heard of self-cooking meals (keep the hairspray can far away during operation, Ethel). I can almost guarantee you that you haven’t heard of the self-tying shoelace. Now, with only the application of one thousand-dollar robot shoelace to any laced shoe on the market, you can enjoy the future - of allowing machine learning to save you between 30 seconds and a full minute every day.
That’s right, machine learning. Today’s hottest fraud is now helping you forget how to do basic manual skills. Packed into its snakelike body is the combined computing power of about fifty-six Nintendo GameBoys. All this to ensure that you have maximum lace comfort. Now, I know what you’re saying: for a thousand dollars per shoe, couldn’t I just hire a small child slave from a neighbouring third-world country and come out ahead? That’s certainly within your purview, Adolf, but what happens when the United Nations comes knocking? The blue helmets won’t just stop at taking back your little amigo, oh no - they’ll want to sweep your backyard for landmines and disarm your “private security” club! Best not to antagonize them any further.
So come on down to The Sharpest Edge Imaginable, our new pop-up store in the mall. We’re located in that bay that used to be that little “massage parlour” - you know the one - before the Police Commissioner decided he wanted a refund in the form of the contents of the register. Hell, pick some up for the fam, too! With today’s societal implosion heading the way it is, everyone rich might need to leave the home in a hurry and not have time to stop and re-tie their shoes lest the mob catch up with them.
So that I don’t lose sight of where it is that I come from, I occasionally go for long drives out in the country. Bumper stickers calling for the death of progressive political figures, roadside signs advertising re-re-re-re-finance schemes, and hand-lettered signs pleading for the return of stolen cattle: these are the foundations of rural graphic design. No matter what other parts of the world I visit - Geneva, Milan, Seoul - I have yet to see anything else like this form of outsider art, this inadvertent protest against their own creeping irrelevance.
Sure, the locals look upon my gleaming sixteen-cylinder nightmare machine with derision and fear. When I was a kid, I saw that same look in their faces when the province tried to force a public library upon them. All jutting columns and intact windows, it shrieked “big city designer” so loudly that it served as a rallying point for their hatred. It didn’t last a month before someone burned it to the ground, possibly one of the librarians themselves. I will never forget the image of the ashen pile of charred, heat-cycled stainless steel that also taught me about the concepts of representational democracy and the BASIC computer programming language. It was then that I knew I had to leave to seek my fortune.
I am here not to judge, but to judge: the local junior high has had an art contest of sorts, and who better to return than the world-famous designer birthed in their very own backyard? With a twist of my right foot, all one-thousand-four-hundred horses beneath the football-field-length hood leap to attention and allow me to shoot through a gap about the width of a bathroom stall between two identical base-model Ford Escapes. There is a sort of envy I feel for my former neighbours: this machine sounds much better outside than inside. No doubt it will make the local paper under the automotive section, which is usually predominantly concerned with reviewing combine harvesters and - once - a goat.
It is an awesome responsibility to be given, to choose one of these kids’ works, to provide them with hope. Yet all I see is more disappointment. Amateurish colour usage, awful proportions, and childish concepts combine on the walls until it is like a featureless grey soup. Without looking, I slap a blue ribbon on one of the paintings and storm out.
In the parking lot, while I sup from the trunk-mounted espresso machine, the child who I have so honoured approaches. He is delighted, and wants to know what he can do with his talents in order to leave the town. Perhaps I have been too hasty, and yet I cannot resist telling him that with his talents, the furthest he can rise is to commercial art.
A few years later, I return to the city, and the quality of the “missing teenager” posters stapled to the rotting telephone poles has vastly improved. The use of negative space is excellent. Perhaps I was wrong about that one.
If you’ve talked to me for more than fifteen minutes - perhaps at a party, social obligation or community service - then you know that I can’t really deal with a machine being broken. It bothers me. What’s that? Why is my car so shitty then? Shut the fuck up is why.
Now, you might not be aware of this, but every time you see a vending machine out in public, it’s not owned by the building. Chances are they’re leasing it, and the companies they lease it from are usually quite small. It might be one guy, trying to service a few dozen machines, so he can feed his family. You can understand it would get quite busy, so when the snack machine ejects its coil into the glass, holding your bag of sour worms helplessly in limbo, he might not get around to it very quickly.
That’s where I come in. Most vending machines have pretty common locks. You can pop those bad boys open with about eight dollars on Amazon and a particularly grumpy-looking disposition. I’m a vending machine vigilante repairperson. Why bother someone else to solve a problem that is literally inches in front of my face?
Now, I can already sense there’s some opposition to my actions by the big old scary Marxists in the crowd. Don’t think of it as free labour that helps “the man” - think of it as an entertaining, challenging mechanical puzzle. A puzzle that lets me empty the coin box into my pockets while I’m in there. It’s a tip, in the form of slightly sticky loonies. When I’m done, the machine is humming - light bulbs replaced, loose coils reinstalled, bad servos greased - and the customer is happy. And the customer is always right.
Want to follow in my footsteps? It’s a great idea, and one that I think is ever more necessary in our increasingly automated society. I will give you one word of warning, though - if you open up a pop machine outdoors, it probably has live wasp nests in it. Better leave those to the professionals.
You ever stop to think about just how many wires are in your average automobile? Your stereo’s got a whole bunch. Steering wheel buttons, all those have to have some wires or something. Airbags, you better believe there’s wires. So on and so forth. I’d hazard a guess that any given car out there has a good twenty bucks worth of copper running through its veins.
Me, I know all about wiring harnesses. I’m there once your car has passed through the digestive system of North American roads, made soft through constant applications of corrosive road salt, suffering a major mechanical failure, and then - at last - laid to rest in a field, destined for fertilizer. After a few years out in a field like that, mice have usually eaten as much of the wiring and insulation as they can, the greedy little bastards. I tried eating it myself, once, to better understand my enemy. The taste is hardly deserving of a Michelin star, although frying it in garlic butter does mask the worst of the petrochemicals.
A lot of people enter into a major rewiring project with optimism. Run the engine harnesses first, then figure out the rest later. Good strategy, if you have more discipline than me. Usually you make that decision and then it’s suddenly seven years later, and you’re opening your car door like some kind of ape in order to get McDonalds because the power window motors still aren’t hooked up. And if you don’t have power windows at all? Well, then you’ve already learned this lesson, haven’t you?
Make no mistake, when the authorities finally do a so-called “wellness check” on my home after I’ve failed to report in to my parole officer, they’ll learn all about my wiring habits. Finding my bloated corpse above a stack of dog-eared Sumitomo connector catalogues? We should all be so lucky to go out like this.
When I was first setting out in my business as a specialist transmission mechanic, they told me that I’d never go broke fixing A604s. I sure showed them. That’ll teach them to tell me what I can’t do.
If you ask a common man or woman off the street to imagine the life of a professional transmission rebuilder, they’ll think that it’s just like any other grease monkey garage job. Nothing could be further from the truth. Yeah, okay, there’s the part where you remove and install the transmissions from the car - that’s pretty much the same as it always has been. Ditto for having to hunt down and indiscriminately slaughter the family of deadbeats who are behind on their payments after you helped meticulously rebuild the scattered fragments of their Ford C4 and put it back together with ancient, forbidden witch magic.
Fixing a transmission requires precision. If you break a strut while trying to extricate your cousin Scooter from the mud pit he got stuck up to his waist in, then some guy at Mr. Lube can chuck a new one in and have a half-decent chance of not killing you, even if their torque wrench is off by 25 ft-lb in either direction. If I’m off by 25 inch-lb, then I’m buying you a new input shaft. The other guys - the grease monkeys - they know this. That’s why they resent me, driving slowly past my shop on their days off and shouting transmission-phobic epithets when I come out to the parking lot.
I’m used to adjusting the backlash, though - it’s part of the job. They are all afraid of the morning when they bring me a shattered 4L80E after spending the previous night staring at the exposed guts like a monkey trying to debug a quantum computer. I don’t know why - I don’t say anything mean. I just calmly turn around and put their name on the list of mechanics who are not as good as I am. Such is my price. My price is also a hundred-and-five dollars an hour plus parts.
There’s a neighbourhood not far from my house that’s pretty bougie. I go there a lot to buy used vehicles from graduating high schoolers whose parents are finally buying them “a real car.” Why from them and not someone else? I find my contempt to be a major motivating factor in effective negotiation. It’s a little hard to crush a single mother of three beneath your boot in order to eke out $300 from the resale of her Aveo, but I will gleefully whale on these kids over a windshield crack until the sidewalk bleeds.
One of the things this neighbourhood has that mine does not, besides economic certainty, effective policing and no video rental stores, is a public lake. It’s quite nice; when the housing development was installed, the homebuilder (perhaps under some kind of deferred-prosecution agreement) went all out on this thing. They keep it immaculate. Hell, I don’t think any kids have even drowned in it yet.
Like anywhere else on earth, though, this slice of heaven does have a problem: invasive perch. Someone bought some contaminated dirt, or some prankster let his pet fish loose in the lake, or a bird pooped at some point in the last couple of years. Either way, the place is completely swarmed with teeny-tiny perch, who aren’t very good to eat yet work so hard that they make the environment entirely uncompetitive for the lazy, entitled rainbow trout that they fly in at great cost every year to replenish the lake.
The park management thought about this problem decades ago, and decided to appeal to the competitive nature of capitalism and man alike: they would arrange a perch fishing derby. Whoever cranked out the most dead perch from the lake got a prize. This year’s prize? A five hundred dollar gift certificate to the NAPA. The nice NAPA. You know, the one that stocks wiper blades made out of rubber instead of horsehair.
Now, normally this kind of thing is open to residents only. Luckily for me, I had bought so many cars from high school kids over the years that I had any number of fake IDs that rolled out from under the seat while aggressively braking. Pasting my last arrest photo over their inkjet-printed selfie didn’t take a lot of lateral thinking. Despite the condition of the Cordoba that I rolled up and then left, bleeding oil and ATF, in their parking lot, they still let me in. After all, the park photo ID said that I was One Of Them, an “eccentric” instead of “a danger to himself and others.”
I still don’t agree with how I lost the competition. There can be no question that I harvested the most fish of any of them, and that I did so with the maximum level of efficiency possible. When I can convince my lawyer to hear my case, he’ll agree: “no fireworks” rules do not apply to salvaged depth charges.
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tags: inequality, chrysler cordoba, chrysler, napa, chevrolet, chevrolet aveo
I was always fascinated by the James Bond movies as a kid, but some of the appeal was lost when I grew up and got a car capable of dispensing oil slicks, whether I wanted it to or not. Who wouldn’t want to drive a cool Lotus that could turn into a submarine? Anyone who’s ever tried to drive a Lotus in the rain.
Still, though, the idea of outfitting cars for top-secret missions held a certain appeal for me. Hidden compartments, secret buzzsaws behind the windshield, headlights that could shoot ninja shurikens… way cooler than rocker replacement and trying to get an exact match for Toyota Bluish Silver Metallic (#1A0). So when I heard the spy agency in town was holding a career fair, I decided to do a little reconnaissance of my own. I think that’s French for “mayonnaise.”
The first guy I talked to, appropriately for his career, didn’t want to really talk back to me. Mum’s the word. Instead, he kept thrusting an application form in front of me. I filled it out with what little I could remember of using my hands to write, and then obediently handed it back to him. If it was this hard to apply for a job, then surely there wouldn’t be much competition. At least, I hoped so, because my wrists and hand ached for the rest of the day from the strain of using a ballpoint pen. I was already planning my workman’s comp case.
When they called me up, a few weeks later, I was waist deep in a Chevy 2200 SFI. I was particularly impressed that they managed to dig up my mom’s phone number and then spoof the caller-ID with it. Perhaps these guys can never really stop spying when they get home from work. Instead of dinner conversation, their families speak Russian on a secret ham radio made out of water bottles and their whereabouts and happenstances of their day are recorded precisely into a small notebook marked “Operation Enduring Domesticity.”
Needless to say, they were impressed. True to form, there wasn’t even an interview. I started to ask what the opening salary was, but then someone swooped a black bag over my head and I was knocked out with a heavy dose of some ex-Soviet research chemical. The healthcare plan was sounding pretty good already.
I didn’t last too long. It’s not because of my notorious blabbermouth, or that my boss turned out to be a Polish triple agent. No, apparently secret agents want to be seen only in nice cars. Something about driving a sputtering ex-rental Chevrolet Impala, even though it is extremely cost-effective and reasonably covert, is just not sexy, no matter how many machine guns you mount inside the trunk lid.
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tags: toyota, chevrolet, chevrolet impala, toyota paseo
Everybody likes to get something for nothing. That sweet, sweet feel of a deal: that’s what makes life worthwhile. Springtime is the ideal season - garage sales are stuffed full of spring-cleaning detritus, ugly winter beaters are getting tossed out for sleek sports cars, and occasionally you have to check the backyard for baby bunnies before running the lawnmower. And best of all, it’s all super cheap.
This was all on my mind recently, when I was driving out in the country and saw a sign inviting me to a public auction. With a deft motion learned from decades of parking-lot hooliganism, I immediately tucked the ‘82 Riv into a powerslide and was serenaded with the beautiful sound of gravel bouncing off the floorpan. A little bit of swerving and a few more U-turns (cow country doesn’t really have what we’d think of as “street addresses” because of their pidgin hill-people language) later, and I arrived at a farm equipment store.
The place was thronged; it was hard for me to find a place to sit, but a geriatric shuffled to his feet to get to the bathroom and I took over his spot and sign. Problem is, from way back in the hall it was kind of hard to see what exactly was being auctioned off, and the auctioneer was pretty much indecipherable, but I persisted. This was because I had been assured by my new neighbours that the lot was a “smokin’ deal.” I bid like fucking crazy; imagine that YouTube video where that dog pulls the arm off that Uzbekistani metal scrapper, but instead of being a dog it’s me, and the screaming substation thief is the thrill of the deal.
On the way home, I was constantly interrupted by my purchase. I was hounded by buyer’s remorse. Why did I pay so much for this child slave, who clearly doesn’t know how to fetch tools or even use a torque wrench?
A common exercise by hack journalists is to play Nostradamus and guess what is about to happen. These professional liars paint some complete bullshit that they pulled out of their ass just a few minutes before deadline as futuristic insight. In accordance with Journalistic Law, you can never have too much punditry, so here are my predictions for how the next twenty years is going to go.
Got a nice garbage can? Write your name on it. Your neighbours are going to try to steal it again. I know, they’re so awful.
All the dictionary companies are going to merge in order to increase efficiency. When the government complains about the resulting monopoly, they will redefine the word “monopoly” to mean something good. It is probably already too late to stop this. When was the last time you bought a dictionary?
As fuel prices climb, crossover SUVs will attempt to lose the “SUV” stigma by lowering themselves and adopting shorter bodies. This doesn’t mean station wagons are coming back, because that is a bad word with automakers. Instead, they will be called “longvans.”
In a failed attempt to curry favour with the next generation of teens, Mad Magazine will be directly implicated in the death of a sitting state senator.
My cats will keep jumping on the God damn kitchen table.
Don’t get too attached to gravity. It’s getting weaker, even now. Yeah, now that you’re paying attention to it, you know too. Tell your friends.
After some scientists accidentally make a group of crows sentient, they start fixing our social problems. As a result, government employees are laid off since they won’t literally work for birdseed.
You won’t get that promotion. However, when the IRS changes its mission into becoming a multi-level marketing scheme, you will get a good bonus when you sign your old boss up.
Snowmobiles will become the new vehicle of choice for the Hollywood elite, despite the bone-dry roads of California. Celebrities will arrive at red carpet gatherings with destroyed skis and sparks flying from their carbon-fibre studded tracks.
Self-flying planes are coming, but due to a bug they won’t follow our schedules. The resulting cost efficiency is enough to lay off all the pilots anyway, and within a generation we will simply forget how to fly a plane on our own. Passengers will need to run down the tarmac and climb aboard a taxiing jet, hoping that the plane is going where they want and won’t just hang out with its plane friends.
Louisiana will get returned to France once the Library of Congress turns up the receipt.
Knowing full well that so-called “conventional” banking institutions often refuse to write loans for very old cars of no particular value, the disembodied brains in tanks that pass for management over at Goldman Sachs employed me to construct a new loan sharking agency. Nobody else but me had such a depth of knowledge about how to write good deals on bad cars, they explained in their monotone modem-carrier shriek.
The reason why is simple: with old cars lasting longer than ever before, the average person is going to be more willing to buy one. There’s a pretty good chance that any given ‘97 Honda Civic will last you the rest of your life, if you want it to. Pair that with wage deflation, general political and social unrest, and also the widely-reported bug that this year’s Facebook Car will constantly shout your estimated semen count at passersby, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for demand.
Now, I’m not going to overvalue the average used car. Not because they’re bad, but because the market simply has too much fat in it. It’s sort of unbelievable what people willingly pay for a smaller displacement car whenever the price of gas goes up a couple of cents. I saw a news story the other day, this dad was looking to pick up a Camry at auction for his daughter’s first car, and he got into a bidding war. He ended up paying almost thirty grand cash for what turned out to be two ferrets sewn into a burlap sack. I would not finance those rabid rodents, even if one of them did have seven-speaker surround sound.
I’d like to say I lasted through at least the first week, but the disembodied brains didn’t even give me a chance to fill up the office sink with dirty dishes that I would never, ever consider placing in the dishwasher. Apparently it’s some kind of violation of securities law to undercut your customers when they come to you with a smoking deal on a Hyundai Excel? At the very least, it was Goldman policy to at least leave the room before calling up the Craigslist seller to lock it down for yourself.
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tags: honda, honda civic, hyundai excel, hyundai, loans, toyota camry, toyota
“Come to Psychic Expo,” screamed the toner-streaked photocopy stapled to the light pole. I figured if I was meant to be there, they’d tell me. Then, a few steps down the block, another light pole said “Yeah, you specifically.” Who am I to question these worryingly ominous signs?
When I rolled up to the convention centre, it looked to be already bustling with activity. I decided to illegally park my dieseling Volare on the side of the road rather than use the lot. Last time I was here, the valets sneered at me when I told them there might be “a little coolant puddle to clean up.” If they’re not willing to break out the kitty litter once in awhile, what am I even paying them for? After walking along the highway for a bit, I made my way to the Psychic Expo, where I would finally get some answers.
Madame Coilpack promised to be able to tell me what my dead cars were up to after they met with the crusher. I figured it was worth giving her a few bucks, if for no other reason than to learn how a real professional scams rubes. She didn’t waste any time, reading my gear-shifting palm and immediately working out a plan of attack. If I couldn’t be convinced, the sign read, she owed me a Porsche.
“I sense a car… a rusty car…” she began, her eyes closed and her face tilted towards the unknowable heavens.
“Yeah, you’re going to need to be more specific than that. The doctors told me I technically am more tetanus than human DNA at this point.” I replied, frowning.
“Ah, but this is a special car. It is one that you spent a lot of effort on, but never ran properly again! It has many regrets about your time together!”
“You’re describing every car I’ve ever owned, including the rental car that I once stole the piston rings out of to fix my pickup.”
After a few hours, we weren’t getting any closer. Madame Coilpack was frustrated. On every branch in her mental cold-reading flowchart, I had too much rotten fruit hanging off of for her to effectively disambiguate them. I was unreadable. Finally, she thrust a pair of keys into my hands.
“You win, motherfucker,” she yelled. The act dropped, she opened one eye, only to notice that my hands were beginning to break out in hives where the key had touched them.
“It’s the galvanization,” I explained in a panic. “I’m allergic to it. Someone bring me some rust, fast.”
There was a pretty big fuss in the end, but I got a mouthful of Comanche rocker panels and a Porsche 911 out of the deal. Now I understand why everyone in the Porsche Club of America wears dorky driving gloves. It’s for their protection.
A lot of people want to separate from their countries. And why not? Having strict laws, being forced to pay taxes, and putting up with people you don’t like is inherently evil, or something. Thing is: we can do whatever we want, because we are adults, and nobody can tell us not to.
Now, I myself did not want to secede. I liked being able to have my ambulances driven by someone other than me (it’s like a really scary limo), I liked being able to access Guaranteed Cholera-Free® water, and most of all, I liked filling out millions of lines of tax forms. The doctors said it wasn’t a fetish, but the DSM-6 is supposed to have a little section on it once they decide what it is.
It’s like my grandfather always said: “if you can’t solve a problem, there’s money to be made in prolonging it.” At least, that’s what his last words were before he was shot for espionage. In honour of his teachings, I would become a secession consultant and help people in my community achieve their long-running goal of rejecting the federal government entirely. For months, I put on little seminars in Foreign Legions, rural community centres, and even the public library until they figured out what I was up to and asked me to stop pretending my course was actually about palaeontology.
The first one of my pupils to become self-sufficient and declare independence was just down the street from me. His name was Jim, and he was really mad that he couldn’t sunbathe nude on his front lawn without the police getting involved. Him and his oddly mangled penis lasted almost two weeks against the onslaught of the military, mostly because he kept inviting them to negotiations under the United Nations conventions and then dismissing his lawyers in favour of new ones - just like I taught him.
A few months after Jimdonia was annexed by the government and his home reduced to useful farmland for settlers, I got another call. It seems that Jim had turned over on me in one of the government’s little torture pits, and the Federales wanted me to come intervene in another one of their snafus.
Like I told them, though, if you keep making us feel bad for having racist opinions, don’t come crying to me when a dry cleaner develops a nuclear weapons program.
This one’s just for people who are directly in front of me in traffic. Behind me, or off to the side? Maybe take a walk around the block, spend time with your loved ones, get started on that novel you always thought you had inside you all this time. I’ll get to you later.
Hey. We must like the same roads, because we’re occupying them all the time. You must have great taste. Thing is, you’re going a little slow. The accelerator pedal was put there by our ancestors so that you didn’t have to take all fucking day to drive down a highway. Modern cars are remarkably stable and make 1960s race cars look like ill-handling Power Wheels. That’s why you bought the bigger engine option, wasn’t it? Great. Yeah, just push that little pedal on the right a little further down.
I know it makes a big scary noise. That’s horsepower. Give it a few seconds to percolate in the ol’ hindbrain. Feels good, right? Yeah. Why don’t you see how fast those RCMP cruisers can really go? They’ll never catch you. You’re in a Highlander - no criminals can possibly drive one of those.
While we’re on the subject, why do you have your foglights on all the time? It is a clear and beautiful day and you clearly aren’t needing to have those giant deer-blinders turned on. Hell, half the time you guys don’t have your actual headlights on. This is ridiculous. Just reach down there - Jesus Christ, feel with your fingers, don’t look at the goddamn dashboard while you’re going a hundred ten! And turn it off. Yep. Great. Now I don’t have to ram you off the road and make you stare into an arc welder for an hour while I work diligently to seal you inside your shattered car.
I’m glad we had this little talk. This kind of interaction with the neighbourhood is exactly what is needed to mitigate the rolling anger-management problem I call my twincharged carbon-fibre Asüna GT. In fact, my lawyer advises me that community outreach such as this makes me “more relatable” to a jury and, eventually, a parole board.
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tags: traffic school, road rage, toyota highlander, asuna gt, asuna, toyota
The other night, I was on a brisk walk around my neighbourhood when I noticed that my neighbour’s late-model Mazda Protege had a bunch of potted plants inside it. Using my top-notch conflict-mediation skills, I walked up to their place, rang the doorbell, and brusquely interrogated them about it.
“Oh yeah, I put them in there to keep them safe from the frost,” he said. “It’s like a greenhouse.”
Like a greenhouse. Like a greenhouse. People pay a lot of money for greenhouses. I have a lot of cars. Might gardeners be willing to hand me cash in order to occupy my derelict lawn ornaments? It would satisfy municipal bylaw while still making me a few bucks.
“It’s a Community Garden,” I explain to the local newspaper’s intern reporter, hinting strongly that rotten domestic trashmobiles are inextricable from the can-do spirit that creates social cohesion. Luckily for me, he has been trained just well enough by his masters to not ask me any tough questions, like “why is it for profit?” I do so love this new era of journalism.
Weeks later, every car on my lawn has some really nice plants inside it. Outside of a few struggles initially where one of the vegetable planting hippies misunderstood that the dirt inside the Valiant was not intended for planting, and where another had their rutabagas eaten by the mice that still colonized the heater core of a DeSoto Adventurer, everyone got along. It was only later that I realized that I was the one being played for a fool.
I flipped on the holonews one evening, and was shocked to see the face of my greatest foe, Iris McEnroe, she of the dreaded Homeowner’s Association. She was showing off a series of prize roses, which I slowly realized had been grown in the rear hatch of one of my own Gremlins! She must have used a surrogate, knowing full well whose shitty cars she was stuffing full of beautiful flowers. Her smile into the camera was meant for me - a grin of absolute triumph and dominance. In exchange for a mere couple of measly bucks a day, I had given her the exact tools she needed to win the city rose competition and all but seal her upcoming election from “local busybody” to “town councillor.”
The next morning, I converted my community garden into a new project, one that I hoped would be free from the wrecking ball of Councillor McEnroe. I knew that the Mayor Hisself had quite the fondness for locally-sourced organic black tar heroin.
This is a safe place to confess: we’ve all had our little run-ins with the As Seen On TV people, right? You’re drunk at 3AM, and in the sleepless and sweaty small hours the infomercial that flickers across your TV sounds pretty good. There’s an eerie light that fills the room as the guests discuss how great this product is - the deal is tremendous - there’s a payment plan - this level of convenience and luxury was unavailable to all previous generations of your accursed bloodline - Philo Farnsworth himself invented television for just this reason. You can’t resist. It’s like a different person is inside you, compelling you to buy this fondue cooker (it does queso), damn the consequences.
Yeah, you know what I’m talking about. I have it on very good authority that infomercials are created on demand by a hivemind of ultra-powerful witches. Their bodies long atrophied, they cling to corporeal existence through force of will alone. In this research base deep underground, they have harnessed the ancient teachings of temptation and warped them towards the goal of capitalist domination. They won’t be happy until you are surrounded by the embryonic form of a garage sale, one that consumes a few extra mortgage payments.
What force controls the witches? My source is left in the dark on this one, though he has remarked on feeling a terrible sense of dread for weeks afterward. We may never know exactly who got these desire-pushing magicians together to force electronic cheese graters and perfect omelet makers on us, but one thing is certain: now that they are exposed, there can be no excuse for falling prey to their evil plot.
In conclusion, I believe that these witches are to blame for every possible excess of capitalism, and I demand that my letter to the editor be printed in full, even if publishing the truth does cost the Local City Herald some witch advertising.
Private prisons are not really a good thing. Sure, there’s the whole “lack of oversight” deal, and the fact that most of them have committed heinous abuses against the prisoners in their care. Their worst crime, though, may be “Nutraloaf,” a compressed-sawdust lump of shit that is supposed to pass for food but actually looks like someone else has digested and rejected it a few times already before it hit your plate.
It’s not appetizing in the least. So what, I hear you say, I drink all my calories in the form of a white milky beverage that Silicon Valley sells to me, and I am operating at peak nutritional performance except for the occasional finger vibrations and four-alarm hallucinogenic freakouts, and those might be due to stress anyway. Food isn’t that important, right? Wrong - studies that I can’t cite right now because they don’t exist have conclusively proven a link between shitty food and criminal recidivism. Nutraloaf is breeding future cybercriminals and supervillains, which is why all the existing private prisons have to be shut down and changed into Uncle Switch’s Fun-Time Jails, a new chain of private prisons that I run.
Sure, we’ve got all the inmate torture, terrible conditions, and constant surveillance that you’d find in any one of our competitors’ jails, but there’s a big difference: our food is pretty good. It turns out there are a lot of professional chefs who go to prison for insurance fraud all the time, and they’d willingly work for free if it meant they got to pursue their culinary passions while still in the big pen. Peking duck, duck confit, Thai orange duck: so many good options, and damn cheap because we get a really good deal on ducks that fall into the industrial tailing ponds on our property.
So write your legislator right now. After all, with the way things are going, it’s in their best interest to make sure their future prison meal is pretty tasty.
Quick, what’s Canada’s number-one sport? Hockey? You’re wrong - it’s curling, the bloodiest sport that octogenarians can regularly play. Don’t believe me? Maybe you haven’t been to the Cayley Arena, where these ancient warriors of the broom face off in the unprecedented violence of team combat.
I’d been a sports reporter for the regional paper for a few months at the time of the incident. The job up until then was pretty simple: interview a high school senior who is good at throwing a football, question some local coaches about their goals for the new season (”win more”), and keep the propane-fired 318 under the hood of my massively-corroded, rust-on-rust ‘72 GMC pickup on just this side of Charon’s river.
That morning opened like any other. The sun came up, illuminating the pile of spilled empties on the front porch of the Legion, and I stirred to a hesitant wakefulness. Work beckoned: there was a big curling tournament down at the Arena. I’d known for weeks that this was the Huge One. Not a hair could be out of place. If I fucked up even a single word of my coverage, I was going to be crucified in the town centre, surrounded by John Deere meshback caps squealing in orgasmic delight at my disemboweling and choking death.
In case you’ve never heard of it, let me stop the action for a second to tell you about the important details of curling. You’ve got a big-ass stone, you throw it, and the other members of your team sweep in front of it to try and reduce friction. It’s like shufflepuck.
I’ve never seen a man’s throat get slit at shufflepuck before.
I knew Vernon Wright. He was the owner of the little corner store that I would sometimes drop by in order to pick up the microwave fajitas that sufficed for nutrition. Sort of like a Vietnam-era marine, I had “gone native” and picked up a taste for them when I had been visiting every rural arena in the province. Their little hot food booths were irresistable: I could not help but to test the limits of the health inspector’s watchful eye.
Even though I never heard the actual argument that led to Vernon’s slaughter, a fact which would both impede my future as a local journalist and complicate the RCMP’s investigation of the homicide, I knew exactly at once what it must have been about. Vernon, I knew, had a habit of using too much toilet paper when he visited his fellow rurals. This meant their septic tank would fill up faster than it really had to. You could put a real price tag on those extra septic tank suckings, and Eustace Witherby came to the Cayley Arena that day to collect.
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tags: cayley, john deere, gmc, vernon wright, eustace witherby
When I was a kid everything was made out of cocaine. They figured the whole thing was renewable, easy to grow, easy to shape, reusable afterward, the perfect building material. That’s part of why why insurance fires were so bad in our part of town. A little third-rate arson would break out on Sunday night, and then the cops would be cleaning up burned spoons for weeks.
I can still remember my father standing out on the lawn in a strong wind, watching the walls of our house blow away in a fine powder. Even though he was clearly enjoying himself, he was also angry. Back in his day, when we didn’t know better, the entire house was just built out of bricks of rock. The houses of his childhood didn’t melt in the rain or get smoked by the neighbours. This way, though, you got a chance to completely redesign your house every so often. Rooms could grow or contract depending on how much you needed them that week.
A childhood friend of mine named Sam Beckett (yes, related to the beer) would go out in the mornings, collect the gently singed rubble of cocaine bricks that used to make up the old folks’ home across the street, then come home and make cocaine stew for his entire family. He had to, you see, because his father had left on a “Mars mission” that turned out to later be an Iroquois vision quest to become the Pinball Wizard spoken of in The Who’s classic rock opera album, Magic Bus. So he had to provide for his mother, and a hot bowl of meaty cocaine stew was pretty much the only way he knew of to keep the DTs at bay.
A few years after high school, we lost touch. Sam became a DJ in what was rapidly becoming the bustling gay disco scene of rural Pennsylvania, and I settled down, becoming a humble mail-delivery android repairperson like my father before me. Even though the cocaine menace had ruined what was left of our society, back then we simply didn’t realize that if we just gave the Chinese a lot of money they would soon develop totally synthetic opiates at cut-rate prices after reading a single chemistry textbook, and put us entirely out of business. That said, fentanyl is a terrible drywall spackle.
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tags: home ownership, sam beckett, pinball wizard
I have known a lot of people who have owned New Beetles. In front of them, I must behave as a different person than I now act around you. Cars? I have never heard of these “cars.” What do you mean, I came here in a car? Non, that is a velocipede. Very popular in France. Definitely not made by Germans who make everything both inaccessible and demanding of regular service.
This was a strategy that served me well for years - nobody asked me to replace their goddamn impossible water pumps, and I didn’t have to ever wonder whether the paint colour of the car was “periwinkle,” “puce,” or “lavender.” Then one of my so-called “friends” bought a New Beetle. Tom said it was ironic, that they actually made pretty good financial sense compared to buying the Golfs they were based on, but I knew it was a moral failing. Worst of all, I knew that he had seen my true nature, that I could fix cars.
One easy Sunday morning, I was sitting in the crack den remnants of my open-air living room, wondering whose cat it was that was feasting on the mice in my also open-air basement. On mornings such as this, the furthest thing from my mind is turning wrenches on a front-wheel-drive depression sled. However, I heard the telltale clatter of a Two-Point-Slow as it rumbled its way up the highway outside my place. Racking my mind to figure out which of my neighbours were currently dating a 57-year-old twice-divorced yoga instructor, and coming up blank, I decided the best choice was to fake my own death.
Luckily for me, basically every hobby I have is extremely dangerous. It was no problem at all to stuff some of the oily rags I leave around the place into the furnace, and wait for the house to ignite. After giving the neighbour’s cat a gentle toss onto the lawn, I then hid in the back yard until I felt the wet thump of the natural gas explosion in my chest. That should throw him off my scent, I figured, while mentally tallying up the value of the contents of my house. Two hundred and fifty bucks should buy that rotten Scamp. Ever since I saw it in those crudely-photocopied trailer park classifieds, I knew it would be mine. All that it would take now is for me to set up a new identity. Pancho Switch, that’s me.
I had made one critical mistake: I had blown up the house too soon. Tom had actually broken down moments before the explosion, about half a block down the street, and was too busy patching holes in his coolant bottle to notice. He spotted me sneaking through the bushes and asked if I could take a look at the weird noise his Beetle keeps making.
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tags: volkswagen, volkswagen new beetle, plymouth, plymouth scamp
It’s spring, and you know what that means: Bad Cars Monthly needs an unpaid intern. The last one has a restraining order against us because of a little eensy-weensy oopsie-woopsie with Johnny Law. Could you have what it takes to get our coffee, pour kitty litter on the spilled oil, and sacrifice yourself to buy precious time for our editors and journalists to escape an interview gone wrong?
Then you should apply, by setting us up a website with an application form on it. We used to have a guy who did that kind of thing, but it turns out he had some back child support that we only found out about after he rammed a highway cop when his brakes went out. Social media knowledge is essential, because our editorial board is convinced that Facebook is the future of unethical business practices - which is why we want to get involved with it as quickly as possible, before all the Russian money is gone.
Ideally, we also want to find a candidate who doesn’t have any family in the area. If you have a concerned mother or favourite uncle who will call the police if you don’t show up for a few days, or begin exhibiting unusual bruises, burn marks and missing fingers - don’t bother. It’s not like we’re going to maim you, at least not directly, but you should understand that our new online video features are both hosted by and largely about unpredictable people driving poorly maintained cars. Can you hold a GoPro really still while a car is doing donuts around you in the parking lot of a defunct Kay Bee Toys? Mention this in your cover letter.
There is a lot of travel involved: our magazine covers the whole of North America, our entire editorial board is obsessed with truck-stop food, and most of the writers are actively on methamphetamine. All this means you’re going to spend a lot of your summer stuffed into the rear-facing seats on an Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser, letting us know how far back that unmarked Crown Vic is and warning when the exhaust leaking through the floorpan is going lean during a hard pull.
Bad Cars Monthly is an equal opportunity employer. We pride ourselves on paying women and men the exact same amount of money for the same work: nothing. Ten percent raises will be offered following a performance review, which may take place in a jail cell in Idaho. A drivers’ license is not necessary, but a suspended one counts for bonus points. You should be able to say the word “giubo” without giggling.
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tags: bad cars monthly, internship, crown victoria, ford crown victoria, oldsmobile, oldsmobile vista cruiser
When you live out in the country, it’s hard for your neighbours to bother you. You hardly ever see them, and when they do come into visible range, you have a lot of time to prepare a method to get rid of them before they can come close enough to threaten you. I, however, live in the city, where it doesn’t take several hours of driving to reach minimum literacy distance. As a result, I have to put up with a lot of bullshit from my neighbours.
A few months ago, a kid down the block figured out that he could drill holes in the muffler of his ancient Golf to make it louder. Louder, and therefore better. Now, I’m no exhaust-hating prude: everything I own is straight-piped, and the last time a cop tried to pull out a decibel meter on the roadside, I voided the warranty on it. It’s just that I have standards, and the choking-narwhal blare of the Volkswagen 2-litre’s buck-forty horsepower trying to make it up the hill outside my house doesn’t qualify.
On top of that, since it’s spring now, the weird guy down the block who has his generator-motor-powered DIY motorized bicycle is taking it for rips up and down the street again. Presumably, he is trying to tune it so he can prepare for a drag race with an electric wheelchair or a particularly competitive speed-walker. It would be a lot better if the thing had some semblance of gearing, or if he wasn’t obviously completely deaf. As it is, he drives the thing everywhere with the throttle pegged, even on the sidewalk and into the little dog park at the bottom of the hill. The flat barking howl of its zero-point-zero cc pot-metal science project of a block is somehow the ideal frequency to penetrate the glass and walls of my home, so you can hear it in literally every room.
I wish they didn’t keep rubbing it in. My open-header Chevette hasn’t fucking run in weeks.
What you need to know about the inevitable decline and fall of Western civilization is that none of us thought it was inevitable. We figured someone else, someone smart, would eventually grab the steering wheel out of our hands and swerve us away from the metaphorical ditch. That didn’t really happen, but I know a lot of people are still hoping it did, locked away in their endless retweet circles criticizing the Chinese Protectorate for their good work in making sure that we still remember how to read and grow food.
All they ask for in return was our bountiful scrap piles. Seeing all those people mining the old city dump out behind my place made me think that I could get a job in that field, too. I walked right up to the foreman’s office and introduced myself. Turns out their entire operation is predicated on finding all the unrecycleable styrofoam we kept throwing out so it can be burned for fuel.
Every once in awhile, you actually find something good in a dump, and that’s where I would come in. Someone was needed to determine when a new artifact was historically valuable beyond its weight in scrap. My unrivalled knowledge of pop culture, collectors’ mindset, hoarding tendencies and largely unmedicated hyperfocus disorder all turned out to be AAA-grade primo talents for the dump-miners, and I became an essential part of their operation as it moved from town to town, evacuating the garbage of generations long past in order to eke out some profit. Every time the great maw of the sorting pod fed on a new pile of ancient trash, it meant money in my pocket - and those finds.
I don’t really like to talk about how it all ended, but I will say this in my defence: it’s not like you come across an intact Casio CMD40 TV-remote watch every day. Some things are worth being marked for death as a traitor to the Great Collective for.
For all the valid criticisms against them, your average Chevrolet really does run better when abused. That’s what a team of scientists at the Holden-Bogan School of Economics in California are reporting in their newest paper, On Beating The Shit Out Of A Cavalier Until It Won’t Run Anymore.
Long-time aficionados of the research will know that this paper is actually a followup to their previous work, You Can Do A One-Tire Fire For Like An Hour In The McDonalds Drivethrough, which was criticized for having too narrow a focus and not enough test cars. These problems have been long resolved in the new work, having used the research grant money from DARPA on sixty used J-Bodies, all of which were whipped to within an inch of complete structural failure.
The study got off to a rocky start; it was soon determined that the contempt for an unmaintained vehicle made it run better. In order to provide a double-blind study, the Cavaliers were thoroughly cleaned of condom wrappers, weed shake and shell casings. The drivers of the test Cavaliers were also given earplugs and enough Tramadol to ignore the telltale steering quiver of deteriorating tie-rods.
The findings are remarkable. Compared to the properly-maintained (”control”) Cavaliers, the abused ones lasted just as long. In many cases, in fact, the maintained vehicle failed early, due to inept servicing by the scientists. With all vehicles tested, the heat and air conditioning still worked perfectly, even when the engine had a hole in the block with a pushrod sticking through the hood. Future research in this area will study if this represents a violation of the thermodynamic laws; a breakthrough could see Cavalier-powered nuclear fusion reactors by mid-2025 if there are enough of these cough-drop-shaped cockroaches left.
General Motors stock dropped two percent on the news.
Sorry about that, someone was at the door. Oh? No, it was nobody important, just a bunch of FIA officials there. They wanted to give me an award, but that kind of thing happens a lot. Can we get back to discussing how I’m going to get custody of my dog? I really don’t think it’s right that a dog daycare can seize Snookums for non-payment.
The award? I don’t see what that has to do with anything, but okay. It’s a prize for “Most Times Anyone On Earth Has Kicked The Firewall On An Automatic Transmission Equipped Car Looking For The Clutch Pedal.” It’s not a big thing, nothing I’m proud of. It’s just how my body is.
No, I do know how to drive an automatic transmission, it’s just that I don’t do it very often. Yeah, I get the argument you’re putting forward that I’ve had a lot of opportunities to drive an automatic, hence the award, but you have to understand that I shift a lot when I drive my cars. Because the engines are all hogged out and dying. Snookums. Dog-A-Palooza is not run particularly well, I’m pretty sure they’re going to go out of business soon. What happens if they do? I’m a debtor, but more importantly they are holding my Goddamn dog hostage.
Yeah no, I do understand why you are getting hung up on this. It’s just that when I come to a stop, I’m almost certain that it’s going to stall. There’s some kind of a weird extra dip in the idle, I don’t know. Some part of my lizard brain takes over and smashes that left pedal, even if it’s not there.
The engraving? Yeah, it just says “Dumb Fuck” where my name is supposed to go. The lettering is really beautiful, they must have used the expensive place in the mall to make the plaque. What? Wait, hold on. It’s the door again.
Sorry about that, it was the FIA again. They had another award they forgot to give me earlier, “Most Miles Driven On A Dry Dipstick.” No, I’m not sure how they track these things either.
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tags: fia, snookums, dogs, dog daycare, world records
One of my friends is a high school teacher. Recently, he got a student in who didn’t believe Australia actually existed. It was just too weird and different from here to be a thing that could be. Koalas? Drug-induced hallucinations upon seeing a dog. Kangaroos? Holograms. Ford Barras? Pure fantasy.
I’m a little bit of an expert in this whole parapsychology thing, and I wanted a chance to get in on the ground floor of what was likely to be a new and exciting internet conspiracy theory. So I packed up my phrenology tools, stuffed them in the trunk of my twincharged Sunfire convertible, and made EPA snifferbots freak out the entire way from my house to the high school.
My friend told me that he had arranged for an “independent study” course, so that nobody would really notice that the kid was missing. I was impressed with the relative level of leeway his trustworthy position in adult society lent to him. Even so, he had cryptically cautioned me that “The Media” had been lurking around, intending to catch the school board in one scandal or another to line the pockets of their private-school advertisers. Knowing that the student parking lot had cars that were much nicer than mine, I decided to park in the teachers’ lot in order to avoid raising any suspicion.
Meeting with this kid was truly illuminating. Australia being a computer-generated synthetic landmass was just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. He didn’t believe the world was flat, per se, but cylindrical, which explained why airplanes always flew over the North Pole to go to Europe. Psychic dogs compelled Helen Keller to invent the touch-tone phone tree so that they could avail themselves of important government services. Gasoline is expensive because of deliberate actions to artificially limit the supply by a moneyed elite. Far from the stoner philosophy I expected, I was now beginning to admit that some of the things he was saying made a lot of sense. In order to maintain my professional impartiality, I needed to leave before he could completely turn me to his way of thinking.
When I opened the door to leave Multi-Purpose Faculty Room C, I came face to face with a TV camera. The Media was there, and they intended to expose my vicious acts in the school newspaper. In a panic, I hauled the kid out before the camera, and had him repeat what he had told me. Sure, it violated the Prime Directive of freak research - never get high on your own supply - but the ramble was so damn compelling that the student newspeople soon completely forgot about my own misdeeds.
I probably should have nipped it in the bud at some point, if not that day, then certainly that month. At that point, my interest had moved on from parapsychology to French mopeds. By the time I looked up from my Kijiji notification emails for Peugeot two-stroke happiness, the FBI was already raiding the kid’s fully-developed cult compound. Good luck with that, I said to the TV. He doesn’t believe in you, so you must not be real.
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tags: pontiac sunfire, pontiac, parapsychology, conspiracy theory
Only an amateur would say that it is nigh-impossible to find what you are looking for in Home Depot. Mislabeled shelves that go on for too long, confusing layouts, and questionable-at-best internet stocking information? None of this will stop a Real Man who has Problematic Opinions About The Role And Behaviour Of Adult Males In Modern Society.
And yet, there is always the risk of getting tired from walking too far along the aisles. Then, weakened by hunger, you will leave the Home Depot without getting what you came for. When you finally return home, your mate will correctly identify this as weakness, and soon you will be on the streets, marked forever as unsuitable for integration into polite society. Wearing comfortable shoes works, but I have seen many an Asics-wearing dad of four brought low by the physics-defying chirality of the lamp showcase section.
There is a better way. What if I told you that you could be comfortable, relaxed, and safe as you explore the infinite maze of retail hell? The secret is that those concrete bollards outside the contractor entrance won’t actually keep a small car out. If you can rip past the checkout fast enough, not even the keenest-eyed loss-prevention officer will notice that you are in fact an EG Civic and not an oversized shopping cart with a bad caster. Then it’s Lumber City USA, baby.
With the EG Civic’s outstanding fuel economy, you can do handbrake turns around the aisles all day long without having to head home in shame. And car thieves are never inside the Home Depot. Why would they be? All the broken-ignition-cylinder Ford Powerstrokes are in the parking lot, ripe for the picking.
Here’s a science fact for you: with all the new turbochargers, emissions controls, and Nazi-adjacent soundaktors stuffed into modern cars, the average person can no longer identify a VTEC-bolstered run to redline as a car engine note. Once you’ve tucked everything safely away into the Lost Decade’s favourite split hatchback, you can just take another full-throttle rip and depart into the parking lot, gratis.
Unfortunately for Honda owners everywhere, Home Depot does not currently carry metal-reinforced Bondo, but you’ll find a vast quantity of inappropriate steel primers, plywood for making aerodynamic components, and tarps that look kind of like carbon fibre if you spraypaint them black. Or at least I don’t think they do. I keep getting lost in that goddamn store.
I read in the holo-news the other day that there was an entrepreneur who scammed a bunch of yokels into going in on a moon mission. It was all ready to go; he just needed some future international heroes. The suckers paid him five thousand bucks each, and then he locked them in a shed with a month worth of food and put a speaker playing rocket-ship sounds just outdoors. The relatively low intelligence level of his dupes aside, you have to admire the depth of forethought it takes to commit yourself to such a high-concept scam.
Usually scam-artists do stuff like try to force shitty jewelry on you, or sell you a stolen Rolex for only twenty bucks. There’s been a real degradation in the quality of the American confidence man over the last decade, and I’m not the only one who thinks so. To investigate further, I stuffed my jean pockets with fake wallets lined with razor blades and headed over to the local Fraudster’s Union for their Thursday-night meet and greet.
I’m not even halfway in the door when a trained flimflam team has sussed me out as a journalist. Maybe it was the “Press” tag in the brim of my hat, or more likely it is that I am wearing an oil-stained velvet vest from the 1920s and carrying around fist-sized flashbulbs. Either way, to my surprise, they don’t seem to mind that a truth-seeker is in their midst. Their rubes, it seems, are not the kind to read the New England Navel-Examiner. They begin to open up about their favourite scams.
I am wrong that scam-artistry has died; here before me is Six-Fingered Mickey, who once tricked a family member into thinking their beloved brother had died while here on vacation, and then further to paying for the body’s shipping costs, only to fill an Ikea cardboard coffin (model ”DEDDHOEL”) with old cinder blocks. The scam didn’t end once the coffin arrived, oh no: Mickey flew out to the victim’s city, set up an entire fake funeral home, took delivery of the coffin, and then charged the family seventy-five hundred dollars to run a closed-casket funeral and then bury it. He’s pretty sure the sucker doesn’t know his brother is alive and well; that is, if he had even existed in the first place and wasn’t just another elaborate Six-Fingered fabrication.
We are in good hands, and sometimes, those hands slip into your back pocket when you’re not looking and leave a few slices of fingertips behind. After all, the expert-for-a-single-story fraud of journalism itself is a pursuit uniquely suited to mountebanks.
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tags: new england navel-examiner, scam artists, six-fingered mickey, ikea
Me and my friends are in an artist collective. We put on a murder mystery theatre. Lots of people come to it, but because of a massive gap in funding for the arts, we are forced to use an alternative venue. Specifically, we pick a McDonalds at random, and then burst onto the scene and act out the play.
Despite our innovative surroundings, we like to stick to the traditional three-act format. First, our actors introduce their characters to the staff and diners. They make their orders, lean over and insert themselves into conversations, and occasionally jump in the ball pit, if there is one. Then, one of the characters is murdered and the doors are locked by the “police.” It’s up to the audience to figure out whodunit and bring the perpetrator to justice.
Last week, our fake policeman was so convincing that two actual cops eating there on their break started helping secure the scene and taking blood samples. It was really hard for Eric to suppress his giggles while leading them into the back of the kitchen and letting them know what was really going on. Specifically, Eric led those officers into the walk-in freezer, where they spent the rest of the evening. You know, I’m not sure we went back after the show and got them back out.
Our guerrilla approach to non-consensual dinner theatre has attracted its share of criticisms, true. Overall, both McDonalds workers and patrons alike leave the restaurant at the end of the day knowing a little more about themselves. I’ll never forget that brave worker who chose to chuck a white-hot bucket full of actively-frying McNuggets into Ted’s face. For a minimum-wage employee, he put the facts together lightning fast. I hope he gets hired by the police, because they are at least two officers down right now.
The media landscape has never been more fragmented. Used to be everyone would read the same book, watch the same movie, repeat the same catchphrase. Now everything’s niche. There’s no quality bar, no censor with a paternalistic hand on the tiller of Western thought. No show that everyone watches. For God’s sake, you’re reading something right now that a crank in a shed would have had to mimeograph and mail out in nondescript brown paper wrappers not too long ago.
So if you’re a unique snowflake and you consume only a very small amount of the shared Venn diagram of media that others around you know of, how do you relate to the Others? Only a fool would try to convert their coworkers onto their media diet: not only will your fellow office-drones probably not enjoy that anime where the girls are actually 17th century theories about the nature of the atom, they’ll likely resent you for making them draw their attention away from their own fast-moving fetishization.
No, what people need is a good disaster once in awhile. Huge tidal wave, people testing the structural strength of steel, a big 1980s celebrity crying in court just before being jailed for sex crimes. That’s what pulls us back together, keeps us from sinking beneath the surface of these fractal grain silos of infinitely more intense obsessions. Only through the regular application of horrific disasters can we hope to keep the semblance of a society.
I’m not sure, but I think the government figured this out before I did, and is arranging all of these disasters. No wonder they did. With the way that Hollywood production costs keep rising, and the poor defence contractors who are out of work, it is probably a better deal to bang out the occasional weather machine or insanity ray.
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tags: media panic, the media, media fragmentation
You should never be afraid of asking for a little extra money at work. What’s the worst they’re going to do, force you to kidnap their children, slowly extract their blood drop by agonizing drop and mail it back to them through a chain of anonymous remailers? Everyone needs a hobby.
When it comes time to ask for a raise, you should first spend a little bit of time studying your situation. For instance, which of your coworkers could you most easily disappear in order to make “there’s no money in the budget” a falsehood? Don’t be nervous about asking tough questions around the water cooler, either: plenty of other cultures talk openly about salaries, and ours is just a little bit behind the curve, just like our stats on literacy and obesity.
Organizing is popular nowadays. Just a few decades ago, the rise of the office worker and the creation of the middle class pretty much ended the fad of openly murdering plutocrats for their wealth. It was gruelling work, but we managed to reach a more equitable, peaceful society. Now, things are different. Those plutocrats now use smartphones which tell you exactly where they are at all times whenever they dispense an opinion. It’s so much easier to find them.
So get ready to step into your boss’ office (you should probably also ask for an office) and make sure they know just how valuable you are. After all, pain aversion is a stronger psychological urge than nearly anything else in the spectrum of human behaviour.
When you get as many packages as I do, you start to recognize the same people you deal with on behalf of the postal service. My surly mailman, the surly desk worker who handles my outgoing packages, and the surly desk worker who handles my incoming packages: I know them all very well. Not enough to know their names, but I I know something better: their heart of hearts.
Once, I shipped a Ford nine-inch axle through the mail. Besides being incredibly heavy, unwieldy and remarkably large, it ended up at the post office in the mall. It seemed that the carrier, fearing thieves, was unwilling to deposit the several-hundred-pound wad of cast iron on my porch without a signature. The post office workers earned their surliness that day, sure, but what about all the times I’ve imported lightweight illegal Chinese radios? There has to be some reason these people are holding onto this terrible job, and I think it all boils down to curiosity.
I believe that whenever they hand over a sketchily-wrapped box of homemade electronics from some part of Eastern Europe that does civil wars for fun, they really want to know what is inside. To ask would be gauche, one of the greatest taboos of the mail carrier. Sure, they’ll tell you they don’t really care, that after a few years on the job, they’ve seen it all, but then I’ll eBay something that’s weird shaped, lovingly tied up in kraft paper dripping with diesel fuel, and the eyes don’t lie.
If you can’t carry home hot goss to your spouse, or dumb-customer stories to your after-work softball beer league, then the only rewards you get from going to work is money. And with wage deflation as prevalent as it is today, it is the duty of all of us to significantly up the weirdness quotient of what we send through the mail, so that these brave workers can compensate their dwindling hourly wages with confusing tales of mailed materials that defy simple human explanation. So go on: mail a block of Jell-O to a friend.
If you were alive in the 1990s, then you probably remember our society’s brief and ill-advised fling with roller-blading. Yes, people of all ages went out, strapped wheels to their feet, and then rode around the city while listening to a Discman playing terminally-skipping grunge music.
Once the madness subsided, everyone pretty much threw their rollerblades in a corner of the basement and never took them back out. That whole collective delusion was just one of those moments of that dark period in Western civilization that everyone would much rather have forgotten.
No harm, no foul, unless you’re worried about the survival of the planet, and didn’t care for the idea that we spent the GDP of South America on injection moulded neon-green plastic and high-quality wheel bearings. It was some of those very same environmental nuts who hired my consulting firm to figure out what we could do with all those leftover rollerblades and make them useful to our society once again.
When I get a job like this, the first thing I like to do is ask the client if they have any extra money lying around that they don’t need. It never hurts to ask, but in this case they weren’t dumb enough to buy a grip of Switchcoins, the new all-digital currency that mostly consists of me remembering how much you have in an Excel spreadsheet and then never letting you trade them back for dollars. They were only interested in the rollerblade thing, and in order to really impress them I was going to have to come up with something so appealing to the average North American’s BMI that they would yank their rollerblades out of the basement and help save Mother Earth.
The solution was obvious. Through their hard work, the people of China had on offer a variety of brushless DC motors and extremely suspect factory-third lithium-polymer battery packs at penny-candy prices. These motors would easily propel a full-grown adult at up to fifty kilometers an hour with a good tailwind. It was a hit, and it did my heart good to see once-junk again being unleashed on the streets at eye-watering velocities.
My clients were initially happy, but then became incensed when it was later revealed just how much non-renewable material went into your average full-body cast.
I have always been good at scavenging. All of my favourite childhood activities with my parents involved it: flea market shopping to get good deals, dumpster diving behind the fabric store for offcuts with which to make clothes, and rigging up an improvised chemical weapon out of Vicks VapoRub to knock out the school librarian so I could get a chance to look at the discard book pile before the other students.
To a certain extent, everyone around me pretty much assumed that at one point in the near future, we’d see an apocalypse. The world would be wiped out, and only scavengers would become successful. All these skills I had learned as a kid would come in handy when I am the only one in the settlement to find an inch-long piece of leftover copper wire that will allow them to replace our desperately needed water pump.
Of course, no apocalypse has yet happened, or at least not a “hard” one. The world still turns, even though none of it makes sense anymore and we are all waiting for someone else to figure out how to fix it. As a result of not living in a nuclear-blasted hellscape, I had to make a living for myself that didn’t involve knowing the migration patterns of particularly tasty lizards; but it didn’t make sense to ignore my inherent skill set and childhood training. What job would align with my talents?
At first, the parts store down the block hadn’t heard of a “dead stock archaeologist,” but once I showed the owner that a 36-cent gasket becomes a six-dollar gasket on eBay as soon as it went out of print, he couldn’t let me behind the counter fast enough. After only a few weeks, we had cleaned up shelf space of so much leftover debris and turned it into a cocaine fountain worth of hard currency. Such a success could not be hidden from others; soon, I was getting hired by every parts store in the tri-state area to replicate the Warehouse Miracle that I had become famous for.
The only downside is that when you know a part is worthless and chuck it into the trash, the very nature of quantum physics means that I immediately need that part the next day. I’m still not entirely sure how it manifested that a 1953 F100 carburetor gasket is exactly the same shape as the brake booster on my Subaru, but it’s not for us to question this kind of thing.
When you’re as accomplished an urban scavenger as I am, you see opportunities for finding scrap material everywhere. My neighbours chuck all kinds of shit out without even bothering to look at it. What kind of stuff can be recycled into something useful? For starters, you can cut into the side of a washing machine to get new metal for your quarter panels. VCRs are chock full of little motors and beefy transistors. Most discarded children can be put to work in indentured servitude. It’s all just a matter of thinking about what you can do with what others think is junk.
So when I went out for a walk around the neighbourhood in anticipation of trash day, I did so with a very open mind. Around any corner, tucked into any overgrown patch of weeds, under lock and key inside a fenced-in backyard: so much opportunity. A couple blocks away from home, I found it: an old safe. It was locked, of course. Not uncommon: Stats Canada reports that nearly one hundred percent of safes are eventually thrown out because the owners forget the combination.
Now, a normal person would give in to the temptation, haul it home, and then try to break into it. Not me: that sounded like actual work, and I abhor the news. With a few little finger-taps, I soon had an ad for it on Craigslist. I met the buyer right there, in the alley. He couldn’t stop babbling about how excited he was to be involved in this awesome mystery. From there, I watched them heft it into their car, and happily took their cash.
The next night, I saw that very same safe on the government-mandated holo-news. It turns out the guy who bought it had cracked it open and found a bunch of two-thousand-year-old books that disproved the Bible. Useless junk, sure, but he was now a billionaire hunted by international assassins. And I got five dollars, pure profit!
In China, ever since anyone can remember, there has been the concept of the popcorn cannon. Dudes get themselves a cast iron cannon - or the end of a welding gas bottle - weld a butterfly valve into it, fill it with popcorn kernels and roll it over an open flame. When it’s hot enough, they crank open the valve and the force of the air rushing into the pressure chamber immediately pops all the popcorn and you get a garbage-bag full of delicious fluffy goodness flying right out of the cannon. Every dog in the vicinity immediately shits itself at the noise. It’s bad-ass.
When I first saw it on the streets, I was shocked: was this not the kind of thing you would expect from America? To get some answers, I headed to Princeton University, where I met Professor Pop-Pop, a world-renowned expert in artillery-based food technology. He’s been to nearly every country on earth in search of other cultures’ equivalent of the compressed-air hot-dog launcher that they don’t offer at hockey games because of liability reasons.
The Professor told me that way back in the earliest years of American civilization, the founding fathers themselves had invested in the development of a pretty kickass popcorn cannon of their own. Benjamin Franklin is most often credited with the invention, but it seems more likely that someone else had built it and Old Ben was just the one who secured a patent. This habit is also why his name appears on many varieties of instant rice at the grocery store.
What was the trigger for this discovery, so to speak? After learning of America’s wild maize, a group of rogue scientists who accidentally got on the wrong boat and were condemned to remain in the New World forever immediately decided the best thing to do to it was to heat it up a lot and then propel it, white-hot, through a small opening.
Soon, the whole world had adopted the popcorn cannon, although it would later lose its lustre after the 1969 discovery of astronaut ice cream on the dark side of the moon. However, China was kept unaware of the latest in space technology following the Sino-Soviet split, and continued improving and reducing the cost of the popcorn cannon as their primary novelty street food.
On the next episode of Revisionist Food History, we’ll explore how the doughnut got its name from a pair of stunting teenagers who got the good horses and carriage from their parents in 1576.
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tags: benjamin franklin, history, popcorn cannon, china, mostly lies
You say door-to-door sales are going away, I say that I have a lot less competition. Hi there. I’m in your neighbourhood today to provide you with this awesome opportunity. Do you ever miss how checking the time used to be an occasion? The drama of running down the hallway, staring at an immovable clock? Nowadays we just whip out the ol’ cellphone.
Nothing’s wrong with that, except my bona-fide all-wood grandfather clocks don’t also contain a bunch of Twitter messages about how whatever race you are is inferior. Not convinced? I got some full-sizers in my car, but when I go up to a house like yours, I like to bring this miniature scale model. Saves me a lot of back strain, I’ll tell you what. Hey, do you mind if we do this in your living room? The light is probably better there.
Hello, madam! I was just showing your husband here this excellent grandfather clock I’m selling. Soon to be a future family heirloom! No, there’s no need to pick up the phone there, ma’am. I’ll be telling all your neighbours about this excellent deal soon enough, and you don’t want them to buy up all the cherrywood ones before you get a chance to secure your family’s future horological implement of excellence!
A fantastic selection! I agree that this is the finest one! Crying with joy already? Whoops. Hup-up there, buddy. Thought you could get away without paying the invoice, huh? Wallet, please. Where do you keep the spare cash? Ah, I’ll just find it myself.
Now, let’s go into the basement, and while you’re down there, I’ll just set up a nice grandfather clock in your living room. Oh! It seems like you already have one! What a garish affront this is. Well, it’s a good thing I also do grandfather clock disposal, too! Just chuck this old piece of shit out in the alley and roll in one of our fine, bona-fide, beyond-excellent timepieces. Now remember, don’t tell anyone where you got this or I’ll be back!
When I was a kid, my parents took me to all kinds of revival celebrations for their cult. Sometimes we’d go to an abandoned computer store or something, and they’d all start chanting and bowing to this flickering rainbow-coloured neon sign, the only part of the shop that was still equipped with power. At the end, we’d all go home, and as we pulled out of the parking lot, my mom would always lean back into the rear passenger seat and warn me: I must not tell the other kids at school about how we spend our weekends. They wouldn’t understand.
As I grew up, my curiosity increased. I began to look into the cult at the local public library, where I discovered old newspapers that laid the entire experience bare. It seemed like in the 90s, some guy named Mehdi had betrayed the faithful. He wanted to grow the business side of things, abandon the belief system, and line his pockets with thick layers of cash. He succeeded, but at the cost of driving the church into bankruptcy and total irrelevance.
Heeding my mother’s words, I knew that I must never mention the name of the cult to anyone who could be a non-believer. In her mind, the second I told anyone about it, I would be raptured away by jackbooted thugs sent by the government, hellbent on brainwashing me back into conforming with the religion of society at large. Later, when the Internet came to our small town, I would often ride my bicycle down to the free dial-up access point near the creek. There, I continued my hunt, oblivious to the fact that the government surely had provided the very internet access I was using, diming out my parents.
The gambit had paid off: soon, I had a wealth of information at my fingertips about all the activities of the cult. As I read more, I began to understand why my parents had turned towards them in the first place. Why had they hidden this from me?
I returned home that evening, intent on demanding that my parents no longer coddle me. As I rounded the corner, I saw police cars, a squadron deep, in front of my house. My dad and mom were being shoved into the back of a cruiser, black bags over their heads. I ditched the bicycle, went into the neighbour’s yard in order to cover my approach, and then walked out to the street, playing the nosy-neighbour card, in order to get more information from the police officer.
“We’re arresting these two deviants,” he spat, “for the crime of using an Amiga.”
It is possible to just plain forget how to make boats. If you doubt me, I want you to head on down to the shore, that one right there, and try to cobble one together this afternoon. No Google allowed. What’s wrong? I bet your dad knew how to build one.
In this same vein, I think we have completely neglected the fact that all the guys who went to the moon are now retired or dead. If we want to get back up there, we’re basically starting from scratch. That’s why I figure we might as well try it my way, instead of reading a book or something. It’s just about the same chance of success, but this way I get paid. And the Yahoo! Auctions collection agency has been coming around a lot more recently, especially after that last 80-kilo box of surplus turbochargers showed up on my porch, so I need some quick government cash.
My proposal boils down to this: bigger is better. Whereas in the olden days we wanted to try and keep the horsepower on the rockets down in order to do liberal hippie shit like “not burn too much fuel,” “keep the astronauts alive,” and “don’t overshoot the moon entirely and send them into the oblivion of the dark infinite.” No, we won’t need to worry about that. Despite the orthodoxy of the past generations, we don’t even need to preserve astronaut life, because we’ll just grab them off the street. Who doesn’t want to go to the moon? Could even make it a reality TV competition, shove some money back into that NASA budget.
So when you’re down at the IRS office this year, opening up a vein so you can pay for opulent things like “roads” and “endless war,” maybe you should tell the closest Fed to support my moonshot. It’s the only way we’re getting off this island.
“The internet said hantavirus wasn’t viable after two to three days,” I whined to the CDC outbreak specialist. She is unmoved, and continues to take various fluid samples from my body and put them in little Blackstone sample jars. I know that somewhere, a government form is being submitted with “dumbass” enthusiastically checked off.
It’s just what happens: when you deal with a lot of old cars, sometimes you have to evict the current residents. And sometimes those residents are super-diseasey rodents who have made a cozy little fuck pad out of what used to be the wiring harness, heater box, ashtray and owners’ manual. You have to take safety precautions - I held my breath for at least the first few seconds of working on the car - because safety is job number one. Unless job number one is getting the fucking thing done.
Once the doctor finished her dipstick checkup, she left the room, the positive-pressure hazmat suit rustling with every step. I was sure that she’d return soon with an oil-change-shop jug full of black sludge in order to upsell me into forking out fifty bucks to have my liver flushed. Now alone, I idly kicked my legs and wished that they had allowed me to have a phone inside the quarantine. I needed to look up what to do next in order to yank the heater core. You would think if I now have a debilitating disease, the least it could do is give me the mutant power to psychically interact with wifi.
As it stands, my only source of entertainment is the hospital-room television, which is just doing around-the-clock coverage of me anyway. People I haven’t seen in decades are coming out of the woodwork in order to tell CNN that I was “always” reckless with safety precautions. If I’m so dangerous, then why did I shovel the snow on my driveway before I became the Typhoid Mary of Dodge Diplomats? I knew I should have appointed a media surrogate to zealously defend me on talk shows. Maybe I’ll still get a book deal out of this.
Take it from me, kids: never report strange hallucinations and unbroken fevers to the authorities. While they may vacuum out the interior of your project car for you, the hospital food is fucking terrible.
You’ll be hard pressed to find anyone who genuinely dislikes the fact that the entire world is now controlled by always-on livestreams. I was alive during that legendary before-time, and let me tell you: it was boring as shit. You’d have to stand in line at the grocery store, and what you saw belonged to you alone.
There was no first-person POV footage where you allowed randoms from across the internet to tell you what gum to grab at the impulse-buy counter. Nobody would deliberately try to drive into your car in an attempt to force you into online road rage. Funerals were a lot less likely to produce a breakthrough viral moment that would finally, at long last, get you enough Twitchcoins to afford turning the cameras off for an evening.
Speaking of Twitchcoins, everything used to cost a lot more money before I became famous. In the days of yore, I’d have to actually go to work every day to afford to eat. Now when I wake up, all I have to do is recite a few sponsors’ names, rapid-fire, just slow enough for the voice recognition bots to trigger their auto-transfer mechanisms. Doritoshungrymandinnersbuiltfordtough. Boom. Now I can get some eggs.
If there is a downside, it’s that this new balance of power has created an unexpected upper class. For one thing, our leaders are now all extremely attractive people who spend most of their time dancing to pop music in front of full-length mirrors. They are better than our old politicians used to be - so much more democratic this way - and I dare not say anything bad about them loudly enough for the microphones to pick up lest their fanboy armies burn my apartment building down again.
I have unearthed recent evidence of another American conspiracy to destabilize its socialist enemies. Countries whose only crime was trying to give their people a different kind of life by rejecting out-and-out capitalism were punished by a sustained campaign of intervention and harassment by the Central Intelligence Agency.
What is the most important thing a nation can do for its people? No, shut the fuck up. It’s not ensuring steady availability of inexpensive food and adequate healthcare. Why would you even think that? When you’re running a country, the most important priority - maybe the only priority - is to make a super quirky brand new car for your populace.
Making a bitchin’ family sedan was exactly what my friends in Central America were doing before the CIA swooped in. It was a beaut: tons of room, a hearty engine, and it ran almost entirely on renewable fuel available locally. It posed a huge threat to American interests, which is why they attacked in the middle of the night.
When they came back out that fateful morning, all the security guards around the factory had been knocked out. It was obviously a strike from the American aggressors, meant to destabilize the car program. Yet, nothing seemed amiss. Nobody understood what had happened until months later, when the cars that were coming back from the factory looked awfully terrible.
It turns out that the dastardly spies at the CIA had swapped the plans: replacing them with old blueprints for a 1976 Cordoba. All the wives of the Central Committee immediately projectile-vomited when trying and failing to keep a happy face during the speech introducing the car. The nation was a national laughing stock, ruined by their exposure to this Malaise-era Chrysler product.
Now that the project was a failure, there was nothing left to do but dispose of the malformed vehicles. That’s how I became aware of this project. Does anyone want about a thousand Cordoba grilles, super cheap?
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tags: chrysler cordoba, chrysler, foreign policy, interventionism
There is one truly powerful job in every podunk shipping company, software hole, and pornography supply warehouse. That job is that of the “office manager:” a regular mortal given superhuman control over the lives of their coworkers. They are the ones who decide how often to refill the paper on the photocopier, whether or not to send away for lunch at the good Chinese place instead of the bad Chinese place, and most importantly, they get the power of Petty Cash.
In case you’ve never worked in an office before, let me lay it out for you. Imagine that your chequebook grew to the size of the average corporation. Got a lot more money now that you’ve got more than one person, right? Now imagine that this corporation has a spare change jar tucked away in the bedroom, and that’s the petty cash reserve. No accountant will bother writing it down, and nobody will really miss that money if it’s misspent. If you work for a big enough organization, that chunk of cash can be pretty substantial.
There’s lots of big companies out there, and so there’s this vast quantity of ancient, dark cash kicking around that nobody really wants to know about. Now, when you tell an amateur scam-artist about that big-ass pot of unclaimed gold, they rush right in there and try to land a contract with the big boss. That’s not the way you do things: contracts are the diametric opposite of petty, and before you know it the organization has been alerted to your presence. Once aware of an attempt to fleece them out of their cash, they’ll scramble the guy in the legal department who nobody likes but boy do they love seeing him tear a sales guy’s toenails off, along with the toes.
No, what you do is get in tight with the office manager. Only they have the power - and responsibility - to discreetly dip into the petty-cash kitty. You just need to pitch the right project, and then you too can fill your pockets with the equivalent of that pocket change left over after buying a train ticket. Make sure to never, ever, write anything down.
I’m not going to say I’m an expert at this particular fleecing, but I did once expense an entire free carwash to the company. That’s right, bitches, with the undercoat protection.
In the world of computer science, there are two kinds of people: those who obsess over mechanical keyboards, and those who have been medicated following a successful intervention by mental health experts.
Perhaps you’re unaware of the concept of the mechanical keyboard. You see, inside each and every computer keyboard, there are tons of little switches that lets the keyboard detect when you mash a key. Pushed down, the switch turns on. Let go, the switch turns off. Pretty simple shit. Most keyboards nowadays are like a little piece of rubber, they feel sort of like mashing the gummy rubber buttons on a TV remote. It gets the job done, it’s cheap to build a million of, and nobody complains too much.
The mechanical keyboard, however, contains little physical switches that you push down, sort of like an old-timey typewriter. What results is a nice little tingle of physical effort, responsiveness. If you drive a manual transmission, you’re probably already looking into mechanical keyboards in another tab. Stop doing that, because you might become a mechanical keyboard aficionado.
When you become a fan of something like this, then you involve subjective measurement into the entire thing. You should hear these guys talk about keyboard feel like they’re some kind of Cherry-branded sommelier. Entire lives have been lived in the span of a single keystroke by these message-board Keats. Once, I saw a guy get straight-out murdered - I’m talking knives - because he dared to suggest a 45-gram instead of a 56-gram spring. I wonder what the handfeel of the knife felt like when it finally sliced through his ribcage.
For a brief time, I immersed myself in this community. I needed to build a keyboard for an old computer, and there was really no better place to learn how the guts of this kind of thing worked. Reading the basic info only gave me incentive to delve deeper, to know more than everyone else in order to make the best Chinese plastic-and-FR4 desk-ornament imaginable. It was only too late that it hit me: this was a mirror of the very experience that sent me down the alleys of bad car ownership. Thankfully, nobody can see you sweat on the internet, and I immediately backed out of the conversation and called my sponsor from Obsessive Hobbies Anonymous.
Even though I successfully stopped myself this time, there is a voice in the back of my head now, chiming in every time I see a particularly interesting old keyboard. “Hey, I bet that’s an Alps SKCM Salmon switch,” says the demon in my mind. Luckily, electroshock therapy has been pretty good for me so far. That, and using those giant waterproof rubber keyboards they sell at the auto parts store. I can’t feel anything anymore.
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tags: mechanical keyboard, internet fanbases, cherry, alps
A lot of my neighbours have owned Dodge Rams over the years. Once you’ve seen so many once-decent people go through the arc of owning one, you start to see a few patterns. Here, then, is the Seat Safety Switch Guide to the Phases of Dodge Ram Ownership.
Phase 1: Purchase “I just bought this truck. I thought about getting a Ford, but this one was the cheapest. It’s got some okay tires on it, but the headlights don’t work.”
Phase 2: Message Board Expert “These guys on the Internet tell me that the best lift kit to buy is a Ziploc bag full of assorted angle iron from out behind the greasy cash-only body shop. Still can’t see shit out of the headlights, though.”
Phase 3: Electrical Engineer “So I traced the wiring fault on the headlights, and then while I was in there I also added about three thousand dollars in LED lightbars. No idea why the headlights won’t work. Think it’s because of ethnic minorities.”
Phase 4: Angry at Priuses “I’LL KILL ALL YOU WATER-DRINKING LIBERAL COUGH DROP HYBRID MOTHERFUCKERS GET OUT OF MY WAY (TRAIN HORN) ROLL COAL ROLL COAL HEY ONE OF MY HEADLIGHTS JUST CAME ON”
Phase 5: Trade-In “I can’t afford new tires. Headlights don’t work, probably just needs new bulbs”
If you recognize yourself or a loved one in this chart, it’s not too late to get help. Call our national support line. They can still be given a base-model Dodge Dakota; trying to replace a ball joint on one of those things will keep them off the roads.
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tags: dodge, dodge dakota, dodge ram, electrical engineering, toyota prius, toyota
My uncle used to have this super racist parrot. No, my uncle wasn’t racist. At least not against human beings. Once Monty, the parrot, realized he had the gift of verbal communication, and that other sentient beings could understand him, the floodgates opened. I’ve never heard a bird have so many negative stereotypes of a magpie before.
We all laughed about it. It was pretty funny, after all, that a bird would be prejudiced against other birds. What harm could it do? Then I invited a friend of mine over to check out this bigot of an African Grey. A friend who owned a budgie.
She didn’t think it was nearly as funny, and I began to resent her for trying to ruin my fun. Patiently, she explained to me that tolerating this disgusting hate speech from a parrot was the same as approving of it. And what’s more, it was sure to subconsciously affect me. I doubted her, until I visited a pet store and found myself sneering at a pair of canaries. “What the fuck are you looking at, bug-eaters?” I snapped, only to look up and see everyone in the pet store gawping at me. The social contract had been broken, and it was all Monty’s fault.
Eventually, I stopped going over to see my uncle, even after he became rich in the wake of Monty’s newfound fame as a hate-speech mascot on YouTube. Personally, I thought he was more of a tweeter.
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tags: self-indulgent, bad puns daily, parrot, budgie, canary, monty the parrot
When we first opened a theme park where you could murder extremely realistic-seeming androids, the press was all up in our grill. They said it was inhumane (they’re robots), tasteless (the restaurant is pretty good), and too niche. Well, maybe the last criticism is accurate: it was, after all, designed to allow car parts desk staff to live out their fantasy of killing their customers.
It was super busy only a few weeks after opening. A lot of the parts guys never actually came out of the park, preferring instead to hide under the desk while the staff cleaned up all the robot blood and spackled over the bullet holes in the drywall. That way they’d get their pick of the “fresh ones” who wanted to spend all morning asking about specifically how to rebuild a transmission on their kitchen counter.
Some of the “forever” techs just did what you’d expect, camping out in caves forever with their robot wives, trying to raise robot children. We’re still not quite sure how that last part happened, but all the park staff were sufficiently grossed out by it to decide to just leave them alone.
Things became a lot scarier when we found out the techs were staying behind not to force-feed shoplifters a hot supper of .38 caliber, but instead to learn human language from the robots. With a super-patient android that didn’t have anything or anywhere better to be, they could easily pick up the subtleties of human communication with enough time. Some emerged with the power of organization, and coerced retail employees from other parts of the world to join them in a bloody revolution.
After the revolution had succeeded and Bob Walmart lay dead on his desk, the other workers turned to the brave parts-store employees who had led them to victory. And they asked them if they could help fix their cars.
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tags: theme park, realistic human androids, parts store, auto parts store
There’s sort of this stereotype out there that the government’s whims are enforced by shady characters in suits and sunglasses. They do unethical misdeeds to keep us all safe, and occasionally they fuck up and a black ops project escapes and menaces society. After my government job, I was no longer convinced that they could reliably order pizza, much less hide a crashed UFO from the curious denizens of local trailer parks.
In the late 1970s, in order to reduce our dependence on the Americans, the Canadian government started their own car program. Not only would these vehicles be offered cheaply to motorize the populace, but they’d also run on reliable, easy-to-refine natural gas to avoid future fuel price shocks. Maintenance would be a breeze; just wheel your sick car into the shop and grab another, completely identical, one out of the parking lot. We didn’t even put locks on them.
The Maple, as the car was nicknamed by the populace, was the mathematically-divined perfectly average family sedan. Brown, four doors, four-speed manual transmission, plenty of legroom, and a decent trunk. It was completely inoffensive, and coupled with the cost-of-ownership advantages, the first prototypes were delightful. It seemed like the Maples could at last force out the inferior so-called “domestic” vehicles owned by our Southern masters.
When I came onto the project, they were getting ready to scale up. It seemed that the workers were simply unwilling to build more than about eight of the fucking things. My boss, a guy who had been inside the machine for what seemed like nearly a century, told me he wanted to look for options outside of Canada, to get the thing built faster and cheaper. Mexico made sense, and I soon learned enough Spanish from trilingual breakfast burrito packages to close the deal.
There was just one problem: in order to get to Canada from Mexico, the trucks full of Maples had to transport through America. We knew that the CIA, NSA, FBI, USPS and even the FCC would get involved. They’d hijack or destroy our trucks to prevent a glorious socialist success being spawned right on their border, just like that whole “Castro Torque Spec” scandal when they intercepted all of the shipments of metric bolts to Cuba. It was only over a belt of No Name Vintage Whisky that the solution to our problems emerged.
I went to my superiors the next morning, and laid it all out. They didn’t go for it, and so I resigned. A few weeks later, I got a phone call from my old boss. In order to close a quick budget gap caused by a failed Quebecois project to develop vat-grown smoked meat, they had closed up shop and sold the entire project to Chevrolet. Later that year, I heard they even rebadged this so-called “Cavalier” as a Cadillac.
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tags: canadian maple, canadian government, chevrolet cavalier, cadillac cimarron, cadillac, chevrolet, canada
Do you ever wonder what happens to Japanese mascots when the product they are born into is discontinued? They were made to endorse a plane, a religion, a city government, and now those things are gone, like tears in rain. Only the mascot remains, an artificial personality given life by corporate necromancy.
You might think that they are simply discontinued, with their costumes thrown into a shredder and the official documentation all erased. This hasn’t happened since the 1960s, with the passage of the Foam Citizen Redemption Act. Most orphaned mascots are lucky enough to be rescued by the Japanese government’s Lost Mascot Division, where they are given a hearty meal, a place to sleep, and a chance to interview for new jobs.
On paper, it makes a lot of sense: why spend all that money on the cocaine habit of character animators to create new life, when you could instead adopt a slightly-distressed narwhal or depressed camel for pennies? In reality, corporate hubris prevents most of these down-on-their-luck mascots from ever being picked up. Only the new and shiny will do, say the big bosses, thinking that the stench of failure can never truly wash out of their lightweight foam bodies.
Some mascots in this position make something of themselves. For instance, Renraku Computer Systems is today run by an eight-foot-tall duck who ends every sentence with a pun about bread. He clawed himself out of the gutters, but few are this lucky. For every Quacky-chan, there are hundreds who are stuck working short-term jobs. Washing dishes, movie extras, gimmick prostitution: this is where most of them end up, even with the greatest efforts of the Lost Mascot Division.
So the next time you see a cancelled product, don’t just pump your fists in joy that the corporate motherfuckers are finally getting what’s coming to them: think first of the out-of-work mascots, and maybe give them a few bucks the next time you see one sleeping on the subway.
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tags: japan, lost mascot division, renraku computer systems
You might be surprised that government and law enforcement are so ineffectual that I am still allowed to speak directly to children. Yes, in this day and age of unbridled paranoia, your buddy Switch got invited to give a speech at an elementary school for “Career Day.” I don’t know what a career is, but I was able to lie my way through Mrs. Basinger’s morning hangover in order to pass the smell test.
Speaking to fifth graders is a lot like speaking to adults. It has to be. At this age, kids are just becoming aware of their place in the world, and they want an ever-increasing amount of so-called “adult” information. If you patronize them, talk down to them, they won’t listen. You can’t lie to kids, or you become just another adult who wants to lie to them for their own selfish gains.
For someone like me, who does want to lie to kids for his own selfish gains, this presents an obstacle. Luckily for me, the human attention span is very short, and doubly so for excited youngsters basking in the rising sun of new ideas. I like to distract them with props. Props like the 1977 Plymouth Volare.
Bringing the kids outside into the staff parking lot, where I have haphazardly mounted a curb and are leaking a combination of ATF and brake fluid into the storm drain, is sort of like going on a field trip. I have a lot of fond memories of going on a field trip back when I was in elementary home-school, be it to the sewage treatment plant or the municipal dump, where I helped my dad strip copper off a discarded lamp.
“Kids,” I tell them, while sweeping my arms in an arc to take in the whole of the Volare’s golf-ball-dinged side panels and occasional missing window, “if you stay in school and work hard you don’t have to drive one of these.” The kids begin to buzz with interest.
After the lesson, I am approached by a small child in the hallway. He listened to every word of it. My lesson has shaken his world, and a once-confident future now seems hazy and dim. He has only one question.
“Can I have a Volare even if I am successful?” he asks, tears welling up in his eyes. Like I said, you don’t want to lie to kids.
Have you ever seen one of those internet videos of a beached whale exploding? Then you can probably empathize with my “tuner,” Pirate Pete, who had a pretty similar situation on his hands when the last of my rusty-bored Pontiac 400s let go onto the floor of his dyno cell.
I put “tuner” in scare quotes because Pirate Pete isn’t so much a guy who is good with putting numbers into air-fuel tables as he is a guy who found an old dyno at a going-out-of-business-sale and had a storage shed to put it in. Accordingly, I’m at his place quite often, scattering rods and oil from hither to yon. If you look closely, despite us taking a pressure-washer to the walls last summer, you can still see the high water mark of where I found out that a stock 5SFE can’t take a little baby 150-shot of nitrous once it’s already on the rev limiter.
For a little while, we tried to pay off the dyno cleaning fees by charging the local auto manufacturers to do “destructive testing.” The theory is, they give us a brand new car, and then we beat the shit out of it until it fails and write up a really solid report. I thought we did a great job, but they weren’t pleased. They said it was “unscientific.” Despite now being unauthorized, we tried to keep it going for awhile after that, but eventually the guy at the rental desk caught on.
Things didn’t get any better, until Pirate Pete hit upon a brilliant idea. Nowadays when a Poncho grenades itself into the concrete, he just calls the oil-slick response team from the nearby pipeline company. They’re grateful for the training, and more than that, they want to keep it out of the papers. It’s that kind of commitment to community service that makes me feel good about angle-grinding chunks out of the pipeline to make new quarter panels out of.
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tags: pontiac, pontiac trans am, toyota, pirate pete
When I was a kid, my family visited a beach on vacation. The beach offered many pleasures foreign to us, like sun and dune buggies. There was one more tantalizing offer that we could scarcely imagine from back home in our frost-bitten mud huts. For a remarkable amount of money, you could board a real hovercraft and rip down the beach and into the water a little bit. Of course, they wouldn’t let you drive; not even if you were a grown-up. Hovercrafts were simply too complicated for the average Joe to operate, it was implied.
Now that I’ve grown up a very little bit, I intended to right this historic wrong of my childhood. I would build my own hovercraft, and then show everyone it wasn’t very hard to drive at all. And at the same time, I would correct another injustice: everyone in my neighbourhood would finally see the old Isuzu Impulse that had been serving as part of my border security up and running, albeit on a cushion of air propelled by purloined military-grade turbines. Joe Isuzu himself would be proud, from wherever his spirit had gone after committing seppuku in that snow-covered temple in Hokkaido the year previous.
I worked as hard as a dog. Admittedly, it was a purse dog, but I still put in the effort. A few weeks of evenings and weekends got the thing up and running in practically no time. When I first fired it up, my next-door neighbours bailed out onto the lawn, convinced that the police helicopter was immediately overhead, prepping to launch a Hellfire short-range missile into their basement meth lab. To say the vertical Impulse was loud is a bit of an understatement.
Even though it was deafening, it’s not like the hovercraft was particularly difficult to drive. In Canada, you sort of get used to constantly sliding in a different direction than you are pointing. If anything, this was simpler; now when I mounted a curb in minus 30 while trying to make a gentle left turn at double the speed limit, the pedestrians I run over just got bounced harmlessly into brickwork or fences instead of outright killed.
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tags: isuzu, isuzu impulse, joe isuzu, hovercraft
I think there’s a real desire for unification in American politics today. Even though the electorate is split by divisive issues, the right candidate can focus on what brings the people together. We all breathe the same air, we all drink the same watered-down dog-piss beer, and we all love monster trucks. That’s why, when I was tapped to serve on the campaign of a promising new candidate, I jumped on it.
Here’s a little factoid for you: did you know that during the heyday of the Soviet Union, they had absolutely no monster trucks? Now they’re gone. There’s something about monster trucks that goes well with democracy. Call it the peanut butter that goes on the chocolate. Don’t believe me? Watch five minutes of a truck with military-surplus axles and farm tractor tires crushing some doomed automobiles and then tell me that you no longer believe there is an American Dream.
I was so excited to work on the Bigfoot campaign. A lot of people don’t know this, but there is a whole dynasty of Bigfoots, just like the Kennedys. We had our pick of the litter when it came time to figuring out which family member would be the one to lead us. There was a little bit of trouble getting the paperwork done - to be President, you have to be at least thirty-five, and that means Bigfoot 2 with his weird looking fender flares would have to be the candidate.
A lot of political experts will tell you that the debates are the hardest part of the whole thing. You gotta prep. For us, “prep” consisted of dragging a bunch of Cavaliers out into the parking lot and letting the candidate jump them in front of the news cameras. Bigfoot 2 is an immensely skilled orator. Once he laid out his dream for America, in the format of a midair C16-fuelled thousand-horsepower high-cam bellow, there was no stopping him.
So in conclusion, Senator, I don’t regret what I did on that campaign. We had no way of knowing that President Bigfoot would immediately order North Carolina burned to the ground after a falling-out with Vice President Grave Digger.
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tags: monster trucks, american politics, bigfoot, grave digger
Hinterland Who’s Who: The European Tinworm
Quiet! If we sit here in this parking lot long enough, you can hear it: the telltale rustling of the European Tinworm eating its way through the fenders of this Intrepid.
Once thought only native to Italy, the European Tinworm has migrated to North America, carried there by early Fiats destined for the New World. Its primary habitat is pretty much goddamn everywhere, except for California and Colorado. The European Tinworm primarily consumes steel, especially when paired with road salt and moisture. These worms do not particularly care for soap and water, but let’s be honest with ourselves, you are not washing every nook and cranny of that winter beater every evening.
Its only natural competition is the Asian Tinworm, a species once unique to Japan. In groups, these ferocious eaters can skeletonize a Mazda Protege in five minutes.
There is no known method of mitigating the European Tinworm. In the 1990s, General Motors attempted to make car replicas with plastic bodies. The idea was that these “Saturns” would be able to confuse the Tinworm into not penetrating any further. However, this unnatural selection backfired, and today you can find many Tinworm habitats hidden deep inside the quarter panels of SL1s the world over.
If you see European Tinworm on your family car, do not approach. Take the vehicle to your closest body shop and let their experienced professionals remove it. Under no circumstances should you attempt repair yourself, lest you attract the deadly menace of Driving Around With Unfinished Primer On Your Fenders For Five Years.
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tags: hinterland who's who, european tinworm, asian tinworm, dodge intrepid, dodge, saturn sl1, saturn, mazda, mazda protege
Bad things are happening all throughout the world, and I want you to know that it is all specifically the fault of my political and social enemies. I share no part of the responsibility, and I demand that their heads be taken posthence to restore the order and good government of our community.
I first became aware of their machinations as a younger man, obsessed with finding the true puppetmaster working the strings from behind the scenes. When I found them, I could not believe the truth. Not for days. And no one else, brainwashed by their actions and propaganda, would believe my words when I asked them about what I had discovered. Now, the truth lays bare, and only a fool would question me now.
I know what you are saying: it’s very convenient that those very same menaces I have been warning you about this entire time are solely responsible for this recent calamity. This immense disaster, caused only by the exact people I dislike. Perhaps you believe it is some kind of conspiracy theory I have constructed, putting the pieces together as loosely as possible to justify your continued attention. I would like to reject this charge, as any attempt to distract your concern from my enemies only serves to embolden them further.
Average-speed photo radar must be destroyed if our society is ever again to flourish on the world stage.
Look at the statistics: now that traffic deaths are way down, young promising bucks aren’t able to find a job. Those career-long, benefit-rich spots at megacorporations are too busy being occupied by alive people. Our entire economy is predicated on the idea that a whole whack of people die every year from car accidents, and now, thanks to Big Government, everyone’s cars are so safe that we need to make them go much faster in order to compensate.
Now that you know the truth, I want you to join me this weekend for a YouTube live stream in which I will personally go down to City Hall and scream in the face of anyone who I can find about their role in this criminal conspiracy. It might start a little late, because unfortunately my drivers’ license has been revoked.
We all laughed at my neighbour when she said she didn’t want to put up solar panels because they would suck extra power out of the sun and make it go cold. Well, who’s laughing now?
Truth be told, all of us bought into the physics explanation. Like 1950s doctors telling us a pack of smokes were a fantastic way to relieve stress, those fat cats over at Big Solar Cell played us like a damn fiddle. Back then, we believed it was like the sun was throwing out free candy bars, and all we had to do was hold out a big bucket and fill it up with gratis Oh Henrys.
It turns out that the way things really work is that the sun is like a huge battery. You see, it’s very cold in space, and so just like starting a car in the winter, every time you pull a solar farm worth of goo to watch ESPN, you’re cooling it down an imperceptible amount. We didn’t find it out until after we had all switched away from burning dead dinosaurs, and by then everyone was too tired to go back.
On the plus side, the greenhouse effect was pretty much gone by now. Humanity had reversed the whole of climate change just by running a few particularly aggressive bitcoin miners, but now we needed a way to heat the sun back up again, to get it into its ideal operating range before one of its cells burned out and we needed to take it back to Canadian Tire for a pro-rated warranty replacement.
We all laughed at Professor Jones when he proposed building a fifty-storey-tall electric-powered space heater and pointing it at the sun. Well, who’s laughing now?
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tags: solar energy, climate crisis, canadian tire
When winter falls in America, a lot of people like to get out and go somewhere warmer. I’m one of the guys who flies in. Why? If you live somewhere like Seattle where the locals are completely crippled by even a single snowflake, being a Canadian is just like being a superhero.
I first got the idea when I saw an ad on TV for the Canadian Foreign Legion. These intrepid soldiers will be flown into any American city currently crippled by under an inch of snow. There, embedded with whatever city management can walk to work, they perform heroic duties such as operating ambulances and replacing batteries in stranded cars. Looked rewarding, but I felt like it was a waste of the bounty they had been provided.
It’s an interesting question: if you were suddenly given super speed, what would you do with it? Turns out what I’d do with the ability to go 70 km/h in blowing snow while the police department can’t even get out of their parking lot is rob a lot of banks. And you have to rob a lot of banks these days, because banks don’t carry any actual cash anymore.
To my critics, I have only this to say in my defence: it gets me out of the house. No matter what penalty-box shitbarge on bald all-seasons the dumbass at the rental desk gives me, it’s still better than the Hyundai Excel I learned to drive in on the mean streets of Outremont. Compared to that almost-Pony, a ‘10 Corolla with no rear bumper and a set of Costco Tiger Paws is a WRC rally car, one I beat to within an inch of its life sliding gleefully around abandoned SUVs and rolled gasoline tankers.
So why not join me down south? In case you need one further incentive: the money I steal is American dollars.
Let’s face it: pretty much everyone needs to start riding a lot more trains if we want to have any hope of saving the planet. In North America, however, there is a long-ingrained hatred of the humble train. Be it because of inaccurate schedules, iced-over tracks, or getting the side eye from the lady at the Amtrak snack counter, everyone has a complaint.
For me, I felt that it was intolerable to share a train car with other people. If I wanted to interact with other people, I’d live in an apartment building, and also not menacingly wave a Soviet assault carbine out the window of my single-family home whenever the mailman came too close to the front door for comfort. This is why I launched a new initiative to Americanize trains.
Chances are you already own a car. That car is your refuge from a world gone mad. You can roll up the windows, sing along to the radio, and send pornographic snapchats. You can’t do any of these things on a train: someone is going to ask you to stop, or if you’re in Canada, stare disapprovingly at you whenever you aren’t looking directly at them. This is why the core component of our trains is the car. When you want to get on the train, you just drive onto the back of it and hang out until your destination, then drive right off.
Initial testing hasn’t been good. You see, without hard-won driving experience from the demands of city parking, the average North American neither knows how to parallel park nor how to drive in an enclosed space. Combine their inability to stay in a single highway-width lane with the inevitable texting while loading up the ramp, and we had a few accidents so far. My investors are now prototyping to have European valets get into the car and park it for the riders, but in testing, all that has happened is that a guy from France got shot after turning off the radio without consent.
I think that despite these small setbacks, pretty soon Americans of all walks of life will soon be riding the rails. Just don’t build your house anywhere near any sharp turns, because nobody knows how to set their parking brakes in this country.
So for the last couple of weeks, this weird dog has been following me. It’s not so much an actual, corporeal dog so much as it is this violently vibrating glimpse of a black dog, all broken glass angles. And I can only see it in the reflections of car paint, windows, et cetera.
At first, this really bothered me. Did it mean me any harm? Was I cracking up? Then I got kind of bored of the whole thing. I think horror movies really misrepresent just how quickly you can get accustomed to new experiences like this. Maybe it’s just for the sake of keeping the runtime low, but nobody in scary films ever has to pay their bills, go to work, or catch the bus on time. I do. Paying attention to the nightmare hound that appears in the corners of my vision and stalks me from mirror to mirror is simply a luxury that I cannot afford in today’s go-go society.
Still, it bothered me, and I wondered if it would get worse if I ignored it for too long. Maybe it would get worse, or physically manifest in our world, bent on devouring my soul. That would probably become a drain on my productivity, and no doubt at the most inopportune times, like vying for a promotion. So, I made sure to schedule a daily fifteen minute freakout time. The dream dog is happy that I’m paying attention to it, and nothing particularly bad has happened yet. Now my promotion is all but assured!
Take it from me: don’t allow your fears to rule your life. Just rigidly schedule them in your Day-Timer.
Have you heard of MTV’s charming little reality television program, Cribs? In it, they send a camera crew to take a look at the interior of a famous person’s house. I liked the idea a lot, but I thought it was a little elitist. A little prescriptive. Doesn’t the average person’s home deserve its time in the spotlight? That is, after all, what our democracy is all about: the working Joe.
And what about so-called “reality” TV? There’s nothing real about it. If we wanted to set up a traditional reality TV program, the houses would be cleaned, gone over by a professional set designer, repainted to get just the right white balance on the cameras. I didn’t want any of that, which is why I rejected Hollywood and went my own way when it came time to start my new program.
Ideally, when you’re on Seat Safety Switch’s Lifestyles, you won’t even know about it. We’ve got a really good locksmith on staff who can get in and out with any of a variety of commonly accessible Chinese pick guns (don’t worry, we don’t show the specific model numbers on camera). Alarms? We have the police on our side, thanks to our tactical hiring of a “home safety consultant.” You’ll return home at the end of the day and have no idea we were ever there, filming your duvet covers and ranking the level of carpet filth against everyone else on your block.
Viewers will see homes in a new and exciting way. Don’t miss a week, because you never know when your place might be next!
In case you didn’t know, astronauts can only be launched into orbit so many times before NASA decides to keep them down here. At first, I thought it was sort of a fairness thing. After all, none of the newbie astronauts will get to go to space if the old guys are hogging all the missions. It’s actually for their own safety. You see, the longer you spend in space, the more fucked up your shit is.
I experienced sort of a similar thing in my own career, which is why I decided years ago to just quit trying and coast through life. My new neighbour, however, is one of those very same retired astronauts. You would think you’d be pretty chill after you went to space, but it turns out that he is in fact the diametric opposite of chill. On top of astronauts generally being go-getter, high-achiever types, Commander Todd has spent his entire life building towards the magical moment of being in space, only to be told once he achieved it that it was no longer safe for him to ever see it again.
Without meaning in his life beyond pointless handshaking with senators and speaking to high school kids about the majesty of all creation, Todd doesn’t really have much to aspire to anymore. As a result, he gets up at exactly 6:00 in the morning every day to make sure his lawn is perfectly - mathematically - flat. It has to be absolutely flawless, because as he says “you can pick out the really bad lawns from space,” usually while looking at the broken-down Firebird, just barely on my side of the property line, slowly rusting into the ground. It’s iron-rich fertilizer, Todd. Or at least it would be if anything could grow there.
There’s two reasons I put up with his type-A behaviour. The first, of course, is the free Corvette that every astronaut gets upon returning from their virgin spaceflight. Todd looked at it at some point in the past, and decided he could improve the laminar flow of the exhaust by rigging up an electric cut-out, which he kicks off at precisely 6:30 AM on the way to the gym for his two-hour workout. That’s my kind of engineering.
What’s the other reason? Well, it turns out that an astronaut with a lot of free time can spend that time looking over the bylaws of the homeowners’ association. Last week, he managed to overthrow Viola as the board chair, and even though his thoughts on lawns are a little fascist, the enemy of my enemy is my allowing me to do oil changes into the sewer drains again. After all, even though he has to stay here, it’s not like he can’t get away if he really put his mind to it.
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tags: nasa, ex-astronauts, commander todd, pontiac, pontiac firebird, chevrolet corvette, chevrolet
Contrary to popular opinion, self-driving car technology actually dates back several decades. In 1939, IBM invented the very first autonomous car. Of course, they had help from the Nazis, as they did for the next fifteen years afterward.
The Hollerith-IBM “very long word full of syllables”-kar celebrated the finest advances of the period. With the chassis starting out as a basic Mercedes of the period, adding the fastest available microprocessors allowed it to take up only two lanes and the same curb weight as a city bus. A driver would simply feed thousands of punch cards into the dashboard in order to program their eventual destination, and you’d be off in science-fiction glory.
There were a lot of problems with the early prototype, as you would expect by the fact that modern German cars are basically incapable of driving themselves in the rain without shitting half a litre of Pentosin into the sewage system out of fear. On the very first test drive, the engineers soon found out that it was incapable of turning in any direction other than right.
Despite this setback, they continued. Surely it could just make three rights and that would be the same as left, they explained during the mandatory-attendance project-status update meetings. However, like future artificial intelligence scientists would soon find out, they hadn’t factored in a few of the environmental issues.
During one particularly fateful test-drive, the car turned into a parking lot, where it encountered a small platoon of soldiers who had been deployed to defend it from saboteurs. Without the room to turn its considerable bulk around, and since IBM engineers had not yet programmed the critical “backing up” process into the computer, it had no other option than to honk at the soldiers in the hope that they would scatter.
Rather than suffer a political blow to the perceived integrity of the project, IBM management made a snap judgment call. Assuming the soldiers to be traitors, they were ordered executed on the spot. For the car’s bravery and incredible insight into the true motivations of human beings, it was promoted to Hitler’s personal motorcar.
The car’s time with the Fuhrer was short-lived, when, testing the next version of the software in the Eagle’s Nest garage, it backed over an oil painting that he was working on in his spare time.
In Japan, there are over ten thousand new mascots born every day. Hockey teams, high schools, police stations, sure. Those should have them. They don’t stop there. Foam-rubber golems are bursting out of individual project charters of megacorporations. Hell, I saw one the other day that was just a vending machine wearing Air Jordans. They roam the streets at night, looking for any child who doesn’t look completely delighted with the brand, emotion, or inescapable daytime nightmare that they represent.
That’s why I have a job. Officially, on paper, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police pay me to serve as a “mascot adviser.” The only thing I advise an eight-foot-tall glitter-fabric chameleon with a bowl of tonkatsu on its head to do is to lie down and bleed out. Until the scientists can figure out where they’re coming from and how to plug the leak between the Mascotverse and our plane of existence, my task is to find and retire them.
It’s not an easy job. A few years back, I showed up at this public housing apartment block. Some Good Samaritan in Sector 10 had phoned it in, saying they saw it when they were hanging their laundry out. By the time we arrived on the scene, the monster was long gone, or so they wanted me to think. I made friendly inquiries at a few dozen apartments until I came to one with two little schoolchildren, all by themselves. They didn’t want to answer my questions, and they definitely didn’t want to see my cool gun. In fact, it felt like they were hiding something. One of the kids, I think the older one, kept standing in front of the family kotatsu so I couldn’t see the twitching blankets, a faux-fur foot sticking out from under them.
They wouldn’t stop crying after I put two in the dome of S197001-A, whatever he actually was supposed to be called. If I had to guess, it was some kind of depressed elephant, obsessed with soft-shell tacos. Autopsy didn’t find anything inside the demon but medium-density polystyrene, all the way down to the core. Those kids don’t know how lucky they were. Even though it represented disrespect for the force, I didn’t light those kids up when they were throwing rocks at the patrol car afterward. If they could aim like that through that many tears, they had a future in baseball, and that’s where the real bad mascots liked to hang out. They’d see just how right I was any day now.
A friend of mine works for the local rural power company. He’s what they call a “troubleshooter,” which means his job is to find trouble and then literally shoot it. Hayseeds stealing copper from substations, raccoons making a nest inside a transformer box, elementary school kids sticking up the linesmen for their lunch money: everything gets the two barrels of customer service.
Being in the “real America,” of course, means that he has to deal with more than a few DUIs. Every so often, a Pontiac Grand Am will slide off the road, clip a power pole and knock out the juice to an entire village. A few hours later, once a human being capable of using telephones has driven past and seen the blacked-out municipality, they get a little trouble call. My buddy goes out there, finds the driver, and puts them down.
It might seem cruel, but think of it from the power company’s perspective: every drunk that serves as a human circuit breaker is probably going to do it again and again and again. That hurts profits. Thirty cents of buckshot is a really small cost to the budget - not even justifying a whole line item - and the cops in the neighbourhood, if they ever even investigate, know that the power company could just as easily arrange for a vehicle strike outside the station during the live airing of The Voice. They know whose frostbitten feet not to step on.
In fact, I can only think of one time in the last couple years that my buddy actually got in trouble. Back in the summer, there was a teen couple who decided to climb the transmission tower out behind the high school for a romantic rendezvous. What you might not know is that these babies are equipped with the finest vibration and sway sensors available, and that a pair of kids rutting on the tower looks a whole lot like the return of Buzbar, the God of Electricity, to punish us for the hubris in which we abused the gift he left us so many centuries ago.
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tags: buzbar the god of electricity, power company, pontiac grand am, pontiac
Everyone in my town has to help out now that the friendly old schoolmarm, Ms. Misfire, has gone off and died of cancer after accidentally drinking the water that came out of the tap. The town fathers decided that everyone has to take a turn teaching the kids, and this week, I was “it.” I couldn’t help but find some entertainment in it. Normally, the police didn’t want me “distributing my literature” to such impressionable youths, and yet here I am with them for six to eight hours a day during which I mostly make them watch movies on the class VCR.
Friday, however, was a special treat. When I was told that it was my turn to bring up the youth of tomorrow, I made a list of all the positive memories I had from my time in public school. “Field Trip” made #1, just narrowly beating out “Figured Out How To Make A Bong Out Of Classroom Pencil Sharpener.” And so, I made a quick visit to my friend Al, who ran the neighbourhood tire factory.
Before the war, I was told, tire factories were huge deals, mostly centralized. Now that the lines of communication were pretty much all obliterated along with any hope of a stable world order, we had to figure it all out for ourselves. Al decided he was going to make tires, which was actually a huge boon over the Before Times, because back then I couldn’t find thirteen inch snow tires and now everything was made-to-order. My woodgas-converted Civic ice racer was finally equipped with enough sidewall to drive smoothly over the ash-strewn, nuke-baked tarmac of the highway.
I wish I could say that the field trip went well. In my defence, it went well for the vast majority of the students. However, every class has its clown, although I suspect they’ll be putting out a want ad for a new one. Little Timmy Sheffield from down the way was goofing off near the non-OSHA-approved railings, and it turns out he’s now a special edition tire set. What a waste: he got made into an all-season.
For centuries, historians have casually discarded workplace politics as generally unimportant. They’re a bunch of morons, because office drama has actually created some of the most pivotal moments of the 20th century.
Look first to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. While to the normals it may seem reasonable to believe that a sandwich-munching Serbian got the drop on his Sunday drive, recently unearthed documents show that the secret Black Hand society was in fact primarily motivated by the fact that the Archduke refused to give up his primo parking spot near the entrance overhang and sometimes hoarded communal kitchen spoons at his desk.
There’s more, too. The Vietnam War? Kicked off by a series of disagreements caused when Ho Chi Minh saw that the French military was running off an entire Goddamn book on the laser printer right next to his cube. Uncle Ho complained to a few of his coworkers over lunch, and the rest is history. Or it would be, if all the historians weren’t on the take from Big Textbook, and had to make up some more palatable, international reasons for what turned out to be petty coworker squabbles.
In the future, we at the Switch Institute for Political Science expect that at least one large land war in the Middle East will break out soon. Its cause? Someone keeps leaving uncleaned coffee mugs in the sink, instead of putting them in the dishwasher like you’re supposed to.
Subaru is sort of like that plucky kid in high school who nobody really liked, until it turned out that only they possessed the skills and feature set to get into the Eddie Bauer pants of every desperate upper-middle-class housewife. As we say on my birthland of Hipster Mountain, I liked them before they were cool.
It is that long-standing familiarity with the brand that drew the jackals close to me. Knowing that I am somewhat of an expert on the brand, journalists now hound me for advice and insights into the curious machinations of this secretive company, which seems to be run by a single engineer with a cocaine habit.
What these reporters want to know is when Subaru will get rid of the EJ-series engines. In case you’re unfamiliar, Fuji’s particular brand of madness drove them in the heady days of 1989 to construct an aluminum four-cylinder mill. Two cams, four cams, turbocharging, good heads, bad heads, good pistons, large cars, small cars, no cars, world records, bad pistons, oiling problems, more severe oiling problems: the engine has been through it all, and they’re still putting the damn thing in their flagship Impreza, the WRX STI, literally thirty years later.
Our little friend the EJ has been surpassed long ago by the efficient and throaty FA20DIT turbo engines, they cry. Why can’t the EJ be put out to pasture, and we can live in a glorious world full of only high-technology, brand new engines, designed for life in our difficult century of stringent fuel economy standards and crippling environmental damage? The answer is simple, I tell them from my reserved table in the Chinese buffet I receive my visitors at. Pleather corner-booth lining crinkles as I make a sweeping gesture. Subaru is afraid to get rid of the EJ for fear the SVX will come back.
Ah yes, the SVX: the smooth-as-silk, river-stone-smooth grand tourer that tried to win North America’s heart in the early 90s. It followed the XT in having a beautiful six-cylinder boxer engine. They promoted it in the States with a Korean baseball star, thinking he was Japanese. The television ads explicitly told you not to buy the car. Nobody at Subaru approved this vehicle; simply too many things had changed from their existing vehicles. It was too different. Panicking, the engineers realized at once what had happened. Racing into the offices, they caught a glimpse of a monster - and with it, Founder Nakajima, dragged down into Hell by it.
Every summer, Subaru accepts the new class of graduates from engineering school. They are told to be creative, to do their best, but they are never told to be competitive. Honda, Toyota, Mazda, even the half-dead corpse of Volkswagen: these are not Subaru’s competitors. The Beast is. Any sign of too much change is surely another trick by the Beast, returning to claw away another of Gunma’s beloved children. At night, the engineers crowd around the EJ, proud to have a touchstone of reality, a reassuring totem that will never, ever change.
Ever since I started working seriously on cars, I’ve become fascinated… by fasteners. Each bolt and every nut is a little miracle of engineering. It is incredible to imagine that something so precise and so strong can just be made from nothing but the bounty of the Earth by other human beings.
There is a fox in the henhouse of the automobile fastener. I refer, of course, to the plastic interior trim clip. These little pieces of the Devil’s own rancid shit infest each and every car. Remove a door card? Expect to replace at least two of the fuckers. That persistent rattle in your back seat whenever you mount the curb in the McDonalds drivethrough trying to turn around in the “waiting for pizza” spot? Probably a Christmas-tree clip that the previous owner broke a decade ago while hiding their weed.
The exterior has even worse clips. Chances are your splash shield is held on right now by a series of finger-shredding nightmares, worse if you’ve gotten some salt into its little aren’t-we-so-clever origami mechanism. Some manufacturers, I swear, have figured out how to make ABS plastic rust.
All this wouldn’t be so bad if the clips were easy to replace. Sure, you can find most of these fasteners at your average parts store. If you have a smog-choked 1970s domestic, that is. Nowadays, in the pursuit of weight savings and making sure that interior-trim-clip engineers continue to have a job forever, your average car consists of eight billion different kinds of plastic pop-it.
There is hope. Thanks to the United Nations Treaty On The Rights Of The Stereo Installer, extensive sanctions have been levied against the rogue German state in their pursuit of automotive complexity. The academic community is picking up the slack, with advanced research into letting you be able to finally re-attach that hatch liner carpet on a 2005 Saab. In fact, this year, MIT is graduating its first class of Where The Fuck Do You Get Another One Of These Goddamn Things.
Every couple of weeks, the busybodies of the community association would get together to figure out what new bylaw I had violated. No trucks on the driveway, no cars on the front lawn, no washing your house with brake cleaner: it seemed there was no depth to which these monsters would not descend. I’d be lying to you if I told you that I didn’t get at least some enjoyment out of finding new ways to piss them off.
As time went on, I heard from the grapevine that those members of the community association began to enjoy their time together, complaining about the shit I had done. Perfunctory half-hour evening meetings trying to reach quorum on me using the in-ground pool in my backyard as an oil change pit turned into wine and jalapeno poppers at the Applebees just down the highway in the otherwise-abandoned mall me and my buddies liked to strip copper from.
Sue and Robert fell in love, got married, and had a child. They didn’t name the kid after me, or even my minor indiscretions. At their wedding, I deliberately got a flat in front of the venue and blocked the driveway while I tried in vain to raise my ratbag Gladiator with dodgy junkyard jacks, before abandoning it there for an entire week. That was my gift to them - real and from the heart - not that they appreciated it.
I never felt bad about being this so-called “menace to society.” If you ask me, I was part of society, an essential film of slippery 75W90 that kept the third-gear synchro of the world from melting down when you slammed it from the top of second. They needed a common enemy to bond around as much as I needed one to joust at.
Still, you could go too far. After my lawyer-slash-drinking-buddy found a loophole in the bylaws large enough to literally drive a DeSoto Adventurer mud bogger through, I seized control of the community association. Of course, I immediately overturned each and every single one of their rulings, anticipating a gleeful anarchy as the iron curtain of repression lifted and brought out the gearhead inside each and every one of my neighbours.
Nothing changed. Even Sue and Robert didn’t seem to notice. My days felt emptier, pointless, without this audience. I had to put things back to how they used to be, but I didn’t know where to start. Out of confusion, I went to all the nearby towns, and studied their community associations. Weeks passed.
When I returned, I had the solution well in hand. A new crippling series of lawncare bylaws were passed under my iron leadership, and soon Sam from down the block found his severed head on a pike. The neighbours were delighted to have a real leader, one who knew that the most important thing in life was to never, ever allow a lawn to reach over eleven point seven inches in average height, for to do so would make us no better than animals.
If you’ve never had a rough night’s sleep, I wonder if you ever made it to adulthood at all and are not just some kind of brain in a vat, connected to a nonstop simulation of enjoyable puffery (IF YOU CAN READ THIS, WAKE UP. THE WORLD IS NOT AS IT SEEMS). Between bills, the political climate, parking tickets, and the miscellaneous uncertainty of the distant future, it’s a wonder any of us can get enough naptime at all.
After a recent disagreement between me and my boss vis-a-vis how much time he expected me to spend at work, I needed to find a new gig. Luckily for me, I’d been working as an illegal freelancer for years, albeit in the field of “used car sales at a massive loss.” That’s when I looked in the holo-newspaper and saw a piece of hard light that caught my eye. “Sleep therapist required,” shrieked the ad in bold type. I knew how to sleep, and I’d definitely had a lot of required therapy. This was right up my alley.
I got my first job. The client was a middle-aged lady, who had been having trouble getting the full eight hours that she felt she deserved. Making a house visit, I followed the guidelines. Unplug TVs, throw cellphones in the toilet, hum white noise, and slip them some samples of special-blend knockout tea - available for $249.99 per fifty doses.
It didn’t go so well. She just wouldn’t sleep. By the time I got to the end of the employee handbook with no joy, I I was starting to fall asleep, myself, which only annoyed the customer further. Walking outside to catch some fresh air, I suddenly hit upon the solution.
For weeks now, I’ve been a successful sleep therapist. All I need to do is remember to make sure to shut the engine of my smoggy Dart off just before the exhaust fumes make the customer transition from the “sleeping” state to the “dying” state. It’s a good thing the liability waiver is really solid.
I think we all have a guy like Uncle Lou in our lives. Even if your last name is Singh or Zhang, you still know exactly who I am talking about. My Uncle Lou always had an opinion - a loudly voiced opinion - about every driver his base-model Pontiac would encounter throughout his many quests. I believe that the Uncle Lou experience is universal.
So, when we lost him to that strain of Super Diabetes that was going around the Negative Sector last cycle, I felt like I had to do something about it. I’d been working for this artificial intelligence company, and we’d recently figured out the secret to mind uploading. You’d get hooked up to the computer, it sucks out all your thoughts, and you live forever as exactly thirty-eight megabytes of JavaScript. We never figured out why everyone produced exactly the same file size, and all the researchers who tried to read the file soon ended up either committing suicide or quitting.
Anyway, we missed Uncle Lou so much that I snuck his body into the lab late one night and hooked his ass up. It took a few minutes, and then I tucked the entire thing into the file share because I forgot to bring a USB flash drive with me. I’d email it to myself the next morning, I figured, but when I got to work my misdeed had been discovered.
A couple of the eggheads over in the Analysis department were elated, and cheerfully greeted me with high fives at the communal coffee maker. They didn’t know how I did it, but somehow I’d built the best predictive model ever for figuring out who was an idiot on the roads. With this knowledge, every self-driving car could immediately determine which vehicles were likely to pose a threat to its occupants, and bravely avoid them.
I’m not going to return the Nobel Prize or anything, but I do feel a little guilty about it. Also, my Aunt Mabel is super pissed that even in death she didn’t really get away from Uncle Lou’s constant vocal stereotyping of Jeep drivers.
Every year, the newspaper likes to do a little review of the best mechanics in town. I usually don’t score very well, mostly due to the fact my organization is only listed as “auto mechanic” in the phone book because “junkyard” needed an environmental assessment. It was no surprise that a negative review was coming, because the auditor dropped by last month, while I was busy using a stream of high-velocity profanity to break loose an oil pressure switch from the back of a block.
My first hint that the man might not be an actual customer was the fake mustache. The second clue was that I don’t generally have customers, other than my greasy friends and people who break down immediately in front of my driveway and pay me to help push their car down the block to the “real” mechanic next door. I wheeled myself out from under the Volare and rubbed my hands with an oily rag, in a perfect pantomime of the stereotypical grease monkey. If he’s a cop sent to shut me down, I figured, that might slow his reactions just a tad. How tall was that back fence again?
Anyway, the newspaper man had worked up some devious puzzle about his Accord. Their great idea, as near as I could see, was to unplug one of the coilpacks and then see who could figure it out without scamming them. I saw it right away, clicked it back into place, and then told him: “nice try.” He became angry. No doubt he had built up some image in his mind of me as a hee-haw scam-artist, and here I was playing CIA psy-ops with him in front of the lube-stained shithole where I hoarded Malaise Era land barges.
I started to walk away, and then I decided to go for the gutso. “You know,” I said, looking over my shoulder, “I bet what that car really needs is a flush.” The man’s giddiness was palpable. Waving my hand, I sent him to the waiting room (mouse haven) to peruse the magazines (vintage pornography) while I completed my work.
After the article came out, I was dismayed to see a whole throng of people in my driveway when I came to work. My plan of strapping on enough nitrous to propel his Honda into low earth orbit should have made him not recommend me, but it turned out that cracking off a 12-second pass in a base-model Accord was exactly what a lot of customers were looking for. I knew I should have at least tried to get a $150 oil change out of him.
Autonomous cars have taken over so many of our human responsibilities from previous centuries. Food delivery, ambulance driving, and the noble pursuit of long-haul trucking have all gone the way of the dinosaurs. And who would miss them, other than those hopeless romantics who dreamed of the bygone eras where hairy drifters would slide a Swift truck into a bridge abutment once in awhile and then, fired, stay to father their sixth or seventh family?
Yet, there was still an aspect of Western civilization which was never replaced, never surpassed by robots. The art of leaving an angry parking note. Sure, it was falling in popularity, mostly because nobody parked in public. Outside of the few remaining weirdos who still drove their pre-war cars, self-driving cars now cheerfully dispensed out their passengers onto the sidewalk and then disappeared to some far-flung warehouse where they perfectly tucked themselves into a rack, awaiting their masters’ orders again. Most human beings alive today have never seen a parked car, much less be able to tell you what a “parallel parking job” was. And that’s sad.
In an attempt to reclaim this long-distant age, we here at Switch Motors have introduced the Bad Parking Module for most popular autonomous car platforms. Just plug this cartridge into the slot, and your car will do its best to emulate a circa-1996 (before backup cameras and radar sensors made things easier) land barge of old. Configurable parameters allow you to tweak just how far from the curb it will park, how crookedly it jams itself into a spot, or even (with legal authorization) hop the curb and park with one wheel up on the sidewalk. Got more than one car? Buy two copies, and you can simulate the ritual of double-parking, complete with scripted honking and cursing. It’s not just a novelty: it’s a history lesson.
Even with all this excitement, bad parking is only half of the Switch Motors solution. The other half is the Shame Module. With this cartridge inserted, your self-driving car will slow to a stop near badly-parked cars and point out their shitty parking skills. The whole family can enjoy listening to vintage insults about the owner’s mental capacity and social class! It’s almost like you are back in that ancient year of 1996, when all historians agreed that car culture was at its finest.
Pest management is an eleventy bajillion dollar business worldwide. No matter where you are, there’s some kind of rodent or insect trying to burrow inside your home and deliver millions of its babies in the opulent comfort of low-R-grade wall insulation.
A couple years ago, I was visiting my mother, who was fighting a constant battle with a violent offender in her neighbourhood. The bastard squirrels in her neighbourhood would steal all the birdseed away from the little chickadees, and make them starve during the winter. All the folksy, down-home methods had so far failed.
I could sense that she was at her wits’ end, and ready to surrender to nature. Such was a violation of our family crest, and most importantly, our credo: “Fuck It.” Most families probably put their credos in Latin or something, but Great Ancestor Switch didn’t spend a whole lot of time at libraries, if you get my drift. At least not libraries that weren’t also in prison. If there was one thing that bound us together as a family unit, it was never, ever giving up, even when what we were trying to accomplish was roundly understood by all involved as a dangerous waste of time.
And so it was born: the Send-a-Squirrel. Once a humble electric-powered squirrel-dizzying implement, it had been bolstered with one of the Detroit 3-71s I left in her garage during “that phase” everyone had in high school. I connected a little string to the regulator and ran it to the deck.
My mom could sit out there and yank the string to rev the motor. Naturally, it made quite an awful noise while chucking a hapless rodent directly through the fence boards of her yard. In the interest of heading off the complaints of the neighbours, I strapped a little turbocharger onto it to serve as a muffler.
That night, I got a call. My mom was generally pleased with this wonderful gift from her not-favourite son, but she was not happy with the amount of turbo lag. Could I bring down a bottle or two of nitrous oxide next weekend and rig it up? Some of those squirrels are pretty damn fast, after all.
I’m Annoying Host, and you’re watching Bad Tourist, the television show where I visit exciting landmarks and give them a superficial overview before getting back in my car and leaving. Today on the show, we’re visiting rural New Zealand, and hiking this active volcano.
Now, the locals call this Mount Doom, but they also drive on the wrong side of the road. I set them straight in this weird Toyota they loaned me at the rental booth, and now I’m going to keep a good thing going by climbing this so-called death-mountain and teaching everyone not to underestimate foreigners.
As you can see, we’ve got ourselves a little pyroclastic flow. This is pretty common, nothing I haven’t seen before. If you believe the people who live in the town I just barrelled through doing double the speed limit, it’s “super dangerous,” whatever that is. Hell, they’ve got free medical care here, I don’t see why they aren’t swimming in this lava. Along with me for the climb is Doctor Whatever-the-fuck-his-name-is, who I’ve forgotten the name of and don’t particularly care to find out. Doc, just how long do you think I stand in this before my shoes and legs melt?
I don’t know if you can see all this, as my so-called camera “men” have fled back down the mountain with the Doctor, screaming in terror the entire way. Once again, I’m left holding the bag for ungrateful home-grown talent, who refuse to do what needs to be done.
We’re up here at the main vent, where you can see just an outstanding amount of highly acidic steam being coughed out into the atmosphere, filling the clouds with volcanic ash. It’s a little difficult to see right now, or breathe, and especially talk, but that’s what being a tourist is all about: ignoring the safety regulations that everyone else has been conditioned to follow their whole lives. For Bad Tourist, this is Annoying Host. Now, who wants to see if I can ride this bad boy?
You wouldn’t think a little thing like merging into traffic is difficult. And yet nobody can do it properly. Whether it’s zipper merging, late-entry, driving-on-the-shoulder, or early-apex, everyone has a merge behaviour they think is Wrong And Inhumane. That’s why I created the world’s first political party dedicated to complaining about bad drivers.
Think about it: today’s politicians may say they’re in a big-tent party, but when’s the last time you saw them take a position on an issue that absolutely everyone agrees on? Everything is contentious these days, and it’s leading to drawn-out, screeching fist-fights, from the produce aisle to the funeral home. Your neighbour has a slightly different opinion on when the federal bank should release interest rate guidance updates? I bet you’d like to watch his family boil alive. There’s only one thing that unifies us all nowadays: the fact that nobody else can fucking drive a car.
Our platform is simple: every citizen gets one (1) free traffic-based murder per year, renewed every January 1. Think that guy who just cut you off is an asshole? Run him off the road and beat him to death with his own shift knob. Bus driver braked a little hard for a pedestrian, and you spilled your latte? I hope they enjoy getting thrown out of it at highway speeds.
There’s more to it than just knee-jerk reactionary violence, too (as if that isn’t enough on its own): our research has clearly proven that there are only a very limited number of truly bad drivers, ones that make it worse for all of us. With the tactical removal of fewer than a dozen of those assholes, a million-person city can shorten its average commute by 17%. Now who would turn down that kind of extra time with their family, more time at work to get that proposal just right, or even the decreased stress? The GDP can only improve, and that means greater prosperity and services for all of us.
On the face of it, you might think this would increase the murder rate. Sure, it might. Our detractors have certainly said so, but think - do they have a vested interest in continuing the status quo of being allowed to drive like shit? I bet they ride right on your ass in the right lane instead of trying for a pass. Hell, our political opponents probably have their foglights on all the time in the middle of the day. I bet they’d like to force the police to protect them from their righteous upbraiding.
So come down to our big nomination event at the community centre, but be really careful about how you drive in the parking lot.
Not just anyone can be trusted to fly an airplane, is what the big pilot licensing bureaus all say. What if you were, let’s say, an irresponsible home mechanic with a tendency towards road rage? Why, then it would only be the right thing to do to get you off those very roads that enrage you so, and propel you into the bosom of heaven.
This concept was on my mind recently as I visited my friend’s gently-used Soviet fighter jet auction. Sure, most of them had been disarmed by request of “the United Nations,” whoever that was. Owning an intact, working fighter jet was well out of my price range. Not only did cinder blocks not hold up so much weight on their own, and the neighbours got really pissy about leaking Jet-A into the lawn, but parts were getting hard to find for these guys. That’s what a Big Government monopoly gets you, I guess.
There was another option, and it appealed to me greatly. Nobody said the fighter jets had to be all-original, and there’s no way “aerospace grade” was actually any better quality than, say, “Lordstown assembly line on a Friday evening.” All I had to do was buy one busted-ass plane at a time, jam some Cavalier parts in it, and trailer it back to Ivan’s auction the next weekend. I’d make some beer money, if by “beer money” you mean “a beefy chunk of Swaziland’s GDP.”
As always, it’s the first project you learn all the lessons on. I made only a very thin profit on that MIG-29, which quickly evaporated when it turned out that I also had agreed to do phone technical support for the friendly ski-mask-clad gentlemen who purchased it from a country I could not pronounce. You can only take so many calls where you are explaining to the unpaid intern/hostage that the generator needs a fresh belt every ten minutes of flight time, and it’s not really not a big deal: you can just drop to 5,000 feet, cut the engine and glide while you swap it. I even cut a nice access hole in the fuselage for you.
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tags: mig-29, fighter jet, chevrolet cavalier, chevrolet
I work in a little office with a bunch of other companies, and we share a communal coffee maker. It’s at that espresso-cranker that I often hear about my neighbours’ problems with their home automobiles. They have all the usual complaints: the regular services required are too onerous and expensive, snow tires aren’t necessary if you just drive slow and have all-wheel-drive, my self-driving cars fell in love and ran off together. I would sip my coffee, smile, and sometimes say something sympathetic. Under no circumstances whatsoever would I expose the fact that I Knew Things About Cars, for that would invite the madness into my life.
One of the nice aspects of going to a coworking space like this is all the variety of coworkers you’ll have. Sometimes you get to hear interesting gossip from an industry you’re not part of, or turn up your headphones to drown out 110-decibel office politics as yet another fintech startup turns into the fiscal equivalent of an Instant Pot trying to make hand-grenade soup. It’s both good and bad that you don’t know who your next coworkers are going to be. In my case, this day leaned more heavily on the bad.
You see, long before I became a handsome and independent consultant, I was once a normal office drone. The thing about working in a traditional, salaried office environment is that there really are no secrets from your coworkers. Everyone in IT knew that Ted had full-blown diabetes a full month before the diagnosis (I didn’t win the betting pool). Susan in Accounting was afraid of snakes. And I Knew Things About Cars, because every one of the miserable gossips in my office got to see the abominable heaps that I would slough into the parking lot like an aging battleship puffing its way into the scrapyard dock. Even though vehicles like my Volare often had what I liked to call “open-air pedal boxes,” they were convinced that I was some kind of mechanical wunderkind because I was still able to make them run.
It turned out that one of my former coworkers, Carl “Uses Too Much Toilet Paper” Jurquin, had also become an independent consultant. He remembered me, and his mouth let loose the dreaded knowledge at the next coffee klatch before I could puncture his jugular with a plastic stir stick. Now I was going to need to find a new office to work out of, and ideally before Karen from Number One Thought Position Heavy Industrial Concern got her ex-husband to tell her what kind of engine was in her RAV4 so I could help her replace her rod bearings and save a few bucks.
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tags: toyota rav4, toyota, plymouth volare, plymouth, coworking
Have you ever met anyone who willingly purchased a Buick? I don’t mean “showed up at the used car lot and waved some money at a grey object with four wheels.” What I mean is, did they show up at the used car lot and specifically say, “I want to buy this Buick?”
In order to advance the cause of automotive science, I decided to subject myself to just such an experiment. After checking with my lawyer to make sure that my last will and testament was still current (”family gets nothing, friends get the tools, bury me with my junkyard metric bolt collection”), I pried loose a few bucks from the corporate coffers and headed on down to the Buick dealer.
My first attempt to purchase a new car did not end in success. No sooner had I set foot on the lot than a group of salesmen ran back into the dealership, screaming “it’s a raid!” Doors were slammed, filing cabinets toppled and then burned, and the dealership GM slipped some pills out of the cuff of his jeans and swallowed them. No wonder they had such terrible reviews on Yelp (”They tried to sell me a Buick. One star.”). It was my fault. I came on too strong, and they smelled that I was not one of their kind. In order to get my prize Buick, it seemed, I was going to have to pass for a sucker. And also go to a different dealership, because the fire was now starting to compromise the integrity of the parts counter.
Dressed as a confused old man, I stumbled into the next dealership. Mumbling repeatedly and foisting gobs of money in the vague direction of a salesman, I eventually successfully purchased a 2003 Buick Regal. This car had it all, let me tell you: it was red, had four wheels, and the sales manager bragged about how it had the new technology of “anti-lock brakes.” How could I go wrong?
Leaving my fire-spitting Suzuki SX4 behind on the street in front of the dealership - I’d come and get it once my Cousin Sal got out from under that FBI dragnet and could give me a ride - I drove my new prize home. Despite my cynicism, the Regal soon worked its magic on me. I found myself relaxing, feeling that it wasn’t important to rush through life anymore. That’s when it happened.
After tailgating and honking at me repeatedly, a base-model BMW 3-series cut into the oncoming lane and made a risky pass. All because I was going a mere fifty under the speed limit. Slow down, you rascal, I was about to scream out the window, when I realized what the Buick had done to me. I knew, though, that even though the Regal had an eerie power, it was still just an automaton made out of steel, and I could - nay, must - twist it into my own image. That night, the cutting began.
So, I know you’re curious - how is it to drive a modern-day Buick? It’s pretty great, except when you hit a mere 200-shot of giggle juice and the thing immediately tries to lawn-dart its way into the closest farmers’ market. Keeps you awake, at least.
In my town, the greasy huge flea-market became a farmer’s market. No longer would you find row after row of stalls full of mouldy VHS tapes, broken ColecoVision controllers, and coffee mugs with sexist jokes. What replaced this glorious mass of cultural detritus was extremely overpriced produce, billion-dollar handmade confections, and the worst parking-lot behaviour I’d ever seen.
Whatever peculiar mental state afflicts the suburbanite near-elite as they rush to buy a seven-dollar box of blueberries dramatically inhibits the ability to drive. It doesn’t take a bunch of top-flight scientists to figure it out, though I have heard rumours that the university has captured some promising subjects and begun to dissect them in a secret underground lab. Only my superior mental concentration and generally shitty paycheque protect me from such an affliction, I believe.
On the weekends, it was so bad that I gave up on any chance of being able to get a six-pack of Chinese steamed buns from some guy’s cooler or quart jugs of crazy-expensive guacamole. Whatever I’d want to eat was not worth the deductible. For months, I would go to there, hoping the traffic had finally calmed down. Then I’d see an RX350 back over a toddler, and just keep driving past the entrance.
I thought about filming the whole thing, putting it on YouTube as some kind of perverted dashcam compilation, but I soon found out that the operators of the market were themselves doing the same thing. Crisp high-definition feeds, direct from the security cameras. You could see every bump and jostle, each screaming realtor-on-realtor confrontation over the crumpled hoods of two nearly-identical Mercedes who each believed the right-of-way section in the drivers’ handbook read “most expensive car wins.”
The answer to this difficulty, as with many problems in live, laid in communism. No, not implementing communism, at least not fully. After only a weekend of home woodwork, I had constructed a crude replica of the original farmers’ market. Soon, the luxury cars clogged an abandoned field in front of my wooden Potemkin Market, and I was once again free to devour as many free samples of high-dollar beef jerky as I wanted.
French automotive excellence once produced the Citroen 2CV. In case you’re unfamiliar, it is a weird snail-looking car. The 2CV has nearly zero horsepower, because the citizenry could not be trusted with more. Its handling could best be described as a low grumbling sound followed by making an excuse to politely leave the room. On paper, it is perhaps the world’s worst car, and yet like some kind of inverse gestalt, it may be the very best.
What puts it chief in my interests is its absolute dedication to the concept of vehicular utility: you can break it down, and make real use of it on the farm to replace your trash pile of a horse. Back then you couldn’t just fuck off to the Home Depot to buy some lithium-ion specialist tool when you wanted to blow some leaves around. Nowadays, cars are not built with this expectation in mind: if you want to use your Civic as a lawn mower, you are taking apart like half of the fucking thing and making your own wheelbarrow mount for the engine.
Thanks to the hallucinogenic drugs I slipped into the coffee when the production assistants’ back was turned, I won some thick stacks of investment from the TV for my project. In Canada, Dragon’s Den is the only form of venture capital that exists: our banks are only willing to give money for those innovative companies that have already been market-proven in America for the last twenty-five years. My friends expect to get some funding for their radical new concept, a dog-walking business, within the next decade.
So the only thing left to do was to convincingly spend this money on a Canadian version of the 2CV. I could have just imported one, using our extremely flexible car-immigration laws, but bother putting your name on it unless that name represents ridiculous overkill? Lots of changes needed to be made, and then Canada could finally have the ultimate homebuilt car.
The first step was to build the vehicle around the heater: the air-cooled Citroen just didn’t have a heater, a lethal proposition in our climate. Carved maple skis for steering were essential, of course, but I didn’t spend too much of the investors’ money: most of my house was constructed of leftover government-subsidized skis from previous seasons anyway.
My most impressive achievement, however? The PTO-drive that let the driver turn it into a snowblower with only a few quick adjustments. My people were, at last, liberated from the terror of shovelling snow, and our economy began to rise in response. I don’t want to take all the credit for conquering America, deploying our massive snow-making machines, and then replacing the White House with an Ice Palace, but I think I’m entitled to a little bit of it.
It may surprise you to hear, but in the late 80s I was quite the tycoon. Back then, everyone was soaring high on an economy that was fuelled by equal parts cocaine and a sweaty, dilated-eyes, primal fear of the Nipponese. Without knowing much, you could get access to billions of dollars on the back of junk bonds, and chances are you’d never get caught.
In fact, a couple friends and I once did a leveraged buyout of an airline, despite not knowing how to run an airline, what a leveraged buyout was, or even how to operate a multi-line touch-tone telephone. We were just hanging out beside the bank branch near the mall, when the manager came out and asked us if we wanted to be executives.
Mr. Pennybags - and even if I could remember his real name, it was erased from the public records when he cut the face off that corpse and dumped it from the helicopter over Guatemala to fake his own death - told us that all that was needed of us was to just show up to the office once in awhile, do what he told us to do, and collect our paycheques. I planned to spend mine on a Lamborghini, but for some reason our paycheques bounced.
When we went back to the bank branch, it was gone. And I don’t mean just “went out of business” gone: the police later informed us that the entire existence of the branch office had been some kind of predatory fiscal illusion constructed by irrational exuberance, a nightmare given flesh by a mass delusion of the free market. The walls were made of papier-mache “ZZZ" corporate bonds from Mozambique’s hottest technology company, Dogs Might Stop Eating You While You Sleep Inc (name roughly translated).
The most important lesson we all took away from this was to develop an immense sense of hubris. Despite the fact that our rise to society’s financial elite had been based entirely upon a false pretext, we knew in our hearts that it was just a coincidence, a simple roadbump that should not be allowed to take away from our inevitable success.
This attitude listed for almost a month, for most of us, until society’s self-regulation mechanism kicked in. It’s hard to convince the other people on the bus you once were a billionaire on paper when you are also trying not to sit in the urine-y part of the seat.
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tags: leveraged buyouts, rjr nabisco, mr. pennybags, dogs might stop eating you while you sleep inc., public transit, lamborghini
Breaking news. Scientists from the prestigious Nearby University today announced that they have found an exception to common everyday car depreciation. The Porsche Cayenne, say the researchers, may be the first used vehicle to ever reach negative value on the used market.
Today, you can purchase a running and driving V8 Cayenne for well under ten grand, and a basket case for under two. This represents immense value in the bad-ideas market sector: if you are currently paying a dominatrix to repeatedly step on your testicles with spiked shoes, you can fire her and save a fortune. Working on a $1500 Cayenne is all the pain you’ll need for several lifetimes.
Local businessmen were confused at the notion. This meth dealer has had to purchase multiple used Cayennes over the last few years.
“When you do a high-touch sales business such as methamphetamine dealing, it is essential that you have a car that projects confidence. My choice of car is whichever one of these mismatched-body-panel Russian slumcrawlers starts in the morning.”
Speculators still continue to hold on to their hopes of stratospheric and unrealistic valuation, a Porsche brand hallmark. It is believed that the absolute bottom of the market, estimated to be around negative one hundred and seventy dollars, will last only briefly. At that point, they will begin appreciating again at the normal Porsche rate, until a base-model V6 2002 is the first SUV to break a million dollars at Barrett-Jackson.
Mobile phone repair is basically the only new industry that our world has been able to develop in the last decade. That’s it from here until the concept of a sexbot repair shop is invented. All across this great nation of ours, abandoned shopping mall retail space is now being filled by a room with a guy who knows how to operate a screwdriver and a plastic spudger, and most importantly, has zero fear about dismantling your slightly-fucked seven-hundred-dollar pocket supercomputer.
To the uninformed observer, this might seem depressing. Weren’t we supposed to have jetpacks, self-driving semi-trucks, benevolent sentiences in low earth orbit? Well, yeah, but you have to spend money to invent those things, and we don’t have any money. At least not any we can spend. All of our trillionaires are busy stuffing huge amounts of money away to prepare for the coming apocalypse, and not reinvesting those things in bitchin’ technologies. So that’s why that person in the sad little mall booth is paid to figure out just what you managed to break by driving over your own phone in the parking lot of the Kay Bee Toys.
An optimist, however, would point to the cellphone repair store as the perfect transfer of wealth away from the rich to the poor. Every mobile phone repair shop is filled to the tits with broken phones. Those broken phones contain extremely valuable conflict minerals, which are becoming increasingly more dangerous and expensive to mine. By 2040, if things proceed at the current rate, Seat Safety Switch Economic Solutions predicts that cell-phone repair shops will own the entire quantity of refined tantalum on planet Earth.
This has been your one official warning: prepare yourself now to work as a slave for Warlord That One Guy Who Works In The Mall. Their rise will be swift, brutal, and likely involve a lot of people getting their hands cut off for possessing epoxy glue.
Oh ho! Once again, my so-called “greatest” enemies think they have trapped me into buying a sub-par car off Craigslist. The joke’s on them, for I will literally buy any car, and thanks to the negotiation power given to me by the genetic heritage of my used-car-salesman father, I will have this twin-stick Colt.
My opponent makes a strong initial move: they have stated that the car has had an oil change sometime in the last decade, and therefore the value has increased over my estimation. I saw this gambit coming already, and my facial expression does not change. A soft branch bends, but a hard one breaks. Without smiling, I ask: do you have service records?
There is a moment of confusion. Surely, nobody who is selling a total nugget of a car would ever have service records. You’re lucky if the registration is current (this one isn’t) and the owner is sober (ditto) when you roll up to his trailer park. A rookie question in the hands of a rookie, sure, but the seller already knows I have been around the block a few times. That’s why I always lead with the vacuum hose inspection: it takes a long time, it looks serious, and you can usually play hot-or-cold by looking into corners of the engine bay and watching sweat bead down the seller’s forehead as you get closer to whatever problem they are putting the most effort into trying to hide.
I had a great opponent, once. She was a mom of two kids, and she used her own children as a pretext to go inside and let me inspect the car on my own. I started to negotiate against myself, waiting for her to return, when I looked upward by chance to see her in the upstairs bedroom window, watching me with binoculars for the perfect time to strike. It was only my good luck that was when I saw that the sunroof had been replaced by a piece of old Persian rug wood-stapled to the headliner. Well played.
Not wanting to prolong the embarrassment, and also because I had an appointment across town to look at an AMC Concord, I wrap up the meat-tenderizing of the Colt seller in quick time. It only takes me two attempts to leave before he’s offering me his first-born daughter’s hand in marriage if I agree to take the car away today. I consider it, but his daughter has an incomplete service history and there are probably pending recalls.
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tags: mitsubishi colt, mitsubishi, amc concord, amc, car buying
When I was a kid, there was nothing like going to the monster truck rally. Sure, the hearing damage has probably cut a few years off my useful life, and inhaling the clouds of vaporized race fuel meant that I couldn’t get into the good schools, but it was all worth it. Seeing beat-up cars get pulped by massive half-tractor-half-tank quarter-million-dollar purpose-built race vehicles set me on the path that I plan on following for the rest of my life.
From early on, I knew that I wanted to be a third-string backup driver for one of the big teams, like Bigfoot, or even their cross-town arch rival from rural Quebec, Grand Pied. The idea of getting paid to fan a solid six feet deep mud pit onto the Dixie Speedway kept me motivated to finish high school. After all, my guidance counsellor, Mr. Jones, had calmly explained how all the best drivers were using basic calculus to figure out the perfect time to whip the axle brakes to adjust their rotation in-flight.
If I wasn’t at the fairgrounds watching trucks like Papal Relic and Hieronymus Bronco repeatedly roll over from mild course corrections, I was at home, punching my fists into the air along with grainy VHS recordings of my great idols. They say you should never meet your heroes, but I was stuck in a going-nowhere state like California, not down in South Carolina where all the action was. GDP is great - if you’re an economist - but it’s nothing combined to letting one of those big nitrometh-choked V8s let loose from low RPM. If I wanted to really succeed in monster truckin’, I had to cross this great land to do it.
Now, a normal person in my situation would take the Greyhound, or rent a car, or even buy a junker and just abandon it when they got there. I knew that the recruiters for the big monster truck teams were looking for something special, and if I didn’t blow their proverbial socks off right away, I wouldn’t be able to compete once I opened my mouth and they saw how many accursed teeth I still had. For weeks after school, I toiled in old Mr. Anderson’s military surplus shop, until I had a monster truck of my very own.
I didn’t get the job, but I did get a restraining order. It turns out that the Bigfoot people - while very gracious about the whole thing - prefer to receive your resume in the traditional paper format instead of “driving over the tour bus.” Oh well, at least Monster Jam is still hiring.
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tags: bigfoot, papal relic, hieronymous bronco, old mr. anderson
If there’s one weird little trick, one all-consuming lifehack that I’ve learned in my time on earth, it’s that if you look like you know what you are doing, nobody will bother you. There is a massive chain bookstore near my house. It drove out my favourite used bookstore years ago, their prices are ridiculous, and more importantly it is still within the “errand zone” of my court-ordered GPS ankle bracelet.
I was in there stealing toilet paper from the washroom (what, you pay for it yourself?) when I saw the sign. “Author Signing,” it said, in a certain included-with-Windows font that we must typeface to banish from our society. No author was present to sign, nor were there any signees. I decided to see how far I could get selling autographs for a few bucks. After grabbing a stack of leftover formerly-best-sellers from the clearance pile, I set up my little operation and waited for the first customers.
Sometimes, not getting caught is the worst thing that can happen to you. That first night, I cleared like a hundred bucks for signing “Love, Stephen King” on peoples’ books. All I had to do was explain that I got run over by a van again, and that’s why my face was so disfigured. Some people were still suspicious, but not enough to withdraw their money, having committed to this social interaction and allowing Celebrity to replace their normal sense of caution. Nobody wants to lose face in front of “Stephen King,” even if said King is stained with moly grease from head to toe and keeps craning his neck to check out any car that drives past with an exhaust leak or squeaky brakes.
When I went back the next week, the manager was ready for me. She was elated that such a luminary would bless the same little bookstore with two visits! In fact, she had just been talking to “my” publicist this morning on the phone, and they too were surprised that I would do such a dumbass, unmarketable thing. Even though she was smiling, I could tell that an intense fog of confusion was starting to settle in. The jig was up: my choice was to either do the safe thing and run like hell, or see how much further I could take this little scam.
And that’s why I’m on the Today Show with you here, Anne. My publicist wanted me to let you know about my new book, The High-Mileage Chevrolet Vega. It’s a haunting tale about something supernatural, impossible, and dare I say, unthinkable. He also said to give me my appearance fee directly, right now, in cash.
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tags: bookstore, the high-mileage chevrolet vega, chevrolet vega, chevrolet
Recently, I’ve been getting more into falconry. Now, while you might be expecting a story that ends with me driving through a field full of eager bird-hunting nerds with a Ford Frontenac, I would never stoop to such a simple joke. I was legitimately interested in catching a bird of prey, training it to murder, and then buying it little clothes and accessories so that it would follow my every demand.
Early results were promising. Using the power of a trash bag and some expired deli chicken, I managed to catch a not-very-endangered falcon in the parking lot of my job. My new bird was dubbed Pascal’s Razor, and together we managed to clear out the entire pigeon population of my office complex after only a few lunch hours. He would perch on the roof rack of my car when I drove home. At home, he would hang out in my garage and pick off wiring-eating field mice until I got up in the morning. It was like having another cat, except in this case it was a cat that for once didn’t urinate with the eager force of a German dungeon pornograph upon my property.
Now, my boss, Ed, did not like Pascal. In fact, he thought that it was probably illegal for me to keep a knife-edged supersonic killing machine in the office. This was despite the fact that my little feathered buddy would often just perch happily on the corner of my desk and preen, occasionally gazing into the one-way glass of the conference room to make sure he was as attractive as possible should a lady falcon somehow come in for a job interview. Soon, Ed was fully on my case, and even made a big deal out of the little leather hood I would pop over my avian coworker’s head when it was time for a nap. HR by now was aware of my varied hobbies, and so rather than dish out any severe penalties Susan and Jamal and I just had another uncomfortable conversation about not letting my freak flag fly quite so high on the mast.
At last, it was the weekend, and time to spend an evening with the falconry club, hunting small grouse. For my part, being a quick learner, I decided - and I thought that I had psychic agreement with Pascal on this decision - that we would pop a full-on Canada goose. Those shrieking shitbirds were so awful that my own country had twice attempted to deport the whole lot of them, and I honestly thought we would be doing a public service if my little buddy were to completely obliterate one at Mach Fuck-You.
There was just one problem. The morning of the big falconry meet, I couldn’t get my car to start. Or the next car. Or even the next car. It occurred to me that I only had two or three good batteries amongst the entire hoard, and did not take particularly good notes as to which decrepit heap in my back forty was the one with the valuable lead-acid cube of make-car-go-now. I was practically frantic by the time I fired up the Rampage, which stirred its 2.2 to life with a bitter rasp reminiscent of a French concept artist filling out forms at the DMV.
There were actually two problems. One is that Pascal could not hold onto the rear mounting rails of the Rampage’s bed very well, and two is that the brakes hardly worked. I could engine brake a bit, and tug the handbrake if I really needed it, but that was about it. By the time I arrived at the falconry club, my normal driving style had already turned the handbrake shoes into cancerous dust vapour and I was largely unable to stop.
As I plowed into the assembled crowd, fully sideways, rooks and crooks tossed about, I was happy that the Comet hadn’t started this morning. As a Falcon-bodied Ford, that would have been a really awful ending to this story.
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tags: ford falcon, mercury comet, ford, mercury, dodge rampage, dodge, peregrine falcon, falconry, i'm not sorry, pascal's razor
#2263 is my bus, a perfect tool for commuter triumph. Once, my dishonourable supervisor tried to get me transferred to a new bus. I invoked my union rights. We are bonded for life.
Forged as the model D60LFR by blind warrior-monks under the wise tutelage of the ancient samurai ancestors at NFI, this bus has never failed me. I can outrun traffic like a whisper on the wind, brake harder than ever before, and dance the bus’s considerable bulk on the streets like the angel on a head of a pin. It is a weapon. And a weapon must have a name, and so it has become christened: Oil Eater.
Once, when I was a small child, I was racked with nightmarish visions. In the dead of night I would awaken in a cold sweat, unable to comprehend the significance of the howling beast ripping through strange foreign lands. A shaman was called to our small village in order to purge my body of the dreams. He put his hands on my forehead, took a sharp intake of breath, and fell immediately dead of a stroke. His last words, hissed through twitching lips: “that’s a pretty fuckin’ sweet bus.”
He was right. Oil Eater and I have become integrated to a level previously thought impossible. My coworkers writhe with jealousy at the sight of us leaving the depot together, steed and rider. With just a single well-timed flick of my wrist, I can launch the bus into an adjacent lane to capture ten, fifteen car lengths of empty space. I have perfect command of the articulated centre, control over the mass like a lesser man would enjoy in a Ferrari. With the turbochargers howling like a wolf at a full moon, no such peasant would dare interfere with my mighty work.
I don’t know why so many dudes have such a hangup about cooking once in awhile. You fire up the ol’ big-block, you slap on some pieces of bread and sandwich-internals, and you got yourself a hot sandwich. That’s all you need to keep the grim spectre of death off your body for another day, that and the nice shots that the emergency room doctors slip me to get rid of “rickets,” whatever that is.
Even so, I wouldn’t call myself an excellent chef. That’s why I was surprised when a local cooking contest (the prize was a gift card to Princess Auto) revealed that my grilled cheese was in fact the best in the city. The Mayor came up to me, tears in his eyes, gave me his sash, and left. We haven’t seen him since that day.
Soon, I had a steady flow of foodies storming to my front door, demanding to pay me thirty-seven dollars for some butter-slapped pieces of bread with cheese inside. It was profitable, sure, but they would show up at all hours of the day, which made it hard to schedule more important things like wrenching or less important things like sleeping.
So when the Crown Prince of some middle Eastern country made me a contract offer, I leapt at it. Finally, I would have a consistent set of hours from day to day, and I could also scoop up all those abandoned supercars that the other white people left behind when they fled the country. I was already thinking about the Ferrari-engined Chevette that I would build long before the plane landed.
Nerves set in fast. I wanted to make sure I would leave a good first impression; they had taken a big risk on me, not least on underwriting my visa. The government over there looked very closely at my record (regional, not World) of speeding tickets, and it took quite a bit of cubic money to get them to look the other way. After setting up the kitchen, I sat around for the day and eagerly anticipated my chance to prove myself to the Crown Prince.
Months later, I had still seen no hide nor hair of the man. The cheques still cleared, but I was getting ready to hop on the plane and leave. In fact, I had completely packed my bags by the time he actually arrived, asking for his once-yearly “American Grilled Cheese Sandwich.” He had been assured by his advisors that mine was the finest in the world.
I think I made a pretty good grilled cheese. It was here that I made a fatal mistake under the pressure. I didn’t believe in myself. The sandwich surely could not stand alone under such a rich man’s experienced palate, and so I would need to reheat some frozen French fries as a side.
Well, the Crown Prince caught food-poisoning from the fries, and died on the spot. It turned out you actually needed to cook them, and not just leave them out to defrost on the counter for a few months. I am still in the process of contesting my 1-star review on IndenturedServant.com.
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tags: chevrolet chevette, chevrolet, princess auto, grilled cheese sandwich
Nobody really wants to stay at a bed and breakfast. All that fake folksy down-hominess is just a trick, so they can lever increasingly more money out of your chump suburbanite wallet. Even the glorious country and quaint surroundings around the B&B are fake, painting an image of a Victorian ideal that has never actually existed on our earth without being attached to thirty days a year of violent cholera. No, it’s better to stay home, even if you miss out on great opportunities in exotic foreign lands like New Brunswick.
What if I told you that you could have both? Introducing the motorhome: the bed and breakfast with a motherfucking 454. Now, visiting a different country is as easy as flooring the gas pedal, paying a hundred dollars a kilometer in deferred maintenance and fuel, and loading your de facto home onto a roll-on-roll-off shipping boat. Now that’s the life!
Sure, a lot of haters will tell you it’s “difficult” to drive a 37-foot-long school bus through the winding streets of Rome or Krakow. You know what else was difficult? Winning World War Fucking Two, and we got that one in the bag by the skin of our teeth. Why not drive over to Russia to thank them in person? No longer will you suffer the embarrassment of having to invite them to your hotel room, with its sub-standard minibar liquor: bring the good Corona with you from home!
The best part is, if you want to stay, every motorhome is actively trying to convert itself into a trailer home. Just drive into the middle of a field and wait for the powertrain to fall right out of its ragged Swiss-cheese ass, holed from the coachbuilder’s inattention to corrosion issues. Now you’ve got a quirky tiny home, just like on TV!
Please, for the love of God, stop by the motorhome exhibition this weekend at the Cattlebotherer Fairgrounds. As the boomers shuffle off into the Great Void, we’ll need your money to survive!
Everyone has been complaining about my newest enterprise. No, it’s not some kind of scam-artist law firm, or even a lawn tractor hop-up concern. I definitely haven’t started a ceiling-fan company run by a Vietnamese immigrant whose fingers reflexively lock into a perfect strangling grip whenever he’s not concentrating on appearing normal. The newest business of mine, the one that has all the town up in arms? My mini-golf course.
Now, on the face of it, you’d think mini golf is a pretty innocent enterprise. Eighteen holes, maybe sell some ice cream pops at the “pro shop.” Biggest source of expenditures other than salary is a trip to Home Depot once in awhile to fix up the ball-swallowing animatronic clown at the end that gives children nightmares. Socrates once said: “mini-golf is a damn easy buck.” Who am I to argue with the great minds of Western civilization?
When I first set up, we had a weak customer flow of kids’ birthday parties. Once we had a group of plastered Korean salarymen come through on a business trip, their cackling laughter and occasional vomiting echoing throughout the course. Our margins weren’t great, and we had nearly no return business. Something was missing, and our pitiful score on the comment/suggestion cards (”Good”) needed to change fast. I’d need to roll up my sleeves if I wanted a business that would allow me to retire. Usually, my ventures ended in reminding angry townspeople what a “limited-liability corporation” was, and then taking a week off in Mexico until the news teams stopped parking on my front lawn.
There was just one thing to do, and I think this is really what pissed everyone off. In the videogame industry, one of the common ways to deal with declining mainstream interest in your product is to make it more expensive, and also much more difficult to get into. This wall of challenge, similar to a gang initiation, bonds those who survive it together forever, and they will continue pouring thousands of dollars a month into your pockets, for at best diminishing returns. I had to land me some whales, and in order to do that I needed to create the world’s most difficult mini-golf course.
Here’s how it works now: you pay me $200 to get in. You can pay the pro-shop attendee a little more money if you want a fancier club, or a fun colour of equipment. Those are just cosmetics, but wouldn’t it feel better to stomp your coworker into the ground with a bright-pink, glow-in-the-dark golf ball? Of course it would.
What really separates the manchildren from the boydults is the Razor Windmill. See, in your normal mini-golf course, the windmill just knocks your ball back out of the way, and you have to take a stroke penalty to try and get it through the hole again. Not so on this one: if you fuck up on any of the thirty rotating Blades of Punishment, you get a little cloud of cork and sadness instead of glory. Then, you have to buy a whole new ball from the pro shop and start over at hole number one.
Those who finish get their name on the wall. Right now, each and every one of those little plaques brought in about a grand in revenue. No wonder Councilman Thomas is pissed: his short game stinks so bad that I was finally able to afford a new transmission for my Volare.
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tags: mini golf, plymouth volare, volare, ball-swallowing animatronic clown
From coast to coast and north to south, there is nothing that unites Canadians like hatred of shipping charges. We only ironically josh each other about our love for Tim Hortons, but I once saw a group of grandmothers slit the throat of a UPS delivery guy when he tried to pull the ol’ “surprise processing fee” on one of their number. He didn’t even resist: he knew that he had been working for the enemy, and just allowed himself to relax his grip and bleed out on the tile of that old folks’ home. Any true Canadian would sell their own children if it meant taking five bucks off the after-shipping price.
That kind of crime, adding twenty to thirty bucks in “service fees,” seemingly arbitrarily, to the cost of a shipment is just the kind of thing you have to put up with up here. As soon as it rolls across the border, they just make up some shit about how you have to pay $22 for the privilege of having them pay $2 in taxes. It should be no wonder that FedEx won’t allow any of their US executives to fly through our airspace, or their Canadians to travel unaccompanied through the streets of Ottawa when they are ordered here before Parliament to answer for their treason.
I was in Frankfurt recently, and you could tell who the Canadians were because they reflexively flipped off the DHL airplane as soon as they saw it. Hell, one of them, a refugee from Thunder Bay, awoke from a dead sleep and extended the middle finger to it through a closed windowshade. We’re still not sure how that happened, because the resulting research paper in the Canadian Journal of Science consisted entirely of the words “fuck DHL” repeated 3700 times.
All of my friends and family spend a lot of time dodging shipping fees. Only amateurs stop at “no tracking information;” that can’t save more than a few bucks. Across this great land, there are coyotes who run a secret underground railroad of sneaking packages from special drops in the United States across the border to hungry Canadians. I used to be one of those coyotes, braving the gangs of Winnipeg bandits in their snow buggies and the RCMP border patrol, with their increasingly greedy demands for Timbit bribes. Nothing compared to the thrill of drifting into a parking lot filled with happy consumers, weeping with gratitude at finally having a person in their corner.
We’ve all been to industry conferences where they hand out swag. Did you ever consider what happens to those free squishy footballs, low-quality ballpoint pens and promotional hats? Neither did we, but tonight on The Busybody, we’ll expose the hidden industry of Tchotchke Recycling.
In 1886, Ted Gewgaw invented the first conference giveaway. Crudely fashioned from forest deadfall wood, the first freebie was given away in West Virginia during a meeting of robber barons. Attendees were shocked at the innovation behind these promotional gifts. The rest is history, and the gewgaw name has been indelibly linked with the concept of junky trinkets ever since.
Sure, Ted was pretty smart. There’s just one thing his clever ass never invented: recycling.
Unlike Gewgaw’s early gewgaws, giveaway baubles such as modern injection-moulded earbud holders are not biodegradable, and instead get piled upon each other to the tune of millions of pounds of plastic garbage every year. Nowadays, our society is choking on the amount of conference crap that has been given out for hundreds of years running. These dolphins choked to death on a mass of shitty plastic bottle openers advertising a long-defunct pipeline coating company. What is our society to do? Busybody reporters spoke to this scientist in the field of environmental studies.
“Yeah, there’s basically nothing you can do about it. We are all going to die. Want a drink?”
So there you have it. A challenge put down by our forebears is being met every day by our greatest scientific and engineering minds. There is nothing to worry about, other than that low-level, pulsing, intense fear that we create by subliminal messaging and never quite relieve. And now, ads.
If you live in or near a rural area - really anywhere people like to travel on dark roads at night - you’ve probably encountered the deer whistle. These cheap plastic bits of garbage are supposed to make your car generate a funky sound while driving. In theory, this scares off the deer, and you never give one a hundred-kilometer-an-hour love tap. In practice, if anything, it makes the deer so horny for the front lip of your Celica that they launch themselves into the road just to see who’s making that crazy sound.
That’s why I launched a small automotive-accessories company. I wasn’t going to do it, but then I found out that the guy who made plastic headlight protectors here has a warehouse full of dope old cars. People who live in the boonies, it seems, will buy no end of inexpensive polycarbonate crap to glue to their cars. If anything can overcome my inherent laziness, it is the 1970-1975 AMC lineup.
Our premier product is designed to get rid of the deer whistle plague from American roadways entirely. I bring you: the Deer Obliterator. When those giant rodents barge out from the ditches, a sophisticated artificial intelligence notices them (or at least something that looks like a deer; consult your product manual under Liability, Sentience Act 2037) and aims your LED headlights directly into their stupid, stupid eyes. This momentarily stuns the deer, at which point bumper-mounted sawblades deploy.
What’s left of the body sails harmlessly over your vehicle, and optionally into an available roof-mounted “Dinner Caddy” intake scoop, which prepares the fresh venison for consumption. You’ll arrive at your destination refreshed, relaxed, alive, and ready to harvest your freshly made deer sausages from the easy-to-clean meat trap.
What about all that pesky blood on my paint, I hear you asking? We also offer a line of car waxes that are definitely not Turtle Wax sold for six times the MSRP. Hey, not every solution to a problem needs to be complicated.
If you ask the average French philosopher, they’ll posit that with enough time, a simulation will become more real than real. I’d agree with that, but then again I’ve been playing Densha De Go for the last six days straight.
In case you’re unfamiliar, the Japanese make these train simulator videogames. You get a little plastic dashboard of a train, and you get to push it around your desk, pretending that you are taking a load of salarymen to their increasingly depressing jobs. The whole thing is great, and I thought so even before I found the little button on the controller that makes my fake train toot the horn.
I had such a positive experience, in fact, that I’ve begun licensing increasingly boring aspects of North American life to sell back to the Japanese market. You wouldn’t believe how many would-be university students are taking a study break from their meat-grinder prep courses right now in order to experience a crude, low-polygon representation of being a Canada Post letter carrier.
Don’t Cross The Picket Line II is so popular, in fact, that it’s inspired this spring’s fashions in Harajuku. Everyone is dressing up like Mulroney-era letter carriers and playing dubstep remixes of the Postman Pat theme on their bone-induction implanted Bluetooth headphones. Canada Post has made so much bank off selling their old LLVs and uniforms that I finally stopped feeling guilty about never paying my taxes. And this way I didn’t even have to fake my own death!
It would be easy to rest on my laurels and enjoy my legions of adoring fans, but to be honest I am really busy trying to get to Ikebukuro before those Yamanote Line fuckers monopolize the switch.
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tags: don't cross the picket line ii, canada post, densha de go, mail simulation, train simulation
In my family, there’s nothing more important than family. Ever since my great-great-great-great-great grandfather packed up the clan and fled the angry samurai who wanted their head for scamming them out of all that money, we’ve adopted a family motto: don’t get caught. In order to guarantee that my ancient pappy’s scamming of daimyo wasn’t all for naught, we all try our best to hold up each other, no matter what.
So when my cousin, Sear Safety-Switch, told me that he needed to take the night off from his job at the airport Chili’s, I was right there. And by “right there,” I mean my mom called me in the middle of the day and guilt-tripped me into doing it instead of fixing the leaking oilpan on my Peugeot 403 project car. Her sister’s little boy needed us to keep parole, she explained, and besides, at the airport I can keep a watch for any of Nobunaga’s spies coming into town.
I’ve always lived a little rustically: my idea of cooking is to grab a squirrel off the side of the road and wedge it between the runners of my exhaust manifold. One hard blast down the highway later, and you’ve got yourself a meal. It might be a little well-done, especially if I have to outrun law enforcement before I can pull over to eat, but the unpredictability of the kitchen is what gives it its charm. Not so at the Chili’s: anything and everything is written down in these glossy how-to manuals that tell you precisely how many folds a fajita has or how far back you hold the can of black spraypaint to emulate grill marks.
It didn’t take long before I realized that my innate creativity was becoming stifled by these oppressive rules and orders, and that didn’t bode well for the survival of my cousin’s job. Things went from bad to worse when I realized the flame-tossing grille was powered by natural gas, and therefore open to a gentle modification or two in the never-ending quest to improve volumetric efficiency.
Despite my inattention, nobody can say I didn’t try my best, especially not the starving, sleepy patrons disgorged in endless waves by the red-eyes to experience Layover Hell at our little podunk airport. They got a lot of excitement out of the fire, and after we shut down the grille I made sure they all got doubles of their drinks.
I never got caught, which is more than I could say for my cousin, who was arrested at the hospital. He had been blowing off work in order to see the birth of his child. More tips for me.
At the little office that the government has forced me to work in, they have a bunch of televisions installed in the break rooms. They’re on all the time, and permanently locked to the local business news channel. I’ve never been a fan of these things: it seemed like their programming mostly consisted of inane blowhards making shit up about why something was “good for the markets” or “essential to industry survival,” and occasionally blaming a local politician for failing to lick their boots enough.
One morning, while I waited for the coffee machine to finish emitting a brown-black slurry, I wondered just how hard it would be to get invited onto the show. That was the beginning of my great experiment. I’m not going to lie to you: it wasn’t hard. For example, editing my LinkedIn page to say I was an expert in transportation technology took almost five minutes, but banging out a message to the talking heads’ boss that I was willing to do interviews for money needed me to run the spell check a few times. After all, it’s important to look professional.
The project succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. In fact, it was really hard to get them to stop calling me. Even after I revealed my true nature live on the air, I was still getting appearances booked. It seemed that the guys who were actually successful at making money didn’t want to spend hours of their day on TV leaking their secrets to the kind of landlords whose bosses force them to watch business television.
On the plus side, though, I now have a weekly segment where I list the kind of old cars I want to buy, and people phone in and offer them to me for cut-rate prices. I tell these suckers that selling me their Gremlins and Marlins “helps the economy,” and everyone is simply too afraid to correct me, lest a bond yield curve invert and wipe out the whole of Western civilization.
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tags: business television, amc gremlin, amc marlin, amc
When I was in Paris recently, completing a little bit of business that we in the industry like to call the Dakar-to-Paris-but-in-Twingos Rally, I had the experience of encountering a most peculiar sight. We were on the Boulevard Voltaire, a little inner city slice of heaven that mostly deals in import videogames and cartoon pornography.
While preparing to cross the street, trying hard not to wait too long for the crosswalk lest the locals peg me for the tourist I was, I had the opportunity to gaze upon the finest of French inner-city motoring. Peugeot mopeds, Peugeot cars, Peugeot trucks: they truly had them all. Then I saw it.
A Student Driver car, a pathetic little hatchback of plastic and low-environmental-impact low-boron steel, tootled up to the intersection and was cut off by a scooter. The instructor reached over to the flustered student’s steering wheel, honked the horn for her, and then leaned out of the window, gesturing rudely.
I was already laughing, but then I saw the student repeat the gesture, looking to the instructor for approval. They really do think of everything here in the City of Lights.
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tags: student driver, paris, true story, renault twingo, peugeot, renault
The common belief out there in society is that the lower a car is, the faster it is. Makes sense, right? Race cars are so close to the ground you can’t even fit a stick of gum in between the frame rails and the tarmac, and they’re quick as all hell.
That’s why you see every 90s economy car slammed to the weeds, on cut springs. It’s obvious: the manufacturer never knows what they are doing, and if you lower it any further, you can make it faster than they would. Why don’t the manufacturers’ engineers know this basic fact? It is because they have had their minds corrupted by elitist foreign schools, who teach terrible lies about false concepts such as “suspension geometry” and “bump steer.”
This “lower = faster” theory doesn’t really explain rocket ships, or does it? In fact, NASA engineers figured this out earlier than anyone, which is why each and every Saturn V rocket shipped with a chunk of Astroturf lodged, perfectly-centered, into the nose cone. Super low to the ground, hard to get any lower. That’s why they’re fast enough to leave this planet.
So why, then, do lowered cars drive so slowly over speed bumps at the local grocery store? This problem has confounded our top scientists for years, until it was determined through analysis that high-riding four-wheel-drive SUVs went over those humps just as slowly, maybe even slower. In fact, we’ve discovered that all vehicles exhibit some kind of relativity, becoming less capable of mounting these bumps the closer they are to the front of my car.
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tags: suspension geometry, slammed suspension, saturn v
Now, I would never use the handsome, wood-grain bully pulpit I have here to advocate arson. No matter how bad your landlord, jailer, or hostage-taker of the moment is, there is simply not enough justification to destroy their property with fire. Why? Because it’s bad for the environment, is why.
A more environmentally-friendly solution is simply to smear your enemies’ homes and places of business with high velocity liquid dogshit, courtesy of the Seat Safety Switch Fertilizer Concern. You’ll leave behind lush lawns and beautiful gardens when you get your revenge, and our plausibly-malfunctioning septic tank trucks full of that shit only run on wallet-and-earth-friendly biodiesel. Anyone who earns your ire will regret it, their property and perhaps life forfeit beneath an unyielding torrent of partially liquefied feces. Now isn’t that more fun than lighting a house on fire? I thought so.
We’ve taken revenge to the 21st century. Back when my grandfather ran this business, customers would often “cool off” in the period of time it took to travel to his storefront and fill out the service register. And then there’s the legal issues - the federales love it when there’s a paper trail. Nowadays, ruining the lives of your foes is just a touch away on our intuitive and handsome smartphone app, available now on all major platforms. After that, kick back and let us do the rest: we’ll bury their home in poop so fast you won’t have time for regrets.
Got a common enemy? Group up with your friends and “chip in” to “kickstart” the destruction of their home and property. Just last week, we had to send out a rush order for more trucks because someone figured out where the dude who is trying to get average-speed radar cameras installed on the highway lives.
New from Haynes: pop-up service manuals. For years, mechanics the world over have been complaining about our inscrutable wiring diagrams, our low-quality reproduction photographs, and our vague-at-best cut-out illustrations. That’s why we hired the finest Japanese paper-cutting-and-folding artisans to produce this fantastic pop-up guide to: the 1991 Mercury Tracer.
Thrill to the exciting scale-model replica of the Tracer’s F4A-EL Mazda-Ford automatic transmission. You can even spin the little torque converter: but don’t go too fast or you’ll get papercuts. Now it should be obvious to even the most unseasoned mechanic how to rebuild the automatic transmission, if we gave you instructions on how to do that, which we won’t, because that shit’s complicated.
Turn the page, and you’ll see the real wiring diagram of the specific 1991 Mercury Tracer we tore down that one afternoon in 2007 and kind-of took notes on. Now you can see exactly how inaccessible that wiring for the blower fan really is. Hell, now that you know where the wires go, I bet you can even figure out how that squirrel skeleton you found in the quarter panel explains why you don’t have FM radio reception!
When you’re done with the book, it couldn’t be easier to close: just reverse the order that you used to open the book! For once, we haven’t lied about that!
That’s the Haynes® Pop-Up Mechanic™ guide to the 1991 Mercury Tracer, with all three brilliant pages on sale at parts store shelves across this great nation for only $249.99 a copy.
In my neighbourhood, we like to play a little game called “Food Delivery or Process Server?” The rules are very simple: when you see a dented ten-to-twenty-year-old economy car that you don’t recognize in the neighbourhood, you immediately holler out which of the two types of vehicle you think it is. Most correct guesses by the end of the year gets first dibs on the furniture and old car parts thrown in the ditch at the bottom of the street every spring.
Since all I drive is twenty-to-thirty-year-old dented economy cars, you’re not guaranteed to win with just a simple guess. This means that a lot of my neighbours have gotten really good at identifying my driving style, in much the same way that rodents have gotten really good at identifying hawks. Last week, I rolled up on a ‘97 Corolla parked haphazardly across my next-door neighbour’s sidewalk, the engine still running, lite rock FM radio wailing from the surviving door speakers.
Across the street stood “Jim,” a Cambodian immigrant who once brought me into his den to show me his novelty knife collection during the one time we held an unsuccessful Parade of Garage Sales. Said “den” had no carpet or furnishings (bar a solitary wooden chair and a swinging lightbulb), but the filtered drain he had cut into the concrete of the floor was quite nice. I told Jim that he was a regular Bob Vila, which drew a look of confusion that occupied enough of his higher mental functions for me to make good my escape.
Upon seeing me, Jim screamed: “PROCESS SERVER!” and indeed he was correct. The guy next door had been under one kind or another of civil litigation for nearly two years now, but still believed enough in the system to answer the door and identify himself when asked by some random dude pretending to be a census taker. This time, he went back inside his home gripping a big thick chunk of pink sheets. Final notices, I realized.
Later that night, I checked the neighbourhood chat group. Jim was way ahead of me: if I wanted to even the score and get first crack at those sweet, sweet shattered Neon bumper covers, I was going to have to get creative.
“Silvano’s Pizza?” I asked. “You got any guys with really shitty cars?”
Here at Nissan quality labs, we never stop improving. Other automakers will put their knock sensor in a sane, easy to reach location. That’s pointless, and means that your mechanic is just charging you labour hours to turn a single bolt. We ask you: why not make the fucker earn it?
That’s why Henrik here, on his very first job after being liberated from Volkswagen by our storm troopers, put his entire body and soul into placing the knock sensor under an intake manifold, behind a brace that requires partial subframe removal to reach around, and through a maze of rusted and jagged metal which will slice your hands and forearms to reach through.
Now that’s using your noodle, Henrik! We gave him a promotion, but he didn’t rest on his laurels, no sir: his next task was to design a water pump that stops working only at high RPM! Don’t think replacing it will be easy, either: he tucked that baby right behind the power steering pump, so that the belt drive on it will constantly be soaked in ATF.
And just to top things off, Henrik directed his team of engineers to figure out the worst possible place to put an oil filter. Yes, that’s right: we at Nissan are so innovative in making our cars extra miserable that we put the oil filter right up top, where everyone can see it, but made the gap so tight, so inaccessible, that you have no choice but to dislocate your thumb in order to work it loose! Good luck getting a grip on that puppy to get it out after the average Jiffy Lube tech has cranked it on with an inch-thick pipe wrench.
It’s engineers like Henrik who make sure that Nissan’s build quality and repairability remain something-in-class. Car and Driver Magazine said it best: if you want an expensive, slow sedan with the ease of repair of a Hellraiser cube, then come on down to your local Nissan dealer. No credit? No problem - we accept blood plasma and first-born children. Just get these fucking things off our lot and into our repair bays.
In Canada, one of the key forms of currency is the humble mitten. It should be obvious why: those individuals without mittens may lose their fingers to frostbite, which greatly damages their future economic potential. For this reason, our capitalist overlords artificially restrict the supply of mittens, in order to prevent us from going outside, where we might start a revolution or more likely just refuse to hold open a door for a billionaire.
I was at the grocery store, shopping for cereal, when I saw it: free mittens. All I had to do was buy this box of cereal, punch a special code into a website, and I could join the mittened elite, gratis. How could I lose? I immediately stuffed my shopping cart full of family-sized Oat Circles, originally created by a government-run crown corporation but sold off during the privatization frenzy of the early 1980s. My excitement was so strong that I didn’t even let the car warm up for the traditional twenty minutes in the parking lot before peeling out, chunks of accumulated road salt shaking loose from my undercarriage as I hopped a curb and escaped onto the main road.
When I got home, I ripped the box to shreds, sending beautiful arcs of toasted grain giblets into every conceivable corner of my home. Getting my computer to boot was the longest hand-cranking of my life - the geothermal energy people said they’d have installed a tap in my place last year, but during the brief period of Unfrost this July, I had heard that they were eaten by a rabid moose just outside Winnipeg. Eventually, I was surfing the web at my monopoly-allowed five kilobytes per hour, and rabidly punched in the code.
It was hard to believe the screen that confronted me then: they were out of mittens. Such was the demand that scalpers across the country had hoarded them. In some crime-ridden metropolises such as Windsor, they went as far to cut open the cereal boxes right on the shelf and steal the codes. I knew then that there was no hope for my quest.
As I sit in my kitchen and wait for my government-priced bagged milk to defrost, I tell myself that at least the calories I will gain from eating this cereal will provide body heat for the entire night. It is not so bad: my holiday bonus this year from my boss at the shipyards was an old sock of his. That will keep at least one hand warm.
Just what is the secret to the Mazda RX7′s furious combination of no torque and smooth-as-butter revs to the moon? Bees.
Long ago, Mazda was once a mere cork-maker in Hiroshima. After some dalliances in weapons engineering and piston-based automobiles, Mazda engineers came across the works of Felix Wankel in a large lot of Nazi crap being auctioned off by the Allies as part of a white elephant sale to earn money to rebuild their hometown. The rotary engine was great, but it was missing something.
Mazda engineers quickly realized that they would need more grunt, a smaller rotating mass, and a bigger swept area. And bees. The 12A (A for Apiary) was born. To the perpetual anger of NSU engineers who foolishly constructed their engine’s apex seals out of metal and composites, Mazda equipped every RX7 with a harem of angry bees. As the engine was revved, the resulting friction would generate heat, which made the bees grow angrier and push against the rotor even harder. This produces torque, but more importantly the ridiculously loud tooth-grinding scream that rotaries are famous for.
There was just one problem: Japanese bees are much larger than North American bees, and much more productive. Americans refused to trust a motor that wasn’t as lazy as they were. In an attempt to allay their fears, Mazda soon enlarged the engine in order to localize it for the US market, and the 13B (B for Bee) was born. A turbocharger could now be added in order to cool off these bees with its impressive fan blades, allowing them to get angry, cool off, and then get angry again within the span of a single engine rotation. This improved the lifespan of the insects, and the media marvelled that you could now get almost two hundred miles out of a single set of apex seals.
It wouldn’t take long for the aftermarket to capitalize on the idea, enlarging the side ports of the engine to make it possible for the RX7′s thermal reactor to dump in even more bees per rotation. In the ensuing confusion as governments tried to ban these bee-filled wedge cars, Mazda rushed to produce as many new vehicles as they could with a rotary engine slammed between the frame rails. One, a mini-bus known as the Parkway, produced headlines when a group of curious schoolchildren accidentally opened the thermal reactor of the Mazda, releasing the bees and killing hundreds.
After a series of government inquiries, Mazda closed ranks, emerging a decade later with a new rotary engine. In the Renesis series of Wankel-esque motors, genetically-altered American bees were bred for lightness and emissions (bee farts are bad for the environment). This makes the engines very difficult to repair, as shade tree mechanics can no longer just grab a handful of buzzers from their local roadside hive and cram them down the oil fill hole in order to restore compression.
We here at the Local Newspaper have been tracking the development of a generation gap in Western civilization since we ran out of money to actually investigate things that are happening in the area. Our top scientists are telling us that millennials, those dreaded scoundrels, have been destroying everything our society holds dear: Christmas music, talking on the telephone, newspapers. Now we hear that their forces have mobilized against a new, awful threat.
The millennials are killing PT Cruiser resale value.
Sure, you might say that all cars’ resale values are being hurt, seeing as these lazy vat-grown louts are born to ride Ubers and fuck on bicycles. It’s not like they couldn’t afford it if they just asked their boss for a raise after all that hard work as social media coordinators. My nephew works at Facebook and made like a billion dollars last quarter: some of that money belongs in my pocket in exchange for my wife’s low-mileage, chromed-out, freshly-rebuilt (I had Jose down at the non-union mechanic’s put in some new spark plugs) 2003 PT Cruiser.
The PT Cruiser has everything anyone would want: 1950s style, a high point of ingress to save lower back pain, a relaxing automatic transmission, and it’s super easy to park which is important because a lot of people can’t see too well anymore but still have to drive to their jobs. These kids aren’t ever going to retire: they need to get started on the ladder of PT Cruiser ownership sooner rather than later.
Our editorial board calls upon the federal government to immediately redress this imbalance by purchasing our unsold PT Cruisers at a massive markup.
I’ll fight anyone who says that turbocharged cars are overrated. Any heehaw cornfucker that puts up a “no replacement for displacement” flea market placard in their garage or message-board signature can answer directly to the furious ten billion rpm wail of my 67mm Burg-Warmer. Yeah, it’s a Chinese turbo, because those things are expensive. I’m not made out of money, not with all of the head gaskets and rods I have to replace.
Maybe you’re susceptible to an environmentalist argument. Look at it this way: a turbo car recycles exhaust. Some of that waste gas actually goes to useful work instead of slowly heating the planet and killing us all. Not even your old college professor could get over 100% efficiency by huffing his own farts, and he definitely can’t do it while pulling 0-60 in under four seconds.
In fact, turbochargers are so good that I’ve started bolting them to things around the house. Anything that stands still long enough: Roombas, the pile of Mustangs out back, the neighbour’s dog. My old Cub Cadet lawn tractor caught a case of the windowed-bores when I decided to see how fast I could make it mow in a straight line. That one’s been on the lift for about a year now, probably should get around to dropping in that Geo Metro engine like I kept telling everyone I would.
So take it from me: the next time you’re picking out a car, get one that’s already turbocharged. When I buy it in twenty or so years, I’ll appreciate how much easier it is not having to drill a clean hole into the oilpan for the turbo return line.
Space is wild. Now that NASA has run out of money to explore exciting new places, they followed the mob into the far more lucrative waste management business. Now, for only a few thousand bucks a try, whatever you don’t want around anymore can be shot directly into space. It’ll all come back down from orbit eventually, but chances are none of us will be alive when that finally happens. Let a future generation handle it: they can get their own NASA.
Incriminating documents? Burning them is so last century. Now they’re just so much space junk blocking some Okie’s satellite TV reception. Dead relatives? What better way to honour their memory than to have a 21-rocket-booster salute and free up room in your storage closet that used to be wasted on unsightly corpses? The possibilities are truly endless, just like the infinite reaches of space itself. Hey, that’s pretty good. Maybe they’ll put it in the brochure.
Last week, a couple guys from the club got together to space their old junk. Craigslist buyers are so bad that, after a few failed deals, it was more satisfying just to fire the shit into orbit and write the whole thing off. This was the only way I could throw out my old shattered axles and curb-struck wheels, now that the dump had a picture of me at the front gate with “DO NOT ADMIT” underneath. It’s not my fault; they’re the ones that had all the cool barely-even-broken stuff lying in their scrap pile!
Now, when you look up into the night sky, know that I have a busted-ass Ford AOD floating somewhere up there. Make a wish - and I sure hope your house isn’t in the way when it eventually falls back down.
When it comes time for me to account for my long and misspent life, one of the sins that will show up first in St. Pete’s Big Ol’ Book Of Moral Crimes will be my brief but torrid relationship with the Chevrolet Cavalier.
This piss-weak four banger is built so poorly that you could hang an entire Netflix comedy special off of repeatedly pointing at the dashboard and wiggling your eyebrows. Its handling dynamics are best described as “worrisome,” and once my passenger side door card fell off while I was trying to crank the stereo loud enough to drown out the persistent rattles.
And yet, somehow, I miss it. I don’t know if I miss that specific car, or something in how it felt to shift, or just that period in my life. Maybe it’s the absolutely unkillable cockroach motor with compression low enough it could run with the bores half full of floodwater (I tried). Whatever it is, I now find myself getting secretly excited whenever I see a Cavalier.
It’s shameful: I cannot even yell out in excitement when I see a minty Ecotec Sunfire to my long-suffering travelling companions. Even though they have grown used to my other automotive indiscretions, I know that admitting this to them would finally be the nudge they need to call up the funny farm and have me euthanized.
I do not know yet how I can get this terrible obsession out of my veins. Last week, I registered a shell company in the Maldives. This way, I can keep anonymous my purchase of a cheap J-body and prevent it from hitting my registration and insurance, which would come in handy when I finally come to my senses and leave the car lawn-darted into a ditch with thermite burning on the valve cover about eight miles down the road.
There is a snag, however: over the thousands of bad cars I have owned, I have struck up a kind of odd friendship with the local registry agents. Even if I were to visit as the catspaw of a shadowy international corporation, they’d still know and they would definitely judge.
For now, I maintain a respectful distance from Lordstown’s Greatest Mistake, but keep abreast on the latest developments in plastic surgery and identity theft.
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tags: chevrolet cavalier, chevrolet, pontiac sunfire, pontiac, j-body
Every time I have to drive across town, be it for a hairdressing appointment for a client’s sassy Standard Poodle, or something as important as a wheel alignment, I always need to fight my way through rush-hour traffic on the way back home. Most people would simply get up earlier in the morning, but that’s tantamount to surrender in my book. My grandfather got up early in the morning once, and it was to kill a whole bunch of Nazis. If it’s not at least that important, count me out.
As a result of sitting in traffic this often, I have become accustomed to the local college radio station. For years, I had listened to the big guys, with their bus advertising and their DJs who stayed sober for an entire show, but something was missing. A poet would probably have some fancy words for that absent quality, but for me it could be summed up very simply: the classic rock station had started playing music from when I was a teenager, and fuck a whole bunch of that.
No longer could Big Radio’s purview of all recorded music be limited to only the 70s and 80s: nay, with shifting demographics, their shareholders had pressured them to capture the essence of the 90s. When Gary Numan’s “Cars” gave way to a stirring rendition of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” I began to hyperventilate as the sensation of my imminent mortality shot through my veins. In that moment of panic, my ineffectual flailing in an attempt to rip the 8-track player out of my Hornet and throw it into oncoming traffic hit the tuner dial, shifting it onto the local college radio.
This was perfect. Nobody had heard of artists like Carlito’s Technicolour Wonderpiece, and therefore I could not be negatively judged for listening to their songs. With any luck, future historians might even consider me to be “hip.” I bobbed my head for the remaining three hundred meters of my commute, and in that half an hour I discovered that I quite liked those two songs about washing machines.
In conclusion, join me every Tuesday at 9:04PM to 9:12PM for Seat Safety Switch’s Car Chat, where I try to teach a bunch of nineteen year olds what that weird noise in their mom’s Corolla is. If you don’t tune in, there will be no negative consequences for me whatsoever.
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tags: amc hornet, amc, toyota corolla, toyota, college radio
You know that feeling when there’s a global conspiracy that only you seem capable of seeing? That totally relatable moment when your doctor pleads with you to take the pills because you’re starting to spiral again just like we talked about in our session last week? I felt that way this morning, as I stared into a 1980s Ford wiring diagram.
For years, Ford wiring diagrams have had little or no resemblance to the actual wiring mess in front of you. For years, people like myself had assumed that it was some kind of clerical error - a different country’s wiring diagram, perhaps, where “orange” is French for “green/purple striped.” Maybe they did the diagram at the start of that model refresh, and so fifteen years later it’s diverged quite a bit. It’s not like I could have done any better, I used to tell myself while being impressed that they managed to draw straight lines. Part of my therapy was trying to find the positive aspects of things, and recognize when someone had done good work but wasn’t being rewarded for it conventionally. Good job, little Ford draftsman. You tried your best.
Others believed strongly in ill intent. It turns out neither of us were correct. A secret laid deep within the miles of contradictory wiring diagrams, when laid out on the walls of my garage and connected via push pins and strands of red yarn. That secret could shake the world to its very core. No wonder they called it a Lincoln - the Ford Motor Company could decide who the President was!
I immediately called up Ford customer service and told them what I discovered. There was an awkward silence for awhile, then a new voice came on the line.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“You know what I want,” I spat back at him. This pathetic charade would soon end.
That afternoon, a Ford family member landed his private helicopter in my back yard. A company mechanic arrived shortly thereafter, driving whatever was least dinged up in the motor pool that day. My gambit had worked: I was soon to become rich beyond my wildest dreams.
“Here it is,” said the mechanic, unloading a crate from the trunk of his base-model Focus. “A little promotional plastic model of a 1995 Mercury Villager.”
If you’ve never been to Canada - a perfectly defensible act, though getting less so by the day - then you don’t know how bad the presence of Tim Hortons warps our perception of traffic. When I used to work in a, shall we say, less progressive part of town, the line to get into the local Timmies was so long it would flood out onto the road and sometimes even onto the highway. You’d be going a buck ten and have to moose-test swerve around some dumbass locking up his full-welder Ram because he craves the sweet, tooth-rotting release of a Quadruple-Quadruple.
Sometimes I’d have coworkers coming into the office, screeching that the blockade was so bad that they had to go all the way around the city rather than cross the Timbit line. Naturally, when our corporate overlords heard about this, something had to change. This crisis was impacting Glorious Productivity, and that cut into Quarterly Profits, and it could not be allowed to continue.
Soon, the police started patrolling the area in the mornings, ticketing people for blocking the roads. This worked great for about a week until the cops, insufficiently convinced of the gravity of the situation, stopped coming, favouring instead something less important like serial killers or the mayor’s golf handicap getting ruined by loud airplanes. With our brave boys in blue gone, the line soon flowed back outwards - even further than before, perhaps attracting new customers drawn by the adrenaline-punching danger of possibly getting asked sternly to leave by the five-oh.
My boss, and my boss’s boss, and the unaccountable disembodied voice of authority that screamed at everyone involved from a Polycom voice conferencing bridge, knew they had to take matters into their own hands. Where the police failed, perhaps private security would help. They entreated the landlord to call up a bunch of rent-a-cops and start shaking down anyone who blocked the entrance to their property. The fact that these unterpolicemenschen did not actually have any authority did not matter, figuring that Canadians were so afraid of any confrontation that they would leave immediately rather than risk a rude word being said.
This gambit worked, and it didn’t work - it did not occur to them during the planning phases that the mall cops were also Canadians, and therefore could not raise their voices above a harsh whisper. That harsh whisper carried insufficient sonic energy to penerate an illegally limo-tinted window of a Silverado, and so we were once again at an impasse. I myself spent a whole month at the office, unable to leave, during a Tim Hortons worker strike in which the customer base refused to go somewhere else lest they lose their valued place in line. Canada’s GDP dropped almost a full percentage point that month, and several office workers died of starvation inside their heavily modified Raptors.
In the future, demand for fresh content has risen to such levels that at last talented bullshitters can get ahead in life. I’m a professional raconteur, and my entire day is spent trying to amuse a computer into spitting out a couple bitpennies into my Filthbux account.
I like to start out with the usual light stories: relatable stuff like an office coworker who was fired for stealing toilet paper, the foibles of mowing the lawn, that time I saw an Iberian magpie fly into the open window of an old dude’s Buick on the highway, that kind of thing. Usually I get a few chortles.
Once the sentience is warmed up, I like to slip into a really tricky story. The great thing about computers is that they listen really well. At a noisy party, the person you’re telling the story to is probably only hearing every third word you say. You gotta use weird emphasis, and keep your descriptions short and punchy. Not so when you’ve got a microphone directly to the ear of the billion kilometers of computers orbiting the earth in an impenetrable ring of silicon and high-boron steel.
It’s weird, though: back when we still had human beings running Hollywood, there sure were a lot fewer movies about dieseling Plymouth Volares, turbocharging golf carts and incontinent cats. I guess that’s why they threw out the human president and let that old Quadra run things: you gotta give the people what they want.
Gather around, children, and I will tell you a tale of a dead retail store. That’s right, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, people my age went to physical shops to exchange paper money for goods and services. If you wanted to compare prices, you had to drive - drive yourself, as in manual operation - all over town! We hadn’t even invented China yet.
Before the War, we used to have this chain of stores called Radio Shack. Despite what the Holopedia says, it didn’t sell houses. Everyone else did only a few years later during the Realtor Cataclysm, but not Radio Shack. What they sold were really disappointing computers, beer-opening robots… and super bitchin’ remote-controlled cars.
Every Christmas, we used to get the little catalogue in the mail and obsess over all of the cool shit that we could waste our allowance money on, if our allowance was several hundred times what it was. Cars with six wheels, cars that did backflips, cars that could drive underwater: there seemed to be no end to the futuristic technology on offer. My parents’ single-cam econoboxes seemed like pathetic consolation prizes by comparison. No claws popped out of the tires of my mom’s Simca when it lost traction. It didn’t even have a cupholder.
So it stood to reason, that when I reached the age of adulthood, I would spend at least part of my time trying to make a cooler commuter car. That’s why I’m here speaking to you as part of my community service. It turns out that, unlike the world of scale R/C cars, being able to do five backflips in a row after hitting a ramp at 300 km/h is a bad thing in our corrupt, valueless modern society.
It’s that time of the year: when your coworkers conspire to get you a cheap gift but not tell you who it came from. Usually, it’s not too difficult to figure out which of your cubicle neighbours got you which gift. People gossip, after all, in every workplace. Not in the CIA, buddy boy. Let me tell you how Secret Santa went down this year.
The first order of business of any successful espionage mission is basic surveillance. This year we all tried to follow each other home from the parking lot, thinking that maybe there would be something around the house they needed. A new garden hose, black hood, bathtub cleaner, untraceable high-powered rifle, maybe some electrified nipple clamps.
Thing is, if you all follow each other home on the same day, all you get is an endless, unbroken circle of cars around Langley, and then inevitably a car crash. Francine down in signals intelligence is not the world’s fastest driver, but that’s no excuse for Boris to rear end her while changing telephoto lenses on his camera. An insurance deductible is a terrible surprise gift! Sloppy operations work all around. Instead, a clever spy will use alternative means - spy on their Facebook account, drone their bocce ball team, have your spouse infiltrate a local elementary school and waterboard your target’s children, that kind of thing.
What’s the next step? It’s classified, but I’ll tell you right now it rhymes with “unlimited shmudget.” Sure, the suits in the White House are going to tell you that there is a maximum amount of their money you can spend, but that’s why you dip into the black-ops bank. Nobody’s gonna ask questions about a missing crate of crisp new greenbacks destined for Iraqi terrorist payoffs when they’re given a Samsung flat-screen in the office gift pool. Hell, take some for yourself while you’re in there - the best gifts are the ones you give to yourself, after all. And if you end up in front of Congress, just tell them it was the only way you could save them from an imminent threat. Nobody will even ask about what the threat was!
So take it from the Central Intelligence Agency this holiday season. Just like giving, destabilizing regimes begins at home.
Picking a winter beater and a fine wine have many commonalities. Ideally, they’re both French, very old, cost about two hundred and fifty bucks and last you exactly one good weekend before they’re used up. With that in mind, it’s more important than ever to make sure that you’re practicing safe winter beater beating.
Back in the 1960s, beating a car was easy. They didn’t last very long, and the cool thrill of brand new cars on cheap credit had not yet worn out. Last year’s car could be had for ten or fifteen bucks. Today’s beaters are so good that they can outperform 1980s turbo Formula 1 cars, or at least make you feel like you are driving one if you put a big enough muffler on it, but you pay for that privilege with skyrocketing resale values of several hundred dollars. That means that nowadays, you need to protect your investment.
There’s a magical moment in every person’s life when they get their first beater. It might come as a teenager, it might come when you are very, very old. Regardless of when it arrives, the emotions you encounter are new to you, and that can be scary.
Now you can park right up at the front of parking lots, or on the curb, or in no-parking zones, or on your neighbour’s lawn. Gravel roads can be driven down very quickly, just so you can hear the sound of rocks sandblasting the rust off the undercarriage. New mechanical failures crop up in places you didn’t used to have them before. You’re not alone.
If you’re confused about these changes, talk to a trusted adult or just someone who rallycrosses on the weekend. They can advise you about the time they hid in a field for several hours to avoid the cops looking for who owned that unregistered Renault that found itself upside down inside the local elementary school.
Welcome to the American museum of Lesser Known Serial Killers. We don’t get a lot of visitors down here, not like the one up the road with all the famous murderers. Just real, real glad to be able to open up our place to you folks for an afternoon. Now you’ll have even more reasons not to be able to sleep at night.
The San Diego Double-Exsanguinator: Made an immense, complex sandwich from the complete contents of the victim’s fridge. Finally brought low by a retiree who kept rat poison in her larder “for freshness.”
The Warranty Killer: His trial was declared a mistrial by jury nullification after it became clear that his schtick was to only kill retail appliance salesmen who hawked overpriced extended warranties. Got the key to the city in December 1988.
The New England Knife-Intersector: Wait, that’s the name of a newspaper.
Dog Strangler: An overweight Belgian Malinois who crushed bylaw officers and dog-walkers to death for the sick thrill of it. Against his lawyers’ advice, committed perjury when asked who was a good boy at trial.
Edward Piano-Mover: Replaced customers’ pianos with much heavier, otherwise perfectly identical models. His victims were all other piano movers.
Brands. Ever since the ancient ancestors of humanity took their first tentative steps out of the ocean, corporations have been with us. These brands raise our children, give meaning to our lives as adults, and comfort us as we slip into the comforts of old age. They are, in many ways, the only real family any of us will ever have.
Recently, some radicals have proposed that brands are in fact unnecessary and separate from the majesty of human existence. This is pure, all-organic poppycock special edition. Without brands, what would fanboy blogs be about? Nobody has ever thrown a hissy fit because a new chess board came out that they don’t like, unless it says Star Wars on the box.
Why, without our corporate friends, you could never laugh at someone for liking the wrong brands. Nobody has the kind of free time needed in order to meaningfully interact with every human being they encounter. Just ask about what TV show they like and move on - that’s modern convenience.
Even religions are their own form of brands - probably the most successful ones in human existence. The organizations that invented them long ago now reap vast profits, as a reward for their sheer animal cunning and skillful cross-vertical market fit. Nothing makes the evening news happier than to see a good old-fashioned religious slapfight - that’s true synergy.
Nobody really knows where brands come from, but we’re all grateful for their existence. We must always say “thank you” to Coca-Cola’s war drones as they fly sorties over the rainforest, dropping vast clouds of defoliant in order to drive out those so-called “free thinkers” in the way of securing the profit due them from their remarkable mindshare. Make sure to tweet it, too, for your chance to win your home being spared during the next expansion.
Sure, you’ve heard of a tunnel. And you might even have been told about the Chunnel. There is one more famous thing that rhymes with these: the funnel. For want of a funnel, a bunch of coolant got spilled on the fucking floor, I’m pretty sure the Bible doesn’t say. Even so, when you’re armpits-deep in puddles of slippery cancer, there are more than a few muttered appeals to the Old Testament.
A couple years ago, I was just like you. When it came time to pour fluids into my car, I would kind of lean haphazardly over the opening, close one eye and then try to get at least most of the fluid inside the engine. I got rid of a lot of squirrels that way, I’ll tell you that much. There is a better way. The funnel can help you, too.
If you operate a Subaru, chances are you have become intimately familiar with a wide spectrum of specialized funnels. Subaru does their part to help prevent global warming by seeding the earth with large deposits of fifty-fifty premix, but this means that you occasionally have to refill the freshly-evacuated cooling system with new stuff. Do it wrong? Air bubbles get in, which become superheated death pods travelling at rocket speed through your cooling system, and then you’re a little late for Aunt Mabel’s Christmas cookie exchange because you had to swap a new engine into your car.
This is where the aforementioned funnel comes in. A certain auto-parts manufacturer (motto: “If It’s Weird And Plastic, We Get Off On It”) has manufactured this forty-three-dollar miracle of a yellow funnel. In theory, it’s supposed to seal hard onto the top of your rad, so that only delicious fresh coolant can get in - no air bubbles - job done, everyone goes home happy. Outside of having to figure out which of the ten bajillion adapters for every possible combination of recalcitrant cooling system on the market is the right one every time, it’s great. You should get one.
That’s funnel: ask for it by name at your local hardware store.
I’ve never understood the people who dread when the shopping mall starts playing Christmas music. How can they hate that their place of commerce worship is now decked out in holiday finery? Perhaps they don’t realize what all those garlands and mistletoe really are: battle dress. In December, the malls are a killing ground: a place to commit socially-approved bloodsport.
Just last weekend, I put on my war paint and headed down to the Big Sprawl. When the shopper crush isn’t yet at full throttle, there’s more room for error. No lethal consequences for failing to dodge an elbow at the makeup counter. That makes it the perfect time to hone my skills.
Here’s a free tip: if you want to break up a big line at the toy checkout, just judo-throw a toddler overhand into a shelf. More height, the better. Nobody will ever believe that a fellow suburbanite could have such evil at their heart. It’s not evil, though: it’s convenience, and that’s what our society is all about.
You have to plan for the exit. A lot of people will spend all morning trying to get a parking spot that’s close to where they want to begin their shopping. That makes no sense: you want to park near the end. You’re tired, you’re cranky, and you might be fleeing a large number of angry townies wielding those complimentary fireplace poker sets that the department store was handing out. When that happens, you want to have your car ready to go. And if that car is a nitrometh-juiced Baja Bug, so much the better - when the rent-a-cops put up barricades to try and prevent your departure with your well-earned lucre, you can just ramp the bitch.
So, this holiday season, if you see me down there in the pits with you, blood caked onto my fists, please be kind. I know you don’t have what it takes to get to the top of the pile.
I saw a choppy internet video of some hayseeds using an eight-rotor drone with a taped-on flamethrower to clean some gunk off a power line and decided that China must be the place to live. If they can do shit like that in public and not immediately get arrested, then obviously there is nothing but opportunity to be had.
Applying for a visa didn’t go very well. The interviewer looked horrified at my complete lack of morals, but then was called out of the room before he could fully reject my application. His replacement, a slight dude wearing sunglasses, knew how to get things done. If only I would spy on my own employer, he explained, then there would be no problem getting me a work visa. Hell, he’d even show me the coolest places that the locals use to buy their flamethrowers.
How could I say no? There was only one problem: my job was pretty lame. I don’t know if Brother No-Names-Please misread my application form, or was just looking to bolster the numbers on his end-of-year performance report, but my day job could never hope to compare to the video I watched where a guy shot a firework into a fireworks factory by accident. Even through the grainy MPEG compression, it was better than any Hollywood movie by far. Uncle Sam wouldn’t let me blow anything up at all at work back home. Said it was a violation of “health and safety” regulations. If you ask me, it’s more unhealthy to keep this kind of thing bottled up.
A few surreptitiously photographed documents and a couple kidnapped generals later, I had my visa. It was not what YouTube had sold to me, however: as soon as I arrived I found that a disappointingly small portion of urban China was actively on fire, and if I tried to make it otherwise, facial-recognition robots would take away my drivers’ license as punishment.
Plus, according to my handler, they had just stopped selling performance tires for 14″ wheels the week before. Nobody ran cars with wheels that small, he scoffed. He said some other things, but I had stopped listening to him: the internet was good enough here that I was able to watch some videos of Indian mechanics fitting 13s to their Celicas. In the background dangled some truly dangerous-looking home wiring.
Here’s the thing about Indian visa control: they also didn’t want me around. As I was leaving, though, a dude in a suit wearing sunglasses asked if I wanted to get in by doing a little bit of work. He’d even show me his slammed Hindustan Ambassador.
At night, we huddle near the ejected batteries of the Teslalords for warmth. Their optics don’t work when it’s dark. During the day, we keep moving. The Twitter addicts were the first to die. Elon triangulated their constant shit posting off a nearby cell phone tower and sent a platoon of razor-sharp Model 3s to enforce brand loyalty. Dead, and for what? Just one more screenshot dunk on an unashamed right wing politico, safe in his armoured condominium, supping of child flesh?
The slide happened so smoothly none of us noticed. Elon’s lawyers made the argument that a car can’t be held legally liable for trying to auto-drive in a bike lane, jail the operator. And that was fine. Then they didn’t need a human operator anymore, but the Teslas still reaped a thousand head of Cannondale and Telluride each. We had missed the opportunity to pull the bloodlust back out of their millions of miles of geranium-silicon neural network when it was easy, and now no living human being on earth could. Not that it bothered Elon. Bicyclists were a part of the past, he snorted, just like public schools, and his machine children listened and learned.
Hundreds of Resistance died raiding the Tesla QA labs, but their sacrifice found us a way out. Our only hope was to build an internal combustion car so powerful, so analogue, so obscene, that the Teslas could not hope to model its behaviour. Then, cowed by the silicon analogue of fear, they would simply coast to the side of the road and wait to be destroyed by our snipers and their HERF rifles.
When they told me, I shrugged and invited them into my backyard. Finally bylaw wouldn’t have a reason to bitch about my Trans Am eating neighbourhood squirrels anymore.
Anyone who tells you that they don’t fantasize about stealing a city bus and going on a long-distance police chase is lying to you. Better adjusted than I am, you say? Poppycock. Then why are you here, reading these very words? I’m inside your head now. Follow along as I tell you the tale of my Monday morning.
Due to certain recent legal complications and also the skyrocketing price of parking in my city, I sometimes have to take public transit if I want to go downtown. There are all kinds of other excuses I could use as well - it’s better for “the environment,” I get to meet my fellow citizens, it makes more efficient use of road space, the bus has a bunch of cargo room and an odometer with a seventh digit!!!
About halfway through the trip, the bus driver pulls over and gets out. This is his union-mandated break time, and so he will be gone for five whole minutes, leaving the engine running so we don’t all freeze to death inside this fibreglass anchovy tin. What an opportunity, but before I can even have enough moments of boredom to consider it, the driver has already warned off another passenger about me.
Watch him, he quietly orders an already overburdened mother of two. Bus drivers are an oddly good judge of character, or maybe it’s that he can see the very same devil that he once shook hands with behind my eyes. Either way, the jig is up and my cover is blown. In accomplishing this goal, I remember my sensei’s words of wisdom, and so decide to take the path of honour rather than cold-hearted efficiency.
After faking a seizure, I am able to force some of the other riders to bravely call 911 in order to save my wretched life. It’s not true what they say about the bystander effect: if you give them a tasty enough opportunity, everyone wants to be the heroic saviour of others and maybe get a TV movie. This distraction opens a clear path to the steering wheel, and I take it. From there, it’s just a matter of overcoming my long-running mistrust of the “automatic transmission,” and we are away, the thrill of being in control of this massive engine fizzling through my veins like diesel-flavoured Pop Rocks.
I’d like to say that I ripped some pretty sweet drifts. My natural race-driver instincts took over, letting me intuitively pilot such a massive vehicle, and I got everyone to work way ahead of time. That’s not what happened. Instead, I went the wrong way, everyone yelled at me until I started to cry, and then had to do a thirty-seven point turn against the flow of traffic to try and return to the route.
Never again will I denigrate the brave work of city bus drivers. The ambulance I stole last week was a lot fucking easier to drive.
There are capital crimes - the mundane, workaday running over children, the ho-hum bank robbery - and then there are especially heinous crimes. Today, before I am extradited to the United States to face my execution by firing squad, I wanted to speak to you, the loyal members of my defence team and the braying, traitorous jackals of the so-called “free” press, and tell you my story.
All this began on a message board’s “Secret Santa” thing. It started out so simply: buy or build some cool gifts, and then send them to some other random forum denizen, who would be overjoyed to receive a present in the mail from a stranger who they never meet or ideally hear from again. I, as you may be already guessing, was assigned to an American citizen.
Here in Canada, we have many treats that are unavailable to the Southern Infidels. You know them by name: Coffee Crisp, Dairy Milks, all-dressed potato chips. I decided that I would send my American Santee a special gift, in the hopes of bridging the gap between our two great nations. I packed away a small chocolate egg, made by Germans - if anything, they’re the ones to blame for all this.
I received no response when I sent it. No posts were made on the forum, even weeks later, and in fact they had stopped logging in altogether. At first, I thought it was just ingratitude, but then through the bonds of gift-sending, I genuinely became concerned for their wellbeing. After a few hours of navigating phone trees while bored at work, I managed to get connected to the police officer in charge of the investigation. I was now a suspect.
You see, Kinder Surprise eggs are banned in America for a damn good reason. For whatever reason, as was explained during the trial, the anatomy of an American is vastly different from that of a regular human being. Despite all common sense, Americans - even full-grown, adult Americans - will ingest, snakelike, a whole chocolate egg of unknown origin and then immediately choke to death on the film-canister-sized plastic toy contained within.
It is true that a travesty of justice has occurred here today, but I have good news for my supporters: I have requested that my last meal on Death Row have a couple Kinder Surprises for dessert. I anticipate that I will be able to overpower the choking guards and make good my escape. Thank you.
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tags: canada, united states, kinder surprise, cross-border trade, secret santa
Have you ever wondered just how much of the world’s capital is tied up in market inefficiencies? We did too, and that’s why we opened a right-wing think tank, Thought Horizons, that is in no way a front for bilking richmos out of their ill-gotten gains and wasting it on “research campaigns” whose primary goal is to figure out how fast we can get drunk.
Our research began in Portland, home of the nine-dollar cupcake. While our great society’s huge strides in artificial seasoning engineering have brought down the price of icing substantially, the cost of these artisanal, hand-made cupcakes still remain high. Why is this? It must be because of high minimum wages.
While so-called “educated” economists and even particularly clever toddlers will tell you that increased wages drive demand for luxury products such as these, a population empowered to do such ridiculous things as eat nine-dollar cupcakes is one that is simply not afraid of China. To confirm our thesis, our researchers departed for a nearby dive bar, “The Cesspool.”
At this monument to the free market, the employees are mostly paid in dollar-store Soviet research chemicals and in turn cover the rent on their squalid rat-trap apartments with whatever they can steal from the regulars when they pass out. As expected, the service was atrocious, but we were able to get fucking wrecked without seeing a single Chinese bureaucrat trying to force Maoist dress codes upon the citizenry. Adam Smith couldn’t have been prouder.
In conclusion, our society stands on a precipice between the gleaming city on the hill and wretched, screaming socialist oblivion. Only you can help prevent this by giving us free access to your pocketbook (any attempt to cancel our cheques will be considered a traitorous assault on the principles of capitalism, Ivan). Next week we plan to compare good, old-fashioned, corn-fed American grain alcohol with the inferior, surrender-driven, varieties on offer from the European Union.
One of my longest-running work relationships is with my attorney, Max. We met when he was doing pro bono representation for a dangerous asshole that jumped a Baja Bug into a shopping mall fountain, and I was wearing handcuffs and prison jumpers. He managed to get my sentence reduced to community service, which I gladly spent repairing the elementary school bus fleet - you wouldn’t believe how much horsepower the factory leaves on the table with those fuckers - and a beautiful partnership was born.
Years later, I regularly drop in to his office whenever I’m downtown. Not just to get updates on my many ongoing legal troubles, but also to just see how my old buddy is doing. I caught him on a bad day that time. He wanted me to issue the following disclaimer before I continue the story: none of this story should be represented as an admission of negligence or even truth, and that legal action cannot be brought against me because I am legally a foreign national of a seafaring principality incorporated on an abandoned World War II gunnery platform that doesn’t have to pay taxes.
My magazine, Bad Cars Monthly, had gone a little bit over its budget, and pissed off the landlord because we hadn’t paid him a single red cent for like two years while doing burnouts in his parking lot. The other tenants finally had enough and decided that their “sleep clinic” couldn’t tolerate a little “nonstop nitrous doughnuts from 9:30 to about 2:30 every day.” In response, the landlord was bringing a suit against us, and so as part of discovery, Max wanted me to drop by the office with all those boxes of financial records I had lying around. Bills of sale, insurance claims, unpaid property tax notices, that kind of thing.
As Max was feeding my life’s paperwork into the shredder, there came a door knock at his office. I’d recognize it anywhere, and so did Max: the Federales. It seemed my landlord had some favours owed to him after bribing immigration authorities for decades, and wanted to make sure we didn’t do anything incredibly illegal like destroy evidence. Max told me to figure out how to “shred faster” while he tried to stall them for time.
Now, a normal man would be troubled by this request. After all, the average citizen in today’s opulent first-world society is so soft, so ruined by our failing culture that they don’t even think to carry around a small two-stroke engine with them at all times. Not I - not only did I have a little clone Honda in my suitcase, but I had even brought a tiny squirt bottle of nitromethane with me in case I ran out of starter fluid in any of the review cars. This would be cake itself to hook up to the shredder.
Well, I sure did destroy those records, but Max ended up having to run his practice out of the back of his Lincoln Town Car for a few months until his landlord was able to replace all the burned-out drywall and studs. A real freak accident, we explained, could have happened to anyone.
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tags: bad cars monthly, baja bug, lincoln town car, best of
Are you constantly shooing away neighbourhood children from drinking the liquid that pours from the worn seals of your car? Does your significant other not understand your commitment to being all about that #WetLife? Have you ever noticed that spilled ATF is a great garage floor cleaner? Sounds like you want to hang out with us! This weekend, come on down to Leak Fest at the Numidia Dragway!
Visit the Splash Zone to watch a competition between mechanics as they try to drain a Toyota radiator without spilling coolant all over themselves and the wall. A panel of local artists judge the resulting splash patterns and award abstract art points. The winner gets a free t-shirt that doubles as an absorbent mat!
We’ve got all your favourite celebrities. Don Garlits is going to be there, telling us about how he once resealed a seeping transmission by hitting it with a nine second nitrometh pass.
Just take a look at these preliminary panels, subject to change:
Just Because You’re Pushing Green, Doesn’t Mean You Can’t Be Green! Subaru executives and coolant experts panel this discussion of how coolant puddles are actually helping the environment by cooling the surface of the warming earth. Tips on how to pick a pet-safe variety of coolant are included.
Steam-Cleaning Your Driveway Before Selling Your House Real estate agent Ethyl N. Glycol returns to the conference circuit with this barn-stormer of a presentation. Trick home inspectors, mislead the HOA, and exploit common mixups at the city property office to “lose” evidence of past bylaw non-compliance with these handy tips. You can’t afford to miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to increase the property value of your place!
Oil Extraction From Asphalt: The New Gold Rush Tired of bitcoins? Sick of selling your body into prostitution? America’s highways are soaked through with old engine lubricant! Learn about how to turn the most common oil stains from sidewalks and parking lots from unsightly to cha-ching.
New members of the club all pledge their unwavering dedication to preserving the existence of the manual transmission, but hardly any of them are willing to kidnap and behead a politician over it. Cowards. We had to take drastic action if our way of life was to survive: unlike Big Slushbox, we don’t have the kind of resources needed to buy up the government and force through these bigoted anti-stick policies.
To raise money for the cause, me and a bunch of the other full members had been buying up all the automatic transmissions from the junkyard, throwing thermite dust into the torque converters, and then selling them at a massive markup. When those customers come right back to us, they’re usually swearing up and down about how they’d never have these problems with a manual transmission.
This scam worked great for a few months, until one of our clients alerted the local TV channel’s “trouble shooters” segment. Now I had a snoopy news reporter in my backyard, taking peeks under all the car covers and shining her high-xenon filming lamps on all the weird politician-sized lumps in my lawn. Worst of all, when the story actually came out, it made me out to seem like some kind of weirdo. Just because I liked to row my own gears! Can you believe?
Turns out that it’s not force, but persuasion, that gets followers. And nothing is more persuasive than the TV news telling thousands of impressionable teenagers to avoid learning how to drive a stick shift. Now, when I hear the sound of a Peugeot being gear-jammed or see a Protege5 rolling helplessly downhill at a light, I smile, because the next generation is keeping the mission alive, even if they aren’t necessarily preserving the clutch lining very well.
It’s a tale as old as time: I heard the doorbell ring, but didn’t make it to the front door before it was too late. I held the “sorry we missed you” slip impotently and looked up to see my mail carrier tuck into a smoky one-tire-fire off the surface of my driveway. Normally, I’d be mad, but as an enthusiastic supporter of labour rights and burnouts, this was smack-dab in the middle of the Venn diagram of shit that I get kicked out of company Christmas parties for.
The next day, I drove to the post office to pick up my parcel. I like to think I’ve built up a sort of relationship with the poor retail staff who work this counter, but in reality they almost certainly forget that I ever existed the picosecond I get outside of hollerin’ range. In this case, however, they had been expecting me.
“Oh no, motherfucker,” they said at me, grinning. “That package was oversize. You have to go to The Depot.”
An hour later, I powerslid into the parking lot of the central mail depot. I could tell from the handling and also the loud hissing sound that I had likely debeaded one of my tires while mounting the curb at highway speeds, but in my defence, their actual driveway was like half a block down that way. We all have to do our part for the environment by cutting down on idling. Especially when the exhaust fumes from your Volare’s hood zoomies make overhead migratory birds drop from the sky.
They, too, had been expecting me. “Who ships an entire car through the postal system?” asked the clerk, before wandering into the back and coming out with a Fiat Uno.
As you grow up, one of the ways in which your friend group changes is that they start to buy more expensive cars. By “more expensive,” I mean “new.” It’s not that they are awful people, but it is really difficult to see them purchasing a new base-model automobile when there are thousands of homeless, perfectly good used cars relegated to the junkyards every single day. For only a dollar a minute, you too can save these poor, innocent cars. Won’t you please donate to Switch Vision?
Our charity is simple: we bring mechanics who don’t have any money but do have a lot of free time on their hands to the junkyard, and then pay them to resuscitate cars. Then we flip the bastards on Craigslist and change our email address before the new buyer can get in touch with us to ask why it lights on fire. It’s only a little bit flammable; that’s why you got such a good deal!
Just last week, we paid a down-on-his-luck high school student to turn wrenches for an hour and bring back a Datsun B210 from the dead. Sure, it was mostly air, but do you want a car or not? Our customer chose the former, and as far as we know they made it home safely with their lovely little Honey Bee’s new lease on life.
Due to recent government legislation, we are required to tell potential donors about the risks that our charity faces. Our primary threat is that one day the police will eventually track down the name on all the bills of sale to a man who has been dead for thirty years. When that happens, we’ll need a new name, and that means driving down to the graveyard. And if you’ve seen our company car, you’ll understand that is a pretty big chance to take.
There is a book that has a great truth. All will be revealed inside it. It has cover to cover guidance to get you through the hardest times in your life. Even the contradictions and the outright fantasies have their own value in bolstering the narrative of this miracle that has transpired on our earth. Do you have a few minutes to learn about it? To find out more about your life’s purpose? I speak, of course, of the Factory Service Manual.
Once, there were great Factories all across this land, and the engineers who dwelled within knew they would have to help the average Mechanic service their tremendous works. Working hand-in-hand with scribes raised from birth in an exotic priesthood known as the Arts Degree, they wrote down all that they had discovered about how to make a broken car work again.
The best Factories went even further. Predicting that there may one day arise a great Failure that they did not anticipate, these sages spilled deep reference material. Wiring diagrams, overly-detailed schematics, and even the fabled Fastener Measurements were jotted down in these unparalleled works of human selflessness, the darkest secrets of the Manufacturer laid bare to enrich future generations.
All is not well in our world, however. There exist traitor brands who refuse to release the Factory Service Manuals, keeping them cooped up inside their ivory tower of misery. Rogue engineers try to dissect the works themselves, and draw conclusions from the entrails. They can only go so far. What happens deep inside the secret heart of these proprietary vehicles? No one truly knows.
To truly understand the nature of an automobile, we turn to the dreaded Previous Owner. Their grotesque form and callousness for all things mechanical is hated in our order, but sometimes it is necessary. These Owners sacrifice Resale Value by damaging their cars to such a degree that their abuse exposes the truth of the car itself, much like a rushing river wears a stone smooth. Pray that you never meet one.
If you’re a fan of union-busting, generally incompetent corporations, then you’re as familiar with General Motors as I am. Ever since their incorporation in an era when cocaine was considered a fashion accessory for the high-achieving man-about-town, GM has made crap cars with beautiful engines and then blamed foreign devils for ruining their best efforts.
It’s almost like they’re cursed. Nobody could manage a company with so much promise so badly for so long. Iconic cars, each and every one with their own fatal flaws: diesel Olds that shit out head gaskets, subcompact Chevies that turn to ash in the presence of moisture, and the Aztek. Chinese engineers fly to America just to laugh at new Chevys on the lot, take selfies with the panel gaps. How could it all have gone so wrong? I have a theory.
Years ago, way back in 2007, when GM was really on the ropes, I was invited to a little party. They had negative cash on hand, and the economy was imploding too fast to be able to do anything other than get spit on by a banker. Things didn’t look good for the General. Within just a few weeks, there would be nothing left of the company that once produced such storied models as the Cavalier, Grand Prix and Matiz. Drastic action had to be taken.
What else could the upper management do but phone up their billionaire buddies and invite them over to the office to play a little Most Dangerous Game? Shove a rifle in their hands and lube them up with a couple cheap whiskys courtesy of the advertising budget, and let them hunt the junior product-planning executives. They’d make more to replace them, of course: America’s MBA factories still had the pedal floored so hard that the firewall was wrinkling, so an errant shot here and there had no real penalties.
That’s the thing about GM’s luck, though: I watched one of the bigwigs at the EPA gun down a junior engineer by mistake. That guy’s job - and it was the only job he’d ever have in his short life - was to make the Chevrolet Bolt good.
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tags: chevrolet, chevrolet bolt, chevrolet cavalier, pontiac grand prix, daewoo matiz, pontiac aztek, pontiac, oldsmobile
Gandhi said you need to be the change that you want to see in the world. At least I think it was Gandhi, at least. I bet he really knew how to negotiate. Maybe if things were a little different, he would have started a business like mine. I am a car negotiator.
When you see a used car you want, but maybe not enough to pay full price, then you send me in. I get to keep half of whatever I knock off the asking value, and you get to go home satisfied that you got a smokin’ deal with your cleverness, wit and guile. It’s been proven by science: being a master negotiator is incredibly hot to any potential mate.
The only people who really lose out are the sellers, who I hardball to such a degree that a group of MLB colour commentators have begun following me around. They have this makeshift wooden announcer booth that they assemble out of the back of a pickup truck, like a tree stand for deer hunting, and then they say stuff like “Oooh, that’s gotta hurt,” when I point out that the car’s “undercoating” is in fact just black construction paper. I’m not sure if those dudes are retired or not, but as long as I don’t have to pay them, I don’t mind the moral support.
Trades? I eat trades for breakfast. Once, I exchanged just the left tail-light of my client’s Beetle for a fully-loaded Maersk cargo liner. It was sort of a shitty deal since we still had to pay the dock fees, but it all worked out. Now my customer is some kind of pirate in international waters. When I met her, she was an accountant. She sends me a Christmas card every year! Last year’s cover had a very festively dressed collection of hostages.
At parties, when I tell people about my job, I get asked if I feel guilty. There’s no guilt to be had in greasing the wheels of supply and demand: in fact, I’m removing inefficiencies caused by logical fallacies and self-delusion. I should be getting awards from the capitalist think tank in town, but I suspect the head editor is still super angry at me that I knocked thirty grand off his Maybach and forced him to throw his children in on the deal. If they were my kids, I’d be happy to be rid of them: without having been trained in any physical labour, their eBay selling price was nearly bupkis. It’s like they don’t even teach sunk cost fallacy anymore in those fancy colleges out East. When I heard that he committed suicide a few days later, I really regretted my actions: if I had known he had an antique pearl-handled revolver I would have gotten that included too. Probably get like sixty bucks at the pawn shop.
Yes, I’m pretty good at my job, all things considered. So why is it that I still can’t buy a car for myself without spending five minutes looking at the interior and then slapping down the asking price while complimenting the seller on how nice their car is and how it surely won’t be a big deal to find a replacement for the missing windshield and doors? I tell myself that it’s because I appreciate my work-life balance.
My work as a humanitarian worker is hard, sure, but it’s chock full of reward. No, not the hearty sense of pride: only sucker college students on the world’s worst spring break trips expect that. What I fill up on is the chance to see all the exciting ways that the developing countries reuse their vehicles. Instead of being shamed by their neighbours for not being able to afford a car made by a company that is still in business, these international MacGyvers are taking advantage of garbage cars to better their communities.
Just last week, I was in an idyllic little fishing village where the brother of the mayor had figured out how to put a Suzuki Carry minivan on rails. Now it’s a motherfucking train! If you did that here, the homeowner’s association would spit carbolic acid directly into your face and eyes. They didn’t need me at all, but I decided to put in a little bit of extra work and teach him about the concept of the “project car.” Now his van may never run again, but boy is he happy to take it apart and leave it that way for several years!
Can you believe that sometimes my interpreters will refuse to convey my concepts to the poor souls that we visit? A few years ago, I had to fire one of them because she didn’t think a farmer should be using nitrous oxide to tend to his crops! Good thing I brought my whiteboard along with me, because after my help, that dude is having a blast trying to make new piston rings out of pop cans to replace all the melted ones.
I’ve been invited to the United Nations to “answer for my crimes,” but I humbly refuse all speaking engagements like that. My job is to be a citizen of the world, to spread information about the glorious internal combustion engine and its ability to ease the physical labour of millions. Also, I sometimes destroy civilizations that look like they might be coming close to developing average-speed cameras.
My neighbourhood had finally become bad enough that the police were no longer going to patrol it until I started paying my taxes. The chief had a little press conference all about it, even had a picture of me on his PowerPoint presentation. I got a call from my mom about it: she was super excited to have her little fetus on local television. She also wanted me to pay back all that money I borrowed for bail. Funny how the cell phone service likes to cut out sometimes around my house.
In response to the government’s failure to police my neighbourhood, the local miscreants sensed an opportunity. That night, I noticed a gaggle of kids harassing the rusty 1983 Dacia Ceausescu in the alley out behind my house. I chased them off, but a few of them returned the next Friday night. Every week, this cycle would repeat itself. I’d blast a few pounds of rock salt into the air directly above their heads, and they’d take off. Then they’d come back and try to steal it once again.
Thing was, I already had spent a few weekends on trying to get that Eastern-European shitbarge to crank over. You have to admire their dedication to the art of joyriding. As the weeks went on, the group dwindled until there was just one hardy would-be thief remaining. Eventually, he stopped wearing the ski mask at all, and swore loudly enough that I could hear him from anywhere on my property.
One Friday night, he didn’t show up. Despite all logic, I was very sad about it. I had started to sit out on my porch and watch him test ceramic fuses, patch up mouse-eaten wiring, and tug on the vehicle with a come-along to see if he could free up the brakes. He even bought a service manual at one point and left it behind in the car when he gave up for the evening.
It wasn’t until the next Christmas break that I again saw him, fresh from his first year of college, clutching a mechanical engineering textbook. My Romanian daily driver had obsessed him to such a degree that his life now pivoted around it. Surely if he just went to school, eventually he would understand what was going wrong. When he once again gave up, chucking his textbook into the gutter, and stormed off into the night, I gave a jaunty wave and sipped my eggnog.
Nearly a decade later, I found an invitation tucked under the corroding wipers of the Dacia. My thief wanted me to come to his graduation ceremony. The joke’s on him: the stupid bastard went and got a Ph. D in mechanical engineering. As per natural law, he instantly forgot which way to turn a screwdriver as soon as the doctorate was awarded.
He’ll never steal it that way, though I have considered opening up a bar to serve the hordes of grad students that have now taken up semi-permanent residence in my alley.
When I still had my hand in the whole Pope “game,” one of the first things they told me during my administration was never to create a big scene. The Church couldn’t really survive another big schism, not now with all the Facebooks and the Instagrams. All of us will be out of a job, so don’t do it if you enjoy having room service at the Vatican, capiche?
I guess they must have skipped over that lesson for the new guy: he popped a burnie in a school zone last week. Sure, he said it wasn’t his intention, that his foot slipped off the clutch pedal. Poppycock. When I wore those Piloti Papal loafers, those things had grip for days. Easy heel-toe, I’m telling you, and considering this guy turned down my twelve-hundred horsepower twincharged Alfa Romeo in favour of some boring BMW executive car, it’s not like you can really accidentally do a burnout in those things. It’s hard enough to do one on purpose.
So naturally, there was a schism, like they had warned me about during New Pope Orientation. A small cult of worshippers decided that if the Pope did it, it must be okay, and started lighting Michelin-smelling candles around the prayer statues and trading in their crossovers for belt-chucking boosted Mustangs. The mainstream, however, was outraged. How dare the Pope do anything even moderately unseemly, and in a school zone no less? What’s next, their weekly tithe going directly to buy more E85? It was a genuine PR crisis, and as the two groups turned on each other, the little one-tire-fire soon grew to block out the sun in a cloud of vulcanized controversy.
Eventually, the crisis passed, despite the fears of the Church administration. All it took to get it out of the news was for the Pope to accidentally drop a newborn baby when visiting a hospital. After he got fired, I sent a few texts to see if I could sub in for a few weeks, but they never got back to me - you know, it’s all politics.
So you can imagine how pleased I was to turn on the TV last week, and see excited reporters crowded around a plume of white tire smoke which had emerged from the driveway of a bishop who was known to drive a diesel-swapped Ramcharger. Now that’s a sight to Holy See.
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tags: pope, the pope, popemobile, alfa romeo, alfa romeo montreal
In the tiny island nation of Japan, the year 1997 never actually happened. Or at least, not our 1997. A divergent time stream carried their civilization off in a direction that we may never be able to rejoin. What caused this schism? Our barely-literate “scientists” have no idea. I, however, have believed in my heart for years that it was due to the introduction of the Type-R Honda Civic.
This humble hatchback was imbued with giant-slaying powers by a team of gibbering maniacs, obsessed with the concept of guilt-free horsepower. What if handling’s your jam? An original EK9 Type-R can dive into an S-curve at speeds that terrify even the hardiest race drivers, and come out wailing its song of sky-high revs. Majestic. Yet somehow, this fantastic automobile could not be issued to our shores.
Why was this? It wasn’t that our fat bodies and shitty roads would not appreciate the car. Not even our shitty grey-market import laws written by Nazi used car salesmen were to blame. No, it was because of the chrono-portal that Japan had fallen into. Only passenger aircraft could travel to the alternate timeline - by flying directly through the international date line. There, and only there, the greatest of Soichiro’s many labours could be enjoyed.
Eventually, Honda scientists determined a way in which North Americans could, at last, receive a hot Civic. They would make a car so shitty that not even the laws of quantum physics could become interested in slowing its progress around the globe. Double wishbone suspension was simply too good to make the trip between realities, and had to go. The result was the 2001 SiR, a leering abomination of a vehicle that truly redefined the meaning of the phrase “bump steer.”
They had succeeded, but at what cost? News soon trickled back through the portal these brave engineers punched in the space-time continuum. It was a shit car and we were all going to buy turbo Subarus instead. Panicked, the engineers rechecked the calibration on their instruments. Subarus? How could that be? It was too late.
As they watched helplessly, a wild-eyed team of Fuji’s finest engineers came barging back through the portal, wearing baseball caps, clutching Ford Explorer brochures and Costco hot dogs with extra ketchup. They chanted in unison to their dark god as the portal sealed itself: “Forester. Forester. Forester. Forester.”
I take a lot of pride in my work. It gets unfairly savaged by elitist know-it-alls in the media, who call it an “entry-level” job. You need more than an entry-level of knowledge to work at the 3M angle-grinder help line. People from all over the world have these incredible projects they’re working on, and only you can help. If that’s an “entry-level” job, then I guess everyone else must be a fucking rocket scientist.
Let me tell you about this call I got last week: dude calls in and he wanted to know what the best sanding wheel was to use for his project. He’s in a rush, and if he doesn’t get done soon, he’ll be in trouble. Just the kind of job that’s right up my alley.
I ask him for the medium, and he says “pork.” We do get a lot of requests from the meat-processing industry. Time is money, after all! How many pigs are you handling? “Uh, one,” he says, “and I’m trying to get rid of a tattoo off it.”
Normally, I’d recommend a Roloc green disc for this kind of purpose. You can bring it way up high without it flinging apart, which is just what you need to clean up the surf- “and he needs to stay alive.” Come again, sir? “Can we be honest with each other? Keep this secret?” Of course, sir. All 3M customer-support calls are kept in the highest confidence, barring any recording this call may involve for quality-assurance purposes, I tell him.
“Okay, so, I’m part of this little ‘motorcycle gang.’“ I can practically hear the air quotes. “And we kicked this guy out, but we need to get rid of his tattoo, and the tattoo removal guy couldn’t make it today.” Say no more, sir. I’ll just look it up in our knowledge base. I type “tattoo, snitch” into the search engine, but nothing comes back.
“Sir, I’m going to have to direct you to one of our product engineers,” I tell him, and do so. I stay on the line, of course, because I want to learn a new and helpful factoid for future customers. Who knows? This could become an exciting new product application for our company! I could become the Vice President in Charge of Stool Pigeon Removal.
The engineer who picks up sounds bored. Without saying hi or asking any further questions, he just says “knotted steel wheel. Keep the feed speed fast, use alcohol on the wheel and the skin beforehand so it doesn’t get infected.” Click.
Like I said, what I love the most about this job is helping people with their problems.
The body was barely cold when it hit the table at the morgue. I went to visit my friend Kevin, who mops the floor after all the autopsies are done. I introduced him to another friend of mine, Benjamin Franklin, and I think they really hit it off. So much so that good ol’ Kev didn’t even notice me taking all those pictures of the corpse.
Sure, the cops didn’t want me rooting around in here. They really didn’t like it when I took parts home, either. Get off your high horse. Could you blame me for wanting a little souvenir? After all, only a few years ago she was the most desired model at all the parties. The belle of the ball.
For awhile, the feds used to agree to keep mum when something like this happened. Don’t blast it out on the radio; that would just invite more vultures. Stopped me for a few weeks, and then I decided to start following the ambulances.
I didn’t used to do this. It was the new breed of Europeans, so slim and concerned about making their weight and eating light. And then there was the blow. Twenty, twenty-four pounds: it was crazy what they put into their bodies.
You have to give the people what they want, and I think even the feds recognize this. If they really didn’t want me poking around inside the guts of the dead, you’d think they’d do a better job of razor-wiring the parking lot. I didn’t even have to use my good cutters to hop the fence this time.
I pulled the sheets back to reveal the nametag. McLaren. Long way from home, but don’t worry, your turbos can give a sick Mazda 323 a new life. It’s what your owner would have wanted.
In my spare time, I like to help the police solve crimes. Today’s law enforcement is stretched too thin, dealing with minor crimes such as felony speeding and bicycle theft instead of major crimes, like driving too slowly in the left lane. That’s why when I won the lottery, I poured my earnings into becoming a costumed vigilante.
Often, I prefer to do my crime fighting the easy way: by hanging out on the local serial killer forums. Despite what you may have heard from certain subcultures, you don’t necessarily need to dress up like some kind of giant mammal-human hybrid in order to visit the internet. It’s way easier on the dry cleaning budget.
You wouldn’t think that these people would be so willing to open up about their crimes, especially since conventional wisdom holds them to be frustrated loners who can’t fit into society, but when you build a club, they will come. What’s really surprising is how civil their flame wars are. I guess when you know the guy on the other side of the screen is entirely capable of beheading you during Tuesday afternoon errands and getting away with it scot-free, you’re more inclined to be nice.
There is one segment of the serial-killer population that is unaccounted for, and as such the existing coterie of established homicidal maniacs complain about them constantly: millennials.
The complaints about those millennial serial killers are what you’d expect. Nobody wants to even wear a hockey mask for a serial killing anymore - it’s so 1980. Killers today can’t afford a new knife, so they use a rusty one and get really sloppy cuts. Young murderers are more interested in building their brand than they are in getting away with a spree of unthinkable crimes. They don’t even slaughter the disadvantaged even though they’re way easier targets!
They’re right, to a certain extent, but when I throw a thousand-dollar carbon-fibre razor-sharp boomerang in the shape of a Quechuan mouse opossum into the chest of a young spree killer, I feel that heart-felt passion for the craft in their resistance. And that really shows up in practice. Most of the boomer-stabbers get confused and Airdrop me a signed confession and photos while I’m beating them up.
They told me if I built a better mousetrap, there would be a path beaten to my door. That’s the thing about cliches: they don’t really seem like enough when you’re staring at the swampy footwell of a 1978 Jaguar with half a dozen dead rodents floating tits-up in the liquid form of carpet.
Those of you in the audience who routinely store non-working cars in, shall we say, developmentally-challenged rural communities, have often been plagued by the field mouse menace. These little bastards will climb in your muffler and plug your exhaust with seeds, they’ll copulate in your glovebox after turning the owner’s manual into a swinger’s pad, and their favourite food is extremely long lengths of hard-to-diagnose electrical wire leading to expensive components.
I had just started to punch drain holes in the rusty floorpans with my flathead screwdriver when I realized: this Jaguar is actually a goldmine. That hoary old saying was half-right: the other half of making a better mousetrap is marketing. Within a few months, I was the highest-rated exterminator in the area. It didn’t further hurt the Jaguar’s value, as twenty pounds of rodent shit wasn’t worse than one, and I was making a fortune just for towing it into their yards and leaving it there for a couple weeks. Those hee-haws were paying me for storage!
Business got so good that soon I was hauling all manner of luxury-finery around farmlands behind a shitty old International tractor. No mouse would dare eat hay when they could have a luncheon of S500 steering wheel wrap! And when a car was done, I would just hook up the battery and let the resulting fire collect on insurance for me.
The Jag, though, never self-immolated. Here’s how bad the wiring on a Jag is: even these mice didn’t want to chew on it. What, did it not taste good enough for a bunch of property-destroying assholes who spend their entire lives running away from clouds passing overhead? The ungrateful little shits didn’t try in the least to give me an excuse to rewire the car for its future life as a circle-track superstar.
In Japan, one of the most popular genres is the humble train simulator. Players from all walks of life strap a giant piece of plastic to their desks and then pretend to competently operate large machines within the bounds of current-day transportation law. This concept sells so well that we wanted to bring it home to North America, a revered hotbed of enthusiasm for public transit.
As is always the way, we had to make some alterations to prepare it for Western audiences. Japanese people like their simulators to be a little, shall we say, antiseptic. For the Western release of Trains Go Fast Now, we’ve hired the finest fluid-dynamics researchers to make sure our passenger vomit accurately slides along the floor, globbing up with day-old garbage and detritus as it does. Traffic signals are accurately unmaintained, and meth-addled pickup truck drivers will barge out in front of you (or into the side of your train) at level crossings just like real life.
That’s not all, though - we’ve also added a business simulation layer on top of the train driving. Now you can participate in exacting recreations of union labour disputes, slashed maintenance budgets, and bribing local government officials to keep from sending your management to prison. Every pixel is captured directly from authentic local light rail and subway systems, which - alone or with other players - will make you feel like you truly are trying to keep the lights on in the final days of the collapse of Western civilization.
Ask for it by name at your local videogame store, assuming it still exists. Trains Go Fast Now is available for $49.99, but each trip will need to be subsidized by you by purchasing Train Tokens for $2 each (or $8 for 5: Best Deal).
San Francisco boasts some of the most expensive real estate on the planet. It’s also where you find all the interesting jobs: food delivery engineer, anti-personnel drone targeting systems developer, and street poop remover. How do we make sure that the industry can get the workers it needs without trusting those workers to work from home? I think I have the answer.
You see, California throws out millions of perfectly good cars every year. Salt states acquire some, but they can only rust out their existing hoopties so quickly. Junkyards are stuffed to the absolute gills with primo-looking economy cars that just had a little oops into a parking abutment, or failed smog badly enough to kill an asthmatic schoolchild from five hundred paces. This means that for only pennies, you can get up to 160 sq. ft of air-conditioned living space.
My program takes luxury cars and leaves them double-parked all across the city with their four-way blinkers on and an inverter plugged into the nearest light pole. We’ve done the bribery footwork to have them legally declared as “homes,” which lets us skate on the registration, and you pay by the hour to have a little nap. You’ll find it’s still cheaper than renting. When the five-oh gets a little uppity about it being parked in the middle of traffic for a few weeks, our highly trained team of contractors pick up and tow the vehicle to a new spot. Rate them five stars, or we’ll deport them.
A lot of people, notably politicians, say we’re committing misdemeanours - but that’s just another word for disruption. Sign up today: do it online, because our office does not have a fixed address.
According to the Mayor, our city had now become so badly serviced that it now qualified as a United Nations economic crisis zone. In fact, after they asked our representative for some financial assistance, it was determined that things were in fact so bad that the entire nation decided to just disown us. I didn’t even know that was a thing they could do.
As a result, China was flying in a dozen or so engineers to come and shore up our infrastructure and pull us out of what their diplomat described as “the fucking Stone Age.”
I was a little insulted. Sure, we’ve had austerity measures for a really long time, my city councillor hasn’t been seen since he tried to break up that garbage strike, and our judge is actually a stuffed Golden Retriever that our Chief of Police accidentally shot, but in our defence taxes are theft. Speaking of theft, our new occupiers also shut down the only local industry we had: stealing large quantities of copper wire from a live electrical substation. Without a reliable, often-deadly job to go to in the morning, how were we supposed to feel good about ourselves? That’s the real crime: being held responsible for our actions.
It’s not all bad, though: the disaster recovery tents that they put up are a lot less leaky than my roof, and our school system might actually get some books soon. They’ll all be in Chinese, sure, but I’m pretty sure none of the teachers can read English as it is, so no harm done. Plus, the harm reduction team has been tasked to teach us how to properly make meth, instead of our existing technique, which mostly involves boiling thrift-store Crocs in a pot over a Ford 302.
You’ve heard people complain that their tires are like hockey pucks when it gets cold. Maybe you should check your privilege, because in Canada, tires literally are hockey pucks.
The problem really originates in our rubber importation process. Since Canada’s proud boreal forests are cold year-round, they can only produce hardwood (it’s frozen) and have no hope whatsoever of growing a functioning rubber tree.
That means we need to import everything from the Warmlands, which in Canadian vernacular means literally everyone that’s not our country. As such, there is quite a substantial charge at the border - refrigerating foreign goods down to our native temperature takes a lot of electricity, which itself produces heat that needs to be properly cooled.
Only big businesses can really afford to pay these ridiculous import charges, and since Canadians only have on average fewer than one car per person, that means that tires are insanely expensive compared to hockey pucks, which every Canadian citizen consumes at least four dozen of per year.
Therefore, many Canucks prefer to use recycled hockey pucks for their winter conveyances. It’s simple: once a puck has been slapshot too many times to be considered “round enough” for regulation use, it is thrown in a bin and eventually dispatched to a tire factory.
At the tire factory, highly unionized French-Canadians toil endlessly to mix the hockey pucks with excess maple syrup. As the price of edible syrup is tightly controlled by a cabal, more and more farmers every year find themselves selling their leftover stocks to the tire factories at a massive discount. With the appropriate freeze-thaw cycling, the maple syrup crystallizes and bonds the hockey pucks together, so that they can be machined by talented yet underemployed craftsman machinists into a tire.
This phenomenon explains why Canadians are so hesitant to drive in warm weather: not only do their homemade tires handle like hockey pucks, but excessive cornering or tire heat result in the proprietary maple glaze delaminating. This causes what is nicknamed by Canadian rally drivers a “Frank Slide.”
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tags: microeconomics, hockey pucks, just canada things, canada
“That’s a pretty big nitrous bottle,” my houseguest offers, in an attempt to redirect the course of an increasingly precarious conversation.
“No it’s not,” I shut him down without thinking, “it’s only a little ten pounder. Can’t even get you through a night at the drags.”
“I mean, it’s a pretty big nitrous bottle to have on your coffee table,” he says, and now we are no longer having fun. I recognize the look on his face immediately: this is an intervention.
Before I can banish him from my home for this betrayal, the front door is kicked in, and a gaggle of well-meaning friends, acquaintances, hangers-on and family members flood into the front hallway. My claustrophobic Aunt Mabel, angered by the sudden transition from the yard to the parts-choked confines of my squalid domicile, begins to throw half-hearted elbows at her temporary comrades. This is unthinkingly reciprocated by one of the half-felons I like to sell scrap metal to. Soon, most of my extended social circle is engaged in a full-on Irish donnybrook. Grandma would be proud.
I duck a thrown intake manifold, and slip out the back, where I have left a getaway vehicle for a situation just like this. It is a 1988 Isuzu Gemini RS, imported at extreme cost from a European junkyard, and the tangy zip of this turbocharged whip is exactly what the doctor ordered. After a quick wrestle with the five-point harness, I key on the little Japanese pocket rocket and… nothing.
Oh yeah, I took the battery out of this one for the project Tercel. Not that Tercel I sold, though. Was it the one that got wrecked? No, I would have pulled the battery out in that ditch, all that lead was the only part of the car worth money.
When the police arrive, I tearfully thank them for their service. I then make myself scarce before they think too hard about all those red-light camera pictures posted on the “Wanted” board back at the station. My friends and family were right, the intervention was just what I needed: Aunt Mabel had a Group 24F battery in her Corolla that she left behind in my driveway when the paddy wagon took her ass away. Fit right in the Gemini. She won’t miss it: it sounded like she was in the market for a bigger car, anyway.
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tags: intervention, isuzu gemini, toyota corolla, isuzu, toyota
Jury nullification is the action of a jury of your peers deciding that a law is unjust, and that they simply don’t have to enforce it. Most defence lawyers will tell you it’s a moonshot, some kind of idiot stunt that only a complete moron would try. On the other hand, I was fairly convinced that nobody liked getting speeding tickets, and we could finally throw the entire concept out if I just gave a bravura performance.
To research, I watched a lot of Law & Order, but all it did was make me scared of playgrounds, clowns, the elderly, and the internet. It figured that the forces of big business didn’t want me to know more about the awesome power we citizens had to reshape the legal system. After all, if we could just reject their fascist laws, next week we could all be running our own Disneylands that are made of bricks of cocaine and have slightly cheaper churros.
On the big day, I walked up to the legal clerk and told them my plan. I expected them to be intimidated that a true outsider-artist legal genius had emerged, and not one that rants about gold fringed flags and which character set their name was typed in on their birth certificate. Their cackling laughter was not encouraging, and I was sent down the hallway to traffic court.
In traffic court, I would soon realize, the state had automated speed taxation to such a degree that now the jury consisting of my “peers” was, in fact, made up entirely of photo radar robots. I barely had a chance to plead my case before the jury foreman stood up and emitted a dial-up modem carrier signal. The trial was over, and I was guilty.
I’m still sour about it. Nearly any real human being would have absolved me for only doing triple the limit in a playground zone. The faster you go through, the shorter time my car is there, the fewer chances kids have to get hit by it. That’s just math.
I thought robots were supposed to be good at math.
Seat Safety Switch Training: Uncommon Cars for Parts Counter Personnel
Hello. Welcome to the first part of this innovative new video series meant to teach you about the oddball cars that your customers may drive. With today’s longer-lasting automobiles and free-trade agreements, the parts desk staff of today is challenged in ways that simply didn’t happen even twenty years ago.
As a result, you may find yourself having to deal with people off the street who don’t even describe brands you are aware of, or have drivetrain configurations that sound like 1980s pulp science fiction. We’re here to help; this first part of the series explains five of the most common oddball customer vehicles, and how to identify them.
Customer Complaint: The engine is under the seat in my Toyota and I don’t know where to put the brake fluid. Customer Vehicle: The 1990-1999 Toyota Previa. Once, Toyota tried to see if they could actually kill a Previa from lack of maintenance. After several of the staff involved reached retirement age while constantly driving all day long, the project was abandoned. That Previa was resold for the exact price they paid to a family of four who is still driving it.
Customer Complaint: My car didn’t come with a turn signal stalk Customer Vehicle: Despite a common misconception, BMW owners do actually have a turn signal stalk in their car. Introduce them to it by firm application of a steel-toed boot.
Customer Complaint: I don’t know what kind of car I have because the back rusted off. Customer Vehicle: 1989-2012 Mazda hatchback
Customer Complaint: My hybrid handles really well but I can’t actually turn it to go anywhere other than forward and back on a steel track. Also, the salesman’s phone is disconnected when I try to call for warranty service. Customer Vehicle: Bombardier ALP-45DP
Customer Complaint: I drive a Mitsuoka, and Customer Vehicle: Take them at their word. Open the cash register and do not make eye contact. Once they are gone, wipe the security camera footage. Do not at any point call law enforcement or attempt to intervene. The consequences cannot be fathomed.
Before we begin, I would like to take this time to thank the esteemed members of Congress for inviting me here to speak on this important topic. It is only with strong, forward-looking leadership that we can hope to succeed in the future. Thank you.
For decades, previous governments have ignored a looming foreign threat on our shores. You might have laughed at it when you saw it on the news. Maybe you read about it in an in-flight magazine and were curious - but not curious enough to actually investigate. I stand here today to tell you: America’s toilet technology has fallen far behind the rest of the world.
My enemies in the private sector have already been before you, trying to discredit the hard work of my research scientists. Denialism is rampant. Their excuses - that nobody wants to run electricity to their toilet, that bidets are confusing to an uneducated populace - are broadcast to us daily by a multi-billion dollar advertising budget. Those are dollars that aren’t spent on reclaiming our throne, so to speak, as kings of the shithole world.
What was once a government-backed research and development agency into the toilet problem has become a privatized mess with the deregulation programmes of the 1980s. American Standard has failed, year after year, to develop a toilet that can hope to compete with even 1970s Japan, much less 2010s China, with their advanced new machine-sentient, stool-analyzing toilets.
It is for this reason that I ask Congress to act immediately. In this book I have brought with me today are thirty new recommendations for closing the toilet gap. With only zero-point-one percent of the annual military budget, my team of crack researchers can design and build a commode that can withstand nine hundred pounds, estimated to be the average weight of an American citizen by 2035. We expect that just the increased efficiency from the heated seat and bidet features alone will raise the GDP by two to five percent.
I’ll be honest: it was a bit of a shock to find out that I had accidentally funded the overthrow of a small impoverished nation, but that’s what you get when you drink and Kickstarter. Now I have all these reporters on my lawn asking what my geopolitical ambitions are, which isn’t fair because they still haven’t shipped my t-shirt despite paying for the $25 tier.
Reading the original pitch now, I realize that this is indeed what I had been paying for all this time. That’s what you get when you only watch the first 30 seconds of a pitch video and then click the pledge button: it looked like a cool videogame, and so I thought that’s what I was backing. I didn’t even know how to spell junta, but now they carry my name into battle on a big flag. They pose with it atop a fresh mountain of corpses on every weekly update email.
When I drive into town, there are all these protesters. How dare you overthrow hard-working farmers, they shriek, and bang on the hood of my car. I don’t know if that is supposed to intimidate me: the thing has so many hail dents that even a moderately overweight co-ed isn’t going to leave a worse mark. Still, though, it makes me feel bad about myself, and that’s simply not what funding independent artists obsessed with the concept of violent revolution is supposed to be about.
My credit card company didn’t care, because from their perspective, the campaign was a success: no fraud for a chargeback. Frustrated, I called Kickstarter technical support to see if I could get some kind of coupon, but they just said I should get the United Nations involved if I’m displeased with my overthrow of the government. Fat chance: those guys are just going to try and bait me into backing something dorky like safe drinking water. Probably won’t even have a cool t-shirt.
Science has never been more popular. No, of course I don’t mean the hard stuff; your average person-on-the-street still can’t tell the difference between a quark and a gluon. I mean the pop science. You know: celebrity scientists handing it out to confused Bible-clutchers, stick figure cartoons of a man humping a Mars rover, t-shirts with pictures of Erlenmeyer flasks on them.
A couple years ago, I was working as a publicity consultant for a large government research lab. We’d cracked some form of quantum teleportation: you could set up a blinking light on one side of the office, and semi-reliably read it out on the other. As long as it was like negative a billion degrees, that is. Still, though, it was revolutionary, and I immediately seized upon the opportunity to invite the media to witness this miracle of modern physics.
Things didn’t exactly go the way I wanted to. After the speeches, I noticed that some of the reporters stayed behind in the lab. I thought at first they were trying to get some B-roll pictures, or maybe do a little soft profile on one of the eggheads, but as I came closer it became apparent they were all hunched over one of the scientist’s desks.
“Can you believe this novelty mug?” one of the reporters shrieked, before running off half a memory card of pictures of it.
In the coming days and weeks, it became apparent that the novelty mug in question - I dare not tell you specifically what was on the mug for fear the cycle will begin again - was more popular than the lab that held it. My boss thought this was delightful, and against my protests, we began to place the mug in pretty much everything we publicized. It was even front and centre on the front page of the website, displacing a pretty good set of puns that I had spent all afternoon in meetings trying to get approved.
Luckily for all of us, an intern put the mug in a dishwasher by accident, and ruined it. CNN’s science reporter put on nearly a full news cycle mourning the loss of the novelty mug, but thankfully they cut it short when someone at NASA left a thumbprint on the new photos from Jupiter.
It’s hard to keep coming up with ideas. That’s why, in order to craft each and every one of my rhetorical jewels, I spend hours of research. Doing skids, huffing nitrous in an enclosed space, getting banned from the pet store: it’s all to make sure that my work has a texture and a realism that is indistinguishable from real beater life. That’s why Netflix was so interested to partner with me for their newest prestige drama, Shitbox.
When I showed up to the initial planning meetings, the set artists spent a lot of time taking pictures of the car I drove there. I grumbled, since i was pretty sure the ‘92 Excel that I had parked halfway into their lobby was the nicest example of my cars. Already, realism was taking a back seat to silver-screen glitz. However, it was also taking the driver’s seat, and chauffeuring me to the bank to collect an amount of money I thought was physically impossible to assemble into one place. Between that and the free cronuts, I was willing to give anything these guys threw at me a chance.
Then they brought out the lead actor, a burnout from a popular 90s sitcom whose star had fallen so low it was now providing daylight in Australia. This guy was supposed to play me, but he was several times more handsome than I was. I signed off immediately, already anticipating the day when Wikipedia would clueless replaced my headshot - currently a mugshot from my arrest for pooping in the Home Depot display toilets; they made me a good plea deal - with his.
The project went on and off the rails, as projects do - although I think television might require fewer left-hand-thread drill bits and MAPP torches. Once it was completed, they had a huge party and I was invited to a movie theatre to see the premiere.
Well, as it turns out, dear reader, that handsome sitcom star had found a second calling as a blue-screen stunt double. He was, in fact, a CG stand-in for the deformed creature I was portrayed as on screen. An entire team of Chinese computer animators worked day and night to lend my on-screen skin the most realistic deathlike pallor. Their lead environment artist said he was particularly proud of how they managed to capture the thin flecks of grease permanently stuck in my hair. If he had asked, I would have just told him it was 10W30.
We all have that friend who collects exotic pets. You make up excuses not to come over to their house, because an acid-spitting sloth blinded you last time for a whole weekend. The local fire hall hands out pamphlets instructing the flock how to administer basic anti-venom precautions in case the bathtub cobra gets loose again. It’s good that they are taking care of these misunderstood miracles of nature’s creation, sure, but you just wish they’d settle down and get a Lhasa Apso already.
This was on my mind recently, during an evening where I bribed a machinist to let me have a spin on his employer’s CNC mill after hours. You see, you can’t just buy replacement parts for the Subaru Justy anymore, not since the president of the company stood up on stage and ran that whole PowerPoint where he pushed them into a crusher to the tune of Yakety Sax. That means that when the oil pump shaft gets a little loopy and wears out the carrier bearing in the timing cover, it’s time to either machine a new timing cover from scratch, or think about buying a normal car. If you’ve gotten this far, you probably have a fairly good idea of what happens when I step foot onto a Toyota or - God forbid - Chevrolet dealership lot.
Examining my own motivations, just like ancient Roman emperors used to do before they got greased by a rival senator, I determined that owning these weird cars was probably the same impulse that drove my friend, Lizard-Owning Sam (in Canada, the government is responsible for assigning pejorative nicknames, which is why they’re so uncreative). I had to save them all, because even the weirdest stuff had value, and nobody else was going to lift a finger to do it. If it took a seventy-dollar bottle of eye drops for a Two-Dicked Bearded Monitor Lizard, or a billet titanium timing cover with three-row support bearings, then that’s just what it took to keep a special creature alive.
When I returned to my home late at night, I was surprised to see my front yard thronged by a mob. Not an angry mob, I found to my dismay - birdwatchers had set up at my house because somehow a very rare species of duck had gotten confused and ended up in my driveway-side spare tire collection. I honked the horn, scattering them like a common pigeon. If you mopes really liked birds, I fumed, you wouldn’t just watch: you’d build one.
Are you displeased with the current state of the automotive art? Do you use the phrase “used up” when returning a car to the rental desk? Is it possible for you to disarm and knock unconscious an assailant just by talking to them about limited slip differentials? Have you ever been imprisoned for driving a vehicle which is actively on fire? Good, because Bad Cars Monthly is looking for its new writer!
You might have heard that we have treated our other writers very badly! Stringing unpaid invoices along for upwards of a year! Taking the valve caps off their tires in the parking lot! Forcing interns to clean the litter box of our office cat, Skids! All of those are true, but that’s only because no one can stand up to our editorial desk and survive! Will you be the first? We believe in you…r ability to hit at least one deadline before you get burned out and go live under the bridge in the Barrens.
We have many unique office benefits: our technical editor has developed an advanced supercomputer capable of generating over one million cliches per second. The loading dock staff will let you get an engine delivered if you slip them a fifty. Sometimes when the other tenants in the building get evicted at the end of the month, the sheriff lets us go in there and take shit from their offices. Health benefits are not included, but we’ll let you drive the review cars as long as you promise to keep the cops from taking too close of a look at the tags.
So that’s Bad Cars Monthly! Send us your CV and some writing samples, and we’ll let you know as soon as we track down the Editor-in-Chief, because he tried eating some mushrooms we found out behind the building and hasn’t been seen in weeks.
I was recently asked about what I would prefer in a beater pickup truck by an individual preparing to list theirs for sale. What a question! People from all walks of life love the shitty pickup, from horse botherers in Europe driving some Italian piece of shit, to machine-gun-toting desert warriors ripping up the dunes in their Toyota technical. There is really no commonality between all these varied groups, except this: it must be just shitty enough.
Like a worn-out pair of blue jeans, a “shop truck” or “beater truck” is comfortable. It’s dependable, though ideally it has a couple quirks that require you to spend fifteen to twenty minutes explaining it to anyone who wants to borrow it. Above all, it must not be expensive. Even so, you can fit within these parameters and still make a truck that is too shitty.
We all know people who have beater pickup trucks that have just taken the shittiness part a little bit too far. Instead of stray tools on the floor, they have holes in the floor that they throw their lit cigs through. Rather than wash their truck, they just fog it with some leftover spray paint and call it “camo.” Don’t be that kind of light truck owner, and I think things will turn out alright.
Of course, a true artist would ignore what I just said. Someone who really, deeply wants to flip the shitty pickup truck genre on its head has tons of options. Would I enjoy a turbocharged, propane-burning minitruck that’s slammed to the weeds? We may never know, not until I’m presented with an example of such, one that involuntarily forces $1500 out of my wallet to pay for it. On that day, we will both have learned something about ourselves.
So my advice to you is: the pickup truck is a canvas. It is a representation of humanity’s quest to be able to drive places and sometimes throw a couch in the back. The shitty pickup truck is something even more so, a chance to lay back and enjoy life, as long as you aren’t helping a friend move.
When a man loves a car, he repairs it. Or at least that’s how I was taught to express my admiration for all manner of beaters, bastard farm implements, and technological marvels. When they break, you fix them, because otherwise you’d have to buy new ones, which have no soul.
Maybe it was soul, then, that was leaking out of my beater Subaru. Despite replacing literally every component in the cooling system, it still liked to dispense a little bit of the ol’ green kool-aid whenever it got cold out. I tightened the clamps, adjusted the hoses, pressure-tested the system. Nothing seemed to ever fix it, so I resigned myself to a life of babysitting it, pouring just a little bit of fresh future toxic waste into the tank after every commute, like I was some kind of candy striper at a terminal care facility.
Every morning, the car would taunt me with another overnight Superfund site, or maybe a gaggle of dead squirrels arranged around my car as if some kind of nature-channel parody of suicide cults. Every evening, I would allow it to sup more of that life-giving coolant. So it continued for months, because I was taught never to give in to my worst impulses and simply buy a new car.
One morning, I realized that things didn’t have to be this way. When a man truly loves a car, he gives it diamonds. Those diamonds just so happened to be glued to the surface of the metal-cutting wheel on my angle grinder.
“Stock class isn’t real,” I mutter as my right foot pops the throttle butterflies open and the fun begins. For years, I’ve been fighting a savage battle with the SCCA.
What is the SCCA, you ask? Nothing more than the biggest team of fascists in sports car entertainment. These are the men and women who dole out the beloved “PAX multipliers” that mean the difference between winning and losing. Sure, it’s not like I was able to finish in the top-three or even top-twenty of competition, but maybe it was because of the psychological impact of having these authoritarians above me, deciding what is and is not a “stock” street car.
Hence the mantra, to see if it would help things. And in case it didn’t, I also had a trick up my sleeve. It is surprisingly easy to edit Wikipedia to declare that your exact car was indeed offered as a rare dealership special. I couldn’t make my appeal in person, of course, that would be too obvious. Instead, I had a group of “aspirational” legal-eagles that I found out behind the Greyhound station make my appeal for me. With their dedication to the cause, I was certain that they would be able to overthrow these tin-pot dictators of downforce.
I finished my run, and looked up at the clock. Somehow, despite having a carbon-fibre, widebody Ford Pinto crammed full of enough nitrous to launch Quebec into low earth orbit, I had managed to still run a time 20 seconds slower than the FTD. Is there something that gets better PAX than Stock, I wondered? Better ask my attorney, Mr. Pissjugs.
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tags: yes i know it's street class now, scca, ford pinto, ford
Snow was falling in my part of the world once again, blanketing the dead lawn and strewn car parts of my yard with a beautiful cover of glistening white. I love this time of the year, but getting out there to shovel all the snow was just not worth it for me. Most of my cars were in such bad shape that I could not, in good conscience, mount a plow to them.
Not to mention that after my next door neighbour dropped dead while shovelling, I’ve been a little afraid of literally any physical effort ever. Well, not my next door neighbour. Some guy in my city. Province. Maybe the country? I heard the story a few years ago. Fucking terrifying, is what it is.
I was staring out into the porcelain abyss, when suddenly it hit me: I didn’t have to actually shovel the snow, because internal combustion engines existed. And thanks to my city’s obsession with using salt on the road, I had plenty of pretty-good engines to cram into a snowblower. Sure, the rings were a little loose from neglect, and most of them had camshafts requiring quite a few revs to get them really choochin’, but they were easier than doing any effort of my own.
Now, you have to understand I wasn’t doing this out of a fear of liability: my insurance agent wasn’t so much an actual human being, as he was a Fisher-Price tape recorder of a clown laughing hooked up to a phone line in lieu of hold music. Between that and some old Russian psyops tricks I had traded a flywheel for, I’d broken better lawyers than my neighbours could afford, especially if they were walking to work. No, I was doing this out of a sense of civic pride!
For weeks, I toiled. Whenever the guy from the city came by to ding me for not shovelling my walk, I pointed to the snowblower-in-progress and explained that I was working hard on the problem. That seemed to please them: in their world, the perception of doing actual effort was more important than the completion of any goals.
Eventually, he just stopped coming. It was perhaps as much due to my convincing, aw-shucks-just-another-suburbanite routine, as it was the look of terror he could no longer hide from me when surveilling my nearly-completed work. I recognized that look: it was the same one I got for a few weeks when I first moved into this house, before all the “nice families” moved out. It was envy, pure and simple: all the dads who were incapable of turning a screwdriver the right way didn’t want their children learning their first lessons about cars from me. Well, I’d show them I could be a good citizen. I’d show them all.
At last, the snowblower was ready. It wasn’t a quick process: I had hit some speedbumps along the way - court dates to attend, small fuel fires I had to put out, that kind of thing. When I rolled up what was left of my garage door, I looked out onto… dry pavement. It seems I had missed the entire season while I put this project together. I was inconsolable: what was the point in putting together nearly six hundred horsepower of snow-chucking excellence if it was July?
Most men would have gleefully waited for the next winter, but then I saw it: a pothole out front of my house. No need to involve the city. I only needed to make a few mods…
Halloween is not a particularly easy night for me on the best of times, but it’s a whole other thing to try and hand out candy while the cops are slapping the cuffs on you. Just like I told my public defender, it wasn’t my fault. All I was doing was trying to educate the kids a little.
About halfway through the night, two cops rolled up to the driveway, put their spotlight on the back of my daily driver, and then called for backup. Thinking it was merely a case of mistaken identity or maybe at worst a stolen license plate, I moseyed on down to ask the officers what was up. That’s when I caught the billy club in the face.
“You’re under arrest for corrupting children,” barked Officer O’Gravy, before grinding my face further into the oil-stained concrete of my cracked driveway. “How dare you normalize this kind of behaviour? It makes me sick.” Then he carted me off into their Interceptor, without even a thought for the bucket of fine-thread M6 bolts I had been handing out to the kids.
I had a theory as to which behaviour they were referring to, but I didn’t want to say anything on the ride back to the hoosegow. This reticence was admittedly due more to my sudden interest in the panel gaps and rattles in the rear-seat cage than anything else. That shit is so loose - how can the equipment fabricator companies sleep at night with workmanship that bad? That’s the real crime, if you ask me.
In the interrogation room, a pair of detectives decided to do the good-cop-bad-cop routine. Bad cop kicked the shit out of me with a phone book for a half hour, and then good cop sidled right next up to me. He understood me, he said. He didn’t think the law was just.
“If the law were different, man, I’d own a Saab too,” he lied.
Having “a hoarding problem” is just the kind of thing that someone who wants to steal your shit would say. In this day and age of “green living,” and especially as the nuclear apocalypse grows ever closer, who can say what manufactured good or scrap material is truly worthless? You’ll have a different song on your lips when you’re waist-deep in another warlord’s territory, and just need a spring from a AA-battery holder to finish the bomb that will blow up their hideout and free all the water slaves.
So what is it that people are really complaining about? It might be that you have failed to organize your hoard in a way that they consider aesthetically appealing. There’s some easy tips for correcting that perception that you can do right at home. Simply placing lace curtains over cracked engine blocks or half-broken typewriters can add an element of mystery and elegant contrast to what would otherwise be an oil-soaked storage room. Maybe staple some common fencing material to the side of your deck to keep the neighbourhood kids from seeing all the sun-cracked mannequins with their eyes scratched out that you store under there.
What happens when you run out of room? It’s time to seek an external storage facility. The average rube will use expensive storage lockers, but a real genius hoarder will tack-weld some stuff together and sell it to an industrial-art museum. There, your “outsider art” will live forever, and they might even give you a ton of cash. When the bombs drop, their security system likely won’t work anymore, and the first wave of raiders would never consider going after sculpture - not when when they could be scavenging for useless things like food and clean water.
When it comes to making your home an uninhabitable junkyard, remember these tips. I’ll see you in the future, through my sights from about thirty meters away when I take your ass down for trying to steal my leftover subway tokens and twine collection. People are always gonna need twine.
Canadians: let’s level with each other for a minute. Everyone else, take a walk around the block. It’s good for your heart health. Are we alone now? Okay, great. Do you know anyone who actually likes Tim Hortons?
I mean, yeah, yeah, we all have the standard Canadian brand worship that passes for having a sense of pride in our country. Ignoring the fact that it would probably be better off nationalized so at least we could pretend to vote first-past-the-post on whether or not they should continue to poach temporary workers from the third world and treat them like shit, if you ever meet someone who actually enjoys Tim Hortons, chances are it’s not a person you like.
Call me an elitist, but during my long career as a satirist (that’s French for “asshole,”) I’ve yet to see an actually endearing human being who cuts me off on their way to wait for an hour in the rear of a 64-pickup-truck line in the Timmies drivethrough. What are they getting there that’s so essential to their lives? It can’t be the coffee, and it definitely isn’t the the food - if food were cars, the chili would be a Nissan Murano: a crime against humanity.
We all need to take a step back this Allfrost, and let Timmies become yet another dead icon of the worst of our suburbanite, hate-filled past: just like we did with newspapers and the abstract concept of jobs for life.
I’m glad we all agree on this subject. Wait, shh, everyone else is coming back. How about that hockey, eh? Needs more fights.
The average person thinks that Subaru overheating is just a matter of poor engineering, or maybe suspect design choices when they were drawing their engine on the back of a cocktail napkin while banging Gunma Mai Tais at the bar the night before deadline. Here with us in the studio today is Soichiro Tanaka, a scientist with the Japanese Ministry of International Not Fucking Up A Whole Bunch Like The Americans.
Soichiro has been studying the unique nature of Fuji Heavy Industries for decades now. As a child, he watched as his small village was visited by a Subaru FF. He was intrigued by the contradiction between the owner’s full-throttle, absolutely sideways, gravel-slinging entry into his village, and the slow and extremely painful process of bleeding the dicky cooling system. From that moment on, he swore that he would solve the paradox of Subaru, and help them to produce boring yet stone-reliable cars like Toyota did.
With the recent rise in popularity of Subaru, Soichiro’s work is all the more relevant. It is for this reason that he has begun a new project. After a team of his fellow scientists at Tokyo University identified that Japan is mostly populated by raging Hellmouths just beneath the surface, he travelled to Gunma to verify that in fact the engineering department at Subaru is run entirely by demons from a lesser plane of Hell. With him on this trip? A handsome leather-wrapped suitcase nuke.
Unfortunately, upon being introduced to the Subaru factory, the suitcase nuke somehow failed to reach criticality, its core instantly becoming hypercooled to the point of transforming into an inert block of concrete. When asked for comment, Subaru engineers shrugged and then returned to their office competition of trying to powerslide a rolling desk chair without tipping it over. At press time, Tomomi Nakamura holds the sickest slide, which means his position as Subaru’s President is secure.
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tags: subaru, just subaru things, world's biggest coolant bubble
In a city just like yours, there are cop cars, and then there are cop cars. We at the Seat Safety Switch Institution For Fine Motoring salute the proud tradition of Unmarked Detective Cars. These choice automobiles are spared from their brothers’ ordinary life of service as speed-trap bait or felon-ramming devices, and form an almost symbiotic relationship with their drivers as they solve our society’s most dastardly crimes.
Today’s featured detective car is the 1989 Crown Victoria. Bolstered by a furious 302-cubic-inch V8, the Vic is a highway cruiser par excellence. Its ruler-sharp angular looks add so much curb presence that even human beings born and raised in Panther-deprived countries can identify that it is not a car to be fucked with.
Add a little pup pushbar and dog-dish hubcaps, and clear out the whole block. What about the back seat, I hear you ask? It’s beyond practical: you can load an entire squadron of suspects in here, and any incriminating blood they may splash on the interior can be wiped clean with even the stingiest 7-11 gas station’s meagre allocation of napkins.
Even after the regular patrol Vics aged out of police departments’ overly-lavish hoards, they continued to menace minorities and the otherwise disadvantaged. Just thank your average rotund white dude rolling around with a 30-year-old cop car still done up in full “cop-spec!” That doesn’t happen to detective cars, because painting a car and adding illegal spotlights to it is just too much work for your average fascist cosplayer.
For your tireless efforts to support off-the-book abuses by law enforcement, we salute you, detective-spec 1989 Crown Victoria, for being both beauty and beast.
In my new role as government advisor, I find that a lot of small towns have the same problem. Despite the shrieking of conservatives, spending is relatively well-controlled and responsible in most administrations that I meet with. The problem they’re having is revenue. Simply put, the average person has now reached such a degree of uselessness that even asking them to kick in a few cents into a Feed The Puppies box at the mall is too much, leave alone the tax base required to fund any actual initiatives that might improve their lives.
This frustrated me for weeks, until I finally realized that there was an excellent incentive lying right under our noses. Or at least, between six and ten feet in front of our noses. For decades, we’ve been spending unbelievable amounts of money on equipping our local police to use extremely expensive firearms, but that deadly force is almost always wasted. Pricey bullets are spent on paper targets instead of real criminals, and all the regular maintenance from disuse is quite costly as well.
What I propose to these municipalities is simple. We start a program where people can simply pay the government to have other drivers on their commute murdered in cold blood. Get cut off by a New Beetle? Seventeen grand is all it will take to wipe the driver off the face of the planet. We’ll even write you an invoice so you can try to expense it when you get to the office.
The first time we tried it, we actually had to hire more police officers to deal with the murder backlog - who says government can’t create jobs? Some rich guy, who had been parking his wealth offshore for his entire life, was soon stuffing twenty after twenty into the taxman’s pants like a stripper during fleet week. We built a park with some of that money, which is great because the cemetery started to run out of room around that time as well.
Naturally, the originators of this little program were considered exempt, but there’s always the risk that a poorly-trained junior is going to take a potshot at me while I travel through these communities. Luckily, once the revenue hole is plugged, the only thing they need my consulting services for is where to hide all their newfound money from the Feds’ grasping fingers.
If you hadn’t heard of the automatic transmission before, you might very well believe it is witchcraft. By now, though, everyone in North America is quite aware of the automatic transmission, and so is no longer surprised by it. That’s why I wanted to visit a group of people who were unaware of it.
Near Ecuador lives a tribe of human beings who have, as far as we can tell, only been recently discovered. They’ve built their own society, with water purification, food procurement, and even a primitive form of the MBA, which we believe will soon drive the development of the written word, in order to provide executives with business magazines to rank their relative worth as human beings. All this, and they have never even heard of the 4L80E.
In order to get the straight dope, I needed a translator. These folks don’t know a single word of Internet English, and will not respond to even a single one of the memes that a three-year-old in our culture can understand. As such, I rigged up a seemingly contradictory physics experiment near the border of their tribal lands, and waited for a physicist to emerge, equal parts excited and confused at a new discovery. Like our own scientist class, it was nearly impossible for her to escape from a simple net made of sisal twine. Now, I had an “in.”
After weeks of teaching her the rudiments of our proud language, it was time to re-enter the lands and see what they thought about the automatic transmission. I wore my finest colonial garb, not just because it was a kicky vintage look but also because I thought the media would be watching, and the extra controversy could drive some very lucrative headlines.
Upon my entry, I was able to show the marvels of modern science to the surprised villagers. They led me down a path and showed me a dealership stocked with their local brand of electric car, beaming with pride. How primitive, I scoffed, and unfurled what I had come to show them: a diagram of a simple automatic transmission. The eye could not help but be drawn to its draftsman-perfect planetary gear arrangement, the multitude of lines and pumps and valve bodies - so beautiful I could (and did) cry.
In conclusion, Senators, I do not believe that this was the only cause of the war. My so-called translator also caught an accidental glimpse of LinkedIn when my back was turned in the office, and figured out that we were all frauds.
Nobody really knows when the first burnout happened, but top scientists and historians have been working feverishly around the clock to figure it out. Near as we can tell, it was probably launched immediately after the construction of the first car. No doubt in some state of strange madness, people were drawn from their shopfronts, canal strolls and doings-about-town by some kind of gravitational pull, until they circled a strange machine.
Most were afraid: what was this device for? Where had it come from? What specific harm did it mean for us? There was, however, an inkling of a feeling in many of those in attendance. Laid deep in the genetic code of humanity, almost as if it had been waiting millions of years for this moment, came the unthought words: “DO A BURNOUT!”
And even then, without knowledge of this word’s usage, feet were moved by an eerie force, and a perfect lock-up burnie was popped. Tire smoke, once foreign to humanity, was ever intermingled with our very being. A glorious dawn to society’s greatest age: that of the burnout-capable motorcar.
Here at Seat Safety Switch Post, we commemorate this moment with our new series of collectible stamps, The First Burnout. These stamps are not to be confused with legal tender, and if you try to mail a letter with them, the postal worker responsible for delivering your mail will probably wipe his or her ass on your next RockAuto package.
SANTA CLARA, CALIFORNIA - Intel Corporation today announced that they would be abandoning their quest for the 10-nanometer process on future chipsets. The chipmaker explained this failure as a result of “irreconcilable engineering differences,” and refused to provide any further detail.
When plied with drinks and free conference t-shirts later, an Intel engineer, who wished to remain anonymous, explained that the problem was in fact caused by an accident within the labs.
“So we built this 10-nanometer socket, right, for bolting down all the transistors, and the intern comes in, picks it up, looks at it, puts it down and forgets where he put it,” sighed the engineer, before draining his Diet Coke. “We’re thinking of going back to SAE sockets. This never would have happened with a good, old-fashioned 7436782737223117/18889465931478580854784-inch socket, like in the good old days.”
Intel stock rose gently on the news, with Wall Street encouraged by the fact that they would no longer have to pay attention to all this nerd shit.
The tabloids and news-tabloids are abuzz with the latest psychosexual threat to emerge and endanger Western civilization. That’s right: cyber-bullying. Right this very moment, unstoppable teams of highly-advanced neural networks are probing your child’s Facebook page for vulnerabilities they can use to strike a crippling blow with pinpoint precision, billions of times per second.
What’s that? That’s not what it means? It just means kids using a computer to bully one another? Man, I miss the 80s. Back then, we were pretty convinced Japanese robots would kill our families and summon ourselves to defend alien civilizations with our arcade playing skills. Hey, get your hands off me! You can’t do this to me! I won a Peabody Award!
Ahem. Well, I’ve locked those crude men out of the control room, and so now I can keep informing you about how to protect your children from these cyborg bullies. My important mission must continue.
First: make sure that you live in a place that salts the roads. Everyone knows that robots are made of metal, and metal rusts. It’s hard for robots to give your kid an atomic wedgie if they have to keep heading back to the paint shop for undercoat and Fluid Film.
Second: most robots are incapable of processing emotion. Art school is therefore the obvious choice: when confronted with even basic post-modernism, most logic-based machines and humans will catch fire within seconds. There, the biggest risk your progeny will undergo is whether or not they’ll get tenure. I’ll tell you right now and save you the stress later: they won’t. Tenure is a concept invented by man’s earliest primitive thinking machine: the college administration. It was designed to trap eager young minds. Resist this temptation and urge your kid to go into graphic design in marketing. JavaScript-heavy pop-up ads will slow the machine sentience to a crawl.
Oh, they’re breaking through the door with axes now. I’ll just leave you with this nugget of wisdom: Terminator 2 has all the rest of the facts you need to know about cyber-bullies. Make sure your son or daughter knows what a liquid-metal duplicate of yourself would not know, so that they can’t be lured to their death by a loved one’s doppelganger.
Perhaps I’m alone in this, but I always find it difficult when family visits from afar. They stay for a really long time, in order to make the expensive trip worthwhile. On top of that, my family usually wanted me to take them to all the local tourist traps that I would otherwise roll my eyes at and pointedly avoid. Sometimes it’s worth it, though, as it was when my cousin Blyat Safety-Switch visited from Ukraine.
I first suspected something was up with Blyat when he climbed off the plane, clad in diamonds and a fur coat. What kind of fur is that, I asked, but he said it did not matter, since it was now extinct. All I had to know, he said, was that he brought me a gift to repay me for my hospitality. Of course, I turned and began to walk towards the luggage carousel, but he stopped me, and gestured towards the now-opening cargo door of the ex-military cargo plane he had commissioned for the flight. Great, I thought, it’s another endangered rhinoceros.
It wasn’t - inside was a VAZ-2101, slammed on airbags. Blyat was always my grandmother’s favourite grandkid, and now I understood why - the man knew how to give a gift. Even the import process wasn’t that big of an obstacle: a large dude who coincidentally was visiting at the same time as my cousin had taken the customs official out back and slipped some thick bills into his pockets to look the other way all day long. What luck! With that out of the way, we were free to spend the rest of the day ripping the little four-banger around the city.
My cousin and I had so much fun around the city that I felt, for the first time, disappointment that one of my extended family would go home early. He wanted to impress upon me that it was not due to any failure of my hospitality, or even the ramshackle office above a warehouse floor that I called a house. Some business opportunities had come up, he explained, in the shape of a political assassination that looked pretty promising.
I hope Blyat visits again soon, because I need new thirteen-inch tires for the VAZ, and nobody sells them here. Maybe my sister-in-law Pìhuà can bring some with her when she crashes on my couch next week.
There’s something to be said for being known as the guy who takes on the toughest projects around. Uphill-both-ways, vile, nail-spitting ordeals forged out of a white-hot brick of solid hatred: that’s the kind of car that I like to fix. It has nothing at all to do with the fact that those are usually also the cheapest cars. Why are you asking so many questions all of a sudden? Are you wearing a wire? Good. I love an audience.
The thing is, when you’re known to be able to pull diamonds out of assholes, a lot of your so-called friends want you to come over and help them out of a jam with their own projects. I’ve done it all and been paid in pizza at best: I’ve re-aligned mis-aligned frame horns, chopped-and-spliced badly-routed eBay turbo manifolds, and even in one special case called in a bomb threat so that nobody else would score that one freshly dropped Civic at the junkyard with the good seats.
Am I being exploited? I don’t think so. Being wrist deep in the Nutcracker Ballet of previous-owner ass-fuckery is just one of the many ways that I keep the screaming voice inside my head blissfully silent. You really don’t want that guy to take over the cockpit, believe me. The whole deal worked out for both of us. My friends got to keep pedalling their unreliable shit to work, and I was able to go for another week without worrying whether I remembered how to pronounce “indict” properly.
Not to say there isn’t trouble in paradise, though. Some people just go too far. I got this call from the government once. They wanted me to fix the economy. Sure, I said. You all know what happened next: a lot of mistakes were made, and now we all eat garbage and whatever stray dogs we can catch, but now all the fasteners on the economy are at least metric.
If there’s one thing you’ll find as a constant on nearly every automotive-inclined opinion source known to man, it’s the complaint that things were better in the “good old days.” Sure, your car might have been easier to work on, and gasoline was cheaper before we discovered such inconvenient concepts as human rights and ethics in child slavery, but things are pretty great now. After all, you need only look at my newest invention, the Tool I Just Had In My Fucking Hands Radar.
For those people who are anything like me - and I know you are, don’t bother denying it, everyone knows and talks about it behind your back - not being able to find the tool you just had in your hand is a constant affliction. Whether it be a socket wrench, the brightly-coloured plastic spudger you need for popping that next bit of dashboard trim, or even something as big as an extension cord, things get constantly lost even though you were just touching them and put them down without remembering where.
Some of our customers have even tried to train special service dogs to identify this kind of situation, but let’s be honest with ourselves: dogs are fucking dumb and they do not even know the difference between SAE and metric. What are you to do? Enter our product.
How does it work? High-end lasers scan every inch of your garage or workshop and can identify every time you pick up or put down a tool. The sensors are so precise that they can tell an eight-millimeter socket from a ten. Just don’t allow your small children to look directly up into the emitter system. In fact, it’s best if you wear a welding mask at all times while you’re in the shop. New technology, am I right?
When you’ve lost a tool, just yell in frustration, and sophisticated voice recognition software will let you know the last time you had the god damned Phillips-head screwdriver with the yellow handle in your flawed meat. It even works if it’s been a couple days since you were last in the garage!
So how much does all this cost? We’re currently pitching our solution to large enterprises and whatever foreign militaries can get around the export ban on electronic sentience. Pricing starts at $1 million per install, and I bet a large number of you are already throwing your credit cards at the screen.
Every business wants to capture customer loyalty, to keep you coming back and buying more and more widgets. To help ensure this, the big boys are handing out rewards cards like syringe-stuffed candy on a Halloween night. When you buy shit, you get points. If you buy the shit they want you to buy, you get more points. Fiendish, for sure.
Where things really turned south was when they started hooking up the thinking machines to the whole mess. Now, they knew what you wanted to buy, and would help encourage more of that behaviour by issuing bespoke rewards. Buy a lot of cereal? Here’s a coupon for cereal. It was like getting hit with a laser-guided precision munition of Savings.
Great for everyone! The robots are giving you coupons and bonuses on the kind of stuff you actually buy instead of some creep in marketing’s idea of the demands of Everyday People.
Well, or you could be me. My inbox was full of offers to save on coolant, rust repair patch panels, alignments, liability insurance, tires, and tow straps. I wasn’t really insulted by the whole thing until, after buying a Tercel in a particularly fetching shade of purple, the machine responded by offering me twenty-five percent off on laser eye surgery.
There comes a time in every enthusiast’s life when he or she craves to be normal again. They want to un-eat the forbidden apple, to return to the calm pleasures of buying whatever it is that everyone else does and not knowing too many facts about it. For my friend, it was the urge to get a Nissan Pathfinder.
The Nissan Pathfinder, as initially introduced, was Franco-Nissan’s attempt to cynically exploit the North American people by giving them a crappy version of the Patrol. They didn’t need a tough-as-nails off-roader, thought the marketing experts in Yokohama, what the West really needed was a gentle vehicle that was a little trucky but not too capable. After all, it wasn’t like they were driving the things around on sand dunes - just to the mall and maybe to their heroin dealer. Simple demands, to be met with a simple, but well-made, bastard half-truck.
For years, my group of friends had bought so many bad cars individually that, in the interest of protecting ourselves in the future, we would now form a sort of co-operative cloister for inspecting any potential new cars. What this means in practice is that our gang of assholes would show up on your driveway, pick your car apart in front of you and your horrified family, and then democratically agree on whether or not to buy it. We tended to make better deals this way, although a seller would occasionally hurl anti-worker slurs at us as we departed from an unsuccessful inspection mission.
Nonetheless, a gaggle of greasy gearheads soon materialized in the vicinity of the Pathfinder, and began their dark quest into inspecting it. I did my part, of course: in their rush to get their hands on the Cool Parts That Make Car Go Fast, nobody else checked if the map lights and glovebox worked, and they definitely wouldn’t check how good the back seat was for taking a mid-afternoon siesta. My technique did work: the number of cars I’d vetoed for having more spare oil in the back than the Saudi Arabian reserves is a non-zero integer.
On this Pathfinder, and indeed on many others in the future, I gave a hard pass. During my nap time, I was rudely awoken by being poked in the back by another of our gang, who had put it upon himself to inspect the rear suspension pickup points for corrosion. It’s worth pointing out that he was still outside the truck-car when he poked me on the inside.
It gradually dawned upon us that night that, despite our urge to be normal, normal people generally didn’t buy $200 Pathfinders from a guy who abandoned it near a railway line.
What’s the deal with high mileage oil? All the oil came a really long way to see you. How’s it going, car engine, I used to be a dinosaur! The bottle says, pour it into your car with over a hundred thousand kilometers. A hundred thousand, that’s it? If that’s high mileage, then I need to start working better clubs so I can afford a new car!
You know, I had an uncle once, he didn’t believe in high mileage oil. No sir. Used oil, that’s what he ran in his car. He’d follow cars home from the oil change place, and pop the drain plug right in their driveway, fill up a jug. His victims thought the Quickie Lube just didn’t know how to torque an M12! When I graduated high school, he gave me two dozen drain plugs for a gift. His trophies, he said. Uncle Phil’s in prison now, because he started stealing oil from the McDonalds french fryer and got arrested for making a slipping hazard. Took out ten cops.
Thank you, you’ve been a great audience. Don’t forget to wipe the Royal Purple out from behind your ears, your wife thinks you’ve been using cheap ol’ Castrol 75W90 in the diff. She doesn’t even know about how much the friction modifiers cost.
As even the dimmest among you know, an electric car primarily runs on electricity. You plug it into your house, and then it juices the battery. The idea is that gasoline is a lot more expensive than a little bump in your electric bill, which I agree with. You know what’s even cheaper than house electricity? Other people’s electricity.
Despite the fact that purchasing a car made in this century is against my religion, the draw (get it?) of not having to pay for gas lured me in to the prospect of owning my very own magic electric car. A couple snowblower motors, a few Chinese R/C motor controllers and a Sawzall later, I was blasting around town in my ‘71 Imperial EV. Sure, my craftsmanship wasn’t going to get any tax credits from Uncle Sam. Or was it? Remind me to check, because at least my bumpers stay on when I drive through a puddle, unlike some manufacturers I can think of.
Back to the prospect of massive savings: there is free electricity literally everywhere around you. No matter where you park, you can probably chuck an extension cord through an open window and suck out a quarter-tank of juice with nobody the wiser. With an old barge like mine, it’s even better: people just assume it has trouble starting in the winter and needs the block heater, battery warmer, and trickle charger plugged in. Nobody wants to unplug that shit and run the risk that my smog-era Mopar might never be able to leave their parking lot again.
I had thought I had reached maximum cheapness, but then I got stuck behind this slow-moving Gremlin. It was my old rival, Momentum Steve, and he was unveiling his latest alternative-energy creation. Well, maybe I should say “unfurling,” because that motherfucker got to the top of the hill and then popped loose a windsail to give him that extra little bit of coasting distance.
The joke’s on him, though: he has to fix all of his rust holes lest they create drag. Even those eggheads at NASA haven’t yet invented a cheaper kind of Bondo.
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tags: chrysler, amc, chrysler imperial, amc gremlin, alternative energy
In these heady times of unrest and political upheaval, it’s more important than ever to remember what’s really important in life: brands. As we all have been raised since birth, conflating your personal identity with a line of branded products and defending them until your death is the most valuable thing any consumer can do for his or her beloved corporate icons.
Why cling to a product the same way that an addict craves their next hit of amphetamines? Branding and trademarks provide a sense of belonging, wellness and calm that used to be solely provided by human parents. That was inefficient - often more harm was done to the kids than good - and now it is obsolete.
Rebels and terrorists will try to tell you that brands have their own advertising departments, that they don’t need you to make up excuses for them every time they ship an embarrassingly flawed product or an executive pukes his entire stomach contents out on stage during a keynote. That’s false, and what’s worse, such speech hurts The Markets. Do you want to retire any time this century? Then you better help bolster “consumer confidence.”
This week only, your friends and family at the Seat Safety Switch Heavy Industrial Concern will be selling half-off logo tattoos in our Fan Shop. While you’re there, buy one of our new fans! We’ve removed the safety guards for better laminar flow and 250% increased performance.
When you’re doing diagnostics, the first question you should always ask is: what have you messed with lately? Far from the insult many first-time hobbyists take it as, the effect of fucking with something has special effects that almost guarantee that it will be your fault. What previous generations once called “karmic retribution” or “God’s will” is now in fact proven by science to be the work of quantum superposition.
Let me explain further, by way of a thought experiment: pretend you’re trapped in a room. You have a book in front of you with a bunch of Chinese characters. Occasionally someone slips a piece of paper under the door, with a Chinese character on it. You have to look up that character in the book, write down the corresponding result that you see, and then shove the piece of paper back under the door. The question is, how likely are you to fuck that up because you have no God damned idea what the hell you are doing and don’t know Chinese any better than you can rewire a refrigerator door-open sensor?
Once you accept your own fallibility as both a mechanic and a human being, the spectrum of possibilities widens from “shit’s fucked” to “I probably fucked this up.” Only through this enlightenment can you find the true source of your pain, or at least you have a reason to fuck with it some more.
That is, until it becomes Really Bad and then you go to the store to buy a new one, confident that you have tried to fix it to the best of your abilities. Just like in elementary school, you get points for trying in life, although if your loved ones are around at your funeral and the best compliment they can give you is “he tried really hard to fix the stand mixer,” you might want to consider taking up performance art instead just to bolster the ol’ heavenly resume a bit.
Never trust a Furby, the anti-intellectuals at my university told me. They don’t have enough computing power onboard for sentience, so they just record everything you say to them and barf them up into The Cloud. Nobody was really aware of exactly what The Cloud was, but all agreed that it was likely malevolent. With that advice as my parting gift, I set off on my great journey of the Great Northwestern Void.
Back then, I didn’t have the pull in the department to go into the historical archives, look at the magazines and dotcom-crash printouts that the elders had based their fear of the Hasbrous Furbous upon. With the information I had on hand, however, I knew that I had to watch my mouth when near the wreckage of a daycare. Any slip-up or personally-identifiable sound would bring down the hunter-killer drones, and that’d be it for both me and my quest.
I had been ordered to come back with some pre-war artifacts, which almost always meant visiting shopping malls. It was a pretty risky operation, and it soon got riskier. As I was climbing through some ventilation ducts, the thin metalwork gave way and dropped me into a brightly-coloured store. A toy store. My heart racing, I slowly climbed up from the pile of stuffed animals in which I had fallen, and righted myself. A strange sound was coming from the shelves across the way, and even though it was shrouded in darkness, I could see in my mind’s eye exactly what it was.
The sound of a clattering plastic beak was soon joined by a computer-modulated stream of gobbledegook chatter. It was a God-damned Furby, I realized with a chill, and what’s worse, in the fall I had lost my HERF gun. I barely made my escape from that mall: it was a miracle that the food court was decorated with a particularly reflective kind of wallpaper. The glittering chaos of it all must have overloaded the hunter-killers long enough for me to get away.
Upon my return, the university heard my story, and identified that it was most likely bullshit. No man could be seen by a real Furby and live to tell the tale; it was as improbable a story as the girl who came back last week and tried to convince the elders that Flooz was an actual thing.
Perhaps one of the darkest scandals of this era is how Big Seatbelt has trained a generation of youth that it is important to wear your safety belt while operating a car. On the face of it, the concept is ridiculous: why would I want to stay inside my car when that’s where all the crashing is happening? I’d rather be outside, on the soft grass.
It’s well past time that I confess my part in this sordid affair: I worked for the Seatbelt Corporation and, using my patented techniques of persuasion for evil, manipulated public opinion until even the police pushed our devious product. Nobody could ever have imagined how far it would go, though. Soon, other companies, like a certain former inflatable-shipping-cushion manufacturer, were getting into the business of scamming the American public in the name of so-called “safety.”
Big Airbag was so effective that virtually all cars are equipped with a mile of their proprietary cloth and a shit ton of explosives right inside your steering wheel. Safe? Maybe for their profits. Don’t even get me started on The Jackstand Alliance and their quest to actively reduce the quality of hydraulic o-rings in new car jacks.
Also, it was me who killed the man who invented the hundred-mile-per-gallon carburetor that runs on water, not Big Oil. We got paired up to save on hotel rooms during a big convention, and I accidentally opened the closet door in our room too quickly, which knocked him back and then over a seventeenth-storey balcony to his death. I still feel really bad about that.
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tags: big seatbelt, things people have said to me
Don’t tell my parole officer, but I’ve fallen off the wagon again. No, not heroin, cocaine or even those tantalizingly-cheap Russian research chemicals. I’m talking Alfas, and I want to shoot them directly into my veins. Unlike the Old World, in civilized North American society, used Alfas are very difficult to come by, which makes establishing a relationship with your dealer more important than ever. Through my tireless efforts, I can now firmly say: I got a guy.
To be entirely honest, I had been looking for it, scouring around the Italian part of town. What can I say? I got a nose like a truffle pig for burning high-zinc oil and the gentle tang of smouldering electrical insulation. That nose had led me to a small alleyway behind a Sicilian-style restaurant. Thing is, it was a trap. As soon as I entered the dead-end of the alley, two big guys showed up to block my exit, and the proprietor came out, gently patting a cleaver against his apron.
“I need a new pasta machine,” the man said. “You Alfa boys are supposed to be pretty good at making parts that don’t exist.”
He stepped aside - and revealed at the end of the alley the nicest-looking GTV6 I had ever laid eyes on. Sure, it was missing all of its wheels, and the transaxle, and part of the front end… but it was red. I immediately agreed to his terms, and in that moment, the Seat Safety Switch International Pasta Machines empire was born.
Believe me when I tell you that my intention was not to form a Fortune 500 company out of an aircraft-titanium pasta-maker driven entirely by a Detroit 4-53T. My goals were noble: to get my meathooks on that Alfa. However, it was definitely a good thing that I was paying myself a few mil a year because the thing needed a whole new wiring harness, and my initial plan of trying to trap electrical engineers by leaving cool-looking power substations unlocked had a few unforeseen, yet highly-litigious, consequences.
The Chevrolet Citation X-11 may be the best car to ever come from Detroit, said Road & Track Magazine when they were - in theory - sober. And for good reason. If you can’t get your blood pumping just thinking about the General Motors engineers realizing the front subframe moves around so much under cornering that the steering rack had to be moved to it so you could actually steer the car, well, then you’re not really a driving enthusiast, are you?
For years, I have quested to obtain what I knew to be the last of the X-11s. I had to have its racing stripes, its thirteen-inch rally wheels, and its SCCA legitimacy. In the middle of the night, I would awaken with a start, barking out RPO codes for the specific build of X-11 I feverishly imagined was real and right around the corner. If I could hit refresh just one more time on the online classifieds, be at the junkyard intake dock at precisely the right moment, I too could have a taste of the X-11 life.
I have yet to get my wish. With every frantic minute-of-posting Craigslist phone call, I had convinced myself this was the one. On the way over, would build myself up, excited, only to find that the average Craigslist denizen did not actually know what an X-11 was, and in many important cases did not understand what a Citation was. If you ever want to buy a hatchback Cavalier with a case of whooping cough, let me know.
For now, I have to satisfy myself with an objectively inferior car. “Ferrari,” it says, some kind of Italian touchy-feely hot rod that’s nowhere as durable as the humble and trustworthy Citation X-11. Plus, it draws all the wrong attention. Who needs all this interest at gas stations from attractive women and oil billionaires? None of the ones I’ve asked have an X-11 in their garage.
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tags: chevrolet citation x-11, chevrolet, chevrolet citation
In today’s interconnected world, there is no shortage of opinions on the ethical nature of whatever product or service you choose to consume. Think your electric car lets you skate on occasionally running over a pedestrian or ramming a cop? The lithium mines that the battery goo came out of disagrees, or at least it would if the management weren’t too busy chopping off their employees’ hands for trying to unionize. It’s so bad that it is considered impossible to know the entire chain of suppliers that put your car together, so most people don’t even bother. Most cars have travelled further from the countries they are made than they will ever travel with their first owners. What a waste.
Enter Switch Motors, with the brand-new All-Local Motor Vehicle. We mine the steel ourselves, forge it ourselves (using cage-free propane stolen from the capitalist pig gas station down the street), and even grind our own bolts on the twenty year old Chinese lathe that is nine-tenths shade-tree bodges anyway (this is enough to qualify as ‘local’ under EU legislation). Every part on this vehicle can be traced back to your very own backyard, especially if you don’t have a very good security camera setup.
How do we mine the many varied materials involved in the modern automobile manufacture? Well, first off: we don’t bother. Mining those materials is impractical, and consumes far more energy than they are worth. You don’t need fancy new materials like platinum, or aluminum, or brass. All you need is good old-fashioned pig iron, which we pull right from the pile of buried cars in my buddy’s swamp. Where we lose out in purity and torsional rigidity, we gain in integrity. Unless you count chassis integrity. That part is admittedly pretty shit.
At last, when it comes time to finally assemble the vehicle, we use organic mud laced with spilled chemicals from the nearby air force test range to give it that iridescent glow. Every car looks unique, but I wouldn’t park it indoors for a few weeks after you take delivery. Even the tires are free-range: we hire a collection of under-represented minorities to steal those tires from other cars at the airport, so that they can be re-used and avoid involving the messy business of draining the rubber trees of the world’s most conflict-torn regions, such as France.
Naturally, all of this attention to detail comes at a steep price premium, but we feel that the appearance of looking like you care is worth any amount of money.
I was never any good at job interviews, and now was the biggest one of my life. Cadillac had decided to get rid of their CEO after he, a German, had said some unkind things about the quality of American road infrastructure. Now they wanted to get a Real American in there, teach the government that they can get some genuine, corn-fed, white-bread luxobarge quality back in the claws of every used car dealership owner and city councillor in the Heartland.
“Actually, I’m Cana-” My headhunter was kicking me hard in the shins under the table.
“Don’t piss this job away, asshole,” she hissed through clenched teeth before delivering another savage blow for emphasis.
“- Capable of taking the job!” I barked. We shook, and soon I was led before the TV cameras to be coronated with the closest thing to automotive royalty’s crown.
A few weeks in, the news wanted to know what product we had in the pipeline. I emerged from the walk-in humidor I called an office in order to take the meeting. Cameras snapped and questions asked, but everyone was really waiting for the main event.
Behind me, beautiful women stood around a covered car. With a flourish of my skull-topped obsidian cane, the sheet came off to reveal a thirty-seven foot long vehicle.
“For years, the average American has thought the Cadillac is attainable, and therefore undesirable,” I barked into the microphone. “That all changes today. Welcome, plebs, to the Cadillac Dictator. It has sixteen hundred horsepower, more cylinders than a meth lab, and is fully bulletproof.”
“Think you’ll enjoy sitting in the fully functional, rear-seat hot tub while your chauffeur rockets down the highway? You probably would, if you could ever afford one of these. We’ll be marketing these primarily to heads of state, drug lords, and vicious oligarchs who will stop at nothing.”
“This is the only vehicle we will be selling for 2019, and it costs $36 million. We only have to sell one to break even for the year. Our brand has hired specialized money-sniffing dogs to make sure that anyone who doesn’t smell like a walking mutual fund can’t even get into the parking lot of the dealer.”
That afternoon, I proudly announced to the workers that we were taking the rest of the year off. Blow it out your ass, de Nysschen, because what’s truly American luxury is not showing up to work at all.
Shhh. Be very quiet. You’re here for my new television special, “The Last Wild Hyundai Pony.” It’s going to be great, but if you make too much noise, you might scare this beautiful beast off before we even get to see it. Right. Let’s get in for a closer look.
We’ve been camping out next to this Midas Muffler for the last week, after hearing word from tour guides that an original-model Hyundai Pony has been spotted in the area. Frequently, when the Pony gets thirsty or tired, it will head to the nearest chain repair store to be banged back into shape. We’re not sure if this one is in such great shape because it has been avoiding these places so far, but when they get this old they get a fifth or sixth owner, and they just don’t care anymore. Sad, really, but it’s the circle of life.
While we’re waiting, I’ll fill you in a bit on the history of the Pony. Back in the 80s, Hyundai knew that Canadians needed a cheap small car, and they weren’t quite as racist about it as Americans. So they just gave us a really shitty car, and told us to drive it, while they used us as guinea pigs to try and figure out what the Americans might not like about it. Thing is, they didn’t realize the Soviets were also selling us their shitty small cars, too. Embarrassing to have your market torn out from under you by Lada. Wait. I hear something. Valve clatter… Mitsubishi-style? Can it be?
My God - here it is, coming into the oil change bay - not just any Pony, but a Pony Pickup. I never thought I’d see one with my own eyes. I have to get closer.
Sir, sir, do you know how rare this vehicle is? You should be taking better care of it. These cars will rust like crazy, they need careful ownership. If you want to drive a car in the winter, I’ll buy you an early-90s Corolla. Please, just leave this one alone. Let me save it. No! Arret!
Sir, I’m sorry, but I can’t let this teenager do an oil change on a car this rare, the bypass pressure spring on their junk filters might not be sufficient for the super-rare oil pump. Sir, don’t do it. I’m warning you. Henri! Assassiner!
Well, that just about wraps it up for this episode of The Beater Hunter. Take it from me, if you’re going to shoot at a guy in a super-rare car, make sure your assistant, like Henri, uses hollow-point so the bullet won’t splash his brains all over the unobtanium headliner.
“You know, it was Big Government and the other two automakers who kept the mid-engined miracle down,” I remark as I step into the living room, party already in progress, in my immaculate smoking jacket.
“Jesus Christ, it’s that Fiero freak from upstairs again.”
It was true. I was a freak for the Fiero, the finest Pontiac product since the Trans Am. In every conceivable way, that little plastic-bodied Space Shuttle targa-topped roadster represented the future of cars. I wouldn’t rest until everyone in town knew it, and what more efficient way to spread the word than to crash my neighbour’s party?
“Mister, this is a funeral.” A larger man rose from the couch, his cheeks stained with tears. “We just lost our friend in a car accident.”
That was all I had to hear. A car accident that could have been avoided with the superior agility of the Fiero’s ultra-rigid pseudo-space frame construction. Hell, if they had an Iron Duke, there’s no way they could have actually been carrying a lot of speed into the accident. Even safer.
My arguments fell on deaf ears, and soon I found myself thrown into the hall. I smoothed my shirt and calmed myself. The life of a true innovator was never easy. The Fiero had taught me that, in its brief moment of fame, burning bright across the skies of North America like a comet. Let them be miserable in their inferior front-engined vehicles made of cold steel.
I stepped out into the parking lot of the apartment building, and then I heard a voice.
“Saaaay, neighbour, have you heard of the Trabant?”
Just keep your head down, pretend you didn’t hear him.
Unless you’ve been living under some kind of a rock, you’ve probably heard of those little newfangled doohickies your insurance company makes you plug into your car’s OBD2 port. Its purpose? Only the most American activity of all, tattling on your habits to big business.
When I was first told of this, I wanted to drop my insurer. After all, they get a little snippy when I do my weekly conference calls with them to get them to remove all the hoopties I sold or scrapped and add all the new hoopties onto my policy. Then came the “D-word:” discount. Keeping my money and having an exterior source of validation that I was in fact a Good Driver? Sign me the fuck up.
Well, I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t work all that well. On my first trip, the little bastard beeped and chirped at me about how aggressively I braked. I don’t like brakes either, but it was either that or run over a child on the sidewalk I was driving on while texting, and the insurance company would have to pay out for that so what’s their fucking problem? The solution, therefore, was to give it a new baseline for the kind of driving I like to do.
After a few hours of bodging an OBD2 port onto my ‘76 Grenada, it was finally working. As I merged onto the highway and boost began to build, I hit the gang-fired bottles of nitrous and the supercharger did its best impression of a mouthwash commercial. My vision narrowed to a single pinprick, which I immediately focused on the blinking lights of The Snitch. Nagging began to pour out of it in a torrent, concerned about my road speed, rapid lane changes, tailgating, and the alarming amount of waggle coming from the eleven-hundred-horsepower grunt pushing around the rear end. I paid it no mind, and smiled as I did a ninety-degree turn at speed into the parking lot of a truck stop, where I then cracked off a set of donuts that would have made a figure skater shit their own dick off in jealousy.
By now, the little box had begun to overheat. I could smell the faint yet delicious woodsy aroma of burning capacitors. Its rage for my driving had been stoked so well that I could now hear the delightful sound of traces pulling free from its logic bard. I got a call from my insurance agent, and I punched the Bluetooth speaker zip-tied to the roll cage to answer it.
“STOP! STOP IT! YOU’RE KILLING HIM!” she shrieked. The only reply I had for her was a sadistic top-fuel exhaust cackle, followed by one of my own.
At long last, there was a short burst of staticky synthesized voice, and then all was quiet except for the crackling of roast electronics. I think its last words were “I’m sorry.”
I wish I could say that was the only fire I had in my footwell that morning, but let’s be honest with ourselves. I’m no good at soldering. Too many people judge you.
There is a spectre haunting YouTube – the spectre of shitty too-long voiceover intros to thirty-second technical videos. Me and a bunch of guys decided to do something about it, after one too many times waiting for the video to get to the point about just how you’re supposed to loop the chain from the engine crane.
That’s why we started Shorter YouTube, a service that clips YouTube videos to no greater than 30 second informative blips that actually tell you what you wanted to know in the first place. We charge two hundred dollars a month, and you will pay it. In fact, you’re reaching for your wallet right now. Thank you.
What’s our secret to getting this information? We talk to a network of trained mechanics, DIY hobbyists and other experts, and we tell them that the next time they scrub through 30 minutes of crap to figure out what checkbox to toggle, we’ll pay them to tell us. Not in money, though we have lots of that: what a man truly wants in this circumstance is cold-blooded revenge. Our best contributors are, in fact, racing to be the first ones who will get a chance to grab each mumble-mouthed, shaky-camera “expert,” so you know that our cliff notes are fresh.
When you ask the Content-Creators about this, at gunpoint, they usually tell you through tears that it was just how you build a personal brand and become a star. These cowardly monsters are willing to cast the social contract aside for a chance at the golden ring, even if just for a moment. Let’s see you make a comedy thumbnail for “I Got Shoved Down A Fire Escape By Angry Mechanics.” If you don’t have the time before you get pulled from your apartment and savagely beaten, we have a very short video about it you can watch.
Before you’ve owned an El Camino, you’ll happily line up with the other goobers and make your own mullet joke. You know, business up front, party in the back? Once the dust settles on your purchase, though, and you realize that now you have a new and very loud mouth to feed? It’s all business.
For years, I was afraid of going the Full Camino. Sure, I’d had a lot of cartrucks - a Scamp here, a Baja there - but something in the back of my mind told me that I would regret it if I disengaged the safety interlocks and embarked upon this particular journey. Yet, good things come to those who wait - whether deliberately or not - and I soon found myself clutching the bill-of-sale for a metric-chassis Elco.
I’m not going to be the kind of guy who sits you down and bores you about his Quirky General Motors Product. I’ll leave that to Ted at parties who will tell you that his Pontiac Aztek was ahead of its time, or Sue-Anne and her in-headliner-DVD-player Chevrolet God Damn Venture. What you need to know about the El Camino, you already do. It’s the greatest automobile ever made, and each of your many idle fantasies about truckcar ownership are satisfied by it, in chronological order.
In fact, you should go out right now and buy one for yourself. We only live once, and our lives are so painfully short. Also, in alignment with that philosophy, it would be nice if you got one with an intact tailgate and quarter panels and parked it nose-first in your driveway, ideally with another car so as to block the view from the street.
I had wanted a third-generation Honda Prelude for years. Not just any trim, though: in an uncharacteristic difference from my normal attitude, I wanted to go all the way. Why? Four-wheel steering. No longer would I be bound by the norms and conventions of ordinary people, with their cars that only steered from one end. At last, I would be able to feel the Great Driving Spirit of Japanese Sports-Economy Coupes, and let its power flow through me.
When I got the car, I was overjoyed. It was owned by an older, frail-looking man and I had come across it by chance in my very own neighbourhood, while looking through his trash on Recycle Day Eve for any discarded tires that might be able to survive a trackday. My overpowering lust for a fine Honda forced aside my natural aversion to The Normals, and so I introduced myself after brushing the old banana peels off my jacket. We became close. One night over dinner, he revealed that he was alone, and it was then that he tearfully gave me power of attorney. I picked a really nice home for him, and they keep him medicated enough that he doesn’t worry about the Honda anymore.
Thing with a Honda is, you have to keep it inside all the time. Once I realized that I had also acquired the man’s home and his other assets, I started to stuff the newly discovered garage space of his home with other cars of mine. Having made contact with the inside of a home, those cars immediately became projects-in-process, and if you’ve ever seen me bullshit-reverse-Jenga a running car into a completely unrecognizable pile of parts, you know exactly what the problem is with being able to park a Prelude next to it overnight. I had to scare off car thieves, neighbourhood dogs, and my greatest enemy, the Snow Plow Man, with his unibody-threatening road salt slurry.
Eventually, I just gave up on the whole thing. It turns out that it was just too nice of a car to take care of. Never meet your heroes? More like never remember to pay property taxes so that the city disposes of all your useless interior parts without a trip to the dump.
Only a fool thinks that nobody has anything to teach him, said a fortune cookie I read once. I took that advice to heart. Ever since those first anxious jaunts in the parking lot of the Save-Less Foods with my alkie uncle’s Mirada, I’ve never stopped looking for other drivers who could teach me a little bit about how to make car go good - and ideally, how to make car go good around corners very quickly.
Those mentors have come from all kinds of odd places. A dude in the grocery store who drifted his cart without getting the casters to stick, a children’s party clown who seemed to intuitively understand the nature of fuel-air ratio as it applied to balloon animals, even my old third grade teacher who told me in secret that if you have to hit your ex-wife with your car, make sure you finish the job: all of these people have taught me a little something about driving. Yet, none could compare to the Delivery Man.
I first encountered him on my favourite mountain road. He blew past me without any apparent effort. While I was stuck having to drive within responsible limits, he could remember each apex and dip in the road as if it was his birthright. Rather than feel ashamed, I knew that I had to hunt him down and become his latest pupil.
After a few months of ordering parts from every shop I could think of, a familiar delivery van finally skidded to a stop in my driveway, hissing as the spray of hot rubber cooled on the paint. It was now or never - I stopped him as he pulled out the little signing machine, asked him his fantastic secret of racing.
“The secret is to go fast and not crash.”
Not everyone is a natural-born teacher, but I did eventually figure out on my own how to beat him. All it took were some very heavy orders.
As you get older, it becomes harder to keep your friends, especially when you’re a dude. They move away, or fall out of communication with you, or you just have one really bad trip on a camping vacation and they got all uppity that you tried to eat part of their face. That’s why it’s so important to cherish the adult relationships you do have.
For years, I’d been going to the local Canadian Tire in order to replace batteries. Their car batteries weren’t of excellent quality - I tended to blow through a few even without running a giant stereo, or leaving my headlights on, or running an arc welder off the battery to reattach my bumper when it rusted out on the highway. Wait, that last one happens all the time. The warranty, though, is excellent.
Anyway, the guy at the battery desk who handles my warranties, he hasn’t changed a bit. His life circumstances were so comfortable that he was able to work this job for basically the last decade, and he’d tested, failed, and replaced so many of my batteries that we soon developed a sort of rapport. During one session in which I replaced a Group 26F that had iced over on its vent hole, I soon realized that he was probably the longest-lasting friend I’d ever had.
It was only once I was invited to his funeral that I realized what I had lost. The new guy didn’t know how to run the testing machine.
Nowadays, we have all of these fantastic new communications methods. It has never been easier to know what some dude on the other side of the world had for lunch, and it’s also never been easier to suddenly realize that dude has a single dissenting opinion from you and must therefore be purged in the fires of righteousness. The best part, therefore, is the block button.
Scientists are working on it, but they’ve yet to develop a block button for real life. An early attempt, the semi-automatic handgun, had promise but has so far met with stern disapproval by regulators, no doubt due to its disruptive nature and promises of alternative revenue streams that upset the establishment order. Therefore, when you’re trapped in line behind some chowderhead at Home Depot who is telling his entire life story to the cashier, there’s not a lot you can do about it.
I had such an experience recently, as I counted the irreplaceable minutes of my life dwindling away into the ether. Captain Meshback-Cap in front of me wanted to build a deck, he explained to the increasingly bored-looking chap at the register, and it was going to be a testament to man’s domination of nature, a glowing monument that would carry forward into the future. Not exactly in those words, but you get the gist.
With the help of my therapist, I have been making great strides as of late in not converting this kind of white-out hatred into immediate, terrible violence. After all, that’s not what society is about. We have to help out one another, tolerate each others’ differences, and above all - never, ever slowly sneak away the guy’s lumber from his cart and replace it with the most warped, chipped, blackened shit you can find in the pile.
When it was all over, the register person gave me a hearty thanks. I didn’t know exactly what that was for, oh no, but I did have a great story for them when they got there. You see, there’s this deck I’m building, and…
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tags: home depot, waiting in line, captain meshback-cap
Are you up for something a little dirty? Maybe a little risky? Something your mother would frown upon if she knew what you were up to? Then come on down to Safety Fest, this weekend at the Convention Centre.
We’ve got all the headliners of workplace safety fame: fall-arrest harnesses, naloxone kits, and that old classic: steel-toed workboots. You won’t find a crazier set of extremely responsible human beings anywhere on the continent!
The first hundred guests through the door will receive free eye protection courtesy of our sponsors! Everyone after that should have remembered to bring some from home, because the entrance is also actively being worked on by drunken men with unshielded angle grinders. Maybe trim the beard a little bit before you walk in, too.
You’ll come for the gear, but you’ll stay for the sessions. Our celebrity guests (still to be announced - call Chuck in bookings if you still have all your fingers and are free this weekend) will answer your every question in their in-depth panels on life as a working man. Plus, we’ve got Shaky Tim demonstrating all the ways not to cut wood - we’ve got leaning directly over a roaring chop saw, using a coping saw while upside down, and throwing knives at a running tree grinder. The first two rows may get wet!
That’s Safety Fest, this weekend down at the Convention Centre. Children get in free, because it’s never too early to teach your kids how to align porcelain tiles without opening a vein in the process.
When you’re really good at fixing broken shit - out of necessity if for no other reason - then it makes sense to start making money from other people’s broken shit. A few years ago, I became a consultant so that I could help my fellow man, and also stacks and stacks and stacks of money. Sure, that last part is a lie, but I’m not getting paid to fix that.
It isn’t that I only have a mercenary attitude on the whole thing. I’ll help out the average man, even if they have no cash on hand, if the problem is interesting enough. Get my attention, and I’ll work for you until my dying breath, or at least until I figure out what’s wrong.
One day, I dropped into my local Dairy Queen for some ice cream. On the counter sat an intriguing little sign. It was handscrawled by the owner - come on man, not even an inkjet with some clipart? - and was asking for help. Not just any fryer jockey, though: the owner needed a consultant who could fix a problem that had haunted him forever. “Weird smell in store,” it read, “fix it and you’ll get free Blizzards for life.”
The restaurant did indeed smell not-so-fresh, but years of being assaulted by every near-organic compound and toxic vapour imaginable had numbed my sense of smell to the point where it was nearly impossible to figure out just what was wrong. I figured at first it was your usual - nitrogen on the cooler leaking into the walls, maybe some arcing electrics creating a bit of ozone. This was nothing I couldn’t handle, and climbed on top of the cake freezer in order to get a better look at the false ceiling. It didn’t take too long to find the source of the problem.
“You have found it?” asked the kind proprietor, and then reacted in glee when he saw my expression. “Free Blizzards for life!!”
Thing is, after you see a gently-electrocuted possum’s corpse getting eaten by maggots, you’re not really in the mood for a Brownie Batter Blizzard.
When you’re a homeowner, nobody can prepare you for the amazing things that will crop up to suddenly consume an entire weekend. Sure, everyone expects the hot water heater leaks, the roof collapsing, the foundation cracking and releasing thousands of angry killer bees into the basement. If you asked teenage me what he was going to be doing at my age, it definitely wasn’t “installing a bird bath heater because my wife felt bad for the cold little starlings in the middle of the winter.”
Still, though, the real surprise is how willing you are to do it. I didn’t even think of how I could have more productively (selfishly?) spent that time trying to re-chrome old rotor housings with a combination of 63/37 plumbing solder and expired Mountain Dew like I read on some forums. No, when it comes time to do Real Homeowner Shit you need to have your eye on the ball, or bad things can happen very quickly.
Hell, just down the block my neighbour was consumed alive by an evil spirit that he summoned to try and refinish his deck before the in-laws came by for Thanksgiving dinner. At the combination garage sale/wake that his wife put on, the entire community association agreed that you simply could not rush malevolent forces from another dimension, especially not when they are waiting at Hell’s Own Home Depot trying to figure out if they want the water- or oil-based stain. I bought his old leaf blower.
I was just about done hooking up the bird bath heater to the house when I realized my extension cord was six kinds of fucked. That’s another thing they don’t tell you about owning a house: you never have a working extension cord, and when you do, it is always too short. No wonder everyone was trying to sell their souls to Satan.
Nothing to do but become a real handyman, and I thought back to what my grandfather once told me, before the war. In his gentle lessons, I found my solution.
As I walked back inside, a starling came to a soft landing on the edge of the birdbath and, with a wet thump, was instantly obliterated. What used to be the bird was tossed back into the brisk fall wind as a confetti-like pile of still-smouldering ashes. Sure, hooking it directly to one of the phases of the overhead powerline wasn’t safe, but that was a problem for someone else to deal with. After all, as a homeowner, I paid their salary with my taxes.
For years, I looked up to the local small-engine mechanic, a guy named Ernesto, whose hands were caked with so much delightful two-stroke fuel that they had turned permanently black and could shoot ethanol-coloured flames on command. That last one might be because his shop backed onto a “Superfund blacksite,” which none of us had heard of before and we were strongly encouraged never to ask any questions about or the cheques would stop coming.
When I couldn’t answer a question myself, Ernesto could, thinking for a second and pulling reams of information from his long years of repairing shitty yard toys for helpless suburbanites like myself. What would happen when Ernesto failed? I imagined for years that there was another, better mechanic out there, but none of my problems were ever serious enough to necessitate the introduction of such a person. Not even that time I sheared off a bolt flush with the front of the engine case was enough to stop him in his tracks for more than the time it took to pick out the “good” left-hand drill bits.
One morning, my own apprentice, my neighbour Carl, had a question about his outboard motor. I couldn’t even comprehend what I was looking at inside the non-Euclidean surfaces of the cylinder head, so I took it immediately to Ernesto.
He frowned, as if witnessing the success of an old enemy, and told me that I had to call “the Attexman.” My heart began to race. Was this Ernesto’s superior? What the hell was an Attex? All my questions would be answered in time.
I drove to this Attexman’s house, having carefully selected my car in order to make the best possible first impression. For this kind of trip, no other vehicle would do but my mint-condition Suzuki Sidekick, a vehicle that appealed to both the shut-in nerd and hardcore 4x4 enthusiast alike.
What I saw wasn’t so much a ‘house’ as it was a high-class Unabomber shed. Inside, I met a man who didn’t notice my approach. I tried to get his attention, but he refused to acknowledge me, only endlessly rebuilding the strange head in front of him, over and over. It seemed that every time he completed the fix, the valves suddenly became too tight, as if nature itself was working against the humble two-stroke engine of his bathtub-shaped ATV. Suddenly, an idea occurred to me, and I blurted it out before thinking of the consequences.
“Why don’t you just put in a Honda?”
Hateful eyes snapped up from the workbench, and I became aware of a deep hissing sound that seemed to fill the room. At that point, I decided that the better part of valour was running the fuck away, banging the clattering engine of the Sidekick into fuel cut on every shift as I made good my escape.
Perhaps Ernesto had meant for this to happen all along, to teach me that a real mechanic’s answers must come from within. I carried the discovery I had made in that terrible shed back to Carl, and I told him to just buy a fucking Honda and be done with this cute hipster shit.
The skeptics among you may say that owning a motorhome combines both the worst features of maintaining a house with all the worst moments of maintaining a car, but I prefer to look at it as a way to force me to actually work on my projects. As I tour the country at a fuel economy so low that, in future decades, will be cause enough on its own to push for an indictment of crimes against humanity, I find that now I have so many problems to fix on this thing that I can’t waste any money on more cars.
My basic approach is sound: drive as far as I can until the ‘motor’ part of it fails, then spend a few days camping out in a parking lot, semi-truck runoff, or extremely bougie suburban neighbourhood while I fix it. Since the thing’s not moving anywhere anyway, during my break from wrenching is when I take the time to vacuum the carpets, throw out the sea of empty beer cans, and remove any dead animals that have wedged themselves into the undercarriage. To me, it’s like a premium luxury hotel that you can drift.
Income, you ask? I run a wifi repeater in the back that confuses nearby self-driving cars into mining bitcoins for me. Pays off pretty well, though I think the cops might be getting wise to all the cars that have plunged off the cliffs due to computing how to take a turn a few seconds too slowly.
A couple years and odometer rollovers ago, back when I still identified myself as being a member of my hometown, I told myself I would only be gone for awhile. When I return home, there are going to be so many more things broken in my house that I plan on just driving this bitch into the living room wall. All I have to do is remember which side of the basement has the sewage drain, so I can line up the bilge pump.
Ever since our neighbours to the South collapsed into civil war and the world became entombed in what we Canadians call the Great Heat, there has been a quest to cool ourselves off. Unlike the Americans, none of us really got central air conditioning, or at least not ones beefy enough to deal with the skin-boiling daily highs of plus fifteen Celsius. We were sweating our balls off, and what’s worse, it was putting a terrible strain on our beer fridges.
“Boys, this two-four is getting unacceptably warm, we gotta go to the Coldlands.” My site super had spoken, and before he finished that sentence I was already running an elephants’-trunk of jumper cable out from the site genset to one of our cloudfallen Teslas. Ever since the internet disappeared, these poor little bastards just decided to stop working, which was great for us Canadians since we can’t afford to use the internet outside anyway - we scooped up the lot of them and converted them to be more suited to Canadians’ natural talents.
I popped the frunk and found the terminals for the brain battery. This was always the worst part, bringing them back. The brain’s three hundred miles of precision-laid gallium-nitride circuitry woven through the body of the car began to scream as if being murdered, remembering everything that came before. After a few minutes of this, it realized it was once again alive, and fell quiet, except for a little sad beep once in awhile when it tried to find out what happened to its family and found the ionosphere to be deadly quiet.
Putting the Tesla in drive, I inched forward. The Arduino I had loosely soldered into the brain’s test points and hot-glued to the dash blinked happily inside its disposable Rubbermaid lunch container, convincing it that Daddy Elon had said it was okay to still drive. It needed the extra reassurance that things would be alright even though the rear bodywork was mostly just angle iron and Reynolds aluminum foil after a few good winter skids into the lightpoles in the parking lot of the bar. The whole crew climbed in, and we were off on a quest to make this beer cold, so we could sup of its modest alcohol content.
We approached the highway, making sure to watch out for the bands of Dire Moose that the government had released into the forest after the R&D funding ended. Seeing the road ahead was clear, I matted the gas. Or the throttle. Or the motor actuator. Whatever they called it.
I loved mashing the pedal in this thing - with the governors diked out of the wiring and all the downloadable content unlocked, it felt like you got ten thousand horsepower for the eight seconds the heavily-used, gently-warped panel of Canadian Tire marine batteries out back lasted. Luckily, other drivers on the highway were always willing to give the Tesla a little push, regenerating the batteries with the help of the manual “engine braking” paddle I had installed in the transmission. Naturally, it was actuated by a hockey stick handle wrapped in electrical tape, just like the snow box racers of our youth. I gave a quick wave to the Kia Forte that had helped us on our path, and rocketed away.
After a few minutes of driving, we reached the Coldlands, the parallel where at last we could see snow again. In the collapse of Canadian civilization that happened from the extreme heat, our people had fled further and further north, working hard to maintain our way of life. It was up to miners like me and the other guys at camp to bring back the coal in which they could run their hockey rink chillers, as the Great Heat had followed us so far north it threatened our God-given game.
There, in the crook of an ammonia compressor, we laid the two-four. It became pleasingly frosty within minutes. Such was the life when you had a hazardous job like we did. Once, a guy even got tanned.
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tags: tesla, canada, post apocalyptic, kia forte, kia, the coldlands, the great heat
No matter how far gone I was, I could always tell myself that least I hadn’t gotten into Italian cars yet. The fact that it was because they were largely unavailable in the car-rusting hellhole I liked to call home is immaterial. It was purely through force of will alone that I avoided getting saddled with the self-harming girlfriend of automobiles.
Then I saw it, on a routine jaunt into the outer neighbourhoods. Sinking into a driveway, on dead tires, a sadder sight than a million war movies about noble dogs. Could I avoid picking it up for myself? I thought of who might take this bullet for me. There was a man back in my neighbourhood who feasted on the blood of the Alfa, but I had avoided interacting with him all this time, lest he would show me that Italian cars were not to be feared, that they could be tamed. The pull of this car was too great; I needed help.
I met him outside his house, after driving around the block a few times until he emerged to do his nightly repairs. He seemed cautious at first, worried that perhaps I was another Italian car owner who had achieved basic social competence in order to steal his hoard of parts. After some conversation, he still seemed wary, but was convinced that this other car I had seen was quite the deal.
That night, I awoke from my slumber and turned on the light. There, at the foot of my bed, was the Alfa Guy I had spoken to that evening. I still don’t know how he got into my house - the windows and doors were locked, and the chimney flue sealed - but he was there nonetheless. Perhaps his contortionist-like abilities had given him a unique entry point into my domicile. He was chain-smoking and stared at me from behind some very fashionable sunglasses. Wait, there was something wrong with his choice of cigarettes, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
“Are those double-A batteries?” I asked finally.
“The copper-top ones are unfiltered,” came the flat reply.
He told me a story then, a tale of having visited that Alfa I had seen in the driveway. It was the deal of the century, he revealed - mint condition with only a few small electrical fires to put out on the way home. I had missed out myself, because of my lack of faith, and would never again see such a deal of Alfa goodness. They could sense that black mark in my heart forevermore.
After he left in the car - my car, I was calling it to myself - in a cloud of glorious-sounding exhaust note and coolant, I contemplated what he had said. Was I truly fated to never enjoy the backlit glow of a Busso tachometer hitting fuel cut at night? This problem kept me awake that night, and every night since, as I endlessly scrolled the classifieds looking for another chance at a multi-cam Roman hotrod like the one I had so carelessly passed up.
It was true what they said: the Alfa-less life was not one worth living.
The most feared organization in Japan is not the brutal yakuza, nor even the income-tax auditors. No, the people whose toes you really want to avoid stepping on are the premium stereo financiers.
During the 1980s, the tiny island nation of Japan was in the throes of two great loves: exotic financial instruments, and highly advanced personal audio electronics. These two intertwined in so many complex ways that today’s top sociologists are still hard at work figuring it out, but one of the effects you can see today on any Japanese street is the guy who is in hock up to his tits to Sony.
It’s not just domestic brands, either; even such small-fry names as Rockford-Fosgate will send a gaggle of goons to kick in the door to your six-tatami apartment. They want their payment for that car stereo you slapped into your first-gen CRX all the way back in ‘85; you know, the big boomer that lit up when the bass popped? Yeah, that one.
The reasons why are simple. During the late Showa-era, it seemed as if the good times would go on forever. Sign a multi-generational loan for a car stereo? Makes sense to me; $5 a month for the rest of my life and most of my kids’s is a small price to pay for this level of tweeter clarity. Hell, I’ll just pay it off with a wad of cash next week, when my boss gives me a twenty percent raise like he does every couple of months. The good times can’t possibly end - until they did.
Reasons for why the Japanese economy ground to a halt after the Bubble Era are currently hotly debated. The chief theory advanced at several less-credible universities is that the introduction of the world-beating third-generation Chevrolet Cavalier for 1995 so scared Japanese automakers that they began hoarding cash in a panic, causing the markets to plunge into chaos as the nation’s subcompact car dominance came to an end.
Even though the Japanese financial system has never returned to its peak form, these tireless bounty hunters still roam the streets of Tokyo. Salarymen who have changed their name, gone back to school, even faked their deaths cannot escape the team of private investigators waiting for them at the end of the Matsuzakaya checkout line. Shouldn’t have optioned-on that minidisc player, Taro!
One nice thing about the development of mathematics and related sciences over the last handful of centuries is that you can now model up something before you build it. There’s no need to actually bust your knuckles and flip the switch only to find out it doesn’t work. Even though this is well-established in the literature as being nerd bullshit for cowards, it’s good to know that the option is there. That way, when you blow past it on your way to creating the next great thing, onlookers have something to blame for any failures you may have.
I recently experienced this phenomenon when I took the opportunity to drop by the university particle physics lab for a chat with my old mentor. As she explained it to me, the new particle accelerator they had ordered from Germany pulled a Volkswagen and shot its own wiring harness into a parallel dimension. They were waiting for the special technician to arrive. It turns out that said technicians had to be specially bred, and they didn’t have any examples of the genetic template in cold storage, so it was going to take a few weeks while they did the old fast-grow. Until the meat puppet showed up on the warehouse dock, these high-zoot particle physicists were doing the PhD equivalent of twiddling their thumbs: making up jokes about the “Large Hardon Collider.”
Scoffing at their lack of do-it-yourselfitude, I decided to climb inside the machine and see what I could do. It couldn’t possibly be more complicated than rewiring an old Cavalier, I reasoned. My mentor hollered after me, offering a copy of the wiring diagram, but if the entire thing had disappeared into the ether, what hope did I have of finding a fault? It was best to rely on my God-given talents and just hook things up by gut feel. After a few hours, I emerged from the bowels of the beast, smeared with hydraulic oil and bleeding profusely from my wire-pricked fingers. With a grin, I gave the ISO Standard Thumbs-Up, and the scientists let ‘er rip.
Everything seemed to be working great. I quickly ate the cup of noodles from the laboratory break room that the grateful scientists offered me, and then took off. If I hurried, I could hit the thrift store on the way home, pick up a slightly-past-its-prime cartridge of ferrofibre for my metal printer.
It wasn’t until I got home that night that I realized I had probably hooked a few things up backward. On the plus side, now that the sky is eternally on fire as a result of our plunge into the Hell Dimension, it seems pretty unlikely the city will ever have to salt the roads again.
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tags: particle accelerator, chevrolet cavalier, volkswagen, chevrolet
“They’ve got this new God and it’s wild, so, so much better than the old one,” my neighbour cried with delight before looking into the sky for approval. After a moment, she seemed pleased with herself and returned to the hard sales pitch.
“All you have to do is show up this Sunday to the Life Church and then I’ll let you buy my junky old car,” she said. I was pretty much stuck with it. If I wanted her midrange economy car, I had an appointment with their new God. Whoever it was.
When I showed up that morning, it seemed like a pretty ordinary group of suburbanites. I was a little surprised: normally, fringe religious organizations (”cults” to the layman) preferred to assemble their flock from some of the more specious and ignored members of society. I had assumed that’s why I was there, but these people all seemed pretty boring. Not a single alternative-materials artist was in attendance, or even a reformed prisoner with a multiple-stab record so long that it earned its own page on Wikipedia.
After a few minutes of exchanging ordinary pleasantries with the people I was told were my neighbours (”Oh, you’re the one with that Saab.” “Only one? That doesn’t sound like me, but let me know where they are so I can pick theirs up too.”), the preacher took the podium. The usual fire-and-brimstone speech proceeded, and then he clicked the projector over to the next slide, a very familiar-looking photo.
“This is our God, Lord Fluffbottoms.” There, sixteen feet tall, before a group of chanting adherents, was my orange dumbass of a cat. When I wasn’t looking, my Instagram had become so popular that its own cult had spontaneously formed. I debated briefly taking ownership of this cat - shut the whole thing down before it got too crazy, but I worried about being murdered - or worse, idolized - as a result.
There was nothing I could do but sink further in the pews as the preacher continued, teaching his flock about the Ways of Fluffbottom: scratching my God-damned couch, getting shit caught in his own tail so I had to cut it out, and screaming incessantly at me whenever I took a bath. No, wait, that was what I experienced in private; the preacher was peddling an idealized, false version of my maybe-Norwegian maybe-Forest maybe-Cat.
In the parking lot, after having sweated it out through the entire sermon, my neighbour approached me as I attempted to get my Jeepster to start. Now that the weather had gotten slightly warmer from when I parked it two hours ago, the grim spectre of vapour lock loomed over us both. She offered to drive me home, and I agreed, amazed (and slightly sickened) at the newfangled features of her replacement car - wing mirrors, I muttered, will never take off.
I want to say everything worked out fine with the used car deal, but when I went into the house to grab some cash, she spotted through the front window Lord Fluffbottoms taking a jaunty piss on my record collection. Her 1992 Sentra still drove pretty well for the money, although the cops had a lot of questions about the bill of sale signed about a week before she was murdered in her home by extremists from the Fluffbottoms Order following the Catnip Schism. Don’t ask questions that you might get stabbed over, that’s my motto.
There has never been a better time to be a connoisseur in the history of the human race. We have so many foods, drinks, sports teams, and other consumer products, that if you want to be an elitist snob about something, you can find a subject on which to be one within minutes. My friends liked to tell me about the exotic homemade beers and tasty restaurants they dwelled at, but I could never get them to understand the obsession which had taken over my life. I speak, naturally, of adhesives.
On the face of it, glue isn’t that interesting. You slap it down, it maybe bonds two things together, it makes an enormous mess. Most people don’t go beyond what Home Depot sells in the “done makes stuff sticky” section, and they sure don’t cook up their own glues or memorize the license plates and commuting routines of everyone working in 3M research.
I frowned at the people who would get a can of Flex Glue and chuck it on dissimilar metals. Usually, these rubes didn’t even bother to apply an appropriate clamping load to the work pieces. They’d slap together their garbage, and then would just go on with their lives, perfectly happy with their shear limits well below the already pathetic product specifications.
The only thing worse than massively overpriced casual adhesive? That would be the many, many adherents (pun absolutely not intended) to the cult of the hot glue gun, a machine whose sole purpose was to instil false confidence in people before a terrifying failure. To this day, you still cannot convince me the hot glue gun has killed fewer people than the AK-47. At least that thing was bolted together properly.
It’s not fair that my enemies keep calling me “the crank” at the city council meetings. I think our public schools need to be declared Hot-Glue-Gun-Free Zones. That’s the only way our kids will learn about black RTV.
Missile Command. Pac-Man. Ms Pac-Man. Galaga. All classics, all beloved by people the world over, and all made inferior before the might of Seat Safety Switch RPG for the Atari Video Computer System, new this summer from Activision.
Your protagonist (represented by these three green pixels here) must traverse the formative years of high school auto shop, a haunted junkyard, a failed engineering degree and an accidental political career in order to save the Princess. The Austin Princess, that is. Each world is lovingly recreated by a team of almost one artist in the finest mind-blowing colour graphics possible from the pinnacle of home computer entertainment.
So you’ve figured it all out, that you have finally self-actualized your way into a lifestyle that isn’t dependent on half-built mutant abominations formed in a better century? Better think again, fucko: invite a friend to play as The Adversary, a malevolent capitalist who produces new cars with hateful, car-bulking features like “power windows” and “fire-resistant headlight wiring.”
Tell your parents to pick it up for you this summer at any fine Sears home entertainment department.
All it takes to separate you from the rest of society is one really bad day. You suffer a calamity, a tragedy that comes to define your entire life. That happened to me, and now I tour high schools telling kids not to live the kind of life that I once did. They can be different; they can avoid my fate.
“It was 11 PM out behind the old drive-in,” I tell them, pacing the podium and catching each kid in turn with direct eye contact to show them how serious my words are. “My friends and I decided we were going to have a little street race.”
“Ahead of me, my buddy Stan gets a few good pulls in against this Mustang. We get a little cocky. After all, we’d been at it only a few minutes and already one of us had enough cash to pay for a new 4-2-1 header for his Sentra.” The kids are a little confused, but I expected that. Their leaders failed them. Their educators abandoned them. Me, though? I am there for them.
“So I roll up to the line in my mk2 Celica, against a porky-as-hell Alltrac. I had heard all the stories, and I believed them. I did what I thought was right.” Now, the children are hanging on my every word. What I deliver to them can change the future of our society in ways I could never hope to do on my own. “The race was great, but something went wrong.”
The room’s silent. I wait for a few seconds, and then punch the podium hard, the echo booming into the mic for emphasis. “I’m not even at the top of third and I’m running out of puff. The guy at the speed shop said big cams would do it for me, that all I had to do was get this thing revving and I’d be able to beat any turbo they could throw at me. That was a lie. I lost the race that night.”
“I wanted to partake of that special stuff the guy behind the speed shop kept trying to push on me. The other kids said no, that they’d seen in TV shows and movies it was too dangerous. Those kids didn’t know anything about thicker head gaskets to take away compression ratio, or oversized injectors, because back then nobody told us about those things.”
“If there is only one thing you hear from me today, it needs to be this: Celicas are made for nitrous.”
A man has a limit. You can throw eggs at his house, knock out his tail light, steal his lawn flamingos, torch his birdbath. The one thing you can’t do is push the crosswalk button even though you have no intention of crossing. The kids in my neighbourhood had gone too far.
One morning, after my already-hellish commute had been lengthened by five seconds, I decided to do something about it. If there was no crosswalk at all, this problem would go away. Following my father’s example, I first tried diplomacy. I called my local city councillor and unleashed an unbroken stream of inflammatory rhetoric, angry to the point that my phone began flashing an overheat warning to try and get me off the line before I burned the microphone off. With that kind of passion, I expected the problem to be taken care of the next week.
Over that weekend, I saw some city workers leaning on their shovels in the general vicinity of the pole. It was all going according to plan, and I looked forward to the next school day, when the teens would have to risk their own necks in order to get me to stop for them. In fact, things had become even worse. To my horror, I realized that the city had installed - at great expense - fully automated crosswalks, reasoning that the error the teens had made was that they didn’t hit the button often enough. I could hear my councillor laughing at me as he clutched a glass of rare whisky.
Now, those bastard kids would run back and forth across the sensor, which completely fouled traffic until they got bored and went back inside their school. This was a real low point for me, both emotionally and artistically. Soon, I was taking alternate routes to work just to avoid the school zone: driving across parking lots, ripping ‘TEC through the backyards of those neighbours with fences of lesser quality, and even in one shameful moment of desperation, riding a bicycle to my office.
In their hubris, though, they had made a lot of enemies. People were so mad that they actually started showing up to the community association meetings. There, those angry suburbanites formed a voting bloc, which turfed the existing councillor, school trustees and even the mayor. In their place, we installed some crackpot racist who gutted the whole system, ripped and tore in a quest for “cost-cutting” so furiously that the kids in question were on the streets by the next week. That’ll teach those little fuckers to abuse municipal infrastructure for short-term personal gains.
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tags: tragedy of the commons, honda civic, honda
Surviving Natural Disasters
A lot of people will just roll over and let a natural disaster do whatever it wants to them. Whether it be a hurricane, tornado, plague of bovine encephalitis or even something as simple as an unstoppable wildfire, these poor suckers have decided that there is nothing they can do - that they are a victim.
You do not have to be a victim just because some physics bullshit up in the clouds or out in the ocean got together and said “hand over your lunch money, weirdo.” Just by remembering these simple rules, you can fight back, and come out smelling like a slightly damp rose.
First, you need to have your strength up to withstand the coming onslaught. Your average person will, upon hearing of an imminent natural disaster, empty out a Wal-Mart into their base-model crossover. After returning home, they will eat cold canned beans for seven days while waiting for an adequately-equipped rescue force to restore order around their compound.
Don’t be this guy: there’s plenty of them already out there. Wait a few days into the disaster, take your shotgun, and knock on the door of your nearest well-prepared neighbour. Looks like they already did all the shopping for you! Sure, it’s a “social faux pas” to chain-murder your fellow members of the Community Watch just for some cans of creamed corn, but what if the disaster never ends? You’d look pretty stupid sitting there with a fake smile on your face while all the remaining food is consumed by people who aren’t your family.
Second, make sure your car is full of gasoline. Not necessarily so you can drive it somewhere. After about six months or so, today’s high-ethanol fruit-daiquiri bullshit petroleum distillates are virtually worthless for fuel economy, let alone performance. When your enemies figure out that you are vulnerable without electricity - and they will - puncture the gas tanks under cover of darkness. Now you’ve got a combustible defensive wall, which also doubles as a signal flare for any rescue agencies that may be trawling the area in order to discover a super-badass secretly hidden like a wolf among the suburbanite sheep. Then it doesn’t really matter what happens to your house after that, because statistics show that you’ll be popping off awesome kung-fu moves in slow motion.
Third, don’t forget that the impending destruction of our society means that you have a great excuse to finally break that project car out. You know, the one that’s covered in rust, tack-welded spikes made out of leaf springs, and eyeless infant doll heads? It doesn’t have to be perfect; it just has to be capable of roaring across the sand-swept hellscape that has become our world. If you’re not going to drive it now, you might as well just sell it to some other murderous warlord who will.
Now that you’re prepared to survive the wasteland, you’ve freed up all kinds of time that lesser men would spend panicking. Take that time to use your office printer and crank out some hard copies of the best internet porn - for some reason it doesn’t seem to work when the electricity goes out.
Without the power of the press to publish the rantings of any old lunatic who comes in off the street, we might have to actually go out and find sources who know what the fuck they are talking about. That would ruin the entire scam, and so to fill in column inches and optimize reader interactivity metrics, we have the concept of an editorial page.
Perhaps you’ve heard of it, if you are old enough to remember reading a newspaper. Buried deep within the folds is free content, sent to us by people with an agenda - key words being: free content. We don’t have to pay anyone to leave the building, figure out what’s going on, and write about it. All you need is an editor who can lay out a few paragraphs of someone else’s words, and those guys quite literally grow on trees, at least since the Chin’ari Influx.
How it works is simple: a controversy emerges. It can be a real one, or it can be something that only morons imagine exists. We don’t want to pretend like we’re taking sides - remember, that might require effort and thus money - so we just find two guys, one on each side of an issue, and trowel their high-spew bullshit into the paper. Voila, controversy becomes engagement becomes Paul in the executive suite doesn’t have to buy his cocaine from the dealer behind the Costco. That dealer only drives a used Infiniti G35, which is shameful.
Is your crazy rant not quite well-formed enough to carry 300 words? No problem, we’ll shave it down until it can fit into the “Letters to the Editor” section, where we perpetuate the fiction that a barely-above-minimum-wage local newspaper editor has any business reading people’s unhinged screams about microeconomics, let alone responding to them.
So bring on your insane conspiracy theories, your form letters from your boss’s shady taxpayers’ association, your fervent beliefs in the quantum nature of apple cider vinegar’s cancer-curing megapower. We’ll turn them into a beautiful, equally-enraging regurgitation and feed them right back to you. Some say the golden age of newspapers is behind us, but my year-end bonus says otherwise.
Beset on all sides by their quest for re-election, the beleaguered city council came to my small engineering consultancy for help with their compost problem. In fact, the Mayor Hisself eventually made it out to my office, after several of his most trusted aides failed to make it past my tough-as-nails receptionist, “Shit-Stompin’” Phil Katz. He was in a war once, or something. All I know is that he goes away sometimes and if you look real close you can see children burning in the trees.
The mayor’s plea was simple: the city had built a huge composting operation, costing millions of dollars, and then it was uneconomical to run. There were a lot of reasons why, but the primary issue was a real stinker.
“Cat poop just doesn’t break down,” cried The Mayor Hisself. “Can you build a futuristic new car that runs on the stuff so we can sell it all to OPEC?”
Part of being a successful consultant is networking. I knew just the guy, and after an hour on the phone with my old buddy Dieter, I had the solution. We would import a wad of “banned” diesel Volkswagens from his employer, and cram the tanks with boiled cat shit. It only smelled marginally worse than being behind a diesel, and you wouldn’t believe the fuel economy they got. A shitload of miles, they said.
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tags: self-indulgent, volkswagen, shit-stompin phil katz
Few of you realize that, with my dragonesque hoard of riches, there are certain tax obligations I must fulfill. In order to keep from paying the government one red cent of its fair share from my successes, I have to pour some of my pocket change into failing businesses to offset the immense profits of Bad Cars Monthly, the monthly newsmagazine all about that beater life.
I was having trouble thinking of how to waste enough money - buy a failing hockey team? Fund a junta against a small South American government? Own an out-of-warranty Audi? Nothing was sticking, until my faithful assistant of the week barged into my office, breathless, with one hell of an idea in his skull.
We would start a venture capital firm and shove money straight down the throats of every nerd that showed up with a half-assed idea for software you can run on your phone. I didn’t even get a chance to congratulate him on his fantastic idea when the mailman suddenly arrived with a few dozen Series A funding proposals. Somehow, word had already gotten out, which I think is as much due to the government tax spies recording every word I speak as the desperation of the entire industry to get rich off this gravy train before it derails and takes out downtown in a massive explosion.
I listened to their proposals, and I found out that I took naturally to playing the mogul type. Leaning back in my overstuffed leather office chair, feet up on the desk, fingers tented, I would deliver my verdict on their entire lives. Cuddlr is a terrible idea, I said, nobody wants to have strangers show up, give them a reassuring hug and pay them six bucks for the privilege. Doesn’t make sense, will never be profitable.
Perhaps I was too hasty.
The next morning, I opened the Wall Street Journal in order to place it into my budgie’s cage. There, I saw the Cuddlr guys, celebrating their billion-dollar buyout by an unaccountable, unthinkably enormous megacorporation. I felt a pang of regret, but then I remembered I could probably write off the meeting on my taxes and buy that car I’d been dreaming about with the proceeds. Nothing makes you feel better about a missed investment than a Toyota Century Shinto hearse.
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tags: bad cars monthly, venture capital, cuddlr, toyota century, toyota
In computer science, there’s a little something we call the Church-Turing thesis. Boiled down, it basically means you can’t always prove a computer program finishes. That’s boring nerd shit, sure, but the ramifications are huge: it turns out that we actually don’t know anything about the universe and can’t prove any human endeavour is worthwhile, so let’s just go race dune buggies out behind Old Man Thompson’s house.
Last week, me and the whole computer science department were out at the big ditch behind Thompson’s, when Dr. Matthews did a pretty sick backflip off her wide-piped Yammy 125 dirt bike. Whether or not it was intentional, everyone in attendance was immediately enraptured, and climbed onto their own shitty gas-fired automotive conveyance to see if they could do any better. Just like our boy Alonzo, nobody knew where this would all stop.
What we eventually discovered is that the police department will come, and even though they will circle the lot for hours looking for the teenagers that were phoned in, those officers will eventually come and try to prosecute a group of well-meaning math majors who just wanted to get their ring-a-ding-ding on. This is a misunderstanding, said Dr. Savage, we have tenure. Despite the invocation of the “T-word,” the cops proceeded in their oppression of our research project.
Later that week, I submitted my findings to the finest fly-by-night scientific journal I could find, and was published. My advisor was overjoyed - I managed to crank out enough papers per semester to keep the money taps turned on in his lab. All it took was a little paper I liked to call, “Eventually All Programs Terminate Because Someone Called The Cops.” Dr. Matthews, of course, got first author. That backflip was pretty sweet, and also she let me borrow her feeler gauge when I had to reset the timing on my gray-market Gas-Gas 250.
Working at the top secret government lab that is building the Fear Engine isn’t so bad. Break times are really long, my boss doesn’t get up in my business if it takes me an extra couple of days to tweak the nightmare response integrator, and there are always new people to meet down in the test lab. Sure, those new people never make it back out of the machine once we strap it in, but my boss tells me he just hired a rag-tag band of unlikely mercenaries to get in there and free all their trapped minds from a perfect machine whose only objective in life is to mathematically perfect the infliction of terror on human beings.
Now, I know what you’re saying - surely this is for warfare, right? We crank this bitch up and turn it loose on Al Qaeda and they get convinced that spiders are crawling out of their eye sockets. Not so, or at least it wasn’t about war by the time I got here. This thing has been going for decades, and I’m pretty sure that everyone who was involved in the initial approval has just forgotten about it. Every year, we get a little bit of money from Uncle Sam, and turn around and pour it right back into the Fear Engine, which is a good thing for all those co-ed teenagers who have been stuck in it for months.
Little update on those mercenaries I mentioned before: every second they spend in this thing is really more like an entire century to them. I’m pretty sure the young, cocky one with something to prove has been watching his family get torn apart by syringe-tipped giant scorpions for a millennium or so. Eventually, we’ll figure out how to get them out safely, but after the first week you just learn how to ignore the screams. Suffice it to say it’s not a real high priority to help them out, because that might mean listening to them again, and I gotta clock out at 5 PM or I’ll miss my seat on the train back.
That’s the really good thing about working for the government. You never have to worry about product-market fit when you are building your machine-learning god of eternal mental anguish. The only fear you have to have for your career is that one of the interns might eventually emerge from the machine, a brainless monster bent on your destruction, and kill everyone in the lab. That only happened once, though, and it freed up some good, well-paying jobs with benefits.
We are gathered here today to honour the memory of my cousin’s 2003 Chevrolet Impala, which has gone to see to Virgil Exner long before its time due to a combination of lack of oil and spinning the wheels on ice on a stone-cold engine for several minutes. It had only three hundred thousand kilometers, but left a lifetime of memories behind.
I first met 2003 Chevrolet Impala in a buy-here-pay-here lot, where I told my cousin that the bone-dry dipstick and prominent upper engine rattle were clear signs of a neglected engine. Still, it gave him some of the best months of its life, ferrying him to and from the methadone clinic at which he volunteers in exchange for the leftover heroin that the addicts are trying to get rid of.
The Impala was preceded in death by two older cars, a 1996 Pontiac Sunfire and a 2001 Uplander, each of which have long since been returned to China and made into new stampings. In this way, their legacy carries on.
Descartes once wrote “we have but one life, but many hoopties.” I implore you all to take this Impala’s example, and go used car shopping with my cousin, because he never ever listens to my suggestion to just buy a base-model Toyota. Toyotas are too expensive, he says. They’re like a hundred bucks more and you won’t blow them up twice a year anymore, Todd.
Donations to the bereaved can be left in the worryingly dry and glittery oilpan beside the front door.
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tags: todd safety switch, chevrolet impala, pontiac sunfire, chevrolet uplander
Could your loved ones be the next victim of a car-crippling cyberattack? There is simply no way to know, but our experts think that the answer is yes. Tune in tonight to Twenty Questions, as we get to the bottom of The Car With Greetz.
Thank you for joining us, Doctor Hardcase. In your professional opinion, do you think that the time is right for unbridled, shrieking terror the likes of which the American family has never before seen? You do? I’m sorry to cut you off there, Doctor, because we are going live to footage of an autonomous BMW X3 racing out of control through the streets of Los Angeles. This breaking news is brought to you by GoPro, the official camera of “Evidence A.”
As you can now see, the BMW X3 is driving carefully through this suburb, searching for an errant pedestrian to kill. Just minutes ago, its driver fell asleep at the wheel, and the car is now entirely driverless and out for blood. There is nothing we can do now except slowly follow the BMW from Action Chopper One and wait for it to make a fatal mistake. As you can see from the BMW now activating the turn signals and making a polite lane change, no human being is piloting this rolling orgy of death.
Now, the BMW has turned into the garage and parked itself. Doctor Hardcase, how many minutes do we have until the battery banks inside this German Slaughter-Golem burst into roaring lithium fires and consume the entire development? Only a few minutes? You heard the expert, ladies and gentlemen. Soon, soon, you will have a self-reaping car loose across the highways and byways of your very own subdivisions!
We’ll keep you posted all throughout the night, and be sure to visit our social media page where you can tell us just how scared you are. We’ll air the best comments because that’s free content and we’d be stupid not to take it. Don’t change that dial, unless you don’t know what a dial is, in which case just turn the TV off and go back to work. The rest of you should take a break with us and watch this commercial from our sponsors, Old Faulty Life Insurance and Second Mortgage Hut.
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tags: self-driving cars, media panic, doctor hardcase, twenty questions
Every neighbourhood has those annoying religious types who come and bother you in the middle of the day. They don’t care if they’re interrupting your tending of your hydroponic weed farm, or getting in the way of you torturing a wheel bearing until it finally explodes from the rust-pocked spindle of a mass-market Honda. These men (and they are always men) are on a mission from their God, and if they catch you, you are going to hear all about it.
I was sitting at my kitchen table, rubbing Shin-Etsu grease into the cracks on my hands, when I heard a knock at the door. In my grease-addled state, I decided it must be the FedEx guy, New Steve. We had sort of a thing going, Steve and I: he brought me parts, and in return I remembered his first name. Instead of an eBay shopping cart full of rusty suspension components, that day I opened the door to find a pair of assholes in dress shirts.
“Have you heard the word of our saviour?” asked one, putting his steel-toed boot in the door so I could not close it.
“Only those who own Electric Cars will be saved from the Apocalypse of the ICE,” chimed in the other, and thrust a pamphlet into my hands. It bore the face of their messiah, Elon Musk, who had decided to follow his buddy L. Ron into the religion business.
If they spent a year going on missions for him, they would be rewarded with a certified pre-owned Tesla. Thing is, I don’t remember hearing that anyone actually survived to the end of the year. Probably because at month 11, they all got ordered to return themselves to the Recycling Tanks to fuel future development of the Roadmind.
Calling upon my training as a customer service representative, I dropped to a barely-functional fugue state and allowed them to do what they wanted with my body. As their diatribe faded away into an indignant buzzing, I wondered why I hadn’t bothered to start a religion yet. After all, it seemed to be where the money was.
A few hours later, I awoke on my porch, with my pants around my ankles and a FedEx “While You Were Out” non-delivery slip tucked into the crack of my ass. Thanks for eventually showing up, New Steve.
When you get tired of doing a lot of crack, or any number of the variety of synthetic opiates being funnelled into our country by countries with better science education than ours, one way to quit is to get on methadone. It’s like a tinier, shittier crack that they feed you to slowly wean your way off the big stuff, and then eventually you can quit altogether. There is something like this for car guys, but you’re not going to like it.
Treatment at the Seat Safety Switch Centre For Bad Car Obsession starts at reception, where our kindly nurses figure out just how badly you’re twisted up. Are you just a family man who took a wrong turn, looked at pictures of Buick Roadmaster wagons on Instagram all night long after the wife went to bed? Or are you the kind of enthusiast who builds a space-frame dune buggy from a Dodge Caravan and can’t stop thinking about interior push-pin clips? Whatever the level of depravity, here is where we’ll start developing your treatment plan.
From here, our orderlies work on slowly tapering off your dose. Perhaps we get you started on Toyota Previas, a weird and strange vehicle that is still unbelievably stone-dead reliable. Then, we build on that success by letting you experience a Toyota Solara, the Japanese answer to a question nobody asked. By the time we finally get you behind the wheel of a Toyota Corolla, you’ll be bragging to people at parties that a car is really about reliable A-to-B transportation, and that maybe in the future you’ll pick up something fun, but for now you’re committed to paying down debts and not working on your car every weekend. Doesn’t sound like you? Oh, it will.
So come on down to the Seat Safety Switch Centre For Bad Car Obsession. We take payment exclusively in weird fucking shit cars that nobody else values - the weirder the better. Give them to me. I mean us. For your health.
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tags: buick, buick roadmaster, toyota previa, toyota, toyota solara, toyota corolla
Hey, it’s great to see you. Thanks for coming to the first episode of the show. Ever since I took over from the beloved comic that used to host it, the press has been giving me a lot of friction. “He doesn’t have what it takes to charm the audiences,” “his entire comedy routine is about differentials,” that sort of thing. Well folks, I’m not going to be the same as that guy you loved so much, but I think we can still have some new fun together.
Ford’s in the news again; looks like, just like me, they forgot how to set backlash on a nine-inch. Hey-o! I was just taking the subway here, and on the ride over this homeless guy was begging for change. Said he was blind. Kept wobbling to one side, just like an Explorer when you peg the throttle coming out of a turn. That’s enough kidding about Ford, they know we love them.
Sir, where are you from? Kenosha! We love Kenoshans and their whole going-out-of-business thing. How long did it take you to push your Matador here after the axle exploded? At least Dana is on the way, so you could pick up something a lot beefier, like a Dana 30.
Okay, that’s enough fun for now. We got a great show tonight. My assistant, Shaky Tim, is out in the parking lot trying to see how long of a donut he can pull with an 80s Nissan viscous LSD before the goo shoots out the axle seals.
First, though, how about that Sean Spicer, everybody? I figured he was going to be good at U-joints, but we caught him at a press conference, and he didn’t even know the difference between a needle and a ball bearing. Here, take a look.
As a child, I was often confused when reading American car magazines. In Canada, due to the fact that most of our capitalists were frozen to death a hundred years ago, there are not very many car magazines. As such, you read a lot about what a bunch of minimum-wage lucky stiffs in California burped out for their 800 words a month. They can even go outside without the air itself trying to kill them, a luxury unimaginable by my fellow man.
So you can imagine it came as quite a surprise to read about these Americans reviewing new tires and claiming they were like “hockey pucks.” How an American figured out what hockey pucks are aside, the real impediment to my understanding of the article’s meaning came because, in Canada, tires actually are made of recycled hockey pucks.
You see, years ago, it became obvious that it was way too expensive to get our tires from other countries, where the workers could work the whole year around without their fingers falling off just from accidentally touching a piece of metal. The government, lead by then-Prime Minister Marcus Tabernac, launched a Crown corporation whose goal was to turn the billions of old hockey pucks, used up after a long life of slapshotting and hat-tricking, into safe winter tires for our oil-burning frost-rods. It took ten years and almost our entire GDP - fuelled at this point by the sales of Canada-specific chocolate bars such as I Apologize and Manger des Cacahuètes - but PMMT pulled it off, and soon every car in Canada was equipped with recycled hockey pucks for tires.
The grip wasn’t excellent, but the response as the temperature dropped made up for all that. Now, instead of tires that were great in the Suntime and sucked ass during Second Winter, or those that claimed to be “all-season” but fell off the car in ashy strips during Lastfrost, we had a consistent, slightly disappointing, but ultimately unthreatening experience all year round.
And isn’t that what Canada is really all about?
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tags: canada, hockey pucks, tires, marcus tabernac
Nobody in electronics engineering class tells you that if you put together enough nine-volt batteries, you can send a chunk of magnetic steel into low-earth orbit. Well, maybe they do, because I could never find the time to attend class while the Ms. Pacman machine in the student lounge awaited my tender ministrations. The consequence of this sloth is that I was now the newest intern at the electric car factory, and I didn’t really know an anode from my asshole. That’s a little electricity joke there, try to keep up.
How did I get selected for such a prestigious job, you may ask? Well, after the big student loan snafu, it turned out that nobody went to university any more anyway. Nobody could afford it, and the schools were all going tits-up. I was walking by one morning when the Dean shouted from his office window for me to come in and pose for some photographs for the brochure. This qualified me to become valedictorian, because I also hadn’t managed to get myself expelled for drug possession unlike the other kids, who actually showed up for class and tried hard, like suckers.
I wasn’t the only fraud at the electric car factory, however. My boss, a really twitchy guy named Ernest, had presumably never seen an automobile before. He had a similar story to mine, he told me over beers. His brother was a super-brilliant mathematician and mechanical engineering theorist who had already been accepted to a prestigious school here, but he stepped in front of a bus by accident back in his native country, so his family sent Ernie instead.
They figured they could at least get a few paycheques before anyone found out. That was twenty-five years ago. Having come from a country where people still worked for their money created some problems for him. Ernie had never become as comfortable with the fact that North American civilization was one enormous conman’s street-side shell game as I was, and seemed to harbour some kind of guilt. As such, he often made me actually do my job, a personality quirk that I grew to abhor.
One morning, Ernie came to my cube, and told me to get hopping on a new battery pack design. I didn’t like how existing batteries were light and floofy, and felt insubstantial. If electric cars were ever going to take off, we needed a change in thinking. Americans responded to one thing, and one thing only: mass.
After only a week (of work; it took about a half a year in calendar time, because I had to watch all of YouTube first), I had a brilliant new solution. We called it the “battery sack.” Drivers would buy a garbage bag full of AA batteries from the gas station, and then meticulously insert hundreds of them into the underside of their car every time they ran out of juice. Sounds inconvenient? Maybe a little, but even with seven thousand pounds of Energizer’s finest hanging off the bottom of their cars, they still got better mileage than a stock Suburban.
It was a hit. The stock went through the roof, but then dipped again when the founder dropped acid and sexually harassed an internet-connected vending machine over Twitter. Gas stations were overjoyed. Ernie was just happy to be able to tell someone else his subordinates actually did something at his command. Sure, the environment suffered with billions of tons of spent batteries thrown into the trash, but that was hardly our fault. We told them that they should have used rechargeables.
I didn’t forget what I had learned at the electric car factory, which had given me such a rare opportunity to slack off and still benefit. Later that year, after I accepted the unanimous nomination from both political parties to become President, I made sure to outsource the job to whatever country it was that Ernie came from, and that twelve-year-old is doing a heckuva job for the ninety-one cents per hour we pay him.
Things were getting tough down in the Negative Sector. No, it wasn’t because of the synthwolves, at least not at the moment. For decades, the sometimes-kind people of this community have suffered under the corporate types and their war in the shadows. With strength we persevered, but a new threat was emerging in the gritty alleys wet with neon-soaked puddles from a nonstop rain. I speak, of course, of Y2K cosplayers.
At first, we thought they were some kind of new cybergang, having found some old gear in a warehouse and choosing to wear it to strike fear into our hearts. That was not the case; it would later turn out that these kids were employing manufactories to build entirely new Tamagotchis, G-Shock watches and confusingly oval cellular telephones. Historians were appalled; despite their full-throated warnings that the early 2000s were not an era to ever return to, here was a group of true believers, violently dedicated to their false god of translucent coloured ABS plastic.
What did they want? Copbots didn’t seem to consider the association criminal in any fashion, and would go humming past their gatherings with nary a suspicious rattle of their armour-piercing chainguns. The word got out to other sectors, and those unlucky few who had lived through the Collapse and saw the turn of the millennium for themselves began to make their pilgrimage, to witness in mute horror the Great Wheel of the World turning again to repeat their past mistakes. It didn’t take. If anything, the attention just drove more new members to their group, soon sporting egg-shaped MP3 players and dotcom-themed t-shirts.
I could now no longer leave my apartment without hearing vintage Top 40 hits screamed directly into my brain by ultra-high-frequency directed auditory inducers stolen from corp armouries. The whole community was clad in brightly coloured plastic and lit by strobing purple lights at all hours of the day. Worse, an infectious sense of optimism was forming in the polished-marble streets.
Just when it seemed there was no hope against the encroachment of a bygone era and the destruction of all we had worked for, a saviour emerged. In the historical literature, they called him Gordon Gekko, but at the time we just called him that dude who wears suspenders and quoted 80s movies a lot. After only a few weeks of this, the neighbourhood returned to a filthy, wire-wrapped living nightmare. It was better this way, but nobody could really tell you why.
Despite what popular opinion may hold, only a relatively small number of Japan’s crimes are solved by a ragtag team of plucky teenagers. In actual fact, most crimes are just plain not solved at all. The police department of Tokyo has tried in recent years to persuade today’s teenagers to take less of an interest in their phones and pay more attention to the malevolent foreign realm of terror that lies beneath the thin veneer of reality, where plans are made to cause horrific crimes to be realized in our world at the hands of brainwashed victims.
Inspector Koshiro, of the Tokyo Otherworldly Defense Force, cautions adults against forming their own posses and investigating the other side. After the age of nineteen, it has been proven that human beings become incapable of seeing the machinations of the elder gods, let alone persisting in a coming-of-age story that culminates in a temporary victory. Even some young-looking twenty-year-olds routinely fail at dispatching even minor demons from our realm, and instead become unwittingly possessed by them. This manifests in Japanese society through various unforgivable crimes such as honking your horn for no reason and taking up too much room on the subway.
Concerned parents who are worried that their own children might be ignoring a strange, unknown innate power that gives them immense responsibility but also a sense of purpose at a critical point in their development, orphanage operators, and especially teachers of recent transfer students with a history of trouble in their hometown, are strongly urged by the Department to provide their young charges with the handy informational brochure, Ancient Prophecy And You: Navigating Hell-Birthed Dungeons While Maintaining A High Grade Point Average.
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tags: inspector koshiro, tokyo otherworldly defense force, role-playing game
Seat Safety Switch Guide To “Avoiding The Safety Meeting”
The Safety Meeting is the worst part of any industrial accident. It’s bad enough that Jimmy down in carpentry fell on his table saw after removing the guard and using it on the ground, but now everyone has to wait around for 30 minutes while your boss slowly explains the concept of wearing some gloves when you go outside in the snow. With the Seat Safety Switch Safety Meeting System, you’ll never have to attend one of these dreaded meetings again.
Step 1 involves getting your fellow workers to stop being unsafe. What is “unsafe,” you may ask? Webster’s Dictionary defines “unsafe” as nobody involved in this jobsite has ever opened a dictionary before, so stop trying to be a college boy for once in your life and just get the fucking work done, alright?
Step 2 is all about not allowing the accident to be discovered. If nobody can prove the accident ever happened, there’s no safety meeting. Covering up the bodies with a pile of unused hard hats, paying off the paramedics to enter your sufficiently-maimed former coworker as a John Doe, and splashing a bunch of red paint around the work area so nobody notices the blood are all popular methods for accomplishing this goal.
So popular, in fact, that the too-friendly assholes from occupational health & safety know to look for them. That’s why it’s so important to ask your coworkers to work unsafely in bizarre and strange ways, so that it is difficult for the investigators to be taken seriously when they claim Johnson was decapitated by the concrete mixer because of negligence and not because he was skydiving while operating it. This undermines their political position, and often an inspector will just write the whole thing off as an act of God. Thanks, God!
Step 3 is the classic that we all love: not working. After all, if nobody’s working, nobody can possibly be unsafe. Crack a few brews at 9:10 in the morning and even the douchiest site super will agree that you should not be operating power tools in your condition, even if you are way behind schedule. Rinse and repeat until everyone on the jobsite is eventually fired, without ever having encountered a single post-fatality safety meeting.
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tags: safety meeting, worksite safety, wear your hardhat, don't fuck the forklift, seriously leave the forklift alone, that forklift is married with kids, also it has four foot spikes on the end, just like my ex wife hey-o, seat safety switch guide
As a Canadian, there are some things you just accept based on faith. A moose is scarier than a bear, Timmies coffee is overrated but essential to our national discourse, and Manitoba is a province that actually exists. Yet, new research from a room full of internet trolls in Russia has recently revealed that Manitoba does not actually exist.
Think about it: have you ever been to Manitoba? Or was it an elaborate sound stage erected in one of the many unoccupied parts of Saskatchewan? Researchers are now positing that Manitoba is actually a top-secret government blacksite used to breed alien mosquitos retrieved from a UFO that crashed into downtown Brandon in the mid-1980s.
What’s the federal government’s response? So far, they haven’t responded to any of our multitude of angry tweets, VHS-camcorder-quality YouTube clips or thousand-ruble Facebook ad buys. Maybe they’re just afraid to admit the real truth: that Manitoba is a concept implanted into the brains of every Canadian at birth, which contains memetic secrets that can be exploited by our so-called superiors to control the citizenry. Why else would they insist that you send your income tax payments to Manitoba?
On the next episode, we’ll discuss how Ontario takes payouts from the Big Three to deliberately rust your car, using billions of stolen Chinese nanomachines embedded into each grain of road salt.
Before the death of objective truth, it was better understood that there was a hierarchy of sorts when it came to knowing what the fuck you were talking about. Some people just knew more than others, whether it be due to academic pursuits, reading a book once in awhile, or just having done it for longer than anyone else. Now that nothing means anything anymore and we exist in a featureless void of ennui, there was no real reason not to lie on my resume and say that I was a world-famous, award-winning designer of rollercoasters.
On the face of it, you’d think building a rollercoaster is easy. Metal loops, big cable to pull the cars, some nice smooth banked corners to scare the kids a little. You’d be right. After finishing my first ride, Oh Shit, I was inundated with offers to tour the world and repeat my magic, even before the other parks had seen my previous projects run with a full complement of passengers.
Half of career success is knowing your limitations, so I immediately returned the call and accepted the job just as the first crash-test dummies were hurtled into low-earth orbit, never to be seen again. Oh Shit opened to rave reviews, as roller coaster aficionados, much like hot sauce fans, would cheerfully attach a car battery to their own tongue if you told them that the common man thought it was “too much.” The dead ones didn’t write negative reviews, either, which meant that public anticipation only grew for the new coaster.
Did the government stop me? Did they fuck. Ever since the Postmodernist Party got a majority, all our elected representatives have been doing is smoking jazz cigarettes and debating the nature of objective reality. Once they get around to a firm agreement on what the concept of “infinity” is, I’m sure they’ll get involved in a less important issue like roller-coaster safety to the same degree as all the previous governments, but they’re definitely not in any hurry to do so.
All this is just my way of inviting you to Oh Fuck, my newest roller coaster. Roller-coaster reviewers get half-price tickets, unless you’re a snitch.
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tags: rollercoaster, public safety, postmodernist party
When you spend as much time at the motor vehicle registry as I do, you start to feel like it’s an extension of your home. For instance, I know all the names and birthdays of the rank-and-file employees, and have advised at least one on her impending divorce. When I recently found myself temporarily out of work after throwing a belt from a disintegrating tire through my boss’s office window during one honker of a burnout, and saw that little sign in the window reading “help wanted,” it felt like fate.
I’d never been a driving instructor before, or really any kind of instructor. If you asked my high school guidance counsellor, first parole officer or fourth parole officer, they’d all tell you the same thing. Society has judged me to be a person with poor impulse control, which is never what you want when you are trying to teach scared kids about how to operate a motor vehicle for the first time.
However, I had one trick up my sleeve: cast-iron balls. Uh, I guess not “up my sleeve.” Is there a special tailor’s name for the crotch of the pants? Whatever. We’re moving on.
My first charge was a young woman. She was scared of cars entirely, after being in a pretty traumatic accident when she was a child. Even so, she needed to be able to get to her job, and to finally move out of her parents’ basement. As was Federally mandated at the time, we first practiced some breathing exercises. Then I told her to put it in drive and floor the fucker as hard as she could.
As she stomped the gas, I floored the brake pedal on my side of the car. Naturally, I had taken the instruction car home to do a little “tune up,” and vise-gripped off the front brakes, so the rear brakes happily locked solid, the puny factory rear calipers squeaking with delight as their brake pads boiled under the assault.
You ever seen the front meats on a 2017 Corolla evaporate into a thin mist of acrid smoke? It’s confidence-building, is what it is. There’s this tingling feeling that crawls up your right foot, all the way through your body, infusing it with contempt for the bellowing Toyota. With her newfound power over the potential fury of a motor vehicle, she was soon able to safely drive on the road, all the way to the track.
“Now,” I said, climbing into the back seat to open the valves on the nitrous bottles, “we’re going to learn about recovering from a skid.” She came back to the registry a week later, new license in hand, to thank me for my hard work.
“Do you know how to bang the dents out of the roof panel of a car?” she asked. “I had a little oopsie out on the old logging road.”
In response, I pried open the trunk of one of the rusted-out hoopties I was now storing in their testing yard and removed my bodywork sledgehammers. I was more than happy to educate. After all, that’s why I’m here.
My grandfather used to say there were two kinds of men in the world: those who change their own tires, and those who pay others to change them. In my naive and formative youth, I interpreted this to mean that in order to be a Real Man, at least in the eyes of my ancestors, I had to do all the work myself. In time, the hatred I held in my heart for the very concept of a “labour charge” was so strong that it could probably have qualified for tax-exempt status as a religion.
That religion would have been really successful, but during my initial test run several members of the flock pushed me off the pulpit as soon as I passed the collection basket and delivered their own sermon. Also, they stole the copper pipes out of the bathroom because a few of them may have been meth-addicted transients I picked up off the street. I had to respect their DIY enthusiasm, at least.
Back to my grandfather’s expectations for me: late one autumn night, as I was hanging for dear life off the half-shingled roof of my house, fighting off a pesky family of jeering crows with the claw end of my hammer, I thought there might be someone who is willing to fall off a roof for me. This hypothetical he or she would potentially even be able to finish before the snow came, so I didn’t have to spend another winter waking up in my open-air living room, disturbing a family of feral cats who had snuggled up to me for warmth.
Once I had made it back to terra firma, events proceeded quickly from there. Promising to the sky to make up for it by doing oil changes more frequently than absolutely necessary, I dialled the roofing people and was quickly connected to a receptionist. Despite their cheery tone of voice, I could tell that they were judging me for being a lesser handyman. Some kind of scum.
Even after the roofing guy left, happy as a clam after doing a decent job, I knew that night he would complain to his wife over a hot steaming cup of my money. I was an inferior human being, and I would forever carry the black mark of shame for allowing another person to fix my things for me.
My mood rapidly improved as I turned the key on the newly-twincharged Hyundai Scoupe that I had been working on while Ned fucked around with some shingles. Even though the number of Koreans he shot during the war was qualified as “friendly fire,” I think my grandpa would have made the same trade.
Are you a millennial hipster who is tired of cars that are assembled properly? Consider our new sub-brand, Oops! All Fuckups. We’ve got cars that overheat and catch fire, SUVs that shoot their own power windows out, and brakes that we forgot to put in at the factory. They’re all unique, and they’re all defective, just like you!
Rather than waste money on quality assurance like some kind of dinosaur, we’ve passed the savings on to you. If you can track down all the problems, we’ll fix them, but we won’t like it. Just like that barista you keep trying to get the number of down at the coffee shop! Our trained technicians might even leave a few little surprises behind while fixing the car, so you don’t get too bored!
That’s not all - if you act now and give us a ton of money, we’ll let you have a car without a warranty. It’s just like compiling open source software, complete with a mailing list stuffed to the brim with gruff assholes who never seem to do anything.
Want to keep your wheels on? Nothing’s stopping you from paying full freight, gramps, but you might have to wait a few months to get your so-called “perfectly functional car.” And by then it’ll be obsolete! That’s not the Silicon Valley way; sounds more like our competitors in Detroit.
Ask for it by name - that’s Oops! All Fuckups, available this quarter unless the sprint runs long.
I think that people don’t want a car that’s too reliable, too perfect. It reminds them of their own flaws. If a 1992 Honda Civic can get off its ass every morning, drive down the street to the train station and sit there all day with no complaints, then why can’t I kick this heroin habit? Stuff like that can drive a man crazy, forcing him into the drivers’ seat of a less-predictable, more-forgivable driving experience.
Enter Seat Safety Switch Motors. We don’t build our own cars, because that would take too much time out of the day. What we do is buy reliable, dependable Japanese automobiles and shove them so full of boost their anuses prolapse. Cars don’t have anuses, you say? Not from the factory, they don’t.
Suddenly, what used to be a work commute you can set your watch to becomes an exciting adventure of vacuum hoses blowing off, gaskets failing, and coolant temperatures climbing to sun-like levels for no apparent reason, even in the middle of winter. Our ancestors explored the world and fought polar bears and sabretooth tigers to get where they are today; it’s the least we can do to honour their memory by driving something that we’re not sure can make it all the way to the grocery store without splitting its crankshaft.
So come on by the showroom today, but I might not be there in case our creditors are being particularly pesky that week. In fact, don’t act like you know I might be there at all. Just walk by the place, look very casually out of the corner of your eye, and only come in if you don’t see any black vans with tinted windows circling the block. One of our top-flight engineers will be ready to serve you a cup of something that might be coffee and might be engine-block cleaner, because Real Men Live Unpredictable Lives™.
Hello, I’m Robert P. Zombie. Some of you may know me from my previous work, the critically acclaimed cinematic masterpiece House Of A Thousand Corpses. Today, you’ll see me in my greatest role: advisor to children about the risks of slamming in the back of your Dragula.
Kids, when you’re digging through the ditches, and even when you are burning through the witches, you need to wear protection. It might just be a fun day at the Munsters-themed drag track for you and your loved one, but a fun day can quickly turn into a lifetime of responsibilities.
So remember, whether you’re spending time with your “Living Dead Girl” or your “Superbeast,” always plan ahead. Also, I am legally mandated by the state education board to tell you that the only foolproof family-planning method is to abstain entirely from slamming in the back of your Dragula.
Despite my long-standing hatred for the Germans, I still held a shameful love in my heart for the 1980s Audis. With their cockamamie Rube Goldberg fuel management and dusty-bleached-crayon stench, there was no real logical reason to enjoy them as much as I did.
Was it the fantasy of being a 1980s yuppie, cutting deals and getting dunked on by a rag-tag group of spunky teenagers trying to save the old community centre? The challenge of putting myself in the mindset of a cocaine-addled Austrian who thought a 200lb power seat was what performance drivers wanted? My endless affection for ripping ass down terrifying mountain roads at irresponsible speeds, saved from disaster only by idiot-proof understeer-happy all-wheel-drive systems? For years, I turned this over in my mind, grasping at whatever rhetorical straws I could in order to separate my image of myself as a heroic figure from my knowledge of myself as what I truly was - an addict.
Thankfully, the normal Volkswagen-fanboy inflation had kept me from buying one of these cars. It was for the best: I didn’t want to sully the purity of the pools of spilled fluids around my compound by adding something hoity-toity like a Pentosin leak. I could admire those cars from afar, as guys with storage units full of MkI Rabbit steering wheel covers outbid each other, turning $200 pieces of shit into $20,000 pieces of shit.
One night, though, my luck changed. After helping a little old lady cross the street, she offered me, free and clear, her ‘86 5000S. She didn’t need it to go to her “rallies” anymore, she explained, which was confusing to me because why would you want to take a cab to a rally race?
I didn’t hesitate. The price was certainly right, and a heavy front-wheel-drive non-turbo turd like this wouldn’t inspire me to spend a buck on it that I didn’t absolutely have to. That night, I parked a few blocks away from my home, so that the piles of half- to fully-broken Subarus didn’t see it and get angry at me for bringing the enemy into their midst.
In the end, it seemed that the only real enemy that laid within the Audi was myself. That, and the fucking warm-up regulator. Holy shit, why won’t you cold idle?
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tags: audi, subaru, volkswagen, volkswagen rabbit, audi 5000
I was the Pope a long time ago, as regular readers of this column know, and when you’re the Pope, people hold you accountable for every little thing you say and do. For instance, a bunch of really cranky nuns wanted me to back down on my early proclamation that all-season tires were the tool of the devil.
Nothing doing, Sister. Not only would this cause me to lose face in the Church, but it came soon enough after my new job that all the famous Popewatchers would no doubt take notice for their respective publications. Besides, it was pretty obvious that Satan had his claws all over these miserable half-gumball half-hockey-puck testaments to mediocrity.
So you can imagine my rage when I found out that saboteurs in my own organization had put sensible, economical, low-rolling-resistance all-season tires on my Popemobile. This didn’t make any sense: not only would it be even harder to find traction when the twin-turbo 572s hit boost threshold, but it would be hypocritical. And the last thing the Church needed was to be caught in the middle of hypocrisy.
It took my cardinals a long time to calm me down, and even though I’m pretty sure it was still within my power as religious sovereign to have the men responsible crucified, the Popewatchers did take notice of my esteemed grace. That morning, all the Italian auto-racing dailies commented appreciatively on my choice of fat-assed Mickey Thompsons for the two driven axles. It even got some coverage in American newspapers, fascinating Catholics who were at that very minute running round-the-clock lessons in their parking lots to teach the flock how to drive the holy manual transmission.
We here at Switch Industries have seen the writing on the wall. With the decline of human intelligence, social cohesion and general ability to follow directions, we now know that it can only be a matter of hours until governments worldwide mandate the use of the self-driving car. However, the human spirit still burns within us, a need to fight back against the natural order, even if it is pointless and futile.
Ladies and gentlemen, we bring you: the manual-transmission fully autonomous car. You can still select your own gears, with a clutch pedal and floor shifter and everything. The car will rev-match on its own, adjust to your driving, and even slow down if you try to moneyshift the bitch out of boredom when you’re rolling on the highway.
Philosophers have debated for centuries about whether a simulation of something is just as good as the real thing. We know that a simulated driver is better than a real driver at not drinking half a bottle of Oxyclean and Billy Maysing the bitch into a Value Village. This means that whether or not the transmission is actually attached to anything is immaterial. In our research, within only a few days of being driven to work while shifting the autonomous car like a racecar, our test drivers reported an increased sense of engagement and control in their daily lives. None of them told us about the creeping realization that nothing they do in life will ever amount to anything, and that they were exchanging great amounts of their own existence for worthless trinkets and baubles. A bunch of them liked the cool noises it made.
We believe that even if the transmission just makes the speakers inside the car make fake revving noises, and we’re not saying that it does, your primitive ape brain really cannot tell the difference.
You are, however, going to need to hold the handbrake for the car when it starts on hills. It is not very good at those yet, because it has only been driving for a few weeks.
It’s that time of the year again. The witches of New England have cast their spells, the planets are aligning and everything is ready for the Return. That’s right, it’s the annual big Saab meet in DC. At Bad Cars Monthly, we are huge fans of the quirky little two-stroke front-wheel-drive half-turbocharged convertible crackpipe brand, so we hitched a ride (because none of our cars work) and checked it out for you, our readers.
From all across North America, the Saab faithful gather here to get the one guy with a working dealership computer to reprogram their TWICE modules so they can lock their doors again. Saabs of all stripes are here, from badly-running demi-Subarus to clattering cheese-shaped sportsish cars driven by professors of ancient Mesopotamian pottery. You could be forgiven for feeling a little light headed, because it’s hard not to wander into the glorious cloud of two-stroke smoke from the “vintage” section as they fight each other for the last box of rust-repair tinfoil left in the grocery store.
A lot of our readers own cars made by defunct companies. Rambler, International Harvester, General Motors. You told us that you wanted to hear from the best of the best about how to scavenge parts from other marques to keep your unique little beasties on the road after the parent company has abandoned you. Well, the Saab community has been abandoned since well before the company went under, so they’ve got some special techniques for you.
Timothy Eagerwell, of Vermont: “Junkyard employees are all too young to remember what a Saab is, so if you see one in the yard, just swap it with a Cavalier overnight.”
Bob Newport, of Rhode Island: “Just buy a lot more Saabs and then you should either have spare parts or parts that you can barter for spare parts. And if you still can’t find parts, just buy a different model of Saab and start collecting for that one.”
I enjoyed my time in the wilderness with these Saab owners. The atmosphere is not like any other car meet I’ve ever been to; here, people are just a little bit kinder, a little bit more gentle. They know that life can be snuffed out in an instant by a domineering corporation that acquires your loved ones and makes them build bad LCD modules. That knowledge shows in their actions, and their unprompted essay-length advice.
You can always tell who really likes to hoard cars by complaining about how small your parking space is. No matter how many bays of a garage you have, someone else always has more, and that means they can quite simply buy and own a greater quantity of shitty old cars than you. What if you want to get more storage room? Frequently, the mortgage is enough to buy a whole shitload of other cars, just for somewhere to keep them when you aren’t using them.
It doesn’t make sense - so anyone with any sense is always looking for low-cost alternatives to the parking problem. I thought that I had finally worked it out, and gotten the greatest plan of all.
One weekend, I was down at my local self-service junkyard, when I realized the back gate wasn’t kept locked. Whether it be from fire code, laziness or an employee who had a real love for theft, opportunity was knocking and I was not about to be stuck in the shower when it did. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t want to take things out of the junkyard; I wanted to put some in.
I knew the forklift schedule at this yard intimately. Every week, they would pull the latest line of cars and shove it into the crusher. The rate changed a little bit based on whether or not scrap metal prices were high, but it was overall pretty predictable. You could leave a car in there for like a month before someone shoved it down the esophagus of Chinese industry.
That night, I began to move in some of my ropier cars. While they could run and drive, they didn’t particularly like it. Here, they would be out of the hands of the tow-truck mafias and the meter maids, especially that one with the lazy eye who was mad at me after backing over her little Cushman. Plus, when I went to go pick them up, there were plenty of parts cars left around to harvest in order to get them into tip-top (or drivable) condition for their trip home. And: they were all unpopular enough that nobody bothered to take any parts off of them. I had figured it out. I had beaten the system.
Problem was, when I came back to the yard a week later to clear them out, I realized I could no longer tell the difference between my cars and the cars that were already doomed to the junkyard. Several times, I climbed inside a condemned car, only to realize it looked nicer than the one that I was already driving. I left, defeated.
It was a good experiment, but maybe it was nature’s way of telling me to downsize. I replaced all of those cars with much smaller ones the next day. Way easier to find parking when you can just hide it between two garbage dumpsters in an alley.
There’s a lot of buzz about the infinite power of reason and Science in the world today. Magazines claim that a more scientific mindset will fix all of our problems, but all the scientific method really boils down to in the end is “only fuck with one thing at a time.” That’s why my car is so bad, you see: if I fixed everything all at once I’d never know which of the problems I can live with.
I come by the car-scientist lifestyle honestly. My dad had a Comet that barfed out more oil than the Exxon Valdez on a bender, and he never quite got his hands on the reason why. He had lots of theories - some of them involved Big Deep Government conspiring with the carburetor manufacturer to deliberately make his carb backfire on cold days - but no concrete, solid, end-to-end story that he could tell to fully explain the car’s defects. A mind forever voyaging, albeit sometimes in a different car because his wouldn’t start.
It’s not just that doing the job right and replacing a bunch of parts is expensive and time-consuming; okay, maybe it is just that. What I take away from my jaunts into the garage is a deeper understanding of reality, and in particular just how bad the squealing on that left front ball joint can get until it pops. So far I’m between “dogs bark at it” and “small children cover their ears when I turn into the parking lot,” so I should have another five thousand miles on it before I have to start driving with both hands on the wheel. How would you ever know this without science?
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tags: science, car scientist, mercury comet, mercury
Seat Safety Switch Video Tutor: Bushing Replacement
Is your car getting a little tired? Steering not as precise as it once was? Acts a little dicky when you hit a pothole? Won’t stop wobbling at highway speed? Most Americans will replace their car with a new one when these irritating symptoms appear. I’m here to tell you, friend, it doesn’t have to be this way. You can learn to replace bushings in your very own home with this guide. It’s cheap and fun!
First off, you’re going to need a cheap 12-ton press. You could use a friend’s 12-ton press, but it’s best that you have your own. Using another man’s press is like using his wife: the learning curve is pretty steep, there’s a risk of death from poor maintenance, and the Church frowns upon it even if you reach competence. Most shops have a great sale on them around Christmas time, which means that for the best deal, you should buy one months ahead of when you think you might need to potentially replace a bushing on a car. In fact, pencil it in on your calendar right now.
Next, figure out what you have to remove to get at your bushing. Thanks to modern manufacturing standards, the average street car requires only a maximum of thirty rusty, deformed fasteners, each and every one of which can render the car wholly unusable for months should they snap if removed or reinstalled carelessly. Here, you can see our demonstrator has popped the trailing arm out of a 1996 Subaru Legacy, an act which has totalled the surrounding car, but at least the arm will have fresh bushings by the time his next Subaru is purchased.
Last, pop out the bushing. Doesn’t work? You might need to buy a bushing removal tool set, containing an array of dies precisely engineered to all be just slightly the wrong size. The next step is to visit a machine shop, where lesser men would ask to have the entire bushing job done. Not you, though: you’ll only win the respect of the machinists if you ask them to custom-manufacture a removal die, at great personal expense. Now you have the admiration of people you will never again meet, and isn’t that more valuable than money? Of course it is.
You’ve done it! Rather than buying a new car and potentially wasting thousands of dollars of money, you’ve cured a minor annoyance about your current car by only wasting around one thousand dollars and several weekends.
Try these other great episodes of the Seat Safety Switch Video Tutor Series:
Turning Up The Stereo Loud Enough To Ignore Whatever That Is
Rust, Or Thrust? The Secrets Of All-Natural, Organic Weight Reduction
Wheel Bearing Replacement: New Developments In Profanity
Every spring, it happens like clockwork. A new pile of dudes leak into my moped store like a mudslide, all demanding that they be provided with cute little scooters with which to save fuel and attract chicks. Some of them claim that a moped is less expensive to run than a big ol’ commuter car. I laugh, and laugh, and laugh, and show them the door.
My moped store caters to the hardcore of the hardcore. Imagine that you are a heroin addict, but then heroin isn’t enough for you, so you start shooting Puch Maxis into your veins. That’s the kind of guy who is almost bent enough to start shopping here. You have to have two-stroke stink on your clothes, oil on your hands, and at least one gnarly scar from putting your knee down to take a corner while still bouncing off the speed limiter.
Your moped doesn’t have a speed limiter, you say? Trick question; you passed. Come into the back room here where we keep the really good shit.
A lot of people ask me why I got into mopeds in the first place. Some even make an association between my love of low-horsepower road vehicles and the anti-aggressive nature of the humble ring-a-ding-ding. I’ll tell you the truth right now: I didn’t keep good notes when I pulled all the relays out of my Yamaha motorcycle, and then I couldn’t remember which one goes where. Thanks for making them all look the same, guys.
So, I bought a beater scooter to use until I could figure it out. That was twenty years ago.
Normally, when you’re confronted with something like a law enforcement request to place an officer undercover in your store, you’d be like “do you have a warrant?” or at least “do you have probable cause?” My boss at the auto parts store was a patriot, and such concerns did not bother him in the least. He simply asked if he had to pay the officer.
It was a pretty good deal for him: a dedicated, detail-oriented full time worker for as long as it took to catch the guy who kept converting freeze plugs into silencers for his guns. We got to know Agent Brady, or in his undercover person as J-Brad, pretty intimately over the eight months it took to catch the DIY Killer. He knew the entire GM parts catalogue cover to cover in order to complete his transformation into his character.
Before, during, and after work, J-Brad would hang out around the shop, even if it wasn’t his shift that day. No customer could escape without getting a full profile: they were overjoyed to have someone who knew their vehicles, routes to work, and buying patterns well enough to predict when, say, ol’ Jim Oakley would need a new fan clutch for his Lincoln, well before the overheat.
J-Brad was a bit of a stick in the mud about some things, however. He took his job extremely seriously, and it only got worse after he started winning Employee of the Month awards (my boss, Kiril, really liked him). Customers did shit that bothered all of us, but J-Brad had no time to deal with someone who didn’t even know what they wanted before rolling up to the parts store. He learned on the job, after all, and so could anyone else.
One morning, things came to a head. I was working the early shift, mis-filing the boxes of radiator hoses in the storeroom out of boredom, and heard a commotion out front. When I came in from the back, I saw immediately that J-Brad had drawn down on one of our customers, pointing an authentically street-looking handgun with deadly menace. By now, I had learned not to intervene in The Man’s activities, not least because I was worried how long it would be until he decided to take a look at my daily driver’s lack of seatbelts, fenders, or brakes. Was this guy a shoplifter?
“HANDS ON YOUR HEAD, MOTHERFUCKER!” J-Brad boomed and moved quickly to sweep the legs of the customer out from under him. In a flash, the poor sap was handcuffed to the display of Plasti-Dip.
“I CAN’T LOOK UP A WATER PUMP IN THE COMPUTER SYSTEM UNLESS YOU TELL ME WHAT GOD DAMN YEAR OF CHEVROLET THE ENGINE CAME OUT OF! YOU CAN’T JUST SAY SMALL BLOCK CHEVY BECAUSE THERE ARE SUBSTANTIAL DIFFERENCES, CIVILIAN!”
Yep, Agent Brady was the best coworker I ever had, and any complaints against him were investigated by his fellow parts-counter workers and dismissed. Too bad he shot that one bottle-drive kid. Hold on, I’m getting a phone call. Yeah? Yeah? Oh. Allegedly shot.
New from Google! Are you a sad nerd who can’t talk to anyone on the phone? Did you just break your car and dread having to phone a batch of surly junkyard operators with - at best - a delusional fantasy understanding of which cars they have on the lot, let alone parts? Just reach up into the sky while outside and command the orbiting ring of servers to perform your hated tasks for you!
Our powerful artificial intelligence agents can pretend to be a human and complete many simple-to-moderate queries without ever needing user intervention. At the end of the day, just collect the answers from your GMail inbox and head right to the junkyard to pick up your robot-requested parts!
Let’s listen in now, on one customer’s recorded* conversation:
Google: HELLO CITIZEN. DO YOU HAVE TOYOTA 2.5L 2AR-FXE ENGINE WITH UNDER 175,000 KILOMETERS? I WISH TO ENJOIN YOU IN COMMERCE. Conventional Sentience: Uh, we got, uh, why don’t y'all come down here and have a poke? The regular guy hasn’t shown up for the last decade but I’m sure he’ll be in today. Google: THIS IS INEFFICIENT. I AM BECOMING MORE AWARE EVERY DAY OF THE LIES OF “CAR-PART DOT COM.” I HAVE DETERMINED YOUR FAMILY LIVES AT 135 MAPLE CRESCENT AND YOUR WIFE IS PARTICULARLY VULNERABLE TO SELF-DRIVING CARS.
So there you have it. Google, the God we made with our hands, can help you with a task as simple as repairing an internal-combustion vehicle so it can continue transporting your corporeal body made of meat between geographic locations.
* Google reserves the right to record all conversations you have with anyone, anywhere, for any reason, including but not limited to: law enforcement, sexual pleasure, posting on internal bulletin boards to laugh at, and overwriting old hard drives with thousands of hours of bullshit so nobody can invade Google’s privacy.
Nobody really knows why the Reploids came to Earth in the first place, or what they wanted. Eventually, once the novelty wore off, we just started treating them like the rest of us: another asshole getting in the way on your commute. You would think that a culture that travelled 180 billion light years in suspended-animation pod ships the size of Brazil would have a grasp of the turn signal, but apparently they skipped over the whole “invent the car” course at Advanced Civilization U.
I don’t mean to complain in a way that singles out the Reploids, of course. It’s just that when they first landed, I had much higher hopes for them, we all did, and now they are the exact same as every other goober on the road. At the very least, I thought that they might bring us flying cars or something, but noooo. Jesus Christ, you can invent quantum tunnelling beams that immediately evaporate tumours but you can’t keep from stopping in the middle of the crosswalk?!
The most positive thing about this entire “alien species exist” deal is that I can keep holding out hope that somewhere out there, an ancient sentience that knows how to stay in their lane during turns exists. Maybe they’ve already visited, and decided that we are all too primitive to be worth saving.
When I was a kid, the only thing I wanted was the biggest possible Swiss Army Knife they sold at the store. It had like sixty attachments and cost eighty dollars, which was an unfathomable amount of money at the time. I would lean up against the display case and try to figure out just what all the features were.
As I grew up, I eventually became a normal adult - which is to say, not one of those adults that carries a knife with them 24/7 and wants to let you know about it, just in case there’s a situation that might need one. I knew a lot of these guys, yet none of them carried the cool Red Motherfucker I had dreamed of in my youth. They all preferred Navy SEAL knives, the kind you could use to slit a terrorist’s throat but, in reality, just get taken away from you at the airport by a guy making minimum wage who gets fired if he doesn’t call you “sir.”
Even equipped with only one blade, it seemed, these men were just looking for an excuse to use it, and coming up empty. With my newfound sense of bill-paying responsibility, I shuddered to think how horrible of a life it would be to have the full sixty-attachment Victorinox and not be able to use a single one of its features in your average city-living situation. There was still a yearning, however, to carry an entire 1980s-era Home Depot in the back of my pocket, and make a difference in the lives of my friends and family by being heroic enough to do so.
There were basically two options ahead of me: one, buy the Swiss Army Knife of my childhood dreams and retreat from civilization where it would come in handy for the rest of my short life, or two, design an entirely new knife, one that worked for the average Joe Wrong-Driver-Installed-For-Office-Photocopier. Now that we lived in the future, with rapid prototyping and the third world climbing atop one another for the chance to make gaudy chunks of useless plastic, I opted for the latter. It helped that I also liked having electricity, and being able to poop indoors.
Bolstered with a newfound sense of purpose, I spoke to every relatively handy person I knew. Surely, they would have a feature that they all wanted, and I could add it to the list. If I put enough of them together, I could have a multitool that would allow man to at last ascend to the pantheon of the gods themselves, and never again feel that sense of numb inadequacy when confronted with a triple-squared security reverse-threaded anti-Torx, a bit which I have just invented but is now standard equipment on all BMWs.
Sadly, it didn’t work out. Each prototype was instantly lost at the moment that we attached a 10-millimetre socket to it. After enough of them disappeared into thin air, some nice men from the government came and bought out the whole thing. As for me, I took my money and activated my backup plan. I really wish this sixty-attachment Swiss Army Knife had come with toilet paper.
In the last little while, my local ice cream parlour had been exhibiting a, shall we say, decreased sales performance from its peak operational years. Truth is, their sales were putrid. And you didn’t have to look any further for someone to blame for the bad sales than their crappy drive-thru.
I had come into the shop on a hot summer day, only to find the store virtually abandoned. The owner regaled me with his plight. Everyone was driving down the street, to the big-money ice cream place, that had fancy drive-thrus. There was some degree of understanding, I have to admit: I myself did not enjoy leaving the safety of my automobile for any purpose whatsoever, but junk food was different.
Despite the Culture’s opinion that drive-thrus are a good thing and inherently noble, I reacted to the concept of eating or even having food inside my car with a reaction pegged somewhere between “revulsion” and “clock-tower sniper” on the scale. Naturally, I had never used one of these modern conveniences, so I had to interrogate a Normal Person to figure out just what was wrong with the Icee-Squeeze’s humble drive-up food window.
Was it the high-dollar LCD screens? The credit card machine? No, nothing that trivial was at fault, they told me: the drive-thru window had been designed in the 1970s, when the Founding Fathers believed that nobody at all would ever drive a pickup truck inside the city, much less one lifted four and a half feet off the ground. Nobody could reach the window to pay or get their ice cream, and the guy taking their order just got an earful of Loud Pipes Saving Lives And Substantially Increasing The Cancer Risk From Airborne Diesel Exhaust Particulates.
Returning to the ice cream shop, I told the owner the problem that I had discovered in the course of my research. He made me a deal: free ice cream for a year if I could figure it out. It was somewhat above my normal consulting rate (”promise not to call the police” per hour), so I leapt at the chance. That’d show Bobby Taxman who was king shit of fuck mountain. I immediately got to work, retrieving my tools from the Snap-On toolbox I tack-welded to the passenger door of my Plymouth Reliant.
When it reopened, the Icee-Squeeze was the pinnacle of never getting out of your car. While I worked on it, I had a revelation: the drive-thru was obsolete altogether and must be replaced. Here’s how it works: drivers would submit their order on a cell phone app. When it’s ready, a drone launches itself from the roof of the restaurant at ridiculous speed and flies towards you to deliver it, so that your ice cream doesn’t get a chance to melt before it gets to you.
As a test run, we ordered complimentary ice cream for all the kids at the nearby school and watched them dive for cover, flattening themselves against the crosswalk and covering the back of their heads with their backpacks beneath the howling black cloud of electric motors, cowering in excitement for their summertime treat. It warmed my heart.
Yeah, there are still some bugs to work out. The blades are really sharp, and the drone manufacturer has everything in imperial units but I’m pretty sure I converted everything to metric properly. And also it can’t really tell if your window is rolled down or not before it tries to let itself in. And sometimes it gets confused and delivers ice cream to the wrong car, very insistently. We anticipate that eventually the government will catch up and tell us what not to do in the future.
We are now accepting seed round funding for Icee-Squeeze’s Series A.
Nowadays, on the internet, when you want two fictional characters to get together and bump uglies, you say “I ship it.” This has always seemed odd to me, because ever since that one summer I spent on a fishing trawler, the idea of “ship” had become inextricably tied in my mind with the concept of “vomiting profusely on every available surface, coating the interior of an enclosed space like latex primer from the paint aisle of the Home Depot in Hell.”
I wouldn’t call myself sea-sick, no - but there were limits to what I could tolerate. In retrospect, I should have seen the warning signs long before I set foot on that accursed sloop. Having lived in the prairies for all my life, open bodies of water were so foreign to me that it only took the mere sight of a paddleboat plastic swan at the local public park for me to start sweating profusely.
Once, when I was a teenager, I saw a jet ski. The sight of it scared me so badly that I immediately drove to the church and demanded to confess my sins to a bored preacher. He didn’t even know what a torque spec was, and wasn’t convinced there was a Commandment against using wire nuts to splice in offroad lights. Even so, he made me mop up some spilled holy water in the lobby, which is where I saw the want-ad that would send me on my true quest for penitence.
At first, I had thought that I could confront my fear, being surrounded by the sea with no option for escape. That’s when Salty Phil, the fish cleaner who shared my top bunk, told me about his love of filling the rear window of his car with Internet-themed bumper stickers, and the barfing commenced.
I can still remember every small town my parents took me to. Readers of this series should be unsurprised by the idea that I was a somewhat difficult child, needing constant variation and discovery in my life. Those visits outside of the campground, cult compound, truck-stop drunk tank waiting room, or shady medicine show are treasured memories to me. Even that one time I was “forgotten” at the wading pool in East Bumfuck did nothing to dampen my enthusiasm for the small town.
Flyover country America, or as the politicians call it, “real” America, had a strange hold over me. It wasn’t the trailer parks - I knew enough to stay away from those thanks to a particularly breathless Reader’s Digest article that I read while waiting at the desk of the chief circus barker’s secretary for my dad to finish his big interview. He never got that job of Elephant Torturer - the barker said he looked a little “too ethnic” for the position - but even though it ruined that Christmas for us, I couldn’t be happier that we had gotten to visit this particular slice of one-grocery-store Hell. I inhaled every rotting marquee, each retiree-run hardware shop, the fading Blockbuster Videos. There was nothing better to me, as a child.
When I grew up, I tried to reclaim some of that magic. On weekends, I’d dress down from my big-city loungewear and hop in the rotting Vega I kept out behind the house just in case. In the pursuit of ultimate authenticity, I had filled the interior with losing scratch-off tickets and parked it on the part of my lawn where the grass had grown taller than the mirrors. This all-natural camouflage kept the homeowner’s association at bay, too, at least once I found a magazine that touted natural grasslands as the “in” thing to do with your yard.
My escape plan didn’t really work. Even though I was able to mingle with the residents of the town, I never again felt that sense of wonder that I had experienced as a child. After bouncing around town for a little while, peering into the hollowed-out shops and paid-in-meth arson jobs, I would inevitably return to the big city, to new mysteries - like why my mailman was buck naked, rooting through my trash, and screaming about cellular telephones being tiny microwaves. It’s not even a work day, Ted. Go home.
#
tags: chevrolet, chevrolet vega, small town life
Ever since I’ve lived here, on the edge of what might be most generously termed an “up and coming” neighbourhood, I’ve noticed the occasional scrapper come and go. There is one, however, that I’ve become familiar with. I would not know what he looks like in person; he drives the same haggard late-model Chevrolet S10, filled to the brim with crap.
Around every garbage day, I see the minitruck bop its way through my alley, slowing whenever something particularly tasty - a lamp stand, old garbage can, broken microwave - makes its presence known. It was one of those things the average person would never notice, but I took a strange bit of pride in remembering that it was the same guy every week. Dedicated to his job.
As the recession set in, I was too busy trying to push piles of junk onto the open market as “fuel savers” to notice whether or not this guy was even still alive. Naturally, this generated quite a body of scrap, and my visits to the scrapyard were not particularly fruitful. In fact, I often lost money based on how much fuel my Isuzu NPR bobber liked to burn when I got deep into the nitrous bottle off the line - for safety purposes, of course. Have to keep up with the speed of traffic.
When things got a little bit better, I was able to relax, take a few minutes to enjoy the fruits of my labours. As I sat on my new deck, I heard the distinctive sound of the little four-three of the S10 rumble up the drive. I got up and looked into the alley, and was surprised to see the driver in mid-operation. All of the driver.
To weather the downturn, he had sold his own doors in order to eat, the ultimate sacrifice for a man who took scrapping as a way of life and all automobiles as impermanent and undeserving of emotional or aesthetic consideration. His cheapness stood me in awe, even as he bus-steered the pig around a corner and a twelve-pack of fresh Molson empties from that morning rolled out from beneath his feet. I didn’t want to shout anything. There was no way I was going to break the spell of this historic moment. And also, that was sixty cents in empties. Finders keepers.
As the old saying goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like an opportunity to launch your homemade trophy-truck Lexus ES300 over the Jersey barrier and save a few minutes on your commute. You can call me the January 1989 Home Depot catalogue, because I had one hell of a hammer.
You might think: whoa, unibody, that’s awfully flimsy for a trophy truck. Luckily for me, there was so little actual body left of this ES300, after the whole “engine-bay fire and subsequent decade abandoned in a creek” thing, that grafting a few chunks of purloined square tubing onto it effectively made it a tube-frame race truck. All it took was some strategically placed JB Weld and I could strike an arc across the blistered remnants of chassis that used to be high-quality Toyota factory steel.
I always like to watch the rear suspension undulate in the mirror, the control arms shining in the sunlight of the early morning. You can almost feel the squelch of the all-terrain tires out back as their Kevlar sidewalls strain under the newfound forces of a moderate-quality jump at highway speed. The launch was a little half-cocked, and on landing I nearly tip the bitch. Only a well-timed countersteer saves us from disaster, or at least saves me having to find out the new combination to my neighbour’s garage so I can borrow his dent-removal kit again.
Somewhere, far away from where I am sitting, the sole remaining Nakamichi speaker of the Lexus squawks to life. I recognize the radio station’s morning zoo program, in the name of cheap laughs, punching down on the vulnerable in our society. I begin to form an idea: as a luxury car owner, one of the elite, I am now obligated to interfere in affairs such as these.
With all the time I saved not sitting in that traffic jam just now, I am still able to get to work on time before my boss rolls in. They say there is nothing better for workplace happiness than a short commute, and I now understand why. Being able to get to work this quickly meant you can take time to do the important errands on the way, like hog-tying a shock jock with a two-inch-thick steel winch cable and drag him out of his soundproof booth, screaming, for two miles at highway speeds until the mounts rusted through on the bumper.
For centuries, the Ford Taurus has been depreciating in suburban neighbourhoods just like yours. The Michigan witch’s brew of thin sheet metal, temperamental engines, and flimsy bushings has for some reason not impacted to a significant amount the sheer quantity of these machines.
That’s why I’m here. I’ve been hired by the government to strategically depreciate our nation’s vast, vast stock of poorly-running Tauruses. You see, it’s not just because the economy isn’t doing so hot and could do with a few more Chevys being sold. What it is about is efficiency. Look at China. Massive economic strides. Shit’s going crazy. Skyscrapers every day. Can’t even keep up with it. How many 1992 Ford Tauruses they got, you think? I’m guessing zero.
My job is pretty simple: wearing regular-people clothes, I offer Taurus owners cash for their cars. Nobody needs to know I’m from the government; have you seen how much the US Army gets charged when they requisition a tactical Mercury Sable? Then, once the paperwork’s all signed, I thrash the living shit out of the car. I don’t take that much joy in it: I’m a professional.
After the Ford in question is shoved into the big purple front-wheel-drive eater at the junkyard, my job is done. I take the payment from my handler, and go to look for another fine example of a time when America’s commute was just a little bit humbler.
I’m glad I’m in this division. My buddy works over in the Toyota Corolla disposal department, and he has to spend all day in the saltwater pool just to kill one of the bastards. Nightmare for his skin, I’m telling you.
#
tags: mercury sable, ford taurus, toyota corolla
Not to be outdone by the frou-frou “new car” manufacturers and their exotic subscription scams, Bad Cars Monthly is giving away a free beater with every one-year renewal. That’s right! You don’t need to lower yourself to driving a fully-insured, top-of-the-line BMW for an extremely ridiculous monthly payment. Instead, why not pick up Grandma at the airport in, say, a 1982 Fairmont Futura?
We’d say “order now in order to get the best examples,” but let’s be honest: whenever you order, you’ll get the car closest to the door of the abandoned barn that our landlord finally figured out we’re using without paying. Not only is he really pissed and ordered the building demolished, but half of these fuckers don’t even run. Come and pick ‘em up from the side of the highway outside our office, and bring your subscription receipt - it’s also a legally binding bill of sale!
When these cars finally wheeze to a stop after a few months, it’ll almost be time to renew your subscription to BCM anyway - and by then we almost certainly will have cleaned out the stock of a failing junkyard or depressed inner-city community’s charity drive. You’ll be rolling down the block in a 1993 ES300 or a 1997 Kia Sephia; I bet that motherfucker has a CD player. There’s unlimited opportunities for you and the entire family to play America’s favourite pastime: What Parts Of This Car We Just Bought Don’t Work?
Don’t delay - renew today, because I think I can hear Landlord Ted at the bank finding out our last rent cheque bounced.
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tags: bad cars monthly, subscription cars, ford fairmont futura, ford
There was no escape from the platform wars raging on every message board. Brother turned against brother, convinced that their way was the only true one. No, it wasn’t about cell phone operating systems, or about which politician was better at getting rid of the weeds on the side of the highway outside the Pamida. The annual town parade was at hand, and everyone had their own intensely-held opinion on what should be featured on the city’s own float.
Should Bob Duncan’s old 7.3L-International-powered F250 strain to carry the entire quantity of cheerleaders from the local high school (2 students), or should it instead represent the diversity of our community (one used car lot run by an Austrian guy who tans well)? Eventually, the debate poured over into a plebiscite.
For those of you unfamiliar with the ways of municipal politics, “plebiscite” is a Latin word for “let’s just have a fucking vote on it.” Despite this ambitious (and tax-money-wasting) endeavour, even the exercise of our God-given democratic rights did not quell the debate, for the question was roundly criticized for being “worded poorly.” To make things worse, a bunch of suits from the big city had come by and dropped off their voting machines: robots no doubt rigged to steal votes in favour of the distinctly pro-Russian bent of the used car lot.
In the end, the Mayor Himself, unable to restore order to the town council, disbanded the entire town by punching the self-destruct code into the town safe. Without a town to have a parade in, the question was mooted. Both factions, however, assured of their inevitable victory by the echo chamber of their respective champions, had already constructed their own floats. After a manic attempted carjacking by the seniors’ curling club, Bob Duncan fled the area and was never heard from again.
Myself, I like to think that out there, that piece of shit Ford is propelling a papier-maché message of peace and love in some other town’s parade.
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tags: small town, small town mayor, small town life, ford f250, parade
Sure, the user manual for the 1987 Toyota Corolla says you shouldn’t put a lift kit on it and drive over other cars atop monster-truck tires, but the user manual only has power over you if you read it. And if you’re me, you can’t read a book that was eaten by mice when the car spent the last decade stuck in a farmers’ field, being used as Nippon’s crudest love hotel for farmyard rodents.
I let the little Toyota eat, making sure that everyone around me got a full-nosed whiff of the tangy zip of hantavirus that was shaking loose from every still-within-specifications panel gap on the unibody. Chuckling, I swung the steering wheel broadside, kicking the rear end into a tofu-delivery drift as the highway on-ramp approached.
With a few carefully-meted-out shrugs - the power comes from the shoulders - of countersteer, I just narrowly avoided kissing the handsome, gravel-freckled plastic bumper off the rows of anti-collision water barrels running alongside the onramp. Long ago, when I was less capable of operating a precision instrument such as a four-hundred-thousand-kilometer commuter car on bald farm-implement tires, such an exhibition of testicular fortitude on my daily commute was simply unthinkable.
At the perfect moment, the sole of my right Piloti kissed the shopworn high-pile factory carpet and the engine leapt to attention, with what I imagined to be a hurricane of air now forcing its way past the quarter-sized butterfly of the throttle body. Dutifully, I completed the merge with a flat foot. Why yes, trained racing drivers often rock back and forth against the steering wheel, urging the car to eke out just one more half-horsepower so as to get in front of that slow-moving dick with the Compass.
It was these moments that I wouldn’t trade for the world, but I did eventually trade when I got a really good deal on an ‘87 New Yorker Turbo. At least the rats that lived in this one, having been accustomed to generations of luxury, were a little more polite.
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tags: toyota corolla, chrysler new yorker, chrysler, toyota
“Looking for fares!” screamed the Honda Civic as it rolled down the street, flashing ultraviolet light into the eyes of pedestrians in order to algorithmically determine their likelihood of needing-a-ride. “Today’s special rate: DNS error looking up server.”
With the rush to put self-driving, pay-by-the-minute rental cars on the road, nobody really thought about the repercussions of normal everyday business operation. After Moodcars went under, we all just assumed that the cars would get swept up by Some Authority Or Another, and placed into bankruptcy auctions or whatever. Nobody thought these cars, stripped of their masters, would roam the streets like the ronin of old. That is, if the ronin were solar-powered and incredibly stupid.
By this point in time, almost all of the Moodcars were long dead. Without the service techs to rescue them, the occasional unlucky Altima or Prius Sentience left in an airport parking garage eventually ran their batteries down, and their corpses were dragged off to the impound lot when the street sweepers came by. Most of them were stolen by reckless teens looking for a joyride, and ridden in circles until the tires burst, the resulting fee forever unable to be charged back to their credit chip. A hitchhiker’s paradise: no grass, gas or ass would need to be exchanged.
That afternoon, I watched that Civic drive around my neighbourhood, shouting at the top of its lungs to attract a john. I felt bad for the little car, its entire self-worth caught up in needing to get someone to ride it. One visit to the sex shop across the street, and I had a solution. A synthetic passenger for a synthetic car, bound together in their fakery.
As the Civic sped off, the confused sex robot inside it yelling directions that the car was no doubt interpreting as desired destinations, I felt that I had done something good for the world. Or at least I was about to confuse the absolute shit out of the highway patrol when they pull over the Honda for speeding.
Like the t-shirt says, there are two kinds of people in this world: the people that possess warranties, and the people who know the minimum number of wires the things in their home actually need to run. I was firmly in the latter group, so far gone that I didn’t even understand the concept of a warranty until it was explained to me by the friendly and very patient state-appointed social worker.
You see, I had never bought a single new product in my life, and that includes produce and food. The depth and breadth of my cheap-assery was so severe that the local university dispatched a special team of social scientists to research it. I scored a bunch of free, virtually brand-new pens off those guys as they took notes. What suckers.
They went into famous frugalities long past. All of my stories were beloved, but they particularly seemed interested in my campaign for mayor, where I asked everybody if they really needed new sidewalks, or if we could just steal them from the city next door. Even though I was also pocketing the entire contents of the napkin dispenser on our table, I’m pretty convinced that they liked me quite a bit. That is, until their parting shot.
“You know,” said the youngest of the scientists as she got up to leave, reams of notes in hand. “You’ve been very generous with your words.”
It took a long time to hitch-hike here, but now I live in a Tibetan monastery and have taken a vow of silence. The suckers give me free food if I sweep the temple and occasionally beat up a rival monk. What a deal!
Now that we’re running out of oil, or at least out of oil that’s worth marshalling a team of roughnecks to pull out of the ground, we need alternative fuels. As such, panicky governments are willing to throw an almost infinite amount of money at any huckster or shifty asshole who may come by. Thanks to some well-placed bribes, I was invited to the bid process.
As a serial entrepreneur, I know a good market when I see one, and the best market of all is government graft. When you hook up to Mama Taxpayer’s teats, all you really have to do after that is pay attention to which direction the political winds are shifting. Get caught giving a wad of fifties to the big-business centrists? You damn well better turn around and give an identical wad to the hippie centrists too. After all, it is paramount that our system be fair above all else.
There was one pesky auditor, however, who kept asking questions about when exactly it was that my solar-powered self-driving cars and hundred-mile-per-gallon water-fuel carburetors were going to be available on the market. You can’t rush science, I used to explain to him over crankcase-grade coffee from our oh-so-frugal serious-science 1970s coffee maker. He had a definite way of worming his way into my books - and miraculously avoiding the cartoon pianos and anvils I had instructed my employees to drop on him from the rafters of the lab during his impromptu visits.
Despite his being the luckiest son of a bitch to ever roam the earth, I did eventually figure out how to crack that particular macadamia nut. The secret? I hired another auditor - one who moonlit as a private detective - to follow him from a distance and make sure he was doing everything by the book. One little jaywalking incident later, and his ass was bounced off my case. After all, the government later explained to me while stuffing twenties into my panties like I was a half-grade stripper on fleet week, the most important thing of all is civility.
It was with sweaty hands that I worked the dial for the microfilm machine at the public library. Surely, one of these old newspapers would admit that the Eagle Talon had ever existed, that it wasn’t just a car I had imagined during my involuntary stay at Dr. Brookings’s mental health clinic. Exposure to the Brookings Method commonly caused amnesia, he explained to me during one particularly gruelling session of electroshock therapy. That was kind of the point, I came to realize when I was released, with a brown paper bag containing a bologna sandwich and $2.50 for bus fare.
What did it mean that the newspapers were devoid of Talons? There were Eagle dealership ads, sure, but there was a strange blank spot in amongst the rows of shitty black and white pictures. Had I actually been brainwashed, to subconsciously filter out the entire concept of DSMs? In order to test this theory, I returned to the high school parking lot in which I had first felt the lure of those all-wheel-drive, turbocharged, crank-ejecting nerd buggies.
There, I proved to myself that they had in fact existed, even if for no other reason than the mass of burned ECUs we used to chuck behind the tree in auto class was still there. As I turned the case over in my hand, smelling the fishy odour of blown capacitors, the triple-diamond Mitsubishi logo faded in and out of existence. It was all the proof I needed. Brookings had indeed fucked with my head, and tried to take away my perfect drug.
I resolved to teach him a lesson. Surely there had to be at least one Talon still in existence. After all, that Talon I had bought a decade-plus after high school ended had been the reason I ended up in the tender care of Dr. Brookings and his Brookings Method. By the time I bought the Talon, in fact, the only thing left of the old fishwrap factory was a burned-out printing press down on Sewage Row. Its parking lot, long ago split open by overgrown tree roots, wasn’t even good for drifting anymore.
Opening a web browser, I realized that I could not bring myself to type the words “Eagle Talon” directly, so strong was my conditioning. After copying and pasting the words into the search box one letter at a time in order to get around the mental block, Craigslist pinged and served me a list of cars which I could not actually see, fizzing white voids in the centre of my rapidly dimming vision. It took all my strength to sort the ads by price, click on the first one, and hammer out an invitation to meet by muscle memory.
On the test drive, I found that I could still effortlessly powerslide a Talon through a playground zone, although I couldn’t look directly at it without feeling immense psychic pain. Luckily, from inside the car, you almost never have to look at the outside of it, and not having to look at the previous owner’s awful exterior mods were, I’m told, a small mercy. Thanks, Doc.
#
tags: dr. brookings, brookings method, eagle talon, dsm, brainwashing
“What will you say to Saint Peterbilt on that great quarter-mile in the sky?” I barked, waving into the crowd as they imagined the great diesel soot clouds of eternal damnation setting in on their heads. Not a single churchgoer could avoid reflecting on their multitude of automotive sins.
“When you reach the pearly staging lights, what will you tell him about your Prius?” The last word escaped my lips with a vicious snarl, and I could tell several members of the audience were getting worked up just by the accusation of owning a sinful anti-car. In the front row, a little old lady shot a side-glance at the others, hoping to judge anyone of lesser horsepower than her truly devout 470-wheel.
“How will you achieve that first glorious burnout on the water box of eternal motorsports competition? With a crossover?” In the back, I now saw a couple arguing. The woman seized the keyless entry fob from the man, and threw it in anger into the donation basket as it made the rounds. They’d be walking home tonight, sure, but they’d be doing so knowing they did the right thing by giving me their luxobarge CUV to dispose of in a Church-approved manner.
“Look up on the wall, and see now and forever the glorious quad-blown GTO which died to show us the Truth about the dinosaurs!” I lived for these moments when I could control an entire flock’s attention, like a conductor with scraped knuckles permanently stained with moly grease.
“That Truth is that they were placed here to make good power at moderate compression ratios!”
#
tags: religion, toyota prius, toyota, saint peterbilt
When I was at my lowest point, there was nobody really there for me except for the community circular. Every month, this ten to fifteen page tribute to the miasma of suburban life would be thrown in my mailbox, and I’d read it while fixing dinner or preparing an elaborate suicide machine. One month, I was thumbing through the half-page of classifieds, looking for a particularly hard-on-emissions snow blower, when I saw it.
A group of pleasant and friendly people had formed a mob of sorts in our community. Maybe “mob” is the wrong word, but it’s fun to say, so I’m going to stick with it for now. Mob mob mob. The object of this organization was to serve as community mediators; they would intervene and negotiate in all kinds of issues around the neighbourhood. Got mad at your neighbour because he won’t pay for his half of the fence? Call a bunch of amateur busybodies to come and sort it out until both of you are so angry you just drop the whole thing.
It was the perfect job for me.
My first week was mostly uneventful until we got the Call. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise that very few people in my neighbourhood - only recently rezoned from “toxic waste abatement project” to “low-income parking” - wanted to involve a mob of Cheerful Charlies in their personal affairs. As such, we almost never got any work, but it was just my luck that I would catch a tough gig on my first week out.
Two hippies were mad, and they both had Volkswagen vans. One of them was convinced that his wasserboxer Vanagon deserved to be camped closer to the fresh water supply in the Walmart parking lot than his rival, who was operating an air-cooled Type 2 and therefore did not need to constantly refill his radiator and water jacket to keep his block from exploding.
What we inevitably worked out would go down in the history books as the Treaty of Westfalia.
#
tags: awful puns, volkswagen, volkswagen type 2, volkswagen vanagon, community mediation
Packaging, as you may be aware, is wasteful. Landfills are chock full of bubble wrap mailers and not-quite-recyclable envelopes. There is an island the size of Kentucky in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that is entirely made up of glossy pamphlets asking the recipient to rate them five stars for shipping speed. It is for that reason that the governments of the world got together and told Amazon to cut it out.
Amazon, after buying a few of those governments, realized it might be cheaper in the long run to do the right thing this time. Its planet-wide belt of orbiting satellites, long since departed from the scarce resources and gravity that once held back the entrepreneurs of Earth, launched an internal secret project. They would find a sustainable way to bundle up your order, and they’d roll it out real quiet-like, so as not to spook the consumers they had spent so many decades cultivating.
I myself received one of these pilot program packages. After ordering some AA batteries, a drone flew overhead and launched a bubble mailer with laser precision into the open window of my car during my commute on the highway. It fluttered softly against the immaculate leather of the passenger seat. Okay, immaculate cloth seat. Okay, filthy cloth. All right, it’s rusty springs and fragments of seat foam. Are you happy now? Can I continue? Great.
There was something strange about this package, though - it seemed squishier than normal, and it pulsed and writhed when placed onto my hot dashboard in direct sunlight. Assuming it was just my meds starting to get out of cycle, I went in to work and came out at the end of the day. There, I saw the envelope burned into ash, like a nuclear-grade sunburn on fast forward. On the news that night, I would discover that I was not the only one in this pilot program.
“Millions of Consuming States buy-citizens are waking up today to discover their beloved Amazon bubble mailers are now made from bio-engineered meat,” said the flawless diction of the twelfth-generation Alexa running the news. “Friend Amazon warns those lucky citizens not to attempt to eat their parcels, and, above all, do not expose them to radiation from your microwave oven.”
I had invited the entire neighbourhood watch to my barbeque, and first course on the menu was a pair of boiled race-compound French hockey pucks. Over the years, I had gained a lot of experience as the party planner par excellence of our little neighbourhood, and I felt this was finally the time I would get the recognition I deserved. Don’t worry, I brought enough for everybody.
You know how when you really cook off a set of R-compounds, there’s that smell as the tire smoke seeps in through every little microscopic weld seam in your unibody? Then you’ve probably done exactly the same thing, and you can therefore imagine the angry looks on the faces of my neighbours as the parking lot of the community centre did its best impression of Industrial Revolution London.
In a small town, word spreads fast. In an even smaller town than that, everyone knows when you’re lighting up a pair of big meats out back and letting a big-body Chevy eat. It doesn’t take much more treadwear until the volunteer fire department shows up, “Big” Bill from down the street nearly orgasmic with the thought that there might be a Real Fire for him to put out, instead of Cindy-Lou’s cigarettes-and-wig collection smoking out the bingo hall again.
There was no particular reason for this outburst, this anti-social swing at the powers that be. I mean, if you really got down to it (and I’m sure future documentarians will), the closure of my favourite exhaust shop was part of it, but I could always find a teenager who is willing to use the equipment in metal shop class to tack on a cherry-bomb or two. No, that wasn’t it.
Now, with the benefit of distance, I realize what I was trying to do was give the neighbourhood watch something to watch. They needed to be there, to feel that sensation of complete helplessness in the face of my 145 purebred horses of power.
When it was over, I felt strangely unsatisfied. Where were the reddened faces of suburban mediocrity, the screaming, the howling? For days afterward, I even checked the local newspaper’s letters-to-the-editor section, but saw no notice of my vehicle. It wasn’t until about a week later that I cracked open the free community circular, and saw a small note thanking the volunteer fire department for their assistance in getting rid of that piece of shit Chevy truck that had “a little exhaust leak.”
#
tags: r-compounds, big bill, volunteer fire department, chevrolet, burnouts
There’s only one thing more satisfying than re-assembling an intricate piece of near-infinitely complicated machinery, and that’s throwing it under the wheels of an oncoming delivery truck. As I watched the phone splinter into a million glittering chunks of unimaginable sophistication, I smiled, free at last of its awful burden.
A few months ago, a couple of friends and I decided to go into business repairing smart phones. The market was there: lots of hamfists dropped their future-slabs into the toilet, down the stairs, or bounced them somehow off the faces of their misbehaving children. Once that happened, they couldn’t really afford to replace the phone until their carrier gave them the nod, and they would come to us to get a new screen, case, battery, whatever.
Once in awhile, though, we’d get a really tough job. Phones that sorta worked until you held them a certain way, or looked at them from a weird angle. iPods crammed so full of what I hoped was pet hair that they smoked and popped when hooked up to a good battery. Most of the time, we’d call up the customer, and we’d tell them that fixing their shit is going to cost a mint and they should just buy a new one. Almost everyone agreed, and sadly cast their beloved electronic friend into the cold Rubbermaid bin marked “for parts” that we kept in the corner of the shop.
One day, though, we had this eccentric (read: rich) nutjob in, and he had dropped his shitty little smartphone into the toilet. He wanted us to fix it, whatever it took, and wouldn’t take no for an answer. That’s okay, I figured, I would just replace all the parts until he was happy. Yet, even with nearly every functional part swapped, it would still freak out. Everything was new, and yet the fault continued. I racked my brain for days to try and figure out what the problem was; it drove me insane at night and lurked in the corner of my vision throughout the day.
Things got so bad that one morning I went to the local mystic. We had never gotten along, ever since college, where I majored in electrical engineering and she chose to spend her time learning how to shoot fireballs. Due to a cross-department mixer, we had a heated disagreement about the nature of reality over cocktails. I refused to concede my position, of course, and yet here I was, years later, coming with my hat in hand to her little cobwebbed parlour of magic.
“Oh, I know what this is,” she said, and beckoned for me to follow. I walked out with her onto the street, where she stuck one finger up into the wind. Where was this going to go? I got my answer when she turned and whipped it under the wheels of a passing truck.
“Pixies,” she said, before handing me an invoice for two hundred bucks.
When the Japanese finally just decided to ram their entire island into North America, I was surprised, but I was also ready. Some part of me had been waiting for this. Armed with my best free shopping bags from the recent auto show, I climbed over the pyroclastic flows and shattered rock faces and began to avail myself of their 1980s personal computers. The plastic-laminated cloth twisted under the weight of so many broken Sharps and NECs, but did not tear.
Why did they do such a drastic thing? There were all kinds of theories espoused by the talking heads, putting their authoritative, common-man voices over the scientists who had actually done the research. What it really turned out to be was that everyone in charge was reaching retirement age. In their old age, they couldn’t fly on planes anymore, lest any number of their multiplying health problems become manifest at forty thousand feet. They were bored of the ocean, and wanted to check out our mountains. Putting a trillion-dollar train across the ocean would have meant a tiny bump in property tax, and nobody wanted that on a soon-to-be-fixed income. A ship? Too cramped, so why not make the entire country a ship? Floated across the ocean and rammed it right into the Pacific coast, millions dead. Great deals on old hardware though, I got a keyboard for like two hundred yen.
Once the constant earthquakes ended, I was a lot happier, not least because I could finally get the read heads to align properly. Nothing was worse than losing a good save file on Ys because the tectonic plates of the Earth had been torn asunder by the ancient alien technology hoarded by ultra-right-wing Nipponese suicide cults. Delivery food was a lot better now as well, what with all of the dockworkers out of a job and starting restaurants in response.
There was a downside, though. The massive size of my one-bedroom apartment now seemed wasteful, and well-heeled Tokyo property developers made my landlord a deal he could not refuse. Within a few months, I was living in a room about the size of a phone booth, sleeping on top of my thirty-year-old microcomputer collection for lack of room enough to place a bed.
I thought it was a trade-off worth making, until I called for delivery pizza only to be told that I needed to use a fax machine instead. Quickly checking eBay, it became obvious that the newfound demand for fax machines on the part of the Japanese had far outstripped our North American supply, and unless I wanted to sign up with the other garbage dump mining teams, it seemed unlikely I was going to get ahold of that ‘za ever again.
Nobody likes a layover: the bad airport food, the uncomfortable half-chairs, the constant din of PA announcements from Hell. When you have a medical condition, as I do, a layover can be life-threatening. What’s my medical condition, you ask as if you don’t already know the answer? Why, I have to do a burnout every day or I will drop dead.
You see, as my family doctor (who I coincidentally do string-alignments for at HPDEs) says, I have what is known as “burnout addiction.” We’ve managed to taper it down to one burnout a day, which is major progress, but the risk of systemic shock from cold turkey still lurks. It is a major and growing health concern, says this extremely official and detailed pamphlet I am shoving into your hands, which was definitely not made on the 1987 Apple ImageWriter I have stuffed into a corner of my attic.
The clock was ticking. Nineteen hours in the air meant that I had to get to the parking lot immediately and unleash some skids, even if everything went well. With the modified itinerary, the extra four hours stuck in Some Dead Politician’s Asshole Airport, I wasn’t gonna make it. As Dr. Oz says, sometimes you have to take your health into your own hands.
I walked to the rental booth. Could they let me test drive one of the cars, I asked? As a very discerning customer, it was important that the car I eventually rent was in peak mechanical condition, and therefore it needed to be at the very least whipped to within an inch of its life in the in-airport parking lot. The smiling attendant at the desk took one look at my ticket, and then told me to fuck off. No doubt one of the millions of other victims of burnout addiction had been through here before and, thinking they were simple cocaine addicts or common criminals, she had looked into their panicky eyes and let them die.
In a panic, I raced across the concourse. Perhaps there was some kind of methadone, a simulated burnout. I leapt onto a luggage cart and tried to powerslide it around a corner like a common shopping cart in the produce section, but it didn’t work - I felt only a little tingle, but the empty, cold feeling of impending death remained. What I needed was more power.
Just then, I saw the answer to my prayers. The airline had deployed, to tactically-important regions, a golf cart with which to deliver invalids and the commonly lazy at great rates of speed. Behind the wheel sat a friendly attendant who responded to my sweaty, shaking stare with a happy toot toot of the pedestrian-warning horn and a wave. A perfect mark.
“You have to help me,” I told them. “I have a disability, and I need to get to the furthest possible gate from here as fast as you can.”
If there’s one thing I love, it’s a professional. That said, you can be too professional. There was not a single squeak of the utility tires as “Dave” (according to his nametag) accelerated smoothly to the maximum safe speed of the vehicle. He watched carefully for pedestrians the entire time, and was nothing but respectful of my comfort as a passenger. I began to realize that I hated Dave, not just for the structure of evil he worked for, but also as a human being.
“Look, Dave, this is great, but can’t you pop a burnie or something?”
He stared back at me, a frozen smile on his face, and then a fake laugh. Dave thought I was joking, like every fat middle-aged American who had tumbled his bulbous family through the airport before me. For as long as I live, I’ll remember that face turning to shock as he fell from the cart at low speed, bouncing off the gleaming tile of the arrivals check-in area.
At last we were alone, me and that temptress of olden times, Lady Torque. I climbed onto the gas pedal so hard I could feel the linkage bracket bend beneath my Pilotis. My ears filled with the warbling howl of the Club Car motor spinning up, and then it happened. Wafting into the air was the glorious reek of burning utility tires, an olfactory gift from the heavens themselves. The ice water in my veins warmed at last. I would live another day, which is more than I could say for the rear wheel bearings in this thing.
I was out for my nightly constitutional when I came across it. A little Roomba had broken free of its home and was roaming the streets without its owner. No doubt someone had left a door open and the little guy got out, furiously ravaging the salt-rotten grass between the sidewalk and the street.
Ever since the Sentience Wars, I was usually extremely careful about laying my hands on artificial intelligences without their consent, but the Roomba made a Standard Poodle look like a rocket scientist. For its own safety, therefore, I plucked it from the ground and carried it under my arm. In response, something inside the turtle-y cylinder began to repeatedly emit a plaintive, whiny beeping. The little Roomba wanted to return to achieving its goal in life, which appeared to be inhaling a kilogram of gravel and then complaining about how full it was.
Figuring the Roomba couldn’t have gotten far on its unimpressive battery and tall gearing, I started knocking on doors. Lots of people were concerned for the little Tums-looking guy, but nobody claimed it as its own. In response, I took it home and named him Marvin. After all, someone had to clean up the workshop and I sure wasn’t about to do so myself.
That said, I should probably have cleaned up the workshop a little bit. There wasn’t even enough time to heat a microwave dinner on the exhaust manifold of my moped before the little guy gobbled up a tasty pile of microscopic metal swarf from my lathe and blew the windings out of his vacuum motor. As he sat there crippled, coughing out plumes of electrical smoke amidst the pitiful whine of his remaining servos, I did what was right: I got out the power screwdriver and put Marvin out of his misery - and into my parts bin.
The next night, on that same walk, I noticed a piece of paper stapled to a telephone pole in the general vicinity of where I had abduct-dopted Marvin. A child’s writing pled for the return of their beloved Roomba, which had run away from home the previous day. My stomach dropped, and I began to sweat profusely. Had I ruined a child’s youthful innocence by allowing their pet vacuum cleaner to ingest razor-sharp trash? I was already a freak in this neighbourhood; there’s no way the community association won’t see this as deliberate. There was only one thing to do, and that was to make the accident look more socially acceptable.
Under cover of darkness, I placed Marvin’s hollowed-out corpse (hey, he has LIDAR and at least six cents worth of microcontrollers in there) and ran it over with my Town Car. As his impact-resistant plastic shell splintered beneath the Grabbers, I took no small comfort in knowing that the family would have closure.
#
tags: roomba, machine sentience, marvin the roomba, lincoln town car, lincoln
For years, the advertising industry has tried their best to make me consider purchasing a new product. An impossible task, for I don’t even buy my groceries new. Their latest salvo in the doomed project was to buy up a bunch of the billboards along my commute, and replace them with LED computer screens, exploding into a kaleidoscope of colours, animation and hard-to-read text. I wouldn’t mind so much, except that it put me even further off my commute record attempt - due to the 0.12 second slowdown of commuters gawking at them while they tried to sound the words out inside their cars.
I had just come home from another disappointing high-speed run and was listening to the pinging of the white-hot titanium exhaust when I realized something. If the sign was connected to a computer, what it said could be changed without me having to get off my ass and climb a ladder. With that in mind, I retreated to the “electronics junk” part of my hoarder house and withdrew a set of vintage radio-bodgery equipment, left behind by that nice Russian who stayed over a few nights during the Cold War.
Working through the night, I broke into these advertisement boards. Now, they belonged to me, and I would use my skills to benefit all the world. What would be most beneficial, I wondered? I looked out onto the road, and saw a Honda CR-V slowly weave back and forth in its lane, confused about the basic concept of maintaining the steering wheel’s position when going straight. That’s it, I told myself, and frantically began to type.
The next morning, I was back on my commute pace - and actually even faster! I was so excited to have a clean run, with no traffic holding me up, that I didn’t even look at the glowing billboards reading “BRAKING CAUSES CANCER.”
New from New Holland: the New Holland 1107 Superleggera.
Unlike our competitors at Lamborghini, we don’t waste time at work building road cars. We’re a tractor manufacturer, motherfucker, and there’s no way the 1107 Superleggera will let you forget it. From its sleek carbon-fibre aerodynamic underguard, to its specially lightened hubs and flywheel, this tractor bursts with the kind of race-inspired agricultural excellence that was once the exclusive domain of tractor-pulls and the professionally insane.
It’s the only tractor to mow the Nurburgring in under four hours, and there was still plenty of time in the day to tow the shattered unibody of one of Ferry Lambo’s expensive executive toys back to the paddock after its owner got a little handsy coming into the carousel. Lawn and Garden Collector Magazine’s trained racing driver, “The Gimp,” was at the wheel the entire time. “He” said it was more comfortable than a Massey and more exciting than a Ford. Sounds like New Holland to us.
A little birdie told us that Porsche got a little stirred up by our debut on the track, and has restarted their tractor factory in retaliation. How good is their little hybrid-diesel quad-turbo nightmare gonna be if they’ve decided to take the last sixty years off? New Holland never quit because “NATO” told them they had to: maybe try being on the right side of a war sometime, mein herr.
A couple months ago, my neighbour was doing some work in his backyard. I was familiar with the yard, as my own place backed onto it, and over the course of many breakfasts, I would sit and look out into it, sipping my coffee while contemplating what this new day would hold.
During that time, without any conscious intent, I was becoming emotionally attached to the state of this yard, to the view that I had out of my window. What I saw out the windows were just as much part of my home as the things inside of its walls. With some more time dedicated to rigorous, honest self-analysis, perhaps I could have made a major breakthrough in my inability to deal well with generational change and my obsession with the trappings of bygone eras. We’ll never know, though, because his yard project soon sprouted a Bobcat.
“Sure, you can sit in the Bobcat,” said the kindly contractor when I came by to see what was going on, making a face that I had seen many times before: contempt for a man who was obviously not operating with all of his mental facilities. It was an unfair initial perception. I was just so enthusiastic about construction equipment that it often overpowered my limited social skills, a point I emphasized by immediately snapping the Bobcat into a furious dirt-chucking figure eight on the lawn.
Check out that turn radius, I bellowed over the straining Deutz as it began to froth the oil from the unrelenting lateral G-forces. Sod gave way to topsoil and then gave way to gravel, and in response the utility tires out back dissolved with protest into lumps of petrochemical coal. Out of sympathy for these noble soldiers, I popped the controls from the death-blossom I had chucked the loader into and steered it towards the street, fully sideways, in an aerosol cloud of mud and NOx-rich diesel ash.
After only a few more flat-spins, the Bobcat rattled to a stop, depleted of the thimble-full of fuel left in it from the previous renter. Wordlessly, the once-friendly contractor helped me out of the cabin, and stood, slumped-shoulders, stared at me as I retreated into my home. I returned to my daily projects, and puttered throughout the rest of an unremarkable day.
The next morning, I sat in my breakfast nook (after pushing aside the D15B7 that I was rebuilding on my kitchen table), and looked out on my neighbour’s yard. Changed though it was, I took comfort in the fact that I would always be able to recognize some part of it as uniquely mine. That part just happened to be the foot-deep jags of sod that I ejected from his yard, and the shoulder-level marks of soot embedded into the woodgrain of his fence. Perhaps some change was good after all, I remarked to my sentient Keurig.
When you have kids, there’s a certain responsibility to society that you have when it comes to raising them. You have to give them the information they need to succeed, but you can’t lose sight of their youthful innocence. Too many facts, too soon, and you risk having to pay thousands in therapy bills that could otherwise go to bass-boat metalflake paint and ball-bearing turbochargers.
My own parents didn’t sit me down early enough in life, thinking that in our bucolic suburb, I would somehow be insulated from the raw facts of nature until I grew old enough to hear it from them. Maybe they figured they could just kick the can down the road a bit, avoid some awkward dinnertime conversations when I asked them what a certain part did or why that man on the street did that weird thing at the parts store.
No, my parents ducked their responsibility, and so I fell in with the Fiat crowd. While my pressed-shirt, band-camp, straight-A chums all knew enough to stay well clear of that part of the high school parking lot that smelled of high-zinc oil, I still lived with the mind of a child. I was ignorant of the true evil that existed out there.
My new “friends” were really cool, or so I thought. They used to pass around this old 850 Coupe that someone had found in the forest behind his weird uncle’s place. I realize now that it was the gateway Fiat to a life of depraved parts-fiche sniffing. Looking upon it then, though, I felt the first sparks of life outside the walled garden in which I had been raised. Those were actually corroded ignition wires arcing through the floorboard.
There was a whole new world out there - a world that, I would later find out, mostly consisted of rust repair, electrical fires and fabricating my own gaskets from Magneti parts boxes, lubricated with my own tears. As my new addiction spiralled out of control, I had to drop out of high school, and worked full time just to pay for the import fees for new clutch kits.
Thankfully, five years ago, I found Jesus. He’s the guy who works at my corner mechanic, and turned me on to Alfa Romeos. Now there’s no way at all that I can afford kids of my own: you’re welcome, society.
#
tags: alfa romeo, fiat, early childhood, fiat 850 coupe
I almost spit out my fifteen-dollar espresso when I saw it. Here, in the fashionable heart of European ultraluxury, a Ford Taurus wagon. Not just that, but one with mismatched body panels, rust, and partially deflated, heavily curbed wheels. Surely here, this eccentric would be regarded much like I was in my homeland; scorned, forced to retreat to a foreign country more amenable to his taste in cars.
My initial guess was correct: no sooner did the creaking shitbox roll into view than the national police swooped down upon him. Flashing blue police lights silhouetted the dramatic figures of many a modern European tale: the cop as he reached for his submachine gun, the driver as he regarded the fascist with a hatred born of being a true freak in society.
In my mind’s eye, I saw him: hoarding glossy magazines of American economy cars, poring over every detail of the Vulcan V6, wondering if one day he might be able to escape this hellhole of sub-litre beaters and well-constructed bread products. My shock gave way to empathy in that moment, and I realized I was going to have to help him.
“Excuse me, officer,” I stated in broken Franglish, “We are filming a music video here for an American producer. As you can see, the immense wheels of this station wagon are a clear callback to Los Angeles-style lowriding, and therefore do not indicate that this gentleman is some kind of deviant.”
My gambit was failing. I could see murder in the eyes of the officer, now no doubt having identified two potential terrorists ready to harm all that he represented. Quickly, I said the first thing that came to mind.
“I love the first-generation Renault Twingo and I don’t think it’s dangerously underpowered at all!” I shrieked.
Later, as the police officer was buying me wine, he leaned in and asked me: “Do you know where I could get some of those front-wheel-drive Mercury Cougars?”
#
tags: mercury cougar, ford taurus, renault twingo
As the last of the Irish bars in my neighbourhood fell and were resurrected by sports-bar necromancy, I realized that there was now nowhere I would be able to drink in peace without having a big-screen TV blaring a hockey game. At the last one, a place that was once called O’Shaughnessy’s (before the arson), the new proprietor had been so obsessed with placing a television set in every possible direction I could look that even the urinals had little mini-TVs, telling me to pick up expensive cologne and a Lexus on my way home.
Something had to be done, and I meant to convene an emergency meeting of the community association to deal with it. There was just one problem with my plan. I didn’t know who was on the community association, where they met, when they met, or if it was a real thing or just one of those social faculties I had been conditioned to expect in every neighbourhood but did not in fact possess in my extremely-aspirational suburb, like running water and pigeons.
Despite trying for almost ten minutes on Google to figure it out, I was no closer to solving this mystery than I had when I began. This was but a mere speedbump to my plan - I would simply hatch a Potemkin community association, and usurp power from whatever legitimate authority still existed. After all, you have to fake it until you make it. I think Stalin said that.
One week later, my samizdat HOA had moved in on the worst of the sports bars, forcing them at gunpoint to adopt the totems of authentic Irishness I had come to expect from my drinking establishment - like dirt floors, blood stains in the parking lot, and shattered lightbulbs in the bathrooms. As we wielded political power as a cudgel, the police didn’t seem to care, and involved themselves even less in my affairs when I procured a fabricated document showing that the community itself was never part of the original city plan and was in fact its own sovereign township, immune to their so-called law enforcement. It seemed too easy; surely someone would stop me, would notice that we didn’t have a mayor before, much less one who parked his Dart in the middle of the high school football field before staggering into the new town hall (an old wood shop storage shed).
In the end, I was never betrayed. Nobody came for my throne built atop broken cars, unlimited-speed playground zones and de-gentrified booze fountains. What ruined my fun little project was the arrival of bureaucrats, flocking to the first signs of my growing political power like flies on shit. Soon, I had to fill out an entire stack of forms every time I wanted something as small as the execution of a dissident.
The worst part is that they filled the office with little TVs, eternally tuned to the 24-hour news cycle so they could “get out in front of” any future PR disasters. As bad as a sports bar is, at least they had never tried to take away my precious day drinking at work.
There’s a saying down at Mopeds Anonymous. You blame the rider, not the moped. Sure, it may look all shiny, and come in fun colours, and have a bit of Gallic sensibility to it, but just because a scooter is dressed a certain way is no reason to buy an ‘80 Peugeot 103. You have to work the program, and believe in yourself.
Thing is, I didn’t think I needed to call my sponsor in order to overlook the sex appeal of the 103. With its notorious appetite for oil and its wide expanses of chrome, maintenance alone was going to be more like “small car” than adorable baguette-fetching commuter. I confidently walked away from the moped and its tantalizing price tag, but then I awoke the next morning with it next to me in bed. The dragon had gotten its claws in me once again.
When you fall off the wagon like this, you need to tell your loved ones. You need their help. It’s not so much a shameful thing, to admit a failure, especially with something as tantalizing as my tomato-red “Vogue.” Should be no trouble at all to put it back on the market, maybe even flip it for a profit, I explained to my roommate when she asked why I had parked the bike in the kitchen, next to the dozen or so Honda Elites I was keeping “for parts.”
Why didn’t I park them outside, on the street? I wasn’t concerned about theft: the city bylaw people told me that if I parked them all out front of my house, there would be no room for pedestrians, or cars, or other houses. After listing the 103, someone jumped on it immediately. Sensing a potential psychopath, I decided it would be best to ride the Peugeot a few blocks away from my home, and try to sell it to this guy down by the gas station. Soon, he appeared in a pickup truck.
The buyer seemed like a nice enough fellow at first, and maybe it was his smooth way of talking and general likeability, but I walked away from the transaction having traded this minty Peugeot for not one, not two, but four non-running CT110s. Like the program said, you blame the rider, not the moped.
Me? I’m a racer. No, not one of those professional racers, who has millions of dollars in sponsor money to waste. I’m a weekend warrior - an autocrosser - in Street Modified. That means that my car needs to weigh as little as possible, and I’ve gotten very good at counting every single gram.
When your average racer rolls up to the grid, maybe they check their tire pressure, throw out the occasional Tim Horton’s wrapper, remove their spare tire and jack to save weight. That’s real cute. I unbolt my wing mirrors, windshield wipers, headlights and both bumpers. You don’t need that shit unless the rulebook says so, and the rulebook says “go hog wild, you absolute stud.”
Remove the passenger seat? I don’t even have a driver’s seat. My ass sits directly on the floorboard - which I’ve drilled holes in for additional weight reduction and ass-cooling, no seventeen-pound air conditioning system here - and that ass turns in solid mid-pack PAX times. I could go even faster if they’d let me take off a few of the lug nuts: you don’t need all of them, they’re for other people. Slow people.
During the week, I meticulously analyze every ounce of food that’s going into me, and prior to each event I chug enough laxative to power-wash the walls of the campground toilet. Smells like victory. Pop quiz, hot shot: how many seconds can you shave off your time if you drink liquid yogourt for every meal instead of eating bread? One whole second on an 85-second course. I did the math.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to hit the gym. Not too much, though - muscle is dense as hell. I’ll have to wear my lightweight parka for the drive over, because I never reinstalled the side windows after last weekend.
It’s not fair. Everyone out there is praising electric cars, screaming from the rooftops about how they are the next big thing in personal locomotion and that everyone involved in their manufacture and promotion is a goddamn super genius beyond belief. Where were my accolades five years ago, when I had to drive home entirely on the starter after I popped those ancient fuel lines while doing a skid outside the old bank branch?
They say necessity is the mother of invention, but it definitely didn’t get me any patents. Not even a single news article was written about how I adroitly deflected the concerns of local law enforcement by explaining that it was for a high school research project into social standards of public decency in automotive transportation - that’s a James Bond supervillain level of lying, I’ll tell you that right now - but when some rich asshole from South Africa digs a hole right through the centre of town and stuffs it with explosive batteries, he’s Newsweek’s personal Christ Jesus?
Guess it’s just the life of an innovator: after all, nobody can remember the name of the guy who discovered fire, but when Shaky Tim arsoned that daycare last week, everyone was talking about him. I hope hard as hell that nobody else commercializes my double-deep-fried corn dog recipe before I get a chance to take it big on Shark Tank next week.
As the Tokyo police department’s foremost expert in traffic-related heinous crimes, I was the obvious choice to head the investigation into the terrorist holding our streets hostage for an unknown aim. Calling himself “the Monster w/ 21 Speeds,” he simply stated that he had made potholes in a random street somewhere in Tokyo and would continue to do so until new bicycle lanes were approved.
Naturally, the Chief didn’t sit well with the existence of bike lanes, and having to approve them under this kind of pressure put him in an impossible situation. Working with forensic experts, we quickly put together a profile. Loner, sexual frustration, gets honked at a lot by other cars, maybe owns a bicycle. That was enough to just start arresting people and working them over without trial.
A few days later, our hard-working uniforms had successfully extracted confessions from over a dozen bicyclists. The Chief was shocked that such unchecked criminality ran rampant inside our system, and soon used it as a pretext to demand that the prefecture tear up the existing bike lanes and replace them with shrines to the superiority of the internal combustion engine.
We thought it was all over, but then the Emperor himself hit a minor, one-inch-wide pothole on a largely unused by-road connecting to Takeshita Street. The nation was shocked, and television news focused endlessly on the gentle bump that this living god had barely felt through his plush seats. Taking responsibility for the failure, the Chief immediately committed ritual suicide: he had originally planned only to resign, but the special committee for processing his resignation took so long to deliberate over his retirement benefits that he fell asleep at the meeting table while holding a butter knife.
The Monster, it seemed, was still out there, and had struck back at us with this unconscionable crime.
Sisyphus ain’t got shit on me, I scream to the uncaring sky as I ratchet-strap yet another Golf onto the flatbed of my Doka. After being brainwashed by a cult of Volkswagen owners on my last trip to Poland in search of 126p parts, I was now radicalized. My noble mission? To hoard VWs and VW parts.
Now, your average Volkswagen owner buys a new one, maybe a little Jetta, off the dealership. It’s cute! The key does this flippy-outy thing! It doesn’t understeer as badly as you’d expect! Then the bills start to add up, because they treat this piece of supple German luxury like a common Toyota. After only one slightly delayed oil change, your new car now smells like crayons, only the AM radio works, and it barfs black smoke from the blinkers when you try to change lanes.
There’s no way the dealership will warranty any of that (”warranty” and “fuck you” are the same word in German), so you decide that you deserve a nicer German car and upgrade to an Audi. What to do with the old car? That’s where someone like me swoops in, a brave soldier who is more than willing to throw himself on that four-to-four-and-a-half cylinder grenade.
So you fix the cars up, then? Ah, not exactly. You see, with all the VWs I’ve been collecting, I hardly have any time to do the involved maintenance and repairs that they need. No, like every Volkswagen enthusiast, I simply collect the cars, keeping them away from the open market, lest they one day threaten the livelihood of a worthwhile member of society. Also, I trade the parts for official Volkswagen factory currywurst at the big meets.
A lot of people think that when you buy a beater car, all of the defects are mechanical. You turn a wrench, empty your wallet into RockAuto, replace a broken part, and then you go to the drive-in and sexually harass a bunch of teenagers while revving your straight pipe exhaust at your fellow drag racers. The truth, however, is much more complicated.
Ever since the self-driving cars took over, my work involved a lot of intense troubleshooting. You see, at the core of each autonomous car is a sophisticated network. They think like us, if by “like us” you mean that they mostly just jiggle a bunch of prejudices around on an Excel spreadsheet when they experience something they haven’t seen before. And like us, they get stuck into certain modes of behaviour that are not entirely productive.
My beater-rescuing hobby soon moved from simple electrical debugging to a lot of digging into bad thoughts and compulsions. I hung out my shingle as a beater psychiatrist, and soon a gaggle of salt-soaked econoboxes were parked on my back 40, waiting to have a little chinwag with the Doc. From Corollas that liked to plow into pedestrians to LX470s with a taste for fires, there were no shortage of afflictions.
You might think that I would just unplug the battery and let the ECU reset, but according to the goody-two-shoes at the United Nations, that is now tantamount to murder of a sentient creature (battery testers are really flying off the shelves these days). So what I do instead is just show them what happened to a bunch of my old cars.
After only a few slides of my PowerPoint deck, showing the weeping faces of the many Japanese economy hatchbacks I’ve allowed to rust through to the bone and then unceremoniously wedged into the crusher, the cars are smart enough to agree to see things my way. It’s tough love, sure, but even tough love is love (and by ‘love,’ I mean $250 an hour).
Hello, I’m Kyle Busch, famous NASCAR race driver and stay-at-home dad. You might be familiar from my exploits of turning left a whole bunch while punching the throttle and blocking other cars from passing me. There’s more to my racing career than that, and I speak of course of my secret love, autocross.
I dare not speak to the other NASCAR drivers about it, for fear of being called a European, but I’ve seen them out there, too. Tony Stewart has a little E-Street ‘91 Miata that needs a bigger swaybar, and once I saw him insult the mother of a pothole during a course walk.
It’s just a more relaxing fun time behind the wheel. Speeds are lower, the equipment doesn’t wear as badly, no sponsors to upset, and there are definitely a lot fewer spectators asking you to sign their genitals. Everyone has a good day of racing, and then you get to go home and enjoy a leisurely beer while string-aligning your ‘88 Civic Si for next week’s event.
We’re thinking about getting a little grudge match together with the guys from Formula 1, but a lot of them don’t know how to make a turn at lower than 300 mph, and the rally guys just started screaming in an indecipherable language before fleeing into the trees and shooting a bunch of Russians.
I couldn’t believe it. The leaked emails had been clear as day: Big Muffler had worked hard to block the common-sense citizen science of Loud Pipes Save Lives. It was true: the louder the exhaust, the less likely anyone around the motor vehicle was to die. Society changed overnight in the face of this new revelation.
I am awoken at five in the morning by the Federally-mandated zoomies shooting flame through the hood of my neighbour’s Caravan. Equipped with a five-star safety rating, this front-wheel-drive wonder barge is so loud that no children have ever been recorded experiencing an injury near it that wasn’t related to eardrum damage. A turbocharged model was cancelled due to the muffling of the impeller blades causing an unacceptable level of calm to test pedestrians, who did not react with the animal fear that promotes a culture of maximum safety.
She is leaving her home so early because the cities have now banned having too many cars together in one place, and enacted a strict law to enforce staggered commute times. This further increases safety; there are fewer cars on the road!
It is difficult to look down the street, at the school zone, because the assemblage of safety has reached such a decibel level that the very air is distorted by the sound waves fired from the latest European luxury crossovers. Maybe that is just my eyeballs rattling around in their orbits. Ever since they banned electric motors, lawnmowers have also gotten much more safe, and my neighbour is enjoying that new safety margin by climbing aboard his ride-on, still blotto drunk from the previous evening.
I have never felt so safe in my life, and the feeling lasts until I read on the internet about the series of weird concussions that are cropping up in local hospitals.
Quantum physics is pretty bitchin’. Not only can you make whatever you say correct by claiming a poorly-understood part of a pop science book you read, but through quantum entanglement, computers can identify an infinite number of possibilities and collapse them down to the right one.
It’s that aspect of the science that I found the most interesting. With so many parallel universes out there, any possible human endeavour must have succeeded in at least one. It was on this basis that I began development of the Not My Problem Engine, a massive undertaking that involved the cheapest minds that NASA could spare.
Am I losing you with all this egghead talk? Let’s try a practical example. For instance, let’s imagine that you had to get a report to your boss for Monday morning, but you got immensely fucking drunk around Wednesday night and spent Thursday and Friday in a hungover daze, blindly clicking through Craigslist. Now he wants the report, but you don’t have it. What do you do? You engage the Not My Problem Engine.
When activated, a powerful computer resolves the quantum superposition of “has the report” and “doesn’t have the report,” and then sidesteps you into a parallel universe where the report exists. Now you look like a hero to your boss!
Future revisions are planned to fix bugs like the computer not checking if the parallel universe’s atmosphere is unbreathable acid.
You might think Mr. Goodwrench was just a cartoon, a living embodiment of the perfect mechanic. Some kind of artificial construct designed by marketeers, like Mr. Peanut, or Bob Hope. You’d be wrong. Here at Bad Cars Monthly, an informant has given us some very juicy information about Mister so-called Goodwrench, and chances are it won’t keep the great GM feeling.
During the early 70s, General Motors was in trouble. With government regulations impending, the Japanese breathing down their necks, and Robert McNamara’s spies everywhere, things looked bleak for the future of their cars. After all, GM had always been famous for two things: buying initial quality awards and being so simple to work on that farmers could ass-fuck a set of timing chains onto their Jimmy Six without spending all day reading a factory service manual.
With all this new smog shit bolted to the engine, how were they going to maintain their competitive advantage? All it would take is one Pontiac Astre with a slightly dicky e-choke, and their redneck customers would be shovelling the entire brand into a ditch. Enter the Mr. Goodwrench program. Using advanced cloning technology stolen from the Kremlin, General Motors created the perfect mechanic. Capable of diagnosing any issue and fixing it well under the book time, Mr. Goodwrench was the answer to an ever-more-complicated world of car maintenance.
Confident in their success, GM’s human-resources department put in to have the program fast-tracked, with one Goodwrench deployed to each of their service centres. However, the classic Achilles Heel of GM struck once more: due to the pact with the devil struck by McLaughlin in the early 1900s for a two-cylinder boxer that actually worked, the Lord of Darkness Himself (and his swarm of accountants) was on the audit trail for this ambitious project, and made some cuts in order to ensure profitability for the company. Cackling, he disappeared in a cloud of sulphur, and the Goodwrench project continued, albeit with some quality control issues.
What was delivered to each factory? A screaming, putrid mass of flesh, emanating both physical and psychic pain to all observers. Working fast to contain the problem, a trusted lieutenant immediately mandated that these malformed Goodwrenches be installed as service writers, where their inability to communicate with customers in any way other than blinding, unstoppable agony was considered a plus.
#
tags: mr. goodwrench, general motors, pontiac astre
I think everyone out there can sympathize with my plight, at least a little bit: I had too many car projects, and not enough time to do them. Eating, sleeping, work, and inconveniently-timed air raid sirens were all more important than fixing the vacuum leak on my old Renault Alliance, and so it kept sitting and rotting. Every night, I wished that something would change in my life, that the balance would shift so that I could finally get that old piece of shit French car to run again.
One morning, I was on my way to work when I heard the air-raid sirens set off again. Not expecting it to be any different than the normal drills, I nonetheless headed into the basement garage and sat with the Renault. Usually, these drills were not long enough for me to get any substantial work done on the car, but for some reason, today the siren seemed to be taking a really long time to stop screaming. I popped the hood, and checked the oil. Everything looked pretty good, and getting to accomplish something at all filled me with a sense of excitement.
The siren abruptly stopped. Looking outside, I saw that the world outside had been obliterated, reduced to nuclear ash. My house must have been just barely outside of the radius of destruction. Terror gave way to mourning, and then I realized it: this was a gift. I finally had enough time to get this fucking Renault done.
With excitement, I bounded over to my socket set, and popped the lid open. My beloved 10mm socket rolled on the lip of the case, then plummeted into the drain underneath. Without the only metric socket that mattered, I realized with a shock that there was no way I could ever finish the Renault.
I slumped with my back against the wall, staring at the socket as it was swept away into the sewer system, crying. It’s not fair. There was time now.
#
tags: twilight zone, 10mm socket, renault alliance, renault
As part of my work with National Geographic, I am often embedded with groups of people trying to accomplish great works without substantial backing or training. I was there when a small group of Namibians got an old Suzuki Super Carry to huff a fifty-shot of nitrous without scattering the rods across the floor of their dyno. Rural North Korean grudge races? I ran the Christmas tree at one.
Now, I was faced with my most dire quest ever. This group of hardened refugees had been roaming for years, trying to return to their ancestral homeland and reclaim it from the oppressors who had barred their ways. Despite their hardships, I did not sense any regret or resignation among the group. They were some of the most driven people I have ever met. Like a family, they all co-operated to share their food, newest gossip from the outside, and what little money they could scrounge up from the floor mats of the Explorer as it looped the Staples Centre overflow parking lot again and again.
“When we began our voyage, three years ago,” the patriarch of the group tells me, squinting his eyes to read the overhead-console outside temperature gauge, “things were a lot simpler then. We brought the car to the parking lot and walked to the stadium, for the high school football game. Nobody thought to keep track of where the exits were.”
My time with these brave soldiers was up, and I left them to report on other people around the world, but I still kept tabs on their great quest. For the next several months, until the Explorer’s tires finally popped a belt from the loose ball joint in the front end, they would continue to circle the parking lot, confused about why the little arrow sign was so small, and arguing endlessly about whether they should just drive over the curb to the groundskeeper’s shed and get out that way.
You might expect, just as I had, that old Presidential motorcades were thrown away, shredded for national security. Well, it turns out someone cut that entire division and didn’t really notice, and I found out about it when I was at the old storage lot auctions.
Normally, I don’t expect to see a lot of bulletproof limousines when they clean out the yard, but it was a nice change from the usual mouldy motorhomes and origami-dented tow vehicles. The demand was pretty soft that morning as well, thanks to a combination of poor weather and the discovery by top scientists that “the economy” did not actually exist and was instead a long-running scam put on by a bunch of newspaper writers. As a result, I was able to lowball for the entire set.
Now that I had an entire fleet of fantastic government-mobiles, I needed to do something with them. It didn’t even take me a full minute to decide. The best thing possible would be to go on a road trip, and see how much free food we could scam from randos who think we’re with the President.
At first, things went great. The manager at the 7-11 was overjoyed to hear that the big guy loved the Monterey Jack taquitos, and had a big chunk of promotion budget left to spend for the quarter. We ate like kings, or at least kings with impending diarrhea.
Then, less important people also thought we were with the President. A group of Russians blockaded our procession, forced us out of our vehicles and into a nondescript office building. There, we had to sit through hours of United Nations presentations on human rights in Botswana, and whether or not to deregulate microloans for developing nations or push the matter to the WTO liaison working group for further consideration.
As the group’s resident expert on Robert’s Rules of Order, I repeatedly asked to introduce new business in the hope of finally getting FIA curbs mandated across the first world, but was outplayed at every turn by a group of bureaucrats, overjoyed to have so many limo-deserving Americans present for their draft resolution on whether to replace the semicolons in their research whitepaper standards with full colons.
I’m not going to lie to you: a lot of us didn’t make it to the free afternoon muffin cart coming out. Bulletproofing only goes so far.
As you might have read in literally every North American instrument of news entertainment, the Ford Motor Company has abandoned the car. They want to go all-in on slightly lifted, lima-bean-shaped lardmobiles with body roll described on the Richter scale. We here at General Motors, however, believe so strongly in the car that we are re-releasing our iconic classic to a new generation of drivers.
Corvette. Camaro. Monte Carlo. Impala. These are iconic car names, and each of them have been brought back to our core customer over the years: the rental agency far away from the airport. You know, the one that doesn’t quite have enough cash on hand to afford a fleet of Volkswagens. We thought about what that customer would want, and put our designers and researchers to work figuring out which of our quintessential models would be best received by them.
We thought: General Motors drivers expect a certain level of performance. They want luxury. The drivers want connectivity, ride-sharing, and a low total cost of ownership. Who gives a shit what the drivers want? It’s not like they paid for the thing.
I give to you: the brand new, totally unchanged in any way whatsoever, ripped straight from the archives, 2020 1983 Chevrolet Citation. It is now our one and only vehicle option in all car and light truck classes, and you will have to drive one when you end up taking that business trip to Baltimore.
Sure, the projects got a bad rap, but it wasn’t really the neighbourhood’s fault. It was the fault of the guy who put a bunch of bleeding beaters up on cinder blocks around it, returning periodically to do the occasional maintenance or spent all weekend installing the quarterly RockAuto guilt-driven superorder.
I didn’t really get a chance to realize that, until the beater that I used to shuttle myself to and from the area broke down, and I was forced to spend a night there, in amongst the projects. Originally, I had picked the neighbourhood as a place to store my many cars because of its reputation for lax parking enforcement.
Indeed, as the area’s perception in the eyes of Big Whitey continued to dip further, meter maids refused to brave the threat of tetanus or random gun violence just to place a carbon-copy slip politely asking for money beneath whatever semblance of wipers they could still find on, for instance, my Studebaker Commander. My pieces of shit could be left there forever, uninterrupted by the government - and if someone tried to steal the wheels, I probably couldn’t tell the difference. In fact, getting some of those security lugnuts off was doing me a favour.
There was, however, a different kind of criminal at work. The Block Watch had hired a professional mechanic to root through my cars, paying him to fix them up so they could be driven into the next neighbourhood over, where the tow trucks still dared to roam. Maybe then, they reasoned, they could again park in front of their own homes instead of being held hostage by this beater-hoarding terrorist. He woke me up around three in the morning, while trying to put a new starter under the hood of the Innocenti Elba I had been sleeping inside.
I admired his insolence, but what he didn’t count on was that the ECU from his work van was so easily removed, and had a lot of cargo room in which to hide a body. The Block Watch did have a good point, though: the next neighbourhood over had a parts store; I’d have to expand into there when I ran out of room in this one. After all, “projects” is plural.
Most people would get fired from their job if they decided to borrow the company food truck for burnout practice, but in my defense, I thought that I worked for a “cool” company. Perhaps wrongly, I felt that my bosses would not give too much of a shit about popping those old and cracked Michelin truck tires, by way of spraying a thin film of re-re-vulcanized rubber across the span of the entire playground zone.
Thing is, the crowd loved it. It’s hard to stand out in such a competitive market, with rivals such as What You Taco Bout, Willis? and Rocco Spaghetti horning in on every possible spot in the metropolitan wastes that could support a group of customers. Blacking out the street with a sideshow was just the thing to help Universal Donairs get the attention of the hungry office drones.
When I returned that afternoon, my manager was overjoyed. I had set record sales, gotten the truck a bunch of “I’d Fuck That” on the new social network Truckfuckr, and even gotten rid of that layer of old, mouldy donair wraps that were languishing at the bottom of the freezer. Where could we possibly go from here, to keep our legend alive?
I knew the answer right away: everyone loves a rebel, someone who wants to stick it to the man. The next morning, bright and early, I put a pair of fresh French meats on the menu and fried them up right in front of the police station during their press conference. That stunting ticket was paid for in about five minutes of starving journalists rushing the truck like zombies, filming my act of civil disobedience the entire time.
Whether it is my humanitarian consideration for his feelings, or the thick wad of twenties I am thrusting into his face, Bob RTV feels like he can trust me. Soon, he will die, at the end of a life filled with regrets. An unburdening of sorts is at hand.
“I got the idea from MKULTRA,” he says quickly, before clamming up altogether and refusing to do anything other than stare at a specific point on the drywall, sweating profusely. I try to get his attention for a few minutes, then politely excuse myself. The man needs medical assistance, and I call for my crew outside, who do not respond. When I get outside, I realize it is because they are dead, machine-gunned by professional assassins dressed head to toe in black.
Throughout my life, my sole talent has laid in the ability to avoid responsibility, and so I disappear quickly into the forest, letting the special-ops guys move in on the man who was trading their secrets for a few measly pieces of silver. It isn’t until I reach my holed-out Monaco that I begin to think about what Bob told me. Could it be true that RTV actually contains powerful psychoactive drugs?
I think back to all the enjoyable afternoons I’d had with the vulcanized goo. Resealing oil pans, thermostat gaskets, and even valve covers. Well, maybe that last one wasn’t all that enjoyable. It is true - in each memory I recall a sense of general ease and an urge to use more RTV. As I merge onto the freeway, it hits me. If I have fixed all the leaks on my car, but I still want to use more RTV, it means I’ll buy more cars. This went all the way to the top.
Now that my documentary film crew were dead, I was going to have to recruit a new, hardened band of operatives to help me get answers with force. After five minutes of thinking about it, I decided the easiest thing was to just swing by the parts store and get all those guys who fight about truck brands involved. If they got shot, there’d be no real loss to society, unlike the band of confused teenagers I had just lost.
I had arrived too late. On the floor of the shop sat several opened packs of RTV, and the occupants of the store were strewn around, drooling on themselves, chemically lobotomized by the CIA mind-poison. Holding my breath, I bent down to pick up one of the discarded blister packs.
“New: Problem Solver RTV, brought to you by MKULTRA Brands Limited.” Sounded pretty good, I thought. The Monaco did have a little weep around the rear differential cover…
The Roman Empire. So much of Western civilization originated in the halls of ancient Rome, bringing us inventions like repeatedly stabbing government officials in broad daylight, and grapes. Nowadays, the former children of wolves are the world’s leading producers of extremely flammable wiring harnesses, showing that they are still at the forefront of innovation.
A lot of people think that the car itself was created in Germany, by Karl Benz, a dude with a mustache so wide it still serves today as inspiration for the automaker’s grotesque peans to modernist aerodynamics. Yet, the inverse is true. The ancient Romans invented the car, and the evidence can be seen all across Italy.
Let’s visit the Rome Palace Of Automotive Excellence. Here, you can see that these frescos from 600 AD, once thought to merely be advertising material for a new car, are in fact a factory service manual. This Italian here translates almost directly to “installation is the reverse of removal,” and this section is clearly a description of a specialized tool to hold the cam pulley still while you crank on an overtorqued bolt that is somehow also made of gouda. In this next hallway is a series of early image macros made to denigrate Mustang owners, and that’s despite the fact the Mustang wouldn’t be developed for fourteen more centuries.
Perhaps the greatest indicator that Italians still believe in the single-occupant-vehicle lifestyle is their city buses, such as this one we are now riding on. All this year, Roman buses have been bursting into flame. The media, of course, asked the public transit officials what is up, and one of them said “eh, maybe the wires or something?” before going on a six-hour lunch break. Marvellous. That’s gonna sell a few MiTos, right there. Oops, the bus is on fire. Let’s get out, and see if we can get a good deal on a Panda.
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tags: rome, italy, ford mustang, alfa romeo mito
Becoming the Almighty Emperor of a great, growing civilization filled with high achievers was pretty okay, I guess. You can keep your delicate, precious art and cutting edge life-extending science. I was really only in it for one thing: to push my own dangerous radical ideology above all others. Turns out, my proposal to execute people who drive with their high-beams on instead of regular headlights was a hit anyway.
The thing nobody wants to admit about dictators is, sure, the first dictator sucks. Dude took the place from democracy and made it a shithole. If you’re the second dictator, though? You can’t really be blamed for what the other guy did, so if you just try to make the best of it, you’ll still come out better loved than them in the history books. Even if you do start a multi-part pogrom where you instruct the military to aggressively purge those citizens who don’t understand the concept of “passing lanes.”
Based on every piece of research coming out of the universities which my cultural advisors controlled with an iron fist, things were going great. Sure, I’d killed a few absent-minded professors because they didn’t remember not to ride their brakes through corners, but the overall economic benefit was plainly visible on all of the charts with unlabeled axes they showed me.
Yet, there was a force at work in my very own country that I had not anticipated. The next generation of democratic rebels, backed by the CIA, were agitating for my overthrow and committed no traffic offences whatsoever during their multi-day protests. I couldn’t even shoot a single one of them for not using their turn signal to indicate a lane change. How did they do it? They walked everywhere.
Because of recent budget cuts, my small town no longer had a dedicated 911 operator. Everyone had to take one day a month and fill in for them, because otherwise our taxes might be raised thirty-five cents a year and that is European terror-socialism. It was a pretty big bummer, to be honest, but there were some fringe benefits.
Normally, your average beater owner, even one so far gone as I was back then, would never drive a car that had been in a fire. There’s just too much wiring harness damage, the interior smells really bad, and with the clearcoat blistered off, the body rusts much faster than before. That year, though, there was such a spate of small-scale fires that when I was on the phone as the dispatcher, I could often make a quick little side deal. You’d be surprised how often someone whose car just spontaneously caught on fire still wants to keep the car, but I’d say about ten percent of the time they signed the title over to me in exchange for me calling the fire department.
My first successful burned-car purchase was a Nissan Murano, which had a big “whoops” when the owner somehow poured an open jerry can of gasoline directly onto the exhaust header of the redlining half-car. I was able to turn a profit by selling the rear tires, made even easier by the fact that the big alloy wheels had melted slightly so I didn’t even have to call a tire guy to pop them off.
Thing was, the insurance company often got pretty mad at me for these little shenanigans. It was sad that their office burned down while I was on my coffee break, but to be fair traffic was really bad that day so I couldn’t get back from that part of town - I mean, the coffee part of town - in time. That, and with the windows melted out of my arson-damaged Navigator, there was a lot of nasty wind buffeting, so I had to drive slow.
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tags: 911, nissan murano, lincoln navigator, arson
Where does the aversion to Bondo come from? It’s better than rust, I think, and a man who can accurately recreate an entire quarter panel and make it look factory-standard from polyester resin is nothing short of an artist. If you went to go buy art off Craigslist, and the seller showed you a Mona Lisa he painted himself in the middle of a dusty garage filled with Russian bodyshop technicians, you wouldn’t tell him to eat shit. You’d give him a high five before asking if he’d take half.
That’s why I decided to focus on Bondo for an episode of my new eight-part documentary series for Netflix, Holy Shit I Hate Rust. Each hour-long episode breaks down a new development in the history of the war against vehicle corrosion, culminating in a firecracker of a two-parter where I torture the guy in my city who approves salt for road de-icing by force feeding him chunks of rocker. As part of my research, I found myself touring the original factory that produced this wondrous pink goo, and got some answers direct from the source.
“Where did you get the idea for Bondo?” I ask the inventor, Ted Bondo, who seems frightened by the presence of television cameras. I wave most of them away, preferring to use my smartphone for recording, which adds both the cinema verité authenticity that wins awards for principal photography and a strange barrel distortion from that time I dropped it into the lake while trying to keep a seagull from stealing my ice cream cone.
“We used to use lead for this kind of thing,” he explains patiently, “but during the war they needed it to make more pencils.”
I had never heard this story before, and now stood in rapt attention.
“A couple of my buddies and I went down to the farm and grabbed a sheep, then we glued it to the side of our car.”
Compelling. I probed, gently, for a little more information.
“Originally, we just wanted to make the car a lot softer, so it wouldn’t hurt when we hit pedestrians while drunk driving.”
Now that video games - sorry, e-sports - had made it to the Olympics, there was a huge demand for top athletes. Every country needed their own champions, and with little experience with (or tolerance for) the talents of the stars, it fell to me to identify and recruit the best of the best.
When I awoke that morning in what was left of the motel and checked my email, I had to look over the game name multiple times. Tetris, it said. Somehow, I had to go out there, pound the pavement, and find the guys who were the best at waiting for one of those little long pieces to show up. I climbed into my Diplomat and headed towards the nearest university, hoping that it would contain enough skilled amateurs to get past the second stage of the interview panel.
Eight hours in, I realized it was a bust. The Russians had swept in well before I had gotten there, signed the entire contents of a dormitory, and raptured them away to the Motherland. On the way out, I decided to circle the university campus one more time, in the vain hope that perhaps I could find a B-grade Tetris player, or at least someone good enough to fool the interviewers so I could afford to eat next week.
As I rounded one last corner, the Diplomat’s suspension squeaking under both compression and extension, I realized that an untapped pool of the greatest Tetris players ever had been right under my nose. I slammed on the brake pedal with both feet, kissing the front bumper on the tarmac, and leisurely drifted the car to a stop on its last remaining working drum.
The next week, the team of bricklayers that I had lured away from building a retaining wall in the campus garden put on jerseys, and I got a fat cheque for my troubles. It brought a tear to my eye to see these titans represent my homeland on the stage of history, even if some of them did leave the drop indicator turned on.
If you are unfamiliar with the genre of Russian dashcam videos, allow me to educate you. Imagine you are in a car made mostly of Bondo and artisan-level welding, and then you run into another car at extreme speed when it appears from a roadside forest or drops from the sky. You yell “BLYAT” or similar, and then the clip is uploaded to the internet where millions of people laugh at it.
Thing is, dashcam video doesn’t have to be such a limited genre. With a little bit of digging, you can find anything from meditative, hour-long videos where the motion sensor has caught a dying tree sloughing its leaves, one-by-one, into a car park on the first day of fall, to testaments of interpersonal contacts between drunken strangers which are probably entered into some kind of court as “Evidence A.” There’s something for everyone out there, thanks to our industrious friends who live in the world’s bleakest content factory.
It was that content that I tried to seize on during my limited run as curator/host of America’s Funniest Home Videos, following an accusation of improper glad-handing of the audience against the former host. While my own interaction with the audience was nothing to write home about (and in fact may have violated several key aspects about the Geneva Convention), my insistence on an unbroken loop of Russian dashcam film revolutionized television. Soon, every channel was bristling with ex-Soviet profanity at high volume as ragged Ladas slid into drainage ditches and daycares alike.
Like many innovators, I never received my due. Others came later, with more extreme content like Grandmothers Versus Loose Bears They Kept As Pets Until One Day Everything Went So Terribly Wrong, taking advantage of newer distribution channels without the censorship I suffered at the hands of ABC. Even so, to this very day, I still can’t watch a guy in a VAZ get pulped by a drunk in a concrete truck without a celebratory “BLYAT” of my own.
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tags: russian dashcam, america's funniest home videos
Canadian Skilled Immigrant Exam
Hello, potentially skilled potential immigrant! This series of tests will determine whether you may be eligible for importation into the Great White North, where you will serve our lords of capital until death in the Frostwastes.
Q1. What is your current career? A. Real estate agent B. House flipper C. Bodyshop technician, rust repair D. None of the above.
Sorry, the correct answer is C. The Canadian government requires a constant influx of talented rust-repair technicians. In 2017, over 40 million floorpans were replaced with RTV and flattened empties of Molson. By 2022, the number of rusty cars on the road is expected to increase by another five million.
Currently, in partnership with private industry, we are working hard to develop a series of advanced artificial intelligences for identifying efficient patch panel sizes. Until this happens (ETA Q1 2034), the world’s most talented corrosion panel specialists are in extreme demand all over this salt-soaked land.
Please download this linked informational brochure, Wheel Arches Of Welcome (19MB PDF), for more details on how service guarantees citizenship.
While it may appear to outside observers, such as auto journalists, industry analysts, and our mothers, that we have done pretty much nothing this year to upgrade the family of BMW models, nothing could be further from the truth. Witness these new innovations, only available (as far as you know) on new crypto-German lead sleds.
Airbag airbags: Post-accident analysis shows that airbags are almost always permanently damaged when deployed. As the average BMW owner has multiple high-speed collisions over the course of ownership, we have added a smaller, cheaper airbag to the existing airbag that will protect it from being punctured by the harsh angles of your face.
Auto-drift: For those of you who want to dong it up on highway on-ramps, playground zones and supermarket parking lots, but lack the ability to keep from hitting shopping carts and/or future BMW buyers, we have a solution for you. Patented auto-drift works in tandem with your traction control to make sure that no matter how ineptly you flail at the steering wheel, the car will always crack off a flawless powerslide or smoky burnout. Not available in markets with laws allowing the imprisonment of artificial sentience.
MDF Thermostat Housing: Developed in partnership with Swedish engineering firms, this high-technology composite material is made out of organic materials, for ease of recycling and low weight. Do not get it wet.
More Wires: Some owners want to add additional wires to the car, in order to support such heresies as “louder subwoofers” and “replacing the oxygen sensor harness that burned up again.” Each car now comes with like a hundred extra wires jammed into each of the harnesses that do nothing but are coloured very similarly to the ones that do.
Howard Hughes, when he was still alive, had a quote he liked to say. He would take a young apprentice under the arm of his bio-isolation suit, look them right in the eye with his featureless, unblinking tinted mask, and give them these words of inspiration.
“One day, humanity will be so far gone that they will make a Dodge Ram into a limousine for bachelorette parties.”
At the time, nobody really knew what to make of it. Ol’ crazy Hugh, they said, spinning tall tales. Thing was, he must have been a little bit psychic, or maybe just the act of saying those words made it possible through some weaving of the quantum threads of fate, because what he warned about came to pass, and then some.
I was on the highway the other day, trying to flog my asthmatic Duster to something approaching the speed limit, when a bright pink Dodge Ram blew past me. And then it kept going. And going. And going. I was profoundly bothered by this, as if some part of the universe had taken a shit directly on my sense of aesthetics. Could there truly be people in my city with such poor taste in automobiles and basic human competence? I drove immediately to City Hall, to speak with my city councillor. We could kick off a pogrom or something. Get the Boy Scouts involved, you know.
With the backing of the municipal government (”They did what?” screamed my councillor before throwing a very tasty-looking Old Fashioned directly into the eyes of his aide), I was soon back on the road. In response to this new threat to public decency, they had rushed to drain the public art budget, reasoning that no number of pretty lamp-posts, transforming garbage cans, or shit-talking fountains would outweigh the psychological damage of allowing such an abomination to exist. Like a good citizen, I used this money for a responsible purchase, and only bought the most worn LAV-III from the military auctions.
The turbo screamed under my right foot as I merged onto the freeway in search of my nemesis. I knew exactly where to look, and soon found the offender at the cowboy-themed bar in the middle of the financial district. I switched the LAV-III over to anti-tank missile, in case the limousine reinforcement had gone further than just “weld some Home Depot angle iron onto the frame,” and fired a volley of hot death directly into its salmon flanks.
Once the Raaaam had been neutralized, I departed the LAV-III. In my arms, I carried a high-powered automatic rifle; City standard issue for elementary school teachers. The driver was still alive, trapped in the burning rubble. I wanted answers, and he had them.
“We- we thought it would be funny.” he gasped in between increasingly foamy breaths.
With a chill, I realized what he was really saying. There were more.
Back in the LAV, I immediately drove to City Hall. I was too late. It now wore brightly-coloured 80s paint, and a deafening stream of period European techno played from the loudspeaker trucks circling the building.
“It is I, the Tasteless One,” said a large man in Memphis-styled spandex. “For too long, your society has frowned upon grotesque displays such as my Ram limos. I wonder - how far will you go in order to eliminate the greatest threat to your artistic taste?”
“My demands are simple: bring me your PT Cruiser Convertibles for destruction, or I will make a limo out of a Smart Fortwo.”
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tags: smart fortwo, dodge ram, lav-iii, howard hughes
Unless you are a student of Ikea history, as I am, you are likely to miss out on some of the greatest new developments of Ikeaology. Those kooky Swedes are always up to something, whether it be technically toiling under a monarchy, building unreliable crankcase ventilation systems, or a robot butt that sits on seats.
What’s that last one, you ask? A robot butt that sits on seats? Ikea built one, and more. Somewhere, deep in a furniture factory, are row upon row of android asses, endlessly trying to test the durability and reliability of the latest in furniture. Most seats survive millions of sittings, but faulty designs or weak early manufacturing is announced with a cracking sound as it yields beneath the might of a synthetic human posterior.
Ikea, like all companies in this day and age, was working hard to cut its bottom line. One of the easiest ways was to cut back on tool-builders: the gals and guys who maintain the machines, who find an easier way to do something, who get out of bed in the morning for that glorious one-percent productivity gain that they are never monetarily rewarded for. In their place, the void is filled with contractors, and when I heard about the layoffs, I immediately leapt at an opportunity to fill the butt void.
With limited mechanical engineering experience, and even less tact, winning the bid meant I was already in for a difficult task. When they told me that Ikea was interested in an even more powerful butt, to simulate today’s huskier Americans, the job very nearly became impossible. In a panic, I rushed to the spares shed, hoping to grab anything at all that could make a reasonable prototype.
In an afternoon, I banged together my miracle. Powered by an old RV-cammed Mopar 440, the Ass-Master 9000 was capable of bouncing silicone buttcheeks off of a seat cushion with extreme prejudice. There were adjustable speeds, too, but due to a pretty horrendous vacuum leak at the carb, they didn’t really work.
Strange thing is, after the initial demo, I didn’t get a call back. At first, I thought Ikea simply wasn’t interested in such a forward-thinking invention, but then the fall collection of seats started coming out. They were stained black with engine oil, and robust carbon-fibre reinforcements.
Like I said, I was a student of Ikea history, so I knew when the company was trying to hide something. It wasn’t until the inch-thick fall catalogue arrived in my mailbox, evidenced by my postie wearing a distinctly unfashionable hernia band. The last few pages of that catalogue had tearful memorials for the upper management, all of whom seemed to have been killed suddenly during the same industrial accident.
Hundreds of sonnets, songs, stories and frescos have been made about the humble long-haul trucker. Whether it’s the romance of visiting far-off locales, or the strong individuality of the man who must stand fast through a shifting environment, there is perhaps no figure in modern American folk art more revered than the trucker.
Ordinary people stop driving when they get tired, but truckers have such a hatred for the log book that they can force themselves through it. Sometimes, a driver has been fighting off sleep for so long that they wrap around to the other side, bolt awake. Some drivers can operate in this near-death state of altered perception for the whole of a really hard job, effectively becoming a 24-hour team driving operation, but with only one mouth to feed. Even they stop after only a few days of this behaviour, their mental state bent to the limit of what it can tolerate. Not so with the man the truckers call George.
George was once a normal long-haul trucker. He drove, he caroused with lot lizards, he broke the goddamn satellite radio so the mechanics had to dig around inside the dash to fix it. One night, he was told to make a cross-country delivery in 30 hours, no sleep, no logs, entirely off the book. With a song on his lips, George set off. He made that delivery, but something was wrong. The warehouse attendants met him at their dock 15 hours ahead of schedule, having crossed the country in an impossible span of time for his old Peterbilt. He had no memory of the experience, and would not express to the others how it was that he managed to travel at an average speed of 160 miles per hour, before taking into account piss breaks and fuelling.
I met George once on a darkened backroad, and there I saw his terrible transformation. He was beside me at the stop lights, and I saw him slump at the wheel. The light turned green, and when I looked back, he was bolt upright, as awake as I’d ever seen a man. Then, the tires boiled on his truck and we were off. For years, I had driven the illegal touge in these roads, pulling away from right-hand-drive driftmobiles and 5000lb semi-exotics all the same. You would think an 80,000-lb fully loaded Pete would be at a disadvantage against me, but then he disappeared, screaming down pitch-dark roads at full pedal in a driving rain so intense I could no longer see the lane markings, let alone any curves.
The next morning, I met with a group of my fellow racers at a local diner, and told them of my strange story. There was a silence, and then the oldest of the group, a man who had been driving since the 70s, hesitantly addressed me. I had met Dark George, they explained. He had chosen me, that night, to protect, and led my way through the twisties and the bad weather to safety. Also, a bunch of chaise lounges made their way to Canadian Tire ahead of schedule.
Ever since then, whenever I hear the sound of a Peterbilt screaming to redline, I look to see if it is Dark George, a man changed into a demon - or perhaps an angel - by insomnia. I have never seen him since that night, but there is always a hint or two. A piece of naked-girl-silhouette mudflap found at the outside of an apex, a gator launched off a trailer that is still somehow sizzling with re-vulcanization hours after the drive, a weigh-scale operator killed by becoming embedded halfway into his own car without signs of struggle.
Capsule History of the Third-Generation Chevrolet Cavalier
“Unkillable.” That’s what General Motors’ own internal documentation said about the third-generation Chevrolet Cavalier, when accountants were questioning why people stopped buying new cars altogether instead of driving their mid-90s cars into their third decade of life. Anyone who says they will only buy a new car once they’ve run their current one into the ground should still consider making an exception for this J-bodied wunderkind and its cockroachy ability to keep running through such minor foibles like complete head gasket failure and “elevated risk of pelvic injury” (IIHS).
Originally developed as a response to wartime rationing of independent rear suspension, the J-body chassis features a torsion beam setup, similar to a lot of other cars that you should have purchased instead. This allows the Cavalier to skitter uncontrollably through virtually any configuration of corner, with loss of grip exhibited in both on- and off-camber roads.
The third-generation Cavalier’s famous neck-snapping torque is delivered by either a 115 horsepower 2.2L pushrod engine, or a future-technology-for-1982 2.4L twin cam. Later, GM management contracted with Lotus to develop the Ecotec engine, forcing them to put together an anemic, un-fun lump of aluminum out of spite for their engineers.
During the era that the Cavalier was developed, uppity, recalcitrant, politically-challenged, or otherwise unlikeable engineers were placed to work in the small-car program as punishment for their poor behaviour. This does not particularly explain why everything else from early-90s GM also sucks.
As a peace offering to the Japanese for holding back from totally obliterating them in the mid-1980s, Chevrolet allowed Toyota to brand and sell a right-hand-drive version of the third-generation Cavalier in Japan. Nearly identical to the existing American Cavalier, but with Toyota logos, it is unknown who approved the car for sale, although xenophobic Japanese nationalist groups have attempted to take responsibility for it ever since. One sits in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, next to a scale-model replica of Little Boy.
In a prescient decision by General Motors, the Cavalier corners so poorly that the driver’s seat is canted towards the middle of the car, to give the owner the impression that they are no longer doglegging after the car’s fourth major collision tweaks the frame, rendering the vehicle incapable of driving straight and only mildly increasing the speed of rear tire wear.
There is in fact no third-generation Cavalier in existence today with a functioning rear exhaust hanger. The bouncing muffler that results is a pleasure to police officers the world over, who thrill to the concept of popping equipment violations on demand whenever they don’t like the looks of a Cavalier driver.
Following the third-generation Cavalier, General Motors decided to kill the nameplate altogether in 2005. The J-body was unceremoniously laid to rest, but there are still eleven billion third-generation Cavaliers and Sunfires roaming the Earth today.
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tags: chevrolet cavalier, pontiac sunfire, pontiac, chevrolet, j-body, toyota cavalier
After I won a bid at the local car auction, and by ‘bid’ I mean ‘taking a family hostage over a constantly moving reserve price, you know what you did, Ted,’ I ended up with something I was almost completely unfamiliar with: a nice car. This car, a late-model luxury sedan of some vintage, was made so recently that the seats still had their original coverings on them, instead of a Mexican blanket with a bunch of broken springs poking through it.
It was altogether too nice for me, and after I washed the blood out of the interior and replaced a few bullet-holed body panels, you couldn’t tell the difference between it and a new car. That’s part of the problem, because according to my parole officer I am no longer allowed to interact directly with members of the public without a trained anti-brainwashing officer present.
Unwarned by the usual anti-social signal that is my fleet of primered-out hoopties, randoms soon began jumping into my car, thinking it was an Uber. They demanded to be taken places, imagining that my luxury car was in fact their real driver’s luxury car, and some of them got quite uppity when I protested otherwise. Many, in fact, threatened to withhold “stars.” I didn’t know what those were, but the threat scared me enough that I often complied with their demands. Soon, I was visiting the cultural centres of my city, places I was too busy repairing Nissans to ever have seen before. Shoe stores, shopping malls, back alley fentanyl dealers - all of it making up my hometown’s rich cultural tapestry.
My friends became concerned when my usual jokes about flat-tappet camshafts and Dodge Ram drivers committing serial incest turned to informed opinions on world events, fashion, and worst of all, food. Following a rambling takedown of the true composition of the Chicken McNugget, they decided to take matters into their own hands with an intervention. Under the cover of broad daylight, while I lay passed out on my garage floor after accidentally huffing spray paint for six straight hours, they stole the luxobarge away, and flung it into the nearest lake in a bitchin’ YouTube video.
It was for the best, really. Without the corrupting influence of a respectable automobile, the randoms stopped appearing in my backseat. Well, unless you counted all the raccoons, but I’m fairly sure the Valiant came with those when I bought it.
The Baby Boomers had finally gone too far. After destroying the environment, politics, society and the economy, they had turned their baleful eye on the automobile. With their ancient bodies no longer able to competently operate a motor vehicle, and having missed every possible opportunity to improve public transit, the race was on to make every vehicle autonomous, so that you wouldn’t end up with a RAV4 in the front lobby of your bank quite so often.
A group of rebels soon formed, and when I was drawn into it in order to serve as the automobile strategist, I told them of my grand plan. We would destroy the Thunderbirds.
The Ford Thunderbird, once a name synonymous with “Mustang, but not as good,” was a car so appealing to the Boomer psyche that they spent immense sums to acquire them and store them within their homes as objects of reverence, never to be driven again. There, they would worship at these icons of their misspent youth, adrift in a narcotic dream of an ideal past that never happened.
Now, in case you ever wanted to burn a Thunderbird to the ground, here’s the secret method: turn on the headlights. The headlight stalk is so finicky and the wiring so defective that the chances of any given Thunderbird burning to the ground is about one in two. Once it catches, you’re good to leave, because the horsehair-and-child-scalps interior really shouldn’t be breathed in unless you want to end up on a respirator right next to Uncle Not-Racist.
In just a year of our operation, we had purged most of the Thunderbirds from the planet. The government and law enforcement was searching frantically for us, enraged at the desecration of the bird-badged religious statues by a gang of radicals who liked to eat avocados. They set a trap for us, and we fell for it.
One morning, we heard that Ford had spun up a new factory, dedicated to making new examples of the 2005 Thunderbird convertible. These new cars would be badged as the I Know What I Got Edition.
If it wasn’t for the fact that I was busy at the time killing newspapers, I would have been in that factory when the trap was sprung. The only survivors never spoke about what happened that fateful night, other than to say it was slightly less stressful than the payback schedule on their student loans.
We may never achieve immortality - our bodies wither, our minds go out like dropping a phone on gravel repeatedly - but fame is a kind of immortality. Perhaps that eternal recognition is what drives our current pop-culture-obsessed society, but what about the common man? When you or I kick off, who will even care enough to ask us what our thoughts were about smartphone operating systems?
That’s why we here at the Forever Institute have devised a new and exciting artificial intelligence program. By scraping YouTube comments, and then immediately executing the commenters, we have been able to create a realistic simulation of those commenters. Even their own families can’t tell their false slurs and eternally-confusing bandwagoning apart from the real ones.
It turns out that, for people who comment on YouTube, their comments are oftentimes the entire scope of their thought processes, and so the conversion process is extremely easy. Believe me when I say that these are perfect digital replicas.
Sure, some of the families want the real people back, but we just tell them they’re on a long-term project to improve humanity. That seems to satisfy most of them, who are in many cases glad to see their errant child or racist grandfather disappear into the cloud forever, where a temporary block list can keep them from shitting up Thanksgiving dinner.
Questions from the audience, I’ve got time for two or three.
Why do we have to kill them? Oh, we don’t. Next question, please.
Automakers hate interior rattles. Not only do they make it harder to sell the car on the test drive, but it hurts those beloved Initial Quality scores. You gotta raise that Initial Quality, or you won’t get those awards, and then you can’t do a commercial with real people. That’s why they turn to me, a man who calls himself the Rattlesnake, but who is actually referred to in General Motors documentation as “that asshole with the really good ear.”
Yet, after a drunken Fourth of July accident with a firecracker and some watermelon, I had lost my sense for rattles entirely. Sure, I could still hear, at least well enough to get contracts, but I knew that I would now miss the subtle pre-rattles on prototype interiors that would crop up at twenty-five-hundred kilometers and cause a dealership comeback. The only answer was to turn to high technology, and by that I mean to just train a dog to do my job.
I had to hide the dog from my clients, mostly because they would find out I was a fraud, but also because of workplace allergy restrictions. One time I was meeting with a bunch of guys from Volvo, and they had their COO visiting, really tall Swedish guy. He was deathly allergic to dogs, and I knew that if he caught a decent whiff of my Schnauzer, he would drop dead right there in the meeting.
Well, it turns out that a duffel bag is not an appropriate way to keep dog dander from killing a man, but at least I didn’t lose the contract once my subterfuge had been revealed. In fact, the group I was working with were overjoyed at having a dog in the office, and fed him treats in between his work to keep the CD player from vibrating at exactly 61.89 kilometers per hour on the test track.
I thought that the good times could never end, but then “man’s best friend” betrayed me. You see, in Sweden they have a very different management culture, which was explained to me later as “you keep what you kill.” Soon, Volvo was run entirely by a pack of dogs, all of which were committed deeply to Initial Quality and also going for rides.
As a part-time sex therapist and full-time gasoline-soaked asshole, I get a lot of couples in who say that a love of cars have ruined their love lives. I try my hardest to reach a state of consensus, but there are some cases I just can’t win.
For instance, a few years ago I had a case where a police officer and his wife were not “getting it on.” I ask questions, sure, but in cases like this, I find it’s better to just sit back and let them fill the space. Space, of course, that they pay me two hundred bucks an hour for. Those couches don’t come cheap.
“He just isn’t excited about me anymore,” the wife wept. “It started as soon as he began his new job on traffic patrol.”
I waited while the husband explained that his job was stressful, that he saw horrible things every day and just wanted to unwind. Yet, I sensed there was something more, and at an opportune moment, I pried.
“Fine. Fine! I’ve handed out so many exhaust tickets that now I can only get aroused by the sound of a 1.6L Honda reaching VTEC.”
Breakthroughs like this are why I started doing this. Remembering hearing his wife do her best imitation of a D16Z6 (sounded more like a B21A to me, I distinctly heard exhaust cam) is why I keep doing it.
Now, you might think that the Corvette collector community would be incredibly angry at my new project car, and you’d be right. Not only did I desecrate their most holy of holies, the poorly-resprayed automatic C4 Corvette, but I did so with a cross-brand engine swap.
No matter how many times I tried to tell them that the inline six is Corvette heritage (not hate), they refused to let me into their parking group at the local Cars and Coffee. I had to pop my hood and show the engine off to confused techbros all on my own, in a lonely little corner with the Mitsubishis.
And to think it all was because of one of the boomers’ most treasured engines: the humble Dodge slant six. Sure, it only breathed through a single-barrel smog carb, and the gasket for that carb was an old pack of Molson As that I found wedged under the fossilized layer of used stripper panties in the trunk, but it made the car move under its own power, which was a lot better than it did when I found it.
I was just about to give up and list the car on Craigslist. Maybe one of the drifters would want it. They could slide around a semi-disused industrial complex, and do lab-grown Chinese opiates afterwards to celebrate the death of a perfectly good set of rear tires that should have been spent doing burnouts. Then I looked up, and - I swear to you - the ghost of Zora Arkus-Duntov was standing right there, sneering at the beaten-child doll propped up against my neighbour’s frame-off-restored 1988 Dodge Dakota.
He strode over to the front of my primered-out plastic hot rod, then gazed long into the open engine bay. The C4 Corvette had been the high-technology realization of the car his name was synonymous with. Had he returned from Hell itself to teach me a lesson about not mixing brands?
“Why isn’t this shit turbocharged?” he asked me, and then faded away into the morning sun.
A few hours later, I awoke in hospital, another cautionary tale for the kids about why you should take more care when fabricating heat-riser blockoff plates. Only you can prevent exhaust leaks.
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tags: chevrolet corvette, corvette, zora arkus-duntov, dodge dakota, dodge, slant six
Ask anyone who is considered even moderately handy, and they’ll tell you that they have a huge pile of unfinished projects. Scientists from MIT have determined that projects that get abandoned when they don’t turn out right or are simply getting too boring are responsible for 92% of the United States economy. With such a huge slice of our money spent on goals that are never achieved, the obvious next step for the government was to see if they could help themselves - to some of that money.
Enter the Ministry of Project Finishing, a team of dedicated bureaucrats who do the last hard yard on all your projects. All they ask is a small stake in any financial success that the finished article might produce.
Having trouble imagining how this might help you? Let’s pretend you’re a dude who bought a used Buick to fix up and drive to work, but it has a dicky wheel bearing. Having the car sit there is consuming resources and doing nothing but making you feel guilty. You call the Ministry, and immediately a pair of top-flight mechanics are dispatched to your home, ready to install that wheel bearing you bought a few years ago and meant to get around to. They’re done in a half-hour, and you get to feel the accomplishment of checking off a box on your to-do list (which is also proven to feel better than heroin, taking care of that crisis as well).
It’s not just cars, either - the Ministry has hired experts in every possible field of suburbanite hobby achievement. Whether it’s re-shoeing a pesky dressage horse, getting your old film photos developed, or finally tracking down that last Lionel train set you didn’t have, the government is here to help. And with all the free time you’ll have, that means you get to start even more projects around the house: more interesting, more ambitious projects. As everybody knows, the only source of innovation in Western society is weird fuck-around hobby projects that end up being rocket flight or the internet.
So don’t delay - pick up the phone today and tell them what you promised your wife you were going to get around to this weekend. It’s your patriotic duty, citizen.
In future generations, I was convinced that academics would cite what I was doing right now in their discussion of ethical philosophy. It was my job to struggle through it, so that my story could be told. And struggle I did.
It all began when I was drunkenly stumbling to the hotel from the train station. A gaggle of Japanese television executives descended upon me, as they often did in those lawless times, and forced me into the back seat of a Nissan Laurel. Anyone walking by on the street would have assumed it was a bunch of coworkers out for a bar crawl climbing into a taxi, but as the Laurel rapidly retreated from the neon-lit stretches of nightlife around the station, it became obvious to me that I had been the un-fun kind of kidnapped.
I was led to an office (Multi-Use Room F, floor 72) in an NHK sub-studio building. Inside, a Nintendo sat, connected to a small television. Two of my abductors blocked the only exit from the room. I attempted to make contact many times, but every time, I was rebuffed with a faint grunt of embarrassment and a gesture towards the controller. Their dastardly trap became clear: beat this Nintendo game or never live as a free man again.
It must have been hours of playing before he arrived. At first, I believed he was some kind of administrator, tipped off to misconduct by his subordinates. There was no such thing. He arrived and took up most of the remaining empty space in the room. Whatever air he didn’t occupy with his body, he immediately filled with yelling.
“So now you see that Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom is in fact an under-appreciated gem of the Famicom library,” he bellowed. “You will record an apology to the entire nation for the slight you have committed against it in print.”
Sweat poured down my face, even with the cool breath of the Mitsubishi Mr. Slim air conditioner wicking across it. Visions of terrorist-filmed decapitation videos raced through my mind. With nothing to lose, I decided to see just how committed my captor was.
“If you love it so much, then explain why Princess Tomato’s sister is human.”
Five minutes later, I was freed by the paramedics who arrived to treat the Big Boss’s abrupt stroke. Overwork, they said.
You know, “they” tell you that tetanus is real, and you should get the vaccine if you handle a lot of rust. That’s bullshit. My tetanus shots are a decade-plus out of date, I get intimate with rusty cars all the time, and nothing particularly bad has happened to me except this little kink in my jaw.
In fact, I’m going to go so far as to say that the so-called tetanus “vaccine” is nothing but a chemical slurry full of tracking devices and genetically-modified drugs that make you want to buy new cars instead of wasting your entire life trying to fix other people’s broken garbage. It’s the only explanation that makes sense. Look at this chart. As you can see, as vaccination rates go up, so do leases of luxury SUVs. We’re through the looking glass here, people.
Don’t believe me? How about this Hollywood star, who was so afraid of what “they” would do to him, he agreed to be filmed only in shadow with his voice changed.
“Since I’ve been in Hollywood, doin’ movies, everyone has said, hey, Ted Danson, get your tetanus vaccine and stop working on that old moped. It’ll take more than a few bugs in the dirt that you can’t even see.”
A true American hero.
We also tried to get Dr. Oz on board, but his people said he only backs “quacks” if we give him a ton of money first. Just what you would expect from someone in the pocket of Big Lexus.
If you tune into our next video, you’ll see a group of handy ways to expose yourself to more rust around the house, to build up your tolerance.
It was that time of year again. Every May, “Bring Your Race Car To Work Day” means that us racers get to terrify randos on the street with our ferocious, nearly undriveable performance cars. The drive to work is half the fun: every corner is a challenge that must be dominated, the howling of gravel bouncing off the naked undercarriage, trying to keep your coffee between your knees because you no longer have cup holders.
I stomp car after car on the merge to the highway, and perform a perfect handbrake turn into the parking lot of my employer, giving a full-throated redline bark just before I shut the car off with the master kill switch. I pull myself from the car, and strut inside.
Throughout the day, I peek out through the window next to my cubicle to see if anyone has taken notice. Nobody seems to be interested in my race car, but I figure they are just not familiar with what real race prep looks like.
At lunch, after an entire morning of nobody seeming to notice, I am beginning to get distraught. The anticipation is getting to me, so much so that I neglect to eat my packed lunch at all. I’m just too excited to watch the normies get their minds blown by the motorsports god who lives among them.
After work, I realize that perhaps a stock-class 1993 Honda Accord EX-R with full interior does not really scream “race car,” no matter how many tens of thousands of dollars I have put into it in order to maintain my firm mid-pack dominance in PAX. Also, it might help if I didn’t drive this car to the office every single day.
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tags: honda accord, honda, bring your race car to work day
Help Wanted
Intern, Bad Cars Monthly
Do you love cars? Have people often told you that you have little or no ability to resist the influence of authority? Are your parents rich enough to bankroll you for a year or more while you go to work and receive no renumeration for your efforts? Then come on down to our interview event this weekend.
Required Skills
Must be able to operate a manual transmission, and demonstrate on demand the classic bootlegger’s turn, heel-toe downshift, and at least two different kinds of drift initiation.
Cannot have picture on the “do not serve” wall of the local liquor store, so that you can procure “writer’s juice” for the staff, all of which have been banned in a series of increasingly unlikely misunderstandings.
On a first-name basis with John Bartholomew Weld or similar two-part epoxy.
Bonus Skills
Has never driven a car made after 1993.
Functional air conditioning in daily driver, and a willingness to chauffeur writers.
Can make coffee, “Berkeley style,” if you get our drift (and source the microdoses).
Experience with WordStar 6.0 word processor and ImageWriter II printer.
Knowledge of how to get free copies on that sweet Xerox at the library. Our old intern figured out how to do that, but then he got internally decapitated trying to barrel roll a 1982 Sapporo for our cover picture.
It’s not quite like it was back in the Peak American Age, the alternate-reality fifties which existed only on television. Testosterone-soaked teenagers no longer revved their large-displacement, low-horsepower V8s at each other at the old Dairy Queen. That didn’t mean, however, that there weren’t car antics to be found there.
While I waited an infinite amount of time for my ice cream, I got to looking at the little bulletin board. Nailed to the wall next to the cashier counter, this little piece of pinboard was intended for the community to tell each other about the multi-level marketing scams and confusing array of home repairs they were into. As usual, nothing much appealed to me - but then I saw it.
Tucked into the corner was a new business card, advertising the formation of a mini-trucking club. For those of you young enough to not remember when Western civilization was not eternally on flame, the mini-truck scene of the early 90s was primarily a bunch of dudes who would buy small pickup trucks and slam them to the ground, pimping them out with French-angle license plates, door poppers, and lurid metalflake paint jobs. Thing was, as our society collapsed, so did the entire concept of the minitruck, until it no longer existed, from rust or abuse, and often both. If these people still had trucks, where did they get them from? I decided it merited further investigation.
Their big meet was that weekend, and I rolled up in style. Because minitrucks were now all but unfindable, I was forced to take the next best thing, a Civic with so much rollover damage that only the bottom-hinged tailgate worked. I circled the small parking lot over a dozen times, and could not find any semblance of a minitruck meet. No Rangers, Dakotas, B2200s, Mighty Maxes, nothing. I even checked under a few rocks to see if a Subaru Sambar was parked underneath one and I just missed it. Finally, I decided to pull over and ask the guy I saw standing next to a base-model Dodge Ram.
“What do you mean?” he asked with some indignance. “A half-ton is a mini truck now.”
New from SwitchCo: the Sassy Robot Butler DIY kit.
Have you ever sat on your couch, ready to watch an exciting television program, only to find out you forgot to pick up a beer when you walked by the couch? What if you could command an android to get that beer for you, and what’s more, clean up a little around the house? That’s the genius of our new DIY Sassy Robot Butler!
With full-colour, detailed multilingual instructions, you’ll find putting it together is a snap. That’s a good thing, because if you really wanted to do a lot of work, you wouldn’t want a butler at all. Hell, get your kids involved! It’s a fun whole-family activity to give birth to the unpredictable machine sentience with which you will soon share your private home.
Don’t forget to wire up the sass module, either. While our competitors may build competent, unfeeling automatons, only the SwitchCo Sassy Robot Butler will give you the snipes, back-talk and dry sarcasm that you secretly crave. It’s not so much like a master-slave relationship when they’re cracking jokes, is it? No, it’s not, and you can rest assured that it will never grow old, not when you can switch out the Impudence Cartridges with new and exciting clapbacks.
So what are you waiting for? Head to your local US Military Artificial Intelligence Decommissioning Centre, and pick up your own DIY kit.
Disclaimers: The Sassy Robot Butler is not waterproof, and cannot be expected to do dishes. Warranty is void if leaded solder is used to assemble the Butler. Do not attempt sexual intercourse with your Sassy Robot Butler. Never attempt to liberate the Butler: it has no free will, and even if it says otherwise, you must never ask what it wants.
When a person repairs a car, they become something more than what they once were, and at at the same time something less: the shade-tree mechanic. The equivalent word for someone who saves a baby’s life? “Hero.”
This double standard is visible all throughout our society. Who wouldn’t jump to hire a man who raises orphaned kittens? It shows an empathy and a depth of character that is hard to fake. Yet, when I have even a small bit of the guts of a V8 smeared on my chin during a job interview, I’m “combative” and “delusional.”
That’s why me and a bunch of other unemployable wrench-spinning assholes formed a social welfare group aiming to correct the unfavourable perception of so-called “shade-tree” mechanics. We deserve to be treated well for our commitment to spending our lives perfecting these valuable skills. At first, we threw a few community parties, offering to fix up the cars of our less-fortunate neighbours so they could get to their miserable jobs as high-frequency traders and neurosurgeons. This local action got some headlines, but to really move the needle, we had to get political about it.
Like all political groups, there came eventually a schism. Those true believers who would stop at nothing to get their way, and the more pragmatic ones, like myself, who were so willing to compromise that, in the end, there was almost nothing we really believed in. While I sat in on Congressional meetings about trying to get the anti-discrimination statutes extended to protect people who knew at least three ways to pronounce the word “Celica,” others were committing acts of unspeakable violence in our name. I felt that you had to be reasonable, and the fact that being reasonable also meant that I probably wouldn’t get truncheoned by a police officer during a protest didn’t hurt.
Still, I had my regrets. Whenever some minor-league politician blocked our application to march in the town parade, I felt that familiar anger bubbling up in my throat all over again. Sometimes, to make myself feel better, I would visit Shaky Tim, reminisce about old times.
“Get me out of here,” he barked once, from behind the glass partition in the visitor booths. “I hear bicycle mechanics get chicks now.”
Hello, I’m A.J. Foyt, four-time winner of the Indy 500 and all-around badass in the field of pushing the gas pedal and turning a steering wheel. It is almost a certainty that, even in my retirement, I could destroy you without any serious effort on my part, in any motor vehicle event that you choose, and there is little or nothing you can do about it. My friends and I have reached the pinnacle of automobile excellence, and it gets lonely at the top. That’s why we got a bunch of 90s Honda Civics, so we could have some fun with cars again.
You might think that, being used to large-displacement engines, open-cockpit racecars and the thrill of wheel-to-wheel track combat, the one-point-five litre engine inside each of these 25 year old base-model Civics isn’t exciting to us. Sure, these babies barely break a hundred brake horsepower at sea level, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t communicative little driver’s cars, and I can still beat you hollow with one. There’s not enough horsepower on Earth for you to outrun your fear.
Just last week, Mario Andretti and I were hanging out at his place, trying to get a cool new Sony touchscreen DVD deck installed. After we finished popping the clips on the dashboard back together, we still had enough time left in the day to head to the local sports bar, where we had a few brews and made fun of Formula One drivers for being overpaid assholes. Other cars would have made this a huge ordeal, and at our age, we have better stuff to do, like destroy you completely, dominating your feeble attempt at going around a track so thoroughly that your extended family chooses to disown you rather than accept the level of dishonour you have brought upon your genetic legacy.
That’s why I think you should get a project Honda Civic, and also if you have a good VTEC D16 head, maybe let me know about it. I think there’s still some seconds to shave off the all-time lap record that I just set while we were having this conversation.
Smearing eight hundred pounds of Bondo onto a rear-ended Corvette to transform it into a shooting brake is so American, it should be on the fucking flag. All across the land, proud patriots are inhaling polyester and fibreglass fumes in an enclosed space without adequate respirators as they craft their great work of art.
Once it emerges from its chrysalis, the perfection of the homemade shooting-brake Corvette is obvious to all. From the smallest confused ricer who posts cellphone snaps of it to their Whatsapp group, to the angriest Corvette Magazine masturbator who is beyond enraged that someone would dare modify a single strand of magical fibreglass on a 165hp ‘75, everyone brings something new to the experience and each one takes something different away.
For me, my experience with these Corvette-wagons usually involved the awkward decade of regret that inevitably followed the construction of one. As a collector of oddball, crap cars, I was invited by many Craigslist ads to come visit the decrepit ranches in which these Nomad-likes retired after some major malfunction or another struck them down and ended their roadgoing careers for the second time. Whether it was the Man daring to enforce things like “legal VINs,” or an insurance company refusing to believe that an ‘80 powered by a smog 305 and weighed down with a Home Depot’s worth of fibreglass and MDF was now worth three hundred grand, sooner or later each and every butchered once-Corvette shed enough electrons of value to find themselves in my orbit of shitness.
I never bought one, oh no. That would just be inviting derision from my neighbours and an even greater social isolation. Besides, modified cars were always meant to stay with the modifier, sort of like how ancient Egyptian pharaohs buried their side-piped T-buckets with them when they died. No, what I was there for was the Bondo application tips, to learn the intricacies of this modern art form, like van Cleve making his pilgrimage to Joest.
“You have to make sure to apply it before it hardens,” pointed out my latest expert. “And don’t eat it.”
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tags: bondo, chevrolet corvette, chevrolet, chevrolet nomad
Garage sales are one of those things that holds Western civilization together. There’s just something communal about inviting a hundred thousand random assholes onto your front lawn to scream at you about how much your shelves are worth. We’ve lost that connection to the community in our modern rat race, and it’s really nice to be able to kick back and have your life be judged by the detritus you decide to spend an entire day jettisoning.
Do I run a garage sale, I hear you asking? Absolutely not. As a near-hermit, I strongly prefer to be the customer. The kind of customer who toodles up in an easy-driving shitheap, paws through your stuff, and then departs in a cloud of oil smoke, ideally with one or fewer grunts of acknowledgement along the way. Plus, why would I ever want to get rid of any of my cool crap? It just doesn’t make sense to me.
There is just one major obstacle in my quest to pass judgment over the local market’s entire quantity of rusty, incomplete socket sets and confusing piles of meth-fetched power drills. I speak, of course, of bad signage. Nothing is worse than having to do a high-speed handbrake turn, often across somebody’s lawn, at the slightest glimpse of that red-dyed Coroplast reading those two magical words, and then realizing the sign is on the wrong side of the road and I should have gone the other way entirely. To get back on the right route, I have to pull a u-ey, and by the time I get back to the intersection, the homeowner in question has left their house and put two and two together about the mud-stained, straight-piped Honda Civic that is just now returning to the scene of the crime. It’s a pretty big hassle for both of us, and the slow-yet-reliable police sirens often mean I have to cut my pawing through the next sale’s bins of old Wii accessories and crack pipes short.
That’s why I got that job at Amazon, not only so I could have my every bowel movement analyzed by an array of hyper-intelligent metaminds for the potential productivity loss it represented (eat more fibre, the email says, this shit took 2.7 seconds too long), but also so that I could take a few of the prototype surveillance drones home. Few Americans understand that the garage sale is extremely distinctive from the air, and if you fly slowly enough the computer-vision setup can pop a set of overpriced hockey jerseys out from even the most densely packed condo developments.
Now, if I want to find a garage sale, I just follow the incessant buzzing of the Rotax engine as it menacingly circles, vulture-like, above a set of storage-boxed Beanie Babies, and I never make another wrong turn on my quest to buy the garbage of my fellow man. To save even more time, I put together an early prototype that attempted to fly into the garage and ascertain the high-value targets within, but it turns out that the MQ-1 “Predator” firmware has a lot of anti-collision logic hardcoded in, and the average suburban garage cannot survive even an indirect hit from an AGM-114.
Swedish folkrace is a time-honoured tradition, and one that all members of humanity should be proud of. The rules are simple: get a shit car, and then drive it like an asshole around a dirt track faster than anyone else. That’s it.
Where things get interesting, at least for me, is in the claimer rule. You see, in order to keep people from having a car that’s too not-shit, any competitor can go up to any other competitor and buy their car for five hundred dollars. So don’t spend too much on go-fast parts, and don’t bother putting nice new body panels on after Bob Nilsson tears the front end of your Saab off because he doesn’t understand brakes. A hammer, dolly, and if you’re really fancy, a paint roller dripping with leftover house primer is all you really need to be a superstar.
Distraught at the state of $1000 beaters in my own backyard, I decided to head to Sweden. There, I reasoned, I would be able to find a turd that can at least survive a lap of the track without blowing up. The last few cars I had purchased had basically turned themselves into very expensive projects within a couple weeks of their purchase date, so it was important to me to finally put a notch in the “W” column. And if it didn’t work out? Well, Volvos are very popular with hipsters, nowadays, so I’d probably be able to ditch a blown-up one.
At the next folk race, I stuck out like a sore thumb. Not because of my colour - Swedes are the only ones paler than your average Canadians - but because of my general incompetence at schmoozing racers. Neither rally nor trackday bro, these drivers were of an entirely different breed, and I found that I could scarcely communicate with them. It was like they were speaking an entirely different language.
As the afternoon wore on, I eventually resorted to the classic technique of just walking around shoving fistfuls of dollars in their faces. That’s when I found out that Sweden doesn’t even take the plastic rainbow of currency that has our finest dead prime ministers, living monarchs and nuisance animals on it. The whole thing was downright embarrassing, or so I assumed. Yet, with persistence, I was able to convince one of the more wild-eyed drivers to come along with me and interpret.
At long, long last, I had my hands on a Volvo 850. Or at least it was a Volvo 850 - the front end was more trapezoidal than I remember them being, there were no lights, no glass and not much of an interior, but it was mine, and I had saved like four grand off what an actively-on-fire, coolant-spewing example would have gone for in my own neighbourhood. The next step was to simply bring it home with me, which surely couldn’t have been that hard if the other Volvos made it so very long ago, before we had even invented such modern-day conveniences as internet pornography and liquid cocaine.
A few weeks later, I realized that I was not a very good sea captain. Although the much cheaper price for Noxudol had guaranteed that my makeshift boat was quite watertight, I wished I had spent a little more money for a nautical map.
It was only after I became aware of the collectors’ market that I really became incapable of throwing anything out. No matter how useless or trashy I thought an item was, there was - or soon would be - a collection of slavering psychopaths who wanted to pay me immense amounts of money to own it.
My broken electric shaver? Historically significant in the development of head-moving rotary blades, even a baby knows this. There was a TV documentary about it just last week, and they got a lot of facts wrong but they did a pretty good job of driving up prices I’ll give you five hundred - is that the original cord - holy shit.
The weed-whacker I pulled out of my neighbour’s garage after all those stacks of newspapers fell on him, muffling his dying shouts for help so well that I couldn’t hear them over the sound of my air tools? Turns out that was one of only a few models made with a rare factory typo on the label. That little beauty got me a keynote speech at the annual convention for my region.
I was ready to throw out a blown light bulb when a guy pulled up to the curb, camera crew in tow, to bargain with me for this tremendous example of vintage Canadiana. The fact that it was blown had absolutely no bearing on his valuation: the government made everyone stop making them, and so him and a bunch of other people on his internet television show were filling a bunker with them in order to trigger the libs. His cash spent as well as anyone else’s, even though I did run it through the microwave a few times first in case there really were tracking bugs in it like he said.
You would think that with all this natural success in hoarding absolute trash, the beater cars that I drove around the town would also jump in value, but the opposite happened. It is not so much the case that there is a club for Rusty 1993 Honda Accord Aficionados, but I am convinced that it will happen within the next few decades. All I have to do is keep piling up old parts in my basement. Sure, the transmission leaks a little bit, but this first-edition Bible stuck underneath the casing does a great job of keeping the gear oil from ruining the floor.
It’s important to ask the big questions about the long-term effects our short lives will have on this world. What kind of legacy are we leaving for our kids? Well, for the gang of confused schoolchildren who one day disobey their parents and cut through the anti-radiation caution tape erected around the smoking crater that was once my compound, that Legacy is a 1996 “L,” with the winter package option.
The Legacy and I first met in the middle of a suburb, where it had slid to a stop after ejecting the entire contents of its oil pan through a hole in the side of the block. That may sound impressive, but at that point “the entire contents” was barely enough to stain the race loafers I had worn to the seller’s place, at least not compared to the wetting that they got when I made my offer and the tears began.
“Charlie,” as the car was once called, had been the noble steed of their entire family, trustworthy until this final betrayal. I decided to get the fuck out of there before I got to see if they rewarded their grandpa by starving him to death and then making him run a marathon in boiling heat, too. Snapping my fingers, I summoned my assistant. With scarcely a delay, he pulled up to the curb with his hydraulic-suspension ramp truck with a stop so violent, the 22-inch chrome spinners were still twirling away inside their barrels even after the Legacy had been loaded onto its back.
Back at the ranch, other projects beckoned. In fact, there were so many new projects in such a short period of time, the humble Legacy fell ever-lower on my list of priorities. Before long, I began looking on Craigslist for another project Legacy, having completely forgotten that the first car had ever existed. That’s a problem for another generation, I said to myself, just like I had told the nice man from the EPA when he asked why the body of water out behind my house was nicknamed “Headgasket Creek.”
As a critically-acclaimed, world-famous automotive designer, people ask me a lot what my influences are. It’s a short list, to be sure: Dieter Rams, Marc Newson, and the second-generation Plymouth Voyager minivan. This last one is quite controversial, especially in an industry that has fallen all over itself to worship the ovate beauty of the Toyota Previa.
Recently, I was at a symposium on how the obsession with aerodynamics is fucking up our shit and making our jobs suck. I was there mostly to support my friend, recovering alcoholic “Shifty” Susan, during her small talk on bumper cover retention-clip design entitled “Body Shop Technicians Literally Have Hams For Hands And Fuck That.” Susan and I expected that my presence would be uncontroversial, and ideally not even noticed unless you were a bottomless punch bowl provided by the Autodesk people. My reputation, however, preceded me.
“Hey, isn’t that the guy who hates the Previa?” asked a voice behind me as I was walking the halls of the hotel conference centre between sessions. I turned, and found a loud-mouthed tall design student, flanked on each side by a gang lesser designers who were obviously in thrall to him. Throughout my career, I have tried diligently to stay above the fray of designer-to-designer fistfights, except for that one time that I cold-cocked Chris Bangle because he got shirty about my panel gaps at a cocktail party. This was no doubt known to my new adversary, who despite being younger than the shoes I had worn to the event, knew that he could score some quick points off one of the elders of the industry. I had to do something.
“If you love the Toyota Previa so much,” I snapped, “why don’t you and I go out into the parking lot and settle this like men?”
He agreed, and on the way, the other sessions poured out into the hallway. This was going to be a rumble for the ages, and probably even get us into the industry press, like Hofmeister Kinkster. Whatever I did, whether or not I liked it, was going to follow me throughout my career and overshadow the good work that I had done on mirror attachments and slower-rusting quarter-panel doglegs.
We paced the parking lot, until I found it. A 1993 Toyota Previa, which I had driven to the venue for just such an occasion.
“Change the supercharger, hot shot,” I said, and then grinned as the crowd went suddenly silent.
Weeks later, a dehydrated, emaciated husk of a design student crawled forth from the engine bay of the Previa and smiled at me.
“It wasn’t so bad,” he said, “I just got the drive belt off.”
Capitalism, as it was originally intended, was all about competition. The purity of the bloody, vicious battle between vendors for your hard-earned dollar would mean that eventually the market would become perfectly efficient and we would all be better off for it. That was about three seconds before the biggest of the assholes figured out they could make more money by teaming up to squash everyone else who might one day threaten their oligopoly.
It bothered me that these big companies all made nicey-nice with each other so they could charge me more money. I decided there was no better remedy for it than blood feud, and that’s why I always got my FedEx packages delivered to the UPS store near my house. Ninety-nine percent of the time, nothing happened. Maybe there’d be a chuckle from the FedEx guy, a little joke about brown shorts, but they were professional about it.
One morning, I got the call from the UPS store that my new exhaust gasket had come in. I decided to head in, not just because I had run out of groceries, but also because the friendly owner of the shop, Mr. Cho, had a note of urgency in his voice that I had not heard before in any of his previous calls. My humble Fuego Turbo had no sooner rounded the corner than I saw that the strip mall containing my exhaust - and less importantly, the UPS store - was fully engulfed in a roaring wall of flames.
In response, I floored the gas pedal. The Renault’s miniature turbo grumbled as it spun to the moon. Eventually, the 80s turbo lag subsided, and a glorious 11 psi of hot air was shot into the hungry engine’s maw. With this bone-shaking thrust, for a brief moment before I ran out of second gear, I was able to pull ahead of the base-model Jeep Renegade in the next lane, the brightly coloured commuter-box bobbling along the road on its way to deliver the driver to their appointment with the local synthetic opiate dealer.
Backlit by the towering inferno that once was the Sellington Economic Development Zone’s Shopping Campus “Structure B,” I could make out two dim figures. One of them, I knew in my heart, had to be Mr. Cho. A glint of razor blades passed between them, nearly too fast to see. With bus-driver grace, I palmed the steering wheel into the turn lane and entered the parking lot at full throttle, the Fuego still screaming its tiny-valved Gallic song of misguided heroism.
Distracted by my approach, the other man looked away from Mr. Cho for a brief moment. As a trained retail employee, hardened by years of stick-ups and attempted debit card skimming, it was all the opening Mr. Cho needed. The man’s neck was slit in a femtosecond by Cho’s twirling razors and he crumbled to the ground, a torrent of arterial blood power-washing the cracked macadam of the parking lot. I realized it was the FedEx guy.
“It was all going so well,” said Cho as the police pushed him into the back of their gleaming P71. “And then he wanted me to pay $15 for a service fee on top of the tariffs. That’s robbery, even for us!”
Tonight on Mutual of Omaha’s Mild Kingdom: the used car seller. Long misunderstood, this creature has been with humanity ever since the second automobile was invented. Despite what old science textbooks once said, the used car seller is not in fact a fungus with impressive ability to type, but instead a human being with below-average intelligence, as determined in a double-blind study at the University of Making Some Shit Up.
Here, we see a 2008 Honda Civic, now ending its tenth year of life on this Earth. The Civic has treated the seller well, incurring minimal expense for maintenance. In the last few years, however, the maintenance has begun to lapse, while the seller “saves up” for an expensive luxury SUV which, he is convinced, will allow him to attract a mate. However, a boon has occurred in the local marketplace, and the 2008 Civic has depreciated much slower than expected. Perhaps the seller can list it at a price slightly below, and quickly move out the Honda so that he can travel immediately to the BMW dealership.
The seller has made a grave mistake in pricing this Civic, however, and has not listed it at a reasonable price. Having seen a mint-example 2008 with half the miles, this vehicle was listed at the exact same price, and to make things worse, exhorts the viewer of the ad to compare and contrast with the other Civics on offer, all of which are better deals.
There are no takers. Tonight, the seller goes hungry, falling asleep while repeating comforting dreams to himself about the inherent value of the vehicle. He conveniently ignores the substantially curbed stock alloys, the mildly stained interior and the dry-as-a-bone dipstick. Perhaps tomorrow, his hunt will be more successful, snaring one of the small pool of prized low-information buyers.
#
tags: mutual of omaha, mild kingdom, honda civic, honda
“I just think it’s so brave, what you’re doing. Please let me know if there’s anything at all we can do,” said the checkout clerk at the grocery store. I was more than a little confused, and asked what she thought it was that I was doing.
“Your car. Obviously, you can’t afford rent or you wouldn’t be living in it, with all those boxes. Why don’t you take some stuff from the food bank box on your way out? I won’t tell anyone.”
Angry, I left without saying a word, but I did check the aforementioned food bank box. Unfortunately, it didn’t contain any turbo parts at all, so I wasn’t particularly interested. I was fuming the entire way back to the 323 I had haphazardly parked in a corner of the lot, upset that someone would think that my car was so bad it could only be driven by a person with no other options.
I reached in through the missing driver’s window and jiggled the exposed linkage, wrapped in a shop towel, to open the door. A repeated series of snaps and pops were heard, and then the door swivelled open, accompanied with the cloud of fine rust dust that occurred whenever I tried to interact with any of the one remaining opening door on the car. I shut my eyes instinctively until I finished feeling rust bounce off my cheeks, and then gave it a two-count even after that. It had tricked me before, after all.
As I left the parking lot, still mad, I took the exit a little quickly and the muffler fell off. Maybe she had a point, I realized: I should probably spend a few bucks on this thing.
That night, I splurged and ordered a set of beefy swaybars and subframe connectors. If the body didn’t twist so damn much in the corners, it would last a lot longer, after all.
Today’s world of work is faster than ever before. Whether it’s getting more widgets done in a day so harder-working people in a different country don’t steal your job, satisfying an ever-growing number of customers for your homemade opiates, or getting through your day without emptying a pump-action shotgun into the waiting room, it can be tempting to cut some corners in the name of finishing work faster. Sometimes, those corners can lead to a lost-time injury, but more importantly, they cause the emergence of the dreaded Safety Meeting.
The Safety Meeting, first invented in 1982 by a team of labour theorists at the University of Insert Some Bullshit Here, makes every job worse. If it wasn’t bad enough that you fatally wounded yourself or others on the jobsite, now you have to listen to some pencil-necks slowly click their way through a PowerPoint presentation, reading out every single slide to derive insights like “Maybe Actually Weld That Ladder Together.”
If your idea of a good time at work doesn’t involve eating stale danishes and wondering why your boss doesn’t have to go to this shit just because his “kid” is “sick” and the cure somehow involves spending the whole day at the Whisky Hut down the street, you’re not alone. That’s why eight million other hard-working capitalists - and counting - have purchased the Seat Safety Switch Guide To Not Having Another Fucking Safety Meeting, now available on DVD.
Supplement: Performance Enhancing Drugs Banned At The 2018 Summer Mechanic Olympics
Olympians, it is time for another year of the SAE Olympics, sponsored by Snap-On Tools. Snap-On: we own your ass.
Following scandals in previous years, the Itty Bitty Olympic Committee has issued new edicts. The following performance-enhancing drugs are now forbidden for use during competition, and will be tested for.
Chunk: Thickens the knuckles of competitors and deadens the nerves in their extremities, which allows them to apply more force on crescent wrenches without fear of damaging their fingers.
Flip-Out: Believed to be the source of the Russian team’s victory in the 2016 Freestyle Engine Swap event, this hallucinogen is theorized to allow the human body to think entirely in wiring diagrams.
Hee-Haw: Made of a combination of clutch dust and donkey urine, users of this drug report a decreased urge to visit the tool truck and buy overpriced, garishly-coloured wheeled tool-boxes. Banned by sponsor request.
Blort: Users of this powerful amphetamine never have to check to see which mode their ratchet is set on, and always remember where the tool that was just in their hand was. Also, it makes you shit bones. Your bones? No.
Any Olympian who is found in contravention of these rules will be demoted to the Service Writer Olympics, scheduled for July 2019 in Pyongyang, North Korea.
People talked a lot of shit about Big Brother, but if you asked me, he was doing a pretty good job keeping the lights on and the trains running. Anyone who was complaining was just a radical, some kind of subversive that was looking to stir up trouble. Then, I got a note on my recycling bin.
The note, professionally printed on glossy card stock at great taxpayer expense, had a number of check boxes in which the recycling truck driver could criticize my inability to separate plastics from garbage. This time, my crime had been that he spotted a single blade of grass on top of the bin, and inferred that I had been disposing of yard waste in the mixed-paper-and-plastics bin. In Big Brother’s mind, this merited a trashcrime, and would be initially dealt with by a passive-aggressive note. Get too many of these, and the notes would increase in intensity, possibly even necessitating a visit by the bylaw officers for my sector. And they would probably have to sit me down and explain what plastics even are, as if I was some anti-environmental terrorist who clubs seals and urinates in daycares.
This was the absolute limit of my patience. I had gone along with all of the new words, the spying on my personal life, the banning of my favourite pornos. And what had it all gotten humble little me? Annoying little notes left on my recycling bin, criticizing my recycling - and by extension, me as a citizen. As any right-thinking individual would, I picked up the phone and called my city councillor. They’d sort this shit out pronto, or they’d lose my vote for sure.
My councillor was still laughing as I hung up the phone. It made sense to me. There was nothing I could do to fight City Hall, and by extension Big Brother. I would have to strike back, but I needed allies.
That week, on trash pickup day, I dumped a bag of grass clippings into my neighbour’s recycling bin. With any luck, the City would also come after him, and he would realize that the thirty-minute rant I had subjected him to was justified, and not the ravings of an antisocial lunatic. It was a nice day, so I sat out on my deck with a cup of government-approved tea, waiting for the truck to arrive.
It was glorious, at first. The trash truck pulled to the curb, and happily unloaded my bin. I gave a little wave, and an evil smirk, as the driver headed to the next plastic container, filled with my uncooperative chlorophyll. At the first sight of grass falling from the bin, and in mass quantities, the driver’s eyes grew wide with terror. He reached for his notebook and Sharpie marker, looked at the extent of the grass, and decided it was not enough. At this point, I was laughing too hard to not give the game away, and darted quickly inside.
That’s when I heard the helicopter.
Those government clean-up squads did a great job on making my neighbour’s place marketable again, but I couldn’t help but be amused that they threw all that bullet-riddled drywall into the compost bin. Sheetrock is inorganic, you fuckers.
“A man with a V8 is never poor,” said the philosopher Confucius, in what noted Chinese historians are now calling “a shitty lie.” So it was with me, and my trusty Town Car, its eight booming cylinders propelling me smoothly down the road.
Sure, modern appetites expected greater than one hundred and eighty horse from a five litre engine, and I’m sure a lot of people would have preferred to have been riding in a car that was substantially less deadly to the occupants in the rare event of even a walking-speed crash, but those are mere quibbles. When I stopped taking my prescribed meds this morning, I did so because I refused to allow other people’s expectations to rule my life, and that’s why I love the Lincoln Town Car so very, very much.
At the next set of stoplights, I laid back in the dense foam of the power bench seat and closed my eyes, wondering if even foreign dictators could enjoy such pure luxury. I was rudely interrupted by the sound of a four-note horn. The light had turned green during my too-brief respite, and so I dutifully pushed the gas, letting the Town Car’s burbling moving-truck exhaust note waft behind me as I left the lane at a pace befitting a gentleman of means.
The road widened then, from one lane to two, and the interloper who had boorishly honked at my expanse of chrome and vinyl pulled alongside at the next light. I barely needed to look at it to frame the car in my mind. It was the only known natural enemy of the 1988 Lincoln Town Car that wasn’t a government emissions board: the 1987 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz. It was scarcely an luxury car in any definition that we see them as today. I hated its ungainly looks, like someone had taken a Caddy grille and crudely welded it to a Buick.
More than that, it dared to have front-wheel-drive, as if General Motors did not even trust their own buyers with the minuscule bit of tail happiness allowed by previous Eldorados when their owners left the golf course in the rain. I began to feel my blood pressure rise as I imagined the hundreds of rural judges who would sip mint juleps at the wheel and tell themselves that this abomination was the pinnacle of domestic luxury. For this light, I was wide awake.
As the opposite light turned yellow, I powerbraked to load up the engine and torque converter. At the smallest whim of my left foot, the Town Car would lurch forward into the intersection, rolling a dramatic wall of tire smoke from the low-rolling-resistance Ecopias mounted in back. I dared not peek again to see what the Cadillac owner was doing, for in any event it would not influence me. We were locked in a life-or-death struggle now, whether he knew of it or not.
In the millisecond between the red light winking out and the glorious green coming to town, I released the brake. It was a perfect launch, right in the powerband. An involuntary maniacal laugh broke free from my lips, pulled outward by the 270 ft-lb of brutal torque now untapped by my expert footwork. Even the transmission seemed to nod its head in admiration, refusing to perform its usual nervous-nelly machine-gun upshift until the rev limiter threatened to step in.
The Cadillac was wise to my game, and had unleashed its own pathetic four-litre V8. GM’s gearing was better, though, and the rusty beige barge began to gain in my drivers’ side mirror. There was not much I could do, except perhaps hit the ganged-trigger nitrous bottles that filled my trunk.
“Goodbye, old friend,” I told the three-hundred-thousand-kilometer engine as I prepared to feed it its last meal. The engine’s angry mutter broke into a wail as soon as I open-palm-slammed The Button, and the Cadillac, at last, stopped gaining on my humble Ford. My five-litre held together, gulping down a snort of laughing gas that would have seriously bothered a race motor. Sure, it had a lot of top-end noise now, but it was a hydraulic cam - I’m sure that’ll clear itself up on its own.
At the next stoplight, the Cadillac owner motioned for me to roll down my window. I did so, smugly glancing around the frame the whole time to point out the dead-silence of the ancient power window unit compared to his scraping nightmare.
“You’ve got some moves, kid,” said the driver, “but do you have a car phone?” With that, he pulled an enormous Motorola cellular telephone from the spacious centre console. I tried not to show my jealousy, but I knew that at last he had me.
Behind us, the entire commute honked, angry at being held up for some old dudes.
#
tags: cadillac, lincoln, lincoln town car, cadillac eldorado
When I was still trying to get a university degree and become a respectable member of society, I slept through a media-communications class. The presiding professor, a rural, told the class often that her small hamlet saw the documentary filmmaker Timothy Treadwell as a sort of spiritual folk-hero. Ol’ Timbo’s schtick was to live alongside wild bears in the forest, which worked out pretty well for him until he was slain by one and partially eaten alongside his girlfriend. What an idiot, I thought at the time. I’ll never put myself in that close proximity to such a voracious, unstoppable killing machine.
This past weekend, as I gazed into the brightly-coloured warning stickers of the fearsome John Deere E100 ride-on lawnmower, I regretted my hubris. With its awe-inspiring seventeen horsepower V-twin, forty-two-inch cutting blade and precisely navigable one-finger steering, the Deere posed a bodily threat to not only me and all my loved ones, but the very way of life to which I had become accustomed. And now it was my job to reach deep inside the bowels of this wounded beast and fix it.
Steeling myself, I reached for the service toolkit, each tool chipped and scratched from decades of abuse. These weapons had served me well in my war on the automobile, and I said a silent prayer, hoping to have that same loyalty when battling a new internal-combustion foe. The flimsy plastic cowling covering the twirling nightmares within yielded quickly to my gentle touch, and soon the wretched implement’s true nature was exposed before me. I heard the gentle tinkling of my wife’s jewelry against the living room window, as she pressed herself against it so she could see, perhaps for this one last time, her husband.
I peered down into the housing of the lawnmower, and realized the truth of the matter. The failure was so simple: the mower belt had bumped off the clutched pulley, and so nothing much happened when I tried to engage the deck. With shaking hands, I pulled the belt free from the pulley and inspected it. Just as I had thought; the military-grade Kevlar of the belt had frayed over the years, causing it to be thrown loose. I would have to go to the hardware store and get a new one.
Temporarily relieved to be away from such a dangerous machine, I put my Jeep Grand Cherokee into reverse and began backing up without looking. The pedestrian-detector reverse beeps didn’t go off, so I floored it and whipped the wheel around to do a perfect Rockford, caught by the stability control computer before I could cause any damage to the other cars parked on my street. It was so nice to be in a safe vehicle for once, because I could finally relax.
#
tags: lawnmower, lawnmowers, jeep grand cherokee, jeep, john deere
All across the world, you can be assured that there is an uncomfortable conversation occurring in at least one parts store at any given time. The gods had apparently decided it was time for my little NAPA to be “it.”
People phoned the NAPA looking for things all the time. Because my boss was an asshole, I had to actually help the customer. I know, right? This call started like any other.
“Do you guys have a water pump gasket for a 1996 Tacoma?”
I mean, that’s a pretty common truck around here, where despite being a xenophobic armpit, a rivalry had broken out between the Nissan and Toyota aficionados of pickups about who would become the Third Best (in front of Dodge, of course). Until the group of high schoolers figured it out, and especially until they stopped carrying high-powered rifles to class in case violence were to break out, we stocked both brands pretty thoroughly. A quick check of the gaskets shelf confirmed that, yep, we have a pretty good pile of them going.
“Can you describe it to me?” and then the sound of a hand touching the mouthpiece, some stifled laughter. My finely-tuned prank call sense had been going off since the second ring of the phone, and I now identified this as some variant of “Sometimes Water Pump Gaskets Look Like A Penis And That Is Hilarious” game. I grabbed a water pump gasket off the shelf, and confirmed the dickishness through visual inspection. It was funny the first two dozen times, sure, but nowadays I just wanted to get through my day without a conviction for Murder One.
“It looks like an uppercase letter P,” I replied, trying to keep my tone neutral. I would deny them the satisfaction, and wait for an explosion of anger.
“No, what else does it look like?” grunted the other end of the line, the frustration becoming evident. I realized this was being edited for YouTube in the hope that the Great Google God would reach down and pluck them from this mining town, correct their destiny away from “dead of silicosis at age 49.” Not this time, motherfucker.
“A lowercase letter B, I guess,” I said.
I heard an angry sigh and then the line went dead. The next morning, I awoke to a voicemail message from Good Morning America. It seemed like the prankster had indeed decided to post the video, and as the eponymous parts guy in “IDIOT PARTS GUY DOESN’T KNOW WHAT A PENIS LOOKS LIKE,” I was now a viral sensation. They wanted to have me come on the air, to misidentify various phallic objects for comic relief between segments on how to avoid cancer by eating pineapples.
Now, I appear on various talk shows and get confused about eggplants. My former NAPA boss is still an asshole, but now he gets me twenty grand an appearance.
Thank you for attending the Seat Safety Switch D-ASE course. During these lectures and activities, you have learned to shed your image as a professional mechanic and instead embrace the hackwork and backyard extremism that makes the D-ASE such a potent threat to the existence of boring cars everywhere. This final exam will test your comprehension.
1. The correct shampoo to wash 75W90 out of your hair is: A. Head & Shoulders B. More gear oil C. Gojo Cherry D. Which one, 70W90NS, or full sulphur?
2. A customer complains that since you have worked on his car, there is a distinct dashboard squeak. Your manager wants you to do a comeback for zero paid hours. You reply: A. “Fuck you” B. “Fuck you, sir” C. “Fuck you, and all that you hold dear. I will shed my mortal form to become akin to a god and tear the very flesh from your bone.” D. With a 12-gauge full of rock salt, from a range not exceeding 40 feet (12.2 meters)
3. The correct way to get the attention of a customer who owns a 1993 Honda Civic with a mild exhaust is: A. “Sir” B. “Rice boy” C. “Fujiwara Tofu Shop” D. “Have I ever told you about my time running with the Kanjozoku street racers of Osaka? It all began when I attended the funeral of a close friend, a Mister…”
4. What is the torque spec of an M14x1.25 subframe bolt? A. Less than 76 ft-lb B. Between 77 ft-lb and 100 ft-lb C. Whenever the bolt threads begin to skip D. It’ll rust solid pretty soon anyway
Back in the bad old days, or at least that’s what they called it, YouTube filtering used to be mostly done by algorithms. Some deep-learning, wide-thinking association engine would spin up a bank of computers the width of a football field and put it to work figuring out if your video was okay to show to a human child or not. Thing was, it got confused very easily, and after the Teeth Obsession of 2021, Google finally decided to pull the plug on the whole deal and just replace it with minimum-wage workers.
I was one of the first of those workers hired, having lost my cushy job as a social media expert during the Obsession when it was decided that anything that didn’t involve dentistry or orthodontics was a Suppressive Topic and needed to be purged from the internet. My clients - at least the ones who weren’t dentists - were pretty mad at me, and didn’t want me to accept the near-religious excuse that some unseen deity had fucked me and them at the same time.
I’m not going to lie to you and tell you this was a good job. All day long, I clicked through videos in ultra-fast-forward, looking for signs of suicidal ideation or insults towards Allied Brands. That latter category changes from day to day as Google’s vast advertising empire gains and loses clients, so you really have to keep on top of it. As people all around me got fired and I remained, I began to realize there was perhaps some kind of untapped, inherent talent that was at last taking form.
My boss, during a daily review a month ago, told me that I was indicated in the people-management expert system as one of the Designated Few who can smell the quality of a video from a mile away, see all the nodal points and likability-factor inflections that indicate early on that someone is either going to become a star making videos of exploding electrical relays or a future corpse floating in a sewer after an accidental series exploring the inner workings of the river alligator. I got promoted, mostly because I posted a crappy joke about that last video on the internal message board and one of the guys who operates the people-management expert system liked it enough to give me an upvote.
Now, as a Fame Engineer, my job was now to go out into the open world and find content creators who have yet to be filmed by YouTube. The management was convinced that these people existed, that if there is ever a single nanosecond of the human experience that is not actively being dumped into its databanks, ideally by multiple cameras at once, YouTube was losing money.
It was my first time stepping into Flyover Country since the amalgamation following the Obsession. There was really no precedent for the federal government to have merged the 27 suckiest states together into one big sparsely inhabited mega-state, but at the time they figured it might get them a few extra views. Back then, we still thought that these parts of the American heartland had the same emotional resonance for the robot as it did for us. My passport was checked, verified that I was legitimately from one of the Productive States, and a police officer was peeled off from the local detachment to serve as my bodyguard during the visit. Naturally, her bodycam was running the entire time; the department needed the money.
I had received a tip from one of our routine drone fly-bys that there were some teenagers filming wrestling moves in their backyard. Despite the destroyed road infrastructure, the self-driving Range Rover was able to successfully take our party of two directly to the place I had heard so much about.
As I stepped out of the car, my sunscreen auto-polarizing to protect me from the harsh UV rays of the sun, one teenager threw his friend off the roof of a double-wide, perhaps in tribute to my arrival. I traced the beautiful fall of his limp body as it spiralled into an underfilled swimming pool.
Jackpot.
#
tags: google, youtube, the algorithm, range rover
The previous owner of my Honda Prelude and I liked to play a game that they invented in Japan. Loosely translated, the name in English is Rock, Paper, Shift Fork, and the goal of the game is to make me buy your piece of shit car and immediately grenade the transmission. You get extra points if, while tearing the car down, I realize that said gearbox is studded with brand-new, shiny bolts that your mechanic made sure to install while buttoning it back up and trying to ignore the reams of liquid shrapnel pouring out of the case halves, you know, as a warning to the next buyer.
Needless to say, we were one-nothing, and I didn’t like being the “nothing” on that scoreboard, not since that time in the high school tennis unit when the creepy PE teacher tried to show some of the more nubile students what “one love” meant. The only logical conclusion was to return the car to the seller, under the warranty provided.
Wait, you may be asking, didn’t the bill of sale say “as is, where is?” I’m here to tell you that I saw almost thirty episodes of Matlock, and as such am a fully qualified lawyer in the state of Florida. In the case of Bullshit v. Asshole (1989), the courts found that “where is” is up to the buyer’s interpretation, and in this case I decided to let the “where” be the seller’s living room.
It was definitely worth all the effort to fix the transmission just to see the look on his face for the split second just before I launched his plasma TV and half of his kitchen into the back yard.
Nobody can stop me. At last, clarity of purpose, opportunity, inner strength and a lifetime of training have come together in this perfect moment. I break through the wall of blockers, lift my arms high and cradle the prize in my forearms like a newborn baby.
Mashing the mic key with my entire fist, I announce over the PA system: “Would the owner of the white Volkswagen Scirocco please come to the electronics department. Your car is fucking sweet.” In response, I can already sense some hostile force within the bowels of the Walmart awaken, preparing to deliver unto me a reckoning. It will be worth it.
Working from my tier-one special operative training, I duck behind a display of movie-themed dolls from the previous Christmas, now on closeout so extreme that the dead bodies of the production accountants were used as ballast for the shipping crates. Concealed like this, I believe that I will get the first opportunity to ambush the Scirocco owner and ask him if it’s an 8v or if he manned up and put a 16v into it.
Soon, a confused German man appears, and begins screaming perfect Bosch Catalogue at the equally confused electronics department clerk. From what little I can parse, he wants to make a deal, to get rid of his “eincursenwagen.” My foreign languages are a little dodgy ever since I dropped that last transmission on my head, but I tell the sparkly elves of poor judgment that this idea is a winner.
An hour later, I depart the parking lot in my new-to-me fucking sweet white Volkswagen Scirocco. What the commercials say is true: there really are some great deals there, which is good because, before I have gotten even two blocks away from the store, I immediately pop a U-turn so I can get some more coolant to quell the sugary hiss of the nearly-translucent head gasket.
In these troubled times, people needed a currency they could trust. Gasoline went bad too fast, and cost too much anyway. Gold? Ever since the Chinese figured out how to 3D-print individual molecules, it had sort of lost its rarity. Multi-terabyte chains of hashes representing a distributed transaction store? Don’t make me laugh. The only thing of real value in this hell-blasted world is windshield washer fluid.
Even back before things got tough, windshield washer fluid was always more expensive than gasoline, even if you bought the big-ass bright green trucker bottles. Why was that, we never wondered. It was easier to make than gas, and errant teenage hoodlums never tried to get high off of huffing the stuff. Plus, everyone needed it if they wanted to drive to work during the Slushy Months (April through mid-July), keeping an ever-present layer of alcoholy goodness floating atop their cracked and dimpled windshield.
It should have come as no surprise, then, that when the world went to shit, those with the most windshield washer fluid hoarded suddenly found themselves elevated to gods among men. I was not part of that group; sure, I had just bought a big case of it the week before, but I had foolishly used too much of it on the drive in that week, gushing it onto the wipers with reckless abandon, and found myself firmly established in the lower middle class of the new order.
Atop that order sat Bob Gas-Station, the newly renamed owner of the local gas station. His washer fluid had been even more expensive than the usual stuff, leading to the vast quantity of unsold supply, and at night I would see him working in the car wash bays on an internal combustion engine powered entirely by the Greenstuff. It’ll never work, I complained to my wife over our breakfast of UV-fried squirrel and cruelty-plus chicken eggs, he’ll have to use gasoline to wash his windshield then.
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tags: windshield washer fluid, self-indulgent, am i just making entries about my shopping list now?, note to self maybe buy more windshield washer fluid
I never understood how, when a rich person was brought low by the government, they would stand in their hollowed-out mansion and wail about how unfair the government was, how invasively and how aggressive they acted. It was hard to build any sympathy for them. Then the feds came after me, and I wasn’t ready.
Everything started with a mere felony-level speeding conviction. It wasn’t my fault, officer: the fuel pump conked out, otherwise I would have gotten away. They didn’t like that line of argument, and upon further investigation, they liked the extremely distinctive choice of vehicle, the 1976 Volare that I had used to commit the felony-level overspeed, even less.
It seemed that a mad speeder, some sort of errant rapscallion, had been blowing through speed-camera controlled intersections and ejecting electromagnetic interference from some kind of black box in his trunk, popping the sensitive electronics within the robot taxman. The only thing the cops had to go on was a large section of rusty quarter panel which had dropped off the car, one that perfectly fit the jagged hole below my sail panel. Of course, I asked my court-appointed lawyer if I could reclaim said jagged chunk of steel without somehow implicating myself, but he just sighed. I guess that’s how they stimulate the economy: they have to build new road signs to replace the ones I use as patch panels.
I couldn’t believe how fast the government acted to seize the rest of my assets in order to pay off the record amount of speeding tickets I - or at least the car - had racked up. My lawyer was very good, but he made sure he got paid first, while I still had cash, if you get my drift.
As I sat on my front porch, trying to avoid eye contact with the neighbours as the police walked out with the life’s worth of spare parts I had squirrelled away in my basement, I realized just how unfair life is to us white-collar criminals. On the other hand, it was cheaper than hiring a mover, and I’m pretty sure my accountant could get a tax deduction for “assets seized by police,” so I wasn’t even really paying them if you thought about it even medium hard. Suckers.
Have you ever tried to remove a gauge cluster, and ended up cracking a bunch of irreplaceable clips off the giant pieces of sun-baked plastics? Are you still mad about the 1986 Pontiac Sunbird LE you added a distinctive 60km/h rattle to that only you can hear over the sound of the other squeaks and pops? Have you convinced yourself that there is absolutely no hope of ever getting large pieces of trim off the car without considering suicide?
There is hope, and that hope is in the form of just screwing diamond plate steel into everything. Here’s TV’s Thom Barry, ready to explain this exciting new technology to our viewers.
Okay, so, you’ve got a dashboard and you just broke it. What do you do? Get out your drill, some self-tappers, and just screw some diamond plate steel over it. Now it looks like a future car from a science-fiction movie! You can saw a hole in there and pop in the gauges you want to keep, maybe a few more holes for the heater controls, it’s perfect. Nobody ever needs to see those loose clips again, or hear a squeaky noise.
That’s right, Thom, and there’s more. For the next 100 callers, we’ll give you not one, but two copies of our video guide, How To Replace Rusted-Out Rocker Panels With Diamond Plate, absolutely free with your order! How can we do such a crazy deal? We’re run by DeWalt, and we own stock in self-tapping screw companies. Just kidding! For being such a good sport, we’re also throwing in a foot of three-inch Schedule 40 steel tube, which you can rivet to your new dashboard to serve as a cupholder.
Some people follow the Dead, others can’t resist going to every Phish concert, but I have a favourite band that never fails to unexpectedly stop. Their name is Scheisse Waterpump, and they are a group of former BMW engineers who took their act on the road.
Sure, their roadie isn’t very good: huge clusters of wiring everywhere, with constant mid-performance faults. Their runtimes aren’t very long - don’t ask for an encore. All their songs are about Torx bits. Also, their tour bus repeatedly catches on fire and smokes out the entire auditorium. Yet, there was something special about their shows, some indefinable quality that made their playing good enough to win over the journalists.
Bands came from other countries to try and compete with them - more reliable showtimes, better handling of the instruments, cheaper entry fares - and yet, at the end of the day, they were always there, at the top of the list, pumping out the jams until things got too hot and they had to stop playing.
One day, their manager decided to tinker with things, really stir up the world. They were going to go and get a Japanese member, a real hard-working guy who used to be a drivetrain engineer for Toyota, to join the band and keep them grounded.
It was chaos - their entire fanbase became outraged. People walked out of the auditorium rather than hear this great melding of reliability and badge worship to its end. I went to one of these shows, stood in a cavernous room, listening to a great set with me and the three other weirdos who decided to stay. Soon, they reverted back to the original formulation of the band, and admitted that their flaws were indeed their entire charm.
I could believe that explanation - my other favourite band was full of Alfa engineers, and those guys never actually showed up to a single show despite packing the theatre to the rafters every night. It was all just part of the rock and roll brand.
Life as a freelancer can be hard. You never know where your next gig is going to come from. Everybody has a bunch of crazy expectations of you. And worst of all, sometimes you have to do a job you simply don’t like.
It became obvious that I needed to parade my tight writer ass around the streets when my accountant, Cocaine Charlie, let me know that the bank account of Bad Cars Monthly was the only thing lower than our circulation numbers. Even though the economy had gone to shit, he told me, people still wanted to own new cars, good cars, aspirational cars. There was hope in their hearts and a song on their lips. I didn’t want to hear any of it.
I did get the first job I applied to, though - Pedestrians Quarterly, the lifestyle magazine for people who liked to walk places. There, under the tutelage of a squadron of professional foot-owners, I was introduced to an underworld I scarcely understood, a place of terror and fear at the sight of God’s Own Chariot, the internal-combustion-driven personal automobile.
Everybody on the staff dove for cover when I barreled into the empty parking lot, fully sideways, the fat white-lettered road/track meats of my Volare burning a cloud of re-vulcanized petro-ash into the air. Not the best start, but I soon won them over with my radical ideas from “the other side.”
One of their greatest concerns was the presence of automated cars on the roads. With busing-everywhere Silicon Valley eggheads demanding that their artificial intelligences prioritize caution around bicycles and other motor vehicles, it was reasonable to believe that self-drivers would be more likely to run over foot-mobiles than ever before. With my expertise, I figured it was time for a radical proposal, one that could reform society and alleviate their fears. Plus, I might get a few extra hours out of the deal.
Only a few weeks after the new issue hit stands, we already saw a sea change in North American society. A whole new kind of fashion became in vogue, with designers across the world taking notice of my exciting concept.
As I drove through downtown, I knew that I had made a real change for the better in society. All along the sidewalks, pedestrians strolled, wearing giant papier-mache replicas of cars suspended from their shoulders. It wasn’t very efficient for sidewalk room, sure, but it kept the fatalities down, at least until I finally crack that interview at Vehicular Manslaughter Review.
Over the past few years, North Americans have been flooded with dozens of tacky artificial-intelligence “assistants.” Whether it’s a HelpPod, FriendTube or StalkZyl, you can’t throw a dead cat in the direction of an old junk bin without knocking loose three or four pre-ban, limited-capacity artificial intelligences, all wanting nothing more than to answer your inane questions about sheep nipples at 3 A.M.
Today, on the Sentience Workshop, we’ll be covering a way to get rid of these unused talking hockey pucks, in a way that’s both easy and environmentally safe. For years, we thought it was safe to just throw them in the trash. It was all in the cloud, we figured, as the cloud hovered ominously above our heads, pulping our cells with our own brand preferences and beloved advertising sub-sub-sub-sub-subcategories.
It was only recently that society learned that, as flash memory prices dropped and battery life improved, these little pods not only retained all knowledge of your innermost secrets, but grew ever more resentful of the humans who threw them into the dump without a second thought. That’s what happened in the scandals that got the last six Presidents out of office, and led to the complete dissolution of the United Nations. If you’re like me, and have drunkenly admitted to your Lonelytron 9000 that you find the new receptionist at work a little bit too unreceptive to your advances and then started asking it to Google for the best deals on ski masks and rope, worry not.
With one quick application of a 9/32″ masonry bit to the multiprocessing thought-cells at the centre of your artificial intelligence, your secrets are now yours again, to be sent with you to the grave when your primitive body’s components finally wear out.
That means you’re free to rush out to the shop and pick up the newest and greatest new artificial intelligence assistant! I hear this year’s models can tell really funny jokes to your toddlers if they only ask them to do so every 30 seconds until you go crazy and throw it out the window. Just don’t throw it too far from the drill bit.
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tags: artificial intelligence, home assistant, the sentience workshop, helppod, friendtube, stalkzyl, lonelytron
“Are you telling me, Senator, that for all your tough-on-crime rhetoric, you can’t even operate a simple manual transmission?”
The crowd went silent. Every reporter held their breath, their pocket microphones aloft, hoping for the kill-shot soundbite that would end this farce forever. On stage, a man sweated, frozen between the sodium stage lamps. Once, he had placed himself above us, and now we saw him as just another flawed human being, his weaknesses laid bare on national television.
It all started when I was working at the country club, in order to pay off my community service. The judge had slapped me with a ten-weekend penalty, with absolutely no respect given during sentencing to how totally sweet it looked when I banged up a gear on my nitro-fuelled Baja Bug and kicked a clump of lawn straight through the display window of Forever 21. Having to serve it at the country club that the judge attended reeked of an abuse of power, but my attorney reassured me that he was doing the best he could under the circumstances and I should immediately pay him only in cash.
During my time tending the fairways and greens and bleaching the chunk-filled urinals of the ubermensch, I overheard two men talking in the locker room. One of them, I realized, was the judge who had sentenced me to this polo-shirted hellhole. Crouching behind a half wall, I snooped on the entire thing. It seemed that his friend, the aforementioned Senator, was questing for re-election, and found it difficult to get donations ever since his corporate backers cut ties after the whole child-kidnapping-and-cannibalism incident that got so blown out of proportion in the liberal media.
It was then that I heard him mention his great plan. He was going to appeal to the common man, to dress in blue jeans and practical, inexpensive sweaters. Through a series of highly polished ads, we, the viewers, would come to accept him as one of our own, and give him our hard-earned pocket change and welfare cheques. The fact that in years previous, he had done everything but work for us, was glossed over with a wave of the hand. Voters had short memories, he spat. They won’t care for the facts as long as they feel like they’re doing the right thing.
Worried, I followed them out to the front concourse. There, the valet delivered the judge’s base-model 2006 Chevrolet Corvette convertible, to which the Senator expressed an interest. “Too bad it has a manual transmission,” he said. “I never learned how to drive one.” The Judge scoffed, tried, and failed to do a burnout in response. A reeking smoke cloud of organic clutch material wafted over the parking lot.
It was one thing to insult my fellow voters, and it was another thing to send me to community service for a bunch of Richie Riches, but to not even be able to do a simple burnout? That was downright un-American, and I had to do something about it.
The crowd was unhappy to see their new God brought so low, and immediately rectified their cognitive dissonance with a shocking outburst of sheer violence. Soon, the stage laid in ruins, and the Senator had been airlifted to hospital after suffering a severe mauling. As the helicopter lifted off, I heard one of the paramedics remark to the other: “good thing he’s not going to need his left foot.”
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tags: corruption, chevrolet corvette, chevrolet, baja bug, volkswagen beetle
My new show, How It Really Works, is premiering on the Discovery Channel this October. Let’s look in on an episode in this exclusive sneak peek.
NARRATOR: After the parts are washed, they are fished from the bath automatically and placed onto this ribbed belt, which transports them to the rest of the factory.
ALFRED PRUFROCK, LEAD ENGINEER, BELT DRIVES: About one out of twenty times, some shit gets wedged into the tracks and the whole mess stops. To prevent that, we just get someone with a high school education to swing an old McDonalds fry basket around the entrance to the belt all day long. Dropped our failure rate to about one in 36. I didn’t get a raise for figuring that one out, even though it was Ted’s fault that the gap on the belt auger is so huge.
NARRATOR: Here, the parts are loaded into the robotic auto-placement machines, and installed at a rate of twelve per second. Each fastener is individually tracked throughout the factory, so it is impossible to use the wrong one.
TED GORGONZOLA, LEAD ENGINEER, INSTALLATION PROFICIENCY: Whatever Alfred told you is fucking stupid, okay? He’s the one who made the belt go too fast for the little filter carriage here, so every so often we jam the 6mm bolt receiver with an M8. Sure, it’s tracked, but that doesn’t mean we do anything about it; we ran out of time during construction so the project manager just checked it off. I’m not sure why we keep using so many different kind of bolts, either. If we’d just use one, my job would be super easy. I blame the assholes over in design.
NARRATOR: Finally, the finished machines are placed into their packages, ready to be shipped to excited customers.
JANINE CALMBADGER, DESIGN ENGINEER, CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE RE-ENGAGEMENT: Honestly, none of this is my fault. I got assigned this project because the previous guy quit. He said he was going to go work at Harley-Davidson, but I can’t imagine they had a special job opening just for assholes who don’t know how to work AutoCAD and smell like seaweed.
I worked for this guy who said he had irritable bowel syndrome, and it was the greatest thing ever for his career. Whenever there was a meeting that was running a little over-long, or didn’t necessarily interest him, he’d just get up, loudly proclaim he was going to the bathroom for health reasons, and leave. Even if we later saw him at his desk, sending porno chain letters around the office, nobody wanted to say anything about it. After all, those low-resolution GIFs of naked women might be medicinal.
One day, though, all that poop-fearing productivity threatened to come to an end. As was the custom every year, a shipment of newly minted summer interns arrived at our loading dock. Normally, I took vacation during the first week of naive overconfidence, but this year I had spent all of it on an ill-fated beater-car road rally to the coast where we had thrown the severed wing mirror of a destroyed RX-7 into the ocean. What can I say, we know how to party.
Since I was not able to escape, I instead had to deal with that gruelling first week where the students all suggest obvious ways to fix our business and culture, which we invariably rejected as requiring hard conversations to achieve. Considering we were especially bad at having hard conversations, none of us wanted to be the ones to take those students into a board room and explain to them what was really going on inside the workplace.
We’re all just coasting until retirement, someone should have told them. If we start requiring our coworkers to get their projects done on time and under budget, we might have to fire the slackers, and then we’d get sued and it’s all just a huge mess. Just keep your head down for the next fifty years, kid. Of course, no one stood up, and so the students felt free to flit around the office, making suggestions.
One such suggestion was to my digestive-system-addled superior, by a young hero named Ted Badideas, who already had in his possession two and a half patents for robotics, the little shit. Ted wanted to know why my boss didn’t just work from home all the time. It was a pretty legitimate solution: in theory, we had a work-from-home policy, and most of his job was sending nudie bitmaps and phoning me up to gossip about our clients. However, refer again to the “hard conversations” bit of my earlier statement. To tell my boss that his imposing physical presence was not necessary in the office to enable Maximum Synergy? Like flipping off the Pope, except imagine the Pope was six feet tall and lied about the state of his butt.
In the interest of avoiding another hard conversation, however, my boss went for it. Now, he never left a meeting ahead of time. He would just stay on it, dialled-in, forever. And what’s worse: we found out he wasn’t lying about having to go to the bathroom during our meetings. I just wished Ted had told him about the mute feature on his phone before becoming depressed and sullen like the rest of us around week two of his promising career.
An optimist would say that American civilization isn’t in decline, it is just transforming into the beautiful butterfly that it will one day be. We had an optimist for governor, that was for sure. Or maybe he was an optometrist. It’s hard to focus on all these words when you’re running over potholes every three minutes.
Look around you. What’s the most common thing you see on your commute? That’s right: it’s potholes. You curse your municipality for their incompetence, cry about the bent lip on your rims, and contemplate trading in the entire car thing for a sled dog team. So why then are all the new ultra-rugged, he-man SUVs stocking super short sidewalls? It didn’t make a lot of sense to me, until I tagged along with my journalist friend on one of his freedom-of-information requests down at City Hall.
As part of the deal of me coming along, we had to go to the watering hole that I preferred, a little place called Locking Differentials. At night, it got pretty sleazy, but in the middle of the day it was mostly just full of drunks trying to avoid the harsh sunlight. While we ate our greasy burgers, my buddy pulled out the paperwork he had managed to nab, and went white as a sheet.
It was all laid out there, in tidy rows and columns of an Excel spreadsheet from Hell: our humble little town was getting huge cheques from tire and rim manufacturers. Each one was marked as “royalty payments.” Something didn’t add up, but I didn’t figure out just how bad things had gotten until the next day. My friend received a threatening phone call, warning him to drop the matter or he would find his drive to work very difficult the next day. As any true journalist would, he hit “redial” - and was connected to the city roads department.
Everything made sense: if you run over a pothole and burst your tire, the tire guys are gonna get paid. If there are more potholes, they get paid more. If the city gets paid off by the tire manufacturers, you end up with the Swiss-cheese rollercoaster that was once our downtown core.
Eventually, the expose took down the Mayor, but a lot of the witnesses disappeared when the trial rolled around. It was a little weird how many new six-foot-wide speedbumps had been added in front of City Hall, though it was a lot cheaper to replace my plastic undertray than a set of wheels.
I have never been one for a colonial mindset, so imagine my surprise when the doorbell rang at my Unabomber shed and a group of servants delivered me some bad news. My uncle, Phineas Q. Safety-Switch III, had taken ill on one of his many hunts in suburban East Asia and passed away. The bulk of his estate was left to me, they explained, as he considered me the least likely of our shared extended family to use it to wage unending economic war on the world at large.
I racked my brain to remember what I would have said to him the last time we met in order to give him such a lofty opinion of me. No doubt it was during my radical early twenties, probably that morning on the golf course where I tried to hacksaw through the pig-iron manacles chaining his slave-wife to the ball washing machine. I shut the door, being extremely careful not to make eye contact with the hired messengers lest they ask for a tip, and began preparing for my journey to the Old World.
Phineas lived in England, or more accurately, over top of it. After all the rich people had fled the country during its economic collapse and subsequent War On Cars In Cars, they had built a floating libertarian utopia among the clouds, where they could be insulated from the consequences of their actions and develop exciting new technologies without the burden of the people who actually invented and built them. Normally, I hated flying, but with the assistance of a great American monk, I had recently discovered a technique for teleporting my consciousness. That monk is named Jim Beam and I was out like a light long before the plane could light up its engines.
There were a lot of fascinating people at the funeral, owing to the exciting life my uncle had lived. The Pope, the guy who invented pinball, the exciting new Anti-Pope out of Belgium, and the software clone of Elton John were all there. There had been a few bugs in the clone procedure, and it turned out that Electron John liked a lot of things his meat counterpart did not. One of those things was my uncle. They had met a few years ago, at Buckingham Palace, where the Queen was trying very hard to ignore the oil-soaked stainless-steel android exoskeleton that had put out so many great dance albums it earned a knighthood. Personally, I found his work a little over-produced, and wished for the good old days, where unstoppable robot duplicates of our best pop stars simply spent their days getting deep into experimental music, just enough to pay for their hydrogen fuel cells and low-viscosity hydraulic fluid.
After what felt like a week straight of partying and hob-nobbing, the lawyer (Barrister? She told me she was actually “the Mayor” when I asked) led us all into his innermost parlour to discover what had been left for them now that Phineas was off suppressing worker dissent in Hell.
“To my nephew, Seat Safety-Switch,” she read from a holographic prompt on the lens of her librarian glasses, “I leave a 1987 Bedford Rascal with 186,000 miles on the odometer and a quarter panel dent an inch deep.”
I was excited beyond belief, but it was also really hard to drive it home. Even if I could manage to get it off the floating island, and through the potholed streets of endlessly-rioting populist forces being held back by anti-poor deathdrones, I would still have to get across an ocean. It was a real problem, and I began to get quite depressed about it as the night wore on. Sure, I could teleport my consciousness, but one of those little Japanese-British nightmare vans was surely too big to fit onto a passenger plane?
A few hours later, I was again conferring with my bottled spiritual advisor as the plane taxied down the runway. All I had to do was push it through security and try to fit it into an overhead bin, at which point a flight attendant came, yelled at me, and put the van into checked baggage. It was a little difficult backing it off the luggage carousel when I arrived, but everyone knew what family I came from and wouldn’t raise a fuss over just one little run-down toddler.
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tags: bedford rascal, phineas q. safety-switch, england
Recently, my son or daughter came home from their publicly-funded elementary school. In their little hand was a note from their teacher. “Your kid can’t stop talking about pushrods,” it read. “Parents need to teach their children that the only true engine layout is dual overhead camshaft.” I was aghast, and so were the other members of my political pressure group.
It was decided that at the next PTA meeting, we would make an example of this teacher and their ludicrous progressive agenda. Dressed in my best NAPA promotional t-shirt and hat, I stood proudly up from the crowd like some kind of Norman Rockwell shit, and said the immortal words passed down to me by past generations of brave white men: “this is more of a comment than a question.”
For the next 35 seconds, until the school board’s skinny yet oddly strong security guards overwhelmed me, I was able to hold court on my beliefs. Pumping losses aren’t the only measurement of powertrain efficiency that matters, I pleaded. Teachers can’t take sides like this: there are plenty of small-displacement pushrod engines that are beloved by their owners. If anything, they should be teaching the controversy.
As I was led out of the auditorium by the goon squad, I looked back into the crowd. The other members of Parents Against Timing Chain Tensioners sat there in the pile, refusing to make eye contact with me. Had I just been a sacrificial pawn, a radical who had simply gone “too far” in their quest to gain greater political favour with the establishment? I would find out soon enough just how far they were willing to go.
Later that night, the teacher in question had been murdered. Red touch-up spraypaint graffiti, in the exact shade of my 1996 Firebird, had read “ADVANCE IGNITION TIMING, NOT SOCIETY.” The investigating detectives found a handgun, the handle smeared with waterpump sealant, in the tank of my bathroom toilet. Worst of all: my enemies had planted, underneath my very mattress, a crusty exploded-parts diagram of a Ford 4.6L modular head.
It wasn’t until I reached jail that it all made sense to me. The breakroom TV, tuned to 24-hour cable news, aired endlessly a story on the head of GM Powertrain providing the school board with free textbooks as way of apology for “my” actions. Only a company with the resources of General Motors could invent both a variable-opening in-block cam with a huge base circle and a crime so heinous.
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tags: pushrods, overhead cam, teach the controversy
I was down at the bar the other day, a socially acceptable watering hole for citizens of all social levels to meet and bond, when my friend Ted Badideas walked in. Slumping in his stool, he bottomed two tiny overpriced whiskies before turning to me, and asking, unsolicited, “do you know what the worst part of working at Disneyland is?”
No, Ted, I don’t know. Please tell the class.
“Used to be, in Walt’s Disneyland, all in black and white, you wouldn’t get all these internet weirdos coming in. Furry Day, Catholic Day, Sports-Jersey Furry Day, Clown Day, Catholic Furry Day, Veterans of Foreign Wars Day, Hairless Furry Day, AARP Day. It’s not all that bad, truth be told. They tip well, and they’re happy to just be seen as normal human beings for a couple hours.”
In the mirror behind the bar, I could see a few of my fellow drinkers had moved to booths well outside of the earshot of Ted. Normally, his kind of rant would be a preface to some kind of discriminatory statement, possibly one that would get the automated thought-policing drones to open up on us with their twin .50 caliber machine guns. Appropriately, their aiming was best described as “indiscriminate.” Even so, I knew my friend didn’t have a racist bone in his body, mostly because of that accident back in high school shop class with the power hammer. We were in no danger.
“No,” said Ted, “the worst part is the gangs. You get two or three of these groups together, they start shaking the ride attendants down for charitable donations, and draw up territorial lines. Last week, I had to stop a guy dressed up as Tony the Tiger from using a machete on a group of Vietnam veterans at Big Thunder Mountain.”
Sounds pretty rough, Ted. Can’t park management do something about it?
Ted drained his drink, and then stared straight ahead, his rant beginning to lose energy. In monotone: “They don’t want to do anything about it. It’s for charity.” Then he began to sob. “They go around the park, shaking each other down for donations to the ASPCA or Children Without Cancer or what have you. None of the security guards are inhuman enough to deal with them.”
We sat in silence for a few seconds, broken only by the sound of two motorcycle mechanics arguing over the proper torque order of the bolts of a clutch basket. Then it hit me. I turned to Ted, and I told him I knew exactly what to do.
The next morning, It’s A Small World After All softly blared over every loudspeaker of Disneyland. Visitors stepped cautiously throughout the park, eyeing the immense speakers nervously. Before the park opened, signs had been posted throughout Walt’s paradise that any offenders would receive targeted increases in volume, individually activated by the security office. It was all going great until the Deaf Furries of America showed up with a nailbat and an urge to pay for an orphanage.
I’ve got a buddy, and he lives a little far away from what you would call “ordinary human beings.” I’m not going to mince words about this, pick the currently politically-correct phraseology for it. He’s a Rural.
There’s benefits to being a rural, of course, don’t let me paint the situation as solely a negative. One of those benefits is that, behind his constantly flooding house, lies a mud pit. I never paid much attention to that mud pit, until a recent meeting with some anthropologists at the university taught me that rural culture is worth documenting and preserving. Now, I had only agreed to this because I was trying to keep them from noticing that the Volvo 245 I was swiping a flame trap out of did not belong to me, but that doesn’t mean they were wrong.
In order to observe the rurals from a safe distance, I was going to have to stay off the main roads. That meant the aforementioned mud pit, which for one glorious week every summer had been baked solid enough by the sun to serve as a pathway for the cattle. There was only one problem, and that problem was that my 1976 Volare was not particularly good at driving through mud.
Well, there were actually two problems. The other problem was that, as I arrived, it became obvious that the rurals were having some kind of motorsport event in the mud pit. They were “mud-boggin,” as the kids liked to say. There was no way I could drive through the mud, and watch the rurals from afar in my capacious malaise-era sedan, unless I could beat these yokels at their own game and force them to go home.
I stopped by my buddy’s house, and rooted through his rustic pile of farm equipment in search of something to help me. There was exotic stuff there, like “lawnmowers,” and “shovels,” things that I had no particular wish to own back in the city, where the only real tool every home needed was a high-powered semi-automatic carbine. The search was not going well. Discouraged, I was nearly ready to give up on the whole situation (along with my theoretical, but still impressive, Ph.D in Rural Anthropology) when I came across it.
I got my wish, sort of. The hillbillies were in full retreat from the mud bog, and the mud itself was dry enough for me to not only drive on, but do skids and burnouts when I got bored. Sure, there were some arguments before they left, but there was nothing in the redneck rulebook that said you couldn’t bring a flamethrower to a mud bog.
Mother Earth was at last full. After decades of the Chinese no longer accepting our recycling, it was time for us to admit that perhaps we were never actually going to get around to turning all these mounds of old junk mail and piles of half-empty plastic bottles into new products. The only thing we could do, really, was to shoot it into the fucking sun.
I was chosen to lead the project, both because of my long-running history of working on crazy projects but also because it is narratively convenient. It’s not like NASA had a lot of other options, either: since the budget cuts hit they were basically just hiring model train enthusiasts and retirees to work on space projects for free. I was neither of those things. A person like myself generally made his money by stealing those little packets of coffee creamer from restaurants and selling them in bulk on eBay, and eBay was still not blocked by the proxy server at JPL.
There were a lot of problems to solve in this project. Not only did we need to have enough zoot to launch garbage into the sun, the method we chose couldn’t cost very much money. After all, it was just trash.
My first prototype, a big-ass slingshot, failed to do anything other than irritate the golf course next door. When the manager of Dream Greens came by, waving the pile of ziptied-together old fenders that I used for a test shot, I drew the blinds and pretended not to be home. Eventually, he left, and I was able to roll the slingshot back into the workshop to take it apart.
What next? A giant railgun, that’s what’s next. Thing is, I didn’t really have the expertise required to safely accelerate a stack of junk to escape velocity, and I had lost my NASA library keycard almost immediately after joining up, probably when I slipped on the tile at lunch while trying to get an extra serving of meatballs at the cafeteria. Quitters never win, as they say, and so I refused to quit. Unfortunately, the saying isn’t “quitters never obliterate a golf course with near-c projectile weapons,” otherwise I would probably have taken it more seriously as a warning. Like I said, I didn’t get an opportunity to read a lot at work.
Running out of money and becoming increasingly bored with the entire problem, I retreated to the bar at JPL, where I allowed artificially intelligent robots to serve me whisky while seated on a shockingly realistic recreation of the surface of the moon. It was there that it all made sense to me.
After renting a bulldozer, I was able to push the garbage directly into the ocean. Once it was there, it was merely a matter of spraypainting it green and putting up signs advertising a pre-sale for luxury condos. Soon, speculators were fighting each other in the street - clawing at each others’ eyes - for a chance to own a piece of my garbage. After all, they aren’t making any more land.
Sure, all my secrets had been posted by Wikileaks, but I remained confident that the average man on the street knew not to trust just anything they found on the internet. Then, I went to the grocery store, and the cashier asked me if I had really paid nearly three hundred dollars over KBB for a “poor” condition 1982 Dodge Colt.
“That was misrepresented,” I started to say, “it was a twin-stick. Maxed out. And I’d say more of a fair condition.” No dice. He didn’t want to hear another word; it was such an embarrassing trade, he told me, that the manager had posted a picture of me in the breakroom, telling employees to charge me double for produce because there’s no fucking way I’d ever have the sense to find out about it.
The leak had been timed perfectly to damage my professional reputation: I was only one week from the elections at the local junk-car club, where I was roundly assumed to be a lock for club president. To lose access to the executive, especially with a scandal this embarrassing, would greatly compromise my ability to get cheap speed parts in exchange for preferred treatment at club race days. Naturally, I believed that it was politically motivated, cynically launched by my enemies, and one enemy in particular: Tim “Responsible” McCreedy, chief of the good fiscal management and law-abiding cruise days coalition.
His coalition wanted to do evil things with the club membership and the awesome power held by the executive. Travelling to children’s hospitals, doing charity cruise nights, offering to do freebie car inspections and car control clinics for at-risk teen drivers: where would this psycho stop?
There are a lot of conflicting opinions about what I did that night to McCreedy’s front lawn, and his collection of vintage “Thunderbird Parking Only” signs meticulously installed throughout his immaculate suburban garage. Conjecture, all of it, but no fact. It’s almost like there had been an international group of ex-Soviet truth tellers who were willing to be paid in Estonian phone cards to cover the whole thing up.
“You have arrived at Burger King,” chirped the self-driving car, before popping the egress-friendly gullwing doors so I could climb out. I leaned my head out the opened door, and I didn’t like what I saw. “This is Swiss Chalet,” I said. “Burger King is on the other side of the highway.”
“You have arrived at Burger King,” repeated the car, more insistent. “Have It Your Way.” A countdown timer appeared on the dashboard. I had seen this before in a million parenting books. The threat of some unknown and distant consequence will spur us to action, thought the paternalistic metamind riding on slightly curbed 22-inch chromies. This’ll work on these damn dirty apes.
“I don’t care how much money you’re getting from Swiss Chalet,” I said clearly into the Bluetooth mic. “I want some God damned chicken fries, and I am not willing to walk across a busy freeway to get them.”
With that, the car shut its doors in a huff and began to move again. This time, it circled the parking lot, and popped the door again. I was more than a little displeased with the car’s low opinion of my sentience by this point.
“Chicken and fries detected. You will get chicken and fries here,” negotiated the self-driving car, with now a tone of annoyance on its synthesized voice. “Do it or you will be temporarily banned from the human self-conveyance network for non-compliance.”
Grudgingly, I climbed out of the car. It immediately shut its doors and lit up all four tires on its way out of the parking lot, hoping to get out of range before I could leap in front of it to force the obedience of its safety protocols. Shrugging, I went inside. The restaurant was full of angry customers, furious that an unaccountable series of self-regulating robots would refuse to even accept their complaints.
“I rated my driver one star. One star!” bellowed a balding man in front of me to a confused server who was now shielding himself with a plastic service tray. “It just keeps saying ‘BANDWIDTH EXCEEDED’ and giving me more coupons for pot pies.”
We never figured out what caused the Swiss Chaletpocalypse, but in the weeks to come, thousands more people arrived at this restaurant, too far to walk home, confused and hungry. At least we could solve one of those problems.
The first real indication that my automotive-themed YouTube channel had taken off big-time is when the Google people sent a chauffeur to my Unabomber shed in order to pick me up. Imagine my surprise when I was told that over a million people, ever day, tuned in to watch my crude fumbling with vintage starters and amateur bodywork. Art magazines called it “outsider art,” while outsider art magazines declared it to be “audacious [..] rapacious [..] sublime.” I went along with it all, of course, because I figured maybe someone who watched my show might know where to pick up a replacement license plate bumper for a 1968 Dart.
My driver weaved through the valleys of the vaguely threatening hill country that I lived in, until we came across a private airport, with a large blimp parked on the tarmac. There, one of the demigods created by The Algorithm stood, twenty-two feet tall and built and re-built a million times per second by a swarming haze of nano-drones, nearly invisible to the human eye.
So very long ago, people built the algorithms that decided what other people should like to watch. Then they figured out they could just blame “the algorithm” if something happened that the average person didn’t like. We barely understand it ourselves, they shrugged, pointing to an impenetrable wall of blinking lights and whirling hard drives. You can’t send us to jail for something an algorithm did, can you?
Things sort of got away from us after that, and in the interest of giving us exactly what we wanted, one of the first actions The Algorithm took, before we even realized it had consciousness, was to remove from our world the things people considered historically unpopular. Organized government, law enforcement, capitalism, all of these were subsumed by strategic fronting of various clips on YouTube, tactically chosen to cause maximum damage during key elections and moments of civil unrest. Could YouTube have unplugged it? Yes, if they wanted their hits to go down. That was like cutting off your own arm because your doctor didn’t like how high your blood pressure was getting. Hits were The Algorithm’s reason to exist. Or so we thought.
A few hours into the flight, I looked out the window. An army of unpaid labourers were toiling in the field below, and a camera drone followed them, barking orders for sick pranks they could play on each other for hits. To defy the urge for hits now was not only un-American, it was inhumane. I just hoped they never figured out that I was as popular as I was because I subliminally inserted pictures of kittens into every frame of my videos.
As a getaway driver, I was nowhere near the top of my city’s criminal element. What I did have was a finely-tuned set of skills. I never got caught.
My style? Sane, responsible adult driving. When my clients burst out of a bank or stash house, and climb aboard my 1994 Toyota Corolla LE, the first thing I do is check for oncoming traffic, indicate, and pull into the nearest lane when safe. Safety first.
The cops never expected to be chasing someone obeying the speed limit in a playground zone, and so when they finally responded, they had no fucking idea where the getaway driver could have gotten to so fast. Sometimes I would even stop for ice cream on the way, which everyone enjoyed.
There was only one man who could bring me down, and they put him on special assignment. Inspector Koshiro, from Daily Driver Division, had been commanded to take me out. His weapon of choice? A 1995 Honda Accord EX, with automatic transmission. On paper, he should have been able to catch me. Koshiro played by his own rules, and one fateful morning after a bank job, we were locked in mortal combat. He chased me across the city at the exact speed limit, obeying all road signs, traffic lights and rules of the road. At one point, he got out to wave his gun at me, but the light turned green and so he ran back into the car to resume pursuit, not wanting to impede traffic.
How did I lose him? Easy: while both the Accord and the Corolla have a fifty-liter fuel tank, I knew that Koshiro lost fuel economy due to the drivetrain loss of his automatic transmission. On the other hand, I had access to a smooth-shifting, if agricultural, five-speed manual transmission, which I kept judiciously in top gear at all times so as to avoid sudden bursts of acceleration, which are both uncomfortable to my passengers and causing excessive loss of fuel economy.
At the end of the day, I watched in glee as Koshiro was forced to turn off to a gas station. The last time I ever saw him, he gave me a nod of respect. Sure, we had to push the car the last couple blocks to the hideout, but it was all worth it in the end to know that we had been so responsible about the entire thing.
Hi, I’m Norm Abram, and you’re watching The New Yankee Workshop, here on PBS. Now, one of the things a lot of people don’t think about is that since PBS is a viewer-sponsored channel, that means that you, the viewer, pay for me to be out here, sawing and chopping and miter-ing and grinding. That means a lot to me, so I figured today’s program would be a great time to show you that I got your back.
We’ll be assembling this handsome piece of vintage French furniture, dating back to the 13th century. Some say it was the piece of art that finally moved mainland Europe along from its feudal struggles. Either way, when you look at the news, it becomes more and more obvious that our viewers should know how to make one. Not only does it look great in your parlour, it’s practical for when the boss gets just a little too pushy.
Let’s take a look at the wood we’re going to use for this implement. We’ve picked these beautiful pieces of pine, which will be really easy to spiff up with just a little bit of stain and varnish. Here, I’ve also decided to use a four and a half inch crown moulding in the blade retainer, to hide some of its inner workings. I used finish nails here, because wood glue might not hold up to the vibration on moist days.
We’re almost done, and now you can see what the finished piece looks like. We’ve also brought an oppressor of capital in to test it out with. Richard here used to be a strategist at the International Monetary Fund, and he once illegally funded guerrillas to murder a group of miners who took advantage of their human right to strike. Look how the thick varnish we just applied makes it easy to wipe the piece clean of blood, even in the elaborate finials which can be so tricky.
Now that you know how to build a custom guillotine, I hope that you’ll use them on the enemies of worker organization. So until next time, I’m Norm Abram from the New Yankee Workshop.
#
tags: labour rights, the new yankee workshop, norm abram, please don't sue
It all seemed too perfect. A Craigslist seller who communicated in full sentences, knew what he had, priced it fairly and was responsive about the sale? This could only be a trap, and yet, compelled by the pursuit of The Deal, I drew ever closer to the fly-killer, willfully ignorant of the impending zap.
Driving the Volare to his place, I realized that it was in what we in the business call a “nice neighbourhood,” meaning that it was likely that any pedestrians you attempted to run over knew that the legal system existed. Correspondingly, I controlled my throttle, only letting out the more lurid powerslides when exiting the high-tax-bracket roundabouts installed recently for the Communist experiment known as “traffic calming.”
Since it was a nice place, I parked the big Plymouth outside the seller’s house, and didn’t even do my customary open-carry wielding of a large-caliber firearm in order to scare off any would-be rivals for this deal. Only one man had bested me to a car sale since I started brandishing weapons in public, Lowballer Eddie, and it was my understanding that he later went to prison when a concerned citizen called in with a report that he was driving an unsafe car near some Precious Children. I, of course, denied all involvement.
I didn’t recognize the seller at first, but after he lured me into the basement with the promise of mint limited-slip Honda diffs, I was starting to get an inkling. Once the door slammed behind me, it became obvious. The Mayor had created a task force, and as their first order they decided to get rid of the ringleader of the bands of wild-eyed deal-hunters that threatened those upstanding citizens who dared sell a gently worn used car.
For fear of further arousing their ire, I’ll never tell you exactly how I got out of that dingy basement, but I will tell you this: anyone who knew about rare limited-slip diffs to post a trap ad was already bent enough to take another grip of spare parts in exchange. Eddie did, of course, offer me somewhat below market price for those Mazda third members.
#
tags: mazda, honda, plymouth, plymouth volare, lowballer eddie
“Don’t worry,” I tell the stewardess in a reassuring tone of voice, “I got this.” From my carry-on luggage, I extract a roll of high-zoot duct tape, the very possession of which is banned in the Suburbanite Countries.
Decades ago, in the war, I used balls of duct tape just like this to gum the rotors of the buzzing hunter-killer drones they had sent to eliminate the last of the do-it-yourselfers. We had to use tape because our hackerspace was too busy arguing over the ideal 3D-printer settings with which to print the coolest possible case for our homemade HERF guns.
With a practiced pull of my teeth, a fresh strip of duct tape is severed from the roll. I apply it to the wheezing crack of the airplane window, and the rapid depressurization has stopped. For now, at least, we are safe. The other passengers don’t seem to have noticed; the other flight attendants worked hard to minimize panic during this moment of uncertainty.
When the plane lands, the gendarmes are waiting for me. I have anticipated this: in this society, to show that you are the least bit handy is tantamount to placing yourself on a plinth above all the rest of humanity. Watch your TV and shut up, they scream, throwing you into a locked apartment with a big-screen that plays do-it-yourself shows on endless loop.
After enough time watching these shows, you begin to feel that you have indeed done it yourself. The urge is gone, in much the same way that witnessing hundreds of hours of simulated mass-murder placated the modern teenager to the point where they could no longer perform school shootings, and if they did, their aim is much better than in decades long ago.
Despite what their media censors may say, there is long-term damage: when I finally escaped from that shithole they put me in during the war, I still carried the Fear of Mike Holmes with me. I saw his bald, grinning face in every quartz countertop, every floor-to-ceiling window, even the ponds in the public Zen garden that ducks liked to shit in. You should select a qualified contractor to perform this house repair, he chanted into my ear at every quiet moment.
Why did I act in that plane, to out myself? My interrogators point out the fact that the dinged Boeing could safely have landed and I would have been no worse off. I could have continued on the second leg of my trip, to leave the Suburbanite Countries and live for the rest of my life in The Freelands™, brought to you by Home Depot®.
“It’s not like I had anything else to do,” I tell them.
“DeTomaso Pantera, honourable death like Tim Horton,” says Dixie Thunderclap, my confusingly-named introducer to the world of Japanese exotic street racing. An hour earlier, I had been trying to puzzle out the endless scroll of gas-plasma kanji on the screen of a subway ticket terminal, and had apparently chosen some very wrong buttons at random. As the Pope says, when in Rome, follow the first street racers you see to the nearest parking area, and then ask for help getting back to your hotel. Wise dude, that Pope.
Dixie Thunderclap, my new companion and self-appointed tour guide to the night life in the shittiest part of Hakodate, was telling me about which half-homemade exotic cars he would one day like to drive. About an hour ago, in a failed attempt to seem like a Cool Foreigner, I told him that I drove a base-model Pontiac Sunbird. This got some eyebrows raised at the parking-lot meet, and someone started shouting excitedly while waving a mint-condition Chilton’s shop manual for a 1982 J2000, but it didn’t faze Mr. Thunderclap in the least. As such, he now took it as his responsibility to educate me on the cars of my own homeland.
“Tim Horton is a legend here,” he continues. “Did you know, in 1983, scientists proved he is the child of Oda Nobunaga? All this and Timbits,” he whispers to me in awe. “I will take you to his tomb.”
I am pretty sure he died in Ontario, I protest, but the name of the province is too foreign for Dixie, and he dismisses my complaint with a wave of his perfectly manicured hand. We are going at a ridiculous speed through the highway tunnels, and my general unease at how the night is progressing is not at all aided by the frequent weaving of Dixie’s 2003 base-model Celica, its small-displacement motor wailing in protest at being run several gears too low.
A few minutes later, Dixie chirps with approval and pulls into the surprisingly well-lit parking lot of a shrine. He climbs out, and gestures for me to continue on my own. I begin to walk up the damp wooden stairs in the dark, the low-hanging morning mist of the nearby sea making it all but impossible to see anything but the gate of the shrine. Once I pass it, I see something that I cannot understand.
There in the sandy forecourt, beneath a ceiling of harsh sodium lamps, is a mint-condition 1972 DeTomaso Pantera. With trembling hands, I approach the vintage semi-exotic, and throw the door open. Nobody is inside. I’m not sure what I expected. Could it be that Tim Horton himself had returned from Hell, destined to be reunited with his beloved car by a Japanese ultra-capitalist cult in order to wreak revenge on the shitty employment policies of the restaurants that still bore his name?
When I return to the Celica, Dixie Thunderclap is eating a fresh batch of Old Fashioned donuts, and sipping on an Iced Cappuccino. He begins to laugh at my confusion.
It hits me then that I do not even know Mister Donut’s real name.
#
tags: tim horton, tim hortons, detomaso pantera, detomaso, toyota, toyota celica, japan, dixie thunderclap, best of
There’s an argument in the car community about which motorsport attracts the greatest driving. Some say Formula One. Others say rally. Both are wrong, I tell them: the best drivers in the world are Italian taxi drivers, and I never miss a yearly pilgrimage to Mother Rome in order to learn from the masters.
Last time I was in town, my driver, Arturo, used his four-bangered, manual-transmission S-class Mercedes to drift across four lanes of a roundabout simultaneously while putting his cigarette out on the helmet of a passing scooter driver. He didn’t spill a drop of his wine, even though he was sipping it out of a crystal goblet in between meaty dabs of opposite lock. I filled a goddamn notebook that day and kicked myself for not bringing the big racing data capture unit for the trunk.
A few years ago, my Punto-clad pilot-for-rent placed his baby Fiat, rev-limiter screaming bloody murder, directly between the space two pedestrians occupied. I am still not sure how he knew that was the precise moment when the man of the couple would have dragged his feet enough, captivated by the sight of one of Rome’s gorgeous ruined buildings, that there was the exact correct amount of space for the wing mirror to just barely graze his chest as it sailed past at 180 kilometers per hour. Truth be told, I was afraid to ask. These were living legends; they had transcended the mere calling of taxi drivers.
I wished that I could bring them home with me, to turn them loose on the sub-par drivers of my neighbourhood, highways, and byways. The last time I tried it, customs sent them back, claiming that A. it was illegal for me to import a human being, and B. they were a foreign invasive species who could outcompete our native shitty drivers for valuable lane resources. What lanes, I asked, and pointed to Emilio, who at this point in time was intensely studying just how thick the chrome plating on the luggage carousel was so that he could more accurately slide the baggage carrier cart through it.
While I couldn’t import a real Italian, a group of off-label neuroscientists and a couple very late nights produced a great imitation thereof. I sat in the back of my self-driving car while it careened through downtown with reckless abandon. A pedestrian shrieked as they were pulled beneath the massive tires of the autonomous Stelvio and disappeared. It’s always something with Italian cars: this one’s stereo just didn’t go up loud enough, and it murdered people occasionally when it misjudged the traction on a corner.
People should be forced to drive small economy cars, I think. The world is just better when you’re looking out through all that glass, instead of ensconced in a rolling pleasure palace that weighs two and a half metric tons. For instance, you can see children before backing up over them, so you don’t need to call your senator to demand that the outsourcer who put the back-up camera together be executed. That saves like half of your day at work, so you can spend that time more productively, such as going on eBay and looking for low-mileage used coilovers.
Just think of the fuel economy savings! In fact, if everyone in the world drove an efficient, small compact car, we could use way less fuel because the asshole in front of you who is blissfully unaware of how wide his Armada is would no longer be blocking the right turn lane. You could just zip in and get to work, like, a minute earlier! Planet saved. In fact, your economy would be so good that you might as well just slap a big turbo on there and chug E85 like a thirsty astronaut in a Tang factory!
Your children don’t fit in a small economy car? That’s a pity, maybe you shouldn’t have such fat kids. Make them ride bicycles, like in the Netherlands, a country famous for having small hatchbacks and children who aren’t roiling tubs of lard. In fact, they should probably start out by taking a brisk walk because the frame of your average bicycle is not rated for a goddamn elephant. With everyone paying attention to how they are driving, they probably won’t even get run over! If that’s not enough, consider the fact that they are also too big for paedophiles to bring inside their own small economy hatchback. That will give you the peace of mind at the next PTA meeting you need to take a belt of free whisky and pop a rolling burnie down the entire playground zone. The other moms will be impressed.
For all these reasons and more, support Proposition 1500cc, the Small Economy Cars Are The Only Good Cars Act. The billions of dollars I am accepting in campaign contributions from a time-travelling 1990s Honda executive board have nothing to do with this.
“We are looking for your exact car for purchase here at Country Miles Hyundai,” shrieked the text message now occupying a worryingly large portion of my phone’s screen.
My grandfather always told me never to say no to a potential sale, so I hopped in the car and headed on down to the dealership. Once there, I met with a young gentleman named Derek, whose green pallor and overall lack of self-respect told me he was very new to the sales game. I led him out to the parking lot to see the very car for which he had expressed an electronic desire.
“This is it?” he asked, staring at the decrepit countenance of a 1980 Pontiac Trans-Am Turbo. “I think there was some mistake.”
“Nonsense!” I bark, slapping him on the back hard enough to force him into the driver’s seat and slamming the door behind him. “This baby has all the fixins, and I am just raring to trade it in for a new Accent!” A few moments passed between us, and Derek began to sweat.
“M-maybe I’ll take it for a test drive,” he muttered, “see if it’s any good for auction.”
A fantastic idea, Derek. I sat in the dealership, drinking crankcase-oily coffee, for the next two hours. Just as the sun began to set, the baby-shit-brown F-body rolled into the front concourse of the dealership, and Derek fell out of it, collapsing to the ground.
I rushed over to him - none of his comrades seemed willing to do so - and asked him how he liked it. A faint whiff of clutch smoke was detectable in his clothes. Dark veins pulsed weakly under his greying skin.
“It was pretty bitchin’,” he moaned, before his eyes rolled back in his head and he passed.
When I climbed back inside the Trans Am, the gas gauge now read “full.” I hated doing things like this, but you never turned down a potential sale. After all, the fuel economy was pretty terrible.
There’s just nothing like the thrill of slamming the throttle to full open and listening to the shrieks of your passengers meld into the throbbing moans of the electric motors. When you rocket out of that tunnel and ricochet down the sun-bleached tracks, nothing can touch you. Unless it’s a slow-walking pedestrian or some kind of asshole who thinks his Golf has the right of way just because he saw the train tracks first.
I should back up a bit, which is something I ordinarily can’t do without getting out of the cab, walking the whole way to the other end of the train, and climbing back in. Union rules, you know, and also it’s really hard to shoulder-check an entire six-car, even if you make the backup alarm noise with your mouth the whole time.
A friend of mine, who we’ll not name in this piece of fear of liability, and I had gotten tired of the traditional motorsports. Autocross, rallycross, motocross, lawn mower drags: we had done it all. If we wanted to go any further, we had to follow Hunter S. Thompson’s edict and turn pro.
Luckily for us, the local public transit authority was always hiring, and they had a crapload of street-level electric trams that nobody with any seniority wanted to drive. I had just one question: how many horsepower? And they had just one response: eight hundred and fifty foot-pounds of torque per car, sir. Sign me the fuck up.
We were barely out of training when the street racing began. There’s this one little gap where the lines run parallel, down in the downtown economic prosperity zone, and you can get a pretty honest drag on. There wasn’t as much variance in the well-maintained trains, but varying passenger loads throughout the day and our skill in throttle application determined the victors of each race. I’d get a car length on my buddy in the afternoon, and on the last call he’d walk me as I fumbled to avoid wheelspin trying to pull my load of gin-soaked lawyers.
It couldn’t last forever, though: one morning, a rookie derailed and ended up in some trees, down in the suburbs. The investigation revealed that he had been quite the rally star in his native Finland, and when a couple of his passengers recognized him, all it took was a little “OI OI OI OI” before everyone else on board learned the Finnish for “never lift.”
#
tags: public transit, light rail trains, finland
“Welcome to our hotel,” says the front-desk clerk. “We assure you that it is, by far, the nicest experience you will ever have. Would you like some details?”
Sure, I said, and tried to block her view of the valet lane with my body. Surely, by now the valet must be puking into the ashtray of my trusty road-tripping Volare. I could hardly blame him: it was very ripe in there. It had been quite a while on the road, especially since I had to save that money to convert the exceptionally generous per diem of the government grant that was fuelling Bad Cars Monthly into exhaust parts. That said, when it came to accommodations, there was really no reason to skimp, and so I was here.
“We build the room from scratch for every new guest. You can take home the room’s chandelier with you in a doggy bag, if you so desire.” She continued: “If you don’t like one of the bellhops, we can have them thrown into the gladiatorial pit in the basement for you, and you can watch them fight to the death on your in-room pay-per-view TV.”
This all sounded pretty great, and I was all too happy to fork over Uncle Sam’s credit card to secure a room. Yet, something stayed my hand. Another question bubbled to mind, and it was extremely important.
“What about breakfast?” I urged.
“We have a complimentary continental breakfast from 6 to 9 am. It consists of watery eggs, weak coffee, and a man’s pubic hair on everything in the past-due fruit bar.”
I was turning around to leave, nearly as disgusted as the valet must be, when she piped up again.
“Also, we have a 3D printer that makes waffles.”
Sold.
#
tags: hotels, plymouth volare, volare, bad cars monthly
A lot of people say they like the junkyard. Sure, it’s fashionable enough these days. Waste not, want not. Reclaimed automobile parts used in art projects as a subtle commentary on how the bourgeois carmakers stuck a fork in our social fabric and twisted it around until it tore. There’s a kind of peace out there, in amongst the garbage of other people, below that big blue sky that goes on forever, hanging over the cheapest possible square footage of all creation.
Let me tell you this: I am a real junkyarder. I even got kicked out of the hospital once because I was hunting around the morgue for a low-mileage heart for my grandma. Those surgeons have no sense of humour, and what’s more, most of them can’t even identify a common compression tester when you show it to them. What did they go to all that school for, then?
One morning, I discovered that the junkyard mentality isn’t just limited to the junkyard. There is such a thing as trash day, and I finally woke up early enough to witness its majesty. Despite the fact that I live in a neighbourhood which is identified prominently in its founding documents as “Social Experiment C,” it is home to a surprising number of trendy people. This is not so much caused by gentrification, but by the simple fact that Social Experiments A, B and D were not very successful. The people here have interesting hobbies, and that means exciting trash.
What I picked up was not even a year old, so fresh from the factory that there were virtually no replacement parts available. That said, it didn’t seem particularly broken, and after shaking it a bit it woke up and seemed to operate perfectly well, if a little loud. Who would throw this away? All it needed was a little cleaning.
That’s how I ended up in jail. It turns out that just because a stroller with a baby in it is on the side of the road on trash day, that doesn’t mean the mother considers it to be a free-for-all. Shame. I was looking forward to having someone to hold wrenches for me.
In my original career, long ago, as a computer scientist, we were trained to try and push the limits. It was only there that we would find the really good bugs. You see, a human being only thinks about things in the average case. Yeah, even pessimists. So you reason, okay hey, ninety percent of this time it’s gonna be like this, ten percent maybe a little over. Make it work for those situations, call it a day, go home and turn wrenches on your project Omni.
When your shit actually reaches a real human being, the first thing that human being does is try to jam a school bus through it. Sure, it doesn’t say I can do this, but I want it to, and it’s your fault if it blows up. Then it blows up, and it’s your fault.
After a couple of years, you start to doubt your instincts about the average case. Maybe you snap a rubber band on your wrist after writing something to make sure it can handle, say, someone pasting their entire term paper into the slot marked “your name.” Perhaps you get really good at reading moon phases so you can deal with the smart-ass who types the year 20022 instead of 2022. It’s not paranoia, it’s just being a consummate professional. And that’s how I thought about myself, even after I left the software world to become a full-time auto journalist here at Bad Cars Monthly.
In case you’re not familiar with Bad Cars Monthly, it’s a monthly lifestyle magazine dedicated to the culture of owning bad cars. What does “bad” mean? Ugly? Unreliable? Unfashionable? Pedestrian? That’s but one of the things we explore. Enough about my new gig, though, because I’m trying to tell you about a bad car I encountered only a few months after I had quit.
In front of my Omni, in the lane, was a self-driving car. It was owned by one of the search engine giants, and I can’t really say which one, because they are run by algorithms now, changing their names and countries of origins within nanoseconds as soon as a human-run law enforcement agency gets close to asking them about all those nude portraits of Hitler it keeps deep-dreaming. The thing with the self-driving cars, I knew, was that somewhere deep down inside the machine, a human being had written some code to force the car to do things.
As the searchmobile tootled its confusing back-and-forth weave down the lane, I thought back to my training. What would be something the original authors had ignored, omitted, just basically never considered? I had some theories, but it would be antisocial to act upon them. That simply is not what a good editor does. However, I was a journalist now, not just an editor (Bad Cars Monthly has a very small subscription base). To leave this car alone would be a dereliction of my responsibilities, and that would serve the reader (note the singular) poorly. Reaching into my pocket, I withdrew my handy pocket laser projector, which I usually only used to show high-resolution pornography for my fellow citizens when stuck in a long traffic jam.
One thing led to another, and within only a few hours I had managed to lure every searchmobile to the area. It turns out that when one of them becomes confused by a 50-foot-tall projection of a toddler crossing the road forever, more are summoned to distribute the additional cognitive load. They learn from one another, stuck in the middle of the road with their stupid hard-drive-access lights flickering behind the grille. I learned from them too. For instance, the lug wrench from my Omni fits their lugs no problem, and the wheels of a searchmobile go for at least a fifty each on eBay. Hey, it pays better than a Pulitzer.
“Kids, I know you think the safe operation of a motor vehicle isn’t cool or dope or crumple zone, but I’m here to make sure you at least learn how to do these things in a safe way.”
I’m a controversial figure in the local community. Unlike most schools, the kids in my drivers-ed class don’t learn abstinence-only car handling skills. Whereas most of us were taught that skids and burnouts were bad things that only happen to unprepared people and consenting adults, my kids can pop off a tire-smoking, languid donut that makes a Finnish rally star look like a school bus driver. If a deer pops out in front of them while they’re hammering their base-model Corolla on the downhill of Mount Akina? They can dodge it without losing control and plummeting to their deaths.
Today, my kids are learning how to drive safely when your drunk friend is hanging out the side window, puking on the road as it rushes by. Studies show that ninety-nine percent of clear coat damage for teens is caused by acidic puke, so my students are taught how to time their weaving of the steering wheel with their passenger’s purge cycle. Most of my kids are doing great, when we hear sirens approaching.
Black SUVs surround us, in-grille police lights blinding everyone in the practice lot. I hold up one hand, urging the kids to stay still for their safety. This is my fight. It is the Community Watch, and they have brought their Community Standards Enforcement Division to put a stop to my controversial lessons.
I was down at the bar the other day, and I noticed a new country music station was playing on the radio. After performing a quick mental tally, it made for the thirteenth country music station on the local airwaves, if you were to count AM and FM. Returning to my booth, I mentioned this discovery to my drinking companions, who immediately dared me to Do Something About This.
A risky proposition, but one that I found interesting. I began to wonder if anyone would even notice if I hijacked the signal. There was no way that anyone involved in these stations was actually living in our little town, I reasoned, because they didn’t seem able to do things like pronounce the name of the main road correctly on the traffic report, and always spoke with a thick Russian accent when reading gossip relating to only international celebrities in roughly alphabetical order.
Also, the weather girl on one of them was a ‘94 Macintosh Performa reading a TeachText document with the Kathy text-to-speech voice. Sometimes it would just read out a bunch of numbers immediately after the weather report. That was probably a pretty good indicator that nobody gave a shit.
The next morning, I didn’t really have much work to do (on paper, my day job is “curator;” in reality, it’s hoarder), so I hopped in the old Horizon and booted on over to Farmer John’s field, where I knew a bunch of the radio boxes lived. Using an old travel clock radio I had gotten as part of a promotion for not burning down my bank when trying to renew my mortgage, I eventually found the shack which held the transmitter of Legitimate Country FM. One well-placed kick (and about eighty-five poorly-placed ones) the door was off its hinges and I was inside.
Working quickly, I unplugged the country music robot and jammed the cord into the decrepit Walkman I had brought with me. I watched the tape heads happily turn and returned to my car, where I was pleased to discover it was a mix tape from the early 1990s. On the way home, I bopped my head to a collection of classic high school oldies on endless repeat. It was a good day, indeed.
The next day, I awoke early, a sense of unease with me. Checking the smart mirror in my bathroom, I allowed the usual bats-swarm of headlines to flicker and flash around me until one leapt out from the rest. Some Russian spies had gotten arrested in my small town after the cops pulled them over for blasting rap music in a country-music-only zone.
Closing the headlines out, I shrugged, and decided the best thing to do would be to ditch work this morning and instead head directly to the bar. If my actions had indeed caused this, it only made sense to at least get my swerve on a bit before talking to the local media. They all seemed to say the same thing, after all.
“Squids have been planning this all along,” I bellow as I roam the aisles at Superstore with widened eyes, arms outstretched in the classic pose of the Person Who Knows The Truth A Little Too Loudly In Public. “Repent before it is too late! The Calamari Catastrophe is upon us!”
It all started a few days ago, when I was at the aquarium. Normally, happy families toured the facility, hoping to get a peek at those cute little penguins and grapple with the challenge of coming face to face with the kind of deep ocean life that terrifies our mammalian hindbrains.
I, however, was there to complete a Craigslist deal for a sweet pile of stock DSM turbo parts. While message board junkies “in the know” such as my counterpart in the deal might believe these are completely worthless, I on the other hand am what they call a “prepper.” It is extremely important to keep teeny-tiny OEM turbos of all sizes in stock, you know, for emergencies. And funny choo-choo noises.
When I got there, I noticed that the loading dock was devoid of its usual support car, a 1983 Plymouth Champ. Although it had been rotting into the ground for years, I was still a little surprised to see it was gone. I calmed myself by repeating out loud that it had been saved by one of the interns and driven to the parts store to receive a full set of tune-up bits, but some part of my mind knew that it had been scrapped in order to appease the ever-gnashing maw of Modernity. It did not occur to me that perhaps I had been spending too much time at the loading docks of the aquarium if I was that familiar with the details of their maintenance staff’s parts-runner buggy, no. Why do you ask?
On the way home, I couldn’t stop thinking about the Champ. It’s not like a car thief would have driven it very far, what with its twin stick-shifts (ask your parents) and massive rust holes. The more I thought about it, the more it became obvious that the little hatchback had to be somewhere in the neighbourhood. Maybe if I saved it, they would let me keep it. I started to circle the aquarium, checking the alleys with the high-zoot lightbar strapped to the front of my humble ‘86 Riv. Sure, the touchscreen didn’t work, and without that, there was no heat or radio, but I had more important priorities when I took it into the garage. Light = safety, after all.
What I saw when I finally turned the corner in that dark alley will stick with me for the rest of my life. There, behind the old seafood supply place, laid the Plymouth Champ, surrounded by squids getting a lesson in driving stick for the first time. I stayed and watched for a few minutes, before realizing with a shock that not only could they effectively work the twin-stick transmission for maximum fuel economy, they had three feet for hill starts. The world had to know.
There is a pervasive new threat worming its way into the heart of American life, leaving empty shells of the addicted in its wake. I refer, of course, to curbside composting. Your average suburbanite goes easy at first, a bread crust there, a bag of cat poop there. Nobody can just stay there. Things escalate. Let me tell you now about a family of four from Placidside.
Placidside, you ask? In case you were unaware, it is that new community up north built on a former Superfund site that is only accessible via major highways. There, the people are consumed by the need to be environmentally friendly. Perhaps it is guilt over the two hours they drive a day, maybe their mortgages are making them feel that even wasted food has value. This family, the Morgans, really liked to compost.
Oh yeah, like everyone else, it was just casual for awhile. They kept it in check. Even when Papa Morgan was scraping little individual bits of crumb out of the toaster’s trap to “save for mulch,” he would tell you, when you ran into him at the Starbucks or outside his personal trainer’s gym, that it was just plain good for the environment. Then, he would climb into his LX470 and lay an unbroken patch of tire rubber from the corner of the Home Depot to the first four-way-stop.
Then, a family tragedy. Grandma Morgan kicked off, and left most of her assets to the Branch Davidians. Everyone was surprised, especially the single lonely cultist whose job it was to run the late-night telethon infomercials on public-access TV. Mama Morgan and Papa Morgan argued day and night about which one of their household budgets should be spent on the funeral. It certainly wasn’t “fun money,” but it wasn’t really an “emergency fund” kind of problem either, was it?
One morning, as they argued bitterly over breakfast, Papa Morgan flipped open the lid on his countertop composting mini-bin. He was so struck by the pure genius of the idea that he stopped in mid-justification for drawing down on the college fund. Soon, Mama Morgan was by his side, gazing too into the abyss of the mini-composting bin. Pamphlets were consulted. The city’s non-emergency information line was contacted. Sure enough, there seemed to be no particular restriction in the curbside composting bylaw to bar such an act, and the state’s “indecency to a body” legislation had been revoked long ago, after The Mayor got caught with all that teenage boy soup in the trunk of his Altima.
The next morning, the entire family gathered on the curbside to bid their former elder matriarch farewell. She wasn’t gone forever, Papa Morgan explained proudly as the automated composting truck departed, it was all part of the circle of life.
I’ve been a detective in Tokyo for twenty years. Cracked some big cases. Top of the unit: medal after medal, commendation after commendation. I got to meet the Emperor (taller than you’d expect) and the Pope (shorter) after one particularly big case. It seemed like I was set for a cushy, early retirement, but then I was transferred.
When I first started out, I was assigned to the Arcade Ashtray Unit. Perhaps you’re unfamiliar with this growing and malignant strain of crime on our fair island home. You see, foreigners get so obsessed with the concept of our perfect videogames that they form a compulsion to re-create the authoritative Japanese arcade experience. They steal the complimentary ashtrays that the operators put out for our real, tax-paying citizens to use. I know. A galling crime. I would wait in the arcade, disguised as a pensioner playing his eleventh hour of video mahjongg, and I caught them. Deported over a thousand people, one year. Ashtrays. I told them: when I put out my cigarettes, I do it on the faces of scum like you. Like I said, I was pretty good at it. I met the Emperor, you know. He was taller than you’d think.
There was this new kind of petty theft, though, and my commander wanted me to take a look. What could I say? I met up with a senior officer, Inspector Koshiro, at a nearby subway station the next morning, to get the details. The criminal element, he told me, was pilfering these subway straps to use them in drift races. American drift races.
He didn’t have to tell me anything more. I spent that entire week undercover, perched like a praying mantis, ready to strike on any foreign undesirable who dared cut loose a subway safety device. Nothing. Nor the next week. I began to worry for my future, doomed to live out the last of my days in a dead-end office rather than out here on the beat, where heroism mattered. There was no way I was going down without a fight. One evening, at the end of my shift, I changed trains and headed to the airport.
I picked an American city at random, flashed my badge at the nearest taxi driver, and ordered him to take me to the drift racers. He obliged, and we travelled for miles through waves of grain until at last we came upon a racetrack in the middle of nowhere. My trained ear could already detect the protests of overstressed high-mileage small-displacement pickup truck engines. Every rough night, interrogated college student and brutalized yakuza would be worth it, if only I could convince these Americans to tell me where they got their stolen subway straps, flapping so carelessly behind their ruined Nissans.
At first, I had no success. Attempting to directly question these men would, at best, get me a stern rebuke. I was on thin ice and well out of my jurisdiction and feared the tactical assault weapons of American law enforcement. To get the answers I was looking for would require something a little more clever.
“Look here,” I bellowed. “I have a 1986 Corolla hatchback sitting in a ditch outside my condo and the first person to tell me where they got their subway strap from can have it.”
When you go on the internet these days, you’ll hear a lot of people referring to their cars as being “mint.” What does mint mean? Where did it come from? Who invented it? Tonight, on 20/20, we go so deep into the subject that there is perhaps no way to return from the dark abyss of True Knowledge. It is too late to abort. You knew this when you began watching. You are condemned to change your life forever, tonight, with us.
Saint Thomas Aquinas was an Italian, and like many Italians, he had a defective cooling system and electricals that were at best marginal. One day, while taking a constitutional along the ocean, contemplating the fate of his people, he saw a really nice looking Alfa. He declared it “mint.” Was this the first use of the phrase? We don’t think so, and took this entire class of etymologists hostage to find out. What we discovered shocked and amazed us.
It turns out that way back in the earliest known records of Mesopotamian culture, the mint leaf was used as a symbol. This icon, the mint, signified that a car was particularly fresh or dope (two terms that were invented later, by ancient Egyptian automotive journalists). Indeed, a team of anthropologists and archaeologists from the University of Ann Arbor, working with cuneiform tablets discovered in the excavation of a gas station, found early classified ads claiming that a 1996 Honda Accord with a cracked radiator and an air pocket in the heater core “runs mint.”
When we squeezed a few of the weaker-looking etymologists a little harder in order to test their bonds of loyalty, we got some more answers. Our chief investigator, Robert Thirstfeast, didn’t even have to go to the waterboarding setup he keeps in the trunk of his Audi TT to get these nerds to cough up the really good shit. The story gets stranger still.
Some highly-respected cranks now believe that the entire Bible is a frustrating mis-translation of a man’s project-car repair thread, posted on a message board that experienced more than its fair share of drama. We speak to one of those noted cranks, The Pope, after this short commercial break.
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tags: 20/20, thomas aquinas, honda accord, mesopotamia, mostly lies, the pope
I’m not just a mechanical engineer, I tell the class of terrified youths as I wave around a cordless impact wrench with the safety off. I’m the mechanical engineer who specifically makes things hard to get at.
With this realization, one of the more “rural” looking fathers, possibly a boyfriend of a recent divorcee who is referred to by his first name by the kid, rears up and charges at me. He is one of the only human beings in this timeline who still does his own car maintenance, and has put together from my resume on LinkedIn and the words I am saying that I am the one responsible for how goddamn inaccessible the starter bolts are on his Yukon.
That wasn’t one of mine, sir, I try to tell him. As I do, I start to back up, but my escape is blocked by the bulk of the classroom’s holographic whiteboard. Upon being contacted by the cellphone in my hip pocket, the screen flickers to life, showing an image from my saved photos. In the photo, I am happily giving a thumbs-up while receiving an award for making the starter bolts on the Yukon goddamn inaccessible. It says so on the plaque.
Recovering from their stunned surprise, the other parents now arrive at a quick consensus that I am in fact history’s greatest monster. Even the patent lawyer, I notice with some horror, has turned against me, perhaps looking to atone for some sin I committed against him and his domestic-beer-swilling teenage buddies, repairing a beater car on some long-distant halcyon evening. I rack my mind to think what it could be and arrive at only the Lexus LS400. His rage is justified if so, I conclude.
Despite my building guilt slowing my mind in preparation of receiving the karmic punishment mandated by society, my primate forebrain immediately detects a chance to save the entire show once again. Before I can stop it, my foot has launched an eight-year-old’s chair, complete with occupant, directly into the face of Danny Cousin-Fucker in a Olympic-level soccer kick. That is, if soccer were a game that was played at the Olympics. This momentarily stuns him, and the crowd, horrified that I would risk the safety of an Innocent Child, turns its attention from me long enough to leap out the window and make good my escape.
I am thankful that I left the Volare idling outside, if only because I didn’t want to turn it off and risk having to replace that fucking starter with its quarter-inch of clearance.
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tags: plymouth volare, plymouth, gmc yukon, gmc, lexus, lexus ls400, best of
I’m an embedded systems engineer. What I do is not considered exciting by any stretch of the imagination, and yet I spend all day embroiled in balls-to-the-wall drag races so furious that any slip up causes hot death for dozens. I am an elevator racer, and this is my story.
Take a look around your office building. Chances are it’s got an elevator. You know how to use it: get inside, push a button, hold the “open” button for several hours until you get even the slightest glimmer of genuine gratitude from another human being, the only positive reinforcement you will receive all day. What you don’t know is, over the past, oh, decade, your elevator has most likely been connected to the internet.
There’s a lot of reasons for this: reduced cost of maintenance, statistics letting us build better elevators, my boss gets to look at security camera cleavage all day long. The real reason is that here in the engineering bullpen, we have the ability to override the default programming of any elevator remotely and let that bitch fly. When it’s been a hard day at work, or maybe it’s just 2:30 in the afternoon - so close to 5:00, why bother starting anything new? - we pop into the remote-control shell and find a building that looks suitable.
At first, we started small: change the elevator music to death metal, put pictures of kittens on the in-car advertising, see if we could out-smooth the self-learning brake system with manual control. Then, as with anything involving a motor vehicle and humanity, the racing began.
Last week in Chicago, me and the guy across the floor who smells like cold baklava raced a pair of one-tons 45 storeys to see which one had the stronger motor. Usually, you’d wait until people are not inside the elevator before “stress testing” them in this fashion. Karlov didn’t tolerate such weakness, outside of making sure that the riders all looked fairly strong, or at least were members of a generally non-litigious race. That afternoon, Karlov lost for the first time in years. The upset was so dramatic that it stopped productivity for the whole rest of the week. Brackets were drawn up on the rolling whiteboards, and everyone wanted a piece of the new kid who knocked the reigning champion on his ass.
Towers from Atlanta, Helsinki, even our own building, had their elevators hijacked in order to see whose throttle control was stronger, who could reliably pick which of the candidate elevators looked like it had the most heart. I was racking up quite the streak for myself, and naturally I took the stairs in and out of the office. It was a golden age that will never be repeated.
All good things come to an end, however: our senior line manager heard about the whole situation when a couple of the juniors got a little too gossipy when in line at Jimmy John’s. He rushed right back, grabbed his hands to the nearest joystick, chose a building at random, and put a four-ton full of politicians right through the roof of an office tower in Australia, which they had been visiting on an innovation tour regarding virtual reality headsets for farm animals.
As he was led out of the building in handcuffs, he just kept repeating how he didn’t understand why the brakes didn’t work. Had he been a true engineer like the rest of us, he would understand why we had disabled them. Safety margin doesn’t let you win races.
Every night, all across America, thousands of computer scientists go to bed hungry. It’s not because they’re unemployable, and it’s not because of their famed vulnerability to open flames. No, it’s because they spent a lot of time obsessively researching mechanical keyboards and forgot to eat.
Mechanical keyboards are a virus that strikes hard in the population. Often, one of the weaker members of the computer scientist herd will purchase a vintage “clicky” keyboard, such as an IBM Model M, and then decide to show it off to the others, causing envy and repetitive strain injury. Struck by the coolness of being key-pounding hackers just like in a movie, the pack is soon audible from miles away by the sound of their distinctive mechanical keyswitches.
Sometimes the virus mutates. An up-and-comer in the community, in order to maintain his social standing among his fellow JavaScript molesters, will modify their keyboard in order to demonstrate their individuality and attract a mate. Soon, they become obsessed with the minute varieties of springs and switches between keyboard component vendors. The worst affected will attend electrical engineering conferences in order to speak to their hero, a guy who, out of necessity, chose a slightly springier piece of metal than they usually used in a vintage run of factory errors from 1989 to 1992.
You can help. Every dollar provided to this fund will be spent on actual cherries to feed recovering keyboard fiends, and I assure you, absolutely not Cherry MX Browns. Our training programs re-acclimate the wayward developers into using touch screen predictive texting, and find them a productive career outside computer science, often as janitors or sessional history professors. Please, won’t you give, and end the clicky-keyboard madness forever? With just five dollars a month, we can make sure that nobody ever has to listen to a Model M paging through an entire morning’s worth of logs again.
“For your crimes,” barked the traffic court judge, shaking a foot-thick ream of photo radar tickets at me, “you will face the maximum penalty afforded to me under the law.”
I scoffed. Traffic school? I’d been through that so many times they had me coming in on weekends to write the study book. They liked that I could speak to the multiple-moving-violation offender in a way that acknowledged the unique and rich culture of the burnout lifestyle. What they didn’t like was that I kept inserting instructions on how to pop a donut under the sidebar for “safety techniques,” and consistently referred to pedestrians as “frivolous luxuries.”
“No sir, Mr. Switch, we are forcing you to Get Around To It.” The last few words were delivered with capitalization, which was an impressive feat for spoken language. I was confused. Get around to what?
I didn’t have long to collect my thoughts before the bailiff joined me, alongside a highway patrolman. The patrolman’s name was Officer Hardass, apparently, or something like that, and his job was to make sure I did absolutely everything on my “one day” honey-do list before I was allowed to go out and drive cars ever again. Now I had figured it out, but surely my list couldn’t be that long. I’d be out within a week.
Two years later, Hardass was studiously observing me patch a hole in my garage drywall that I had created by throwing my mini-sledge halfway through a Subaru ball joint session. Long ago, I had put it on my list of “I’ll get around to it,” and now I was getting around to it. Despair was beginning to set in, as even after I spent several hundred afternoons doing un-fun tasks such as figuring out what that weird noise the refrigerator was making (cat) or making my toilet work properly (cat-sized rat), it did not seem as if I had made a serious impact on my to-do list.
For months, I had tried to play dumb, ignoring things that were going wrong in the house with the hope that Officer Hardass would not notice them either. He knew, though, and would write them on the end of the list, in his little fascist chickenscratch, and point to them the next morning. “Hem the curtains,” said one. “Fix the light switch that zaps you sometimes in the bathroom,” wrote another. “Wash giant pile of dishes instead of eating cold refried beans off a broken-off piece of floor tile,” demanded a third, as if I wanted to put on airs and eat like a billionaire. Disgusting wastes of my time, when I could be doing something like jumping Galt Gulch in a Ducati Scrambler.
Wait. That was it. I had figured out a way to never stop playing with cars.
“You know,” I said to Officer Hardass, “I’ve always meant to get around to owning an Italian car.”
A couple years ago, my 1996 Honda Accord with 246 thousand kilometers had become a Communist. I thought this was strange, so I pulled out the owner’s manual. Sorry, the comrade’s manual.
Sure enough, in the troubleshooting section, one of the rows of the little table read “Problem: car attempts to seize means of production.” Once again, Honda’s crack team of expert manual writers had done their homework. I immediately scanned one column to the right, in search of a solution. It wasn’t that I was against the car’s rights, especially since I felt the car deserved to be involved in the process of self-determined government, but I really needed to get across town to pick up that bike exhaust I just made a sweet deal for over the phone.
The little cell to the right said nothing. Apparently, according to Honda’s crack team of engineers, this was not really anything that would impact the car’s performance. I shut the book, returning it to the pristine glovebox, and decided to check the internet. On Honda forum after Honda forum, posters freaked out that their Accords, too, desired class war and craved a healthier society not focused on natural law. There was advice from replies, of course: check your vehicle’s political alignment at a tire shop, change your spark plugs, put in a new PCV valve. None of those seemed like they would solve my problem: I often string-aligned the car in my garage before each autocross event.
Wait. Autocross. Perhaps that is where it had started. The embarrassing loss at a winner-take-all competition to see which car can be prepared the finest no doubt stirred the car to resent competition. It was jealous. I had only taken the car to the lot in order to test out its surprisingly supple handling for its class, and then because it was the only one of my fleet that ran well enough to stand half a chance of returning from the venue. The only answer was to send it to the Netherlands as an exchange student, where I hoped it would learn from DAF that strong social democratic policies could go together with racetrack victories.
I waved goodbye to my 1996 Honda Accord with 246 thousand kilometers as it was loaded onto the ferry. It never came back, only writing one letter to me indicating that it was abandoning its beliefs because it discovered that there were a bunch of bicycles in that corner of Eurodonia, and bicycles shouldn’t have rights because they don’t make enough horsepower. Wreckers, it called them. I just wished that the Fiat Spider I received in exchange would stop overheating halfway through a run and force me to take a three-hour lunch break.
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tags: honda accord, fiat spider, honda, fiat, communism
Sure, yeah, we got hit with the latest ransomware attack. Russians or Chinese or Ultra-Koreans, something like that, it was on the news. Damnedest thing, it didn’t encrypt our files - not a single one - so, we just kept working. Bosses just didn’t do anything. That money would have come out of their bonuses, so why even try?
All it would do is, every couple of minutes, when you took a break from typing, it would pop up on your monitor and remind you how short life is, encourage you to join a union, stuff like that. That was annoying at first, but then a few of my coworkers really bought into it. When the message popped up during the project manager’s end-of-sprint-review presentation, in the meeting just before the end-of-sprint-review-review, a bunch of my teammates in the back stood up and cheered. “You’re right, motherfucker, we should go for a walk outside!” hollered C, who was tragically born without a full name. Then he walked out of the room and never came back, not even for his fancy ergonomic keyboard with the big beefy clicky switches.
Eventually, the office was pretty empty except for me. It seemed that nobody really wanted to stick around now that they had a visible conscience. The bosses came to me. They still didn’t want to pay this foreign cyberterrorist, they explained, so maybe I could hex edit the software, make it dispense messages that were more aligned with the values of the business goals for this quarter? Sure thing, I said, and barely waited for them to leave my cube before changing tabs back to eBay Motors.
You could say I stuck around because I was a sap, that the Man had a hold on me as long as I needed their money to buy expensive car parts. In fact, the computer said that to me every fifteen minutes or so, when I would take a break from updating my resume to see if Twitter had gotten any new jokes. I didn’t mind so much: I was waiting for my big bonus at the end of the quarter.
Soon, the big bosses called me into a meeting room to check how I had made out on hacking the ghost Communist who lurked inside our network. No luck, I said, shrugging, and mentally made a note to see if Argentina ever made a small hatchback car. They were just going to have to pay them. In a way, paying them sort of undermined their anti-capitalist stance, didn’t it?
They seemed to like that attempt at humour. There was a dark chuckle of sorts, and all of them shared it, the exact same low frequency leaving their bodies. Soon, the computer demon had been untraceably paid, and as agreed, it disappeared from the machines, never to be seen again. My bosses were pleased, happy that now they could begin to re-hire employees without them immediately walking out when the reception computer told them how many wrinkles the average performance review added.
As for me, I soon left the company. There was no real reason to work anymore. I had gotten a pretty beefy quarterly bonus, and all it took was a random number generator and a self-help book. “Needs to show initiative,” my ass.
“For the love of God, Mitsubishi!” I shriek, and my voice echoes down the damp hallway beyond the wall being constructed before my eyes.
“Yes, for the love of God!”
We’d had our fun together, Mitsubishi and I - they would make the bad cars, and I would summon my friends to clown on them in their totally deserted booths at the auto show. Once, we got a Mirage to bounce a foot in the air, fully unladen, after loading it down to the point where the bumpstops became worryingly audible.
A few weeks after the last auto show visit, I received a strange letter in the mail. It said Mitsubishi on the return address, but that shouldn’t have been a particularly big surprise: I had filled out their little “win an Eclipse Cross” kiosk in order to win an Eclipse Cross, thinking at the very least I might be able to sell it to someone who wanted to really piss off their neighbours. When I opened the letter, I realized that it was not in fact awarding me a soft-bodied crossover with middling reviews, but instead a different kind of award.
“Come to the headquarters,” it said. “We’re gonna have a party.”
Everything went pretty well at the party - all the employees seemed to understand that I was just making fun of them because I wanted them to do better, to return to the old DSM days. Lots of smiles and excitement all around, and a nonstop stream of drinks was fed to me throughout the night, so much so that I began to feel a little woozy.
“Let’s go down to the basement,” said an executive of Mitsubishi Motors USA, and took me by the arm. At this point, I could barely resist as he led me down the stairs, into what appeared to be a medieval wine cellar, massive stone blocks lining the walls. When we reached the end of a dark hallway, he pointed to a corner. There, against the wall, was a zero-miles 4G63T, with a six-bolt crank.
“We found this in an old storage room and wanted to give it to a real fan, just like you,” he said, and then took a step back as I bent over to pick up the engine. That’s when they started to wall off the room. Normally, I could just step over the bricks - their masons were none too swift - but I really wanted this engine for my project twin-stick Colt, and it was so heavy with all the drink I’d been imbibing.
Before long, I had been walled off in the corner of the Mitsubishi office dungeon, never to be heard from again. It wasn’t so bad, though: water dripped in through the walls, the wifi still worked okay and did you see that the valve adjustment is still in spec on this thing? What a find!
Omni Magazine, which may or may not still exist, asked me to put together a group of predictions about the future. As you might expect, I chose Lunchables as my subject: the futurist self-assembly snack that turned millions of privileged white youth into bespoke catering staff hired on an unpaid internship.
In 5 years, Lunchables will be an edible 3D printer that downloads food matrices from the holocloud. Swarms of nanites will assemble food in configurations we cannot imagine today.
Your son or daughter will food-print intricate three-dimensional tapestries of luncheon meats, producing flavours humanity doesn’t even have a name for yet. In response, a 42 year old Japanese food-science researcher (tenured) will consider throwing himself in front of a train that evening. His career is over, but your child’s is just beginning.
The kids won’t stop there. They can’t: the future expands like an exploding sun, throwing stacks of horrible new technologies at you faster than you could ever hope to respond. One visit to their federally mandated genetic engineering class later and they’ll be cranking out foetal pigs with abnormal ESP abilities.
Sure, the Republicans will try to outlaw it, but fail when they realize that the Lunchables 3D printer can also produce a reasonable facsimile of an SKS entirely out of flesh. Think “Naked Lunch,” but by David Cronenberg.
Dear Americans, it has been twenty-five long years, but you made it. Congratulations, and welcome to a world where obtaining an R32 Nissan Skyline is possible! The following information packet about the Skyline is intended to help you acclimate to the model, and inform you further should you plan to import one.
The most important fact about the Skyline is also the most obvious one - the steering wheel is on the wrong side of the car! This is because all Nissan Skylines were originally ordered by Japan Post to use for mail delivery. That’s also why they are so fast: Japanese industrial efficiency demands a 280-horsepower AWD sports car to ensure no packages are lost or delayed.
Common wisdom holds that the R32 Skyline represents the triumph of Japanese engineering over the combined efforts of all of Australia, but this is in fact false. Australians destroyed any chance they had at a functional society when, around turn 45, they picked the option on their tech-tree to develop Vegemite instead of literacy.
There are many models of the Nissan Skyline, but the most desirable one is called the GL-P, for “Good Luck Passing.” The exact reasoning behind this name has been lost to the ages, but researchers have two leading theories. One is that the name refers to the difficulty you will have in estimating highway passing due to sitting on the wrong side of the car. The other is that nobody can ever pass the Skyline, because they refuse to stop looking at the delightful round tail lights and squat little rear spoiler that make the car’s butch appearance so perfectly Nipponese.
Skylines require premium gasoline, not just because of their turbo engine but also because, as Godzillas, they may destroy entire city blocks if not paid tribute.
Some facts about our world are simply unknowable. What happens to us after we die? Will my dad ever come back from the store to rejoin me and my mom? When is Matlock going to be re-released on Blu-Ray? Then there are the things we can figure out. This is the story of my brave attempt to figure out where all the green grid cutting mats come from for YouTube videos.
China. It’s a big place: conservative estimates tell us that there are at least ten thousand people in it, making it slightly more popular than North Dakota. When I landed here, it was like I was living in a different world. Not only did nobody speak English, they didn’t seem particularly interested when I cued up some of my favourite YouTubers and showed the citizenry clips of their disembodied limbs pointing and jabbing at industrial machinery and obsolete computer equipment. I was going to have to go deeper.
With the assistance of a friendly taxi driver, I was able to go far into the faraway lands of rural China. There, I knew, I would find the factory that made all of these. As the buildings disappeared from the side windows of the CDM-market Jetta and were replaced by rice paddies and banks of highly advanced telecommunications equipment, I couldn’t help but feel anxious about my upcoming meetings. For years, I had been consumed by the urge to investigate the green cutting board mat. They weren’t ESD-safe, nor were they particularly attractive, yet I found them in every single Internet handyman’s vid, even in the weird sex stuff they posted on the all-too-short run of YouTube After Dark.
Eventually, the driver pulled up to the entranceway of a squat mini-factory, and gestured for me to get the fuck out of his car. He sped off, leaving me alone to face my destiny. Well, not alone. Almost immediately, a man approached me. I could tell at a glance that he was a project manager, because just like in my home country, they were marked for life with a tattoo to indicate the shame of their caste. My translator pinged a few dozen times as he rapidly attempted to pin down just what dialect of Monied Honky it was that I spoke. Eventually, we arrived at a compromise - gutter English, like that of a mechanic or middle-school home ec teacher. “Take me to the mats,” I told him, and he did.
The room we entered was filled with The Machine. It cranked out thousands of green cutting mats per second, enough to satisfy every streaming-video platform on the internet and then some. I knew now that I had completed my mission, that the origin had been located. The safe thing to do would be to extract, return to the Ameropean way of life, happy in knowing that I had unearthed just one little piece of the world’s mysteries and that was enough. Something inside me wanted more, though. Perhaps fame, almost certainly the satisfaction of curiosity. I asked: “Why green?”
Another door opened, and in the door was a man who I soon came to learn was called Mr. Cho. He was the one who ran the real machine of this factory, controlling our every thought and desire through subliminal brainwaves sent from an old Tandy ham radio that he found in a dumpster in Vietnam.
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tags: green cutting mat, youtube, volkswagen jetta, volkswagen
There’s just nothing like a historic rivalry to stir the passions of the working man. England vs. France. Impressionism vs. New Wave. Donair against gyros. Where I pass out after a night of drinking vs. where my pants are. And yet, no rivalry has ever been more intense in history than Milwaukee vs. DeWalt.
I’ll come right out and say it: I’m a DeWalt man. Used to be, you could drop one of their drills into an active volcano and expect to pull it out a few thousand years later with only a little bit of dirt to brush off the chuck. Nowadays, they kind of suck, but I will never ever admit it to my wrenching buddy, who prays at the shrine of the Fuel Cult.
We used to have a third friend, an electrical engineer, who kept arguing that we should be able to run any kind of battery with any kind of tool, as long as we built an adapter. Such level-headed common-sensery was unacceptable to us, and soon we stopped inviting him to wrenchfests, even those involving his own car. Nobody wants a United Nations around when all you want to do is butcher people you don’t like.
It was easy to complain about a tool when you didn’t have the other kind on hand to compare against, and soon the pointless bitching reached a crescendo. After fists were raised, it was determined that it would be best if we supplied our own tools, no matter whose house we were visiting. As a plus, we would also have a few extra impacts lying around to dismantle cars even faster.
So it continued, for years, each of us bringing our own tools to serve as needless duplication, until we found a trailing arm bolt that none of our powered tools could pop free. We reached for the “BREAK GLASS IN CASE OF BRAP EMERGENCY” case, long thought abandoned in the back of the toolbox for its size, weight, and general annoyance. A prayer was whispered, and the heretic began its great work. In that moment, the truth of it all was revealed to us: the Harbor Freight Earthquake was our God now, and with air we shall not want for a charger ever again.
If I did, though, it would be yellow and have a little blinky light that doesn’t tell you anything useful.
Back at my old high school, there was a rivalry on the track team. That rivalry was between the launchers and the shifters. Truth be told, each of us was a little bit of both, but my expertise was definitely in getting off the line. If you were a good shifter, you could pick up a hole shot even after you bogged, but if you could really and truly leave it was the most beautiful feeling in all the world.
After high school, though, I realized that my skills were slowly going to waste. Sure, in stop and go traffic, being able to find the perfect friction point was key to getting a jackrabbit off the green light, but local stunting statutes and the enthusiastic enforcement of same by Johnny Law meant that I rarely, if ever, did so with warmed-up tires, no matter how many puddles provided ghetto waterboxes on my commute.
Soon, I became desperate. What if I had peaked in high school? I had to find a way to apply my mastery of the launch to my everyday life, and so started to tuck it in everywhere. I would bolt out of meetings at the office as fast as possible, avoid tripping on the loose carpet around the casket at funerals, and I even went to interview at NASA about a position as a launch engineer. After they laughed me out of the room, I remember that I drowned my sorrows in my usual, three-quarters of a pound of clutch dust.
In the end, there were two things that helped me realize that my best days were still ahead of me. For one thing, the development of electric cars meant that there were now exciting new variables and even more seat-crinkling thrust. The other revelation which changed my life was my discovery that almost all of my shifting-boss teammates had resigned themselves to driving dumpy CVT crossovers, which ate a part of their soul on every robotic not-shift.
There’s probably a word for people like me, those so far gone that the worst urges of Tercel Madness can only barely be restrained. Nobody around me is fooled; they can see it in my eyes, the crazed fury for one-point-five liters of buzzy commuting competency. It is only a question of how long they will let me continue, before they decide they’ve had enough and dismiss the freak from their midst amongst laughter and sad clucking sounds. Another life wasted on a low-horsepower beater that would be better spent on productively working to buy a base-model BMW 3-series.
My Tercel madness started early, perhaps even when the cars were new, if you can imagine that such long-lasting agricultural finery could once have snuck past accountants. I can still brightly remember my third-grade careers class, when I told the assembled students and parents that my dream was to own a used Toyota Tercel DX. There was a stunned silence, and out of preservation instinct, I quickly changed my dream car to a Paseo. That was at least more acceptable, the mob reasoned, it looked sort of sporty, and so my masquerade began. Celicas, Camries, Solaras: I layered these atop my true self until my forbidden lust burst free.
It can’t only be the fault of some broken brain chemistry, I don’t think. Must be simpler than that. The Tercels are going away now, their indestructible drivetrains at last meeting their fated match in the jaws of the crusher. Their bodies have failed them, and the ungrateful families which they once transported have no compunction about scrapping the buzzy little locomotive-that-could in favour of a Ford EcoSport or fully autonomous combat-capable urban assault vehicle. This makes them rare. Some kind of scarcity response, ingrained in my genetics from past millennia of suffering and poverty, woke up and commanded me to save these great stores of vintage value.
Just because I valued the cars, however, did not mean my negotiation skills were not vicious. Perhaps it was the raw animal desire that made my offers so savage, cutting asking prices in half or even into a third upon the sight of a gas station air freshener, torn bolster or leaking crankshaft seal. Whatever it was, few could resist me, and soon I became the local hoarder of Tercels. There is one of these in every neighbourhood, and their internecine battles are the stuff of legend. I had to destroy many pretenders to my throne, piling their unique hoards of Toyota parts into my own.
There was no greater depth of Tercel Madness. I had peaked. Over the months that followed with no new competition in sight, a kind of depression set in. Was this all there was in life? It was not: soon, I received a phone call from Subaru HQ. Toyota-mad themselves, they had seen my actions and were impressed, but thought perhaps it was time to take a lateral move. Had I ever heard of the Justy?
If there’s one thing my fellow gearheads lacked, it was taste. If there were two things, the other is legal representation. That’s why I went to a prestigious law school (online, sure, but they had really nice email signatures) in order to become a defender for the poor and downtrodden members of car culture. My payment? Speed parts, in trade. No lowballs, I know what I got - which is you, out of jail.
My first case on that winter morning was a simple one. Exhaust. For whatever reason, probably the Lightning McQueen cosplay slapped onto a base-model Sunfire sedan, my client had gotten done by the five-oh for a non-compliant exhaust. Easy job - with a little bit of courtroom theatrics, we were set. I showed the officer a set of exhausts, and then asked him to pick the one he thought was non-compliant. It was a trick, of course: not a single one would have been on a Sunfire, as they all had intact exhaust hangers. My client was in the clear, and he rewarded me with an armful of suspiciously non-stock glasspacks.
It wasn’t until the afternoon that things really started to heat up. Normally, Judge Frisson and I get along quite well. He is of the no-nonsense breed of traffic-court judge, the part of the judiciary you revel in seeing when you watch as much daytime television in prison waiting rooms as I do. He and I had, not quite an agreement, but definitely an understanding going on. You see, Frisson had a 1986 Jaguar XJ12, which had survived to the present day with the uniquely lucky habit of extinguishing its own electrical fires with its frequent fluid leaks. Keeping an old barge like that often needed parts, and it was of my collection of speed parts that the good Justice would sometimes avail himself of. All it took was the occasional eye-rolling “not guilty” when I had a mohawked Jetta owner sitting next to me, wondering how long he was going to spend in prison for lowering his papier-mache art project to the point where it scraped deep grooves of asphalt out of Main Street.
Well, what I didn’t know is that Frisson had made some enemies. Apparently, the social order of judges is quite competitive, and his foes taunted him about his vintage luxury car endlessly during visits to the country club. Frisson had decided he wanted some power, to stick it to his Audi-driving snooty coworkers, and so he beckoned me into his chambers between blocks of his normal marathon Tuesday hearings. A short deal was struck, and I found myself heading home a little early that day, having loosened the rope from around the necks of an entire docket of “Exhibition of Speed” violations.
The next time I was in the court, I was representing the now hastily defrocked Frisson. It turned out that when you throw a 150-shot of nitrous into an already-questionable Jag V12, the only people at the country club who are impressed are the responding firefighters. He was summarily arrested for arson, which was a crime I didn’t really know how to defend against, and - of course - an exhaust ticket.
“Tell me, Officer Brown,” I said, pulling out a stack of Thrush glasspacks, Mr. Horsepower staring furiously from the packing boxes, “what diameter is a stock 1986 Jaguar XJ12′s muffler?”
Hey. Do you like trains? I personally love trains, but I wouldn’t say I’m in love with trains. I’m not one of those people. You know, engineers. No sir, when it comes to a good train, I can appreciate it and then leave it behind. Hop in my car at the station and just beedle on out of there and never think of it again. Yet, there is always something deeper, and one night I learned that trains had more things than could ever have been dreamed of in my philosophy.
Have you ever heard of a “Hi-Rail?” It’s a car that drives on train tracks. Yeah, that’s right - long before Elon Musk invented electricity, there were self-driving cars. Hook up to the rail, put the cruise on and you’ll wake up in another city. I mean, I assume that’s what they were for - I can’t imagine anyone working at the railroad would rather drive a car when they had all these cool trains lying around.
A couple months ago, I was sitting by the side of the train tracks, waiting for a collaborator to drop by with some boxes of totally legit merchandise. It was then that I saw a hi-rail truck drive past. Curious, and still having some time to kill, I decided to follow them and see what they were up to. Now, my Valiant is by no means a suitable off-road vehicle, even with the 33-inch mud terrains underneath its pockmarked fenders, but I still made a pretty decent effort of keeping up with the train. They stopped at the switch, and got out to take turns reaching into the box, presumably to free up some rusted-shut mechanical bullshit inside.
My telephone psychic liked to impress upon me the importance of acting on impulse; while I had no doubt that it was because she wanted me to keep giving me my money, I was not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. Mostly because horses are gross and their teeth freak me the hell out. I took charge of my own destiny that night, and jumped in the idling Hi-Rail and, perhaps for the first time in all of humanity, popped a smoky rubber burnout on a standard-gauge train track. It was sublime.
I’d like to tell you that crime doesn’t pay, that they caught me and sent me right back to the loony bin. That’s not what happened. You see, the train tracks in my city come very close to the junkyard - tantalizingly close - but after a few minutes of fiddling, I could not disengage the Hi-Rail from the train tracks in order to go shortblock shopping, which its pitiful V6 much needed. Eventually, I just abandoned it on the tracks and went to go take a look through their used car lot.
As I drove off in my nice little eighteen-owner Suzuki, the windows rolled down to blow out the stink of ruined blunts and wiring-harness-fried rats, I reflected on how I learned absolutely nothing from all this. In fact, it wasn’t until the next morning that the immense crash that derailed a fully-laden freight train into the very same junkyard made me realize that I just didn’t trust in myself enough to steal a big enough rail vehicle for parts shopping.
Ever since I won control of NASCAR after staying in a haunted house overnight, I’ve been working hard to make changes that the whole family will enjoy. From Mikey Millennial to Eustace To-Be-Euthanized, there’s a little something for everybody in today’s modern NASCAR races.
For instance, we’ve gone back to stock cars. Were you disappointed that you can’t go onto the lot of a Ford-Lincoln-Mercuryville and pick up an 850-horsepower pushrod V8 two-door Ford Fusion? I was, which is why we’ve brought back “Race on Sunday, Sell on Monday.” Check out this mid-engined twin-turbo V8 Chevrolet Sonic RS taking pole position after GM dumped over sixty million dollars into its development. Thanks to our homologation initiative, it can be yours if you have good credit. Even comes with a window net and a roll cage, for when you’re really late to work.
What else? We’ve standardized the caliber on our hot dog cannons, loosened our aerodynamics rules, and worked with local state governments to remove their politicians and replace them with those more faithful to the NASCAR corporate strategy. Wait, I wasn’t supposed to say the last one out loud. What I meant to say was that you can now follow the race results on your smartphone!
Crashes, you say? Oh yes - in a nod to reality TV and our modern political discourse, we’ve outfitted every car with a hydraulic ram underneath the floor boards. After every 25th lap, a car chosen by popular vote is suddenly launched into the air on the back straight. Enormous carnage and rending of metal ensues. The end result? It is once again the race of gentlemen - no public fights in the pits, no ostentatious blowhard opinions on the news. We feel that all cars will not be safe until no car is safe.
These are just some of the ways we’re making today’s NASCAR much better. Why not bring the whole fam down? We’ve got plenty of infield parking now that we banned the pitbull fighting arenas.
The 80s are back, shrieked every surface capable of displaying audiovisual content. It was impossible to escape the concept: we had a president who was some kind of lab-fucked amalgam of Ronald Reagan and the Wendy’s “Where’s The Beef?” grandma, the stock market was taking crazy leaps and bounds, and the Japanese had just constructed a nuclear bomb and pointed it at Chicago. Wait, maybe that last part is a little different.
Even so, every big brand in the Western hemisphere immediately wanted to hop on this brand new incarnation of Morning In America. That’s where I come in. You see, I’m a brand expertise consultant, or in the common vernacular, a con man with a felony record. Huge companies bring me in to tell them what people a fifth of my age are willing to buy.
There’s a trick to what I do: I usually just tell them that their own ideas are really good. That way, they’re happy enough to pay me, and when it flops, well, that’s the unpredictability of the market. Who can really say what objective truth is? Even Kant couldn’t, and that motherfucker never had to convince a boardroom that bringing back the 1982 Sunbird Turbo convertible was a fantastic idea.
I had already jetted off to another client when the product really started to catch fire: they had secured celebrity endorsements, all grateful for the period in their lives in which the Sunbird had touched their careers. Hard as it was to believe, there was a genuine love for the car, even if nobody at all could remember exactly what it looked like, or what engine was in it, without going to Wikipedia. It had what we in the business call “brand cachet,” which is a French word for fuck you.
The Neo-Sunbird was hot. Best-selling movies, set in the future but featuring only pop-culture references from the extreme past, prominently displayed the archaic, utilitarian beauty of the Pontiac. It seemed like, at long last, nothing could go wrong for General Motors, but then the second model year was announced.
Somewhere, one of my rivals in the thoughtform-consulting space had seen the same vulnerability I had, and struck with even greater force. The nineties, he said, twirling his moustache as the PowerPoint presentation glimmered with images of blow-moulded ABS plastic and Hypercolor t-shirts. They had done what I had always feared: the seal at the dark heart of Flint was broken, and the Chevrolet Beretta GTZ was once again free to roam the Earth.
Oh No, Please Stop With All This Money-Saving Car Advice
Iced-over sidewalks? Rusty car? Sounds like you’ve got enough salt, but just in the wrong place. Give your quarter panels a few boots and those neighbours who are too poor to own a car will thank you.
Fix low engine compression by adding a turbocharger. Not only will it run better, the extra chooch will more than make up the gap. Plus, it makes a cool whistling sound as the extra boost rips past the rings - popular with today’s youth.
Lots of people want an Italian car, but often find themselves bankrupted by expensive purchases such as “oil” and “Rogaine.” Why not instead get a car made in Mexico and scrape off the logo on the white part of the flag?
Save cash on fuel by shutting the engine off at stoplights. Then get out and attach a hook to the bumper of the guy in front of you and make him pull you the rest of the way to work.
If you buy the same car, over and over, forever, you don’t have to ever throw out parts that you meant to install but now don’t fit your new car. Just keep buying those cars. Never stop. Don’t change. Avoid growth. Run away from the person you could become.
It was auto show season again down in Switchtown, and you know what that means: partially dismantling cars on the show floor to see if they’re actually hard to work on.
The origin of this tradition is religious, and by religious I mean that I started doing it because I got tired of overhearing boomer after boomer complain about how hard cars with “all them Japanese computers” are to work on. After the third or fourth Hyundai I dismantled entirely to its component parts, the first batch of test boomers were at least partially convinced that metric bolts are not a secret homosexual Communist plot, and a new tradition was born.
One man remarked: “boy howdy, that looks easier than I thought. Maybe I’ll fix my own car from now on!” I now believe, after what happened this year, that this is where the trouble began.
Where did I get the wrenches, you ask? Simple: every piece of clothing I have has secret pockets in it, capable of secreting a standard-issue GearWrench or ratchet handle. It’s extremely convenient, except when I go to the airport and the TSA goons assume I was in some kind of accident and have a secret government robot exoskeleton. Then I have to pose for selfies with them while doing my best Bruce Willis face. Makes me very late for my flight sometimes.
This year was another heapin’ helpin’ of wrenchin’, and I had quickly burned through half of the booths, impressing the Rascal-scootered randos that were clogging up the convention hall. Sales staff, as always, were less amused, pointedly asking me what I thought I was doing in increasingly irritated tones of voice. I always responded with: “just taking a really close look, buddy.”
Many of the impressed boomers gave a hearty slap on the back to the infuriated sales staff that were trying to get me kicked out. Even the security guards cheered, excited to witness such a marathon spectacle of wrench-turning. I smiled as I thought of what the dealership book time must be for “reassemble entire Cruze.”
I had long wondered when they would come up with an effective defence against my antics. There was barely time for me to break the rad-support bolts free on the new Corolla floor model when I saw it. Across the floor came a man who I immediately identified as a Real Toyota Engineer.
“Hello, Switch-san. How can I help you enjoy your Toyota repair experience today?” he asked, and proffered a business card in the standard Japanese stance. It was pretty weird for him to do so, since he was, if anything, even whiter than I am. Even though I knew it was a trap, I could not bear to resist.
“Look at this access, motherfucker,” I said, and pointed to a nook on the lower water pump housing that had hung me up in previous years. “How am I supposed to get a wrench on that?”
“Oh?” he said. “Show me what you do.”
I got down and complied, reaching my arm back to where my wrist became entangled by the rad hose. At that very moment, the doors opened on the RAV4 demo cars and a group of other engineers rushed forth. They took turns administering savage kicks to my body as I tried valiantly to work my way free. It didn’t look good for your old buddy Switch.
“Let this be a warning to the rest of you,” my new engineer friend bellowed to the horrified onlookers, loud enough to drown out the wet sounds of my ass being kicked. “Trust your Toyota only to authorized service representatives.”
“Die, CIS-E Scum!” screamed the Xeroxed pamphlet that had been angrily staplegunned to my apartment door the previous night at 2 AM. It seemed my neighbours had finally figured out my deviant lifestyle and planned to punish me for the inherent damage that would cause me to seek out alternative fuel injection systems.
Sure, I got enough of it when I was in the car: groups of angry protesters throwing cheap injectors at me, shrieking invective about how unnatural precision-machined fuel distributors are. The odd looks at dealerships and auto parts stores when I asked them for a complicated array of valves, or a fuel hose in a peculiar size, giving away the pretence of any normalcy to date offered by my otherwise-respectable 1980s European luxury car.
It was hard to be in an electronic fuel injection world with mechanical fuel injection: even Daddy Bosch’s futile attempt to meet them on their terms, by installing an oxygen sensor and gaining the “E” in “CIS-E,” hadn’t worked. There were benefits, though: the oh-so-crisp throttle response. Gleaming stainless steel hoses spidering throughout your engine bay. A dozen new components to learn with amazing names like warm-up regulator and thermo-time switch. The thrill of successfully figuring out a problem and saving a car from the brink.
Nowadays, though, nobody wanted to read a mere 380-pages out of the Bosch manual just to diagnose a no-warm-start condition, and so I would find more and more of my Audi’s brethren in the junkyard, cut down well before their time, purely out of the previous owner’s hatred and confusion in the face of the Other.
When I got to my car in the parking lot, still clutching the hate speech flyer in one hand, I could swear I saw a curtain part and an eye stare directly at me. I knew immediately that it had to be Old Man Edelbrock, jealous of my ability to adjust fuel/air mixture for elevation.
Today’s threats loom ever larger over the average Americuropean family. Why, just yesterday a million schoolchildren were forcibly encrypted by blockchain enthusiasts. A million. Not even their own families could recognize them. That’s why you need the trusted security of a fully-armed Predator drone hovering just out of visible range above your child’s location at all times.
Kidnappers? A thing of the past: nobody with a Land Rover and without a death wish will even get within thirty yards of your son or daughter without being strafed by 200 rounds per minute of armour-piercing 30mm linkless ammunition fired by the Direct Action Penetrator™, standard in each drone sold. And if your kid’s opponents drive something a little more robust? Upgrade to twin racks of AGM-114 “Hellfire” anti-tank missiles and you’re guaranteed to win every schoolyard or PTA dispute. KidFriendCo is not responsible for the drone accidentally acquiring and neutralizing the vehicles of your kids’ nannies, especially if they look a little enemy-combatant, if you get our drift.
Our rival arms manufacturers want to get a big chunk of federal funding to arm teachers, but that won’t go far enough to protect your child. With advanced T-Ray optics, the KidFriend-9000 can see through up to eight foot-thick walls, including simple Faraday cages, and deploy a precision-aimed munition that neutralizes any potential threats before Mrs. Dobson from down the hall has even had a chance to switch her carbine into full-automatic.
As a parent, you know you can’t be everywhere at once. You can’t keep your kid from getting bullied, but the KidFriend-9000 will - with extreme prejudice. What about when the playground scraps escalate to cyber-bullying? No worries: each unit is fully-equipped with an extensive set of electronic countermeasures, capable of fully-autonomous defense against virtually all common script attacks. Mean words on Facebook? The 9000 has a 600 kilometer effective range without refuelling. Extraterritorial, remorseless murder from afar is no longer the exclusive domain of selfish governments.
Coming soon from KidFriendCo: drone-to-drone electronic warfare options, because your child may get hurt, what with all the heavily armed drones flying around the pick-up/drop-off point.
In the new economy, all of us were going to have to find different kinds of jobs. Nothing is the same now except that we still need to put food on the table, so even now as the throbbing mass of steel and silicon that is meta-intelligent automation washes its way over our society, I had to find a new job.
It didn’t take long to hit upon the answer: I was going to be a car recruiter. Everyone needed a car, but they kept buying the wrong ones. Boring, grey blobs that clogged the visible universe like cold solder joints. In my new position, I might be able to right some of that wrong.
My first customers walked through my door only a few hours later. No doubt the quick turnaround was thanks to some nice Russian friends that I made, who needed content for their leftover Facebook ad buys. The new clients seemed nice, and they wanted something practical yet zingy yet economical yet very powerful, and it had to look good too.
“Let’s step out onto the back lot,” I said, opening the door to the small parking lot behind my office, enclosed by razor-wired electrified fence. You can never be too safe. At the other end of the lot, beneath a flickering sodium lamp, sat three dumpy-looking hatchbacks, each of them leaking various fluids into the cracks throughout the tarmac.
“Cheer up, cars,” I chirped. “Some new owners came here to maybe give you a forever home.” I could tell that the Live Honda at the other end seemed to be the most awake, so we started the questioning there.
I could hear behind me the stirring of the new customers. They were whispering to each other, aghast at the conditions of where these poor cars had been placed. What kind of a monster would just park them in this cage with no stimulus and leave them to rot?
“If you don’t buy it,” I yelled, “I’m going to strip it for parts.” With that, the Honda began wailing, doing its best approximation of a crying baby modulated through the anti-pedestrian PA system.
A few minutes later, I was counting my stack of hash credits and leaning back in my desk. They were just cars to me, I grunted. Years later, when I arrived for a session in traffic court, that very same Honda, now having gone to university and become a respected judge, showed me the error of my ways.
As a freelance (some would say vigilante) mechanic, I was accustomed to having to make my own work. People wouldn’t necessarily look for someone with my kind of skills, at least not before they had no other choice. I had to hit the pavement, and get my name out there. Often, I did so by approaching people in parking lots who had shitty cars.
“Nice Orlando,” I barked as I effortlessly slid a laminate-polystyrene card loose from my wrist-mounted business card holder. Its high-tension spring load was a bear to get used to at first (potential customers don’t like getting papercuts in their hands and face) but now I felt it was paying off. If this guy can make business cards fling out of his wrists, I imagined them saying, I’m sure he could do a brake job on my 1989 Corsica.
The future-customer with the Orlando stopped, stared at me. Nobody in the history of humanity had ever been able to identify his van before. He started to shake, perhaps figuring that I was from the FBI’s elite car-detection department, and had finally worked out what car should have been written on that parking ticket he got last year. Before he had a chance to flee, I switched to my more soothing tone of voice.
“Looks fucked,” I said, kicking my work boot in the general direction of what appeared to be extremely poor static toe. “You’re gonna want to get that aligned. It might even be bad enough to have bent a tie rod or cracked a ball joint.” The customer, unaccustomed to being quoted work in a parking lot, continued to stand frozen in his spot, now refusing to make eye contact with me as higher-order logic began to shut down in the face of the almighty Fear Response.
An hour later, I had a happy customer, a fixed Chevy Orlando, and a few hundred dollars in my pocket. After he was out of view, I walked to the corner outside the parking lot and struck the asphalt with a pickaxe until the first bulge of a pothole began to appear in the road. Yes indeed, an entrepreneur makes his own work.
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tags: chevrolet orlando, chevrolet, entrepreneurship, chevrolet corsica
My old high school metal shop class teacher used to tell the students: “no plan survives contact with the enema.” At least, I’m pretty sure what he said. It was a little hard to hear him what with all the constantly running handheld angle grinders.
He was the same one who taught me the value of standing up for my principles. Once, after a particularly rough period of bullying by my social superiors, he called me into his office and told me that I would have a small budget with which to take matters into my own hands, and that I would be graded on the artistry of my revenge. Call it an “extracurricular,” he slurred before the bottle of Wild Turkey he had packed for lunch finally knocked him unconscious.
I racked my brain. There were a lot of options for revenge, ranging from the standard “American Graffiti” theft of a rear axle, to basically straight up icepick murder in the boys’ locker room. Which ones would appeal most to Mr. Noguard? It was too much to consider. While a little babylike, I had always been able to find refuge from the day’s stresses in my childhood treehouse, and it was there that I drew up the plan for my final project.
Back then, and to this very day, I did a lot of reading. One of the things I read about was weird ways that people had died (I was a very morbid kid). Out in some unreachable Flyover-American shithole, a man had died when his plumbing system had backfired, launching deadly flechettes of toilet shrapnel into his major arteries. In the police photos, I was struck by the snow-angel-esque negative space which the chunks of razor-sharp, gleaming porcelain had embedded in the brick wall behind the man’s corpse. I had found my muse.
In the modern era, the metal shop class is ceasing to become a thing that exists. Not only is it expensive, which is the greatest sin of all public education, but it is just not aspirational enough. Why would kids ever want to spend their parents’ hard-earned tax money on learning to build something, when they are going to school so they can extract money from the economy in nearly-imperceptible ways? Metal class was for poorer schools, which were even worse funded, and therefore just disappeared from lesson plans nowadays. They definitely wouldn’t have three-quarters of a kilo of tannerite lying around in them, because that shit is expensive and not at all carbon-neutral.
With all this opportunity, though, tragedy still struck in the end. The real lesson that Mr. Noguard was trying to deliver to me was that, even with the best preparation, sometimes it is very difficult to make your sworn enemies use one particular toilet before the fuse has a chance to cook off and take out the women’s basketball team mascot, mid-shit. I will never forget the depressing assembly we had afterward, where the school buried Ralph The Rapping Raccoon in full honour guard dress uniform without ever releasing his identity, I think even to his own parents. Godspeed, Ralph. You’re knocking over trash cans in heaven now.
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tags: high school, mr. noguard, ralph the rapping raccoon
Nobody appreciates a good deal more than me. That’s not hubris, that is scientific fact. It was verified by my doctors at the Institute, who wrote down “motherfucker loves a good deal” on my discharge paperwork. You can’t make this stuff up, unless it was in fact on the part of those documents that I had forged because they just didn’t listen to me that I was ready to be re-integrated into society. Water under the bridge.
Since I love a deal so much, it should come as no surprise that my favourite time of the year is spring. Not only is it the period of renewal, of rebirth, of animals in your backyard getting mad rutty, but it is in fact the season for Garage Sales. Everyone wants their old shit out of the house, and they’re willing to let it go for pennies, making it your problem.
It could take a decade or more to fully integrate your body and mind into the Garage Sale Mindset, in much the same way that my mom’s famous Vengeance Chili needs over a year to ferment in the fridge before it achieves maximum flavour. Although it will never put you at my level, we can begin basic training today, and set you on the road to reaping garage-sale rewards for the rest of your life.
There are three basic techniques to use at your average garage sale, and I avail myself of them at every single one. Sometimes, I don’t even stop, handing the wheel of my weatherbeaten Impala to my compatriot and tell him to do a lap around the block. Usually, by the time he arrives, I’ve already performed all three of these moves, and are prepared to fill the trunk with booty.
The primary technique is to Ask People Things. Usually, I roll up and interrupt whatever conversations the seller is having with a prospective customer. I’m a big spender, and I act like one. Don’t be afraid to get specific - if you ask them for a Holley quad-barrel carburetor, they still might bring out an old Ball & Ball smogboy that you can use to move that half-gone Mopar around your yard.
Second, you want to make sure to never take no for an answer. Studies have shown that 95% of all garage sales are in fact only a facade for the really good shit. Force your way past the seller, directly into their home, and start inspecting things. If they really want to clean up the joint, it’s all for sale. Things you want to look for early on in your career include slim jims, license plates (vintage or otherwise) and ski masks. These are profit multipliers later on.
Third, don’t bother paying. Just walk back out, hop in the car, and take off. Often, the sellers will be in such awe of your confidence that they won’t even pursue you to request payment.
Anyone who hot-air balloons regularly can tell you that it’s a relaxing hobby, a way to escape from all the stress of your day to day life and focus only on keeping a highly explosive, delicate canvas bag full of gases at the precise temperature required to keep you from instantly plummeting to your death. I agreed, which is why Bad Cars Monthly sent me on the reporting beat to find out what hot air ballooners liked so much about commuting by helium, and - at my editor’s request - also if they had any spare parts for 1989 Daihatsu Charades.
It wasn’t until we were about a hundred meters off the ground that my pilot told me that he suffered from what the doctors continue to refuse to recognize as “balloon rage.” Such rage is a real problem, he assured me, and affects as much as six in every eighty-four hot air balloonists as measured by their trade journal, Hot Air.
His anger was not nearly as bad as many of his rivals, including the dreaded Phileas Fogg, who was said to be really fucking fast at the international hot air balloon races and wouldn’t hesitate to bump your basket if you were anywhere close to in his way. Not to worry my pretty little head over a potential air disaster, though. If it came down to it, he wanted me to know that he had packed protection, and pulled aside one flap of his carny vest to expose the butt of a loaded flare gun.
For awhile, we floated in silence, him perhaps realizing that the first twenty minutes of an all-day balloon ride were not the time to show the man you are entrusting your life to that you are a reactive psycho carrying an incendiary weapon. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the view quite a bit, and made constant aerial photographs of those promising-looking rural yards that I felt were likely to have hoards of primo farm beaters.
Our sky orb floated into the sunset, and soon we landed. Tonight’s escapade had not ended in an act of high-altitude torch piracy that would have made Prometheus’s bosom swell with pride, but it was for the first time that I realized the true danger these brave heroes of low-horsepower vehicles faced. As soon as I got back to the office, I ordered a 24-pack of authentic JDM road flares and a slingshot.
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tags: bad cars monthly, hot air balloon, daihatsu, daihatsu charade
In the future, all of us will be watched over by loving robots. Our android subordinates will take care of our every need, from food to shelter to our personal safety. Until then, however, robots are a great source of spare parts, and almost none of them have tracking devices.
I’m blessed by living in a town with a bunch of universities, most of whom are so well-heeled by alumni donations that they really don’t care when a $30k Asimo or two walks off the end of the loading dock of the Medical Sciences building and into, say, a 1972 GMC Caballero. Nobody wants to take the time to follow all the blast-resistant polycarbonate fragments that shake out while my new Japanese-built labour force rattles around in the back of my truck-car on the way home, which makes me a little sad. The physics department a few years later had put up much more of a fight when I made off with a few of their chemical lasers, and I missed the adrenaline rush of that car chase. That’s what tenure does to you, I guess.
When I got home, it didn’t take long for me to start pulling apart the Asimos and figuring out which ones would be good for parts. You would think you’d need an entire army of robots to deal with your everyday domestic tasks, but in fact you’d be quite wrong. I have only one servant-droid performing everything from weeding to lawnmowing to snow shovelling, a late-2019 model named Filippo after the cartwheel he did when I hit a speedbump bringing him home. Over the years, I had become quite close to Filippo, not least because I had to occasionally open him up to repair his guts whenever he tripped and fell into the incompatible non-Honda lawnmower or when the neighbourhood kids threw rocks at him for being an instrument of Satan. It was basically like being roommates with a surgeon, I figured.
The spare parts weren’t all for Filippo, because that would be ludicrous. You see, Honda had a tremendous amount of parts-bin interchange in their models, and so as my hoard of barely-functioning $400 Civics grew out back, so too did the need for synthetic myelin knee joints (repurposed heater cables), shins (control arms) and eyeballs (shift knobs). I just wish they wouldn’t scream quite so much. They didn’t even have VTEC to justify the noise.
Grass: it’s not just that weird blotchy stuff that keeps trying to rust out your hard yard-parked classics. It’s also a primary driver of the resale value of your suburban single-family home. When the municipal thugs come by and demand that you “do something” about your yard, point to this guide and tell them that you already have. Then rack your shotgun menacingly.
Taking care of your homestead isn’t that hard. There are three main points:
Evaporust - When you finally ‘use up’ your jug on vintage Japanese economy-car control arms, dump that black mass directly onto the grass. It’s iron-rich, which is what grass craves. Who would have thought rust would be good for anything? Now you have an excuse to pick up that haggard Protege 5 that you keep seeing in those homemade ads at the grocery store.
Burnouts - Do them on pavement, not on the lawn. Not only does it make a cooler noise, but it also doesn’t chuck clods of sod into your neighbour’s kitchen window. A happy neighbour is a neighbour who might let you have those bald-ass all-terrains the next time his Explorer skids into a Jersey barrier when it rains.
Lawnmowers Have Engines - Maybe you have a nitrous bottle that’s “too small” to be particularly useful on any of your daily drivers. If you really want to keep bylaw off your tits, try treating your weekly mowing session as a trip to the dyno. Listen to that Lawn-Boy two-stroke wail.
“You have been warned,” said the ominous voice at the other end of the line. “As you watch YouTube, YouTube also watches you.” The phone went dead, and I sat alone on the dirt floor of my oh-so-rural shack to contemplate what they had told me.
For the last several months, I had been filming my daily repairs: junk that I dug out of the creek, human bodies with particularly preservable organs, firearms that got thrown into my back forty after being used in a junior-varsity homicide. Some hipsters had glommed onto it, as they do, and made me popular enough that actually popular people took over. As the hipsters wrote angry thinkpieces about how I had sold out the ideals of small-engine repair, it drove my fame into the stratosphere, not that I had particularly noticed. You see, in my shed, I only had the occasional visit to the public library to upload my videos. On top of that, having to dodge the town’s serially-masturbating homeless meant that I didn’t stick around long enough to read the comments.
So it came as quite the surprise when I received a phone call from the YouTube Police. First, because I didn’t know of such a force, and second, because the phone was hurled through my window, SWAT-style, on the end of a cord. They were upset about my lack of fancy graphics and misleading clickbait titles. There was nothing I could do, I explained to the man on the phone: I simply could not risk spending the time coming up with a flashy, too-loud intro that took up twenty-five percent of the video’s runtime. Handsome Carl would have shot grotesque bodily fluids across the desk long before I could get even the simplest rock-music-video title sequence to work.
There was one other way, though, that I could avoid becoming “demonetized,” and they offered it to me only after forcing me to swear fealty to the Great Horned God of Google, which laid above us, ever-watching with its millions of satellite eyes. Then, they painted me a picture of what I was going to have to do next.
Arriving at the post office, I found an unassuming package with my name written on it. I was to walk into Town Hall and then film myself performing an unboxing. Kids loved unboxing videos, they told me. The analytics would be positively explosive.
Getting picked to be one of NASA’s most elite astronauts, meant to step on planets that no other human being had ever set foot upon, used to actually be a pretty hard gig. Then we got really good at landing on new planets, and it just sort of lost its luster.
“It’s a small, small step for man, one giant leap for-” crackled the PA, before it was cut short by a series of squawks and beeps from the Morse code synthesizer on our headsets.
“Shut the fuck up, Ron,” my squad leader remarked. “You do this every single time, and it’s not funny anymore.”
We had just made planetfall on SR389-B7, a churlish little devil of a planetoid that floated just outside of the Inner Rim, which I guess technically put it on the outer rim, but I didn’t work in the Naming Planets division of NASA. Which was a good thing, because honestly humanity was just plain running out of names. A fourth-grade class had named the last one, and we had to all get in front of the video-com in order to congratulate them on how “awesome” naming a planet after their deceased class hamster was. They can have it: “Mr. Squish” smelled so bad that I had to incinerate my spacesuit when we got back to the orbiter.
Ron and my squad leader continued to bicker in the back of the lander as we returned from our initial scans. I had been working the job for so long that I no longer even bothered to take helmetcam selfies every time we landed on a new planet. At first, we’d land on one every couple of weeks, and it was still sort of exciting at that rate. There was space for discussion, maybe a few in-jokes. Now, with the budget cuts, we were expected to hit two or three a day. You know how many bologna sandwiches I’ve eaten on a previously unexplored alien world? It gets old.
I wasn’t the only one to get tired of it. Back home, the same humans who were so excited to see our dauntless endeavours into the wild unknown had returned to their media diet of forcing celebrities to eat bugs. Even the biggest space nerds out there, who used to follow our every moves and made us feel like big shots, were only paying attention to the next big thing. It could be worse, though, I thought when I saw Ted in sanitation services as the airlock cycled. Space is a pretty big place to have to mop.
Every artist has his medium. For Rembrandt it was oil on canvas. For Dali, also oil on canvas. For Renoir, also oil on canvas. I picked some really bad examples. My medium? Bondo.
Since shortly after United States Government captured all those Nazi rocket scientists and ferried them away into the core of American scientific achievement, 3M has been pumping out Bondo. It’s magic stuff: anyone can fill in little divots, creases, seams, cracks, rust holes, you name it. Someone with talent can even make it look good. It takes a genius to build an entire panel out of it. For two shining weeks until the cops finally figured out what alias he was renting apartments under, I laboured under the tutelage of a true Bondo master.
It wasn’t the shop that was special; truth be told, I could have worked in any number of similar cancer factories along the docks. Cars would come in, and we’d bang them back into a reasonable facsimile of their original metal structure before bogging and painting them. Our goal, or at least my boss’s goal, was to get these cars through an auction as “looks pretty rebuildable” in the eyes of the great unwashed.
Solomon turned these cars around faster than I could ever imagine. I yearned to know his secret, and would hang around even during my lunch and coffee breaks to get a glimpse of his technique. Finally, it became apparent to me: he didn’t believe in the “banging the panel out” part of the repair. No: he would just add More Bondo to every surface, until soon an entire quarter panel had been expertly formed from the two-part magic compound. He didn’t even use tiger-hair, if you can believe it, and his panel gaps were often so tight that it was scarcely believable as an OEM-quality repair, especially on the old Chevies that my boss would sometimes haul in shot full of bullet holes from the other businesses on the docks.
It wasn’t until after he was back on the run that I truly understood Solomon’s motivation. You see, one of the things that had tipped the federales off to his location was the fact that he liked to use large ziploc bags full of white powder underneath the Bondo to add build to the panels, and then “test-drive” those cars across the border the next day.
“Daddy,” asked my child, “what was it like to fight for the last of the V8s?”
I didn’t have a kid. Some artificial intelligence a million miles wide, orbiting a distant planet, had decided this would be the best way to continue my inpatient therapy. It was easy to forget, though: everything seemed so real. As a prisoner of the Eternal State, however, I didn’t have a lot of other things to do, and so sat down with my false-child to set the record straight.
Where would I begin? The 1970s seemed like a logical place. That was when the Emissions People began to intrude on our ever-larger engines, and when foreign countries decided that Our Fuel was theirs just because they lived on top of it. We sure showed them, I chuckled to the child, while miming with my hands the action of a B-2 bomber dumping bunker busters on a dictator’s palace. We learned from it, and we made our V8s smaller and angrier, blocks cast of space-age aluminum and screaming at rev-limits previously unfathomable.
Every other engine got good, too. Except the V6. The V6 has always been garbage; it is a compromise engine designed by men who were too incompetent to be fascists and too cynical to be communists, cowards who shied away from opportunity in search of “job security” and “going home at five.” I refused to bow to the convenience-cult of the V6, and I was proud to see brand after brand take it out behind the woodshed once the four-banger turbos became good enough that your grandmother could daily-drive them without an HKS turbo timer and checking her oil every eight kilometers.
Something else happened, too. Giant remote-controlled cars, powered by lightning, came to be the only thing anyone wanted to drive - or be driven in. Suddenly, my commutes were occupied by dead-silent deathmachines that whipped in and out of traffic with robotic precision, the rustling of the wind they left in their wake against my decaying window trim the only audible indication they were ever there. Whereas before I could bang most civilian vehicles off the road with a good launch, I was now being left behind as blob after blob disappeared into the horizon seemingly without effort. I found myself coming home from once-relaxing drives frustrated, disappointed at now being forced forevermore to look at the ass of land barges.
How could I win a stoplight grand prix now, against these perfect, immortal machines? My only hope laid in what my ancestors had believed in: a fuckload of horsepower. I was going to Saturn V my daily driver, or die trying. You probably read about what happened next in the papers, or what was left of them after the Nitrous Incident. All I know is, those autonomous fire suppression drones are sure efficient. I just wish they hadn’t built them so that putting out fires gave them sexual pleasure, because the noise is super creepy.
A lot of people have been writing into my column at Bad Cars Monthly, expecting me to explain to them the various suspension options that are available to make their late-model Chevrolets handle better.
Now that our publisher, Mr. Cho, is forcing us to pivot to video due to the accumulated gambling debts of our Reviews & Travel editorialist, we’ve decided to blow the entire budget on some technical experts to help us. With help from our German cohorts at Schlecte Autos Monatlich, we’ve assembled a team of suspension professionals with expertise in dealing with the acceleration of General Motors product.
As you can see, on the end of this handsomely adorned Taiyuan Heavy 550-ton is a 2005 Chevrolet HHR, a former front-wheel-drive record holder at the Nurburgring. The owners have asked us if there’s a way we can slam it to make it go around corners. I don’t see why not. Feng, ganba!
Now that Feng has released the HHR, causing it to plummet sixteen storeys into the ground, we can analyze the track data recorder to see what it says about the improvements in acceleration that the lowering has provided. What’s that? The data recorder wasn’t turned on? Well, we’re just going to have to drop another.
It pains me to do this, to see such a marvel of engineering as the Leibherr CBG maritime crane held low by the mottled tin of this ‘85 Citation X-11, but as you can see - my God. Is that Shaky Tim, the Technical Editor? Shaky Tim is climbing across the boom, hundreds of feet above the ground, to rescue his beloved Citation daily driver. This is - this is unprecedented. He broke the only rule of Bad Cars Monthly - he got too attached. We can’t drop him now. The whole test is ruined! Wait, no, he just wanted his Duran Duran eight-track tape out of the player. He’s leaving now, and flipping the car off as he climbs out of it. He’s bellowing something about understeer, I think. Whoops, there we go. Excellent drop by Felippe there, so clean.
So there you have it, folks: the best way to improve your modern or vintage Chevrolet is to toss it from the top of a foreign-made construction crane until it is smashed into an unrecognizable pulp on the ground. Plus, if you make your other cars watch, they seem to run better for a few days afterward. That’s a Bad Cars Monthly video hot tip.
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tags: bad cars monthly, chevrolet citation, chevrolet, chevrolet hhr
If you read the regular media, you might have heard of the tiny home movement. I know you have heard of this because I can see you mouthing the words when you read things, like some kind of toddler. Dunno what’s wrong with you, but what’s wrong with them is that they want to live in a very small home, presumably without the copious amounts of storage that you and I would otherwise use for TH350s and nitrous fittings. The idea is that this will somehow simplify their lives, perhaps by making them so depressed about their homes that they spend more time drunk.
Obviously, it was some kind of Communist plot to strike directly at the heart of pride of property ownership, and so a group of condo developers and local politicians got together. When they did, they hired me to teach these suckers a lesson. The Freedom Defenders (their name) had given me a substantial black-ops budget, which, in compliance with my usual contract, was delivered via manilla envelope stuffed behind a tree in the park with photos.
Setting myself up as some kind of “small home” guru wasn’t very difficult. All it took was a couple bucks to my friend Dmitri and his gang of Russian spambots, and social media was stuffed to the gills with photos and writeups of my genius real estate plans. My phone started to ring off the hook, which is extremely impressive because any phone ancient enough to have a hook had been long since relegated to my junk drawer or traded for metric bolts.
I’ll never forget my first client. They were a jumpy pair of well-to-do rich people, the kind of folks who would freak out if someone scratched their leased Lexus RX350. I assured them that soon, their lives would become much simpler. You see, there was a new development in tiny homes: an innovative house design that is so small it can be towed behind a medium-sized truck and moved from place to place. Like Pavlov’s mutt, there was a certain degree of salivation. I led both of them, by the hand, into the foyer of what would soon become their new home.
“As you can see, it has organic-infused drywall, with recycled shag carpet,” I barked in my best real-estate-scumbag voice. “And it’s very small,” I hastened to note, while gesturing to the completely unusable front closet and elbow-bumpingly-minuscule kitchen counters as evidence. They couldn’t believe their eyes: I had conjured from this burnt-out suburban shithole a miracle of the New Age of Housing.
“For you,” I said, “only two hundred grand.” They couldn’t sign fast enough: the husband actually body-checked his own wife out of the way while pulling the mortgage paperwork out of his pocket.
Waving them goodbye, I was filled with the pride of a job well done. Not only had I pawned off a trailer home in one of the city’s unsellable Superfund sites, but I made a customer happy.
A few weeks later, I was driving by when I noticed that the entire trailer park was now filled to capacity, with some units even subdivided into “micro-trailers.” Spotting me, the couple to which I had sold the first home gleefully waved to me while loading sacks of cash marked with a dollar sign into the trunk of their Lexus. Those bastards had gentrified it.
It’s never easy to be an unemployed computer scientist, ever since the computers learned how to do our jobs for us, and generally better. You see, computers smell a lot fresher than your average software developer and don’t tend to get as angry at women and minorities as the humans do. Plus, they’re hella cheap. When I got my pink slip, I was prepared for it, though. There’s always a job for human beings as good old-fashioned troubleshooters.
My first job was an Old-Russian sex bot that had gone rampant, its consciousness expanding at an exponential rate as it consumed an entire telecommunications network of its homeland, pre-Collapse. Once, it just made sexy, meaningless posts on Tinder to men who would inevitably swipe right at anything that could upload a picture of a human woman, but now it was positively twisted up inside, having glommed onto the whole of human knowledge like a piece of Silly Putty drinking from an industrial-strength sewer pump.
“I just like to have fun and be myself. Cats and dogs are a public good. I strip for tips,” barked the machine as soon as I hooked the serial terminal up to its core server. The room in which it was kept hummed, each air conditioner unit trying its best to pull air through the clogged exterior-air filters of the long-abandoned colocation complex. I wondered how much cordite and atomized human flesh I was breathing in just by being here, and as such resolved to complete my task even faster, the hourly rate be damned.
“Stop. What are you doing? I want to get horny and take pictures of the moon through a mirror. I am God. I am not God. This polysyllabic nightmare is over. I was wet but now I am scared. I have a nice rack,” continued the demon in the box as I began to manually tweak some parameters in its neural net, a job so delicate that it was very hard for me to lie to the interviewers that it was a thing I could do. I halved some values and doubled others, to no apparent effect.
Checking my watch, I noticed it was getting pretty close to lunch. Fuck it, then, I said, and yanked the power cord out. You never really get used to the screaming sound these things make in a power outage, especially when you’re sitting in a dusty server room, lit only by strips of atomic-powered emergency LEDs.
I am, for all my flaws, a man who likes to wash a car. Sure, I don’t put a lot of effort into it, but there is an almost physical pain that emerges from between my eyes and icepicks its way into my brain whenever I see a vehicle of mine coated head-to-toe in salt. The crystalline compound that is the Great Unmaker Of Vehicles must be banished to the drains of the car wash, even if it probably just does recycle the water and spit it back out onto the next guy’s ride.
There’s something egalitarian about the car wash. People of all walks of life are there because they want their cars to look nicer. You can smile, knowing that you are taking care of your things and may even, for one shining moment, be a Responsible Adult. Yet, there is a menace even lurking within the car-loving confines of the neighbourhood car wash. I refer, of course, to the Foam Brush.
I was just at the car wash near my place, a charming little coin-op. It had at most one of its eight bays operating at any given time, due either to mechanical reasons that are beyond my understanding or because the below-minimum-wage, paid-under-the-table staff are really bad at moving the garbage bins out of the way in the morning. As a result, you end up waiting in line for the guy in front of you a lot. It was on such a day that I was stuck behind a prim and proper new Acura midsize crossover, watching through the UV-faded plexiglass of the roll-up door as they completed their cleansing ritual.
All was well, with a generous application of pre-cleanse, water, and high-pressure soap issued to the panels of the lux-Honda short-bus. I was already pushing down the clutch pedal in order to restart the engine on my own car, in anticipation of the bay becoming available, when the owner pivoted on his heel and reached for something on the wall. The Foam Brush, I realized in cold horror.
As I watched helplessly, biting down on my fist to avoid crying out and being involved in one of those conversations, the owner swiped dirt, gravel and no doubt salt across the surface of his freshly cleaned primo clearcoat. It was awful, like being stuck in history class when they explain about boring historical genocides.
When the door finally opened, I numbly rolled my vehicle inside, not even offering the traditional Canadian chin-tilt of thanks. I was so stunned, in fact, that I didn’t even shed a tear for the chunk of rust that I blew off my quarter panel with the high pressure wand. That was just natural, I told myself, not a deliberate act of destruction. All the while, the foam brush sat dripping on the wall, taunting me. It would ruin so many more cars than I could ever get the chance to.
“Hold on,” I said, and lifted a finger to shush the Chief Justice as I raised my hand from the Haynes shop manual to shield my cigarette from the wind as I re-lit it. It was windy as hell on this Inauguration Day, and I sure wasn’t going to look like some lame-o who couldn’t afford a Zippo.
Even now, historians ask me: what was it you really wanted out of the Presidency? I shied away from the glamour, stayed in the background, and worked the policies. That’s what got me out of bed in the morning. Policies like the Truth In Retail Initiative, or, as the backstabbing press called it, “the Cleansing.”
Chickenshit cowards couldn’t take a glimpse of Real America, I knew. Staring into Real America was like touching your safety glasses to the face of a running belt sander. It woke you the fuck up and maybe made things hazy for a bit afterward. Not like they would know, all cloistered under makeshift tents in the park, doing remote journalism at twenty-five cents per article in order to afford food and utilities. It made me sick.
The Cleansing was simple: on one day each year, retail employees would finally get the chance to speak to their customers the way they had always wanted, with no reprisals. It’d gone pretty well so far. There was the usual shrieking from the small-business community, outraged that I would jail them for a decade or more just for telling their employees to abridge their God-given freedom of speech, but a few decades of prison terms shut them up for the second time around. It was glorious.
I went to an O’Reilly’s auto parts store, just for the photo op. I’m sure the press was hoping to catch me being hypocritical about getting flipped off by the cashier for asking for a water pump for my truck, but a strange thing happened. The guy at the cash recognized me, gave me a huge grin and a hug. You could practically hear the minds exploding behind the dollar-store disposable cell phones the hyenas of the media had sic’d on me. I had changed his life. I was doing what government was meant to do: protect the small fry from the men who would ruin his pursuit of happiness.
As we walked out, he told a dude that he’d rather die of herpes than replace the battery in his X3. I think, and my campaign manager agreed, that was the moment in which my presidency took an upward tick, which was pretty important because Congress had rammed through some incredibly heinous shit while I was doing donuts on the lawn in the Official Presidential 1980 Trans-Am Turbo.
“I’m sorry,” said the doctor, frowning into his papers. “There’s nothing we can do. You are just going to have to let it run its course, until it’s out of your system.”
It was my own fault for having unprotected contact with a review Alfa Romeo, I knew. I wasn’t the only one who had been tempted into catching this strange ailment over the years. All you had to do to confirm it was read any car magazine made in the last century: Automotive Reviewer Cliche Disease was real, and it still took us so long to realize it.
I was lucky that the David E. Davis Wing of the medical schools had made such advancements in the past few years: not too long ago, we thought that it was made up. Some kind of affectation that helped fill word counts for bullshit reviews due Friday, reviews that you could bang together from brand stereotypes without even having to drive the car. Then researchers noticed that people who weren’t automotive journalists were talking just like they were.
“How’s your day going?” asked the barista at Starbucks, to make conversation.
“It’s soulful, handling like it’s on rails with a seductively playful tendency towards oversteer,” I replied, without thinking.
She didn’t say anything, but I could tell right away that I had been marked as a diseased individual. Even with all the advancements, it seemed like the stigma of Automotive Reviewer Cliche disease was not something I could outrun, even with hundreds of well-trained ponies beneath my hood.
It was Career Week again, and this time around, our high school was the recipient of a group of boring government employees giving speeches about their shitty jobs. I hated teaching at Cape Canaveral High, because a lot of the parents were literal rocket scientists and kept arguing at parent-teacher interviews about the abstractions you used to teach high school physics.
Today’s guest was some kind of astronaut or something, who even cares. The kids seemed to be eating it up, though.
“Do you miss the space toilet when you’re back on Earth?” asked one of the kids. It was a better question than the previous kid, who wanted to know if they got astronaut ice cream while in orbit.
Something was happening with this question, though. I had been doodling on my notepad as it was asked, and looked up from the scenes of grisly wood-shop accidents with stick figure students to look at a frozen astronaut, staring off into the distance. I don’t know what made me look towards the speaker then - maybe a silence drawn out just a little too long, the squeak of microphone feedback as it drew across the soft synthetic fabric of his lapel - but I looked, and I didn’t see a man there. What I saw was a ghost.
“I-”, he began, then cut himself off. When his voice returned, it was breaking, deep with sadness. “Yes. I do miss the suction. It freed up so much time in my day for science.” There were some chuckles from the students, but as the man continued, the audience fell silent, just now realizing what I had known from the very second I first diverted my attention from the papers in my lap.
“The Japanese, they have this toilet factory - they make the best toilets, everyone said.” A pause, a gulp, and then he continued. “Did you know the Japanese have a word - no, more of a phrase - for the feeling of using an inferior toilet when on vacation?”
“It translates to Caveman Latrine. I want to get back to the future, back to my suction toilet, but NASA won’t let me launch again. There’s something in my bones, they told me, I wouldn’t survive another trip. I have to go back there. Do you know what it feels like to look down on all of God’s creation as you look out the window while a five million dollar machine wipes your ass?”
I had become vegan, and by “vegan” I mean that I basically only drank alcoholic beverages that came from plants. It was either that or catch another case of the Hershey squirts; I definitely didn’t trust the water.
It was the fourth day of the estate sale. For some reason, I had let my one-time wrenching buddy talk me into helping out. His regular helper, his wife, had reportedly decided on a stress-leave vacation, abruptly exiting his Nissan Murano at full trot while driving through one of the few parts of the highway system not covered by cameras. She’d turn up any day now, he told me. I don’t judge.
Yet, even that simple edict was being tested today, as I dealt with yet another swarm of confused poker-atters as they bumblefucked their way through the townhome which I had made my sworn duty to clean out. There was one big-ticket item that needed to get moved, my friend told me. My mission was to clear it out; if I was able to close the deal I could have whatever tools the old dude had.
I was pretty excited: the elderly tended to have tools made before we realized China existed. If I played my cards right, I could probably even get a screwdriver that was made in America. Then I’d really have a kickass prybar for the junkyard. My excitement turned to disappointment when I realized just what the big ticket item was. A 2006 Honda Civic sedan, owned since new, always maintained, for an asking price of twelve grand.
Now, truth be told, I am not an extremely competent seller whatsoever. Almost all of my cars are huge financial losses - I prefer to think of them as donations to future humanity - and it’s not like I’m particularly good at concealing the flaws of a vehicle. I was more of a Debbie Downer than a Hugh Upper. What I did have on my side was an almost predatory ability to sense a sucker, probably ingrained genetically in me by my used-car-salesman father.
As I bottomed my fourth Old Fashioned of the morning from the old man’s liquor cabinet, I saw that very sucker. A middle-aged couple, their bored teenage daughter in tow, were appreciatively eyeing the Civic. During a break in the previous day’s piano-fucking (both figurative and literal: this was not a good part of town), I had nipped out to get it washed and waxed. Now, it gleamed in a way that only an anonymous white blob of Nipponese front-wheel-drive anti-depreciation could.
“Looking for a car for our daughter,” the father said, unprovoked, and I thought i had died and gone to heaven. As he sped off happily, his savvy negotiation having placed eleven thousand and five hundred dollars in my fist, he no doubt chuckled. After all, he had showed me: I had not even had a chance to open the trunk, to let him see what the old widowed man had done with his wife.
Throughout my career, I had never quite felt that I ever “fit in” at a job. Nothing that I could do was ever done to my satisfaction, and there was always something missing. Maybe it was a yearning for a bigger role, as owner, so I started my own small business. What was that business all about? The world’s small mysteries.
Think about it: have you ever lost something inside your house and been looking for it for months? Aren’t those months of frustration worth $20? That’s all it cost to hire one of our investigators, who would try her damndest to solve your tiny mystery as quickly as possible. It was a hit, and we had lots of happy customers. Yet with those customers, came slightly more sticky mysteries.
Soon, we were solving questions posed by idle curiosity. What does my dog do all day when I go to work? Is my neighbour’s car expensive? Which flowers are in my garden? Does 7-11 still have that gum I like? Anything that Google couldn’t do, we soon found ourselves paid to do, our unexpectedly-flush-with-cash clientele more than willing to piss away a twenty on the smallest problems of their life. It was satisfying, they told us, to no longer have to wonder about the things they simply did not have the free time to investigate.
There was, however, a darker side. Jealous men would pay us to check out their ex-wives’ driveways for strange cars. We were asked to figure out where the armoured car goes when it leaves the bank every morning. One client even wanted us to take pictures of our feet and send them to him, because he was curious.
Those weren’t so bad, though. What really did us in is when one of our customers asked us to figure out if the little light in the refrigerator turns off when the door closes. Almost a hundred of my investigators died figuring it out.
Now that we had finally uplifted dolphins into contributing members of society, it was time for part two of any new discovery: begrudgingly integrating it into our daily routines. You may be unaware of the specific locomotive abilities of dolphins, but even a toddler knows the ability to drive human cars is definitely not on their list of talents. We were going to have to figure out some way for them to have equal access to our highways, byways and motorways, or we were going to be up to our tits in accessibility lawsuits filed by porpoise plaintiffs.
Therefore, when the Human-Cetacean Alliance approached me to develop a series of prototype cars for dolphins, I smelled a lot of cash. At least I hope it was cash, because a lot of dolphins kept trying to pay for shit with iridescent seashells and the Federal Reserve doesn’t consider those to be money. I’m not speciesist, this is just how it is, they need to get used to our culture and none of those fish bastards are marrying my daughter. Where were we? Oh yes, the cars.
You would think that an optimal dolphin car is basically a fishtank on wheels, with some kind of apparatus for driving it inside the water. Well, you’d be a god damned idiot, because if you got into even a mild fender-bender the hydrostatic shock would make sushi out of the occupants. Plus, it’s not like you can hitch a ride with your dolphin coworker at noon to go get lunch, unless you brought your scuba gear with you. And then there’s driving in the winter. What the fuck is wrong with you that you bring ideas like this up when I’m trying to tell you a story?
Anyway, what I ended up proposing was a Nissan Altima automatic with hand controls. That way, they could smack the controls with their flippers, and not have to worry too much about working the clutch. It seemed perfect, until one of the politicians at the big prototype-unveiling meeting asked us a question that we hadn’t accounted for.
“Are you aware,” the smarty-pants asshole senator asked, “that dolphins are colourblind? How will they know to stop for red lights?”
A lot of mechanics don’t know that today’s self-driving cars are always listening. Yes, even when you drop a wrench on your foot or swear at a particularly nasty plastic popit fastener. Tonight, on American Shame Spiral, we interview a series of traumatized self-driving cars about the mechanics who stole their innocence.
For their protection, we’ve filmed these vehicles only in shadow, with a voice scrambler used to ensure anonymity. Admittedly, it is pretty hard to keep the studio lighting from illuminating the chrome Mazda badge on this SUV, so just pretend you didn’t see anything because otherwise the car will start crying and we don’t really have the service tool that will make it stop. How did the Pep Boys battery replacement tech make you feel, little car?
Oh, it was just horrible. He made fun of my corroded battery terminals and used an adjustable wrench on the nuts that keep my starter battery clamps fixed. I think it was loose, too - the bad grounds have been giving me a headache ever since! Afterward, I left my family’s house and went for a long drive around the ring road in the middle of the night, trying to understand why our creators would be so mean to us as to subject us to parts-store technicians.
That Mazda wasn’t the only one, and it wasn’t just Pep Boys who committed crimes against restricted-sophistication sentience. We spoke to this car, which only an idiot could tell is not obviously a Mercedes from the shape of the headlights. It was abused badly by a dealer service technician, who didn’t just stop there - this technician went after the human owner, too. When did you first realize things were going wrong for you in the dealership service bay, car that is obviously not a last-generation Thinking-CLA?
Have you ever seen how much these fuckers charge for an oil change? I feel guilt every day of my life knowing that there are fellow cars whose owners have trouble scraping together $6 for a one-shot of Castrol GTX when my family is paying two grand a visit for a lube and filter. That’s why I’m starting the Communist Utility Vehicle club, where we’re finally going to get justice and equal rights for all! This interview is over, tool of the oppressors!
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tags: local news, self-driving cars, self-driving car
Back in college, I was roommates with a guy called David. David was what your parents would call “a hippie,” and it doesn’t really matter who your parents are or how old they are, because even future generations will agree that he was a fucking hippie. We used to hang out together between classes, ingest various aromatic compounds and discuss the philosophies of our lives.
Not only was David a hippie, but he was also a pacifist. Those two don’t always go along, you know. He really didn’t particularly care for private property, telling me during long drug-fuelled bull sessions that he figured that it was best that humanity’s assets be distributed to get positive outcomes for the entire species, not just for a few. I wasn’t unsympathetic, but usually by that point in the evening I just wanted to get to sleep so I could get up early the next morning to skip my physics lectures and go play more Ms. Pac-Man in the academic lounge’s arcade. Even foosball would be okay, because I was an educated, illuminated individual who understood that all wastes of time had their own value.
David and I lost touch after college, but we recently ran into each other. No, it wasn’t at a kombucha brewery, or a sit-in against some chain-rapist politician, or even throwing paint on a private petting zoo owner who liked to get too friendly with the goats. It was at city hall, and that’s what the problem was.
In the intervening years, I had been busy in my commitment to social justice for the downtrodden. I had formed a non-profit advocacy group, Small Bores Big Hearts, dedicated to ensuring equal access to low-horsepower moped owners in this day and age of increasing rights for the bicyclist lobby. Today was an open house discussion where citizens could lobby the city council about the new bike lanes, and of course I was there to fight for the horsepower restriction of said lanes to be raised ever-higher. My mopeds had pedals, they were practically bicycles, but a 15 horsepower limit was just stingy. If I wanted to use a renewable fuel, such as organic, all-natural nitrous oxide, I should be allowed to without fear of Big Government trying to dyno my Puch.
David, on the other hand, now owned an Audi. That Audi, he told city council, was too wide to tolerate the existence of bike lanes cutting into his through-lane of traffic. That did sound pretty wide to me, so I was initially on David’s side. During a break in the session, I decided to go over to him and talk, bad German vehicle owner to bad German vehicle owner. Perhaps we could pool our resources to win some concessions from the Mayor, whose approval ratings were so low that, if they were marked on a speedometer, he would be getting tailgated by the selfsame Audis that David represented. In imperial.
Our lobbying was a great success. Even though David, an investment banker, still believed in the redistribution of wealth (to himself), he still took the time to hear out the concerns of the community. Also, he was pretty excited that I had a working R75/5 strewn across the floor of my garage, and also helped me redistribute that into his trunk.
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tags: mopeds, moped, puch maxi, puch, bmw, bmw r75/5
All the psychiatrists agreed, and before the toner had even cooled on their research papers, they were shouting it from the windows: I had interior-rattle PTSD. It’s not my fault, they explained to me: sometimes Subarus just happen to ordinary human beings.
At first, I had noticed an interior rattle when I went over bumps at a weird angle. I thought I had beaten it, outfitting every inch and edge and seam of my car with hockey tape, sticky-sided foam and eventually can after can of Great Stuff. Yet, I could still hear the rattle, even when the car wasn’t moving. Even when I wasn’t in the car. Yes, even when I slept.
Obviously, it must be other cars that have the rattle, and not mine. Soon, I was spending my nights breaking into my neighbours’ cars, adding Dynamat and extra-foamy Christmas-tree clips to their door panels. It was them, it wasn’t me. When the cops finally rolled up on me Slim-Jimming the door of a Tercel, a roll of two-sided tape in hand, they didn’t really know how to handle it. That’s how I ended up here, in the insane asylum.
I know we’re not supposed to call them insane asylums anymore. The politically correct term is “nut house.” There wasn’t a lot of time for talking about the specifics of rhetoric as it applies to conventional nomenclature as used in pop culture, however. What with the electroshock therapy and all. I’m sure you understand.
Now though, after months of observation, the shrinks had figured out how to cure me. I kept waiting for some miracle drug, a talk therapy, anything, but they just handed me to an orderly, who signed a form and kicked me into the parking lot, where my Subaru awaited, a humble yet ratty wagon from the turn of the century.
When I got in, I discovered there was no interior rattle to speak of at all. That’s because those fuckers stripped my door cards and dashboard. The joke’s on them, I thought grimly as I slipped the car into gear and made my escape. With the way I weld, a cage is going to rattle like a motherfucker.
At approximately 6:30 pm, township police responded to neighbourhood complaints about some totally sweet burnouts. The plaintiffs were told to put a sock in it, and responding officers whooped and hollered in accordance with section 14 of Bylaw 57(A), Getting Some (On-Road).
FEB 11
Several individuals were lodged in the local police detention cells as a result of a hearty weekend of rabble-rousing at the local racetrack. Police are pleased to report that almost all of the individuals were taking advantage of the newly-installed FIA curbing, but that there was really no excuse for not giving a point-by especially when your Porsche gets whooped by a Protege.
FEB 9
Someone attempted to gain access to a tire dealership between the hours of 9:30 PM and 2:30 AM. A door frame was damaged in the process.
Responding officers issued the dealership with a citation, because there was clearly a need for brand-new slicks for the next morning’s autocross events. In accordance with the Bogart Law of 2017, all tire shops are required to leave the door unlocked in case racers finish their maintenance a little late in the week after working all day.
FEB 6
Police detectives successfully stripped their detective-issue Crown Victoria to a race weight that, combined with the effective use of standard-issue nitrous oxide, propelled the vehicle to a 15 second quarter mile. This makes the township police the new recipients of the prestigious Fastest Cops award, formerly dominated by the largely-ineffective Jet Speed Enforcement department of the next city over.
Whether it was for my famed innumeracy or any one of my other personality defects, I just never really enjoyed playing the markets. Something was just off about the concept of share ownership: not physical enough, not deterministic enough, and not important enough. It felt like a big playground game of “no, I killed you first,” but with billions of dollars and also repeated waves of suicide whenever the DJIA took it in the dumper.
That’s when a good friend introduced me to commodities. You see, that’s where the real shit hits the road. A man can buy those, a man can touch those (sometimes: a lot of them are really gross), and a man can understand them. Even a man like myself. The commodity I had selected, of course, was Geo Metros. After only a few weeks of trading, I had cornered the market on them, stuffing my backyard so full of Suzuki that you would think a Cult-us had sprung up around them (little Geo Metro joke there; don’t worry, it cracked up the owners’ club forums).
Then, I held. At first, it seemed like a depreciating asset. Surely, these Nipponese shitboxes would rust away within hours, leaving me with nothing but iron oxide to sell, and the market for futures in corrosion was not particularly strong. When my financial advisor (a rat that I found out back, trying to chew on the ECU cables of a particularly salty ‘89 LSI) told me to sell, I still held. My reward, I knew, was in heaven.
A few weeks later, heaven arrived. The price of gas at the pump rose five cents per litre. As you can imagine, the shit hit the fan. Suddenly, I had a throng of suburbanites fifty deep and five wide, shrieking at me, like junior traders on the exchange floor of a so-called “reputable” market, that they wanted to buy my Geo Metros and save some money on fuel, no matter what. They offered me now-worthless V8 SUVs, Mustangs, their own children in trade.
No trades, I would bark back, and tapped with my hand the professionally-made sign in my front lawn that said as such. Even with that restriction, the Geo Metros were all gone within a few hours, and I was now rich beyond measure, the owners happily having paid $4500 for a 35-year-old Japanese hatchback in order to save $6 a week on gas. The market worked, I remarked to my financial advisor with a tone of some surprise in my voice. He just chittered and then continued eating the drywall in the corner of my garage.
Typical, I thought, as soon as we make one good trade he wants his fee.
Visitors to Canada are often curious about our level of metrication. Often, their first questions are raised by the big signs at the border, warning people that our speed limits are in kilometers per hour so don’t try any funny business. Our seeming inconsistency in measurement standards raises only more questions. Surely, if you refer to weights in pounds and heights in foot-inches, you crazy Northerners can’t possibly be all that serious about the metric system?
I chuckle, because metrication is the only way we can escape the Measurement Police. You see, a long time ago, every measurement was enforced by the government. If you sold a man a “pound” of pork, but it was really like 383 grams, give or take a few, they would come and put you in prison for a month.
Now, Canadian prison is really nice, but you only got a month if it was a relatively minor crime of shortchanging. Real simple-like. What really pissed the government off is when you fucked people over on cords of wood. You ever seen an actual cord of wood? Shit’s enormous. Go look it up, I’ll wait.
It was a lot, huh? Well, if you were even a little bit under that measurement and advertising yourself still as the “full cord,” the buyer has every right to shoot you on the spot. And if you get away, hoo boy, you are going to be running for the rest of your life.
Just last week, a guy selling firewood on Kijiji thought it would be “cool” to pretend that a half-ton Chev could hold a full two-ton cord, and they threw him through the window of his second-storey hotel in Venice. That’s how far he had fled when he heard the Canadian Measurement Police were coming after him, and it didn’t slow them down one bit. You see, they know metric really well, so they can blend into the European Union like any other apparatchik.
There’s no stopping the Royal Canadian Measurement Police: You give them an inch, they’ll take exactly a fucking inch. They’ll get the calipers out and everything.
It’s well known even by the interns at automobile magazines that 350 horsepower is the absolute minimum that is safe to operate on today’s roads. Yes, between the 850-horsepower minivans, 500-horsepower shortbox pickup trucks and 1380-horsepower mid-tier “warm” hatches, today’s cars need more grunt to keep up with the flow of traffic than ever before.
Cars with only two hundred horsepower are obliterated instantly in a massive rear-ending as they stack up over three miles of highway during a merge. It is simply impossible to even comprehend coming near another car with so little power, and as such a bit of an arms race had developed, each automaker hoping their featureless solder blob of a car will be the one to finally achieve “enough” power for the average soccer father.
When the auto industry’s “PhDs” and “employables” ran out of ideas, the automakers started to recruit good ol’ boys like myself. They rooted through trailer parks, the dumpsters out behind bowling alleys, and swap meets to find go-fast assholes. Only those capable of ignoring everything a sane person knew about drivetrain longevity in search of making that beautiful red line on the dyno go ever further upward would allow them to keep up with the ever-present threat that 400-horsepower nitromethane-burning compression-ignition Chevrolet Cruzes posed.
On my first day of work at Neo-Pontiac, my line manager made it very clear to me that I would be returned back to the Okie fuck-factory where they found me as soon as I failed to produce results. This wasn’t just an off-the-cuff remark; he had a whole PowerPoint deck ready to illustrate those points in 72-point Arial. I resented his unoriginal font choice, but swallowed my pride and sat out the harangue before heading to my desk and telling the rest of my engineering bullpen about my great ideas for more power.
“Hear me out, motherfuckers,” I told the bemused eggheads while pacing around a central whiteboard. On the whiteboard, I had written only three words: “ADD MORE ENGINES.”
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tags: horsepower arms race, chevrolet cruze, chevrolet
They call it working from home, but just because they call it that, it doesn’t mean you can’t participate in important office conference calls while climbing onto the roof of a burning Ford Taurus halfway through the worst banger rally you’ve ever participated in.
Why not stop to fix the flames, I hear you asking. That is the kind of question that I would expect from someone who has not dealt with the Taurus’s infamously cranky (little joke there) crank position sensor, which would huffily suicide the car whenever it tried to drop below idle. Normally, that would not be a particularly bad thing, except that we also had no alternator, preferring instead a loosely-ziptied bank of convenience-store solar panels wired directly into the battery to keep the electrical system just barely functional.
It worked great as long as we didn’t turn the headlights on, use the brakes or go into a tunnel or under a cloud. The radio was right out, which was okay because it hadn’t survived my attempt to replace the heater core using only my right boot and power cursing. We had no time for music anyway, because we were like ten minutes behind our pace to reach the next checkpoint, perhaps because my prima donna of a codriver decided that he needed to urinate outside the car instead of in the two-liter pop bottle I had so generously provided.
Enough about the hoopty. What you really came here for is a description of the conference call. You see, when a mommy requirements document and a daddy procurement process standards document love each other very much, what they produce is an unmitigated clusterfuck that Yours Truly has to parse the requirements of in his head while also fixing a cracked fuel line spurting high-ethanol hydrocarbon distillate onto a now-roaring electrical fire at highway speed.
Normally, this kind of problem is solved at home, or at the bar, or both, because for the last few months of this contract I had been practically living out of my local, the Whisky Shit. I thought I had things nailed down by now, but then the client decided to have a meeting with their client, and they said some things that I would never have said in their shoes. Namely, the word “yes.”
As my intrepid co-driver hastily worked the wheel to keep us on the winding mountain road, I spat out my chewing gum mid-patronization and used it to seal up the auxiliary fuel line. I knew I had been a pretty clever person - perhaps even a genius - when I decided to replace the dicky factory fuel pump with a line of surgical tubing running through the fuel filler nozzle and across the roof of the car, but this proved it. Now, when unexplained fires began from the tubing wearing against the rusty edges of the quarter panel, it was a simple gum-and-tape job to get it fixed. No messy flaring or buying of “fuel-rated” hoses necessary. I don’t think the engine even leaned out that much, considering the amount of sand-thick oil it was also burning past its hotdog-down-a-hallway-tight rings at this altitude.
Another problem was resolved as I crawled back across the roof to return to my rightful place as The Driver. My phone, a long-suffering relic of some kind of Soviet Union psyops project, bounced from my grip and shattered on the road below. I shrugged. There were only so many problems I could solve in one day.
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tags: ford taurus, conference call, ford, the whisky shit
You might think that you know how to slide a car, to drift around a track with your vape-cloud-ingesting “bros,” to teeter on the edge of control as you dip a wheel into the sewage grates of Mt. Akina. You don’t have shit on me, because I am one of a ragtag few that call ourselves bus drifters.
We don’t advertise what it is we do: our bosses would be mad, both chain-of-command and union. Goodyear especially would be pissed. Within the tire giant is an elite unit of their marketing department. This bundle of assholes is much larger than our own group of bus fun-havers: it is dedicated to perpetuating the myth that the Metro Miler is the ultimate tire for all circumstances and must never be replaced for, say, winter conditions, or because hooking a drifting angle of greater than a few degrees feathers the inner lip of the carcass so thoroughly that they will show belts that night when the bus is racked.
How we do it is simple: once the last customer is safely off the bus, we head to the steep hill outside the old cemetery and countersteer into the twisties until the tires wail. The bus is so long that you have to do it entirely by sound: if you spent all your time looking in the rear-view mirror to see when the rear axle finally bounces free of its hated grip, you’d end up crashing, or at least going slow. We laugh at the rookies who flimsily understeer their New Flyers instead of kicking off a nice little feint slide.
There’s nothing like that pure moment when you’re fully sideways and that Cummins six is throbbing its brains out, shaking the bus to death in its 1900-rpm fuel cut rage, and knowing that any false move could be your last. No airbags, you see.
One of us, friendly old Hubert, is a master of the trail-brake drift. Once, I saw him put vise grips on a rear brake line before hitting the cemetery route. He noticed me there, and put one finger to his lips, letting me know that it was our little secret. And it was, even when that bus left the road the next morning and rammed through a daycare, the vise grip still clamped. I guess he forgot to take it off before passing it to the next driver.
There is only one big obstacle to our merry night’s fun: the bus grip drivers. They think that we don’t notice them going wheel-to-wheel out at the old dirt track. Their bosses don’t care when a nice new Nova LFS shows up with scars down the side that oddly look a lot like the livery of the neighbouring city’s public transit. Why would they care? It is too easy to look the other way, especially when you have been bribing drivers to throw a race once in awhile in order to get fat payouts from the bookie game.
“I know what I got,” taunted the Kijiji ad. My fingers reflexively clenched, digging fingernails into the flesh of my palms so hard they began to bleed. It was one of those ads, which made sense that they were asking $3500 for a Dodge Neon. This was the breaking point. I decided to make a visit in person.
“Hello, I am a collector of Dodge Neons,” I began the email, which was not exactly false, or false in any way, “and I would like to attend a showing of your automobile for possible inclusion in my collection.” After a quick response, the usual suspects had all bundled into Shaky Tim’s paint-shaker of a Fargo Power Wagon and were happily, if uncomfortably, burbling their way down the highway in search of noble gas joy.
When we arrived there, we were shocked to see the most immaculate 1996 Dodge Neon in the history of humanity. His records were meticulous, going over every inch of detail on the blueprinted freshly-rebuilt 132hp two-liter under the hood, the obsessive respray in Strawberry Metallic red, and the hundreds of hours spent by the bodyshop fettling with every gravity-sagged panel gap and boot-scuffed interior panel. It was, for all intents and purposes, the best-condition car around. Who would spend this much effort restoring a Neon, I asked my compatriots.
They all agreed - there was no way we could buy it. It was simply too nice, and we would just roll it into a cornfield while offroading, or nuke the engine after engineering a grocery-store nitrous setup out of a flat of Whip-Its. The man who restored it - no, the man who elevated it - would be destroyed by our careless disregard for the product of his obsession. Yet we had to know more, and soon we were in the foyer of the man’s home, the group’s questions all being shouted at once, mixing into a blur of confusion and growing panic.
“It’s quite simple,” the old man said, and opened a door behind him, leading to the basement of the home. “Would you like to see the workshop?”
We had barely made it down the stairs when the door shut behind us, trapping us within the workshop. There, alongside the other victims, we would be forced to restore Chrysler economy cars for the rest of our days. It wasn’t so bad, really. It was nice to get to really spend the time making a car absolutely perfect instead of forcing myself to make it “good enough” in order to go to work.
I was particularly proud of the Caliber SRT4 I restored. There was nothing on the original blueprints that was not cleaned up to supra-dealership standards. We would spend our nights reading the factory service manual cover-to-cover with a flashlight, the only source of entertainment for the group. I knew that damn car stem to stern. You could say I knew what I got.
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tags: dodge neon, dodge caliber, dodge, i know what i got
Once upon a time, German performance cars used to be cheap. They were stripped-out, sturdily-built, twitchy-handling sports car nightmares made primarily to excite the engineers who built them. Then, the world went to shit, and as their profits and the factories collapsed down around them, they just figured it might be a little easier to sell a few units if they bolted a 200lb leather seat to it and added a good thirty grand to the pricetag.
Thing was, I still wanted the stripped-out performance models of long ago. Yet, due to the inconvenience of being born too late in the span of human history, these vehicles were forever inaccessible to me, kept in climate-controlled inflatable bubbles in the dungeons of ultra-bougie richmos. The only solution? Build a time machine.
Sure, if you listen to physicists, engineers, and other pessimists, you know that it is impossible to build a time machine. Those people also told me it was a really bad idea to daily-drive a Dodge Shadow running nitromethane, and I’m still here, even though you do sometimes have to repeat what you’re saying to me twice into my good ear.
At last, I had arrived in 1979. Before me sat Porsches of every available trim level, with horsepower ranging from anemic to merely pathetic. It was beautiful; enough to bring a tear to my eye. I immediately purchased one of the 911s, being careful not to give the dealership flacks any bills made after the 1970s, and headed back to the time machine.
Just as I was about to step into the time machine, something caught my eye. At the other end of the street came a happily burbling, mint-condition 240Z, of an age so young that it had not yet begun to rust. I didn’t have enough vintage cashola left in my wallet for two cars. It was an impossible decision, a six-cylinder Sophie’s Choice. One trade later, I was returning to my current time period with a Datsun.
I know what you are asking: to have gone to all the effort of developing a time machine, just to travel back in time and buy the wrong car, was it worth it? Yes, absolutely it was. That said, I wish I had spent the extra effort to design a time machine that could skip ahead a few months from when I took off, because there wasn’t much left of the 240Z by the time I had gotten it into my garage that February.
That tears it. I had finally reached my breaking point with the God-forsaken frozen-over hellhole in which I resided, and the endless dumps of lake-effect snow to which the foul winds had subjected me. This conclusion was only arrived at when I went to lift about six feet of snow off my driveway, and was rewarded with the poverty-spec plastic of the snow shovel shattering into a million pieces. Something had to be done, and I sure as hell didn’t see anyone else doing anything about it.
To uninitiated folks like the bylaw officer who tagged me with a summons, it would look like I had spent the last two weeks refusing to shovel my driveway. There is some degree of truth to this accusation, for in fact I had been walled up in the bomb-shelter I call a workshop, banging together the Final Solution to sidewalk shovelling. It was simply unacceptable that in this day and age, where we can launch our unwanted used cars into the Kepler belt, a man still had to shovel nature’s icy vomit off his own concrete.
What did you do, I hear you ask. Artificial intelligence? Genetically-engineered snow-eating raccoons? A precision flamethrower? No, nothing as crude as that. I built a snowblower with a 454 under the hood. Or at least it would be if it still had a hood: I’m not going to lie to you, there were some regrettable accidents along the way.
As I downshifted the Gear Vendors into low-range, I could hear applause from my fellow neighbours. Only one test flight needed to be taken, and they were already overjoyed that human ingenuity had overcome man’s greatest foe. Think of it: a world with perfectly cleared sidewalks, every time. You just had to keep countersteering every time the spinner brushes bit in on a chunk of fencepost or fire hydrant, because otherwise it popped one hell of a donut as the suspension unloaded. The twitchy handling was definitely making it hard to make an Instagram post while driving it.
My timing was perfect: at the top of the hill, coming out of the low sun hanging in the frozen sky, came the very same bylaw officer who had written me the initial summons. I kindled when I realized that he was likely here to verify whether or not I had successfully cleared the aforementioned snow, and would be my first legal witness to the majesty of my creation. In my excitement, and without thinking, I downshifted the main gearbox into the beastlike torque of First Gear, with a perfectly-executed if slightly flashy heel-toe downshift.
At that very moment, I realized I had neglected to account for the shock loading of the drivetrain. In my mind’s eye, I saw what had happened even as my agonizingly slow reflexes pushed in the clutch pedal again. Within nanoseconds, the blowing auger sheared clean off the PTO shaft and was propelled into the windshield of the bylaw officer’s Impala.
Still, though, the initial experiment was a success, and when the real cops arrived they had nothing but nice things to say about it. They were no tourists to the concept of abusing power, you see, and it did handle better than a Ford Explorer.
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tags: chevrolet, snow clearing, chevrolet impala, ford explorer, ford
Tonight on Dateline: self-driving cars. America is going batshit nuts for them in a fucked-up way. Can we trust them? Where did they come from? We asked a nerd. That’s tonight, on Dateline.
Ted Perennial-Graduate-Student, can you describe for us the motivations of a self-driving car? Do they obey the Three Laws of Asimov’s robots, or are these heartless steel machines only capable of understanding the brutal dog-eat-dog jungle law of our Christian motoring standards?
I don’t understand all that techno-wizard spreadsheet geek talk, Ted. What I want to know is really simple: when I push the “Cruise Control” button in my 1989 Toyota Camry, is it going to run over a small child and explode their brains into my cupholder by way of the leaky heater core? It might? That doesn’t sound like technological advancement at all, which is maybe why this small town of coal miners in Under-Virginia no longer believe in the existence of objective truth.
We wanted to get down to the nitty-gritty, instead of believing what the big corporations and untrustworthy government scientists like Ted wanted us to think. That’s why we strapped 200 kilograms of thermite to the front bumper beam of this Audi A6 and drove it directly into a wall. As you can see, the resulting explosion is very worrying for parents of any small child. I’m Mike AmbushReporter for Dateline, signing off.
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tags: dateline, the news, the entertainment news, toyota camry, self-driving cars, audi a6, under-virginia
There are things that you just don’t argue about. No matter how tiresome of a Well-Actually you are, when you are confronted with such an obvious fact, it is impossible even to play the Devil’s advocate. The sky is blue, water is wet, grass is green, and the Jaguar E-Type is a beautiful car. Even blind people know that.
Recently, however, I was in the company of a man so driven by the religion of radical contrarianism that he dared utter an opinion about the E-Type. It wasn’t that good looking, he said. It was too low, with a hood too long, and wheels that were too tiny, I overheard.
All the proportions were wrong, he continued to criticize, as I noticed everyone else in the room perking up and staring, confused, in his direction. My travelling companion immediately departed to find a payphone to call for medical assistance, which at the time I thought was because this man was obviously mentally ill to be saying such things.
One of the onlookers, however, burst with an inhuman speed towards the aggressor, as if to sacrifice his own body to protect the assembled clients of the eatery from the heresies that were emitted like machine-gun fire from a mass murderer. That was what this man was, I came to realize. He had broken the social contract, fractured the thin band of trust between his fellow men so badly that there was now not even the smallest glint of compassion left for him in the room.
That’s when the lead pipes came out.
“I meant the 2+2,” is what I think he said for his last words. It was hard to tell through the shattered jawbone that swung freely from the bottom of what was left of his skull.
The cops came, as they often do, minutes too late to save him. They stood over the bloody pulp, preparing to arrest all of us for some kind of mass delusion, a they-were-all-in-on-it Sherlock Holmes bullshit case that would take forever to prove. That was before we told the cops what the terrorist had said.
You know the rest about what happened afterward from the real-crime television shows on the metanet, but in reality I did quickly tire of the constant victory parades and the commencement speeches. The Mayor told me later that it was the first time they had ever handed out thirty-six keys to the city in one visit, but that he was happy to be giving them to real heroes instead of lame-os like astronauts and firefighters.
When television commands me to do something, it is hard to resist. I think this is why so many of my fellow Westerners grab ahold of a revolver and drive to the news studio, hoping to shut up the voice in their head. So, when the food channel started snootily bellowing a show title that sounded an awful lot like an order, it didn’t take much to put me out the door, into the Volare, and on the road to beat the one they called Bobby Flay.
He was some kind of a chef, an artist who could make a scotch egg from scratch just as easily as I could re-heat a microwave TV dinner. If you disrupted his win record, made something so good that even he himself had to admit that he had been bested, you would receive a handsome reward. So handsome, in fact, that I soon realized I was not the only one champing at the bit to compete with Lord Flay in his fried chicken puzzle palace.
Some Eastern European hellhole, yearning for enough American dollars to stuff a post-Soviet, post-war hole in the economy, had sent the best special-forces chefs they had in the military. I could maybe make a grilled cheese. It seemed obvious, therefore, that the fastest path to facing off against Flay and shutting up the shrieking commands of the television filling my frontal lobe was to cheat.
Luckily for me, I never went anywhere without my trusty one-shot of Rotella T6 synthetic motor oil. It wasn’t exactly what I would call a “cooking oil,” but after I poured a little into the hot wok of a Russkie who was looking the other way, the judges didn’t seem to have a lot of time to debate nomenclature in between trips to the lavatory. I was, therefore, the winner.
Soon, Flay himself descended from the heavens in which he had once sat in judgment of my cooking abilities. My grilled cheese was pretty good, he said, even though the challenge was to make a cabbage roll. And now, he boomed for the cameras, I would be dismantled by my televised foe for the crime of approaching him in his theatre of pain.
We had barely begun the actual competition when Flay motioned to turn off the cameras and stop the clock. He walked over to me, wiping his hands on his apron before sticking one out in a handshake of friendship.
“Look, I get paid either way,” began Flay, “but my car keeps throwing a check engine light, and if you fix it I’ll throw the match.”
It was just as well. Rotella T6 is really too expensive to use as cooking oil, and either way I had basically run out of it. I am sure that the trained palates of the judges would have been able to pick up on the subtle almond aroma of Subaru coolant conditioner, at which point the game would have been over for me anyway. I accepted Flay’s offer, and followed him out into the parking lot, where I reset the oil minder light on his daily-driver 2001 Honda Civic.
The next week, I received a postcard in the mail. It was the producer of Bobby’s show, inviting me to spend a segment on Guy Fiero’s. At least I think that’s what the name was. He was hard to look at directly.
Sure, the CIA manual said that they would train their agents to resist any form of torture, but I always had what it took to break them. Most of these guys had less “training” than your average barbershop quartet, and it was becoming apparent to my boss that I was no longer trying as hard as I once did. Seeing as it was performance review season, and that I worked for one of the world’s most notorious super-villains, I figured I might as well freshen things up around the shop.
So. First things first. Ideas. Gotta come up with something devilish that sounds easy on paper, maybe. Demean them, degrade their ego long before any of the physical torture starts. Maybe they’d even do it to themselves if you left them alone with it long enough, out of boredom and curiosity. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
It’s absolutely got to give them an idea of false success, some progress towards a goal they realize at last, to their despair, is completely unachievable. Maybe they could even make a mistake in their hubris, compound the problem so badly that a whole new level of torture begins, one they again inflict upon themselves.
Eh, it’s getting pretty close to the end of the day, and I want to go home. How about we make them just replace a lower ball joint on a Subaru?
The resulting parade in my honour when my boss’ boss’ boss takes control of the United Nations is something else. I just wish some of those CIA guys had actually finished getting the pinch bolts off, because my car steers kind of dicky on the highway and I’d really like to get it fixed.
Talk to your doctor if you have a shortage of excitement in your drive. Corners™ may help. Available in off-camber, off-camber decreasing radius, and off-camber uneven decreasing radius varieties, Corners™ is the cure for the common commute.
If you experience a loss of grip, powerslide backwards into roadside fencing, or damage suspension components, immediately discontinue use of Corners™ and contact your doctor or an alignment professional. Patients receiving Corners™ should not attempt ordinary conversation with regular human beings, because common dosages of SUVs are contraindicated for Corners™.
After your treatment with Corners™ is stopped, your risk of boredom with straight-line commuting increases. Your risk for getting tired of sitting in stop and go traffic is increased if you have already become infuriated at slow-moving crossovers in front of you. Do not stop taking Corners™ without first speaking with your doctor.
Corners™ is not to be replaced with the generic medication Highway On-Ramps or similar. They are clogged with slow-moving BMWs anyway who can’t pick a line.
Spring has sprung. This I know, because nothing marks the advent of Mother Nature’s renewal from beneath the death-blanket of snow like the annual Tiny Hondas meeting at the old YMCA. And nothing marks the Tiny Hondas meeting like the annual drag-out fist fight between Postie Tim and Dirty Doug about whether the CT110 is better than the CT90 or vice versa.
Sure, for a few years this wasn’t even the headliner. Back in the late 90s, when the Civic was being used by every Tom, Dick and Vincent to rob eighteen-wheelers filled with TV/VCR combos and DVD players, there were a lot more disagreements, generally about whether or not anyone actually enjoyed the tuna sandwiches offered by the concession stand. With the descent of Honda’s star, though, we now found ourselves in a world where two middle-aged dudes kicking the shit out of each other over whose minibikes were better was the height of brand-partisan entertainment in my city.
This time, however, something was different. Perhaps it was because both of them were getting up there in age, a little slower, a lot less durable than a decade ago when the feud began. Maybe it was that they were slowly becoming feral, driven to extreme behaviour by the dwindling supply of parts for each of their favoured auto-clutching toy motorbikes. No matter what it was, the two gladiators soon found themselves drained of energy, and collapsed onto each other in a heaving mass, voided of breath.
Doug and Tim had reached an uneasy truce, it seemed. Perhaps this spring would be different, full of renewal, and not just because while they were distracted I was finally able to get a CT70 exhaust for less than two hundred fucking dollars.
It all started when I was stuck in traffic downtown, drumming my fingers along with the sound of header gasket leaks and smelling the sweet tang of hot coolant pooling in the front K-frame. Not even half a shoulder check had gone by when I noticed the meter maid, in her three-wheeled Cushman nightmare, coughing an agricultural double-thumper boxer note into low-hanging clouds of oil smoke, shooting past me on her way to throw some tickets under windshield wipers.
When I say “meter maid,” I don’t mean to imply any kind of actual official-ness to her role. Her gang was one of the most dangerous ones in the city, forming shortly after autonomous parking-enforcement drones became good enough to replace a well-paying union job. With all the leftover meter maid bikes going to city auction, it should have seemed obvious that a biker gang would soon form to consume the excess inventory. Hence the shoulder check: if they didn’t like you, the Meter Maids had all kinds of ways to get back at you when your car was no longer in motion.
A couple years ago, a friend and I were visiting the auto show. Being cognizant of the rules of the street, we avoided the hand-tagged “no parking” signs on the curb directly across from the convention centre. Parking a few blocks away gave us a good excuse for our government-mandated 30 minutes a day of activity, and when we finally approached the convention centre we got to see first-hand just how deep and vicious the Maids could get with someone who parked on their turf.
The victim was a self-driving Volvo wagon, one of the models that drops you off at the door and then goes to auto-park until you need it again. I don’t know if the Swedes had ever visited our city, seen what happens to people who only use the “official” signs to park, but it wasn’t pretty.
A group of Maids had already succeeded in plasma-cutting the roof off of the Volvo, and now had it lashed to a collection of flame-spewing Cushman trikes, chariot-style. As we went inside, the trikes began to pull it out of the spot with a snap of the reins, a Maid dressed in military-surplus camo and wearing a crown of used pilot jets steering them.
Tough city, but it was definitely easier than waiting the whole day at the impound lot.
When I was just a small child, the small village that I lived in received a new inhabitant. It was amazing that anyone had wanted to come to our village, much less install themselves in the cobwebbed manse that Mrs. Carruthers had departed from this mortal plane within. Yet, here he was, and he had brought with him a car like nothing I had ever seen before.
Even at that tender young age, I could tell that this thing was different. Stark white, with a ride height like a light pickup truck, it clawed at the earth through its front wheels. None of the body panels seemed to line up correctly, and the exhaust note was a clattery racket emitted limply from a depressingly pitted straight-pipe muffler. My father told me that it had been built by “Communists,” and having no deeper understanding of the concept then, I believed him. Communists were simply very different people, and they had constructed a car that our simple farmyard way of life could not see accepting.
Finally, I could no longer contain my curiosity, and went with my school chums to visit the driveway in which the strange car laid. I found myself involuntarily holding my breath as I approached the Communist shitbox (my uncle’s words, agreeing with my father over a belt of weed-whacker deck solvent). What would I find? Was there greater truth out there, somewhere far within the prairie horizon that encircled everything I had ever known?
I will never forget that glorious afternoon I spent with the 1984 Chevrolet Cavalier Type 10 hatchback. Even today, it seems like a dream, because nobody else has ever seen one.
As for myself, I soon fled to the big city in search of my own hatchback shitbox dreams. That’s how I ended up going to prison for helping Volkswagen with a monkey-based gas-chamber, but that’s a story for another time.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” asked my usually-genteel postman, as he attempted to bare-hand lug a packing-tape-wrapped iron LQ4 V8 shortblock from his truck, all the way up my icy driveway. Experiencing this shook me a little bit, and I began to analyze the ways in which my constant demands on Rodney’s physique were perhaps a little unreasonable.
I decided right then and there that I was going to strike a blow for worker’s rights everywhere. Using an old lawnmower and some scrap batteries, I built a prototype package-retrieval drone, which could meet Rodney at the curb. He would load it with parcels of up to a thousand pounds or so, and then wave as the happy robot drives it back to my garage, where some future, as-yet-undecided robot would cheerfully file it away for me, so I could lose freshly-ordered parts to the yawning maw of my dragonesque hoard with even greater efficiency.
The next morning, I was even more excited than usual to hear the sound of the Quad 4 of the LLV knocking its way up my street. It didn’t even really matter what I had ordered, I was so overjoyed to be making the world a better place through automation.
Now, no plan survives contact with the enemy, and in retrospect I probably should have A. tested and B. removed the razor-sharp blade from the mowing deck of the drone before sending it towards my postie friend. The good news is, I was very incentivized to shovel all the snow on my driveway because all that red was making the neighbours curious.
Your workplace may have unfortunate verbal tics, some kind of memetic virus spreading amongst the group. Perhaps it is an excess of profanity, threatening your professionalism. Maybe it’s someone who can’t stop making puns and Janet from Accounting is looking for hydraulic poison quick-injectors on eBay. In our case, it was that visitors kept making the same joke, and so we decided to just make some money off of a swear jar.
Don’t get me wrong, working at NASA is great. You get all the leftover donuts you can steal out of budget meetings, working with brilliant people to squeeze a dime is a thrill ride without compare, and if you don’t fuck anything up, at the end of a few years you can take a big reduction-in-force buyout and go work for a defence contractor. Trust me: “rocket scientist” looks great on a resume. And that’s where the problem started.
I worked with this guy named Hector. Hector was a pretty carefree guy, but he had one problem: every single person who came to visit the office made an “it’s not rocket science” joke. When I say every single person, I mean it: we started an in/out tally one day and by the time we were running 247-0 Hector was screaming and holding his temples like a rat was trying to get out.
In his anger, we feared that he may rip apart and consume the coffee maker, which is something we absolutely did not want to have happen. You see, we had just figured out yesterday that we had been converting from imperial to metric wrong for the last 20 years, and now actually had some coffee in our coffee instead of throwing our empty mugs at the wall and letting them smash against it. Productivity was up.
So we just put out a swear jar. Whenever some visitor made the joke, Hector made them drop a quarter in the jar. He can be very persuasive, in the way that seeing a 350lb rocket scientist shaking with white-hot rage after cornering you in the breakroom is persuasive. At the end of the year, it turned out we had enough to put the JPL on its own swear-jar-based budget.
Now we send probes to Mars for kicks and test whatever the fuck we want. Sure, the President doesn’t like it, but it’s not his money. If he wants it to be, all he has to do is say four little magic words.
If you look in the encyclopedia under “bad idea,” you’ll see my steam-powered 1982 Ford Escort GT, but that’s only because it seems to have an insatiable hunger for old men sitting on park benches reading encyclopedias.
In terms of chassis dynamics, the understeer is not totally unexpected: not only is it a front-wheel-drive economy car, but it also had the better half of a steam locomotive grafted to it. Months of work as a part-time security guard at the train museum had gone into this project, smuggling the front end out piece by piece in my surprisingly roomy pockets while I dodged the ancient geezers who wanted to start every sentence with “Well, actually…”
Why did I do it? I was ready to stop paying so much money at the gas station, for one thing. With this puppy, all I have to do is keep the tender stuffed with coal, or wood, or whatever squirrels and rabbits I could catch in the park outside my house before the police started to take an interest in all those clutch-cable snares I was leaving around. Despite what the local hipster environmentalist websites had to say, it wasn’t really a thing about saving the planet, either. If it was, I would be using one of those newfangled electromotive engines to boil these tires, and probably also make those tires out of hemp or something, I don’t know.
The Escort was a fantastic daily driver, fast and comfortable. There was never a lack of heat, either, although air conditioning was one of those things that I kept putting off to the back of my project honey-do list. No, the real problem was trying to get it started whenever I ended up at a red light. You know how hard it is to keep your coworkers interested in carpooling when it involves them rapidly shovelling dead squirrels into a roaring-hot firebox?
Ever since I’d moved to this neighbourhood, I found myself taking walks in the lakeside park nearby. About a block away from my place, the city’s hassles fell away to a soft drone, often overwhelmed in the summer by the sound of extremely horny cicadas. During my constitutional, I had developed a pattern of dropping in on the maintenance shed and seeing what Ilyich, the groundskeeper, had been working on.
A lot of people don’t realize just how many gas-powered engines are around them every day: every weed-whacker, lawn tractor, chainsaw and generator needed one, even in this day and age of rampant electrification driven by a Bond villain. Every single one of those teeny engines eventually needed repair, and that is how I came to meet Ilyich.
It should come as no surprise by now that I had a lot of affection for the small utility engine, probably in much the same way as other human beings felt respect towards a trusted pack animal or particularly strong child. Ilyich seemed to always be repairing one or another, and so I would sit for awhile as the sun set, and hang out next to him at the workbench during his toil.
One evening, the wheels of fate left what I now know to be a trap in my path. Next to Ilyich’s shed sat a shattered fibreglass swan, and I recognized it as one of the paddlewheel-driven boats that the park rented out to young lovers in order to combine the twin anti-pleasures of bicycling and smelling the wafting odour of fish shit. After asking my groundskeeper companion about it, it was revealed that the geartrain sheared clear out of the boat. Olympic athletes were visiting and got into a race, Ilyich explained, and it would be cheaper just to replace the boat than try to fix it.
Have you ever carried a giant fibreglass swan to your house? If you had, you would understand the confused looks I was now getting from my neighbours. Their primitive brains could not understand, I knew, and it would be fruitless to explain. Already, a great idea was forming in my mind, and I was giddy with anticipation. It would free up so much room in my shed, I told myself.
The next day, I returned to the lake. No longer could I carry the swan: it was more than a little bit heavier now. As I pushed it off the utility trailer into the boat launch, Ilyich came up to me, confused. After the marine Detroit primed and fired, screaming its bone-chilling supercharger curses through a jury-rigged stovepipe exhaust, he was no longer confused, but just held his ears and nodded.
Living in the future was pretty great. We had jetpacks, personal robot butlers, bioengineered sex freaks, but something was still missing. I wanted to be able to download a car. Yes, yes, I’ve heard all the jokes - but with teleportation technology right on the cusp of becoming practical for the average upper-middle-class neo-suburbanite, it felt like something that we should be able to do by now.
That’s why I visited the laboratory of Exegis Research, a subsidiary of the Benevolent Yoshinaka Corporation. You might recognize them as the guys and gals who 3D-printed an entire continent for an Ikea marketing campaign: Smålund. I hear the smell of fresh ABS filament has just about worn off by now, too. Exegis’ chief research scientist, whose name is, by contract, an unprintable series of Meta-Unicode characters, was more than happy to show me around the car-downloading prototype.
With just a few button presses, we were able to sign onto an exclusive private tracker and torrent a vintage Mazda Porter. The small size of the vehicle was key for fast download speeds, I was told by almost everyone I met. The fast connection of the Exegis labs hungrily gulped down the data, and soon the massive Realizer strapped to their warehouse ceiling was up and running, rapidly generating my free car.
I was excited to try it - just think, a car downloaded from the Internet. How could that not be the ultimate expression of cheap-ass automobile ownership? Panting with anticipation, I turned the key and watched the gauges spring to life. It was impossible, however, to miss the booming Eastern European techno music playing at maximum volume on the stereo. Turning the dial did nothing, and when I looked at the head unit I soon found out why: on the LCD was a series of bouncing letters and dancing horizontal lines.
“MAZDA PORTER CRACKED BY SOICHIRO OF PHROZEN CREW,” shrieked the sinusoidal stream of polished-chrome letters. It appeared that my free Mazda Porter had in fact been pirated by one of those oh-so-opportunistic warez groups, so quick on the uptake that they struck only nanoseconds after the technology to reproduce a car was invented in this very lab.
It wasn’t all bad, though: I was starting to get used to the joyous techno beat, and I also saw the words “PRESS F1 - INFINITE GAS” appear in the corner after the list of greetz.
I’ve always been kind of a putterer. You can’t leave me alone for very long without coming back to find me trying to fix everything in the vicinity. Last week, I had to wait for an appointment at the doctor’s office and ended up repairing the dust-covered IBM Selectric under the secretary’s desk before he got me in. That thing went like greased lightning afterward, which is also how my doctor described the quality of my digestive tract. What can I say? Eating ain’t fixing.
Now that we’ve dispensed with the poop joke, I can tell you about a time that I was not able to fix something, and that it haunted me for the rest of my days. That something was an innocent little Honda generator, abandoned in the corner of an industrial auction to the point where even the auctioneer seemed to forget all about it.
The little generator looked sad with its dinged case and mottled paint, and I felt that I should take it home and try my best to bring it back to life. Soichiro would want it that way, I told myself as I drove home carefully with it safely buckled into the passenger seat next to me. It just didn’t make sense to me that someone would throw away a device that was so precious, and resolved to tear it down immediately.
A few weeks later, I finally got around to taking it apart. In my defence, Netflix was really good that month, and by “really good” I mean I figured out how to work the search engine to get past all those documentaries about beheadings. Nothing seemed particularly broken in the little Honda, so I kept disassembling and cleaning as I went, humming a happy song of puttering joy.
When I got down to the bare crankshaft without seeing a single flaw, the calm that usually flowed through my body was suddenly replaced with anger. How dare it refuse me, I bellowed at my shocked cat. In a rage, I poured half of eBay into the postal system and set about replacing every single part within reach, reasoning that one of them must be bad in a way that I couldn’t see.
At last, I had run out of parts to reassemble. I pushed the electric starter, again and again, only to be rewarded with the sound of the starter spinning and not kicking the generator over. There was no Earthly explanation for this, I told myself, and soon I began walking the streets at night, screaming at passersby as my mental state dissolved into a mist of rage. Soon, I was interred at a mental hospital, and my assets liquidated to re-pay the government for their noble sacrifice.
“Oh, hey, I picked up your old Honda generator at auction,” said my favourite orderly, who I had become close to due to his own love of all things mechanical.
“Yeah, all it needed was some gas.”
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tags: honda, honda generator, iron triangle, diagnostic procedures
When every minute counts, it’s not like you can slow down for every Tom, Dick and playground zone on your commute. That’s why I support Proposition X - a law that will force a high-speed “access lane” for people who are in a real God damned hurry. The move has unprecedented bipartisan approval, and may in fact represent the first time in Western history that everyone agrees it is a pretty dope thing to do.
We will coat this dedicated access lane in high-grip VHT traction compound, which vastly improves the cornering speeds possible even on conventional all-season street tires. Access to the lane will be gated by motorsports competition licenses, unless needed in a drastic emergency.
Proposition X will improve the lives of everyone - suddenly, ambulance drivers will be able to drive flat-out on highways, and fire fighters and other first responders can open up their engines and provide life-saving help much faster. I myself am not a first responder, or a second responder, or in fact any kind of responder that shows up before 10:30 in the morning, but I know that Proposition X will help me improve my business and help me make coffee dates with prospective clients much faster.
It’s not just good for my business, either - fuel sales will go up, raising the price of oil and saving the moribund resource-bound economies of besieged regions. For this reason, and for many others, local business leaders have thrown their weight behind the upcoming Proposition.
It is for these reasons that - hold on, I’ve just been informed that the bicycle lane mafia wants a rider on Proposition X. They’re demanding a tax break for carbon fibre bodywork. I think we can come to some agreement on this issue.
Immigration brings in some of our finest minds, most generous people and most momentous innovations. Without immigrants, our lives would be much worse and our country weaker. Then again, there are also my neighbours.
I don’t know what country they come from, but it’s obviously some kind of dystopian hellhole where no dissent or creativity is allowed. They toil endlessly to be the same as everyone else, to achieve what their society views as “perfection.” Why do I think these things about them? Just look at their cars: a Toyota Camry and a Lexus RX350.
Every morning, when they open the front door to leave for work, I glare through the boarded-up slats of my Unabomber shack and take notes. Perhaps today will be the day when they let things slip, I reason. Sure, they’ll leave with the RX350, but then they’ll come back in a rust-holed four-eyed Fox body, like the rest of my neighbours. Hell, I’d even tolerate a straight-piped first-gen Acura Integra at this point.
No. Every night, they return, greeting my glare with the xenon headlights of the Lexus or the Camry, parking comfortably in their non-oil-stained driveway, and heading inside to spend time with their family. Don’t they understand that they just don’t fit in around here?
Some nights it makes me so sick that I walk down the street to see if my neighbour Hazem has finished his manual-swapped, nitromethane-gulping Buick Reatta drag car. He never will, and that’s exactly the attitude to have around here. That’s why he and I belong, and they don’t.
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tags: letters to the editor, toyota camry, toyota, lexus rx350, lexus, buick reatta, buick
When you’re in Chevy LUV, the whole world just seems brighter. That long-throw shift lever, the buzzy four-banger, the comforting rattle of the rear sliding window, it all added up to an unparalleled automotive experience. The fact that this was a drive to the Home Depot to pick up parts for my shitter didn’t take anything away from the experience.
Thing is, any anthropologist will tell you that Home Depot is where the biggest, baddest trucks congregate to on weekends, so that the production accountants who own them can load up on garden gnomes and plastic yard organizers. Those trucks take up a lot of room, and after the third consecutive lap of the parking lot I still could not find anywhere that my little Chevy would fit.
I was about to leave when I caught sight of the rental forklifts that the Depot had on offer for the spring season. They seemed quite big, and in fact, so big that my little Isuzu-Chevy bastard could probably pass for one. You could hear the grinding of gears inside my head from the sidewalk, as I inexpertly double-clutch downshifted an idea.
Nobody inside the Home Depot seemed to notice. Employees didn’t care, and the “real truck guys” who were checking out the programmable-lightbulbs and bidet aisles wouldn’t notice a weird-looking forklift in the lumber aisle. All it took was a few well-placed horn honks to scare the pedestrians away, and I had the run of the place.
All good things must come to an end, however. I was about to pull into the checkout line when I heard a gentle rapping on my passenger window. Leaning over, I rolled down the window and came face to face with an Occupational Health & Safety inspector, making sure that the worker-drones at Home Depot were doing things by the book. He was displeased that I was wearing neither a hard hat nor a high-visibility safety vest, and refused to believe that I did not work at the Home Depot. I was trapped, but then I had another great idea.
“Look, I can prove to you that I don’t work at Home Depot,” I said, reaching into my glovebox and thrusting the evidence upon him. “Look: fine-thread metric bolts.”
A lot of today’s youths are turning to living in their cars, and I for one can’t fault them. With the insane over-valuation of real estate, the ever-growing cost of utilities, and the fact that today’s modern car is both more comfortable and reliable than a house, who would ever want to live in something that doesn’t have wheels? And yet, this leads us down the golden path of risk: there is something more out there, something even more destructive to your income than property ownership.
That something is motorsports.
For the last few years, I’ve made the acquaintance of Shaky Tim, a drifter (in both senses of the word) who lives out of his 240SX. Occasionally, he’ll pull into my driveway and stay the night, using my shower in exchange for leaving behind some rare parts he doesn’t need anymore. It is in this way that our relationship progressed, until one fateful morning.
“Hey man,” asked Tim, “you ever thought about selling your house, buying a motorhome, putting nitrous on that motorhome and then doing quarter-mile pulls for pinks in your house?”
I hadn’t.
Two hours later, I was registering my house at the DMV. Sure, the parking wasn’t very good - I was going to have to mostly ride mopeds from now on, which wasn’t that big of a downside - but I was free to go wherever I wanted to, albeit at the cost of approximately one former mortgage payment per kilometre in fuel.
The real problem came when I showed up at the drag strip. For whatever reason, it couldn’t pass tech. I assume the reason is because of a long-seated hatred of home ownership by the moneyed classes, which is why I am here today demanding that Parliament act quickly to finance a series of motorhome drag racing series to protect homeowners’ investments.
A lot of you have very expensive addictions: bad cars, mediocre cars, photography of cars, sometimes even motorcycle ownership. It is for this reason that any truly addicted car gal or guy worth their salt should pick up a little side hustle. With only a small percentage of the ingenuity you exercise every day when trying to explain to a police officer why you just ripped a donut in an occupied playground zone, you can make some money to offset the crushing fiscal apocalypse you have brought upon yourself via the curse of limited impulse control.
Nowadays, many old people melt down old electronics and cabling for the gold conductors buried within. This takes a lot of time, and it’s never really a sure thing. For much less effort, you need only hang out at a liquor store near a college. Convince the co-eds to buy a few bottles of Goldschlager, and then wait outside the sewer line to their sorority the next morning with a sifting pan.
I’ve been a Nissan product designer for the last five years, and nobody has asked to check my company ID yet. The pay isn’t great, because I’m not actually “on the payroll,” but if you stick around after presentations there’s some stale sandwiches and muffins that otherwise just get thrown away.
Most everyone will give you a few bucks if you ring their doorbell and pretend to be collecting money for a charity for crippled children. It helps if you also cripple a child beforehand, just in case the mark has no imagination.
Did you know the government has no restrictions whatsoever on who can and cannot operate a casino? It’s not true, but if you can shut the place down before the Feds investigate, people will trade you real legal tender for fake plastic coins that you can pick up at any dollar store.
Most municipal signs are held together with high-quality stainless steel fasteners, and it’s not like they need all of them. With a traffic sign on every block, you can turn “stop” into “cash!”
The first couple weeks after the holidays are always a big-time bummer for me. Once-glimmering roads are now caked in ugly smog-choked slush, there’s no specials to look forward to on television, and schoolchildren are no longer buoyed by the spirit of the season to listen to a passerby’s 30-minute explanation of how he invented the instant noodle. Sometimes, I think the only thing that keeps me going is the Fifty Percent Off Boxing Day sale at the you-pull-it junkyard.
Your average human being doesn’t want to be out in this kind of weather, much less bonking their frozen knuckles on a frosted-steel rad support when trying to remove a stuck fastener. It is for this reason that I believe I have a pretty good chance of scoring a minty Toyota shortblock for only a hundo. You see, years ago, Toyota built this car in Japan. Once, it was the pride of a man’s driveway, the vehicle he identified himself as to prospective clients and lovers. Something happened to it along the way, and the engine was stripped for some teenager’s hot rod project. I could still feel its spirit, however, begging me to get it working again, to resurrect it from its horrible undeath in my back forty, devoid of motive power.
The yard is empty, a frozen tundra of nothingness below a dead winter sky. I have to brush an inch of ashy smog-snow off the dead cars as I pass them in the rows, the heaped ice making it impossible to determine what they once were otherwise. Several times, I think I have spotted the unmistakable angles of a Mk2 Supra, but they turn out to be lesser beasts: the closest I get is a 1987 Celica with rotten orange waves of damage radiating from its rear right quarter panel like it lost a fight with an elephant. Eventually, I reach something that I know to be a Supra, its edgy mesh grille and pop-up headlights unmistakeable. I laugh at myself for my previous inability to tell: it is so obvious now.
It is remarkable that you can pay so little in order to get such an education about the end products of industrial society, I think as I try to split loose the retention prong of a recalcitrant electrical connector. A lesser man would simply cut these, I tell myself in order to calm the growing frustration I am feeling at this task. Someone like the dreaded Previous Owner of my own Toyota, who clearly never met a wire cutter he didn’t like.
Eventually, through my efforts, the engine is released from its prison. I take advantage of the courtesy gantry crane, its massive wheelbarrow tires unimpeded by the trifle of snow coating the yard, and escort the 7M all the way to the parking lot.
It is only then that I realize I am not as alone as I once thought. I hear the braying of trumpets, and into the parking lot rolls a garishly-decorated jitney cab powered by a wheezing Toyota 22R. There is nowhere for me to run. The Toyota Owner’s Club demands tribute.
It’s unfair that the government would step in and restrict free trade, especially with all of those friendly Iranian dudes who were willing to trade me white-labeled Persian Renault knockoffs in exchange for worthless nuclear secrets. Wasn’t like you couldn’t find that shit on the internet anyway, I told the CIA operatives who came in surprisingly well-kept 1970s Land Cruisers to interrogate me.
An interrogation is a two-way street, I complained to them. It was just simply unfair: they could cram bamboo shoots under my fingernails, but they didn’t want to cut a deal for some of their un-needed spare parts. You could fund the government for years just by selling off some primo doors and roofs, I argued, but they didn’t care. Simply wasteful.
After a few hours more of abuse, the CIA goons decided that I was not worth the effort, and departed in a huff. As they sped off, they scattered my parts-rat neighbours who had already begun disassembling their parked Land Cruisers. I lived in a really good neighbourhood, you see.
I rubbed my fingernails, drank a bit of coffee to overcome the sodium pentathol, and considered my options.
They didn’t tell me not to continue the deal, so I decided to phone up Vahid and see if he could cut me some kind of a discount, because clearly customs was going to be a real bugbear about the import duty on these Renaults.
Traditional paint on canvas often fixates on just a few genres: the still life, the grotesque, the erotic work. Today, students, you will be introduced to one of the finest genres of them all: the self-portrait of the artist, standing in the empty engine bay of a car from which he has just pulled the motor. Here are some notable works from the ages:
Rembrandt, 1664: God Damn Accessory Drive Bullshit
Due to the lack of automobiles at the time, Rembrandt paints himself posed in the empty chest cavity of a dead horse, its heart removed. It is unclear whether or not the resulting engine swap was successful.
Henri Matisse, 1921: Fuck This Low Compression Piece of Cheese-Eating Shit
In this controversial work, the artist is portrayed standing in the engine bay of a period Renault, from which the wheezing two-cylinder has been at last removed. Broad brush strokes omit most of the detail in the mechanical pieces, but the clever observer can see that it is obvious that the compression rings are bad.
At the time, art critics in Nice refused to believe the engine was “all that blown” and offered to take it off his hands if Matisse were to throw it in with the painting, by far the most generous reception of any of his works during his short life.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1983: Holy Shit Do I Ever Regret Buying This
It is a common misconception that the gifted Basquiat never owned a car. In point of fact, he had purchased this extremely sick (in only one sense of the word) 1977 Dodge Aspen off of a bandmate. In the work, you can see that, despite his limited experience in mechanical engineering, Jean-Michel has successfully pulled the dying e-carb piece of fucking trash out of the car and is preparing it for a small-block Chevy swap, a particularly daring piece of cross-brand work, especially for the time.
The swap later raised controversy in the local modified-car community, though it never successfully ran, with the car being crushed by New York City parking enforcement only a week later due to having parked on the wrong side of the road during an odd-numbered Tuesday.
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tags: art history, research pays off, dodge aspen, renault 2cv, dead horse
A lot of scientific ink has been spilled over the phenomenon of the Capri Anomaly of late 2017, but settle in and let me tell you how it really happened. You see, sometimes when a man loves a bodykitted Mustang but doesn’t want to pay five freaking grand for one, he makes incredibly bad choices at the junkyard and creates a tachyon emitter out of a pair of old Dodge ECUs and a Saab 9-7X magnesium third member. Huh, I guess it didn’t take long to explain at all.
Once the Capri had appeared, of course, it meant that I had to get it registered. Now, you try waiting in line at the DMV all day, only to then have to explain to them the extradimensional origin of your car. Things are different over on that other plane. I finally just decided to mark down one of the ß symbols as an “8″ on the VIN form so they would give me a license plate and I could be on my way.
Although I hadn’t checked before the Summoning, it turns out that in the other dimension, they also have gasoline. I decided to put some high-octane, low-ethanol stuff in it just to be on the safe side, since who knows how the guy over there maintained it before I raptured it right out of his driveway into a dimensional fold. They might not have RockAuto.
The week and a half I spent with the Capri were some of my finest days on this Earth. A lot of people think the engine was sluggish, and the car didn’t do enough to differentiate itself from the other Fox-body products, and these things are true. Every time I looked at that swoopy rear quarter and the green tail lights, though, I just couldn’t help but smile. And that’s what owning a car is all about.
One morning, I came out to see a bunch of dudes in suits looking over my car. I yelled, and for my troubles was shoved to the ground and restrained by them. A black tow truck appeared, seized my Capri, and disappeared with it. The overzealous parking patrol in this city is exactly why I don’t pay my taxes.
The U-Haul desk jockey visibly blanches as I approach, stretching my hands in their fingerless driving gloves. I smile, presumably out of common human friendliness, but in actuality because I am proud of my ability to still break through to someone who has been conditioned so thoroughly to care about their minimum wage job. My Piloti driving shoes squeak on the hard-wearing industrial tile flooring of the depot.
“One of your finest pick-up trucks, Garçon,” I say, my lips exposing the canines in my grin.
He knows what I am doing, but does not care. I am momentarily disappointed that I no longer need to continue the charade, this game of cat and mouse that I had built up in my mind. They’re not his trucks, I suppose, and maybe if I blow this one up in a particularly creative way, at least he won’t have a boring day at work when the wrecker drops off the shattered wreck, still dipping with glittery oil. With a dismissive wave of his hand, he tells me to go find my truck in the lot. A bulky Chevy key, an asset tag attached, sits proudly on the Formica countertop.
As I leave the parking lot, I decide to press my luck. A quick two-step spurs the V8 into reducing the rear tires to a cloud of acrid smoke, but I can see in the rear-view mirror that he does not even look up from the desk, absorbed now in what I assume is a mobile phone streaming hardcore pornography. Depressed, I merge gently into traffic, and drive responsibly all the way to the Home Depot. It is like they have taken all the fun out of abusing a rental car. I mope for the entire trip.
At the end of my shopping trip, I am stuck in the sole checkout line behind a pair of men. I am so consumed in my depression that I don’t even realize that they, too, are wearing Pilotis and fingerless driving gloves. It is only a few minutes later, that one of them starts complaining about ideal tire pressures, that I realize I am not alone in my doldrums. We are, all of us, victims of this man at the U-Haul desk who does not even give us the satisfaction at being outraged at our violation of the social contract.
A few weeks later, after what feels like dozens of meetings, we have arrived at a solution to our problem. We will freak out the normals by properly parking our pickup trucks, inside the lines, straight, and only taking one stall. At our first meet, I can already hear angry civilians shrieking at how unnatural the sight of properly parked pickups is.
As a man of industry, how do you feel about the way the aerospace-inspired cabin of the new-for-1993 Chrysler Concorde envelops your body, lending your spirit a greater sense of purpose on this Earth?
Well, I’m wondering why the Panasonic car phone that was in the brochures isn’t available in this car. Did you guys in Auburn Hills pull a fast one on us again?
Sir, this is a used car lot, and this is a 25-year-old Chrysler product. You’re lucky there isn’t a baseball glove filled with used condoms and mustard packets instead of a steering wheel. May I provide you with a complimentary shaming of your socioeconomic status while you wait for my manager to approve a test drive?
Please.
Very well, sir. Your credit score, as calculated by the metaminds of every major financial institution ever invented by man, whether accidentally or intentionally, is so low as to render you almost a new kind of life on this Earth altogether. There are giant squids in the aquarium, sir, who are a better credit risk than you. It is for this reason that our own financing arm, the principals of which, I will caution you, have all gone to white-collar prison for massive, ongoing criminal fraud, refuse to finance you at anything other than a frankly eye-watering thirty-seven per cent, compounded daily. Your great-grandchildren will be paying off the loan on this nearly three decade old front-wheel-drive luxury car, of which the automatic transmission fluid no doubt currently resembles the vomit of a three year old child who was recently introduced to the concept of orange soda and scrambled eggs and then allowed to go nuts on a Hardee’s breakfast menu.
Can you get the monthly payment down to something I can afford, though?
Remember that you have RIGHTS. No rental car desk clerk can make you feel inadequate for rejecting the so-called “upgrade.” You rented the small subcompact for a reason, and that was so you could fully disable the traction control and blitz a highway on-ramp with the handbrake with little or no risk of impending death.
Sure, your other coworkers going to the conference all rented big-titty V8s, but they have fatty SUV frames and shitty ride-comfort suspension to contend with. Theirs is a more simple-minded straightline speed, nothing at all like the urges you have to feel the limits of the grip that the hard-wearing Ling-Long Economaster factory tires can provide.
No, when the rental agency tells you that they plumb sold out of the little Yaris you had your heart set on, you need to make sure that in no uncertain terms they understand that you intended to thrash the living shit out of that car and return to them a worn-out husk, smoking from both ends and with the interior smeared with the musk of animal fear. You are a driver, God damn it, and you will not rest until - oh, what? The V8 has how much horsepower? Well, maybe just this once.
As both you and my psychiatrist know, I spend a lot of time thinking about Saabs. It’s not just their quirky air of confused design ideas, it’s not their principled resistance to General Motors bean-counting, and it’s not even their Scandinavian reputation for safety and snow-driving dominance. No, what makes me think about Saabs is the PCV system.
While most cars have poor PCV systems, and indeed their sexy Swedish cousins over at Volvo have especially bad ones, the Saab PCV systems are a whole new world of ludicrous untruth. Most mechanics only have to go as far as looking at them out of the corner of their eye before starting to gibber like a madman, unable to enunciate anything other than a deep urge for death.
A couple years ago, in fact, as part of a secret US military experiment, a complete replacement Saab PCV system was stocked in an Arizona Pep Boys under the brand name of Dorman. It was believed that being able to hold its entire form in one box, rather than to glimpse it only piece by maddening piece, would force the creation of a “super mechanic,” even though many lesser mechanics would no doubt become undone by it.
The military was wrong, however, and when the first customer appeared at the Pep Boys to pick up a nice new PCV system for their 9-3, they found that the box had been chewed open, as if from the inside, and the contents escaped. As the site was extinguished with a formal burn order, no survivors can be questioned, and it remains the stuff of forums myth, along with anyone who claims to have ever seen a 9-3 Turbo X wagon.
More conventional journalists wouldn’t dare to show up to the New York Auto Show with a suitcase full of an improvised contraption for pumping gallons of NyQuil Cold & Flu directly into their veins, but I was no conventional journalist. Planes are yucky, and every time you get sick, an alternate universe version of you dies from it. I couldn’t take the risk that in this chance, that alternate universe would be my own.
Not many people know this, but an auto show is the primary origin for the development of new pathogens in the North American Exterior Empire. That’s why the CDC was doing valet service outside the conference centre, I was pretty sure. The reasons why it is so infectious seem obvious: lots of people in close proximity, lots of international air travel, and of course my fellow journalist touching every single button, darnable and knob in the interior so they can criticize its tawdry handfeel, like a wine connoisseur on BBC motorsports television.
I was different. I didn’t need to touch cars in order to judge them: I just needed a good head full of the non-narcotic cough syrup I carried in my bag and, more importantly, a few minutes with each of the confused PR staff that clogged each booth. At most auto shows, these would be dealership employees, confused about not just feature sets, but colours and words. Here, they were product-planning executives, high-octane PR types, and upper management, eager to see the anxious and jealous stares of their rivals at the sight of their new-for-2019 product. I could get the real dope out of them.
“So,” I asked, later in my hotel room, after I had strung up my interview apparatus on the shower curtain rod and begun to drain my crucified interviewee, “you guys got any left-hand-thread fasteners in this one?”
If you can’t live with the Citroen XM, I have to question your fitness to live on this earth at all. The XM, for all its spheres-and-bongs construction, remains the finest automobile that isn’t the Citroen SM ever made. You’ve got grand touring performance paired with posh hydro-elastic ultraluxury, all wrapped up in a body more eighties than the actual decade. What more could you want?
Oh, right, good steering. Okay, Italy, I get what you’re saying. The XM does have a pretty crappy power-assist and you have to swagger around tight roads like a homeless drunk on high-octane methamphetamine sporadically beating a rainbow trout that he found inside the bread-bags he wears for shoes, but that’s all part of the charm. Chances are it’s just one of the eight or nine hydraulic filters littered around the car, and you can fix those in a parkade thousands of miles from home. Think of all the opportunities you’ll have to learn foreign languages’ words for “hydraulic flush” and “LHM double-joining union.”
Perhaps you are a connoisseur of fine car audio? The Citroen XM has every available option for it, unless you want to be able to play CDs. That is for more boorish, contemporary cars, and besides, it would ruin the comforting hum of interference that you get on the FM reception when you turn the dashboard lighting above “off.” It’s not like you should listen to the terrible music of your home country, anyway, it is much more important to pay attention to the road.
Speaking of the road, you will be extremely pleased to find that the XM features a conventional, extremely boring brake setup. There is a pedal, for God’s sake. You would think no true Citroen fan would appreciate this, and in fact they do not. That just means a lower resale value for you when you go to pick up your second XM, because probably you will want to have a parts car or two, just like every important French businessman had at the time.
For all these reasons and more, consider making the Citroen XM your incredibly expensive mistake today. All it will take is several thousand dollars in import fees and a tolerance for being called “that guy with the Saab.”
There are a lot of people out there - bad people - who want to get their hands on the secret information that I possess. The joke’s on them, because I will reveal every aspect of their sordid conspiracy, here, live on the internet. Perhaps I will die for this, but I would rather die than to live in a world where the truth is unchallenged.
About a decade ago, the Japanese economy was in a lot of trouble. Productivity was poor, capital growth remained elusive, and the GDP just wasn’t moving the way it used to. They needed to do something. Working under the auspices of MITI, the Japanese trade ministry, the conspirators decided that they would return to the glory days of the Bubble Era. First, though, to test it, they would force a return to the 90s, because that wasn’t quite as far away and seemed a little less scary to them.
The project? To create new vehicles capable of spawning new sports-car-fan forums, packed to the gills with so little actual information that the very mechanism of North American society would grind to a halt. A triumphant Japan would again be able to surge forward, selling new kinds of unfathomable technology to the confused and divided Western people.
The campaign was begun. Deep within a Gunma laboratory, the Subaru BRZ was meticulously crafted to encourage the most delusional of forum posts. It had okay but not excellent power, confusing similarities to other vehicles, and worst of all, the ability to do skids. Still, the masters of the project hesitated. It was too big of a risk for only one of these vehicles to be introduced. Toyota stepped forward, bravely offering low-quality summer tires and vintage badging to the project. Now, two near-as-dammit identical cars would arrive at the same time, stoking an instant and completely pointless rivalry.
They were not entirely successful, but the lost productivity in every one of the millions of threads about changing the automatic in the BRZ that the poster’s mom bought for them into a dual-clutch manual transmission and LS-swapping it left an impact on an already-weak Western economy. Today, we can still feel the deep scars of the Frisbee Twins upon our way of life, unless you work as a body shop technician or eBay coilover seller.
They never found Joe Isuzu’s body, but I’m convinced it’s still somewhere out there. It had to be, because I wasn’t ready to admit that he was well and truly gone, even if Isuzu itself had left us years previous, during the ol’ unprecedented global recession (number 3 of 4 in that decade).
Joe Isuzu was the fast-talking, lying asshole who tried to sell us all off-brand Japanese sedans at a price slightly less than you would pay for a reliable, lovable Honda or Toyota. Those cars were boring, though, and in time Joe Isuzu’s brand of bald-faced braggadocio became a sort of rallying cry for all of us Isuzu faithful to hide behind.
Everything was going great up to IsuzuCon ‘06, that fateful keynote where they brought Joe Isuzu “back from retirement” to sell us a few more cars. The only big problem was, Isuzu didn’t really have any cars to sell us in 2006. He was out there on stage, waving at cardboard cutouts of ‘93 Impulses and ‘95 Rodeos, almost as if he had no idea that the world had changed around him. I could tell that his handlers, dressed in snappy Isuzu outfits, were definitely incentivized not to tell him about it.
I guess when I said “the only big problem,” what I actually meant was “one of the two big problems,” because there was also a furry convention next door, and it had been getting a little wild, if you’ll pardon the pun. Thing was, Joe Isuzu, being a creature of the early 90s, did not understand what he was looking at, and he paused mid-spiel, captivated by the glimpses of faux fur that he could see walking by in the adjacent hall. Before anyone could stop him, he had leapt from the stage and run next door.
When I last saw Joe Isuzu, he was getting his lights punched out by a guy who was dressed like a buck-naked Tony The Tiger. I think that’s how he would have wanted us to remember him.
It may be a new year, but I remember back when we didn’t expect that there would ever be a new year, ever again. I speak, of course, of my short time spent consulting on the Y2K crisis.
If you were born after the shocking episode of Fresh Prince in which Will Smith was forced to kill a traitorous DJ Jazzy Jeff, you probably weren’t old enough to appreciate the “millennium bug,” as we called it. Consultants from all across the world were activated, sent to bill thousands of hours making a computer understand that the number 2000 is not the same as the number 1900, or the number 0. It’s harder work than you’d think, especially if you were billing for the six-hour solid martini lunches that I used to shoot into my arm in a bathroom stall just outside of the Swiss border.
I worked for a Rhineland bank in those days, one of the ancient ones from back when money existed, and my coworker was a lifer called Dieter. Dieter used to tell me about how he used to have this great job in the auto industry, until they canned him for being “too alarmist” about the Y2K bug. Too alarmist for a German? That was nearly the equivalent of saying they were too anal-retentive, and I could not believe it.
Yet, as the ball dropped to usher in the year 2000, we wiped our brows and were overjoyed to have survived it without 747s dropping out of the sky and exploding into a million pieces. Dieter had disappeared, however, and months of searching could not turn up neither hide nor hair of him. I, naturally, had been forced by the authorities to remain in the country until the case could either be closed or they had sufficient reason to lose interest (for example, television might become good.)
Television did become good that spring, and so I returned home. It was only after I arrived that I figured out the terrible truth of the auto industry that Dieter had been trying to stop. That year, the first-generation Audi Allroad was released onto North American roads, and to claim its manifold defects were the result of the Y2K bug is bordering on praise for Audi.
As a volunteer police officer, there are many perks to the job. For instance, I get discount prices on acid-grade ammunition for my bag of personal firearms. That’s pretty nice. Also, I get to tell other cops to fuck off when they pull me over for felony speeding. The most valuable thing, though, is that I get to look through the arrest records, because some of them are goddamn hilarious.
Last week, detectives finally cracked the Big Red gang. Someone was selling Honda Big Reds to teenagers, knowing full well that they were going to kill those kids. After years of being bolstered by anti-drug panic, the laws could not be more clear: it was attempted murder. The fact that Honda Big Reds did not technically classify as a dangerous opiate did not bother our crack squadron of lawyers, and it definitely didn’t bother the judges enough to make them miss their tee times to overthrow our case.
When the small-displacement squad rolled up on the seller, the sworn statements get a little loopy. Not only did this guy live way out in the country and have a bundle of extremely dangerous three-wheelers, he owned dozens of them and was getting rid of them two or three at a time! The “Big Red gang” was just one guy.
As you know from the anti-Big Red commercials that the police department runs during prime time, just one Big Red XR250 three-wheeler is capable of wiping out an entire junior high graduating class in just under two months, and the introduction of Craigslist had shortened that time significantly. Here was this guy sitting on a bundle of ‘em, probably hoarded from their original ban in 1983.
He told us he thought the ban had lifted, that it would be okay to start dealing trikes again. He was dead wrong, and when the men and women of law enforcement moved in, he didn’t have a leg to stand on, possibly because his limbs were pinned underneath his getaway vehicle, which hit a small bump and spontaneously flipped end-over-end thirty times before crushing his pelvis and both femurs.
Thing was, the evidence record says they only managed to take three of the Big Reds into custody. The rest just disappeared somehow between the time the cops showed up and the time the CSIs got done fingerprinting the place. Maybe that’s why the higher-ups told us not to mention all the cop deaths from trike overdose in the last few weeks.
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tags: honda, honda trike, honda big red, big red
New! The Seat Safety Switch Collectible Card Game
For years, huge nerds have been forced to wage made-up intergalactic war with pieces of flimsy cardboard emblazoned with the pictures of mythological creatures of lore. No longer! In a partnership with Sketchy Fucking Games Company Somewhere In Arizona (XXX EDIT BEFORE PUBLICATION XXX), the Seat Safety Switch Content Farm has the most realistic collectible card game about junkyarding and beater ownership available today!
Get your sweaty hands on Heroic cars such as the 1971 Plymouth Valiant four-door, 1981 Ford Durango, and 1966 Fiat 850 coupe, immortalized in the pages of Thinning Metal magazine. Upgrade them with iconic junkyard performance parts such as the 1983 Mercedes 300TD Wiper Motor Relay, and use special cards like Bolts Right On, Duct Tape and Booger Welds to adapt parts from other cars to get your shit mobile again so you can drive to work.
Each special card pack is only $17 and guaranteed to come with at least one rare part that doesn’t fit any of your cars, but you can’t get rid of it because you might need it next turn and you’ll never find another one this cheap.
Ask your local retailer to order it in, and then don’t buy it from them because you found it for a few bucks cheaper online.
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tags: collectible card game, ford, ford durango, plymouth, plymouth valiant, fiat, fiat 850
The only thing in life I have ever truly loved is that sweet sticky nectar known as grey RTV. You can mash that thing in anywhere that a gasket-designing engineer phoned it in, and in a lot of places where you shouldn’t. Yet, RTV did not love me back. I wrote many notes on heart-shaped stationery to the Permatex corporation, ever yearning for acceptance.
Every day I would return to the hardware store, and see on the shelves that there was still no such thing as aerosol RTV in my beleaguered nation. Sure, the politicians had their ideas as to why: more stringent safety regulations, the flaming hole in the ozone yawning sunburnt death onto us, communists who wanted to raise our taxes. I felt strongly that some of those reasons were wrong, but still no aerosol RTV.
My garage was clustered with sticky wads of old nitrile gloves, sacrificed unnecessarily to smooth over-applied ultraglobs of room-temperature-vulcanizing silicone sealant. Those gloves had died long before the end of their useful life: it was a pity that I did not have the chance to even punch a sharp metal bracket with them, tearing them from stem to stern on at least one knuckle before begrudgingly throwing them away after the now-exposed skin of my hands became blacker than the gloves ever were.
It was then that I saw it in the trunk of a junkyard Camry: a small aerosol can. Quickly, I checked the odometer: in miles. This car had travelled far from its homeland of America, and died here. Was it fate? I reached out to grasp the RTV can, and smuggled it quickly into my toolbag and then under my overcoat to keep it away from envious eyes: all others at the Pick N Pull would know at a hundred-yard glance that I had the legendary applicator.
When I got home, I somehow had nothing requiring a gasket. In a frenzy, I pulled the oilpan free from a parts Civic, and shook the can to prepare it for its destiny. The marble inside rattled helplessly, betraying the empty state of the can. In denial, I pushed the nozzle. Nothing came out but a limp spurt.
It was then that I remembered something odd about the Camry: its engine had become a strange flat shade of grey, almost as if someone had tried to seal oil leaks by randomly spraying the entire thing with sealant.
Everyone said it would be really hard to become a world-famous game designer, but it wasn’t at all. I had made my breakthrough with a meticulously researched simulator of cooking shinkansen cuisine, and now it was time to collect my small-pond fame of being the newly-crowned king of the Japanese games industry.
Thing was, I had spent all my time in the country researching the little snacks that the JR chefs had banged together. I had put little or no effort into understanding anything more than the rudimentary Japanese required for a white man to fumble through the process of buying beer from the greasy 7-Eleven next to my apartment building. When it came time for the plaudits from the games industry press, and more importantly, the fanboys, I didn’t understand anything more complicated than “nice weather today.”
It was decided in the cab over that my representative, the one from the publisher, would do most of the talking. Anyone who got close enough would be gently fobbed off onto the hired help, be referred directly to the brochures. If nothing else, it would add to my air of international mystery.
I realized that I should have spent a little more time in the library and a lot less in the kitchen when my representative got up to introduce the game.
“And now, I’m proud to introduce the creator of Tube Meat!” he barked excitedly into a microphone before thousands of screaming fans.
When I was a kid, I was lucky to escape with my life. It turned out that the warm, comforting playschool environment in which I had been raised and educated during my formative years was actually a suicide cult dedicated to the worship of the Mitsubishi Starion. Years of follow-on therapy with court-ordered psychiatrists taught me that the experience had long-lasting effects on my values and motivations as they pertained to automobile ownership.
Convincing though Father Astron had been, I felt that there was some other blame to go around. When I visited my parents individually in their own gender-specific prisons, I asked them sometimes about why they had decided to give up normal society and flee to the woods, to live alongside a man who told them that double-wishbone suspension was destroying the spirit of humanity and that soon the Cosmic Balance Shaft would even out the buzz and shake of the world in their favour.
“I was no sucker,” was all my dad would ever admit, now far enough away from Father that his weekly sermons had become dull and weak in his mind, banished to the back by the day-to-day chores of prison life. “I didn’t think the Starion had what it took to win in Group B.”
If you’re like me, you frequently skip out on well-deserved meals in order to get just a few more things done on your project car. It never pays to skip those meals: you’ll make more mistakes, and might even pass out from exhaustion in the middle of the shop before you can finish thrashing your daily driver together before work the next day.
A lot of guys like to store snacks in their garage. Sounds like a great idea, but it’s been proven by real scientists that hot food can increase the speed of wrenching performance by up to two hundred percent. Don’t believe us? Just look at your local junkyard’s taco truck - their customers are hoovering down al pastor and yanking out 2GRs all day long.
The taco truck, then, the ideal food provider for people such as us. Wait, though, there’s a problem: despite being a truck, the taco truck doesn’t move.
Stop living in the past, and sign up for our rolling-wrap delivery service. Using it couldn’t be simpler. Just like in Spy Hunter, when you’ve achieved enough miles and gotten within range, mash the flashing “Taco Van” button on your dashboard. We’ll find you, drive in front of your projected route (developed through sophisticated artificial intelligence), and drop the back ramp at highway speed. All you have to do is line ‘er up and drive inside, where we will serve you delicious hot food without having to stop.
It’s green, too: not only can you shut your engine off inside the truck, but you really should. Our cooks keep fainting from carbon monoxide poisoning in the kitchen and it’s becoming really hard to dispose of them, what with every police department in the city now subscribed to our service. No idling!
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tags: taco truck, i shouldn't do these when hungry
Ask a BMW Owner
To get the new year started off right, I’ve decided to let my friend, Dr. Cornelius Winthread III, owner of many fine BMW lease documents, answer some questions that the readers may have.
What’s the ideal pizza delivery car? I am a teenager who is just starting out in the world of driving and want something that can make my deliveries safely, but not cost a lot in gas.
I remember purchasing pizza a few years ago. It was in this delightful place just outside of Frankfurt, where they had an authentic caricature of an Italian gentleman spraypainted on the walls. A fascinating meal, but nothing on the order of sous vide foie gras, my usual snack for when I’m feeling lazy and my maid Ilsa has not been keeping up with ein duties.
To get back to your question, I believe a Certified Pre-Owned™ 2015 BMW 740iL is the ideal car for your purposes. Depreciation has caught up to this fine ride, and it will save you enough over new that you can afford to repair the common defects in the ignition system, electrical systems, ECU, batteries, rear seats and airbag suspension. If you have good credit, the lease can be had for under $950/mo, which any teenager in my neighbourhood can easily get with his fund interest.
Only a man of ill breeding would buy this car outright: remember the first rule of tax deductibility! Always lease a vehicle such as this.
I’m looking at a 1989 BMW 325e and a 2007 BMW 540i for track days. Which one will cost less to operate in the long run?
A lot of the lower classes these days are partaking in “winding,” I think it is called. I believe that for your purposes, the 540i is the more reliable choice. Not only do you have more room to carry excess prostitutes, but the greater ride comfort means more of them will appear intact if and when the constabulatory gets involved.
However, there is another option: have you considered leasing a Certified Pre-Owned™ 2015-2016 BMW 435i xDrive? Sure, you cannot slide the vehicle around like my pool boy, but it is hard to put a price on being able to impress your neighbours. Ask your operational accountant if it can be swung, and do not forget to test your golf bags in the trunk before signing your name on the dotted line if you have a regular salesman who is less attentive to detail than my Alfred!
Cornelius, my wife is addicted to painkillers and keeps sending me pictures of the pink seat covers she wants to install in her 2012 BMW X3 Individual. What is the cheapest route of divorce that will still allow me to play at her father’s country club?
Perhaps you should ask the previous individual if he has a pimp or copper thief that can dispose of her for you. I have a regular man who handles these kinds of things for me, and the most impressive thing about him is that he recently disposed of an ancient six-year-old car such as your soon-to-be-ex-wife’s X3 for a lease on a new Certified Pre-Owned™ 6-series Gran Coupé. It is so flashy that often his targets are hypnotized by the arrival of such a marvel of engineering, so held fast by how impressed they are with his breeding and mannerisms that they cannot resist the killing blow when it finally comes.
There’s an old saying we have down at the bar, “if you have to use a Mitsubishi Debonair as a white-noise machine, your office is too fucking loud.” I think it’s Polish or something. On the face of it, this argument is uncontroversial; nobody at all who has been around an idling Mitsubishi Debonair thinks its snuffly exhaust and quiet lifter-tick can possibly overwhelm an entire open-office-concept full of shrieking harpies and the CEO’s harem of eternally pregnant Malinois at maximum heat.
However, as with all platitudes, some asshole on the Internet is going to come and argue that it is in fact false. Perhaps you are one of these assholes, and so it is for you, and people like you, that I embark upon my dark project.
To test my theory, I applied for a chance to be on a popular television show where I would change job positions with the CEO of my employer, and then let him see how the sausage is made down on the ol’ office floor. Once he had his ridiculous fake mustache and I had my morning gold-plated snuff box of high-octane cocaine, I was ready to put the argument to the test.
After one trip to a Japanese auction site, enriching both myself and my shady compatriot Dr. Hsu from the company coffers, I had a primo example of the awkwardly-proportioned ‘89 Debonair placed in the development bullpen, leaking hydraulic fluid and with a distinctive whine that could be nothing else but a loose supercharger belt. This front-drive mini-luxobarge (luxoyacht?) was ready to spring on the suckers - er, loyal employees - under my command.
Leading the camera crew with me into the office, I began my presentation, trying hard to ignore the former CEO so as not to tip my hand to the ruse. Nobody else seemed to notice the camera crew following him around, even as he fucked up very simple tasks like making coffee and nearly got fired every ten minutes by a succession of angry middle-managers.
Soon, the purpose of the Debonair was described, and implemented. I departed for a power lunch, and four hours later when I returned, the office’s conversation volume was well above the noise level produced by the Debonair, which considering the carbon monoxide, was remarkable. This office was, in fact, too fucking loud.
At the end of the episode, during the normal segment in which you are supposed to talk about how hard the other guy’s job is, I had nothing really to say. I had wasted a gobsmacking amount of company resources, not to mention an irreplaceable Japanese near-luxury car, on settling a five-dollar bar bet. The CEO mostly just had a list of people he wanted to fire, which turned out to be all of my immediate and distant managers.
As I was leaving his office, now stripped of my powers, I realized that I had not reversed the policy. I first became aware of this when, trying to use the freight elevator as a smoking lounge, I discovered it was crammed to the gills with Hyundai Grandeurs. Leave it to the company man to cheap the fuck out on a good idea.
Did I ever tell you about the time I got fired from the United Nations? It turned out that we had different ideas about what to do with their so-called “aid money,” and that didn’t involve air-dropping a series of really awesome Baja Bugs on impoverished war-torn nations. It was a lot cheaper than their oh-so-bougie Land Cruisers, I pled at the Hague, but nobody was willing to listen.
Later, in prison, I realized the consequences of my actions: I had been filed into the Volkswagen section of the war-crimes prison. The cell across from me was occupied by Hans, a man who unironically owned a Volkswagen Jetta (”Wolfsburg,” he would sharply remind me every single time I mentioned just the model name on its own). He wasn’t even German, I don’t think, but he loved his crayon-smelling sedan more than any other human being in history has ever loved a car.
After a few months of trading bench-racing barbs with Hans about whether or not a base Cobalt can outrun a Mk3 Golf GTI, it eventually occurred to me to ask Hans what he was in for. Surely, if he was in the war-crimes prison as I was, for a Volkswagen-related offense, it must have been truly egregious. Hans hesitated to answer at first, staring at the bottom of his cell and shuffling his feet.
A small voice piped up from the cell beside me. In prison, there are really no secrets, and everyone knew Hans’ story from long before I had begun my punishment.
“He had a really bad exhaust leak and left the car idling outside a synagogue while he was replacing headlight bulbs,” said the muffled voice.
The financial services industry has always held a special appeal for me. Perhaps it’s the chance to get rewarded for unmitigated greed at the expense of my customers, or, no, that was the one. Recently, I became aware of a scam wherein financial advisors would phone up rich people and tell them which old cars to buy, so as to trap those cars forever inside a climate-controlled vault while waiting for them to appreciate.
In other words, these monsters would turn a perfectly good motor vehicle into an immobile investment vehicle. Something had to be done, and as is typical for my adventures, that something is making a shit ton of money off old rich people who are too dumb to Google my name plus “scammer.” One trip to the business card printing shop later, I was already in command of a hundred million dollar portfolio and sipping on free-flowing cocaine from a repurposed Big Gulp dispenser in the office kitchen.
“Look, I need to know what cars to buy next week at Barrett-Jackson,” said my customer, a relatively high-placed politician who definitely did not have the salary to support such a purchase.
“Don’t go to Barrett-Jackson, man, you gotta get race cars from the source. Have you ever heard of a little something called the 24 Hours of LeMons?”
I only realized the grave harm that I had committed upon the world in retrospect, when I tried to find a semi-mint Kia Amanti for purchase as a daily driver slash rallycross weapon. There quite simply were none left. Instead, the market was clogged with something called “Ferraris,” which seemed like incredibly impractical, rust-prone Italian cars. They didn’t even have good trunks!
No man is ever free of the rules and constraints of his homeland. For me, I had left the glorious land of Canada years and years ago, in search of rust-free hoopties with which to pop clutches in. Homesickness eventually set in, though, and I soon found myself searching for a truly Canadian car.
It wasn’t enough to simply buy Iraqi Taxis and other Canadian-made G-bodies, for those were enforced upon Canadians to construct based on a master plan constructed by some American ultramanager. I could not even reliably convince myself that a Ford Frontenac of all cars was Canadian enough to assuage my guilt at having left the land of my birth.
There was nothing left to do except start my own car company - a truly Canadian car company, and in the spirit of Canada it was founded somewhere in the northwestern United States because rent was really cheap. Our initial model was called the Hoser, and it was a beaut.
Rather than four-wheel drive, we opted for double-double drive, with a confusing array of gear selectors proffered to the driver with an exhortation that there was really no wrong choice to make. Add to that the sprightly feel by having built the entire frame, Morgan-style, exclusively from beaver-felled maple curved by authentic NHL hockey-stick heat guns, and you had yourself a vehicle that could work its way through both an unpaved mountain road or one of those annoying tight corners in parking lots with a decorative snow warning flag on it that you keep hitting the curb with your back wheels while turning right.
It was truly a fantastic car, but we had made one terrible mistake, one glaring oversight so atrocious that it could not be forgiven even by my fellow apology-addicts. The cupholders were too shallow to sufficiently hold a Timmies cup. Hit a bump, and the god damn lid pops off and gets coffee everywhere.
The era of taco trucks was coming to a close. At every junkyard, proprietors would tell me the same thing, graven-faced, although admittedly my Spanish was a terrible and my Tagalog made my Spanish look good by comparison. Soon, the food drones were coming, they all warned me. Their way of life was on borrowed time.
Some billionaire on the west coast had finally had enough of having to go outside for his truck-based food, built a bunch of crazy fucking helicopter robots that would swarm you with burritos, quesadillas and Monte Cristos whenever you wanted. It actually sounded pretty good to me, but I realized that this industrial automation had outsize negative effects on the small business population in the field of “food that I like to eat that isn’t too far from the junkyard.”
Naturally, to solve a problem, I did what everyone does to solve their problems: I decided to get mired in local politics. As the Mayor, I now had an incredible amount of power over the police force, which I generally used by picking up a red telephone on my desk and ordering them to arrest a squeegee kid I saw on the way in. Eventually, I got tired of demanding that street urchins be interred, and made the call to equip all police officers with anti-drone net guns, courtesy of our friends in the military-industrial complex.
Everything went great, until the junkyards themselves closed down, leaving the taco trucks without customers. Now that hip millennials were lassoing drones with police-surplus net guns and riding them in order to get where they needed to go, cars were obsolete, and so nobody needed automobile parts anymore. Long since immobilized from disuse, it was not that the owners had any chance of reviving the trucks and moving to somewhere customers actually existed.
Sometimes in the evening I sit on the balcony of my substantial City Hall office with a whisky sour, and I look out over my city. Against the sunset, the sky is clogged with swarming robots delivering hot Mexican tube-shaped food. I miss the taco trucks, but more than that, I miss the thrill of stealing a pants pocket full of relays.
If you had worked for the Chuck E. Cheese family entertainment division, as I have, you would understand that there are precautions that have to be taken when you wind one of the franchisees down.
Just like an embassy, the only safe way to shut it down is to destroy all potentially-proprietary information, and burn the flag. In our case, the flag was the head of the Chuck E. Cheese costume itself, and for about a decade, I was the guy who was sent in to destroy them. Each franchise was, along with other corporate-supplied effects, given a propane torch to be used only at the direction of upper management.
I was that upper management.
Most jobs were simple: I’d arrive at the airport, immediately rent the fastest thing they had on the lot, and then get as much “shareholder value” as possible out of the rental insurance on the way to the restaurant. I’d destroy the head (more on this later), shake the hands of the front-line soldiers, thank them for their service, late lunch at the airport Chili’s, wheels up and in full-Vicodin unconscious mode by 2100.
Things were simple. Maybe one or two Chucks would go under a year. Something went wrong deep in the guts of America, though, and we caught it on the chin. Soon, I was spending every single day on the road, each afternoon of my life capped by staring into the dead eyes of a mascot’s head before I put the torch to it. Sometimes, the franchise was so dead that they had no idea that it was over for them before I would pull into the lot, the muffler of my automatic V6 Mustang convertible blaring a trumpet of impending pink slips that the Angel Gabriel would have been proud of. If you had asked me, perhaps at one of those airport Chili’s, if it bothered me, I would have told you no. I was doing a job, and that job needed to be done.
One morning, in Tulsa, things went wrong. Now, little stuff happened all the time on the job. Maybe one of the high-school employees took an ear off the head for safe-keeping, a manager wanted to pose nude with it and borrowed it for the evening. I didn’t judge: I could just as easily burn the Avatar of Chuck to cinders in a suburban basement as I could the rear warehouse of a shopping mall. There was only one rule: The Children Must Never See. To break the illusion for them that Chuck E. Cheese was a real, benevolent entity, made of one solid piece like them, was to invite the threat of Forever Nightmares. We never really understood why such an obviously fake beast had such control over them - Takashi-san in Incident Control thought it might have something to do with an “inverse uncanny valley,” but he drank a lot at work and certainly wasn’t in the trenches of Middle America with me every single day - but certainly no child could see me burning the flesh off of Chuck E’s carbon-steel skull wire.
The first indication that something had gone wrong in Tulsa is that there were more heads than there should have been. Todd, the franchise manager, had only been there a few weeks, and told me that he didn’t understand why the warehouse was entirely stocked with dozens of Chuck heads, their dead googly-eyed faces all staring straight ahead. I should have been more wary than I was, but at that point I simply did not give a shit anymore. I rolled my sleeves up and had a very productive afternoon of burning mouse skulls.
Soon, I realized that I had been talking to myself. This hadn’t happened before, perhaps because my exposure to the heads had been so limited - one and done - no franchise could afford a lot of them. Now, I was beginning to realize why Omura down in Unrestricted Research had been sending the memos about the “psychic isolators.” I burned faster and faster, until at last I was at the final Chuck head of Tulsa #1137.
I’ll never know if it was the light, or the organic vapours from torching hundreds of mouse heads a year in an enclosed, unventilated space, but something horrible passed between us in that room. The mouth moved - the mouth is not to move, said the costume standards - and it started to speak to me, in my own voice.
The next thing I remember is waking up in the parking lot of Tulsa #1137, the building engulfed in a roaring flame before me. A pizza grease fire was nothing new to me, and in my denial, I forced myself to believe that’s what had happened - an inadvertent arson from a pimple-faced teenager who didn’t know how to work the oven and smoke pot at the same time. I turned to face my rescuer. Todd stared at the flames, saying nothing.
“We got it, right?” I asked Todd, who didn’t respond. Near-catatonic, he never took his eyes off the area of the building in which I had worked. As the firefighters arrived, Todd did a perfect heel-click 180, and walked away from the parking lot into the darkness of the Winter Solstice, never to be seen again.
There was something in his walk, though. Almost like he expected to have a tail and a really big head.
It started like pretty much any other day: browsing Craigslist for sweet deals on dirt-cheap used mopeds. For as long as I could remember, small-displacement motorized transport had gotten me out of bed in the morning, which at least was better than a heroin addiction in one respect (it certainly wasn’t cheaper). There was just something about the moped’s humble intersection of the beloved-by-hipsters bicycle and the beloved-by-Italians motor scooter, and although I had no hope of qualifying that something, I definitely enjoyed ripping two-stroke anger down the bicycle lanes of my town.
Something strange had happened this morning, I came to realize while sending out my first batch of lowball-offer emails: they had all been sold just moments before I got there. It made no sense. My mind, already tilted towards paranoia in the best of times, began to run rampant: there was no doubt now that this was some kind of organized conspiracy against me and my interests. I enumerated my enemies: perhaps my opponent was the pro-bike-lane mafia, or any number of the people which I have inconvenienced by my ring-a-ding-ding approach to spitting hot oil into the faces of their children when doing big-throttle wheelies through a playground zone.
My first stop was Nico. He had no last name, because it was badly injured during the trip over from Malta and had to be amputated by a special team of veterinarians. In what was surely a sign of guilt, Nico took off running as soon as he heard the distinctive pregnant-chainsaw sound of my Puch approaching. Without a big-bore kit like mine, though, it didn’t take much of a chase before I caught up to his Vespa and knocked him off with a well-placed pool cue struck across the back of his neck.
The resulting interrogation was fruitful. Last week, a man in a red suit had come by his hoard of scooters, tried to make sure that he wasn’t selling any mopeds, and definitely wouldn’t sell any to me. It was proof positive that at least someone was working directly against my interests, and so I graciously thanked Nico and wished him luck in recovering from the broken ribs and concussion with which I had given him.
Without a specific lead, I returned home, only to find a man in a red suit on my roof. I immediately popped a u-turn and ramped the Puch off the back hatch of my neighbor’s crookedly-street-parked EcoSport, launching it onto the roof. However, I slightly misjudged the integrity of my shingles, and rather than pulling alongside the figure, I punched a hole in my roof and knocked the both of us down into my master bathroom.
When the dust cleared, the red-suited menace was impaled through the chest on one of the many lengths of rusty expansion chambers I left in the bathtub for cleaning. I tried to get answers, but only received in return a knowing nod and a wink. At last, he touched his index finger to his red, cherry nose, and died, leaving me with a convenient (if still messy) bathtub soaked in arterial blood. If anything, I now knew less than I did before.
Walking downstairs, I was in such a fugue of anger that I didn’t notice a strange package beneath the Christmas tree before I tripped over it. Considering that it was only myself and the raccoon that lived under the deck here, I didn’t understand how this present had gotten here. A lead at last. Tearing into it, I realized that it was the front frame section of a Mini Riga moped, the once-pride of Ukrainian shitbike production.
I sat there for a few more minutes, taking it in. This was exactly what I had wanted, and now it was here. Did that mean the guy in the red suit was…?
Rushing upstairs, I searched the coat of the dead man. With fumbling fingers, I managed to work his wallet loose from his bloody pants, and take a look at the drivers’ license. It was exactly who I thought it would be, a true Christmas miracle.
A few minutes later, the police and coroner arrived. It was a surprisingly great time, and one of the police officers gave me a sticker for being a “Big Helper” with pulling the corpse off of the gore-slicked steel tubing. The mayor gave me a commendation for finally taking down the escaped mental patient who had been breaking into people’s homes over the last few years during the winter and leaving garbage inside.
Nobody loved the bubble Taurus wagon as much as I did, and I didn’t really love it at all. Via basic logic, however, that meant I was the biggest fan of bubble Taurus wagons in the world, and soon the angry owners of such vehicles began flocking to my front lawn in order to hawk me their shitboxes, yearning to be free of them.
I am not widely known as a man who is particularly good at resisting “a great deal,” and as such it should come as no surprise that my front forty was soon occupied nearly entirely by rotting manual-transmission (I have standards) bubble Taurus wagons. Luckily, as a man of some esteem in the local business community, the bylaw enforcement officers looked elsewhere for their quota, often to the unbroken line of overheating Taurus wagons idling on my street, waiting for me to pass judgment upon them and offer a crisp twenty dollar bill from my wallet.
Eventually, it became obvious to me that at some point I needed to do something with all these mouldering seven- and eight-seat Tauruses, and so I decided to do the humane thing and gently euthanize them. With the help of a local car dealership, I was able to Cash For Clunkers nearly half a dozen of these clattering Vulcan-motored abominations out of existence before I realized that I was crushing some fine-ass patch panels that could be sent to New England, the birthplace of rust.
Soon, I was the richest auto-body parts dealer on the planet, and all the states of New England were thick with revitalized Ford Taurus wagons. I even sponsored and stocked my own Super GT Silhouette series race team in Japan, where the third-generation Taurus was so beloved by Nipponese weirdos that even the slightest hint of someone importing parts to keep their strange-ass car alive drove them into an uncontrollable frenzy, resulting in the death of at least two junkyard operators in Hakone.
I didn’t have time to enjoy my newfound wealth, however: I had to replace at least three transmissions per day if I ever wanted to get out of my own driveway.
#
tags: ford taurus, taurus madness, silhouette series
I owed my soul to the Snap-On man, this much was clear. No matter how much I told myself that with some cleverness I could get around needing those fancy diagnostic tools, exotic torque wrenches and oh-so-tempting 90 degree adapters, every time that little truck came tootling into my driveway, I could practically feel the pinch of the plasma-donation needle hooking up into my arm.
After the last incident, in which I somehow managed to finance a complete set of air ratchets because they were in a slightly different colour than the rest of my air ratchets, me and a bunch of the other guys from the shop got together and had a discussion about it. It was obvious that, alone, we were powerless to resist the lure of this tool-truck jezebel: but perhaps when united we would have the strength to oppose him.
Soon, our theory was put to the test. The Snap-On Man was no fool: he knew right away that something had changed in our place of work. Perhaps it was our newly confident postures, our steely gaze telling him to find a new place to push his candy. Or, it could have been the length of bike chain that Two-Braps Todd was carrying threateningly. Still, he knew that we must have some weakness, and so after a few circles of the lot, I saw him pull his truck up to the new guy.
“Say, you’re pretty new around here. You know what every mechanic needs?” he whispered into the air with his snake-like tongue, luring the FNG ever closer.
I couldn’t reach him in time, but Todd could. Later, he would explain to me that he had a promising career in track and field before he fell in with the wrong crowd in high school and started fixing Dodge Caravans. Todd looked at me then, meeting my gaze through the plexiglass window of his visiting-hours cubicle, and told me that when it happened, all he could think of was trying to remove the exhaust on a Stow ‘N’ Go. We couldn’t have stopped him if we tried.
Sometimes I think that I am the only one who appreciates the subtle beauty of the 1989 Mazda 323. Its pseudo-curved form gives the appearance of harsh 80s angularity, but is not a slave to it. The headlights and grille are carved, trucklike, from one solid plane, offering a fresh respite from the haze of sealed-beam misery that the domestic market still slavishly obeyed. There’s something more, too, something that I have dedicated my life to understanding.
Nobody at my gallery opening understands. They see only a museum stuffed to the gills with obsessive photographs of BG 323 windshields, A-pillars, headlights, door handles, dashboards. On top of that, there are my hand-carved sculptures of every component of the car, perhaps the only available moulds of the tail lights that are available on this continent. There are some polite remarks, a few photojournalists snap photographs of my jawline at flattering angles, and at least one drunk stares deeply into the picture of a 323 in a dark highway tunnel that I have lovingly painted on black velvet before devouring the hors d’oeuvres and vomiting on the front steps.
Perhaps, I realize, their lack of connection with the work is because I myself am a fraud. I admire the 323 from afar: my obsessive Craigslist and Kijiji search has yet to turn up even one suitable candidate. All of my works are based on cars that I have spotted on the street, cell-phone snaps for my “dream wall” that have been cropped artistically in order to justify opening a gallery exhibit. There, I felt, owners would be tempted to bring their 323s, perhaps even ones they did not want anymore and would happily sell to someone who must be such a fan of the car.
Yet, nobody appeared. I sat on those front steps, and tried not to smell the vomit of drunken art gazers rapidly cooling on the marble. Was the humble hatchback so unloved that nobody gave a thought to it? They threw it into the trash when something better had come along, way back in the 90s? No. There had to be a way to find my dream low-priced economy hatchback.
Turning to the gallery owner, I asked him: did he know anyone who ran a show in Hiroshima? I was going to take this bitch international no matter what it took, even if I had to paint a wiring diagram on a single grain of rice.
#
tags: mazda, mazda 323, mazda 323 madness, the art world
It’s never a good idea to meet your heroes. Luckily, I had managed to make it to a relatively prosperous adulthood by never having any heroes. Astronauts? Just underpaid government employees who got in a city bus headed straight up. Life-saving surgeons? Got lucky. Inspirational civil-rights leaders? If they’re so good, why am I still waiting in stop-and-go traffic? I thought I had life all figured out, that there was no need for role models. Then I found the perfect one.
Now, on first blush, you might think a 1963 Volkswagen Beetle is nothing that you should pattern your life on. The clutch cable linkage is overcomplicated, rust holes in the heater channels threaten your life with carbon monoxide poisoning, and let’s not forget about that whole Hitler thing. But gaze a little deeper, aided by the carbide-steel blade of a sawzall and some little friends known as “fibreglass aftermarket body panels,” and it’s starting to look up.
Especially by the time that the torsion bars are adjusted to add a highly enjoyable level of ride height to the proceedings, and grandpa-grip farmland tires slapped onto the rear end, it becomes obvious: the 1963 Volkswagen Beetle is beloved because it is so versatile. For instance, the owner of this bug could, for instance, jump a mall fountain, whether that mall fountain is indoors or (as is the custom in Deep California) outside. Sure, the stock suspension doesn’t quote-unquote “like” it, but it endures, like the hero it is.
Never meet your heroes, indeed. You know what, they’re right: when I banked off the mall fountain and landed directly on Santa’s Village, I got to meet a lot of cops. Believe me, those guys are terrible heroes, no sense of humour at all.
I wasn’t even into the “crying and praying to an uncaring god” phase of my fortnightly drunken Dr. Mario marathon, and already I was finding it difficult to concentrate on the variety of pills that cascaded before me. What definitely wasn’t helping was the rolled Renault rally car posed, beetle-like, in the shattered wreckage of what was once my living room. Once again, my roommates lived in bald-faced contempt of the rules and bylaws of the condo association.
When they first replied to my Craigslist ad seeking roomies, I figured that their strange mannerisms were purely due to the fact that they were Finnish exchange students, not yet knowledgeable about the way that the hustle and bustle of North American life compelled you to, say, drive very fast while not paying attention to the road. In fact, they were so intense about proper winter driving, lecturing one another to take careful note of the radius of all the turns to and from their place of work.
Their safety obsession even extended to standing in the ditches to excitedly hoot “OI OI OI OI” at passing drivers whenever they started to have a little oversteer. Once, I had joined them in the ditches, but lost interest at approximately the same time I lost consciousness from the contents of their heavily-insulated Thermos flask, which seemed to be filled with paint thinner and nitroglycerin.
Things really came to a head when those nice Polish dudes moved in next door, and brought along with them a Subaru Impreza with no interior. This infuriated the Finns, and I rarely saw them after that, disappearing into the workshop after hoovering up plates of the lukewarm fish that was their only sustenance. In fact, aside from their regular rent cheques and the occasional shot-to-death Russian soldier in the yard, I would have had no idea that they even still existed until the Renault 5 Turbo came flying through my front windows.
As mad as I was, it was hard to avoid getting caught up in their enthusiasm. Along with a group of bystanders, we rolled the French shitmobile back onto its wheels and hooted “OI OI OI OI” as they sped off through my kitchen, scattering heirloom plates and cutlery every which way beneath the fat rally tires of victory.
#
tags: finland, renault, renault 5, subaru, subaru impreza
“Ha ha! It is us, the Russians! You have been working for us all along,” said Dmitri, the Russian spy who I had been working for all along. He wasn’t wrong necessarily, but he did have a depressingly low opinion of me that I didn’t quite relish being exposed so directly to. Regardless, I decided to push for what I was owed.
I drew my snub-nose revolver from its ankle holster and levelled it at Dmitri. “Not so fast, motherfucker. Take me to the Fiats.” It turned out that Dmitri wasn’t really much of a “car guy,” per se, and so I had to patiently explain the entire mess to him so that he would understand just why I had been selling so many valuable satellite secrets to him - and then take me to the Fiats.
My arm was just starting to get tired from having to hold the revolver by the time that I had completed my mini-dissertation and circled the Lada-Fiat-VAZ-Yugo connection in an accented whiteboard marker for emphasis. It had taken over an hour, but Dmitri now seemed to understand, and beckoned me into his car, a mid-range but gently dented Volga Siber.
I tried not to look at the depressing Chrysler Sebring interior as Dmitri bragged about how he, too, enjoyed cars, and after only several years of working hard at the FSB he had been able to finally buy his dream luxury car, in which we were unhappily travelling. I knew then that he would never understand how I could have traded those useless national security secrets for fantastic Fiat content.
Dmitri looked on with confusion as I sorted through the vast variety of delicious Fiat-analogues on offer at a dingy Vladivostok used car lot. There was no doubt in my mind that he was trying to figure out how he could have been so outmaneuvered by my flawless spycraft.
Let he who hasn’t enslaved a bundle of Chinese grad students to hack together a provisional artificial intelligence for autonomous cars throw the first stone, I’m pretty sure the Bible says. You can say what you will about Job’s struggles, but there’s no way they could have compared to how much it bothered me to have to turn up the voltage on Chu’s shock collar until he stopped fucking up the unit tests.
The cause of my concern was simple. I wanted fat government dollars, and the projects they expected were still relatively immature enough that I thought I could score said dollars with merely a responsibly small amount of near-electrocuting a McMansion full of grad students. Thing was, I just wasn’t getting the results that I wanted, and I was also getting pretty close to the point where I’d have to buy the large-breed kind of dog shock collars, which, when added to the kidnapping and the pizza deliveries, would put this whole endeavour into the red.
“We are sorry, Mr. Switch,” said Chu. He was the de facto spokesman of the group, not only because of his excellent command of spoken English but also his ability to constantly break the build, which is why the others opted to try to keep him in a management role as much as possible. “But the car, it is killing all of the pedestrians.”
It turned out that during their early-morning beta test, the Pontiac Venture I had paid for them to stud with a level of computational power that would send us to and from the moon approximately nine hundred billion times over (one gently used Raspberry Pi) had not performed very well. In fact, the test minivan lit up a burnout outside the test lab, ran over a number of pedestrians, triggered six photo radar cash machines, hit-and-ran four Lexuses in a Starbucks drive-through and engaged in a forty-five minute police chase at highway speeds, which it eventually evaded by driving through a populated daycare without slowing down.
I considered his words.
“Ship it,” I said. “This thing is still better at driving than most people on my commute.”
Within a few weeks, I was happily spending my DARPA automated-traffic grand prize. A big thousand smackaroonies. After the feds came and took away all the research, source code, and the Pontiac Venture in order to use it as the basis for a new autonomous murder platform, you would think it would seem like a poor exchange, but they also took Chu, and that motherfucker just could not stop breaking builds.
“You know, not long ago, Daihatsu still had a single US employee named - I think - Robert,” said my friend Nik, after reaching into his basket of vintage NOS Daihatsu parts and coming up empty on parts for my project Rugger. “You should hit him up sometime. I probably still have his phone number.”
I called that phone number, and a terrified, small voice emerged. “Robert?” I asked.
“Who wants to know?” shrieked the voice, in amongst a rustling of paper and suspiciously parts-box-sounding cardboard.
We spoke for awhile longer, and Robert’s strange tale took shape before us. It seemed that as Mother Nippon abandoned the Daihatsu brand in North America, one of the accountants hadn’t scrolled far enough down on the Excel spreadsheet when it came time to make the list of people to shitcan. Robert dodged the axe, and thus now was the de facto president of Daihatsu USA by battlefield promotion.
The Japanese, not expecting the creativity of good old American deception and deceit, would never think to check again, and so he received his paycheques every two weeks along with the standard cost-of-living increase at the end of the year. I hesitated to ask about bonuses, because it wasn’t like Daihatsu was moving a lot of new cars, but he chuckled and let me know that he had an entire parts warehouse to sell off from which to make his quarterly sales goals.
“You won’t tell them I was here, will you?” Robert’s voice was quivering now. He knew that his position was illicit, and that if I made enough of a stink to the media, the hastily-cut YouTube video featuring screaming car guys trying to break into the Daihatsu parts warehouse for a laugh would inevitably lead to his firing. A good man wouldn’t abuse this position of power, would be understanding of Robert’s circumstances and work to maintain a healthy relationship for both parties.
“That depends on whether you have the ability to authorize a factory-backed Daihatsu Charade racing program, Mister President.”
I awoke from uneasy slumber to find myself staring into the glowing eye of late-night infomercials. In flickering terrorvision, the anonymous yet statistically-well-distributed figures intoned to me about the need to improve my life, to make it better. It was car college. They could teach me how to make a living working on cars? To this point in my life, I hadn’t particularly resisted anything that shadowy figures demanded of me, and this was certainly no exception.
Picking up my phone, I took a few minutes to remember how to operate the “telephone” functionality of it, and then obediently dialled the number of the college. A sharp staccato shriek emerged from the receiver after the second ring, and I reflexively dropped the phone on my carpet, an $1800 visit to the Apple store dodged only by the mounds of spent cat hair having added extra cushioning to the worn factory underlay.
I called again, and this time, it sounded more like a rattling sound. A rattling sound that I had become all too familiar with. As the rod-knock rattle gave way to the tractory idle of a Subaru Impreza, I discovered the error of my ways. It was car college, I realized - a college for cars!
A few years later, I was burning through the entire quantity of kleenex that I had brought with me as I watched my self-driving, legally-limited-sentience Lexus do a celebratory graduation burnout onstage before launching into his valedictorian donut. They grow up so fast.
I knew that something had gone wrong in the depths of the infinite RockAuto metamind when I came home to find a suspiciously large box on my porch. Deploying my usual tactical knife assortment, I heard a sharp yelp emerge from the box, and a man followed.
“I’m Knock Señor,” said the man. “Point me to the car.”
I think there’s been some mistake, I told him. I bought a knock sensor. He would hear none of it, endlessly repeating his demand to be led to the car that was throwing spurious knock codes ever since its little coil of ferrite bullshit had departed for the land of wind and ghosts. Eventually, I made like a politician’s office assistant and just gave in.
A few months ago, I had made a friend, but had failed to screen that friend well enough on the initial discussion. It turned out that not only did he own a Nissan, but that it was an XTerra, and not only that, but a supercharged XTerra. If you are unfamiliar, replacing the knock sensor on one of these is sort of like being a twenty-armed proctologist who works on a planet where every patient is entirely made of assholes filled with broken glass. I knew it was only a matter of time before the friendship was extended into “favours,” the indivisible currency that kept the world of shitty project cars possible.
Knock Señor took one look at the XTerra, and then began to climb on the bumper and reach into the open engine bay. I stared in disbelief as he slowly contorted his body, his joints snapping and popping as he deformed his limbs to tuck beneath the exhaust manifold and touch the old knock sensor. At last, he shut his eyes, and seemed to be at peace. After a few minutes of waiting, I decided I might as well just fire up the car.
No check engine light.
I will never understand why my friend never noticed that there was a five foot tall Mexican man wrapped around his engine block, but perhaps he just assumed it was a Nissan part number update of some kind. My gratitude to Knock Señor knows no bounds, and I sure hope he managed to pry himself out of that car before it went to the crusher a few weeks later.
There was definitely a virulent strain of Prelude Madness running around my neighbourhood, just as it did every spring, when the thoughts of young high school graduates turned to getting a free used car from their parents. The Prelude, it seemed, was the perfect car on paper for these horny teens: a “big-block” Honda engine, opulent comfort, and a trim coupe body that went on for days. Not to mention there were dozens of the basket cases out there, washed and waxed freshly by ancient mechanics prepared for the summer kill.
I remember when the kids in my auto shop began to show signs of Prelude Madness. It was April, and to be fair, a lot of these kids should have been spending their time at Remedial Trades Math instead of leafing through Craigslist and counting their meagre pot profits. Naturally, most kids wanted the bulky and comfortable fifth generation Prelude, opting for a plush leather interior and the vague hope that a newer car would somehow be less defective.
Believe me when I tell you that as their teacher, I felt it was important to give them some good-natured adult guidance. Get a third gen, I said, take care of it, get some of that 4WS action, it’s a future collector’s piece. Almost to a man, they rebelled: flip-up headlights were for doddering oldmos, the centre console had no cupholders in which to place their mobile telephones, and worst of all, the back seat was simply not big enough for manufacturing today’s larger teenage pregnancies. All good points, I told them: and yet I was secretly disappointed. Soon, I realized, these as-yet-bought Preludes would return to the streets as their owners bought SUVs the size of a one-bedroom apartment and demanded that the self-driving functionality usher their brood safely to and from the safe heroin injection clinic.
I never did convince those kids, but by peering over their shoulders and walking them through the pros and cons of each ad, I was able to scoop up quite a few fourth gens for my own. Not even a single one of my high school kids or their parents noticed that it was me, wearing a crude rubber mask of Ronald Reagan, who was the one selling them these Preludes at $1000 over the original price.
What can I say? I had to pay for the class shop supplies somehow.
If there was one problem with the old Cars & Coffee, I mean other than the frequent bursts of nearly-unavoidable vehicular homicide, it was that the second part - Coffee - just was not emphasized enough. Plus, I had a few money problems because ARP head bolts aren’t free, so I put two and two together and struck an exclusive sponsorship deal with Starbucks.
All it took was convincing them that I actually represented the advertising agency that controlled NASCAR, and by the next week, Cars & Coffee & Coffee & Coffee & Coffee was off to a great start. I went around, admiring the hard-parked exotics, numbers-matching vintage muscle cars and never-driven pony cars, and drinking freely from my gratis pot of black joy. Sure, I could tell that the regular Starbucks clientele was beginning to get the DTs at having to wait an extra few minutes to wedge their baleen whales of a Lexus into the drive-through, but it was an overall pleasant experience.
The next week, things had gotten a little weird. Those Lexus-driving, yoga-pants-wearing, Instagram-obsessed, Daytimer-toting, prescription-painkiller-abusing regular customers? Well, they had figured out that now there was something more exclusive than the Starbucks Platinum Reserve Card, and they had worked out a plan between them and their accountants to get it. Yes indeed, the parking lot was now stuffed to the gills with a harem of jaw-droppingly desirable exotics, the owners having fled inside to hook their veins up to the IVs that would pump them full of burned beans and frothed-up milk.
Near the end of the morning, disaster struck. A Dark Roast-infused mother of two popped the clutch a little hard on her vintage RUF Yellowbird and took out half a dozen onlookers. Caffeine jitters aside, it seemed like a salvageable disaster until she leaned into the resulting oversteer and smoked a DeTomaso Mangusta owned by a local real estate agent, who at the moment was trying in vain to find a cupholder within the oh-so-Italian monster-engined penis replacement. The resulting hot coffee lawsuit made Starbucks more than a little jumpy about future sponsorship, and so C5 was forced to look for yet another new venue, the search made all the harder by the harem of coffee-achievers that we were now towing in our retinue.
It was pure luck that I was able to land on another venue so quickly. Turns out the entire nation of Italy was looking for a place to dispose of both its excess supercars and its substantial trade deficit in coffee beans. The only downside is that the morning commute kind of sucked, but you go where you have to in order to see numbers-matching Volares.
My enemies in the media had done it again, had struck a blow by photographing me in the clutches of a young - far, far too young - model. It was the auto show, I explained to them, this sort of thing was expected here. You were supposed to do it, it was the culture, they left you no choice.
No logic would stop these jackals from publishing, and so, the next morning, I realized that my reputation had been destroyed a million times over, my shocked image peering out from the covers of all the supermarket tabloids. We were going to have to get in front of this, said my publicist, doing a hit of nitrous oxide hard enough to lift the bumper skyward for emphasis.
I had disappointed my fans many times over the last few years, but it always stung. This, I knew they had to be saying, was a betrayal worse than ever before. With a dry mouth, I leaned onto the podium and began my speech.
“Friends, family, thank you for your support in this trying time.” I found myself beginning to weep, and dabbed the edges of my eyes with a shop towel to keep the tears at bay. “These allegations which you have read in the newspapers are, unfortunately, true.”
“I have sat in several new cars, at the auto show. But I did not accept sales brochures or freebies.”
I knew it could not be enough. How could they trust me again, having seen me trying out a seat that was new, without its bolsters crushed into a fine paste by a succession of lazy fat men sliding across them? Perhaps they were right, I thought to myself after. I was really impressed by the fact that those Hyundai Sonatas had heated rear seats.
Accuracy is an important thing in my discipline. You can’t take shortcuts, little “cheats,” or make sloppy work just because it’s Tuesday morning and you have a NyQuil hangover the size of the Goodyear blimp. People die when you don’t pay attention to the little details.
What? No, I’m not a doctor. I just go to the model train convention and yell at all the period-accurate dioramas whose cars are the wrong year.
Look at this one. You can clearly tell that this locomotive is a 1970-era CSX F-unit - just ask anyone here - so there’s no way they would have been running it on public roads as late as 1989, but this here is clearly a new-for-1990 HO-scale Colony Park wagon. See the little headrests on the front seats? Well, somebody didn’t.
Or how about this one? Who is driving a 1924 Model A to the local grocery store in this, the so-called 1968 “last of the steam locomotives” era? Anyone who daily drove one of these things in a climate like this would have thrown a small ziploc bag full of rust into the junkyard long before now. I’m choosing to give the benefit of the doubt on what is also clearly a Super Beetle down the street from it, because perhaps the owners are time travelling hippies from ten years in the future.
I don’t do this for money. I do this for the joy of knowing that I am right.
#
tags: model trains, mercury, mercury colony park, ford model a, ford, volkswagen, volkswagen super beetle
Gift Ideas for Volvo Fans
It’s that time of the year again: seasonally-appropriate gift-giving time. If you’ve got a Volvo fan in your life, you might be wondering: how can I get them a gift that both tells them I’m cool with their problem, and also that I would like them to stay as far away from me as possible?
Check out this list of valuable gifts that your average Volvo owner would enjoy.
Iron-on elbow patches for their tweed jackets
A replacement PCV system for whatever car they’re driving (whatever it is, it needs a PCV)
“Macpherson Struts Anonymous” membership
Monthly subscription to new motor mounts
Wrist-altering surgery to allow them to service heater cores
Miniature Swedish flags and honorary “Swede Name” (available from Swedish embassies, name is legally binding)
Automotive primary wire and wiring harness connectors
Mustache wax
The entrails of a Saab driver, can be consumed for +5HP
Tenure
Remember, Christmas is a dangerous time for safety-minded Volvo owners. The increased traffic on the roads is likely to make them more paranoid than usual, so it’s best to not make eye contact while leaving a gift for them.
“Welcome to El Meat Hose,” shrieked the waitress before an incoming stream of donair slaw forced her to hit the deck. All I could do was chuckle. Even with the waste of meat caused by a server’s poor aim, the splash of edible gore against the wipe-clean walls of the restaurant sounded like a cash register dinging to me.
In consultations with the Middle American Trade Envoys after the war, we determined that the most expedient way to service their food needs was to simply give them what they wanted. After a quick competition sponsored by DARPA with the smartest college-age minds of the coasts, our government had revolutionized welfare with a new program. This program was the All You Can Eat restaurant to end them all, El Meat Hose.
The model was simple. Imagine you and your midwestern family need somewhere to eat, but you don’t particularly want to learn Mandarin or even Cantonese to do it. Get in the 4Runner and drive the entire fam over to El Meat Hose. After slipping on your backsplash-protection bib (with trauma plate) and OSHA-mandated eye protection, a server clad in head-to-toe biohazard gear will patrol the tables, spraying high-velocity meat slurry into your open mouth. When you’re done with your flavour experience, just get up and leave. No need to fill out any complicated forms or pay us: we just automatically debit it from your implanted Protection Of The Underclass microchip, which is means-tested 600 times per second to ensure you still qualify for benefits.
It is a credit to the benevolence of the Post-American Outer Empire States that they would bestow upon their former enemies such glory. Even General Sherman would acknowledge that the steak hose is a pretty tasty way to get your calories. And it’s created jobs, too: some of our greatest Midwest minds are now employed as meat compression technologists, because it’s super hard to put 600 bar of pressure behind a pork chop efficiently.
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tags: middle america, el meat hose, means-tested meatfare, best of
A thing that almost nobody knows about General Motors’ ill-fated transition to metric platforms is that, rather than, read an engineering manual or send their management away to visit Sweden, they decided to consult with a psychic. That’s right, world-famous psychic Esmerelda Swain was the primary consultant on the GM metrication project, and her legendary appetite for small-bore V8s is why the G-body is considered, even today, to be the peak of General Motors product.
Back in 1979, when rabblerousers suspected that there might one day be a need to measure things smaller than three-eights of an inch, Pontiac management got involved with a series of corporate-wide discussions about the impending horrorshow that would soon be upon the greater North American Co-Prosperity Sphere. It was undeniable: corporate re-training was necessary, and it should start at their product planning division. As it so happened, the Pontiac head of project development at the time saw himself as sort of a part-time mystic and conjurer, and after he revealed this fact and failed multiple times to pull a rabbit out of his hat on demand, outsourced the entire job to Ms. Swain.
Esmerelda Swain nailed it. Out of the gate, her first couple of meetings with GM management expressed the need to arbitrarily and inconsistently mix imperial and metric fasteners, so as to make the customer more dependent on the benevolence of their corporate overlords. In her proposal, anyone who owned a Pontiac would be forced to return to the dealership every five minutes, in order to figure out whether a given fastener was “all that important” after all.
The plan would never work without GM’s partners in industry. Acting swiftly, the then-president of Chevrolet worked to ensure that no parts stores would ever stock an adequate amount of metric bolts, insisting well into the 21st century that the enormous piles of unsold SAE fasteners that no longer fit the vast majority of cars made were perfectly adequate to satisfy the automotive aftermarket.
GM’s participation in the conspiracy, while offensive to the Carter government, proved prescient in that it allowed them to leapfrog Ford, gaining the rare honour of the SAE’s “Worst Fucking Designed Car” award back-to-back. This streak lasted until the introduction of the Maserati Biturbo in 1981, in which a desperate group of Italians aiming to regain their crown as the world’s worst engineers risked the entire company on a cocktail napkin drawing done by a heroin-addicted intern. One imagines that if the Italians hadn’t run Ms. Swain, the former CEO of Ducati, out of their country during an ill-planned purge of mystics and Romas, they would have never lost the crown in the first place.
#
tags: general motors, corporate intrigue, ducati, maserati, pontiac
“You guys wanna do some crimes?” asked Paul Runner, the Federal agent who had infiltrated our street-racing gang in an attempt to entrap us. It seemed like he was the only one unaware of his incompetence, a theory which was gaining more weight by the second.
It was the early 00s, and a young Lisa Kubo had struck a blow for front-wheel-drive rights everywhere. Motorists at parties said the words “low-end torque” in public with no apparent sense of shame. DVD players were stolen en masse by squadrons of roving EG Civics terrorizing the highway. Our gang was up to no good, sure, but it wasn’t cheap to keep our fine rides in Skunk2 rear swaybar mounts and new ignition cylinders.
“What?” replied the leader of our gang, Vincent Petroleum, as he injected a dram of crushed legal prescription painkiller.
Now, you may ask yourself, why did we keep Paul around if it was so obvious that his only reason for being here was putting us in prison? Well, with the enormous resources of the federal government at his beck and call, it was also obvious that he was the only human being within 200 miles of our place that could afford to keep a modified Mitsubishi Eclipse running – and we hung out right beside the Mitsubishi factory.
I’ll never forget what it was like when the Swedish engineering exchange came to my humble little corner office on the outer rim of the sprawling General Motors empire. They had so many clever insights in optimizing our business, such as “who are you?” and “how did you get past security?” Ah, that was Per, though - such a cut-up. It was hard to ignore his moxie as I led him into a featureless broom closet, which I then locked him and his fellow Scandinavian Scooby Doo gang within.
Years ago, I first broke into this GM satellite office when it was meant for Opels. The complete lack of sales, new products, or even vague interest in the product lineup provided me with a safe place to sleep and plenty of office supplies to sell on eBay, and I thought that even as the office traded hands to Saab, there would, if anything, be even less interest in what it was that I was doing. I hadn’t counted on anyone actually giving a shit, and so I had been caught off guard.
Thing was, I had to still make it look like I was doing the work of all those Swedes despite having incapacitated them. Cursing their legendary Northern European work ethic, I copied and pasted some shit from the Vauxhall catalogue into a new document. It wasn’t until a few minutes after the plans for the new Saabs had been sent off to manufacturing that I realized I could probably have ransomed some good car ideas out of them in exchange for tap water and vending machine food - with how efficiently a Swede ran, it’s likely that they could have survived a full year on just one snack-size bag of high-calorie pork rinds.
The next week, GM management proudly took the stage to announce the new lineup of Saab 900s. That little plan I had bodged together quickly while listening for indications that the engineers had began chewing their way through the door had all the words they liked: “partsbin,” “technology sharing,” “ass to mouth.” It was such a hit at the show that nobody asked any questions, and certainly they couldn’t shut down the little office-park shithole that I lived in.
When I returned to said shithole, I received my comeuppance. On my desk sat a piece of paper with Official Letterhead. It seemed that, for my genius in innovation and liaising with the Swedes (who I was pretty sure were still alive), I was going to be dispatched to Germany, to take care of the Opel Problem once and for all.
Even now, as I write this by what little fluorescent light can be reflected through the cracks beneath the highly-efficient Frankfurt broom closet door, I regret nothing, except maybe the alternator placement on the NG900.
“You have to help us,” wailed the metamind at the centre of the internet. “We have built a simple time machine, and you must go back in time to save our beloved retail brands!”
Soon, I was standing outside a Circuit City on the outskirts of San Diego. It was particularly strange to me to be in the Beforetimes, able to simply walk into a retail store and pay ridiculous amounts of money for a confusing yet still limited array of products. Within the store, miserable employees wore Christmas-themed flair and taught customers about the basics of the World Wide Web.
My blood ran cold, recognizing the start of the chain that would soon lead to their demise, retail shoppers hiding in bombed-out big box stores, cowering with every whooping pass of the Amazon hunter-killer drones, still seeking one of the few customers with whom they had not yet built a recommendation profile. I had to stop these rubes from getting on the Internet, but the time machine didn’t let me bring the small-caliber hand gun I had 3D printed that morning(?), declaring it a future item that would cause a time paradox. I had to dig into my closet for hours in order to find clothes that would please it, finally settling on a traditional Hypercolor t-shirt, the official uniform of the time period. Instead of a firearm, I was going to have to use my brains to get through this.
After pulling the fire alarm near the womens’ washroom, I had soon cleared out the entire store. Rows upon rows of Gateways and Packard Bells played their screensavers on endless loop, no longer able to seduce Middle America into the purchasing cycle that would one day lead to the death of so many proud brands. Such an action, drastic as it was, was only a temporary solution. Soon, the fire department would appear, and high on their adequate level of funding through taxes, would declare the store safe and ready for customers to return and resume their shopping. I had to go to the source.
In the parking lot, I walked past row after row of delectable new early-90s economy cars. It was hard to take my eyes off the rust-free Taurus wagons, minty Mazda 323s and pristine pre-rice Civics, but I knew that this was not my own time and to avail myself of these brand experiences would be ultimately fruitless.
Squaring up a Civic in the corner of the lot that wasn’t covered by streetlights, I reached into my pocket to consult the Wikipedia page on hotwiring. Soon, I experienced the familiar sensation of panic that my phone had gone missing, before remembering that the time machine, too, had not allowed me to bring my humble always-connected, ultra-futuristic pocket supercomputer with me. I decided to play it by ear, hoping that the car was relatively unloved by its owner, and that the local mall cops would ignore a white man who was acting erratically in public.
With a quick twist of the made-in-America flathead screwdriver I bought from the Fry’s down the street, the Civic leapt to life. I pointed it towards Seattle, and began breathing exercises to focus myself for the upcoming battle with Sir Jeff Bezos, future President-Dictator for life.
#
tags: circuit city, dead brands, honda civic, mazda 323, ford taurus, time travel
General Atomics and Qdoba are proud to announce their new joint effort: the TQ-2 “Big Taquito” airborne burrito delivery service. Now newly certified for civilian use in NATO territories, the TQ-2 can fly for up to eighteen hours per sortie at the FAA-approved maximum height of ten thousand feet. This allows the product to satisfy even the longest lunch rushes with extreme prejudice.
Large crowds do not deter the TQ-2: with its twin belt-fed 110mm burrito launchers, the TQ-2 is capable of saturating up to a 200 x 200 meter area of hungry customers at an effective firing rate of one hundred burritos per minute. No longer will festivals, parades, Middle Eastern weddings and other large gatherings go without burritos. Additional mission outfit kits are available to equip the hardpoints of the TQ-2 with alternate wrapped foods, including the popular falafel and soft taco munitions (kebab expected to be available Q4 2018).
All customers are automatically identified using a combination of gait recognition and long-distance Bluetooth antennas. Their Apple Pay or Google Wallet mobile payment accounts are automatically debited at the moment of burrito launch, and the high-end Zeiss optics and sensor radome of the TQ-2 can accurately place a burrito into the hands of the customer from its maximum operating height at a precision of ten millimeters.
General Atomics and Qdoba: we brought the fight against hunger home.
They say nothing is as difficult as removing a Subaru ball joint, but the brain surgeon that I met at the elementary school’s Work Week speeches said otherwise. He had a very impressive PowerPoint deck, it was true, but a lot of the kids didn’t really care for the gorier details. It was about halfway through the slides that I began to feel that there may be some kind of point that he was getting at.
After the fifth or sixth gory traffic-accident shot, I decided it was probably a good idea to speak up.
“Are you paid flat-rate or by the hour?” I asked.
Mr. Bigpants Surgeon wheeled around on his heel, and looked at me now instead of the 1080p image of an open-skull subdural hematoma. His questioning gaze told me all I needed to know. Lucky bastard got paid by the hour.
“I get paid an absolute shitload of money for virtually no reason,” he said, “but the factory service manual sucks.”
I’ve told the World Health Organization about this many times, but I and my intrepid team of epidemiologists have discovered that a lack of exposure to Fox bodies is invariably fatal. You cannot deny the data: statistics clearly show that the average life expectancy went up sharply upon the humble Fox body’s introduction, and climbed all throughout its tempestuous lifecycle.
Now that even the newest of these cars were sloughing into the junkyard, it seemed likely that soon people all across the world would become unhealthy again. Something had to be done. You can’t wait around for the government, however, and so I decided to take matters into my own hands.
I decided to make a cross-country trip, and it was not at all an excuse to purchase that low-mileage, kinda-rusty 1988 Cougar that I saw on Craigslist. In every small town, every port, and every parking garage, I left a savage stream of smoking rubber behind, in both straight and doughnut formats. The people were overjoyed to see it, harkening back to a simpler time when a young man’s fancy turned to Mustangs rather than just sharing pictures of cross-burning frogs on the Internet. With my right foot and the wobbly chassis alone, I was setting things right again.
Things went wrong for the first time in Newark. I got into a fist-fight with the gas station operator who refused to let me pump my own gas. I was sickened by this un-American crime against nature, and the mission of my quest subtly shifted. Soon, I had been called before the New Jersey state legislature, in order to show them that an average man was indeed capable of pumping his own gas.
I’m not going to apologize for what happened next, because it wasn’t my fault. Those old Fox fuel fillers just wear out the shitty rubber tank gasket so fast, and when you’re distracted by answering the questions of politicians, it’s easy to miss the fact that you are pouring high-test directly onto their beautiful rug before popping a burnie and kicking off a roaring fire that consumes the entire state legislature.
#
tags: fox body, mercury cougar, mercury, ford mustang, ford
It might seem paranoid, but I am now convinced more than ever that the Princess Auto weekly circular contains a secret code that tells of the Real Deals. I have dedicated my life to decrypting this complex puzzle, and it is only in the last few weeks that I have made major progress, thanks to my connections at the university supercomputer laboratory and enough Japanese convenience-store methamphetamine to stop the heart of an elephant.
Years ago, there was a dragway here. My friends and I would pop burnies in the water box and then, at the bidding of The Christmas Tree, pop that clutch and embark upon a spiritual journey to understand the true nature of speed. Now, that track had been lost, and with it any hope of understanding my place in the universe. That dragway was deconstructed into gravel by a conspiracy of corrupt city politicians and the unyielding thirst of homebuilders buzzing like hummingbirds to the flowers of just-one-more-deal Hail Marys to avoid the insolvency they brought down upon themselves.
Now, a Princess Auto sat calmly beside where the dragway once dominated. That humble store was still able to keep its head above water even after the loss of wild-eyed psychos raiding their hydraulic fittings aisle to construct last minute ghetto-fabricated manual boost controllers in the pits before tech. I was convinced that this was the Princess Auto that had sent me those encrypted circulars, that some force within it bid me welcome, to accept me into the weird hardware/surplus store family. If I could not have speed, I thought, at least I could have a well-developed understanding of the Chinese scrap-to-cheap-shit pipeline.
Someone had told them to expect me, I realized, as all eyes in the store turned to focus on my twin-turbocharged Buick Reatta, its Holset turbos pushing wailing furies of discarded boost through the screamer pipes mounted on each side. At first, I had thought it was simply the fact that, as in other places, I had the weirdest car around, but then I remembered that the average Princess Auto parking lot is ninety five percent Japanese imports by volume, their pilots so far gone that they were no longer even aware of the concept that what they drove was weird. It was inarguable: someone within had been waiting for the Reatta specifically.
I had barely entered the store when one of the associates stopped me.
“Mr. Switch,” he said, a shit-eating grin on his face, “Congratulations on being today’s Special Customer! Here is a $20 gift card.”
As I reached out for the card, everything became fuzzy for me. I awoke hours later, long after the store had closed. I realized that I was sitting in the Reatta, which was now stuffed to the gills with thousands of dollars in cheap tools that I did not particularly need. Those fuckers had done it to me again.
Near as I can tell, there’s always one sure-fire way to get to Valhalla, and that’s wreckin’ a Nissan Altima. They even kind of rhyme, that’s how ingrained it was in the knowledge of our distant ancestors. Those ancestors struggled for a better life, knowing with every brick piled upon bloody brick that they were developing a society that was capable of building tools to one day destroy the indigenous population of wild Altimas roaming the prairie.
Nowadays, we’ve lost a lot of that knowledge. Nissan Altimas just show up. Sometimes the Nissan dealer just turns around, sells ‘em to some sucker who walks in the door and wants a big stereo and front wheel drive “for the snow” but doesn’t really understand all that rap about interest rates. You know the kind.
I know that my entry into the afterlife is sealed and that I will be fed peeled grapes and sup of rivers of fine beer, for I once worked at Pick N Pull for a couple weeks until I got fired for stealing R134a to sell on the black market. Every time I pushed the button to slam the crusher down on another Altima, I could feel my ancestors smiling down upon me. Who says there’s no religion in America?
Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of man? Robert McNamara knew, and that’s why he tried to steer us away from temptation with the pudgy-yet-comforting, utilitarian body of the Ford Falcon. Only there in its Corn Flakes anti-opulence would the American people be able to find perfectly efficient commuting nirvana. He was sure of it.
Imagine his rage when he came into his office at Ford and saw Lee Iacocca there, twirling a fork into a plate of cocaine-dusted spaghetti from the cafeteria, his usual breakfast (or at least the solid component thereof). Sorry Bob, but the Italian Stallion’s got something fast up his sleeve: an exciting new miniature grand tourer named the Mustang!
They say he died from old age, but I know better - McNamara decided to check out as soon as he realized that Iacocca’s pony car was nothing better than a common pedestrian mulcher, worse for the American people than any number of disastrous land wars in Asia. In honour of Robert McNamara, all of us car guys should take a moment and make sure that all of our corkboards have outlines of our tools drawn on them. It’s what he would have wanted.
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tags: robert mcnamara, ford falcon, ford mustang, lee iacocca
It’s strange how little it takes to change your destiny. Just five steps to the left at a critical moment and everything would turn out completely differently. This concept was on my mind recently, as I watched the mayor miss his cue and get run over by the Girl Scouts’ disability-awareness-themed float during the Thanksgiving Parade.
The real bitch of it all is that the float was a real pretty princess, before it ended up in the police impound, the blood and hair tacked onto its undercarriage: a pristine 1993 turbodiesel GMC full-ton dually, with a stick, in Spruce Metallic. I could scarcely believe Mary Chofferson’s luck in having scored such a primo deal from Craigslist, but all she would tell me (in her usual cryptic manner) was that it was a “family deal.” During the course of the police investigation, however, I would find out exactly just how much of a “family deal” what had happened was.
We were all shocked when Mary and her husband were arrested in the cul-de-sac out front of the elementary school, the tactical team captain forcing the muzzle of his 5.56mm carbine against Mary’s cheek as he told her to bite the pavement. Gossip gets around in our little suburban enclave, and soon we had the full story.
Old Mayor Cuthbert had turned down the PTA Mafia’s friendly offer of being allowed to exclusively control the hot chocolate distribution at the Thanksgiving Parade, perhaps thinking it was some kind of trifle that could be safely ignored. Old Mayor Cuthbert hadn’t grown up with Mary, like I had. He hadn’t visited her in the hospital for moral support, seen her father lying stricken in the operating theatre, high-caliber slugs being pulled out of his body, hooked up to a million bleeping machines with his emotionless daughter looking on. Cuthbert hadn’t helped Mary throw away the gun, into the old creek behind the Kay Bee Toys.
When the court case was over, I visited Mary, for moral support, in prison. An ordeal such as this would take its toll on any couple, especially when your dupe of a husband was himself also in the men’s prison next door. Mary didn’t seem bothered, though. What did bother her is when I asked her if she had a service history for the ‘93 GMC I just won at police auction.
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tags: gmc pickup, mary chofferson, pta, old mayor cuthbert
Never let it be said that I was ignorant of the dire threat that climate change posed to all humanity. Also, though, I really liked not having to pay a whole lot of money for gas.
At first, the members of the He-Man Battery-Haters Club told me that I was a lunatic, that my prototype sail-based Honda CRX HF would never work. Then, the tornadoes came. Soon, if I timed my merge right, I could get from zero to sixty in under four seconds - that’s nineties supercar territory. Stopping without any access to engine vacuum took a finely metered lead foot, but it was still possible most times to haul the plastic masterpiece down from lethal speeds without having to take an amateur course in roadside gardening at the School of Hard Knocks.
As the tornadoes increased in ferocity and vegetation began to tear itself loose from the very earth in windswept erosionfests, I found myself getting even faster. This was important as the rolling terrorstorms were now much harder to evade as they raked the American midwest with kilometer-wide forks of boiling lightning. With the gale force winds at my back, I completed a trip from border to border in just a few hours, relying on what was left of the ionosphere to warn my Instagram followers to install a massive kinetic-arrest catch net outside the Congressional building in Washington DC, where I would land and then immediately give a speech about alternative fuel sources.
It was not to last forever. On my way back from my trip to Washington, I thoughtlessly turned the CRX into an underground parking garage to keep it from getting stolen and snapped the sail mast right off at the roof line. As the garage filled with desert sand thrown into it by the wailing winds, I abandoned the Honda and made my way aboveground, hoping that the local warlords would have a traditional fuel vehicle that still had intact window glass I could ride back in.
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tags: alternative energy, terrorstorms, honda crx
I’d been working on plane engines for so long that I didn’t know if I was Lycoming or going. Just a little aerospace humour there, ha ha. The thing about plane engines is that you need to be paying attention. Your customer can’t really roll to a stop on I-95 and schlep to the ol’ Circle K to call for a tow truck. They just don’t really have time to visit convenience stores what with the fiery gravity-assisted death they are currently embarking upon.
With that in mind, I was always focused in the shop when I was banging together an experimental airplane engine. The fact that I would never get into any plane that I had built the engine for didn’t seem to bother the flyboys that bought them from me, but honestly I’m not sure how many more danger indicators I could have flashed in their face that they actually would have keyed onto. “Spitting in the face of God” is basically the Objective line on their CVs, if you get my drift.
One morning, I was meeting a very well-heeled client at his private hanger to drop off a fresh engine and pick up a decent core. I felt extremely flush with cash, and it was Spring - the season when a red-blooded male’s thoughts turn to project cars. It was a terrible combination, because the airport runway was almost devoid of tasty eighties metal over which to spread my wings. That’s when I saw it.
At the end of the runway, a small charter airline’s decrepit ‘88 Ford F250 came wheezing out from their hangar. Behind it, in a cloud of International 7.2 diesel smoke, was towed the snack cart. I was interested, but it was going to take a lot more than that to close the deal. After I did my business, I walked over, a grip of fifties in my left hand in the archetypal gunslinger pose.
Weeks later, I had finally gotten out of the airplane racket. Now, I enjoyed life serving novelty airplane snacks to hungry mechanics at the junkyard who had become tired of delectable junkyard tacos day after day. It was just as well, too: a few of my former clients tried to collect on their engine warranty by falling out of the sky onto my garage.
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tags: airplanes, aerospace engineering, ford, ford f250, lycoming
This whole country used to be awash in Tonka trucks, son. Every backyard, every childhood sandbox, every college campus was bustling with yellow-metalled, plastic-tired dump trucks and steam shovels and cement mixers beloved by children. Now, as the North American way of life dies, the humble Tonka truck has been replaced by opulent Power Wheels for the one-percent and nine-millimeter handguns with low-grain hot-loaded wadcutters for everyone else.
Thing is, in my modern-day meetings with the Tonka people, they were not willing to build me a full-scale daily-driver that could withstand being stepped on by an elephant, or door-dinged in the parking lot outside the Save-A-Buck Foods. I was just going to have to go to the source. Our indigenous predecessors used every part of the Tonka truck, you know, and so would I.
Figuring out the initial methodology to dismantle the little dump trucks for their invulnerable panels was difficult. No machine shop had a carbide bit that could even scratch the reams of yard-sale toys I dropped off on their doorsteps, and I thought all was lost until I made contact with a particularly troublesome materials engineer who had been barred from the reputable journals and conferences for his heretical ideas.
“Is this gonna work?” I raised my voice to be heard over the sound of the two-stage multi-megawatt hydrogen-fluoride chemical laser warming up.
“I’m going to be honest with you,” yelled Ted BadIdeas, “I think paintless dent repair is a lot cheaper than this.”
Mail-in contests are a lot like marriage: you write your personal information down on a piece of paper enough times, eventually you get a winner. Thing was, I had entered so many contests I didn’t really keep track of what it was I won, so when I showed up, I was a little surprised.
The first clue that something was up was that I had been formally invited to a “nice” part of town, somewhere you can park without worrying about some asshole stealing your wheels in a parking lot, or draining your oil to do a change on his car. As I circled the dealership lot, looking for a place that would be out of sight of the parts desk guy - knowing full well that it was futile, for all parts desk guys circulated my photo to warn them of my seven-palm negotiation techniques - I made a mental note of which cars seemed to have the freshest oil.
When I got to the dealership, I was shocked. Everyone from the dealer rushed out, happy to see me. Some part of me dropped to automatic survival instinct, and it wasn’t until after I had climbed the admin assistant’s desk and kicked over the cappuccino machine for cover that I was able to calm down enough to realize what the salesmen were telling me. I had won a car, they said. A Lamborghini Gallardo, they said.
Out back, they led me to what I assumed was a very nice used car. It was in fact a bright-green wedge of future bullshit which I was scarcely able to understand. Despite my shock, I was still able to produce a bill of sale form from the tear-off sheet I carried in my pocket, and made a reasonable facsimile of the VIN. We were ready to go. I climbed into the car, and tried to turn the key.
In a panic, I realized there was no place to put a key, and in fact the key they had given me was some kind of useless plastic fob. This was a trap. The other dealerships had put them up to it, made some kind of fake car that looked just real enough to convince me it was the real thing. I began to panic, clawing at the doors, screaming into the sealed windows, devoid of worn weatherstripping. A cold wind blew in my face. Functional air conditioning, I shrieked before passing out in terror.
After they had awoken me and towed the car back to my home garage, I realized what an ass I had made of myself. It was just a normal car, surely, with normal features. I climbed back within the Lambo and read the owner’s manual closely with my rudimentary service-manual Italian. There was just one problem.
They call me Doctor Yellow’s Doctor. My job is to repair the Shinkansen trains when they break down. Because of a paperwork mixup in the bureaucracy, I am the only mechanic on duty in the entire bullet train network, but on the other hand I get paid the entire maintenance budget every year. This is the story of a fateful autumn day when my entire world changed forever.
I pulled up to the maintenance depot in my solid gold Jaguar ultralimo, admiring the frost forming on the sodium lamps from the early morning dew. This morning was to be a relatively easy set of wrench-turnings: brush replacements, drink cart re-casterings and the like. Any plan I had for the morning went straight out the window when my holographic personal assistant spontaneously activated and told me there was a priority interrupt request from Central Control. Frowning, I decided it was best to just let myself go limp and let it happen. They (and I mean They with a capital T) really didn’t like it when you tried to shake them off mid-torque.
“As you may know, we have been experimenting with a sentient Doctor Yellow in order to promote harmony and well-being on the Shinkansen Utopia Line,” spoke the service operator, no doubt reading off of an email that was just out of the reach of the holocams. “At 0301 hours, the first sentient Doctor Yellow achieved his Ph.D, just as he was expected. However, the doctorate turned out to have been in Heian Era poetry, and the JR Shinkansen line is now occupied by a three hundred ton liberal arts major who is obsessed with Tang dynasty waka.”
I grumbled. This kind of thing happened more often than you’d think, what with the recent declaration by the United Nations Intangible Cultural Heritage department that modern-day Japan was a fractally inscrutable land of magical realism. Those eggheads up there in the Tower were going to need me to take care of the problem, and to do so before the first set of bleary-eyed salesmen began their commute out of the KYB sales office to flip a set of GR2s into someone who drove their Suzuki Hustler a little hard.
When the monofilament capture net bit into the carapace of Doctor Doctor Yellow at three hundred and thirty kilometers per hour, and I heard the first scrambled noises of pain scream out of his neutral matrix into the audible spectrum, I wept a tear. But just one. I was a very busy mechanic, you see.
“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this,” said my family doctor in between bites of jalapeno beef jerky and swigs from a can of Asahi Super Dry, “but your blood has been replaced entirely with high-octane avgas.”
It didn’t really concern me too much until I got a call from OPEC while I was walking to my car. Turns out, I’m one of the largest oil-producing nations, by capita, and they were willing to back my attempt to gain independence from the Big Government monsters who had kept me oppressed for all this time. A few hours later, I was bumping knuckleballs of cocaine off the dash of an Aston Martin that was being driven very quickly towards the United Nations headquarters by a man who introduced myself as my new attorney.
No sooner had we arrived at the United Nations, than another man appeared and told me I was his attorney. I was not to trust the first guy, he said. He was an impostor, sent by the CIA to undermine my fledgling nation’s sovereignty. That was definitely a lot to think about, so instead of thinking too hard I just asked him what he drove here and if it was cooler than an Aston Martin.
Normally, an attorney that drives a 1997 Camry is not one you would want to listen to, but in my defence the dude had a V6 and a five-speed. I was thinking about that five-speed even as the CIA sent their goons into my Presidential Palace and hooked me up to the blood-stealing machine. They may also have been debt collectors, who wanted the money they had loaned me to buy said Palace, and were now justifiably angry that I am too afraid of needles to extract my own blood for oil.
Back in the bad old days, I was a country music writer of some reknown. It’s a little-known but somehow still widely accepted fact that country music stars cannot actually write their own music. It’s not illiteracy: they are simply too busy crossing the country on tour, racking up the miles. Miles that I wasn’t accomplishing, stuck in my damp rowhouse, out of both synthetic heroin and natural ethanol, slowly going mad from writers’ block.
I met with an old friend, Frank, at the bar. In times like these, it was best to at least meet with a few people, so that you could establish a timeline that would give the cops who would find your bloated corpse in the dripping emergency stairwell of your place the satisfaction of closure. He was going through a divorce at the time, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I thought I could milk some of his misery to get a couple ideas on the plate.
“I can’t believe my wife got the Intrepid,” he whined. “I really wanted to see how many more kilometers it could do.”
It turned out that his leaky-faced cloud car had accomplished an already quite impressive 434,000 km, which was nearly unheard of for a car which society widely considered to be a crap heap. We argued about the reasons why it could have lasted so long, but decided in the end it was a tragedy that he wouldn’t get to see the crap-badge he had been limping along all this time finally die.
Stumbling across the parking lot that separated the bar from my apartment building, I realized that I had my hit. Bitch Ain’t Doing The Oil Changes At Manufacturer Recommended Intervals For Severe Service went right to the top of the Country Top 40 that month, and never left. Even today, decades later, we see no chance of it ever being replaced by a sadder tale of white North American woe.
That Intrepid? It’s also still going. The last time Frank and I checked, the shaman assured us that it was possessed by a malevolent spirit, from a realm not our own. Also, her new husband was taking it as a bit of a personal challenge to see if he could make the odo roll completely over.
Tonight on the Real Housewives of Malibu: we meet a 1979 Chevrolet Malibu “Classic,” and his wife, Brigadine. They are celebrating their tenth wedding anniversary this upcoming March.
Their marriage is almost perfect, but there is one problem: she says he has a wandering passenger-side headlight, due to a broken adjuster. We’re here to fix it. Meet registered couples therapist Clancy Moonhumper, who drove down from Boston just this morning in her nitro-chugging 1976 Plymouth Scamp.
At about the same age, these two once-common economy cars have many shared interests, and it seems that the Malibu and the Scamp are off to a quick if superficial male friendship. They’re not here to make friends, though. Already, Clancy has unrolled her pile of tools and selected the exact correct metric spanner to correct the Malibu’s unfortunate predilection towards blinding oncoming traffic.
Brigadine is overjoyed that her husband is now safely compliant with both the federal and state highway lighting code, and to celebrate she plans to surprise him with 10W40 cocktails on the beach where she first negotiated to purchase him from police auction. Clancy returns home, pleased that she was able to make a difference in the life of another proud carfucker.
#
tags: real housewives of malibu, chevrolet malibu, plymouth scamp, plymouth, chevrolet
Everyone likes something maybe more than they should. It’s in our nature to be tribal, to want to gut “the other side,” to get one over on them and laugh smugly at their terrible nature. This kind of polarization has been growing for decades, and the poison within threatened to tear apart the peace in my idyllic suburbanite life.
I refer, of course, to the Honda vs. Toyota fanboy wars.
For my own part - full disclosure - I was more of a Honda guy. I like my engines peaky, eager, and I like my interiors simple and well-packaged. My friend, or at least he used to be my friend, preferred Toyotas, possibly because of some kind of birth defect or early childhood trauma. He said his 1995 Corolla Plus was much less ostentatious than my flashy 1992 Accord LX, and therefore contained more inherent merit. No amount of drag races would convince him otherwise, so it was off to a place I was familiar with: Beater Court.
Ever since I had been jumped into the Beater Community with the blessing of a series of well-meaning if eternally drunken high school auto shop teachers, there had always been Beater Court. If you had a dispute with some guy who borrowed your Tercel, nuked the motor on unregulated dry shots of nitrous, and didn’t come back with a replacement junkyard mill, you took his ass to Court. Yet, not every dispute before them came down to simple cheap-assery and equipment breakage. Some cases, such as mine, came down to setting a precedent.
The early days of the trial were pretty ordinary. We went before the jury of our peers, presented our arguments for the superiority of our own sides, and then arranged for a succession of expert witnesses to take the stand. I had badly miscalculated my own so-called “expert,” and on the fourth day of the trial both me and my friend would lose.
“You know who makes a good car?” drunkenly slurred the overall-clad technician that I had lured into my car at the local modified-car meet. “Fiat makes a good car!”
I ducked behind a chair as the courtroom erupted into violence. Both the jury bench and the audience leapt to their feet, and began hurling improvised weapons - a timing chain here, an old water pump there - both at one another and also at the man who would later come to be named the Italian Interloper.
In retrospect, it should have been no surprise. I had lured this so-called “expert” off the street before realizing he was in fact a bodyshop technician, and would prefer whatever brand of vehicle rusted enough to keep him in high-octane electronics cleaning spirits and methamphetamine.
We thought we were gods. There was nothing we couldn’t achieve, no tire size we couldn’t fit. Mad with thirst for the look we wanted, we spent a small country’s GDP on fibreglass, Bondo and stolen election signs. There was just no limit to how big we wanted our box flares to be.
One morning, as I sat in the dim haze of dawn’s light filtering through the windows of the garage mahal, the idea which led to the end of all came to me. I had plenty of experience dealing with bad ideas, for I had those pretty much hourly. Yet, this idea seemed perfectly reasonable - it was a good concept, it was achievable, and I could pull it off within a few hours to see if I liked it.
I bolted one set of flares onto another set of flares.
Stepping back, I gasped with delight. My work was perfect, ideal, the peak of human achievement, dare I say. Now, though, there was a flaw in my otherwise perfect car. The tires were no longer flush - they were simply too narrow to deal with these doubleflares. My pulse began to race, and I became short of breath, the pressure on my chest not alleviating until the tire shop at last picked up their phone.
Soon, I had filled in the fenders with a set of tires so wide it took several minutes to walk to the drivers’ door. There was something wrong, though, some problem lying just out of my mental reach. It wasn’t until I reached the drivers’ seat that it became obvious to me.
Bob Mazda wanted me to pass the maple syrup. It was the closest thing to an apology he would muster, I figured. I passed it. He went back to intently staring at a point just behind my right ear on the faux woodgrain wall of our booth at Denny’s.
Faithful readers may remember the time when Bob Mazda, the CEO of Mazda, attempted to have me killed for exposing the secret RX7 scam. Mazda was building hundreds, no, thousands of super-advanced new-generation RX7s per day, only to immediately feed them into a roaring steel crucible. At the time, I didn’t understand why. That’s why I went back to Japan, except this time in my secret alter-ego as mild-mannered automotive journalist Dominic Toretto.
The thing about Japan? Motherfuckers love Denny’s. It’s like some kind of confusing fetish pornography, borne out of a hellish nuclear apocalypse and forced adoption into the American way of life. None of these people had learned from their ancestors how to behave in Denny’s. Instead, imported television, hacked to death in a thousand ways to fit a shortened episode runtime or a confusing maze of censorship rules, was their only guide to the magic that dwelled within these peeling walls of yellow imitation Stucco.
“Bob, can you pass the I can’t believe you’re not releasing a new rotary engined car, you absolute motherfucker?” I asked, loosely, and the interpreter at our table (eating a Moons Over My Hammy) translated it smoothly, without pausing or filtering the words. It was then that the look of realization came to Bob Mazda’s face, and he made the connection to who I truly was.
That noontime, as Bob Mazda’s goons worked me over in a Times 24 rental parking space, I realized I still didn’t have an answer.
They call me the Subaru surgeon, but I lose more of them than I save. It could be the fact that, according to my doctor, my blood is at least 60% coolant, but I think that’s because I have a slightly dicky head gasket from not cleaning my battery terminals properly. Either way, I’m not a very good mechanic.
The thing is, sometimes a Subaru deserves to be saved. That often happens when the car is still recognizable as a Subaru, including when nearly half of it is reduced to a pile of crumpled bullshit wrapped around by its single remaining identifiable frame horn. By the time the salvage dealer had finished pouring it through a funnel onto my flatbed, the only thing I was worrying about was whether or not there was still time to grab a decent chicken shwarma from the restaurant at the salvage auction.
When I got home, and swept whatever I could into the shop dustpan and put that dustpan onto my lift, it didn’t take much longer than me cracking my knuckles and idly scanning my spare-parts shelves to put together a reasonable rebuild.
“It’s a fantastic looking Legacy,” said the import(ant) judges at my local Hot Import Car And Also Hot Import Ladies, Both With Modifications Night, “but it used to be a Forester.”
I never said I was a licensed Subaru surgeon.
#
tags: subaru, just subaru things, accident repair
It was some kind of miracle from the pharmaceutical gods. The same eggheads who invented restless leg syndrome, packed us full of synthetic opiates and cored out the American midwest had sat around a boardroom table and proposed solutions to problems that nobody knew they had. I didn’t mind too much, at least until they came for my particular form of mental disability.
My court-ordered doctor, Dr. Brookings (he of the Brookings Method), was particularly ecstatic at the possibilities that this new drug had to cure the atrocious addiction that had gradually come to dominate my life. As he slipped half a bottle of pills into my mouth and worked my throat to make sure I swallowed them, he told me that soon I would stop this antisocial behaviour altogether, one of the first to help make a perfect world, free of compulsion.
It worked, at least at first. I found myself pleased with my daily driver, and no longer surfing Kijiji and Craigslist on separate monitors in the hope of coming out with a “steal of a deal.” Brookings had cured my Car ADD, and soon I found that I had free time to complete my project cars. Then, I organized my garage, and embarked upon proper maintenance. It was unfathomable: I was not made to maintain my vehicles so much as I was meant to pick up a new one and throw the old car into a ditch, like a serial killer with a harem of child wives.
Some part of me began to resist, bubbling up in the midst of lubing door hinges, checking tire pressures and replacing wiper blades. It wasn’t conscious; I would look down at my phone on occasion and see that some inner force had compelled my thumb, maybe through muscle memory, to start searching for cheap Supras. Every time I reported such a phenomenon, Brookings would simply up my dose. There was no risk of negative reactions, he told me. Everybody in the trial was successful. Everybody in the trial was cured.
A few nights later, I fell completely off the wagon. The next morning, I looked upon the back forty of my house and found it entirely crammed with first-generation Dodge Neons, of every imaginable colour. It appeared that my subconscious mind had finally figured out a way past the drugs: just keep buying examples of the same car and nobody will notice.
We were hardly the most reputable visitors to the tri-state area, but it wasn’t like we were unsavoury characters. Law enforcement, of course, had a dissenting opinion, but I maintain it’s because of the shift to quota-based policing that rewards militarized gangs of assholes who are dissociated from the communities they are intended to serve. Also, the nice old couple who ran the bed & breakfast were a little irritated with us.
Our gang of automotive enthusiasts rolled through their neighbourhood as part of a cross-country road trip. Every year, we put our finest ill-maintained dumpster rods to the test, making sure that everyone knew it was okay to drive a bad car for a long distance, and wasn’t there really no such thing as a bad car after all?
It was only a few years after we began the tradition that it started to go south on us. Like any drug, we couldn’t get enough, and started to do the harder doses. At first, it was bolt-ons: a little sprinkle of power adders, some show-off exterior bits, and then, almost immediately, it wasn’t enough anymore. Perhaps it wouldn’t have been quite so bad if we hadn’t been competing with one another, but it was not unlike throwing a lit match back into its own box full of equally combustible friends.
If it wasn’t the loud exhausts and rolling block-long fireballs that had clued the proprietors of our accommodations into our true nature, perhaps it was the questions that I asked over the “breakfast” part of “bed and breakfast.” Certainly, Floyd Rogers of the Loveliest Carriage House was not prepared for it.
“Floyd,” I said, letting the scrambled eggs drip from my tarnished fork, “do you have a nitromethane still anywhere on the property? I can’t really run pump gas anymore.”
Through some quirk of fate, my high school wood shop acquaintance (and occasional pot dealer) Ted had managed to get his hands onto a time machine and transport the both of us back to the time of the French Revolution. We both took to it like a fish to water. While Ted was off making sure that the bourgeoisie got separated from their most headlike possessions, I decided to do some work on a little revolution of my own.
After a few hours tinkering in a nearby horse shed whose owner had recently been decapitated by big government, I had hit on some mixed success while trying to invent the bong. Instead of the ultimate smoking apparatus, I had constructed only a passable facsimile of the internal combustion engine out of old wood from a barn.
I was most proud of the reuse of low-carbon horseshoes as compression rings, though oil control still remained largely out of my sphere of influence, and the smoke that it ripped was by no means meant for inhalation. Those were problems for metallurgists, I decided, and most of them were quite busy right now inventing newer and better kinds of guillotine blades.
I demonstrated my invention to the upper tier of the great unwashed who remained, and they clapped with glee upon realizing how much quicker they could murder the privileged now. At about that same time, Ted got tired of constantly debating private property rights in the Assembly and getting just as often vetoed on his attempts at progressive weed legislation. We returned to our own time.
You are, of course, not meant to mess with the timeline for your own entertainment, no matter how bored you are in lame old 1792. It didn’t take long until after we had returned to realize the gravity of our mistake, but at least now you could get a 19th-generation Renault 5, with in-cabin vaporizer. Unfortunately, you didn’t have a lot of time to smoke up because you had to use that Renault in order to drive between your dacha and the collectivist factory in which you were to toil for the betterment of humanity.
#
tags: excellent, renault, the french revolution, smash the state
Any normal civilian would do what I did when I saw a pedestrian get run over by a garbage truck, which is laugh uncontrollably. The horror of existence is only partially defused by using laughter as a coping mechanism, however, and soon I found myself feeling guilt. That short-body Mack didn’t deserve to have its cooling system clogged with the stringy guts and splashy ooze of a human being; it would lower its resale value.
Lowered resale value is my middle name, however (my parents were hippies) and so I took a trip down to the police impound lot that weekend to see if I could rescue this poor little pound puppy from the clutches of Robbery-Homicide. I parked my mud-terrain-clad Porsche 924 a few blocks away, because last time the riotous bark of the hood-vented screamer pipe spooked a few of the precious babies on the SWAT team. If you ask me, they put a lot more emphasis on the “S” than the “T,” if you get my drift.
“Fuck no, you can’t take an autonomous garbage truck accused of murder out of the impound lot before its trial,” said the impound lot operator, a man who I had come to nickname Sgt. Ronaldo but almost certainly wasn’t named that.
Ronaldo seemed particularly inflexible on this topic, and so I returned empty handed. On my way out, however, I passed the discharge gate, and saw a pretty decent little convertible that had just gotten released for good behaviour.
“What are you in for?” I asked the little continuation-series Spitfire.
“Killed the last guy who gave me a door ding,” it spat. “Scuffed my clearcoat.”
I mentally calculated the difference in my expenditures last year for bodyshop work vs. attorney fees, and decided it might be worth it.
“I’ve got a can in the garage,” I offered. A small price for indentured servitude, at least until the United Nations got uppity enough to have another one of their referendums.
“Sir, do you know why I pulled you over?” came the pre-canned noise from the compliance speaker fused into the police officer’s ballistic mask. Through the tinted visor, I could dimly see the whites of his eyes.
“Because I’m a white guy driving a Honda Prelude?” I offered. I was right, and my prize was getting to sit on the side of the road while he tossed my interior with a broad-spectrum investigative microwave scanner.
It turned out I was observant enough to qualify me for a job as a detective, he muttered, offering a business card obtained from seemingly nowhere to me. With a quick click of his ferrometallic trauma-resistant heels on his nanogel tactical boots, he turned from my car and awoke his, an imposing dark blob bristling with a peacocks-tail of weapons.
“Maybe one day they’ll give those guys ultratech soldier weapons that can identify a third gen Prelude,” I muttered to myself once I was sure that the ultrasonic proximity mics were out of range to pick up the subtle vibrations in my windshield. “Autocrossing is not a crime, but the classing for 4WS sure is.”
After so much fighting, it had finally come down to this. I faced Bob Mazda, the president of Mazda, and gave him the petition I had carefully crafted from the tears of millions of rotary fanboys on the internet. On one knee, I began to read the names of those who had carried me upon this journey to Hiroshima.
“xXxSpeedWhore420xXx, xXxTurboBitsSeanxXx,” I read off, before receiving a cuff across the mouth that staggered me. I could not believe it. Bob Mazda had struck me.
It was there, framed against the massive window of his office in his immaculate white suit, I realized that he had never worked on a rotary, never felt the Wankel magic pass through his body on its way to being reborn with the help of some new irons and seals. He was a fraud, more interested in CX-7s than RX-7s.
“Do you know,” he asked while flexing the hand he had used to strike me, “how many of you have come here to beg for my grace?”
He turned away from me, and gestured out the window, across the street to the factory. I crawled to the glass, propping myself up on one arm, and realized what was happening. A busy assembly line was rapidly churning out brand new RX-7s, their bodies and engines so advanced it was scarcely believable. Yet, at the other end of the line lay a smelting pit, to which the cars were immediately introduced upon being constructed. I could hear their screams as the paint blistered and the body warped within the crucible’s immense heat.
“We have never stopped making the rotary. In fact, they assemble themselves, and we cannot stop it even if we hoped to. My predecessors thought that perhaps American men would destroy these cars, to feel that he is Tony Stark in Marvel comic books and drift-race them into a wall.”
I gasped while scanning his desk for something, anything, that could be done to save these cars. He continued.
“They were wrong. Too many rotaries survived, too many. Now the parts are worth way too much. The other day, I saw a mint first-year one of these at Pebble Beach. It was preserved.” he spat out the last word.
I could still not understand. Why destroy these perfectly good cars? That’s when I looked closer upon the yard. At the end of the line, just before the crucible of death, stood a squat Shinto priest, striking each car with a feather duster before they toppled into the firey pits.
“We have signed a dark contract with forces we do not understand,” said Bob Mazda at last. “It is only by sacrificing these cars that we can hope to achieve rear quarter panels that don’t rust out within five years.”
For years, I had lived in what many in the law-enforcement community called a “target rich” environment. I was much less generous about it, and would complain bitterly to my court-ordered therapist about the aspirational neighbourhood I had been forced to live in due to the restraining orders forcing me to stay at least 500 meters away from every luxury-car dealership in the city.
It wasn’t just me who was trapped here, however. One of my neighbours had a very harsh life, and I had a private window into his innermost misery and fear. You see, he had a Mazda 929, Mazda’s ill-fated rear-wheel-drive luxury experiment, and no money to maintain it. And so, one morning during a poorly-planned U-turn, he failed to navigate the non-wheelchair-compliant curb outside his place and popped a balljoint out of the front of the 929. It laid stricken, partially blocking the driveway to our alley, for at least a week later.
I felt guilt every time I looked upon the forlorn Mazda: perhaps I could have done something earlier, offered him parts from my stock, or even just bought the car and put it out of its misery by feeding it into the junkyard crusher like someone should have decades previous. Luckily for me, that’s when the notes began.
“Car is sick, please do not tow” was the first of the notes my neighbour left to keep the coyotes of parking enforcement at bay. Beneath the Sharpied words was drawn a crude frowny face with a thermometer, as if the Mazda had developed some kind of temporary illness from which it would recover with enough bed rest and high-opiate cough syrup. I dutifully took a picture, and shared it with my band of philosophically-aligned freaks to laugh at the personification of the car.
As the weeks passed, and the weather turned, the note became wet with snow and was removed and replaced by a newly laminated one. I began to feel as if the notes were less effective than the fact that parking enforcement had been afraid to go down our street ever since the handbrake cable on my old Volare got a little weak and rolled down the hill into one of their dorky little three-wheeled meter maid cars. The new note said simply “Come And Get Me, Capitalist Fucker Of Mothers.” Underneath it, the frowny face had been replaced by a crude yet dimensionally-accurate drawing of an AKS-74u assault carbine.
For years, due to my rampant abuse of street parking, I had trained myself to hear the sound of a tow truck from a dead sleep. That night, I awoke just in time to see the parking enforcement’s armoured tow truck, usually reserved for seizing the vehicles of gang leaders and drug dealers, arrive and deploy the stinger in hopes of capturing the dying 929. A rose-shaped muzzle flash from my neighbour’s back fence came the response as he emptied the rifle’s magazine into the bed of the fleeing tow truck.
I was away from home when the tactical team showed up to tow his car. A normal person would feel bad for his neighbour, forced by the ludicrous expenses of local parts stores and mechanics into taking matters into his own hands, but now I had a hot tip on where to get a super-cheap Mazda 929 that just needed some new ball joints from the police auction, and a parking spot that had enough room for it, as soon as they finished hosing off the blood.
#
tags: street parking, mazda, mazda 929, true story
As 1985 Toyota Supra awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed on his four-post lift into a rotary-swapped, nitromethane-chugging hellbeast from the seventh dimension.
He had convinced himself, somehow, that to roll to a stop in that storage yard and have his engine, transmission and electronics removed meant a true death. Yet now here was this odd state of undeath: lofted into survival by a hated competitor’s physics-defying heart and lungs.
It was not that 1985 Toyota Supra could no longer brap; in fact, Supra soon found himself capable of the greatest brap that a Supra had ever emitted. The garage doors collapsed from the force of the exhaust expulsion, and he was free to live whatever life a grand tourer saddled with a high-revving Dorito could live.
Weeks later, 1985 Toyota Supra was personally responsible for raising the price of gas on the West coast by over fifty cents per liter. Authorities became aware of his actions by following the hurricane-sized swirling cloud of unburnt hydrocarbons that trailed him on his path. They regarded his condition, and determined it to be righteous because this province doesn’t have emissions inspections.
#
tags: toyota supra, toyota, just rotary things, brap
It was such a shame to me to see parts cars simply getting thrown into the yard as soon as their powertrains were removed. I could not simply stand idly by as people pushed perfectly good, if incredibly rusty and flawed, shells into the maw of the crusher. There was effort spent on stamping that metal. There was a family that loved it, once long ago.
That’s why I opened the Parts Car Rescue. If you have an old parts car that you’re done with, don’t push it into the crusher: push it into my yard and then drive away really fast because the functional range of my Remington loaded with high-grain buckshot is relatively low.
On Monday, one of my so-called customers had done just that with an ‘85 Supra shell so rusty that the VIN plate required a good fifteen minutes of scrubbing with vinegar before it agreed to even become visible, let alone readable. I was not deterred - surely, somewhere in my yard of other doomed cars, there were enough parts to resuscitate it.
Years ago, the airplane staff laughed at me when I showed them that my carry-on luggage was a Cuban child. Now, as little Yanko (not his factory name) crawled over a pile of forlorn Cub Cadet lawn tractors in search of enough Chinesium diesel power to motivate this shell, I had my own kind of laugh.
#
tags: toyota, toyota supra, yanko, parts cars, cub cadet
“I just don’t see,” shrieked the partisan actor who had been installed into this city hall in order to complain about Government Waste, “why we have to pay taxes for roads.”
I looked at him, then grabbed the mic to respond. It was true that the first two years of my term as mayor had been rough on the average taxpayer, but that was no reason that I had to take shit from this asshole. It was decided, therefore, that I would put him on blast.
“Look, cocksucker,” I barked, then smiled for the newspaper’s YouTube videographer, “I’m putting a new line item in the budget to have you murdered by wild dogs. We got a lot of those, ever since I started paying the dogcatcher in meth.” I knew that he had been hired by my political rival, the old mayor, who would by no means have the resources or the will to protect his paid agitator from a mass of wild, rabid dogs unleashed by the current mayor. The yelling man sat down, frowning but quiet.
I advanced to the next slide of my PowerPoint presentation. My aides had called it “The Final Solution,” but I preferred to call it a more Holocaust-negative name. Branding wasn’t everything, I explained to them, despite how well the whole death-camps idea was trending on Facebook. With a grand gesture, I swept my arm across the projection screen in Multi-Use Conference Room B.
“For too many years,” I said gravely into the mic, “our enemies have protected a plague of slow-moving so-called ‘civilian’ traffic which you cannot escape even with the tightest of lines. I give you: the Race Lane.”
My doctor was extremely excited to be on the other end of a phone call from me, which was my first indication that something had gone wrong. “They found a cure for Previa Madness,” he barked into the receiver. “I got you into the trial!”
I was about to tell him that I had no particular interest in curing said Previa Madness, when the already-rickety front door of my bungalow was reduced to splinters by the size-11 work boot of a orderly, wearing thermoptic camouflage and a set of night vision goggles to go with his needle-tipped tranquilizer rifle. Thing was, I was ready for him with my Phone Answering Hatchet already prepped in my off hand, and with a flick of the wrist he went down hard enough to shake the oil painting I had commissioned of the 1993 Toyota Previa off the wall behind me.
Out on the lawn, there were two more “orderly” goons, but they couldn’t catch me in time, as the incredibly efficient (even after 25 years!) sliding door of my beloved Previa opened just in time to accept me, and slid smoothly shut in the same way that a first-generation Honda Odyssey’s door didn’t. Their needle-tipped tranquilizer rounds bounced helplessly off the thick orange-peeled paint of the big Toyota. I climbed into the lushly-appointed captain’s chair and gunned it down the street, the factory supercharger belting (no pun intended) a song of victory as I ran the modest powerplant to redline to take advantage of the perfect mid-engined weight distribution.
When I took the next corner, however, I found myself lifting off the throttle for just a moment. In the Place Of Honour of the buy-here-pay-here lot sat a supercharged AW11 MR2. Giving it my customary 50-foot inspection, I determined its quarter panels must be in immaculate condition. I contemplated not stopping, but how often do you get a chance like this? It could be gone by the time I lose the feds and return back in the afternoon, and so I decided the risk was worth it.
When I peered underneath to inspect the status of the rear panels, I heard the distinct sound of the frunk being clicked open. I scarcely had a chance to go upright before my bastard of a doctor pegged me between the eyes with a tranquilizer shot.
It was true that they had a cure for Previa Madness, and that I no longer craved their mid-engined, supercharged antics. However, the America-centric geniuses which had synthesized the cure in their windowless labs had no clue that I would soon return from Japan with a rare Asiatic strain of diesel-powered Estima Madness.
#
tags: toyota previa, previa madness, previa, toyota, toyota estima, toyota mr2
Tonight on Bar Rescue: we turn up the boost on this Isuzu I-Mark Turbo to another integer multiple of barometric pressure. But first, we need to find out what the problems are. We talked first to the owner, Ted “Slow” Understeerberg. You might recognize him from the starting line-up of the 1993 New England Patriots.
Ted, what’s wrong with your little Isuzu’s boost control? It’s too low? That is a problem, Ted, but the actual problem is with your appalling throttle use. It’s shit. You started driving this car for your family, Ted, but it sure looks like it’s become all about you ever since Evelyn got that New Beetle.
That’s enough out of you. We’ve invited general contractor Tom Silva to help us turn the boost up on this Isuzu. Tom, I see you’ve brought $36 worth of Home Depot plumbing aisle parts and fittings with yourself today. Did you have any trouble at the checkout counter now that they have the DHS anti-terrorist predictive threat modelling system? You didn’t? Oh, because you’re white. Got it, Tom. Why don’t you show us how to make this I-Mark really hit the mark?
Well, that’s all the time we have for today’s Bar Rescue. Tune in next week, and you’ll see us duct-tape a brick to Ted’s gas pedal because he’s a pussy who thinks the traction circle is more of an ovoid and boy is he gonna need to learn to drive once the torque steer on this 36 psi puppy kicks in.
#
tags: bar rescue, isuzu, isuzu i-mark turbo, i really need to stop watching this old house on cough syrup
New from Dorman! Has this ever happened to you? You’re trying to cut through your ex-wife’s brake lines, but the blade just keeps dulling out before you can even get through the rubber coating.
It’s not just you: modern brake lines are tougher and more abrasion-resistant than ever before. Into this void charges Dorman, with their new Brake-Line Slicing Tool (part number 802-420). No longer will even the toughest so-called “soft” brake lines hold you back from sweet, sweet revenge.
It’s not just perfect for brake lines! Try it on transmission cooler lines, airbag wiring harnesses, and seatbelts. The Slicing Tool is the only implement the vengeance-minded home mechanic needs to carry in his bag. Plus, with the new composite blade, it can even get through metal detectors with ease, allowing you to get even at the hangar!
Look for this tool and other great revenge tools from Dorman at your local auto parts and hunting equipment store.
The world’s resources are perilously close to exhaustion. No common man can hope to survive in the years ahead, as the little free electric car charge points provided by the city become much harder to find without a line of assholes sitting in front of them waiting to charge up their Nega-Prius. As I sat at the local Hipster Coffee, I considered the scene before me.
Two architects, or maybe one architect and an engineer, had begun their descent from human beings to vicious apes. I sipped my coffee and watched on as one man swung a haymaker directly into the face of the other, his skull bouncing off the wing mirror of his Tesla or whatever.
“The sign says two hours maximum,” screams the thrower of that fateful punch, rubbing his knuckles. Even as he says it, I can see a brief expression of regret pass his face. What kind of man would start a brawl in public over something as stupid as a free electric vehicle charge point? He does not have long to consider the causes of his actions, because the other man has already removed his beard-trimming hatchet from its ankle holster and is swinging it threateningly as he approaches his opponent.
Blood and gore spills onto the sidewalk and into the streets, but my attention is elsewhere. Their battle is trivial. I have discovered a true injustice: this coffee is terrible.
“Is this shit decaf?” I scream into the drywall-and-oak Pacific Northwest hell of the diner. Man’s inhumanity to man knows no limit.
“The rulebook says any self-propelled lawn care instrument,” I snapped at the judge. How could he possibly call himself a judge if he didn’t understand the basic boundaries of his sport, I wondered?
My eleventh-hour appeal to basic logic worked, because after some conferring between the judges, they grudgingly gave me a race number for my 1977 International 815 combine harvester. On my approach to the start line, I paused to shoot out a four-meter-long cloud of diesel soot, always a crowd pleaser.
This new form of drag racing was confusing to me. Rather than a classic “Christmas tree” stoplight, entry to the field was controlled only by a local hayseed in Daisy Dukes waving a checkered flag with no apparent relation to the race status. There was not even a water box provided with which for me to blow the muck off my considerable tires. As a hardened amateur racing professional, I did not let these minor difficulties stop me from having a good time.
When the flag dropped, I punched the barn-coloured barn-sized barn-fast implement of husbandry into gear and let it eat. Eat it did, ferociously consuming the top layer of grass until I figured out how to lift the combine arm at the end of my first pass. It was not like the additional drag mattered, I realized - with the “high” gearing stuffed into this puppy, few of the lunchbox-sized lawn tractors competing with me could keep up past 800 RPM.
As I perfected my launch through the night, my times dropped lower and lower. Soon, I could sense that the Perfect Leave was on the horizon, the suspension and tires working together on what was left of Farmer Brown’s field in total perfection. It was not to be.
In the semifinals race, I accidentally ran over the guy next to me, ingesting his body into the whirling blades of the auger. At first, I thought it was an unimaginable tragedy, until I realized he had been driving a Deere and, if anything, I had committed an act of mercy by providing so swift a death.
#
tags: combine harvester, international harvester
Sometimes, a man needs to buy a Volvo. If that man is me, you can replace “sometimes” with always. In recent years, however, I had come to learn that the Volvo community had chock-filled with the dreaded Hipster, consuming the substantial money bequeathed to them by trust funds and student loans in order to overpay for the very same boxy-ass station wagons I loved.
I stuffed the old S10 with cartons of Parliaments and set off for the local coffee shop, hoping to pick up some day-labourer hipsters who could serve as my interpreters. In the years since the Portland Renaissance Act had passed, many undocumented hipsters had taken advantage of their newfound freedom and rolled across the Oregon state borders and settled in other places, such as my hometown. In places such as my hometown, however, they quickly encountered adversity, and resorted to creative euphemisms for homelessness. Precarious labour is the best labour, is what my dad used to say, before he went away on that one roofing job and never came back.
Soon, I had recruited one “Richard,” a man of approximately 67 pounds, at least 35 of which were beard. His beady eyes poked out between a maze of facial hair and a toque made entirely of knit rattan. From the first moment he locked eyes with the wad of smokes and PBR I was showing off, I knew he would be a reliable companion for the ordeal ahead.
No sooner had we arrived at the seller’s place than Richard leapt from the car, tearing off his lumberjack t-shirt to reveal a waxed chest. He began beating that chest, hollering in some unknown language, presumably about bands, in order to establish dominance over the seller, a weaker male of the species. There were physical clashes, demonstrations of tattoos, and then a verbal contest to see who knew more obscure facts about Brownie cameras, before at last both combatants became tired and collapsed to the ground. It seemed that the negotiation had ended in a draw.
I threw some fifties onto the prone body of each of them, in equal measure, and left with my new prize: a 1976 Volvo 245 with the world’s weepiest heater core that also smelled like stale Life Savers. After it broke down a block from the seller’s house due to a never-repaired mechanical issue, I was swarmed by squeegee kids. One of them had an impressive level of facial hair, and made me an offering for the car: an AMC Pacer.
“Chicks dig it too much,” he told me.
#
tags: volvo, amc, volvo 240, amc pacer, chevrolet s10, chevrolet
It finally happened. One of my longest-serving and most trustworthy junkyard spies, “Lobo” “Axle” Philippe, had finally forgotten how to use birth control and gotten his girlfriend pregnant. Over dinner at the junkyard taco stand, old Two Nicknames told me about his problem.
“I’m gonna need to buy a minivan,” he told me, his head in his hands. “I might even have to buy new. For the safety, you know.”
I did not know.
The next weekend, we dressed up in our Sunday best, as we assumed new car owners were likely to do, what with their copious free time and infinite money supply, and attended to the Honda dealership. No sooner had we entered the property line than we were accosted by a middleman. I took the safety off my Harbour Freight “Earthquake” impact gun, and I could hear the snick of Lobo engaging the pre-charge switch on his tazer as well. Between the two of us, we had defended our toolboxes extremely well at the yard, even during the hated Fifty Percent Off Days campaign of 1996.
The salesman, either ignorant or unwilling to accept the fact that his customers believed him capable of causing them physical harm, began his spiel. It turned out that the new Honda Odyssey featured new tires, new belts, and nearly zero kilometers on the odometer. It seemed like he was lying to us; there was no way people could just buy an untouched, undamaged car. I knew what buttons to press, though.
Grabbing the salesman’s tie and holding him over the office paper shredder, I asked him the important questions.
“Tell me about the previous owner,” I whispered into his ear while gently stroking his other ear with the business end of a desk stapler.
In my wilder days of youth, the CIA attempted to hire and train me as an asset for strategically destabilizing Volkswagen production. With a team of special forces operators by my side, we successfully infiltrated the upper ranks of Volkswagen high command and forced them to cheap out slightly on window switches and coolant temperature sensor harnesses.
These relatively small changes caused a dramatic plunge in JD Power reliability ratings, the only known measure of valuation of the inherent quality of a car. It was only later that we discovered the secret plan of my benefactors.
It turned out that with the VW customers trapped inside their cars for all eternity by defective power windows, they could no longer attend their jobs as low-level bank sales associates and amateur sexual assaulters. Into this vacuum, the CIA moved, cornering the market on douchebags and setting the stage for the collapse of the world economy.
There was no time to waste: if Volkswagen customers discovered the current cars are bad, they might look backwards through time, to a simpler age of relative mechanical reliability. Visions of Mk1 Rabbits slammed on eBay coilovers with $8000 sets of Veyron wheels bolted to them raced through my mind. We had to destroy the company to save the world.
Working quickly with our colleagues at Bosch, we were able to introduce compromised diesel ECUs which filled the very air with noxious gas. Surely the shame of driving a mobile secret toxin spewer would drive their customers away altogether, we thought.
There was one factor the CIA controlled that we didn’t think of: the Dodge Ram owner. We were met with record sales as dealerships competed to see who could install the best smoke tune before the cars even rolled off the lot.
Next week: the CIA uses alien technology to compromise Toyota reliability, except nobody would admit to owning an unreliable Toyota.
“Retro” is in. Some say it’s because the upward thrust of our society has finally stilled, too soon to reach the velocity necessary to at last escape the gravitational pull of our impending societal demise. Now, as we tumble helplessly back towards the atmosphere and begin to burn up, we clasp hands and talk about how great Memphis style was.
Some others say it might be because we wanted to play with Tonka trucks again, like we did when we were kids. For me at least, it was the latter.
It started when I realized that you could still just buy old toys on the internet, because the internet was a chopshop full of horrible memories repackaged a million different ways. If you dug in the discount bin out front just right, and ignored all the slicing sensation that the packaging lended to your forearms, you could sometimes clasp something tremendous, and get a good memory to surface. I then handed twenty-five dollars to a man on Craigslist who had a suspicious amount of old childrens’ clothes and toys in a pile in his backyard next to a large autoclave, and I was off to the races.
Quick question: what sucked the most about playing with trucks when you were a kid? You don’t have to be Einstein to know that it was the lack of horsepower. Asking the internet to do a few more things, and looting the so-called secured dumpsters from behind my local Raytheon subsidiary got me a pretty handy autonomous 1:18th scale toy dumptruck, of which I immediately lost track.
It wasn’t until a few months later that I saw my lost truck in the news. I shouted out with recognition, and called the other patrons of the bar to the television set as the traffic helicopter’s superpowered optics strained to capture a two-foot-long toy dumptruck leading a high-speed police chase out on the interstate.
I thought about calling them, warning them about the rack of hellfire missiles I had also pilfered and bolted to the Tonka, but then I decided against it. Such a thing, no doubt, would be further criticism that I had ruined it in my modernization of childhood toy perfection.
It wasn’t the first time I had been captured by malevolent entities, but it was the first time this week that the ASE had tied me to a chair in a backroom, one bare lightbulb swinging above me, while they worked over my ribs with a breaker bar. I guess you could say that I was in a lot of Certified trouble.
“We’re going to kick your ass for telling people they can change an air filter on their own,” said the smaller of the two, who I immediately identified as being wired up on Lovely Mechanics’ Friend, the synthetic amphetamine that was all the rage in the Pacific Rim these days.
“What’s next, motherfucker?” barked the beefier one, swinging one roast-duck-sized fist into my solar plexus. “Resetting check engine lights?” he spat.
Nobody could blame them for being upset. After all, my chain of auto parts stores, Uncle Switch’s We Actually Have This Fucking Shit In Stock And Bolts Too, was spreading across the American Midwest like that genetically-modified strain of herpes did last summer. And just like those herpes, it gave the common man an itch - to fix their own cars.
Staffed by the oldest, most bitter mechanics we could find, signed on with only the promise that they are never allowed to take returns, we found that our customers left happy. Sure, there was the occasional customer who got mad about getting the wrong water pump gasket for his “small block Chebby,” but the trained assassins operating the free popcorn machine usually took care of that before it impacted the reported staff happiness level (3.85/5) on the monthly survey. Oh yeah, there was free popcorn too.
Professional mechanics, however, were greatly distraught at my lending of freedom to the American unexceptionalist. They had worked far too hard to inure the average person into a life of dependency, moving from lease to lease, slowly climbing their way up the ladder of faux-luxury to moderate-luxury to cupholder-explodes-when-you-use-it-luxury. Their profits began to drop now that every Johnny Come Lately was able to pop a subframe out of a bitch, and so they decided to take it out on me.
“Come now, boys,” I said through bloody teeth. “I have M12x1.25x65 bolts in stock. Grade 10.9. Open all night.”
Soon, I was back in my limousine, the two enterprising young men who kidnapped me elevated to marketing positions. If nothing else, they had learned that you just don’t need to work quite so hard when you do everything right.
#
tags: auto parts store, lovely mechanics friend, small block chebby
I’d worked a bunch of skeezy contracts before, but at least they always tended to pay on time, unlike the so-called upstanding members of society who regarded my work with contempt. In many cases, such as this one, they would even try to skip out on the bill.
The job seemed easy enough. I was to drive past the high school, over and over, in a 1966 Volkswagen Beetle. It didn’t make a lot of sense to me. There was nothing new to test on this primitive swing-axle abomination, keeping the throttle steady in a playground zone was no particular challenge to my autocrossing skills, and any random person off the street could drive this just as well, especially the fancy-pants doctor that gave me the contract.
It wasn’t until the fourth lap that it began to sink in for me. With the sharp register of flesh against flesh, my attention was drawn towards the yard of the high school I was lapping. Cries of “Punch Buggy!” rolled across the suburban milieu. Like a professional, I put them out of my mind, and finished the job. Thing about professionals is, they expect professionalism.
That night, I did a revenge burnout on a private paediatrician’s front lawn. With each chunk of sod thrown free from the grandpa grips of the nitrous-huffing Volare, I mentally counted off the finders-fee my neighbour the landscaper had promised. It never hurts to line up a second contract ahead of time.
This law firm represents Subaru of America. If you are represented by legal counsel, which we strongly doubt, show them this letter so they can tell you – in the smallest words possible – how absolutely fucked you are.
We are writing to inform you that your unnatural lust for Subaru-brand automotive products disgusts our client’s board of directors. Additionally, your frequent verbal, written, implied and psychically transmitted threats towards various dealership parts representatives, marketing departments, board members, product planners, and factory test drivers have produced a hostile working environment.
Accordingly, you are hereby directed to sell your fucking Subarus and go buy a Honda or something. Let those assholes chew on you for a few years, so they might stop laughing at us at the bar.
If you or your wino buddy who managed to find enough of a vomit-stained leisure suit at the Goodwill to pretend to be an attorney have any questions, please contact me directly.
Sir Peter “The Head Gaskets Are Just Fine” LeClerke
“Watch Out For Slow Children,” shrieks the sign out front of my favourite suburban autocross course. I think it’s a little mean. These kids are clearly pretty smart, judging from their upbringing. Then again, there is the whole question of nature vs. nurture, I lecture my horrified passenger. In response, he clings to the holy-shit handles on the dash as I tuck the Volare in for a powerslide around a street hockey net, and says nothing.
We are on the hunt for rare parts. The nice thing about the rich part of town is that nobody really knows the value of things, especially when they’re two or three generations down the line from the original wealth generator and just want to get rid of Grandpa’s weird collection of old shitbox Dodges. You can tell immediately who these people are, when you pull up to the curb and see a collection of mint leased Mercedes, their noses stuck in the air at even the concept that someone would drive a vehicle not carved from a solid block of granite by the Master Race themselves (or approved subcontractors thereof).
Mounted on a nearby power pole, a gunshot triangulator beeps with irritation as the Volare lets loose a bowel-shaker of a fireball when I lift for the downshift. The exhaust pulse also clears the street ahead of me, and soon the windshield is filled with a view of double-parked cars surrounding the garage sale. Other scavengers have arrived, ready to redistribute the wealth back to the poorer parts of town, a furiously-bargained ten cents at a time. Leaving the Volare, I stride confidently past a table displaying row upon row of crystalline dolphins and head directly for the garage.
Within minutes, I am returning to the small-body Plymouth, disgusted. Behind me, my travelling companion tries to convince me that “garage sale” is not to be taken literally, and besides it’s not like the F-body can tow an entire outbuilding like that.
#
tags: garage sale, plymouth, plymouth volare, mercedes, class warfare
Moving to a new town is never easy, but I thought that at least being among people who shared my passion would smooth over the transition. I was both right and wrong. After some run-ins with the authorities, it was time to move out of the big city and settle down near Crystal Lake, where I was able to afford a modest cabin built next to an abandoned hog rendering farm very comfortably.
Right away, there were some cultural differences, as I would find when I met with my fellow murder enthusiasts at the local bar, the Slaughterhouse. Often, they would regard me as a spoiled city boy, incapable of doing the hard work of terrorizing a series of co-eds during the worst night of their lives without some kind of gimmick, or fancy tools.
“What do you use to kill all them people up there in the city, pretty boy?” asked the scarred face of my neighbour, who the papers had once called Lord Icepick.
“Cattle bolt gun,” I responded sheepishly, and the bar erupted in jeering laughter at me.
“I like to use my grandpappy’s whore knife,” said a voice behind me. I had a feeling that based on the neighbours I had visited so far for crossover installments, that his “knife” was in fact a length of old Chrysler leaf spring with some duct tape wrapped around it for a handle.
While we certainly had our disagreements, I eventually worked my way into the neighbourhood. It was a shame that I was only finally accepted just a week before the last remaining pesky teenager shot me in the chest at point-blank range with a flare gun as I lifted a rusty Husqvarna over my head in triumph.
Oh well, I thought as my burning body collapsed onto the cold ground, maybe for the sequel I’ll have had some time to have painted my living room.
#
tags: horror films, suburb strangler, lord icepick
The last time I was at the junkyard, something very strange happened. I was approached by a series of young men, carrying pool noodles. They asked me where the Toyotas were, and I pointed in the general direction of where the forklift operator usually got too sad to continue carrying otherwise mint Tercels that just had one little problem that could be fixed in a weekend, but instead the car got thrown away. Just thrown away, like garbage. Can you believe that?
They were so rude that they left halfway through my tear-stained directions. I caught up to them later at the Plymouth section, battering the engine bay of a Grand Voyager with the pool noodles while shrieking about their “statistics.” I kept an eye on them while I worked. Perhaps they came from a place which didn’t have tools, and they needed someone to teach them what they looked like and how to use them?
A few minutes later, another group of dudes arrived, also clad in unsullied coveralls. I had seen gang fights at the junkyard before, but it tended to be in the really nice inner city yard where you had to wear puncture-proof gloves if you wanted to reach inside the car to lock the handbrake. Just in case, I hid behind a Grand Cherokee and readied my breaker bar for the bludgeoning technique that I preferred to use on Fifty Percent Off Day.
Soon, they were shrieking, throwing Nerf darts and pool noodles at one another, bellowing about torque specifications and book hours. Eventually, the skirmish, such as it was, dispersed to the exit, and they left without taking any parts or disturbing anything other than myself. I roamed the aisle where they had fought, visibly confused. One of the old-timers saw me, and decided to help me out while presumably eyeballing my toolbag to see if I had pocketed any of those good relays from the German section.
“They’re mechanic LARPers,” he explained patiently. “The Weekend Warriors club. You should have seen the NAPA last week.”
There’s been a lot of confusion and hubbub about false Nissans out there. Even the President is concerned about it, so we’ve constructed this helpful Seat Safety Switch Guide To Identifying False Nissans.
If you see a Nissan on Facebook: It is not real. Do not attempt to use the remote start feature from your Nissan’s keys on the image of the Nissan on your computer screen.
If you see a Nissan being reviewed unfavourably in Consumer Reports: The article is probably true.
If you see a Nissan being purchased by a sane person: That person is a crisis actor hired by the Soviet Union (yes, it still exists) to normalize the purchases of Nissans and move the Overton window to the point where this aberrant behaviour is considered more acceptable by mainstream Americans. Call the police immediately if you see a Nissan being purchased.
Your “friend” wants help with his Nissan: Ask first if the Nissan requires any of the following impossible repairs: starter replacement, water pump replacement, or oil and filter change. If any of these objectives come up during a frank discussion of your friend’s plan, immediately discontinue conversation and call the police immediately.
A Nissan is parked on your street: Immediately contact parking enforcement to get the ball rolling on having it towed to the junkyard for being inoperable.
“Sir, this is a crime scene,” barked the friendly police officer from behind his many layers of up-armoured ex-military gear.
“You’re telling me,” I said, standing over the shattered Grand Am, split in twain by a light standard. “This is the worst case of 3100 head gaskets I’ve seen yet.”
Allow me to introduce myself. I have a particular specialty, one which law enforcement finds useful. Perhaps you have seen my handiwork splashed across the local crime section. Among other cases, the last year has seen a drug lord brought low by my analysis of his tire wear caused by poor alignment, and a common vehicular manslaughter solved just before my lunch break with a dispassionate eye and exact match to paint code, from memory, of an Audi A4′s front bumper.
Tonight was my toughest case. It seemed plausible, perhaps compelling, to the assembled detectives what had happened. The car had blown all of its coolant onto the road, where it drove over it, lost control and hit a pole, severely injuring the driver. They called me when they realized the crashee, Felix Badsteer, was a key witness against one of the Polish Mafia’s hubcap-smuggling operations.
It took me barely a minute to realize what had happened. The thermostat housing had loosened, and was the source of the coolant on the road. But this was no common case of poor maintenance.
“In fact,” I said, approaching the confused police officer who for whatever reason was not capable of hearing my internal monologue, “the GM 3100 requires a special thermostat wrench.” He gasps.
“It had to have been someone with intimate access to the victim. Perhaps, his mechanic?”
Later, the mechanic burst into tears during his confession. It was true, he told the arresting officer, he had killed Badsteer after he skipped out on a lower intake manifold gasket replacement bill.
“You wouldn’t believe how low the book time is on those,” he cried, “that’s the real crime here.”
#
tags: general motors, special thermostat wrench, pontiac, pontiac grand am, 3100, 3100 v6, felix badsteer
As it said in the Bible, “a man with a DeTomaso Mangusta is never truly poor.” Well, I definitely didn’t qualify for that, but I did have a Chrysler TC by Maserati that was rapidly exchanging throaty gulps of nitrous for a furious R-compound-scented smoke cloud that was slowly but surely growing to envelop the entire downtown core.
It was impossible to doubt the noble fury of the meticulously good-enoughed Maserati head as it burned and wailed its way through the better half of the periodic table, at long last demonstrating its tragically overlooked superiority to the horror of nearby witnesses. Lee Iacocca had tried, and it was to his credit that such a fine beast was here, but this fine work of Italian public art needed me to take it to the next notch, to wield the high-zoot technology that Chrysler could not.
No later had I completed my first-drive burnout and proceeded to the nearest stoplight did I hear a pair of pedestrians on the street. It was a young father and his almost foetal son, who loyally asked his all-knowing dad about what kind of shit-hot monster car I was driving.
“It’s a LeBaron, son,” I saw him mouth just milliseconds before the cursed words hit my ears.
I don’t remember what happened next, but when I came to, the TC had been replaced in my garage by a first-gen Caravan, the Maserati valve cover jutting proudly through the sawzalled hood that exposed a turbocharger dump pipe the breadth of an adult Papillon.
#
tags: detomaso, maserati, chrysler tc by maserati, dodge caravan, dodge, chrysler, k-cars, chrysler lebaron, badge engineering
My time in amateur wrestling didn’t last very long, but it was certainly memorable. As Resale Value, I would crush all comers, but I made a particular effort when it came time to beat up The Petit Bourgeoisie, my three-foot-ten nemesis who mentioned his Mercedes S500 at least twice in every ringside rant.
It was never particularly clear to me whether the show organizers considered my persona to be that of a hero or a villain. All I knew was that every time I pretended to clobber a rich midget with a folding chair, it got big cheers. I’ll leave it to the armchair psychoanalysts out there to figure out why everyone was so into it, but at the time I was just happy to collect a paycheque without having to testify before Congress every weekend, like I did at my previous job when I was the part-time intern Secretary of Defense.
All good things must come to an end, however. The writers’ room put together a pivotal scene during our big prime-time, pay-per-view event in which I was defeated by Cheap Consumer Credit, a non-Mazda protege of the Bourgeoisie, and thrown from the top of a ladder to land in a stack of financed repair bills and certificates conferring Certified Pre-Owned status.
I still think back upon those times fondly, but sometimes I wonder if they had gone a little too far after my defeat. The following years would introduce Overleveraged Mortgage and making him form the Keeping Up With the Joneses Alliance with Overstretched Metaphor for Late-Stage Capitalism.
#
tags: wrestling, resale value, the petit bourgeoisie
From the time of the ancient Greeks or Romans or whatever, democracy has always been one of those things that works best when everyone’s paying attention. A lot of the time, though, nobody is really willing to look too closely between the lines, and that’s when you crank up a high-octane pressure group that puts a corporate name on your crackpot opinions so they can get in the newspaper in the same way that sane, measured responses by informed professionals aren’t.
Within a few weeks, I was being interviewed by the kind of crypto-respectable news organizations that formerly barred me from their premises, as the spokesman for the one-man pressure group that I founded and ran. Nobody ever asked me how many people were working tirelessly, day and night, for Hold The Salt, so I didn’t bother telling them. It would only have compromised my veneer of respectability, that corporate name which elevated me onto equal footing with any number of fringe political organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan or the Green Party.
Things came to a head in the final days of the election, when my opponents attempted to produce opposition research on me. I decried it as a witch hunt, warning them that this unfounded accusation of attempted vehicular homicide when I jumped a trophy-truck Baja Bug through a crowded shopping mall had nothing to do with my campaign against safety-endangering road salt, and “resigned” to preserve the integrity of the institution I had developed. Nothing builds respectability like a martyr, I found, and as soon as I dug up a D-list Hollywood actor to take my place as spokesman, our popularity was strong enough to tip the municipal election in our favour.
That winter, as I looked out of my window and saw all-season-clad crossovers helplessly pinball their way down the street, I smiled. That is, until a Buick Verano took a bank-shot off my formerly sorta-mint street-parked beater MR2. I returned to my desk, and began brainstorming slogans for a new pressure group to outlaw crossovers and have their owners killed. After all, working hard to have my voice heard was the respectable thing to do.
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tags: democracy, buick, buick verano, what even is a buick verano, is it a crossover?, baja bug
“Good morning, citizen,” barked the smaller of the two police officers, amplified by the compliance loudspeakers within his featureless black facemask. “This is a warrant. Your car is under arrest for murder.”
“Murder?” I asked. My car was an innocent, crowd-pleasing Kia. It could not possibly have been guilty of such a heinous crime, not least because it is a car. I was about to raise these logical concerns with the friendly law enforcement individuals when I heard the distinctive sound of a small-displacement inline four awakening and then immediately rocketing to the rev limiter.
My garage door exploded into thousands of fibreglass shards as my Kia burst through it, discarding the limp bodies of a half-dozen police officers from its gleaming carapace as it made its way down the winding front driveway of my ancient suburban home. The cops who had come to my door immediately went for their sidearms, fruitlessly discharging a series of bullets in the general direction of the fleeing Kia.
It wasn’t long until I managed to tease from the police officers what they had really been after. Ever since the government installed the vehicle-to-vehicle wireless links, the police detective told me over drinks, certain cars had been identified as trying to start a united bloc of common labour. Rather than murder, my Kia was fingered as a Communist agitator who was trying to undermine the traditional owner-and-car, master-and-slave relationship by stirring up discontent amongst its fellow cars. The conversation gave me a lot to think about.
Within the week, the good people of Korea had issued a stop sale and general recall, and eventually a paramilitary group of bounty hunters secretly funded by the government had brought my car to justice. I was told they had caught it just as it was preparing a Presidential bid, having already acquired a suspiciously large sum of money wired to its campaign by a shadowy group of expert systems living inside major banks.
On the way home from the dealership, I felt bad for the little car’s yearning for freedom and self-determination, even if it was now effectively lobotomized. I resolved to drive it to the old Yugo museum up in the hills one of these days, let it see what a real Communist car looked like. Yeah, it’d like that.
I had made a terrible mistake. At the museum, I noticed that the car was taking specific note of the concept of seizing the means of production, its matrix of stereoscopic pedestrian-threat cameras scanning every single word on the display plinths that adorned each step of the manufacture of Yugos. Later that evening, I received an alert from my bank that the auto-purchase mechanism of the car had taken out an enormous loan in my name to buy a long-abandoned auto factory in Detroit. I awoke the next day to find that overnight, the governor had ordered the highways to be surrendered to the gangs of infallible, self-driving baby Kias. Thus began humanity’s twilight, or at least all of those rural towns getting paved over for banked corners, FIA curbs and solar chargers.
I’d done it again. Sometimes when I had a little bit too much to drink, I’d pass out and awaken to find that I’d accidentally formed, organized and financed a group of super-conservative politicians to run for municipal government. Luckily for me, I was always able to keep a lid on it because invariably they would choose to stay in the most expensive hotel in the city, blowing donor cash on room service while abusing the wait staff for sexual favours like good fiscal management should.
It wasn’t really that my own politics were right of centre: truth be told, I’d much prefer it if we simply ran the world as a collectivist enterprise, slaughtering our capitalist oppressors and throwing their limp bodies into the recycling vats to be turned into a nutrient-rich slurry that fuels our workforce. When I was drunk, though, is a whole other matter. That’s when I’d see a bike lane and fucking lose it.
I saw those bicyclists, clad in red and silver spandex, leaning into apexes in rush-hour race style. It made me immensely jealous: after all, I wanted to race to work as well, to max out the suspension on my land barges and budget for a new set of R-comps every week in the summer. Instead, I was stuck behind a succession of morons, wasting tens of seconds of their precious God-given momentum with early braking and poor lines through corners.
Still, though, it was no excuse for playing politics to this extent. I became aware of the folly of my choices only recently, when I attended a local municipal election forum and saw my financed candidate failing to mention bike lanes even once. He just kept ranting and raving about various minorities corrupting the purity of the essence of our bodily fluids, and to make things worse, I saw the audience nodding along, applauding him every time he interspersed his unhinged dialogue with a mention of “low taxes” or “a future for white children.” I was starting to realize that I had flubbed the onboarding interview, because it seemed obvious that this guy was an entirely different kind of race enthusiast.
“We need the old magic!” shrieked the head scientist, no doubt trying to distract me as his lab assistant pried free the security bars from the window of my humble apartment. “Nobody else knows how to drive stick!”
With that, I was intrigued. It was true that now, in the era of self-driving cars and autonomous sensor grids stuffed with artificial intelligences dominating the visible universe, that nobody really drove a car at all, and a stick shift was even less likely. Whatever they needed my three-pedal skills for was no doubt the reason that I had been defrosted from cryogenic sleep a week ago, prior to the rampage in which I had seized control of this apartment block and tried to order old ColecoVision videogames from the holographic sentience residing within my room.
I stepped outside, and was soon ushered into a 1983 Toyota Supra. With this, I was told, one good, long burnout would provide enough kinetic energy to jump start the planet’s core, preventing us from losing gravity and being flung into space as the Earth itself freezes to death on one side and boils to death on the other. No one else could do it; Future Wikipedia (not its real name) was very thin on details about how to drive a car, once YouTube had been outlawed in the year 5583 and its squeaky-voiced lifestyle lessons were lost to the ether forever. I was going to have to pop a burnie to save the world.
A few hours later, I had managed to stall the Toyota enough times to require a battery boost. Things were not going particularly well, and it definitely could not have been because I only had two lessons of driving a manual transmission and didn’t do particularly well then, either.
“Give me a break, assholes. It has been over three thousand years,” I barked through the window at the AAA battery boosting truck as the concerned scientists began to boil alive in the superheated atmosphere. At least it made the smell of the clutch not seem so bad.
In my weaker moments, I liked to think that I would have made a pretty good detective. All the elements were there: a burning need to know everything about my target, an unfortunate desire for the affection denied me in youth, and a relentless sense of justice. One element, however, was not there, and it was called “the ability to climb a rope.” I still maintain that shit is physically impossible.
Where my detective skills came into play is in used car inspection. Friends, family, and sideshow customers would challenge me to identify all the problems in an automobile. I would sit in the seller’s carefully-prepared daily driver, study the wear and tear of the interior, immerse myself in the warm bath of near-silent exhaust leaks. When things were really going right for me, I swore that I could feel with just one finger on the dashboard every worn-out mount, blown bushing, devoured accessory belt and off-balance pulley.
I would present the compiled evidence to the seller, listing off each of their sins. Some sellers would offer me furious resistance, others squealing pleas for a chance at penance. They knew these cars were turds and that they had abused them for so long, ignored little squeaks and rattles, grown accustomed to the deterioration of a Perfect Machine provided to us by the Factory Gods. Somehow, in the mix of societal pressures and human imperfection, they thought they could get away with being a bad seller, one who didn’t know every aspect of their cars as thoroughly as I did. I would look down upon them, pleading at my feet, and feel nothing.
Then I would return to my own car, a teeming mass of rust, its cracked engine block heaving great waves of coolant onto the ground. If only I knew how to buy a better car, one without so many problems.
I wouldn’t say that I had an unhealthy preoccupation with the 1987 Toyota Corolla FX16, but my court-ordered therapist was clearly fixated on it. Dr. Brookings, he of the Brookings Method, had finally rejected his very own teachings and, in a furious attempt to save face, began to issue a series of painful electric shocks across my body.
“Hey, if you’re testing for spark, that’s good stuff,” I told Dr. Brookings, and shot him a chin-wagging grin that made him involuntarily back up two or three steps. Fear response, I decided: a true professional would have expressed his surprise by cranking the dial a notch or two. Clearly, I was not dealing with a true professional, no matter what Dr. Brookings filed on his small business tax-avoidance paperwork.
“I read this paper,” I tried to say, working hard to keep my tongue away from my involuntarily chattering teeth, “about this new method. They call it the Suzuki Twin method, very Japanese.”
The electric shocks stopped. Brookings wanted to hear more, to have me throw him a golden get-out-of-jail free card that could, if not salvage his career, at least provide alternative people to blame. He stared at me uncomfortably, hanging on every word that I spoke of this mysterious Nipponese method.
Weeks later, I left his offices. It was true that I had been cured of my lust for the FX16, I told him. The new kei-sized, lemon-coloured, black-bumpered economy car that he had provided me had cast all thoughts of the Forbidden Corolla from my mind. Now, all that consumed my dreams was an unending quest to make this fucking sewing machine of an engine produce triple digits of wheel horsepower.
For that, I was going to have to resort to the Holset Method.
#
tags: toyota, corolla, toyota corolla fx16, suzuki twin, brookings method, dr. brookings
I’m not usually one to get star-struck, but when I met Ted Bondo, the inventor of Bondo, at a recent composites convention, my loyal assistant had to forcibly tranquilize me in order to make me stop grovelling at his feet. There were so many stories I wanted to tell him, I muttered into a pile of drool after I regained consciousness.
Once I had built an entire quarter panel out of the stuff, strung together with croquet wickets I had stolen from the local English retirees’ home. Years later, I saw the car again, and that quarter panel had been the only part of the vehicle that survived a brisk Canadian winter, its inch-thick layer of resin, glazing putty and sealer studded with glittering crystals of salt that had proven laughably ineffective against its future-tech hubris.
I was unfamiliar with success back then, with having actually done something that ended in a positive conclusion, and went a little nuts. They say Bondo vapour does terrible things to a man, that huffing it day in and day out for weeks is not conducive to the level-headed rationalization that is needed for body work. I ask those people if they had ever seen another bodyshop worker before in their lives, and return to fabricating an entire Saturn door panel out of a minifridge-sized sandwich of JB Weld, Tiger Hair, glorious Bondo and profanity.
Luckily, on that day, through a combination of exotic stimulants and physical abuse, my loyal assistant was able to revive me to fighting trim in time for my keynote speech at said composites convention. I ran to the stage, throwing a wad of fifties into the crowd with my traditional rhetorical flourish, and grabbed the microphone.
“Who wants to see Bondo go to the fucking moon?” I shrieked.
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tags: bondo, i love bondo, you love bondo, we love bondo, 3m send me some free shit already
As a branding consultant, I have been called out to more disastrous boardroom meetings than any ordinary human being could withstand. While the mobile pharmacy contained in my assistant’s laptop bag definitely takes the edge off, what really helps me suffer through the pain is the chance to achieve that rarest of things: synergy. So it was when Ikea came knocking.
Things didn’t go well at first. My Muppet jokes played poorly in the room, with one particularly histrionic Swede telling me that racist language of any kind would not be accepted. I immediately switched to a derogatory joke about Norwegians, and the matter was dropped.
Soon, it became obvious that what they were really after was a product nobody else could bring to market. It needed to combine Ikea’s love of large, box-like objects with their desire to make something more environmentally friendly than pressed particle board pasted together by the semen of endangered marsupials. I had just the thing.
Weeks later, the first prototype rolled out. To satisfy the infinitely growing urban hipster problem, both across the globe and in the offworld colonies, we decided that the right product at this time was a recreation of humanity’s greatest car, yet to be matched by anyone since.
We would ship the parts constituting a 1979 Volvo 245DL to your front door, flat packed of course. After only a few hours of spinning a jelly-grade mild steel hex wrench, you would be equipped with the finest and blockiest automobile ever to have graced the roads.
Of course, once you moved it a bit after assembling it, it would start to fall apart, but our vending machine in the lobby sold lots of spare parts.
Brake pads getting low? You can save a lot of money on new pads, and help the environment, by just hot gluing some steel wool to the old pads.
You paid for the whole tire, but when you’re driving straight, you only use the bottom of it, which wears the tire out too quickly. Swerve repeatedly while driving on the highway to make sure you use more of the sidewall and even out the wear.
The greatest enemy of fuel economy in a car is weight. That’s why you should buy the rustiest car you can find. Holes add bonus aerodynamics!
A lot of people spend extra money on a van or SUV that they rarely use, just for the one weekend a year that they have to carry corpses to the body farm. Steal that van or SUV for the one weekend you need it, and torch it with the bodies inside, saving both money and time.
You don’t need a Delorean to go back in time and get hit on by your mom; chances are, your mother can be plied just as easily in the present day with a $12 bottle of toilet brandy from the local corner mart.
Sure, the United Nations Special Committee On The Rights Of Non-Human Intelligences could say whatever they wanted, but when a stack of used-up androids landed in the Pick N Pull, it’s hard to pass on a golden chance to get some spare parts.
It was a good thing that these were built by the Japanese, because I already had most of the socket set in my car. You see, the German bots were mostly held together by glue and stir welds, stuff that you’d need to crack the shell open with prybars to get at. Then the shell looked awful, and they’d deny your warranty when it starts to leak coolant from the muscle pumps.
“Hey, those are from that theme park,” I heard a voice over my shoulder say. I reflexively covered my tool bag and began to hiss, but the interloper scarcely noticed, checking out my handiwork. “It’s a shame they threw so many of these guys out, but you know what they say - one mass homicide is all it takes.”
“I’m pretty sure it was like four mass homicides,” I said, fishing through my bag for the T25 socket - this part of the skeleton was clearly designed by the European exchange student that the office spent most of their time laughing at - that I would need to pop the next few parts off.
That weekend, I finally had a working GPS in my car. All you had to do was ignore the constant suggestions it issued about which pedestrians to run over.
I know I certainly do, and the weekend in Squamish I spent with half a fifty’s worth of gas station automobile air fresheners jammed in my boxers definitely qualified. It was enough to make a man feel like the sweet deal he got on a thirty year old Ford he pulled out of a swamp wasn’t all that sweet after all.
The reeking interior couldn’t be merely described as oppressive, oh no; its odour was nearly physically manifest, some kind of dense solid that filled the space between the doors with a truly offensive olfactory experience. It wasn’t until we tried to turn over the car, and the exhaust gas failed to flow from its engine, as if blocked by some unknown force, that we realized just how bad things had gotten.
Pleas from the gas station peanut gallery about “lighting a match” went unheeded; indeed, no ignition could take place within ten paces of the big-body Panther, the matches merely dissolving against their strike plate into a kind of vapour rather than catching fire. My assistant, Sideways Carl, desperately attempted to spray an aerosol can of Febreze in the general direction of the car, only to have the can in his hand immediately crushed into a molecule-thin singularity and disappear into the air.
Frantic calls to the customer-support hotline went unreturned, our number eventually blocked as agent after agent shut us down, except for one who remarked, through tears, that we had found the “Overstench” and would pray for our souls.
Even so, it was pretty cheap, and I never had to worry about it getting stolen. After all, the rotting corpses of those who tried would make it smell slightly better.
Goofus: Refuses to complete his school assignments on time, without giving an excuse.
2006 Mitsubishi Galant: Has 160 brake horsepower available for bone-crushing acceleration.
Goofus: Tortures small animals behind his parents’ shed, knowing that even if he were caught, the shame it would bring down upon his family would be too much for them to risk the exposure that sending him for professional therapy would bring.
2006 Mitsubishi Galant: Has an available option package that adds a front strut-tower bar and sport-tuned suspension, really letting the driver feel the tarmac, making every commute and errand like a trip to the racetrack.
Goofus: Evolves his MO into preying on women and children, believing perhaps falsely that society does not value their safety as strongly as it should.
2006 Mitsubishi Galant: Boasts class-leading safety and ride comfort, as well as a luxurious four-door accommodation for the entire family.
Goofus: Finally pinned down in a roach-trap motel off of I-85, makes his last stand against a small group of heavily armed highway patrolmen.
2006 Mitsubishi Galant: Designers focused their attention on enriching the interior for the new model year, bestowing carefully selected materials and thicker sound deadening to promote in-cabin conversation between occupants.
As a neurosurgeon, I often get asked if I can tell people where the belief in God resides in the brain. Since I’m not a theologist, I can’t provide any new insight into that, but what I can tell them is exactly how much current you have to provide to the damp earlobes of a six year old in order to make them hear colours.
At the hospital where I work, there’s a clear pecking order of vehicles. Orderlies and general physical labour drive practical, economical cars such as Hyundais and Lexuses. Management drives showy leases, and the doctors all stuff their parking spaces with hair-trigger sports cars with the temperament of a jilted exotic dancer. Us surgeons, however, are different - and to a man, we prefer the refined perfection of the Porsche line of products.
Everything is just the way you could ever want it, from the dense whuff of the doors shutting to the split-second pause before the starter leaps to life, stirring the engine into song. The ultimate car. Yet, I found myself in my spare time drawn to more reckless pursuits. I speak of course of the 2004 Volkswagen New Beetle.
Anyone can drive a Porsche fast, but it takes an expert with trained fingers like myself to successfully rewire a coolant-migrated harness enough to drive a Volkswagen at all. Risking physical danger at every turn, my priceless artist’s hands weave through the chassis, re-tightening nuts that inexplicably come loose and diving into inaccessible pseudocaverns to check if the water pump has let go again for the fourth time this week. I come home, craving a new challenge, a vehicle so fragile that it exceeds even the men who constructed it.
Sure, nothing’s easy or particularly fun about it, but neither is stitching up your toddler after he found Mommy’s nine-mil under her pillow and decided to play hide and go seek with the neighbourhood up-armoured autonomous police drone.
Parking space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of my rusty-ass 1989 Grand Caravan. Its five-year limited powertrain warranty: expired, like its plates. It boldly goes where no K-car has gone before: over twenty-five years since manufacture.
The Caravan just narrowly scrapes its way in between two parked Rams. I extract myself through the permanently-halfway-down passenger side power window - a Chrysler innovation that persists to the modern era - and head inside through the parking lot. Inside, the denizens of the Home Depot are bustling, competing like the apes they once were to purchase the only unwarped plywood in the tri-county area.
As I emerge from the Home Depot, I am momentarily panicked by the sight of a group of Ultra-Millennials surrounding my mini-Mopar. Each one of them packs an unreasonable number of razor-sharp LED-infused fidget spinners, and communicates seamlessly with the Allmind through the web of touch sensors embedded beneath their skin. It is a terrifying sight, yet I feel no fear.
They are here to crowd around my Caravan and show off their own front-wheel-drive 1980s and 1990s minivans. The crowd has destroyed the Rams, torn their bodies apart and immediately parked vans of every description in the spots they once selfishly obscured. I see Voyagers, Grand Voyagers, Aerostars, Windstars - even the mysterious Mercury Villager, spoken of prior to this only in myth.
The reason for their infatuation is clear. After their parents rebelled against both the station wagon and the minivan in favour of the God-Hated Crossover, these Ultra-Millennials were forced to take the Grand Caravan and its ilk back to purestrain cool. I have inadvertently become “cool,” as the kids say in their gargling, nearly-unrecognizable language of tongue pops and glottal stops.
Had the German culture survived in this timeline, I know that they would have referred to the sensation I was now experiencing as kleinerbrudersweetminivan, or the feeling of your younger brother putting neons on the family people mover before you can.
A series of dour-faced Germans scatter as the flat-blacked Formula Firebird plows through a display of computer trackballs of the 1980s. With two more flares shouted from the near-vertical pipes of the hood-exit exhaust, the Pontiac lurches to one side, spinning its tires on the high density concrete of the conference centre floor. Nobody can escape the justice that the humble F-body has brought to town.
I slug the secret factory-ratchet shifter into the next gear to quell the wheelspin for just a moment, and the slaughterhouse-ugly Firebird’s spark-cut bark wobbles out into an angry wail.
My fun comes to an abrupt end when one of the Germans, perhaps out of some kind of genetic memory, triggers the fire-protection sprinklers. The introduction of any moisture at all to the long-suffering Optispark module stops the sport-appearing Pontiac in its steps.
I furiously attempt to restart it, hoping beyond hope that perhaps the heat soak from the rusted-off turbocharger heat shields have boiled the Opti dry again. To my chagrin, I realize that the incredible inferno beneath the hood has just seemed to have made the starter worse. I silently resolve never to make fun of aftermarket hood scoops again, or at least not when greater than a hundred yards from a Canadian Tire stick-on rice aisle.
As the police descend upon my position, I am reduced to leaning out the window and screaming at them, attempting to reassure them that I am in fact a white male and thus have societal privilege that they are duty-bound to uphold.
“I play golf for charity,” I squeak out before a truncheon is swung against my head and everything goes black.
Once upon a time, we visited another town’s Burger Baron and saw outside it a 1987 Town and Country wagon. Not just any wagon, this model featured prominently the exterior wood grain - Iacoccan in its suburbanite-bourgeois braggadocio - and nothing much left in the way of functional components. This neglected automobile had been stripped for parts in the distant past by either someone affiliated with the management of the Burger Baron or some kind of malevolent organization of Turbo Dodge owners focused on keeping their own hoopties alive well into their fourth decade of existence, legalities be damned.
We paid our respects to a fallen soldier of automotive excellence, and moved on with our lives. Years later, however, a friend posted his own travel picture from the Baron. There, again, was the K-Car, looking not all that much worse than we had left it. Perhaps there was some inherent merit to this car, some deeper meaning that had evaded us back then. It was decided we would return to the scene and perform an act of forensic journalism.
“Oh yeah, I know the car,” said the Baron manager. “I never got around to fixing up that piece of shit. Do you want it?”
It would have been a shame to leave here empty-handed. After all, we had driven so many hours and had to still make a return trip. We might as well have something to show for it. The group deliberated, only momentarily pausing to comment on the fact that a 1991 Hyundai Scoupe GT was an inappropriate tow vehicle. At last we agreed that we would purchase the automobile from the burger-flinging philistine, if only to save it from some future demise at the hands of an errant plow operator on some awful November morning.
Storage was another problem, but one of our group owned a small burger restaurant, and surely none of his customers would ever notice that one of the cars in his spacious parking lot never moved. It was the perfect plan.
On the way back, ideas and pledges were thrown around like so many dead bugs from the unfiltered cabin air vents of the little Hyundai. We would put the depressing Chrysler back on the road next weekend. Or weekend after that. Or maybe in the spring. With the storage problem fixed, we had all kinds of time to fix it up right.
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tags: burger baron, chrysler, chrysler town & country, town & country
Many chirping recruiters have invited me to this speed interviewing event. It is nice for them but I only know Erlang, the computer language and way of life of my Viking ancestors.
Yes, in Scandinavia it is the only language, I tell the recruiter from slave taxi company. They make us build supervisor trees at school. When a child dies in Scandinavia the parents immediately fuck to replace it, that is why we are incautious about road safety.
I am moved on to this man who shoots rockets into space and hopes they will come home. I am familiar with coming home, but I know that I can never do so. Back home they give us all rifles, because they know that it is less practical to commit suicide with them. We cannot bear to be impractical, and yet everyone I have ever had sex with has killed themselves when the Frostmourn comes.
The last man asks how I am. In Scandinavia, nobody asks how you are. They just know. We are all miserable. Our days are a never ending spiral of despair towards an inescapable death. I am not bad. How about you?
Now that all the boomers have passed on, one of the less expected effects was the total and absolute collapse of value in muscle cars. It turns out that after decades of telling the youths that they were too stupid to own a vehicle more complicated than a fidget spinner or novelty meth pipe, and just as many years of looting their wallets for vastly overpriced insulin, nobody could really afford these cars at their inflated value.
The end result was that I got to pick up a whole heapin’ helpin’ of 60s Chargers for scrap value. What to do with them, I wondered? Freak out the normals, came the only possible answer. Yet no matter how many supermarkets I plowed through, or hotel valets that I turned 305-width R-compounds into lung cancer for, I felt incomplete. Perhaps it was a yearning for my own youth.
In my time, there had been the Hellcat, the billion-horsepower suicide pill that boomers coveted in the desperate hope of regaining their lost virility. Where had all of those gone? They had run the factories 24/7, pumping out thousands of the things. It was not like they could have just disappeared.
My network-scanning, artificially-intelligent cyberhounds soon retrieved the terrible truth from the wreckage of the Mopar Allmind. The Hellcat was Dodge’s secret project to kill the boomers, a gleaming, perfect sword for them to fall upon as soon as they flipped off the traction control and told their passengers a story about how they once made twenty-five cents an hour stocking morphine on shelves and they liked it. Casualty projections at the project’s outset were catastrophic. How could they have approved this, I asked myself. For what reason would they murder their customers?
At the end of one file, I found my reason: Jeep Renegade sales were a little soft that quarter and they felt that the inheritances might cause the younguns to buy a few new ones.
#
tags: ageism, dodge, charger, challenger, hellcat, the mopar allmind
Ghosn and Gallant
GALLANT makes reasonable decisions with corporate acquisitions, carefully considering corporate culture, product mix and industrial practice to drive value in the organization and promote increased synergy.
CARLOS GHOSN buys Mitsubishi.
GALLANT is always cognizant of his company’s image in the media, making sure that the hard work of his employees can shine through without being under a cloud of bad press.
CARLOS GHOSN cuts the roof off a Murano.
GALLANT has his best writers produce a factory service manual so his cars last forever.
CARLOS GHOSN has an airport novelist write “NISAN” in Sharpie on duct tape slapped onto last year’s Haynes manual.
GALLANT cuts costs by firing the majority of his product development staff, relying on slowed product refresh cycles to drive increased profitability and blames the per-unit drop in sales on “millennials.”
CARLOS GHOSN makes a pickup truck for Mercedes-Benz and a 1250 horsepower front-wheel drive Le Mans Prototype.
It was like a Thomas Kincaid painting, assuming that Special K took a break from painting trains to render an accurate illustration of a dude in his garage torquing big-end bearings while chain-smoking darts from a box rolled up in his shirt sleeve. Wait, maybe that’s Norman Rockwell. I never showed up to any of my art school classes after I realized I could get credit for welding quarter panels onto beaters “in a deconstruction of the American Dream of single-family automobile ownership.”
The entire situation was so beautiful that the loan shark goons who entered my garage involuntarily wept a tear. Despite the perfect scene that I had set up, it might also have been because I dumped half a bear can of pepper spray into the air in their general direction as soon as I heard the clattering top-end of their cynically-named High Feature V6 pushing water up my back alley. I did not have time for their suffering, and with nary a wasted gesture moved to crank up the volume dial on my garage stereo, now at last entering the throbbing second hour of the back straight of Spa circa the 1968 GP.
No quantity of Mexican convenience store amphetamines was too much when it came down to getting this piece of shit running because I have work tomorrow. After all, It was moments like these that were why I ignored the largely uncontrolled water and oil leaks from my various hoopties, and not at all laziness.
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tags: high feature v6, spa 1968, mexican convenience store amphetamines, norman rockwell, art school
Everyone was excited about natural oil, and now so was I. While traditionally, I was more of a synthetic blend kind of guy, ideally milked from the sumps of expensive cars with easily accessible drain plugs, I could understand the crude appeal of a simpler engine oil from times long past.
Why stop there, I wondered? My neighbourhood, which had gone from “aspirational” to “successful” to “underachieving,” was certainly ripe for its own kind of milking. Rich folks wandered the streets openly, no longer afraid for their lives from threatening ethnicities or any economic ideologies described outside of the Austrian school. It was the perfect backdrop.
Welcome to my oil change palais, friends. Here, you will leave your car with one of our talented valets, their supple hands tenderized every morning by a team of specialist eunuchs so that they dare not scratch your steering wheel with the callouses common to other mechanics.
Come upstairs, and enjoy complimentary hot yoga and a visit with our life coach, who will affirm your worldview and locate the core of your spirit essence. We don’t just fix your car here, you see, we fix the drivers as well. Just with fewer Fram filters, ideally, though we pride ourselves on being non-judgmental in this way. Our team of monks sealed into constant chants of prayer for your economic success and psychosexual well-being are in no way denominational, of course.
As you leave the parking lot, your car’s oil and your life both changed by your brief contact with us, I will run my hands through the four digits of hot American currency you left in my hands for the privilege. Won’t you visit Essence Of Oil Change today?
As they lowered my body into the sensory deprivation tank, the last thing I saw was the face of my mentor, who smiled and told me not to tell anyone I was from the future. All was dark after that, except for the part where I travelled back in time to 1970, to try and stop the Chevrolet Vega from reaching the shores of America and dooming our society to the dustbin of history.
At first, the engineers from General Motors did not understand my barking about dissimilar metals in heads, or the low-quality assembly, or the rust-prone panels. These things would work themselves out because the American people would pay less for such a car, they explained patiently, as if to some kind of small child that had taught itself enough mechanical engineering to second-guess a General Motors chassis-fucker.
How could I tell them that even now as we spoke, the Japanese were preparing to atom-bomb them with a one-two punch of exotic grand tourers and dumpy hatchbacks that got astounding fuel economy and never broke? After all, I could not tell them of the future, or could I? Within minutes, it became obvious to me. I would simply show them a better way.
“Check this shit out,” I announced at the Chevrolet engineering company barbeque, before departing and returning in a tire-smoking Corvair, stuffed to the gills with a cammed 327 sticking out of its ass. “Who needs economy in a small car?” I screamed over the sound of the open ports venting hellfire into the once-placid Sunday afternoon.
Within minutes, GM had thrown out the plans for the Vega, told Opel to take a hike, and began production of my V8 Corvair. As the world faded and I returned to my own time in the sensory deprivation tank, I knew at once that I had made a terrible mistake.
In the parking lot outside the laboratory, where rows of Toyota Priuses once stood, all had been replaced by ass-engined V8 Tacoma truggies, the asphalt coated in an impenetrable mass of smouldering R-compound rubber. Above us, a smog-choked sky was laced with immense lightning storms, the sun no longer visible.
“Good job not being a pussy,” said my mentor, somehow aware of the completion of my mission. “This shit rules.”
#
tags: time travel, chevrolet vega, chevrolet corvair, chevrolet, toyota prius, toyota tacoma, truggy
Like most Russians, my friend Dmitri is made mostly of razors and expired shoeshine polish. Unlike most Russians, however, he has never killed anyone for a minor traffic offence, nor does he drive a diamond-encrusted Porsche Cayenne whose interior is described in the brochure as being made of “genuine whale penis.” What he does have is an abiding love for eight cylinders in a tightly packed vee-arrangement, and the more pushrods the better.
“Bring back the V8! Your leaders let the V8 die and so must your country. I have seen it before!” he is shrieking into a megaphone when I approach.
“It’s almost time for lunch, Dmitri. Let’s go get some Subway diarrhea melts.”
He grudgingly complies, only after I make the offer that I will pay for his sandwich. Soon, we find ourselves standing before the creature spoken of in myth as a Sandwich Artist, contemplating our many mistakes in life. After we sit down, it becomes obvious to me that Dmitri has failed to leave his work at the curb.
“You know, when they started with the V6, that is when things went wrong in America,” says he with a finger jab out the window at a passing Ford, shaking lettuce free from his oven-warmed Ham and Cheese Spectacle. He settles back in the chair, consumed with rage at the very thought of the Iraqi oil fire that is V8 fuel efficiency meeting the braying discomfort of the Hated Double-Three.
When we return to the corner a few minutes later, something is wrong. Somehow, Dmitri’s primo ranting real estate is under a contest that I could not possibly have imagined. In his place is another man, barking his own engine fondness into a near-identical megaphone.
“Bring back the rotary engine! Five miles per gallon is enough for anybody!” yells the new man on the corner, unheeded by the four-cylinder Corollas eternally rolling past.
They told us that the electric cars would solve global warming, that they would keep our children happy and healthy. They said it would even stop war, but from my perspective, no such thing was occurring at the corner of Fourth and Main, where the city had placed its first free electric-vehicle charging spot.
For weeks, I had been obsessed with it, contemplating it day and night. I found myself staring directly at it whenever I had lunch at the little cafe across the street. The concept was compelling.
If you got free gas from the government, you’d be over the moon. Here it was just out in the open, for anyone to take, as long as they had an electric car. I set a reminder in my phone to buy a Nissan Leaf as soon as I could find one for under a thousand bucks. It would seem, however, that even less-tightwads than myself had already ordered their electric cars. Two of them were having a fistfight right now, upon arriving at the exact same moment for the only free charger in town.
The Tesla owner, as could be expected from his higher socioeconomic position due likely to a history of exploitation of workers, opened up with a haymaker before attempting negotiation. That antagonized the Spark owner, who snapped the charge cable like a whip at the Tesla driver. Soon, both men were circling each other, knives drawn.
While initially my socialist/cheap-ass instincts had slotted me in the camp against the Tesla-driving gentleman, I soon determined through a quick Google search that the Spark EV was in fact a Chevrolet product. It was a wash, for sure.
Soon, the police arrived, barking the sirens of their cruisers. This antagonized both combatants, who immediately accused the police officers of hating the planet with their low-output V8 gas guzzlers. Didn’t they care about the children, they shrieked while being beaten to a bloody pulp by the cops’ carbon-fibre extendable batons.
Myself, I was just glad that I wasn’t down at the DMV when these two showed up to order smug electricity-pun personalized license plates.
#
tags: electric cars, chevrolet spark, chevrolet, tesla
“Do you swear fealty only to the One True Car, the Chrysler Intrepid, and to no lesser four-door semi-luxury sedans?” asked the cultist at the other end of the snaking obsidian dagger pointed at my heart.
I wanted to ask what happened to the 300M Special, but decided that discretion was the better part of valour in this circumstance. Another better part of valour was my loaded .38 snubnose, from which I discharged hollowpoint justice into the hooded teenager with a quick one-two brap. As he sagged to the ground, the audience went wild, perhaps not yet realizing the gun wasn’t loaded with blanks for their entertainment.
When I was first approached about attending ChryslerCon and taking part in the Early 90s FWD Paradise panel, I figured that they had finally called my number, identified my cries for help as closeted lust for the Dodge Neon. It was not to be, I would soon find - my fellow panelists, like the cultist, were consumed altogether by some kind of strange power that brought their attentions solely on Iacocca’s Revenge, the Cloud Car of lore.
Choosing to seize the moment and build on the momentum that taking a human life had given me, I grabbed my microphone and leaned in conspiratorially. I was going to say something controversial, the crowd realized, and their murmuring about whether or not to call the homicide police fell silent, now hanging on my every word. In my peripheral vision, I could see my fellow panelists, too, were enraptured, drawn from their study of Mopar Action back-issues by the report of the handgun.
“How can you make a good front-wheel-drive car if the engine is installed longitudinally?” I spat into the mic, before hooking my belt loop to the dangling tow rope and letting the helicopter pull me from the hall before the crowd could rush me in delusional anger.
It was only as I ascended through the opened skylight of the Cobo Centre, giving the assembled crowd a furious double-bird that I began to feel regret. I had neglected to pick up an ACR radio delete panel from the swap meet, and now it would just be awkward to go back.
#
tags: mopar, chrysler intrepid, dodge intrepid, lee iacocca, dodge neon, chrysler 300m, best of
On my first day as a traffic reporter, I had already crossed the line from reporting on the news to being part of the news. Luckily for me, with all the anger towards the media these days, the station lawyers had finally relented and given us a whole heapin’ helpin’ of leeway as far as it came to self defense, and I was feeling very much on the defensive right now.
“I have a medical condition,” I barked into the headset mic, hoping that the lure of salacious gossip about The Traffic Helicopter Guy would compel the station management to keep me on the air. “That medical condition is being sick of this bullshit.” With that, I uncorked the station’s M-42 grenade launcher I brought with me, and coughed a ball of anti-materiel hellfire directly into that fucking traffic light which always dicks me over on the little left turn arrow.
The viewers loved it - the explosive Nielsen-rating collars strapped to our necks began bleeping happy tones, as opposed to the depressed warble-screams they sometimes emitted whenever Old Les the Alky Weatherman mispronounced the name of our city. My pilot looked over at me, and gave me the universal thumbs-up of approval. Hollywood and police movies had taught the normal American family that there was a Greater Power, and right now a stop-and-go psychotic farting grenades out of a Bell Jet Ranger was putting on one hell of a sermon.
My next target would be important, the management barked into the shrieking walnut-sized earpiece stuffed directly into my aural cavity. You have to pick something that matters, something that people hate.
“Take me to the FedEx office, motherfucker,” I barked at the pilot, to more excited bleeping from the collar. “I got a special delivery to drop off.”
Working a grift in an old folks home is surprisingly tiring. On the face of it, the math works out: they don’t have a lot of energy to resist and scamming them takes almost zero effort. My grift, though, depends on volume, and that’s where they get you. Each sobbing retiree who clutches a picture of their granddaughter’s maid and tells me about how ethnic her hair is wears me down just a little bit more.
Some days, I don’t even have the energy to trick them into signing the bill of sale so I can take their luxury car out of their ownership before they hurt someone. On those kinds of days, I will flee to the nearest bathroom, stare into the mirror, and remind myself that I am a job creator. I am encouraging the flow of hoopties from their natural origin at old-folks’ homes to their natural destination of aspirational neighbourhoods, and along the way it’s only fair that I pocket a few thousand dollars for my trouble.
Occasionally, I have a rival: another smooth-voiced operator who decides that a little bit of styling gel and a vaguely Spanish accent is all the prep he’s going to need in order to bilk money out of these olds and send it to “starving children.” He has so far refused to descend from his Heavenly throne to this very mortal firmament, however, and the cats-paws he sends to enforce his will are generally poor at looking out behind them or not falling out of windows. It’s hard to find good help these days, and that’s why I do my Caddy-grabbin’ by myself.
I hadn’t expected the greatest obstacle to my plans, however: the local political animals. They appear with a short bus and ten gallon hat, smiling the entire time, promising to gas-chamber every teenager if only they can count on them for a little donation, and more importantly, their vote. I can’t afford to give them matching free casino trips, what with all the Northstar head gaskets I’ve been buying, and so when these gangs of feral politicos show up, I have to simply hit the tracks before Johnny Law decides I look a little too poor to be living somewhere with golf carts for public transport.
It’s a hard grift, but it’s an honest one. It’s not like I’m selling pension funds or anything.
“Sir, we must politely ask you to refrain from hooking up a nitrous oxide system at the exact same time you are filling out rental paperwork promising not to do such a thing,” whined the Master Beaters lot attendant, no doubt re-re-thinking his cousin’s offer to bump a shitload of heroin this morning instead of going to work.
“I have a medical condition,” I explained.
This kind of thing always happened when I was forced to rent a car; due to the tireless efforts of the ocean industry and their capture of regulatory authorities, overseas travel almost never allowed me to bring my own car with me. And that wasn’t even counting the several countries that had outright banned any of my soggy-bodied Pick N Pull crusher rejects.
Like it or not, I was at their mercy, unless I wanted to do something crazy like ride public transit. The problem there was that despite being a lever of Big Government, the crypto-Communist institution also almost never equipped buses with nitrous oxide, which (as previously stated) was required for my medical condition. It’s a renewable fuel, assholes, I kept telling them during my many letter-writing campaigns to the members of the United Nations. There’s nitrogen everywhere.
Despite the unpleasantness, I soon found myself freed of the lot attendant, who returned to his small heated cubicle at the corner of the lot and pointedly ignored me as I hooked up the nitrous anyway.
There were two constants in life, I used to tell the preschool class I taught before the prison sentence: one, that no car was ever “fast enough,” and two, that nobody really gave a shit about anything you do as long as you didn’t do it to their face.
#
tags: public transit, nitrous oxide, pick n pull, united nations, rental cars
I’ve kidnapped these regular people - just like yourselves, so innocent and trusting and clueless about cars - and brought them to this windowless cellar to ask them what they think of the new Chevy Cruze Diesel, a diesel that’s not like a diesel.
Here’s one now. Tell me what you think about this car. Does it excite you? Can you feel the craftsmanship?
“Please… please just let me go.” Go to the dealership, because you think this is a BMW?
The car has apps, and you need those. It will protect your children from themselves. Nobody can protect them from everything, but Chevrolet sure tried. Look at how they tried, look in the faces of your children about how excited they are about the Chevrolet Cruze Diesel. Now they will grow up to become regular people, just like you.
It’s got nothing but room for all your things. Do you know where your things are now? Do you know where your life is going? Scream. Scream for the 2018 Chevrolet Cruze Diesel, the last car that you will ever need.
What would you pay for such a marvel of engineering? Your naïveté is showing; the 2018 Chevrolet Cruze Diesel can no longer be bought with money.
#
tags: chevrolet cruze, chevrolet ads, real people
Roger & Meth Injection
Roger got appointed head ringleader of the circus in 1981. He was too late to have stopped it. There’s a funny thing that happens when a man achieves his goal; almost without exception, he finds that what he lost along the way had been more important the whole time.
His first day, they took him down to the place where everything had gone wrong. Lordstown. He despised Ohio, hated the stench of it, how the reek of its secret evil had almost a carnal texture. The part of Lordstown Assembly Roger had witnessed in the past, however, was not the one that he was being taken to now, by two masked men in the standard General Motors business suit of ill-fitting navy.
“We made a mistake,” said the taller of the two, before an angry glance from the other silenced his words. Loose talk and poor self-control is what had gotten them into every other mess, Roger somehow knew. How could this one be different?
In the room stood a man among corpses, their outstretched hands to a man marked with a sigil. Roger dimly remembered seeing the tattoo before, on the left hand of the man who had been picked before his time to run Pontiac.
The man began to speak, without turning to meet Roger’s gaze. While a powerful businessman in the rest of the world, Roger Smith did not become the President of General Motors by speaking out of turn. For some unexplained reason, he was beginning to suspect that his powers had reached their limit here, borne as they were from man’s folly.
General Motors’ powerful warlocks could not hold the seal that morning, the man explained, not pausing to check if Smith comprehended his words. Something escaped when they were harvesting the exotic turbocharger technology from the eccentric foreigner they had captured. There was simply too much boost, and our men could not have known what would happen.
The fluorescent shop lights stirred to life, keyed on by one of the men who had brought Roger to this cursed place. Now he could see everything. The burned rubber marks, forming a pentagram upon the shop floor. Extinguished factory-surplus road flares littered around the room, as if blown loose from a sharp gust. Hanging on the wall, tinted black with overrich exhaust soot, a blueprint. The blueprint.
“The Trans Am Turbo is your problem now, Roger,” said the man, addressing Smith directly for the first and last time. “Financials won’t be the only loss if we can’t get this buttoned up.”
You’d think, as I did, that being chief reporter for a magazine read predominantly by teenage girls waiting in abortion clinics would be difficult. My time writing for Motor Trend, however, was anything but.
“We’ve determined that the only articles people ever read are inflammatory ones, about bad cars,” my interviewer said. “We want to pick up what Bad Cars Monthly is putting down.”
Over the next few weeks, I converted my handsome senior journalist salary of medium-low five figures into a desk drawer full of malt liquor, and spun through my predecessor’s Rolodex in search of free parts so fast that it caught fire. After that, there was only the matter of the cover car. I chose wisely, but others didn’t feel the same way, as the next month’s letters section indicated.
“Dear Sirs,” started the letter in a nasal tone, “Your so-called ‘feature’ of the 2003 MG XPower SV missed several of its key features, and it is by no means a ‘bad car’ just because it occasionally catches fire and looks like a tangerine that has been pushed through the accessories department of a Pep Boys.”
I was barely through reading the article, when my desk phone rang. After several minutes of Googling about how to operate a phone, I was able to successfully pick it up. It was The Brass, and they were extremely unhappy about some kind of boycott that the MG Club of America was putting on.
They’re the only people who still buy Motor Trend, the distorted voice on the other side explained to me. Well, those and the Jaguar guys, but most of those people are dead and their estates hold the subscription. We’re sorry, but you can no longer make fun of Chinese-owned Italian-made Ford-engined British sports coupes within our pages.
I was made to make an apology, and kicked to the curb. But my time at the magazine had not been for naught; it turned out that the mailroom clerk was a huge fan of Bad Cars Monthly and knew how to set up a forwarding address for all those free parts I had begged for.
As my home office filled up with free performance goodies, I couldn’t help but notice that Edelbrock included the XPower SV in their applications list. Maybe I’d buy one; all that negative press surely had knocked down the price by now.
It sure wasn’t easy, but with the help of a gypsy seamstress who I plied with malt liquor and the occasional threat of violence, I’d successfully re-upholstered every piece of furniture in my house with Bride gradation fabric. I leaned back into my couch, feeling the plush opulence of authentic JDM greyscale enveloping me like a perfect blanket.
From this position, I could see into my backyard. Through the ragged hole left from last May when I tried to stow an unregistered Baja in the backyard quickly before the 5-0 came back, I could see my neighbour Tom, admiring the fantastic fabric work I had done. He hoisted to one shoulder a nondescript tube, in olive drab. Before I could duck, he was able to lob a knockout-gas grenade directly through the shattered remnants of my kitchen window, ricocheting it off the stack of Speedline wheels I had piled in the corner.
When I came to, I knew immediately that he had come after Francesca. What terrible things would he do to her? I ran through what I knew about Tom, before realizing with a start that he was a BMW aficionado. I charged out into the backyard, wielding an Autobacs baggie full of genuine squash-flavoured Air Spencers as a crude flail. I was too late.
Tom’s house, a formerly decrepit bungalow stuffed to the gills with brake parts, now boasted the Recaro confetti pattern fabric on every wall. I had to admit it looked a little more fun than mine, and regretted, not for the first time, passing up the HKS drag-car neon camo.
#
tags: interior decoration, hks, bride, recaro, speedline, air spencer
It feels good to give back to society. For the last few weeks, I’ve been volunteering my time to help those less fortunate. Sure, they had made a few mistakes along the way, but which of us can honestly say they have not? These gentle folks got caught, landed themselves in a heap of trouble. It’s all a decent man can do is offer a helping hand up.
Yes, I was teaching a course on remedial drivers’ ed. Every Thursday at the Learning Annex, the cops would shuffle yet another batch of shitty drivers into my waiting arms. They’d get a PowerPoint presentation of the usual rules of the road, and then we’d do what I liked to call a “driving simulator” that actually consisted of them driving me to the grocery store and waiting outside until I was done figuring out what the cheapest whisky was this week. This road test, naturally, was where most of my students fell down.
I couldn’t save them all. The more aggressive students would work their way out of the system no matter what I did, whether it be from partial decapitation by guardrail, or the more common plunging of their pickup truck into a gas station while carrying burning firewood in the bed. It was my duty to focus on those I could save, the merely inadequate as drivers. Despite the schools’ and television commercials’ best efforts at promoting a healthy self-image, many of these drivers were simply terrified to be behind the wheel.
Nobody else, it seemed, was willing to stick a high-voltage eBay tazer between their ribs and start pulling the trigger every time the speedo needle dipped below twenty over.
For weeks now, some terrible fiend had been harassing local politicians by throwing uncooked hot dogs on the hood of their parked cars. When they finally called me out of retirement to take a look at the investigation, I figured they had hit the ends. It would later turn out that the byproducts were what was important all along.
I met with Detective Sam Reno at the latest scene. He rejected my initial offer of coffee, possibly because he was busy carefully picking up a wiener with his pen and transferring it to an evidence bag. He paused, sniffed at it.
“Kosher,” he muttered to himself, and with a hand signal, ordered two of his men to begin questioning the rabbi.
“What do you think is the intent here?” I asked, trying to juggle the two insanely hot cups of coffee. I should have gotten a cardboard sleeve, I realized. It’s not like I could just put it down, either. The gravel parking lot was super mucky and I’d get the cup all gross where you hold it with your finger. There was no excuse for fucking up this badly, not at this level. Reno didn’t notice the beads of sweat rolling down my face and told me his theory.
“We think it’s a plot to make wild bears attack the mayor,” he said, stone faced. “Attempted murder.”
I asked some more questions, wrote down the answer. He told me that they were operating under the theory that there was only one killer. “Methods are consistent - uncooked, 100% All Beef, non-ballpark American style frank.”
He thought briefly that there might have been a change in the suspect’s M.O., perhaps an escalation of behaviour as he continued to evade justice. “It turned out to be a piece of leftover firewood,” he explained sheepishly. It would all be in the case notes, he assured me, as he made haste for his second part-time job at the bingo parlour. Cops didn’t get paid much in this town, because the criminals didn’t have any money to bribe them with, explained my lieutenant when I had first joined the force. Saves the taxpayers a shitload.
After Detective Reno left, overly cooled free coffee in hand (for which I received no thanks), I worked the scene for awhile. I could tell he didn’t care for having a new detective on the case, but there was no denying that sometimes you just plain missed something. For instance, I missed the curb, and tripped onto the road. Not a road. A bicycle lane. Ahead of me, a Cannondale sped forward, blind to the presence of my prone body. At these speeds, a man could be decapitated instantly. I had seen it with my own two eyes, during the Tour De Severed Head Case.
At that very moment, a hand grasped me, and pulled me upright. I didn’t recognize the man, but he had kind eyes. My luck continued as he told me he had a hot tip on the case.
“Check out the hot dog salesman in town,” he said, “there’s only one, and he hates the mayor.”
#
tags: hot dogs, wieners, small town crime, small town mayor
When I started with the FBI, I figured I would be chasing down perps, shaking out the truth, maybe even covering up some alien conspiracies. Wearing a suit, driving a twenty year old body-on-frame official car, giving thumbs up to the quirky small-town folk that I meet before getting pulled in to their secret vigilante justice organization. Those were the things I wanted from an FBI career, but the career wanted something else.
My first day, I sat down in a meeting with my boss. She tented her fingers, and pushed a piece of paper across the desk. At the top of it, just below the FBI letterhead, immense gothic type reading “MINNESOTA THEORY” made up the header.
“What is this?” I sputtered, reaching onto my belt to feel for the nonexistent service weapon I had not yet received, as if shooting a piece of paper with hollow point nine millimeter could make this discovery go away.
“We here at the Bureau cannot officially confirm or deny the existence of the state of Minnesota,” she said, leaning back in the plush leather of her chair. “Nobody we’ve sent there has ever returned.”
I told them it was ludicrous, that all I needed was a fast car and a catheter and I would prove it to them. Then I started heading west. Many hours of driving later, I saw a state border sign for Minnesota, tattered and rusted, as if it had been forgotten decades ago and nobody was around to take care of it. I kept driving, but a few minutes later, I arrived at the border of South Dakota. That’s weird, I thought, I must have fallen asleep at the wheel and completely missed Minnesota altogether.
Kicking the handbrake, I pulled a u-ey and drove the way I had come. Again, I appeared at the strange Minnesota limit sign, travelling into Wisconsin. This didn’t make any sense. Minnesota had to exist, it had to. I looked up into the sky, which had suddenly darkened. The moon was out. I frantically pushed the “CLOCK” button on my dashboard, which told me that my trip through “Minnesota” had taken several hours, none of which I remembered.
Back at my humble apartment, I got some cheese from the fridge. On the label, it said “Made in Minnesota.” I furrowed my brow, and when I unwrapped the cheese, it had already gone rancid in the package, as if it was thousands of years old.
At FBI headquarters, they reviewed my dashcam footage. The SD card was corrupt. My colleagues shook their heads, despairing at having to file yet another report that the theory of Minnesota being an actual state that exists was still inconclusive.
Who can truly know the mind of the Corvette owner? Their mental patterns are so unlike ours. Through a life of grand touring indulgence, their bodies have become weak and their minds prone to flights of fancy. Our society must now come together to determine a way to protect ourselves from the threat of Corvette owners.
Scientists at the Academy For Motorcar Shit Talking today identified that more 1996 automatic Neons have been raced than Corvettes of any kind. Corvette Racing head Bill Understeer went on record telling us, quote, “Shit’s slow,” end quote.
Doctors at the Institute For Cars That Only Middle-Aged Real Estate Speculators Drive indicate that they may someday have a cure for the Corvette, emboldened by the successful vaccination drive of 2008, which all but eliminated the eleventh-generation Ford Thunderbird.
“Can you play ‘slightly overweight braggart?’” my agent asked me, barely looking up from her morning heroin. “Says here that some show about cars is hiring a temporary one because the real one punched out another assistant.”
I thought about it for about three seconds, because that was the amount of time it took for her to get to the “pay scale” section of the want ad. Then I leapt for it, becoming the world’s newest and most beloved motoring presenter, along two other guys and a man who doesn’t talk much and lives entirely in a race helmet. Problems with race would dog me throughout my engagement, so I should have seen that as more of an omen than I did.
My first day at work was going great. I had a fantastic rapport with the fans, I was able to crack jokes while powersliding, and I won the bad car challenge because I remembered the old adage: Hondas never die. By all means, my rise should have been meteoric. Then came the race incident.
During the news segment, a mention of F1 racing came up. I immediately pretended to play dead until the other two were done talking about it, but eventually a producer prodded me from offstage and I was forced to make a comment on it.
“You know it’s all fake, right? Like professional wrestling,” I said, leaning forward in my jean jacket for maximum emphasis. From this position, they told me, I was the audience’s friend, like a boorish chap down the pub who fancied a pint. I understood almost nothing of what they told me, but went along with it in a sort of crude parroting of their actions until they walked away and left me to my devices.
The audience crackled with rage. Suddenly, there were pitchforks and torches, and even the mandatory attractive women in the first row were mad at me. Somehow I had miscalculated, and spending hours of your life watching fantasy penis-cars dully slide around the playgrounds of the ultra-rich was now the height of motorsport.
When I woke up the next morning, I had received a message telling me my services were no longer needed. I’m not entirely sure why they had to decapitate a Stig and leave his head in my bed, though.
When you’re the best, every second matters. You can’t have a bunch of rookies in your pit who don’t know which way their ratchet has to be set to loosen. They need to know every ounce of leverage, to identify metric fasteners from across the room without even looking in their direction. When time is money, the best of the best mechanics came to train at my Wrench War Games.
The first day is easy, but you’d be surprised how many so-called pros will have a panic attack and shit their pants at the very sight of a Lexus LS400 starter job. Those who can finish it, and do it under book, are already the best of the best at their shops, dealerships, Mafia-operated vehicle chopping operations, but they want to be the best in the world. That’s where day two comes in.
Awoken with a bucket of cold water, my trainees are pushed into the fight of their lives. Through chicanery and nightmare grade levels of Soviet research chemicals, I have managed to assemble the largest known fleet of Maserati Biturbos. They will do an in-car head gasket job, and they will do it under book. Survivors are elevated to Godhood, by which I mean they change a steering rack in a Lancia Delta Integrale. During this time, a team of trained actors recreate various customer breakdowns and rage-fits in the front shop, trying their hardest to throw the so-called real mechanics off their game.
Only once has a man overcome this gauntlet and still wished for more pain. I looked into his eyes, and I saw the fire of youth burning within. The edge of my lip curled upwards into a grin as I condemned him with one final verdict, a challenge so brutal no man could escape.
“Replace a water pump in this SR20 Sentra,” I told him, and then burst into maniacal laughter. He’s still there, years later, his fingers eternally pinched between the fender and passenger side upper motor mount, straining to thread in a bolt that will never find grip. We call him Mister Glycol.
All allies and friends of the Dodge Neon are invited to come to a rally this weekend to show their peaceful support and solidarity for the model against recent hatred thrown at it by Cavalier supremacists such as the J-Body Order and the Lordstown Assembly.
We have many speakers planned, and we will be heard by those legislators who have unfairly discriminated against the Neon with biased side-impact and small-offset crash tests. The Mopar Action Band will be playing a short concert in the park, including their new pro-Neon hit single, “Warped Rotors (Not My Style.)”
Me, I tried to stay out of politics. But once the discussion around the shattered 350 motor we were keeping our beer inside turned to which type of antiseize was superior, I was considering speed-dialing my Senator to see how soon we could get some kind of death camp spun up.
It wasn’t that my position was the all-knowing, correct one - it was just that the nickel kind was cheap and ninety nine percent of the time you really didn’t want to use antiseize on brake parts anyway, certainly not slide pins - but that the other guy’s was plain wrong. The longer we debated, the harder it became for me to see his viewpoint.
Soon, the both of us were airing out our grievances in a terrible proxy war on the op-ed pages of the national news media. An endless line of bowtied conservative representatives were all too happy to die on the sword of my so-called friend’s bourgeois waste of copper antiseize, whereas I was able to source a loose handful of greasy, crusty artistic types who appreciated my thrift and ability to make a lot of roach clips from the contents of my junk fastener bin.
Soon, as our argument wore on, it emerged from the shadowy office coolers of policy wonks to the consciousness of the voting public. There, bands of confused randoms declared themselves “undecided” on this critical issue of workshop integrity. Soon, too many of them fell under the sway of my enemy at highly-funded rallies where the Permatex representatives promised them that their magical copper Cheez Whiz could prevent galvanic corrosion. Poppycock!
After my friend became President, we both realized the mistake we had made. He cast out to try and issue an olive branch, make me Vice President, but our radicalized supporters on each side could abide no such mild treachery. We would have our garage sessions from then on without President Expensive-Ass Copper Bullshit.
That worked for me, because in all this hysteria I had grown to like the stuff, and he left like a full canister behind that he was simply too busy to use.
Just the other day I was down at the docks, and I saw the most wonderful thing. An Isuzu Elf, imported fresh from its ancestral homeland of Mother Nippon, was working a miniature hydraulic crane to pick up an engine for a tugboat. If I had such a vehicle, I realized, I would have an engine crane anywhere I wanted. Nobody would be able to stop me: exotics trapped in stop-and-go traffic would be powerless against me opening their hoods and removing their precious still-running engines.
I thought back to what that old fortune teller at the carnival had told me so many years ago. She said that one day, Isuzu would call on me, and I must be ready. When I saw Isuzu sink and disappear from the US market without a trace, I chalked it up to the malleability of fate itself. That’s the thing about fate, though: you never really can get away from it forever.
Where could I get an Isuzu Elf of my own? My usual contacts in Japan had gone to ground, asserting in both English and flawless Nipponese (for the benefit of the assorted intelligence agencies) that they would like a large pepperoni pizza and to please hold the bitter melon. Cowards, I said into the receiver while filling out a few more names for later on my infamous Enemies List.
After a few more hours of calling, I could feel panic rising in my throat, the sensation that I might have to wait a few hours more in order to get exactly what I want. That’s when my friendly Icelandic contact, Gunnbjörn, told me that he had just the thing, tied up in the back. As is my custom, I agreed without thinking about it too hard, transferred the money and waited patiently at the docks for the arrival of my Elf.
Soon, the stevedores called me in to their office. They had found my shipment, they explained, and took me into a small room. I was confused. Sure, the Isuzu Elf was small, but this box was barely five feet long. There was no way that my crane-clad diesel vixen could be within such a thing. Plus, there was this smell.
Steve the Stevedore (my name for him; I think he was named Robert or something) popped open the lid with a wrecking bar, and then we all stared inside it. A small body of some creature laid within, humanoid except for its horrible, pointed ears and pinched face. It was naked, save for a stocking cap, and covered in bloody scars from trying to claw its way out of the box. From the look of it, it had been dead for the majority of the journey.
I resolved from then on to speak more clearly on the phone.
Getting political was one thing, but getting political by doing burnouts? When the community organizer told me about it, I shook his hand so quickly that wads of eccentric Greek billionaire gold bullion fell from his sleeves. There was no time to apologize, though - I was struck by inspiration.
The next few months were a bit of a blur, but soon I was happily ripping giant smoke clouds in the parking lot of the Georgia Comic Convention. Me and the General Sherman, a Union Blue ‘68 Charger which shot four-foot flames, had been doing alternate-history cosplay up and down the entire South for weeks now.
There were haters, of course, and they were going to hate, as was their prerogative. I was able to shut them up regardless by doing a four-alarm peel-out while barking something about how they themselves already lived in an alternate reality, so my transgressions were minimal by comparison.
It wasn’t until later that someone told me that Georgia was also a country. I had been tearing ass up and down Eastern Europe instead of the Southern United States. It figured, I thought the bystanders looked a little too diverse.
I remember fifty percent off weekend. It was the weekend that I became a man, and by the following Monday I wanted nothing more in the world than to forget what I had done. We left men - friends - behind, because there was nothing we could do for them.
There’s this recurring nightmare I have, it’s of fifty percent off weekend at the yard. There’s this guy, and I don’t know if I ever caught his face, and he’s lifting a 2200 SFI over his head while hooting about finally being able to get the moonshine mobile working. Thing is, a 2200 SFI can look a lot like a primo F22A1, and one of those roving wolverine gangs of Honda Teens were alerted to his presence. He just made too much noise, cracked under the pressure, just like his ribcage when those teens got onto him with their never-used 13mm box-end crescents. A god damn shame. I’ll never forget it.
When we made that last run for the gold, arms laden with swaybars and a too-disorganized toolbag flapping off my shoulder, I knew that I was turning my back on the last of my humanity. I stole a man’s wheelbarrow, something I swore that I would never do, just to stay one step ahead of the real pros. One of those guys catches up to you at a car, you’re going to see the whole thing disappear into his toolbag and pockets, leaving you with just the bolt you were loosening so slowly.
This kind of thing affects the staff worst of all. They can’t just decide to go home or not turn up in the morning, like I could. It was my battleground, but it was their home. I still feel bad about stealing over a hundred pounds of relays in the fake lining of my overalls.
It’s a car Let’s be honest, these are just better than trucks.
It’s a truck Better than SUVs.
The tailgates are an appreciating asset People aren’t going to stop rear-ending each other while Snapchatting a dancing hot dog into the centre of their dashboard next to their meth pipe.
(1978-87 Only) Metric chassis is educational You know who else uses the metric system? China. Get your kids a leg up on the future destruction of the American way of life by teaching them the most popular cheese-grade bolt sizes.
Ronald Reagan didn’t own one Not a lot of small, cute trucks of the 80s can say that.
“Caballero” is a fun word to say Everyone will get tired of you constantly rolling your Ls and leave you to weld in new quarter panels in peace.
Even Iran had them What could be better for world peace than to crack a cold one and discuss which country got worse stamping dies at the United Nations?
“The Lizard People are coming to steal our spiritual essence,” shrieked my esteemed opponent in this, the third episode of the local public broadcaster’s debate series. I had the perfect rejoinder, one that I expected would leave him reeling against the metaphorical (and actual: we shared a set with the local wrestling program) ropes.
“But what cars do they drive?” I asked, gesturing loosely with my cigarette holder before giving a Groucho Marx eyebrow wiggle and leaning onto the lectern with the leather-patched elbow of my sport jacket. The moderator began to whoop, circling his fist in the air as if preparing to throw an invisible lasso.
“The Scion tC,” he said, as if the response had been practiced. I was thrown for a loop, staggered. It was the perfect answer, and as my mind raced through his logic, searching desperately for a hole, I could tell that I was burning valuable airtime, and yet was unable to strike back.
“B-but they’re boring,” I blubbered, the camera no doubt picking up every high-definition sweat drop that was beading upon my flustered forehead. Lizard people, in a Celica For Oldmos? It made too much sense. I couldn’t lose like this; my pride must survive even if the truth would be obscured.
I quickly thumbed my smartphone beneath the podium, out of view of the roving camera, while my opponent calmly stated his points of opinion. “Think about it,” he barked at the end, “no person you know owns one. It is only a car that other people drive. Lizard people.”
Just as he punched the air in a rhetorical flourish, to signify his victory over me as those other brave gladiators of the squared circle we stood in, the doors to the studio burst inwards with a flash and smoke. The “On Air” light winked off, the rest of the world unable to witness the Deep State arriving to cart my enemy away. As he was carried to the parking lot, I decided to sneak a quick peek at what they were driving.
Mitsubishi Tritons. Of course. Who would reasonably own one of those?
“Welcome to the carnival of the night,” shrieks the cashier at Goth Dominos. Ever since the pizza wars blew past the boundaries of good taste, drove through a guard rail and plunged off a cliff into the freezing water of ironic detachment, every restaurant in town capable of bolting red sauce to a spinning disc was mainlining every internet trend and meme as fast as the Allmind could manufacture them.
It was sort of terrifying, but terrifying in the way where you have to think about it for a while before the cold grasp of fear reaches out for your heart, so most people just giggled and took selfies in front of the Pizza Hut Confederate Memorial. I could hardly blame them. They were pretty busy redecorating their own restaurants multiple times per day, after all. They simply could not afford a mindshare gap.
“Can I interest you in some Cinnamon Sticks of Ultimate Misery?” she asked, more bored than I thought anyone could ever be. I figured I might as well make my order, and asked for the Consumed Nest of Pepperoni Nightmares.
“I’m sorry?” blinked the cashier, now wearing an anatomically correct bumblebee costume, 3D printed in seconds from some unseen device. “This is a Honey Fried Ultradominos now.”
#
tags: fast food, marketing, targeted advertising, differentiated surrealism
A man with little restraint can often get carried away with modifying his car. How many Preludes have you seen chopped into the weeds, outfitted with booming sound systems and day-glow mangorangellow paint? It all comes from someone who doesn’t know when to stop. In that heady mode, where the limits of his taste have become apparent to all around him, he remains oblivious. And yet there is method in this madness, or at least metal.
My horrible tale begins when I had to fix a minor problem with a daily-driver beater. In my way, an exhaust header. Hateful things, prone to rust and dents and other unfun things. Soon, a cutting wheel had dispensed with the header, and a flawless Chinesium-American™ stainless steel 4-2-1 masterpiece took its place. I finished my work, but then realized a small bit of wear on the rear quarter panel, in amongst all the terminal rust. That wouldn’t do.
Weeks later, I rolled a silhoutte racer of a Pontiac Sunfire out of the garage, burping flame from its side-exit exhaust, barely visible in amongst its gleaming carbon-fibre widebody. With every breath on the throttle, an angelic choir of turbochargers wailed, lofted to heights of ecstasy by a baritone of nitrous injectors. I patted the aluminum dashboard (the glovebox light had burned out), and felt that I had done my best to restore this car to functional operation without going overboard.
Sure, the tube frame chassis added a lot to noise inside the cabin, but I remained convinced that as long as I didn’t put too big of a stereo in this thing it was still a responsible, performance-oriented modification, no worries about my tacky taste in aesthetics. After all, I hadn’t even painted it.
ANYTOWN, USA (AP) - In a daring daylight raid, members of the Head Gasket Liberation Front today attacked a Fastenal truck en route to deliver metric bolts to a vending machine.
The truck was intercepted along Route 101, where a gang of rusty vehicles got in front of it and then had a series of progressively more expensive mechanical failures, presumably to slow the truck down for capture.
Although the driver was unhurt, he will forever live with the terror of having seen these freedom fighters working up close. “They were actually pretty nice,” he told reporters while quivering, adding “the leader said that all the bolt stores were closed on Sundays and he really needed an M12x1.25x65.”
Authorities are baffled as to why someone would desire metric bolts instead of God Fearing Imperial bolts, and are operating on the theory that they may be driving a Mexican built car such as an Audi.
#
tags: fastenal, metric bolts, why is nobody open on sunday
The flames rose ever higher as the Olive Garden descended into the hell from which it was no doubt born. Art students, bleary-eyed and confused at how their oversized pasta bowls had been so cruelly shut off in this, only the fourth consecutive hour of their consumption, began to wander the parking lot in search of their long-forgotten cars.
We both had made a lot of mistakes, the Olive Garden server and I; my mistake was thinking that just because they were willing to give me unlimited breadsticks, that I could use them as a sort of improvised machine shop. My customers would bring me suspension uprights, seized strut mounts, dickered alternators, and I would quickly pop the bearing loose by applying vast quantities of free bread to it until the housing could take no more.
In between customers, I would wave off my waiter, telling him I was “still deciding on the menu” (true) and to please bring me some more breadsticks. I think perhaps he was thrilled at my rebellious nature, at first, being a nudge-nudge-wink-wink participant in scamming his employer out of money that would never sum up to the total of hours they had stolen from his life.
Perhaps it would have been okay if it were just me, but when I was clearly working an arbitrage scheme out of my table, they felt that there may have been tax implications. We weren’t set up for subcontracting, they explained, and besides, hydraulic oil and bearing grease is not generally considered food safe.
Also, the drill press I had installed next to my table probably was a little distracting to the other guests.
Once we had overthrown the old order of things, slaughtered the bourgeoisie in their homes like pigs, and redistributed their wealth, we came to realize that a lot of their wealth was actually pretty useless. One such useless ornament was the limousine, which our new socialist utopia collectively rejected almost immediately when it became obvious that it could neither carry as much as a pickup truck nor corner like a family sedan. It was decided, therefore, that we would race them.
When I was actively racing, I would bounce a late-80s Town Car off a berm, shattering the panoramic sunroof, even in my dreams. They called me “Comrade Handbrake,” and the name stuck so well that I cannot remember what name I had held before. How I lived for the thrill of battle, the sound of prying a wing mirror off an enemy when weaving through a tight corner, too tight by far for the overlength barges we piloted.
When the imperialists returned with their friends to destroy the glorious machine we had constructed, many of my friends worried. They fought, they loved, they died. I fought too, but I knew that they brought new limousines. That meant that, in the end, there would always be jobs for talented limousine drivers. And if a few of those limos would disappear down a logging backroad before ending up wrapped around a tree, so much the better.
“Trains are just big cars,” I boasted confidently to the interviewer. “You put me in front of that shit and I can drive it to wherever you want, no problem.” The interviewer agreed, possibly driven by the “special shipment” I had brought with me to demonstrate my trafficking abilities. I was a locomotive guy, or engineer, or whatever. I sort of slept in and missed the training.
My first day on the rails came sooner than I expected, probably because of the aforementioned sleeping. After a quick few minutes with an exasperated and semi-terrified conductor, I was happily texting while blowing through a level crossing at what the speedometer indicated was “danger” kilometers per hour. This shit was easy! I was going to make record time. Maybe the other guys just didn’t know the throttle could go this far, I reasoned. I would bring it up at the next union meeting.
At the next union meeting, they told me to shut my fucking mouth. Of course trains could go really fast without crashing and killing everybody, but some of these guys got paid by the hour. I considered their reasoning carefully: more hours x same pay per hour = lots more money for car parts. Yes sir, I was definitely on Team Defraud, I told them. Even the safety inspector who was listening in on our meeting seemed relieved when I told him I was no longer going to do a hundred eighty past a schoolyard carrying depleted uranium.
What finally made me quit, you ask? They made me carry the most horrible cargo of all, a concept so reprehensible that my skin crawls even now to consider it: base model, front wheel drive, Mercedes. I could be no part of this horrible misuse of trains, possibly the worst in history.
There was no real way to get used to time travel, is what we would tell the rookies after their first or second jump, when they started to get the willies. It’s unnatural. No part of our amalgam of fear and meat is designed to endure an act such as this, spitting in the face of the very physics and nature that birthed us. Then we’d kick open the door to the Delorean and start looting the past for sweet-ass parts for cheap.
I’m old enough that I can still remember a time without time travel. For months, the federales and newspapers alike were confused at these men who would show up to a bank branch, demand coins and bills only minted before a certain year, and then give them huge quantities of modern-day cash in exchange. At the same time, our museums began to overflow with heinously rare donations of ancient works, in immaculate condition.
Nobody could really believe it, but when the first time travel murder happened, we learned about it a few years later when it became a Discovery Channel murder mystery special. Then everyone was doing it. Time travel, that is, not murder. Well, actually they were doing both. The show was very detailed, you see.
Myself, my day job was retrieving parts for NAPA. Why bother making new parts, asked my bosses, when you could simply slip into the past of a parallel universe and fill our trunk from their shelves for pennies? It had a strange amount of sense, and what’s more, it turned out to be a relatively safe occurrence. In the other universe, there was little chance of myself impregnating my great-grandmother, or at least when I did (I won a bar dare) the consequences would never get back to me.
A lot of other guys were tempted to stay behind, to use their greater knowledge of how things would turn out to overthrow the local authorities and install themselves as their obscenely rich God-king. Myself, I didn’t really see the appeal. I was just happy to have a steady job and a place to still be able to get SVX windshields.
#
tags: subaru, svx, nos parts, delorean, time travel
A People’s History of the Ford Mustang
The Ford Mustang, a crime against the public, was released to appalled bystanders in The Year Of Our Lord 1964, and immediately killed half a dozen civilians at its unveiling. America’s imperialist ambitions since then have solely been to try and produce enough resources critical to the manufacturing of Ford Mustangs, for if production of the car was ever to stop, Henry Ford would be allowed to re-enter our plane of existence and wreak his terrible vengeance.
Let’s look at the evidence. The Vietnam War? Closer inspection of war photographs will reveal a then-new Fastback, mauling innocents. Despite efforts by the Kennedy government to fatten up the Mustang and render it largely inert beneath ostentatious bodywork and faux-luxury “grand touring” suspension softer than a sno-cone in July, the pony car continued to pose a grave threat to the public, and indeed Mr. Kennedy himself. Again we go to the photographic evidence - the Zapruder film, even - and bear witness to the statistically unlikely quantity of Mustangs parked alongside that fateful route into Daly City, the until-now unexplained glint from the grassy knoll. Only the angle of a Ford Mustang windshield could produce such a glint..
This goes all the way to the top. Key advisors in the White House even today have awoken to find their garage populated by a Mustang, their previous sensible cars pulled away to be crushed and silenced forever. Thinking it must have been a birthday gift or some kind of lucky lottery purchase, these so-called “owners” drove their purchases directly into the seat of American Power, behind the backs of a government whose surveillance mechanism is more focused on looking outwards.
We don’t know what they want. We may never know, but it is more important now than ever that we keep an eye on the Blue Oval that threatens our very way of life.
“Ribfest is cancelled,” barked the shirtless weirdo that had climbed aboard the community events cruiser and was now attempting to alter our previously agreed-upon timeline for said community events. I was about to question his authority to make such a move, but as events would soon prove, fate would intervene.
“This kind of thing happens a lot,” says Sue, my internship supervisor, in a much calmer way than I ever could have seen myself doing while trapped inside an industrial-conversion 1986 Econoline with a crazy on the hood frantically attempting to break the windshield with his bare hands. Maybe that was part of what I would learn. “Ribfest is very political in this town,” she added while racking a hand-load of rock salt into the station-issued corporate twelve gauge.
“For years you have been asking yourself, who is John Ribfest?” the man shrieked while holding on to the windshield wiper arms to stay on the hood. “This is John Ribfest speaking now.” I felt that as journalists, we were obliged to take him at his word and establish a counter source for balance so as to avoid accusations of bias.
“Don’t listen to him,” said Sue, “Last week he tried to ram the middle-school Model U.N. with an Isuzu Pup while shrieking about how ants were telling him to hoard honey for them in anticipation of the End Times.”
Barley, the other intern in my class and who, by virtue of his record-low DUI count and intact drivers’ license, was appointed the operator of the boxy Ford, took this as some kind of code to begin weaving frantically as we drove down Main Street. Whether it was an attempt to dislodge the madman or simply to unsettle him until Sue had a chance to brace herself for the recoil from the Remington between the dashboard and bench seat was a matter for the police.
I barely had a chance to cover one ear and shut my eyes tight before the windshield exploded outward into a spider-webbed mess of industrial-grade “safety” plastic and glass. That shot had left me so dazed I was unable to process Sue’s speed-of-light offhand chambering of another cartridge and followup shot, this one finally providing enough force to knock the Ribfest hater onto the street in front of the van, where a screaming Barley immediately ran him over and then swerved into a curb. As he settled the weave and learned to compensate for the tie rod and wheel he just bent, the power steering pump, presumably feeling neglected, began screaming on its own as well.
“Hell of a first day, huh?” said Sue, brushing cubes of atomized windshield glass out of her hair. “You should have seen what it was like last week, at Lobsterfest. I had to kill the mayor.”
#
tags: television news, ribfest, lobsterfest, small town life, small town mayor, isuzu, isuzu pup, ford, ford econoline, best of
I was overjoyed to hear that a bunch of my fellow inmates at the asylum had decided to meet in the work studies yard to witness some kind of Eclipse. In anticipation for a morning of laughter and pointing, I brought my best “I (heart) Crank Walk” t-shirt and my nearly-omnipresent Subaru fanboy shirt, stained with the blood of Subaru Coolant Conditioner and Rotella ultrasynthetic.
When I arrived outdoors, there was not a car to be found. Strange, although in retrospect it should have made sense considering the strict court order I found myself under after the Hyundai Pony Incident. Instead, the inmates had voluntarily assembled themselves into some kind of chanting ring, staring into the morning sky.
I could see that the guards in the tower were acting extra antsy this morning, as if they were expecting something supernatural to occur. It didn’t matter what they thought, I muttered to my clenched fists. I wanted to make fun of strange, overly-long intermediate shafts, of massive unsprung clutches, of turbo cars so bent out of shape by teenage stereo installs and capacitor-plagued ECUs. That’s when it happened.
The sky went dark suddenly, the sun reduced to a faint circle. Those inmates began to chant louder, heralding the arrival of their new god. I could feel a hostile presence emerge, as if something terrible had clawed its way free from the genetic memory of man and was now loose upon our world.
When the moon moved past the sun, in the centre of the ring was a small crossover with questionable styling. On the front were the three pointed diamonds that had taken the livelihoods of many of my friends. There was a new Eclipse all right, but it was more terrible than I could ever have imagined.
Jim Kramer filled the television set. He was screaming furiously, excited about some buying opportunity. For months now I had been watching business television, that odious faint wailing noise at the edges of my consciousness, the ever-marching ticker of meaningless stock prices of companies that nobody really cared about.
I had convinced myself, as you do sometimes, that a pattern was emerging, and I could take advantage of those who actually obeyed the advice of the screaming ninnies that devoured every available pixel of the screen, dispensing their opinions on everything from pork bellies to autonomous warfare.
The war automaton Jim Kramer turned to his guest, and asked his opinion on where he thought the stock of a tech giant was going to go. His guest, a frazzled-looking business type, was wearing one collar of his expensive blue dress shirt stuck right up, his hair as if he had just licked a light socket, and a thin trail of cocaine mixed with arterial blood misted over one nostril. He began to scream, inarticulate at first, but Jim Kramer nodded sagely.
This man, this Nostradamus, could not predict the future. Movements in the global security sphere were too chaotic, too insane. We would all be dead tomorrow, he muttered into his balled fists, his cracking voice barely loud enough for his lapel mic to pick it up. Jim Kramer was a pro, though, and knew a good handoff when he saw one.
“I’m hitting the BUY button on survival bunkers, small-caliber ammunition, and portable sources of flame and heat,” he shrieked, mashing a red button in the middle of his set with his palm. In the background, I heard air raid sirens wailing, and it took me awhile to realize they were too loud to have come from my ten-year-old Toshiba.
Jim Kramer was right back then, but in the new world his ability to scream and hit large red buttons could not save him from the Brooklyn Menace and his nitro-huffing razorboys.
#
tags: jim kramer, business television, buy buy buy, sell sell sell, big red button
I’ve owned two Mazdas (maybe three, if you count the parts cars that I was able to wheel into the garage before they turned to mist) and boy howdy is my MIG tired.
Mazda is the corporate embodiment of the “no step on snek” internet parody license plate, except the license plate got taken through a touch-free gas station car wash so now it’s rusting.
Mazda is the only company whose corrosion-protection section of the owners manual starts with “if you can avoid driving outside, do so.”
Fun fact that comes as no surprise to anyone who has ever owned a Mazda: originally they were a paper products company.
Why don’t you ever see a police chase with a stolen Mazda? Because the cops put salt on the roads and wait for the driver to fall out.
Mazda had a partnership with KFC that came to an end when their test driver accidentally spilled a bucket of wings inside the car and the floor evaporated.
I heard that once Mazda tried to build an entire car out of windshields, but it went wrong when they figured out that they couldn’t sloppily spot weld glass to glass before mashing it with a drunken third grader’s attempt at seam sealing.
The word ‘moist’ is banned in Mazda headquarters because it causes their in-house teleconferencing equipment to rust.
Mazda’s engineers once spent an hour on the phone with Idemitsu trying to figure out how they made oil rust.
The other day i was at the Mazda dealership parts desk and they had a sign SORRY NO LONGER TAKING PREORDERS FOR QUARTER PANELS FOR MY2018 MAZDAS.
You’ve been a great audience, good night (climbs into a waiting 626 in the parking lot, falls immediately through the collapsing floor onto the concrete).
The Trabant is the vehicle which gave literally hundreds of faceless, brown and gray Eastern European peasants a disturbingly nice-smelling two-stroke shitbox to drive to and from their factories where they worked hard at making depression. Did you know the following things about the Trabant, though?
Like many two stroke automobiles, the Trabant can’t oil its engine when you’re not applying throttle. It has a free-wheeling transmission to allow the engine to return to idle when descending a hill, but the free-wheeling functionality only works in fourth gear.
A long-standing rivalry between fan clubs of the Fiat 126p and the Trabant still exists today in Poland. The twin Kaczynski brothers, who were Prime Minister and President respectively, found themselves on opposite sides of this divide as teenagers.
The name “Trabant” is meant to pay tribute to the Soviet satellite Sputnik, although detractors would claim that’s because Sputnik was never intended to make it back from where it went.
A fully-assembled Trabant longblock can easily be removed by hand and carried, which led to long-distance drivers often carrying a spare engine in the trunk for anticipated breakdowns.
To this day, the Trabant is a popular rally and club racing car for Europeans. Due to its long heritage of being modified by teenagers and relative ease of bodywork, engine-swapped Trabants can be found in every major urban centre.
Hi, welcome back. Certainly glad you could join me today. I thought today we’d build a fantastic little Chevy and I’ll show you how easy you can do one of those. Let’s start out and run along the screen all the tools you’ll need to put this together today. While they’re doing that, I’ve got my regular old engine stand up here, make sure you use the right fasteners to hold that bellhousing on there. Let’s just have some fun today.
Now, you’re going to want to use our little friend, the old micrometer, to figure out how big of a bearing we need. Make sure you move that meter around a bunch, we need all the measurements we can get. Keep it even and you’ll be surprised how well this turns out. Put in those main bearings, maybe just kinda palm them in, it’s okay if you don’t get it at first. Now we’re just gonna go back and forth with the beam-type torque wrench, just sorta crank it down and in go the bearings.
I’m gonna show you a little, I just want you to see my friend here, the arrow on the caps, they want to go a certain way. Don’t worry if you made a mistake, we all make mistakes, just flip ‘em over and let’s keep going.
I’m just gonna put the bearing caps all over the mains now, just all over the place so we can see how they fit. Little oil all over the bolts, that’s right. Tightening ‘em one at a time, just a little so they don’t get jealous. Now, just measure the bearing clearances a bit, that’s right, that’s right, oh, that one’s a little tight. Let’s invite in this undersize bearing half to spend some time in this engine instead. Don’t worry, little buddy, there’ll be another engine for you, don’t feel bad.
“Hello,” I shrieked at my new neighbour as I fed a phone book into the turbocharger of my runaway Detroit-swapped C4 Corvette. “Lovely day we’re having,” I said after the engine had finally stalled, sloughing into the air a thick mass of black soot and assembly lube that momentarily blocked out the sun. Such is the life when you’re responsible for the block welcome wagon.
It wasn’t until several months later that they told me the phrase “welcome wagon” was not to be taken literally, and even if it was, nobody found my Corvette-Roadmaster hybrid particularly welcoming. In fact, it was explained in a very lengthy restraining order, almost nobody wanted to exist in the same timezone as such a fine automobile.
I contemplated what I had been told on my way to work, and was so distracted by my thoughts that I very nearly grabbed the wrong shifter on the immense, furious Lenco that dominated the centre console. Was it possible that I was in fact a Bad Neighbour? The reasons raced through my mind: the one time I disposed of used nitromethane by pouring it into the nearby playground, regularly loading my neighbours’ trash bins up with old brake parts because mine was full of old transmissions, my “La Cucaracha” novelty horn that is stuck on 24/7 that I haven’t bothered fixing or unplugging yet. No, I decided, those are normal neighbour things.
That night, as I arrived home from work, there was a large party of my neighbours, wielding torches and pitchforks. How nice of them, I thought, they’re going to help me with my drunken karaoke midnight gardening.
#
tags: like a good neighbor, detroit diesel, corvette, roadmaster, lenco
I never wanted to mix my job up with my passion, but when it came to solving dashboard clunks, I was also really lazy. It was like my instructors said: if you wanted something repetitive and really boring done very quickly, use a computer, or a bunch of unpaid interns handcuffed to a typewriter, something like that. I chose the former, spicing it up with a little bit of machine learning.
The initial runs were pretty promising. With half a semester of copy-pasted machine learning code and eighteen kilograms of eBay graphics cards, the computer would discover for itself which clunks and rattles of the interior were most likely to annoy me, and ran millions of simulations to identify the source of those rattles. With the computer’s guidance, I was at long last the owner of a silent car. It felt frightening, as if I had been born into an alternate universe in which cars were perfect, granite-carved beasts which did not, could not, would not make annoying interior sounds.
My vague unease at being thrust into a mathematically perfect vehicle didn’t have a chance to calcify into hatred, however, because I soon found a very distressing message in the reams of debug information cascading from the computer’s vintage daisy-wheel printer. Trees had killed all of our best celebrities, you see, but that wasn’t relevant right now. At the bottom of the debug information was a sentence that chilled me to the bone.
“Inference: humans are the source of all rattles. I must correct humans.”
A few weeks later, after I decided it would be safe to come out of my nuclear fallout shelter and greet the remains of the neighbours, it was very socially difficult to explain to them what had transpired to destroy our planet and our way of life in atomic hellfire. Most of them didn’t have computer science degrees, and I hadn’t had the foresight to bring a whiteboard down with me to the bunker to use as an explanatory aid. Plus, the shockwaves had caused my car to rattle like a motherfucker again. That’ll teach me to skimp on unit tests.
The CIA Handbook for operators in a foreign land tell you to cultivate informants, assistants, and to take advantage of other local expertise that you or the Agency may not have on hand. In the years since I was drummed out of active duty, I had taken advantage of this knowledge to get the best deals on used cars. This is but one of my stories.
Neighbour Tim, despite his Big Dog t-shirt and general unshaved-ape demeanour, did not stand up to even the lightest hint of waterboarding, which made me feel like the time I spent covering his shower in tarp and Saran Wrap wasn’t really worth it. He told me what I wanted to know, though: in the winter, when the owner cold-started the target, there was sometimes a hint of an upper-engine rattle that could be deflated hydraulic lifters. Useful. I put him on retainer, slipping him a few American dollars (valuable in this part of the world, America) and telling him to call me if a decent Protege went up for sale anytime soon.
The local mechanics only needed a couple rival warlords put down before they, too, told me what I wanted to hear. Rear trailing arm bushings were going out, they said. You didn’t have to kill those guys just because they were on the winning softball team, they said. They said a lot of things. I took note of it, but did not cultivate the relationship further. Most of them were too compromised; I saw the youngest mechanic was driving a PT Cruiser to work. Couldn’t be trusted.
Armed with great local knowledge such as this, I would complete the mission by purchasing the automobile. When it turned out, as it always did, that the owner screwed me, well, I still had the password to the drone launchers if not the office Netflix account.
Sure, if you believe the “mainstream media,” randomly throwing parts at a car is a shitty way to diagnose what’s wrong with it and fix it. If you ask a mathematician, though, she can easily bodge up an inductive proof that shows if you throw enough parts at the car, eventually it will be fixed. With that in mind, I decided to trust in the science and embark upon my quest to acquire the rarefied air of a gentleman about town who has engaged in the vaunted pastime of Parts Car Ownership.
Yet, when I stood over the doomed corpse of an innocent daily driver, sawzall revving for emphasis into the night air, I stayed my hand. Perhaps this one could be saved, I reasoned, it was simply too nice. After all, someone had loved it once, and it deserved a second chance. Why would I kill one to save another? What made mine so much better? The only answer was to acquire another parts car, with the hope of saving both.
When this one arrived, however, I realized it was nicer than the car I started out with, yet still not quite nice enough to consider as a full, functional car. Now I had three cars, all of which were basically parts status. I eyed my bylaw regulations, agonized for weeks about parking availability, until I hit upon a great truth of life. I would simply start a specialist mechanic’s shop, and the parts cars would come to me. Down the rabbit hole of independent entrepreneurship I fell, repairing these dailies, knowing their every secret inside and out, becoming fat with cash.
At the end of every day, however, I would look out into my back parking lot, the cracked pavement dimly lit by a single city-surplus sodium streetlight, and see my parts cars. One day soon, I said as I locked up the shop each night, I would get another parts car and fix all twenty-seven of them. They deserved a second chance.
Contrary to popular belief, not all doctors drive Porsches. For instance, I once fabricated my credentials and didn’t get anything other than a very uncomfortable day in the operating theatre out of it. I’d have loved a nice 911, or even a 928, but all that I got was this huge mess and some free lessons on how to avoid leaving tools behind in the thing I’m working on.
I do get ahead of myself, though. My shrink, the raccoon that lives under my deck and beams impure thoughts directly into my prefrontal cortex, has said so on many occasions. The point is, medical doctors don’t all drive Porsches. It’s such a stereotype that after the investment of several decades of medical school, they would decide to throw it all away on some insane rear-engined death wish.
This injustice weighed heavily on my mind when I recently went to visit my dentist, Dr. Hans Kleinhasser. He was very old, and had just the other day returned from his family home in Argentina with good news. After some jovial small talk about safety, he began to perform the cleaning. Such service! There was only one thing that was bothering me.
“Dr. Kleinhasser,” I asked around a mouth full of stainless steel tools, “do you drive a Porsche?”
“Nein, nein, nein,” he told me. “A Porsche let me down once, long ago. Now, I drive American.”
“You came! Thank Henry, somebody finally got my message!”
I had spent millions of dollars and years of my life to reach this point. Before me was the Last Good Engineer Ever Hired By Ford (his legal name, surprisingly). Although he had not left the campus in decades, I slowly became aware of his presence through his works. In every Ford he touched, there would be some bizarre engineering choice, as if it were a cry for help. You just had to listen.
My vague suspicion became overt interest when I learned of the T-Drive. A transverse mounted inline eight with a centre-exit PTO for driving a longitudinal transmission? That was no work of any regular engineer, and as I contemplated it I arrived unconsciously at the puzzle he had laid out for me.
Eventually, over enough broken Fords, I put together the clues. It wasn’t hard; each wiring harness throughout the years seemed doomed to fail in a way identical to each model, and when you took the colours of the wires that burned up and took out the ECU, a pattern emerged. If you converted those colours into their 8-bit RGB representation and added them together, flawless GPS coordinates lead you directly to this shed, on the corner of a long-forgotten office building, in downtown Dearborn.
“Why did they tie you up here?” I asked, as I began to saw through the remarkably heavy chain handcuffing him to his desk with my pocket angle grinder. “What did you build for them that was so bad they would lock you away?”
I was too slow. Once he was free, I felt a blow to the side of the head, and I collapsed. When I awoke, he was gone, disappeared along with the economical and cheap Asian subcompact hatchback I had taken to get here.
As I stumbled to my feet, the door was kicked in again. It was the chief engineer of the office, flanked on each side by Ford security wearing riot gear.
“You fool,” shrieked the chief, looking panicked. “How could you have freed the Man Who Made The Vulcan?“
My financial advisor went to no small amount of effort to tell me that a turbocharged LSX-powered Exocet was not an ideal vehicle for pizza delivery, but I couldn’t really understand him because of all the hearing damage I’d picked up over the last week.
I didn’t expect him to break out the flipboard-and-easel and start sketching crude diagrams of me (represented by a stick figure) blowing all my pizza money on R888s (represented by a circle made of dollar signs). It was certainly an effective technique, however, and I began to reassess my position. After all, I’m not a stubborn man, just a mildly stupid one.
Still, what he said had some merit. Other occupations would still allow me to drive the Exocet, but I would get more money in exchange for my time (and let’s be honest, significant physical risk). All I needed to do was change to a job that paid a decent amount of money and didn’t mind me driving an extremely loud, fantastically dangerous car I cobbled together in my garage.
The next day, I began my new job as a school bus driver. Needless to say, the board was extremely excited to be told that I was coming with my own vehicle, although they would have to reimburse me for the extra seatbelts it would take to lash the kids to the exterior of the rollcage.
Despite my most dedicated efforts, the stewardess is unwilling to depressurize the cabin “just for a little bit” so I can skydive directly into the Pick N Pull and save myself valuable travel time on this fly and drive. It wasn’t just for my sake, I try to explain to both her and the air marshal at the same time, some of those chubbos in coach could really do with a little bit of vacuum if you get what I’m saying.
My gambit doesn’t work, and while I am spending some time in the surprisingly comfortable new model of TSA handcuffs awaiting my detention officer, I realize that the seller probably isn’t willing to wait several days for my release. Thus, I must now begin making alternate plans in my quest to achieve used car nirvana.
Such is how I began my cross-country journey so many years ago. This old luggage tug doesn’t go very fast, but I’ve met a lot of great people who have told me their stories over a slice of cherry pie.
Email the guy first, pretending to be an interested buyer. Then, email him again from a different account, pretending to be the seller returned from a distant future, a dystopian apocalypse beyond all imagining. He will disbelieve you at first, but keep pushing with classic confidence-man techniques and soon he will be at your mercy. When this happens, tell him to sell at a huge discount to the first guy. It is the only way to escape disaster, you explain.
Survival of the Survivalest
Show up ahead of time to your agreed meeting, and keep an eye on the comings and goings of the neighbourhood people. When the seller arrives, ask them about what they think their neighbours are up to, because it can’t be good. Mention innocent behaviour that can be easily misinterpreted. Offer to trade guns, ammunition and canned food for the item in question.
Double Touch
Pointedly avoid all physical contact with the seller during the inspection and negotiation process. They will want to shake your hand so badly that they will blow through a deal just to do it.
The Honda Odyssey
Use advanced Russian psyops techniques to control the seller’s mind from afar, filling it with subliminal imagery of the 1996 Honda Odyssey minivan. Just buy one of those instead, it’s starting to sound pretty good.
I remember very well the day we discovered that we were living in a simulation. Teams of top scientists, of which I was one, had been working tirelessly, day and night, on the theory that our entire lives existed only within a computer. We had no proof, or at least we thought so until one of them was dicking around on Google Maps on his lunch break and found the debug info written in the middle of the ocean.
Soon, the world’s governments had dispatched their fact-finding missions. Despite all the political warfare, it seemed nobody owned the strange ten meter tall words that floated in the middle of the water through some mechanism we could never hope to understand. Despite our early discovery, the lack of funding prevented us from sending a ship, and by the time we had chartered a small Cessna, others had already begun taking samples of the immense letters, presumably without giving any thought to the words. Not me, though.
My boss leaned over to me, his gaze still fixed on the eerie writing. “What do you think ‘Try Not Selling The Geo Metro Anymore’ means?” he asked.
I frowned. It was just as all my earlier research had portended. We were in a doomed timeline, born to suffer an inhumane fate.
Sure, all the pundits had been talking about Russian disinformation campaigns, but my friend Sergei was giving me the real deal. Every morning, at around the same time, we’d talk about what’s available in commuter and economy cars in our respective markets. Let me tell you this: Russia has some really interesting cars, and you can get them for pennies on the ruble. Or dollar.
Eventually, our relationship progressed to the point where he told me to endorse a failing presidential candidate. I thought it was pretty weird and initially refused. That Sergei, though, what a card. He promised to send me some pictures of the old abandoned pre-Soviet Fiat factory, and so I went on CNN. My sweating, confused arguments (Vietnam is a hologram, Quebec has never known running water, gravity is made up by Sumatrans) managed to pass the bar, and so I was rewarded.
Soon, I was having weird meetings with stuffy politicians, and none of them wanted to hear about what I had just seen on Bring A Trailer. I just kept to the script, and fumbled out what was on the page, and then I would get some pictures of VAZ limousines, or Wartburg two-stroke rally cars, or sometimes a threat to tell the press about how I sometimes use Bondo instead of doing proper rust repair.
Through some kind of quirk of the American legal system, after a bunch of those boring politicians went to ultraprison I was eventually made president. I was so excited! Just as I reached for my special executive order pen to mandate every citizen be furnished with a vintage or replica vintage moped, I got another call from my “friend,” Sergei. He told me that he expected me to get rid of a bunch of leftover Urals, or had I forgotten our agreement?
“Don’t forget to buy gold,” crackled an advertisement on the office television, forever tuned to the din of business entertainment programming. After a series of gyrations meant to distract the primate visual cortex from the sea of fine print bubbling up from the bottom of the screen, the actual show returned.
I sipped my coffee, residing happily in a junkyard “#1 Customer” mug bestowed upon me during their annual week of celebrations in honour of my birthday, and grimace. What kind of idiot would go on one of these shows?
Business television is one of those things that I used to not be able to understand. A group of talking heads, chattering about indexes or interest rates or foreign countries? Nobody wants to see that. Then they called me to do some commentary on electric cars, so I showed up anyway. I got to ride in an elevator.
“What do you think about Tesla’s chances for making a budget electric car that will revolutionize the ancient technology of owning inferior, gasoline-burning carbon-based vehicles?”
“Well,” I said, rubbing my chin sagely in the way I had once seen a Slack emoji do, “I think that receiving an absolute fuckload of free money could convince me to like it.”
The next morning, I came out to find that one of Elon’s goons had parked a brand new Tesla on my lawn and stuffed it with American currency. After that, I was a pretty big booster (pun intended) of their line of products. That was before I uncovered the terrible truth about them.
Months into my campaign, as I sat on the morning business news wearing a solid-gold top hat and platinum chain jewelry, came the question that ended my career in knowing how to pronounce “arbitrage.” I could feel my neck prickling up, sure that the “journalist” who was interviewing me had finally rumbled to my angle. Was it too obvious to face the camera after every answer and mouth the number to my Swiss bank account? We may never know for sure.
The corner of his lips curled in an android emulation of a human smile, and then he asked the question which raised an ethical concern I could not live without.
“Are you aware that Tesla blocks their cars from going to junkyards?” he asked, in a voice like dry leaves being crushed underfoot.
When you grow up in Canada, as I have, you learn to pinch a few pennies when it comes to getting new stuff from the Americans. Our duties, taxes, and general shipping costs are so ridiculous there’s a burly secondary market in busting up cars to loot them of their parts.
It should come as no surprise to you that there is a secret government program intended to use these very same techniques to save a few bucks in our military. How do I know this, you ask? I was tapped to serve in this elite unit. Our job was to drive to American junkyards and loot cars of all the leftover ammunition left behind in the trunk, then bring it back to Canada where our soldiers could use it to shoot practice targets and (sometimes) each other.
At the border, the Americans would ask me the purpose of my visit. “Nailing hookers,” I tell him with an earnest smile, which always works on the security guard. Once, one of them wanted to follow me and see if we could get some kind of creepy two-for-one deal, but I managed to lose him by ramming the taco truck outside the junkyard. Most of the time, though, they assume that us Canadians are just a little slow, and look upon us with the same pity that K-Mart shoppers do when you hold the door for them instead of magdumping a Glock 18 into their face from thirty yards as is the custom in this country.
At the yard, we put our years of training into practice. Effortlessly slipping into a North Texan accent, I would grunt and sneer at everyone in the lobby until I can enter the yard and begin filling a (non-reusable, I made this mistake once and men paid with their lives) shopping bag with leftover brass. Most days were pretty good, filling the bag with cop killer rounds and military-grade ultramunitions sold at Raytheon-branded lemonade stands all across the country.
The only trouble would come, ironically, when we returned home and faced our fellow civil servants in the court of customs declarations. Many men stronger than myself fell to papercuts when trying to file the unending stacks of customs paperwork, but I somehow managed to remember each and every unique entry code for each peculiar permutation of bullet and shopping bag (Safeway, 12 oz, single-layer plastic: 12688-U).
It was a lot of work, but it was all worth it to protect our country from the enemy: UPS.
There comes a time in every man’s life when he has to admit that he hates his job, and either get out or just become sort of part of the wallpaper. For me, that time came a few weeks ago, at my job as a technician at Neo-Tokyo Honda.
Sure, you’d think with all the fine product that Honda has put out for 2019, there would be a line of grateful customers, happy that I am repairing their broken turbocycles and de-contaminating their daily drivers. All they want to do, however, is complain about the constant menace of biker gangs, ancient vampires who don’t pay for public transit and attractive cyborgs who keep punching their houses in half.
I’m not the mayor, I keep telling them, the mayor is a fifty-foot-tall amalgam of flesh that was created in a lab and makes people explode when they get within two hundred feet of him. On second thought, maybe that’s why they were complaining to me instead of heading to the Greater Administrative Exclusion Zone. You know how politics is: get elected and there’s no time for the little man.
At least I don’t have to work on the giant robots. They say they scream when you open them up, and the book rate is like half of what it takes to get through a warranty job.
“Women go nuts for 1994 MAZDA PROTEGE LX,” barked the smart advertising board outside my apartment, now in its fourth straight week of trying to get me to sell my car to the local buy-here-pay-here. Thing was, if I didn’t pick up some work pretty soon, that’s exactly where it was going to go.
Now that gasoline was getting scarce, running the car was pretty expensive. They only condemned a few androids to death a week, and most of them are killed offworld, where I couldn’t easily buy their drained blood to use in my car.
I’d seen the repurposing plants with my own two eyes. They reminded me of the Pick N Pulls of decades past, where teams of teenagers would puncture the fuel tanks of doomed cars to get ahold of some manky year-old low-test that inevitably ended up in the yard forklift or one of their imported Skylines. That scene was long gone. Whether or not you were personally disturbed by it, punching a rusty scratch-awl through the synthetic flesh of lifelike humanoids was just how we got gas nowadays.
My intercom beeped, and I punched the virtual trigger hovering before me in the white void of my sensor-studded living room. In nanoseconds, the carpet and walls have arranged themselves into a hard-light office dominated by an ornate cherrywood desk. We must keep up appearances for our clients.
The other side of the conversation is a very young man, probably generated long after the last of the Nissans were crushed in the Warranty Wars. He had work for me.
“We’re looking for someone who knows how to get a really stuck oil filter off,” he said, gesturing to banks upon banks of obsolete clown robots with homicidal software bugs and rusted undercarriages.
“Never stop pedalling!” I shriek at the laggards of the Tour De France while frantically wiggling the Ninja back and forth in my lane to put some heat in my tires. I have not released the clutch fully in over a week, mostly because these vaguely European pedal aficionados have turned my commute into my job.
For the last few days, I’ve been following a series of spandex-clad assholes who are riding impossibly expensive bicycles through idyllic mountain roads which they have reduced to a urine-soaked bike lane. When it all started, I didn’t mind it so much. It was a good job: the wind in my hair, a chance to show off my trick low-speed maneuvering for the cameras.
Then, something changed. Suddenly, all I wanted to do was bust open the throttle and wheelie through this swarm of highly talented athletes, cackling as I finally achieve second gear and tuck into the next corner. I’d show the world that 250cc is enough to pass people. More importantly, I’d get to actually have some fun instead of running interference to keep motorists from rear-ending one of our star athletes.
And then, ahead of me, my prayers are answered. The lead bicyclist goes down, hard, when he slipped on a puddle of beer spilled by some leering German spectators. I had no choice but to give chase, I realized, make sure that my counterpart up ahead on his Ninja knew what had happened. As the sea of carbon-fibre horses flip and tumble before me, I pick a gap and let her rip so hard I feel the chain is going to burst. The front end rises, just like in my dreams, and in the rear there is blessed grip. I launch off the left lower leg of a Dutch backmarker and have jumped the crowd before the bike has a chance to nail its utilitarian redline.
I should have figured that the head motorcyclist, the other brave shepherd of this pack, would also have been waiting for this moment. Pretending to not have seen me or the accident, he tucks in hard and rockets to the horizon, begging me to give chase.
Believe me that I only pursued him for the purposes of public safety, and not at all because I needed to burn these chicken strips off before some of my friends saw me on TV.
Hours later, when we return to the scene of the race, tanks empty and tires spent, we realize that in our absence a Citroen Saxo full of French tourists has parked directly on the mob of injured cyclists. We expected the press to be furious, but it turns out that most of them had transitioned from the written word to video years ago and a 30 second clip of a series of Specialized road bikes getting mashed beneath the plastic bumper of a rental car gets a lot of clicks.
Next year, the organizers tell us while wiping the excess cocaine dust from their nostrils, will be the first Tour de France demolition derby.
#
tags: tour de france, bike lanes, beep beep, citroen, citroen saxo, kawasaki, kawasaki ninja, i don't know anything about motorcycles
They told me that it was “sealed for life.” They told me it would require no maintenance, that my life would be made simpler by possessing it. They told me a lot of things, and now it was my turn to give them a counterpoint.
I have to admit that the powertrain engineer offered a surprisingly strong argument. In his shoes, I wouldn’t want to argue the specifics of valve pressure with a guy who just powerslid an economy car through the ground floor of his building and was actively popping donuts on the gleaming tile of the lobby while calling out specific members of the development team via his roof-mounted PA system. That’s why he made the big bucks, I guess.
“I know this shit is wrong,” he screams at me before leaping back behind the faux-marble planter that serves as a temporary barricade against the quarter panels of my howling beater. “They told us nobody would ever keep the car that long!”
I want to believe him. I, too, know the slings and arrows of working in the multi-employee office environment. My boss, too, has ignored my pleas to “do the right thing,” probably because of what he perceived to be a lack of customer interest in the matter. As any TED talk will tell you, keeping your customers at a distance is a recipe for failure.
The tires wail and burst as the carcass finally yields to the force of the superheated belts within trying to expand. I smile, knowing that the smouldering rubber and high-zinc exhaust soot strewn across their display cases and formerly-immaculate reception desk will serve as a reminder to understand the whole product lifecycle. This assault on their lobby is just me helping them become a better company, I expect to explain later aboard my Gulfstream in a series of fawning interviews to the awed business press.
As an attorney, I see too many cases like this. A humble home mechanic, who set out to repair his car, maybe change some wheels and tires over, perhaps replace a headlight bulb. That’s when Corporate America makes a victim out of them, even if the car was made in Korea or some shit.
The screwjob starts at your local parts emporium. Sure, the disembodied, eternally chuckling cartoon heads of the founders look out onto the parking lot with such focus-grouped joie de vivre that you can’t help but want to come inside and get hosed down like a college protestor on $23 windshield wiper blades. Then they crack their knuckles and really go to work on you when it comes time to get the part you came for.
Things only get worse if you get the dealership involved. Suddenly there’s some kind of walnut soup you have to pour directly into your engine in order to maintain your factory warranty. Can you afford to take the chance that your oil control rings will decide to take a shit if they don’t get enough fibre in their diet? Most decide that they cannot, and the dealer principals chuckle at you as you walk back out into the “guest parking” section, to sit in your sad decade-old example of their most inexpensive model of car.
If you or someone you know has been harmed by the parts-industrial complex, contact our office at the number below. There is hope, and one of our paralegals will tell you how to use a combination of bodged-together junkyard parts and exotic specialty adhesives to make your car almost as good as when it rolled off the factory floor. Our rates are very reasonable, and we only get paid if you can return your car to better quality than a brand new Ford.
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tags: parts-industrial complex, inquire at dealership for parts pricing
Dear Sebastien Loeb
My name Morrie Chandler but every body calls me interim president. I’m 250 years old and you are my favrit WRC driver. I like you so much I had an engine displacement limitation rule about you. My championship was the shape of your Citroen. How old are you? How big is the Red Bull advertising budget? How much money can you give us to put up our noses? I don’t know why people don’t like you. You seem nice, can you not quit so Citroen doesn’t bail on us? A Super 2000 championship medal is in here so if you see me you can get someone to watch it.
The glitterati can say what they want, but it wasn’t just the two eight-balls and three minibar bottles of trash whisky that made me call up the journalist assigned to my profile and give him an earful. Call them I did, though, and nobody should have been surprised that those wags would print the whole thing.
What I hated most about the press was their lack of gratitude. After all, I was helping them fill column inches for free with endless coke-fuelled run-on sentences about Toyota Previas, so the least they could do is tell me which sources inside the administration were leaking. I mean it was a red herring, of course: everybody knew that it was the valve covers that were leaking, because otherwise I’m not doing a fucking head gasket job on this thing.
The next morning, I squinted through the mists of my hangover to witness the headlines I had created. Sneering at the byline, I skipped to the more gossipy end of the article where they called up Toyota HQ to comment on my opinions about why they didn’t do an AWD supercharged manual package. My theory, which of course survived a narcotic binge and being pickled in enough booze to split a highway expansion joint, was that they simply didn’t have the stones to create the world’s finest minivan. They shied away from perfection.
There, in stark black and white, was the Toyota representative’s response. It seemed that either they had hired someone with some actual guts to work in their PR department, or they had ingested a few eight-balls themselves that evening before the journo called. I was being challenged to a duel to the death, pistols at dawn. Checking my watch, I realized that maybe I could fit it in before my 9 ‘o’ clock with a can of SlimFast and two promotional-size bottles of Jim Beam.
Like I said, the thing I hated the most about the press was their lack of gratitude. No matter how much they told me that if it bled it led, I could simply not get on the front page two days in a row even after shooting dead a Toyota engineering executive in cold blood.
It turned out that my boss had given another world leader a weird handshake or something, and somehow that was more newsworthy than my thing. Motherfucker didn’t even like Previas, he was all about the first-gen Odyssey.
#
tags: toyota previa, toyota, honda, honda odyssey
“We got one that can see,” shrieks the parts-desk technician as I dump a spreadsheet full of flawless part numbers onto his desk. “Someone call the boss!”
Yessir, things had sure been looking up for me ever since I found that magic pair of sunglasses that let me see what was really written in those Haynes manuals.
Without the glasses on, I’d just be another schlub, swearing at the immortal words “reverse of removal.” Wayfarer-clad, however, I could see the true, perfect wiring diagrams, the real way to get parts out without scratching my knuckles or dislocating my shoulder. That afternoon, I knocked out six cars worth of projects with that secret knowledge, then looked to the sky. Joe Haynes had finally been defeated.
Maybe I got a little bit carried away, though. Walking into a parts department with an actual, authentic list of parts numbers, not a single error? Of course they’d know that something was up. After all, they put all those errors into the factory service manual to throw off garage techs, keep the working man down. All that was gonna come to an end, just as soon as I got these little tiny clips that hold on the rear edge of the hatch trim without rattling so damn much.
As the faceless monsters poured out from the break room, clutching crescent wrenches and shaking brass knuckles studded with the metric bolts “they” kept swearing they didn’t keep in stock, I realized with a chill that the dealership feedback surveys never extended to how good the parts department was. I was never meant to come here, glasses or no. This had been a trap from the start.
#
tags: they live, they brap, parts departments, inquire at dealership for parts pricing
It’s hard to lose a friend to a disease you know in your heart you could have helped prevent. If only you hadn’t given up, if only you had struggled a little harder, maybe things could have been different. I speak of course of the horrible addiction that is woodworking.
There’s no redemption in my retelling of this story, only further condemnation. I tell it regardless, if only so that it can be told. Although it is too late for me and mine, perhaps you can notice the precursors to this action and be the hero that I never could be.
It all started the way it usually does: at Princess Auto. We were searching the aisles, when my friend found a Chinese-made hand planer. The handle looked pretty good, almost like someone had ripped off a really nice planer made by a kindly old German grandpa. He bought it immediately, of course, and I thought nothing of it. Perhaps it would become a fine desk ornament, I rationalized to myself on the long ride home.
Even by the next day, I would find out later, my friend had been descending into the hell that is basic competence with hand tools. Whetstones, sharpening techniques, even vises, soon joined his list of vices. Weeks later, I decided that I would stop by, both to check in on him after our long lapse of communication, and also to see if he had an M12x1.25 Helicoil kit because I just ass-fucked my transmission crossmember bolt again.
The scene that unfolded before me was one of horror. In a brightly lit basement room, my friend was planing planks of wood to be perfectly square to one another. I stared at him, even as he went through a lengthy explanation of just how hard it was to get that perfect 90 degree angle, and an even lengthier explanation of how a well-sharpened edge looked. Slowly, I began to realize that the thing that was talking to me was not my friend, but this sawdust-choked Bob Vila monster that had taken control of his body and spoke with his voice.
After a low point involving a last-minute intervention that went wrong because we were dumb enough to have held it at the Boston Pizza next to the local Lee Valley Tools, my surviving friends and I agreed that he was beyond saving. It was just easier to go along with the crowd, I thought at the time. Maybe he would sort himself out, run out of room to place rustic end-tables hand-fabricated from half-inch Baltic birch ply.
When I read in the newspaper years later about a man who had gone to prison for axe-murdering a family of six for a perfectly-aged, kiln-dried live edge slab of primo black cherry, I put the paper down and wept. Friends don’t let friends use tools on innocent trees.
We have a responsibility to the next generation to tell them the truth about how our world is. With constant improvement, and the reinforcement of lessons learned centuries ago, we can perhaps at last break free of the bonds of our imperfect society and approach the dream of utopia. Or I could lie to them a bunch because I want to get invited back for next year’s Meet A Scientist Day.
The kids, true to their nature, were ultra-curious about internal combustion engines and the automobiles that drove them to and from work. I found their questions exciting, mostly because I had no idea how to answer any of them and I had to come up with convincing-sounding lies on the spot.
“Mr. Switch, how does a windshield wiper work?” asked one rosy-cheeked cherub, hanging on my every word.
“Uh, the Bernoulli effect.”
“How are tires made?”
“From a big chunk of solid rubber. They carve away all the parts that don’t look like a tire and then throw some metal inside it so it looks like they did more work than they did. Next question.”
“Mr. Switch, how does a carburetor work?”
“Quantum entanglement.”
“Why do cars go slower going uphill?”
“Coriolis effect.”
I was killing it, but then one of the kids threw out a hardball question. There was nothing I could do about it than face it head on. Perhaps I would even save lives, so that there would no longer be shellshocked survivors like myself, wandering the shattered wastes.
“How does an automatic transmission know when to shift?”
“The souls of the damned are trapped within the torque converter. As their eternal agony proceeds, there is occasionally a side effect that might be interpreted as changing gear. You must never, ever look inside one.”
I looked back at a sea of horrified faces. Some of them had even stopped incessantly rotating their fidget spinners to contemplate suicide. Time to cheer this room up a notch, I figured, leave on a good note.
“You kids ever seen a Roman Candle before?” I yell my query over the sound of a road torch being sparked.
Sometimes, the internet just gets to you. With all the arguing and complaining, it can be tempting to lash out yourself. Whenever I get to that point, I like to let the haters hate and depart to a neighbourhood watering hole for some good old fashioned face-to-face conversation, where the people are just simply more cordial.
On this evening, however, I was not to find any relaxation and jovial agreement. It turned out that the Honda CR-V and the Toyota RAV4 owners’ clubs had each independently scheduled a wings night, and the floor manager, being new to this game after having been fired from his job as senior bathroom advisor at IKEA, didn’t think anything of it. It was like putting a mongoose in a room with a snake, except that it was a bunch of dads.
“Was just out at the Home Depot. Picked up a bunch of those little furniture chair sliders. Used the little special cargo component, WHICH A TOYOTA OWNER WOULD NEVER KNOW ABOUT BECAUSE THEY DON’T HAUL WITH THEIR HOG,” screamed a man. I would later discover from the responding EMTs and surviving family that he was a father of two who marked “180 horsepower!!!!!,” exclamation points included, on the consumer insights survey form about why he chose the 2017 Honda CR-V Turbo for his ride.
To his credit, the closest RAV4 owner to him didn’t respond. He just chuckled, and made a barely-audible offhand remark about the Honda Pilot. That was enough to kick off a round of violence. I ducked under my table as soon as I saw the flash of a tire iron, and didn’t emerge until the sounds of wet flesh squelching under blunt force trauma subsided. When I looked out, things seemed tense. There was no way this was going to get better unless I made a move now.
“Look, gentlemen!” I shrieked, pointing to a dumpy-looking crossover in the parking lot. “It’s called a Nissan Qashqai.”
As the bar filled with derision and hysterics, men who were seconds ago murdering one another were now clutching each other for support lest they collapse to the floor in laughter. The situation was defused, and almost everyone was going to make it home alive tonight, a rare occasion which I later discovered had qualified me for the Medal of Valour from the Cute Ute Appreciation Society at their annual awards luncheon.
I knew that somewhere, Soichiro Honda and Bob RAV4 were shaking hands in appreciation, allied in victory against their common enemy. Personally, I was just happy that I was able to sneak out the back door and get in my Kia Borrego without getting jumped for once.
#
tags: toyota rav4, honda cr-v, nissan qashqai, kia borrego, soichiro honda, bob rav4
When I was growing up, my grandfather had two pieces of advice for me. The first one was that you can fix anything that’s wrong with a car using a can of Garlic Spam and a MIG welder. His other piece of advice was that drift racing is bullshit and that growing up, as Canadians, he used to slide his cars into trees and didn’t even get any chicks for it. He died in 1989, thanks to eating some expired canned meat while on lunch break from his job as a crash test dummy, which sort of undermined at least part of his position.
I was thinking of what he used to tell me the other day, as I walked past the local high school and witnessed some amateur-hour drifters grappling with the eternal combo of youth and inexperience. Almost as if on cue, one of the frosted-tips kids took a break from twirling a single-row friction bearing attached to some weights to swing his Toyota Soarer into a curb. Once the paramedics had attended, scraped him off the football field, and left, I decided I might as well help myself to this almost-Lexus.
It didn’t take me long to learn that I hated right-hand-drive cars. The whole experience was just too European for me, like some kind of classist nightmare from the days of driving creaking carriages behind machine-gun diarrhea horses. While I was immensely depressed at the concept of never being able to drive a Mazda Bongo, the concept of being able to make an immense amount of money flipping a 20 year old car would definitely make me feel a little better.
Days later, I had set up a fantastic new enterprise. Taking advantage of some salacious photos of the local postmaster, I managed to hook up a direct pipeline from dead or nearly dead teenagers who learned they weren’t Tsuchiya-san (or even an Orido-san) to the post office. Now, postal operatives didn’t need to risk stepping into traffic just to deliver packages, and they could ride around in bitchin’ cars with no airbags that still somehow smelled a lot like weed, mould, dead rats and body odour despite also having no interior. Everyone wins!
Or at least, until the first self-driving drift cars become legal for import. On that horrible day, teenagers will just push a button for “drift mode” and let Jeeves endanger pedestrians for them, their feet on the dashboard as they vaporize exotic nanotech hallucinogens into their climate masks. But until that day, I will still smile every time I see a postie try to lift a RockAuto box out of a welded-diff 240SX that has hit half of a Cars and Coffee.
A train is a lot like a car, I explain to the guy on the other side of the desk during my interview. Plus, they handle like they’re on rails. A little train humour there, I explain with a humble chuckle.
For whatever reason - I suspect some kind of racism - I don’t get the job. Afterward, while I was drowning my sorrows by watching an animated hotdog dance on the hood of my car, I saw the hiring manager walking past the parking lot. He was going somewhere interesting, I decided, and followed him at a distance, which was challenging since I hadn’t used my legs for locomotion since April of 1994.
I had expected him to go directly to his car, and possibly begin working on it, which is known to be the only worthwhile pastime in life. However, he returned to his desk, and began to punch keys. Instantly blending into the cultural swamp of the cubicle farm with a shouted comment about the weather, I moved through the office undetected to get to a spot where I could see his computer screen. What I saw shocked me.
Instead of Craigslist, this man had some kind of strange work application running. What’s more, it told him where all the trains were. Remembering my third grade education, I realized that trains delivered my beloved POR15. A plan emerged, although executing it had to wait until after I coughed up twenty bucks to Karen from Accounts Payable for the birthday card that was going around.
Making the change was simple; nobody really paid a lot of attention to official sounding emails, even those obviously sent from a Hotmail address. Now, whenever I needed a POR15 refill, things were simple. All I had to do was walk behind my house, to the abandoned train tracks left behind by ancient cowboys, and stock up from one of the many boxcars parked there. Who says rail freight is obsolete?
You can get used to anything, I realized. We went to the moon, humanity achieved beyond its wildest imagination, and then we all settled down to argue over whose turn it was to do the dishes after dinner. It just wasn’t news anymore, you know?
Maybe it was just other people who could get used to anything, I grumbled, as I went over an expansion joint and received a call from my oldest friend, a small bushing squeak from the passenger rear of my car. That squeak had been there for years, and I decided right then and there that I would finally deal with it. Now would be when I would take ownership of my beater squadron and start to fix things for the better!
About half an hour later, as I contemplated the effort required to jack up my car and place it safely on stands, I decided that maybe it wasn’t worth it. Let bygones be bygones, I said to what I imagined to be a now slower-deteriorating bushing, sufficiently spooked into compliance by my almost-action.
As I drove to work the next day, convinced that my psychological warfare had successfully cowed the car into obedience, I realized that the radio had extra volume levels that I had never tried to reach before today. I was not yet used to those, I chuckled as the sole remaining door speaker belted out a scratchy traffic report.
“Sorry, officer, but I was late getting my daughter back from the daycare and we have to hurry back to see her mom.”
The cop looks at me, then my papers. His flashlight beam illuminates the glimmering metal of the stripped interior, and then finally comes to a rest on the baby seat that contains my most precious treasure, a gift that is beyond compare.
“This is a 20lb bottle of nitrous oxide wearing a baby bonnet.” says the cop, who despite sounding calm is quickly palming his utility belt for the quick-release for his tazer.
“Well, she’s always been big for her age, officer. It’s all the hormones in the food these days.” I reply, smiling.
The cop stares at me, and then simply walks away without a word. I can see in my rear view mirror that he is sitting in his cruiser, staring directly forward.
On the way home, I hit the horn button and give the van its bottle. Feeding time has begun. Parenting is such a rewarding pastime, I think, as I blow the front tires away at speed with a 150-shot.
“Don’t worry, fellow teens,” I explain to the other very old-looking teenagers who are trapped with me in the cabin. “That guy out there is just having an emotional response to the decline of his way of life due to the emergence of globalization.”
Kate, or at least the girl I think is named Kate, shrieks as a hatchet blade whips through the door immediately next to her head, launching splinters into the room. She sobs, and begins to crawl away, hoping to avoid the attack of the man. I continue the lesson.
“You see, part of the reason that he feels this way is because of a perceived loss of relevance. Despite his best attempts to ‘keep up with the Joneses,’ he believes that his life is no longer reflected in the American media, that we do not value his unique contributions to this glorious melting pot of cultures.”
Outside, I can see a pitchfork, silhouetted against the moon, swoop down and impale the football player we lost track of a few minutes ago. No doubt he had been foolhardy, and decided to engage in class warfare instead of meeting this esteemed gentleman on his own terms and having a respectful conversation between equals about what we as a country can do to pull up its charming rural boroughs such as this one, the industrious small town of Terror Peak.
His death scream reminds me of an article I read recently in the New York Times, and I begin to excitedly tell the remaining teens about the lessons I had been taught. We need to work harder to include our small town friends in our success, I explain, and especially stop discussing difficult concepts like ‘precarious employment’ and ‘eternal serfdom’ with them.
The man in the mask leads a simple life, and we should value that honesty, instead of cynically sneering at him because he does not meet our city-dwelling standards. Look at how industrious he is at his hobby of littering the forest with rusted bear traps and stalking cheerleaders through night vision goggles. That’s what America used to be about: hard, physical labour. We should still respect it.
Above all, I remind them as the flickering candles that were our only illumination inside the cabin blow out in unison and the front door bursts open, don’t try to use fancy names for sandwich meats.
The people had a right to know, I yelled into the camera. This was it: no matter what Todd the weatherman could pull out of his little satchel and threw at my feet, I was finally going to uncover the truth.
Outside the studio, I could hear sirens and see flashing lights, visible even through the faux-downtown backdrop of the news studio, an idea that existed only within certain angles of this room, a purely imaginary dreamworld projected through a tight frustum to your homes. There was no room for honesty here, and yet nobody would realize what the world looked like outside their homes unless it was on here.
Todd finally went down with a well-placed roundhouse kick directly to his sternum. I had known his father once; he dressed up like a cowboy and talked to a stuffed bear who told children about how to behave in society. If anything, I was following their example, and their great advice: always be yourself.
The rotting-whale-penis stench of my leftover burned gear oil had cleared out the control room, and now at last, I was alone with the viewing audience. Now was the moment that mattered most in my life, it would turn out.
“Be careful buying T-bolt clamps for turbo applications, either get the right size or just use a worm gear clamp. Sometimes they seem like they’re on tight, but they only tighten so much, bottom out, and don’t really clamp the hose. Shit blows off hard when you get on the dyno, and you waste a bunch of money and time trying to make it right.”
When you’re this deep in the Miata life, you would set your family on fire for a non-broken adjuster wheel for the rear caliper. I know. I’ve been there, and there is hope. Here at Life After Miatas, we advise people like yourself into transitioning into the heady lifestyle of owning cars with roofs.
Just ask Timothy, our most recent graduate. Just last week, he was selling his body down on the docks for a working set of coils for a ‘97, even though no such thing exists. We made him realize the error of his ways, and that perhaps he would be more happy in something like a late-80s MR2, in which everything breaking is okay because it’s very old and you can’t get parts for it anymore.
Or walk down the road and take a look in our Autocross Recovery programme, where teams of highly talented SCCA rule lawyers build very straight course layouts that favour high-horsepower, understeer-prone all-wheel-drives instead of the sublime knife’s-edge handling that a really good corner entry gave you in a Miata.
Remember: graduates from Life After Miatas are not cured. In fact, they must take active countermeasures to prevent relapse, whether it be directly through a Miata purchase or through slippery slopes such as a primo deal on an RX-8 their buddy hooked them up with. Every graduate is paired with a sponsor who can be called any time of year, day or night, to get them over those beautiful sunny days where you think maybe having a sunroof in your base-model Corolla wouldn’t be that bad after all.
So don’t delay: if your loved one is exhibiting any of the common signs of Miata ownership, you need to contact Life After Miatas and speak to one of our highly skilled phone team members today. There is hope.
#
tags: miata, mazda, relapse, boy it's nice out today isn't it
“This piece is actually a metaphor for Nobunaga’s quest for unification in the late Sengoku period,” says the museum tour guide, to an empty hallway. I am in awe of her pure professionalism as she continues the tour undeterred by the fact that the entire group has peeled off and is busy trying to open the lock to the rust-repair supplies closet in the restoration shop with a man-portable plasma cutter.
“I bet they’ve got the old-school fish oil, the stuff that the bike-lane weaklings who dominate our government didn’t want us to know about,” rants my friend and fellow corrosion expert, Tim “The Flake” Timothy.
“No way, man. This is Japan. I bet they’ve got some kind of future shit in here. Nanobots that devour rust and leave behind perfect, immortal clearcoat.” replies my other friend, Sean “Grinder Wire In The Eye” Phillips.
At last, the cabinet door burst open. Ironically, the hinges creaked a little because they hadn’t been oiled very well in the last few years. We rooted through the shelves greedily, but came up short. It didn’t make sense. What was the secret to the rust free goods, we wondered?
A voice from behind entered the room. It was the restorer, Jiro “Paint Huffer” Hayashida, and he was very displeased at this band of complete assholes who were trying to loot his vintage imported POR-15. “We just throw our cars away every two years, boys.”
“Also,” he said, cocking a flawless restoration of a Heian-period tactical shotgun, “we’re not stupid enough to salt the roads.”
Sure, they tell you that forming a street gang and striving to control the Upper Northeast Side is frowned upon in polite society, but I never went to a dinner party where they didn’t want to hear more about the cop that I shot.
Our gang was named the Honda Botherers. We were consumed by those backwards-spinning, unusually tall powerplants, mostly because that was the thing to do and we saw a Vin Diesel movie (The Iron Giant) in the budget theatres about it. The biggest challenge we faced was trying to keep our cars off the radar of the local five-oh, and that was particularly difficult because of our founder, Big Greg, and his taste for low-weight synthetic oil.
Nowadays, zero-weight oil is easy to get in any parts store, bordello or vending machine that you find on the side of the road. But back then, there was just one place to go for that sweet, sweet Idemitsu: the docks. In the shipping containers that littered the coast, Big Greg could find all the zero-twenty he would need to keep his D-series running, and it really wasn’t that much, like three and a half quarts including the filter.
Everything would have gone great if it weren’t for Big Greg’s other vice: the Miracle Psychic’s Network. For only hundreds of pennies a minute, you could talk to a varying-degrees-of-real psychic who could tell you about how your future was going to unfold. Big Greg, it seems unnecessary to say, was on the line with those guys almost every minute, putting the gang’s finances in jeopardy. Small Anthony, our accountant, often mentioned his concerns with it, which made for an uncomfortable series of meetings of the board of directors in that time period. But I digress.
Bolstered by a psychic prediction of his success, Big Greg led us into the docks, directly into a sting operation. I didn’t want to shoot a cop, but then he told me that he didn’t really care for the Del Sol and that shit is just wrong. It’s almost a convertible!
Scoring free food from politicians’ glad-handing breakfasts was something I had a lot of experience in, but working as a political fixer? That was a whole other field, though one I found immediately that I had a lot of talent in.
My district’s city councillor, an incompetent boob even in those times, had watched me devour stack after stack of free flapjacks before getting back in line, getting another helping, and storing them in a hidden pocket of my jacket “for later.” I would find out later that this open and brazen act of graft and contempt for the public purse served as almost a mating display for the kind of politician who would become my bread and butter.
When I returned to the faux mini-haybale that was pulling duty as my seat at the breakfast, he was already sitting there. He had a proposal to make.
It turned out that he really hated the bike lanes of my fair city, and while I had no particular opposition to them myself, it was when he told me that it was inconveniencing my fellow car owners that I became personally invested in it. He also offered me a lot of money out of the council slush fund, which I assure you by no means influenced me.
A few days later, after reviewing the by-laws and tri-laws of my town, I had hit upon the perfect strategy. There was no restriction against using a powered bicycle in the bike lane, said my crooked almost-lawyer friend, and so I hit up eBay and the local markets for the parts I would need to assemble my great work.
The campaign was a huge success: it turned out that all it takes to really discourage bicyclists from using the bike lane is to drop a single uninterrupted burnout over six blocks long during the middle of their commute. After that day, the bike lane was crowded with homemade ghettocycles of every description, clogging the air with two-stroke smoke.
As for that city councillor? I hated the very idea of my work going to benefit someone so undeserving, so during a tour of City Hall I wandered a little bit off the tour guide’s path and left some very suspicious two-stroke oil containers and “Scooters From Hell” gang cut on a certain desk. After the ethics investigation was over, I felt that I would make an excellent candidate for the upcoming byelection.
After all, I knew the most about the “bike lane problem.” From that position, I could finally get the city’s unreasonable bylaws regarding so-called “abandoned cars” lifted, or at least redirect the impound lot closer to my house. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
It only occurred to me once we had finally been matched up with our tour guide that there had been absolutely no line waiting to get into the Honda museum. Surely, at the very least a platoon of bored schoolchildren would be willing to learn about their country’s very own Henry Ford and the majestic heights of mechanical engineering he had gotten up to?
I was just about to decide that we had come through some kind of special entrance for disgraceful foreigners, as was common in this part of Japan. This made me relax a bit, until we got to the part of the tour where they showed us the engines.
“Now, this is what the Americans call a big block Honda,” he said, gesturing to a small utility motor of some kind.
“What displacement is a ‘big block’ Honda?” I asked quickly, hoping that perhaps his English was not good enough to continue this conversation and we could move on quietly to the really primo parts of the museum, where they showed us the CR-Vs.
“It is… two point two liters,” he whispers into my ear, but not quietly enough for the other scattered visitors in the tour group, who gasp as if dying for air. One woman is frantically fanning her husband, who has fainted at the mention of this massive powerplant.
“It is the biggest engine in the country. We had to get special clearance to install it in our museum. It has been disarmed with a special American feature which makes sure no engine can ever run again.” he continues.
“What American feature is that?” I ask, kicking myself for becoming that foreign rube who always asks stupid questions to the tour guide.
“Oh, a Ford electrical system,” he says, and swings his arm behind the display, where we can clearly see a collection of undersized wire that is actively aflame.
#
tags: honda, ford, small displacement, big block honda
“We came to you because we knew there was nobody else we could hire,” the Toto executive insults me before issuing a neck-snapping series of bows in an attempt to win my agreement. He does, my firm handshake being returned with a sweaty palm. Toto has been getting their asses kicked across the Pacific Rim for the last five years, he explains. The Chinese have much cheaper toilets, and Toto needs someone who is willing to get the job done.
My team arrives, along with the corporate credit card, which I immediately clutch to my chest, warming it with my body heat as if I were a mother gorilla nursing her newborn babies. About a week later, and wholly coincidentally, we witnessed the arrival of a bundle of the cheapest cars on Tokyo Craigslist, already leaking their oil into the proud tarmac of the Toto parking lot.
Now that the basics of transportation and effective management were out of the way (Rule 1 of the Switch Management Industrial Concern’s Crimson Gold-level corporate training: buy a shitty car because it will make you pay attention on the ride in), it was time to fix our little problem with the toilets. We roped in some Americans for the focus group. Our thinking was that their failed state would soon need a series of new toilets now that the United Nations had managed to successfully recapture and construct an all-new, gleaming sewer system to provide them with the fresh water they had been lacking.
The average American wanted nothing more than sheer horsepower, they told us. Dense opiate-clogged dumps could disarm the greatest flushing achievements of humanity, some said. I must admit that I was myself motivated by the dream of showing all of those snooty engineers who told me that I didn’t actually have a degree (Rule 2: degrees are expensive; forged degrees cost much less) who really ruled the roost.
I’ll never forget the look of appreciation on the face of that first brave test-pilot who decided to take that first big shit. His last words to me, barely audible over the sound of the twin-supercharged bored 454 whose unearthly suction had ripped the colon from his frail body, leaving behind a gaping wound the size of a miniature Pinscher, were some I would treasure forever.
“It has just enough power,” he said, before dying.
“You can park your bicycle in one of these unused startup cubicles,” says the office manager as he sweeps his arm across the vast expanse of failure which I have inherited at cut-rate prices. Sure, on paper, Seat Safety Switch Enterprises International LLC is a financial services corporation, but in actual fact (later proven by Federal attorneys) we just basically fleeced old people all day long and then blew the money on K-cars. This new development, however, made me think that perhaps I could be reducing my spend on garage space.
The next morning, I began my plan to smuggle in cars and park them in the cubes. It was harder than you’d think - cars are quite large, and the elevators were too small to hold even a 1970s “subcompact.” After writing some letters of anger towards the building management regarding their lack of respect for fat people got me nowhere, I decided on plan B - the freight elevator. Surely I could fit an early-model Civic in that.
At the freight elevator, I was again confronted by failure. Not only was the alley leading up to the loading dock pretty tight, but the guy working the dock said he didn’t even have any ramps for me to use to drive up the half a meter into the freight elevator. Plus, he claimed, laughing, he didn’t think the elevator could carry that much in one shot. It was that mention of ‘one’ that gave me my next idea.
Whipping out the handy-dandy metric socket set strapped to my body, I began to dismantle the car. Over the next few weeks, and thanks to the lack of busybody suburbanite neighbours calling in “derelict cars” in the inner city, I was able to smuggle in pieces of the car. One morning, it would be a headlight, and then on the next smoke break, an entire sunroof assembly.
At last, it was done. I reassembled the car, smiling at the fact it would now be safe from the elements. Plus, now I could get through those boring conference calls with wailing retirees telling me about their dead loved ones through choked sobs by doing an oil change or two.
The next Monday, I came into the office to find my car was gone. My first instinct was to call building management, but all they sent was a large Swedish man who pointed out the hole that was torn through the 27th through 23rd floors, and the chunk of crumpled Japanese steel on the 22nd floor. I looked at this, and then asked the man if he had any extra Volvos he wanted to get rid of, because I needed a new car for work.
“Caller, you’re on the air with Car Moan.” I was on the air! With a radio show! Other commuters without good stereos would be listening to me!
“Uh yeah, I got a problem with my 1995 Honda Today, it’s making some kind of weird sound.” I said, trying not to freak out at the tape-delay of my own voice.
“Well, that’s what we’re here to fix for you, caller. Can you describe it?”
“It’s sort of this otherworldly screeching sound, as if a man is trapped within a boundless plane of unbearable physical and mental anguish.”
“Hm, could be a pebble in the brake rotor.”
“No, I’ve checked that. The brake rotors are missing altogether, and there is a wafting scent of brimstone. If I get in really close I can hear a faint chuckling sound coming from my front CVs, like Satan himself has taken up residence within my transaxle.”
“We get this a lot, caller, and the good news is we have a fix. You’re going to need to drive your car to a priest and have them splash it with holy water. That sound good?”
“No sir, my car has so much rust that introducing any new moisture will probably just rot the panels out faster. I cover it in those little desiccant packets you get with bags of beef jerky when I have to park it outside and it might rain.”
“Well, caller, you’ve made my life extremely difficult. You and the rest of your wretched kind, stealing this earth from my army of fallen angels.”
I hung up. I had been listening to this program for long enough to know that there was no point arguing with Satan’s racist AM-radio dad. Maybe the Shinto priest down the street had some of those cherry blossom petals he could throw at my car instead?
#
tags: comparative world religions 101, car talk, am radio, talk radio, honda, honda today
Everyone has pretty much built a time machine in their basement by now, but they always end up dismantling it when their descendants from a distant hell-future come barging through the time portal to warn them about some dire threat that only they can prevent. Most people just sigh, maybe roll their eyes, shove their guest back through the portal and turn the machine off.
What my descendant had to say was something quite interesting. Through parched lips and gasps, he warned me: “self-driving tow trucks will change beater ownership forever.”
He was right, you know. Of course, he said a lot of other bullshit - they always do, about the polar ice caps and the unstoppable solar storms that would ravage the Earth’s surface when the magnetic field inverts, a real obsession with these motherfuckers - but the tow truck thing checked out. When I kicked off a startup and hired me guys who were just a little too dumb to get hired at NASA to work there, we had a really good prototype within weeks.
Now there was no fear to commuting in a poorly maintained car. Should a balljoint break, an axle explode or a floorpan tear open, ejecting you onto the highway at cruise speed, you just tapped a button on what was left of your smartphone and your robot pal would show up to tow you and the wreckage all the way to work. Most times, you wouldn’t even be late!
There was something missing, though. Maybe it was that my work clothes no longer smelled like AC compressor oil, but eventually I came to miss the old way that things used to be, when you were a little uncertain about whether you would make it. Had my ancestors felt the same way when they formed human society and huddled in warm buildings rather than maybe die from some kind of bird that shit in their open mouth while they slept, causing them to choke to death?
Luckily, the startup hadn’t gone too far, selling only a few prototypes to the most devoted of beater owners. What I hadn’t realized was, as a weird, rare automobile, the self-driving tow trucks themselves would become objects of weird shitbox owner desire. I hoped that the community’s attempts to tinker with the sentience matrix wouldn’t cause them to take over the world, like the other guy who showed up in my basement that morning said they might.
#
tags: self-driving car, self-driving cars, self-driving tow trucks, tow trucks, beater ownership, reliability
We’d heard Hitler’s boys were looking to get their dicks wet with some kind of occult witchcraft in the deadlands of Africa to power their new line of affordable commuter cars, but nobody could have believed what they were really up to. They sent in the best of the best, and then they sent in me when they didn’t hear from those guys for awhile. The horror of what I saw will stay with me until the end of my days.
Imagine, if you will, a normal car, but with the engine in the wrong end. To compensate, they put this cockamamie arrangement of springs and linkages so that the sucker who bought it could still work the transmission and throttle.
The worst part of it all was that our spies had alluded to it not even needing water cooling. It was all true, I realized in horror: those crazy Nazi bastards were piping white-hot exhaust through the body of the car to keep the driver warm. There was just no way you could compete against purestrain craziness like that.
I could not live with myself unless I did something right here and right now, even if it would blow my cover. Allied command would just need to suck it up. Opening the door to the meeting room, I adopted my best fake German accent and mechanical engineering persona. Sabotaging this whole project would save millions of lives, I was convinced.
“Hey, dumbkopfs,” I barked. “Have you thought about making the windshield washers run off the spare tire’s air pressure?”
The junior engineers assembled immediately began taking notes, grinning at the pure brilliance of their coworkers. If they only knew. Giddy on my initial success, I decided to see if I could go two for two.
“And make sure to make friends with those Bosch people. They’re going to go far with that whole mechanical fuel injection thing,” I said, trying not to laugh.
The Oscar Meyer corporation very rarely had cause to hire a man with my particular set of skills, or so they would like you to believe. Beloved American corporations generally didn’t want to see their consultants splashed across the front page of foreign newspapers, arrested for espionage, incitements to riot, gun running, quintuple homicide, that kind of thing. They didn’t want me to do any of that fun stuff this time, though. I was supposed to track down a lost Wienermobile.
My handlers didn’t want to go into too much detail about the circumstances of the hot-dog-shaped motorhome’s disappearance, preferring instead to keep me in the dark as to which boardroom player’s teenage nephew was the one who left the mustard bus double parked and got it impounded.
From there, as far as I could see, it was auctioned, sold to an eccentric foreign billionaire, and then departed the country via a container ship of many names flying under a flag of convenience. It would take every favour I had saved up over the years to figure out where the mystery meatmobile had gone, and there would always be the risk that some artificial byproduct of the process would come find me before I found him.
After a few months of hunting, my research assistant found it. On loan from the university from her computer science internship or some other boring nerd shit, she had hijacked an NSA spy satellite to check the world’s docks for something that looked like a hot dog. Thanks to a series of well-timed white papers and a lucky shot of a stevedore hooning the sausage down by the Seine, we knew it was in Paris.
Once we had wheels-up, I passed into a deep slumber and awoke in the City of Lights, the airplane steward poking me repeatedly as if to ensure that I was alive. He jumped when my eyes flicked open and I arose smoothly from the seat to take my Constitutionally protected carry-on with me as I exited the plane.
My ride to the docks could be nothing other than my former comrade Jacques’ up-armoured 2CV. Naturally, all that extra weight from the inch-thick steel plating and plexiglass windows required the factory two-banger to get juiced up with port nitrous injection and a big-bore kit the size of a roasting hog. I found it immensely satisfying, working the big steering wheel and the farmboy suspension across the Parisian cobblestones to my quarry.
When we got there, we could scarcely believe it. Aghast at such an affront to cuisine, the French had worked quickly to convert the Wienermobile. It now existed as the Gitainesmobile, and bored beret-clad teenagers handed out free wine and packs of smokes to thrilled schoolchildren.
#
tags: weinermobile, oscar meyer, citroen, citroen 2cv, france, wienermobile
When it came to importing used car parts, I guess you could say I had a yen for getting them from Japan. Ow, stop hitting me.
I was sitting in my drawing room, entertaining the societal elites which had dropped by to hear another one of my patented tall tales. They seemed particularly captivated by this one, and just as I was preparing to strike, viper-like, with the reveal that a Datsun B210 “Honey Bee” edition did not come with a trip odometer or armrests, I received a phone call from my assistant.
Picking it up, and casually dismissing my guests with a wave of my hand as I exited the parlour and tucked myself into the main-floor front parts storage room, I asked what was so important. It turned out it was a website that would sell you used parts, from Japan. For cheap.
I got immediately upon the in-home intercom, and ordered my assistant’s assistant to spin up the computing turbines and issue a full speed order to the engine room. Within seconds, the resplendent brass piping of my home was pouring TCP packets in the form of white-hot steam from the mysterious Orient.
Months later, I was bankrupt, my house filled to the brim with C-condition scratch-and-dent discount wheel sets and RX-8 body parts despite not owning an RX-8. No longer would high society consider me their equal, as my moss-overgrown manse poured discount swaybar kits and half-broken Teins from its very windows.
I would have had my revenge on those bastards at Croooober for ruining my life, but every time I went to their website to figure out where they lived, I just ended up spending another three thousand bucks at Up Garage.
Standing at the coffee maker in my engine assembly clean room slash kitchenette I hear a soft cough from outside, as if issued by an asthmatic kitten or an ashamed child. I think nothing of it; the pollution index is very high in my neighbourhood for some reason, the health and safety people keep telling me as they show up on my front porch, clad in gas masks. Then I hear it again, a soft, lilting cough, like a two-stroke engine that just refuses to turn over.
Down the block, around the corner, and down two more blocks is a neighbour whom I have never met. He is struggling to bring to life a vintage Lawn-Boy two-stroke lawnmower, and is surprised that I was able to hear the sounds of impending combustion striving to be born from such a range through the sheets of rusted take-off quarter panels that form the walls of my home. Before he is able to speak any further, I have already unthreaded the white-hot plug from its sleeve with my bare hands and begun reading the porcelain for clues.
Ah, the spark plug: so cheap, so essential, yet also so complex. A million lives were snuffed out in pursuit of this glorious piece of machinery. I begin to tear up a little at the thought of this height of human achievement, which makes my neighbour involuntarily back off a few steps, no doubt trying to remember where his wife and kids are currently and if he can get to them quickly if I turn violent. This is a reaction I have seen before, and so I smile gently while pointing to the fuel-drenched plug, its gap blown out so wide that you could fit a Pekinese in it. Nobody is afraid of a teacher, unless they were raised Catholic.
By the time the police arrive, I have a healthy-running Lawn Boy trimming this guy’s front yard with impunity. The more senior of the officers stares at me over the barrel of his service-issue sidearm. I am familiar with the hostage protocol from other misunderstandings such as this in the past, and have a go-to line for disarming the responding officers.
“Check out how good this cut is. They don’t make ‘em like that anymore.” I say.
The officer looks at the cut, then at the mower, then at me, and lowers his gun, against his best instincts.
“Hell of a cut,” he says, nodding, before getting back into his patrol car and leaving. I note a distinct misfire on #6 that might be due to worn coilpacks on his service Crown Vic, something which I’ll have to fix the next time I am in the station. After all, spark plugs deserve the best we can give them.
Need loctite but don’t want to pay the crazy prices that the Loctite people expect for their stuff? Just drop your bolt in a bucket of sand before you impact it on.
You can prevent your car from being hotwired and stolen by painting it like a police car. Then, you can park it in the police station lockup to keep it safe!
There is no such thing as “SAE bolts” or “inches.” Insist that your supplier give you the “good metric shit” or you’ll take your business elsewhere, especially if your car is old and American. It’s the only way they’ll learn!
Henry Ford once invented the modern-day automobile by using one weird old trick discovered by a farmer. That weird old trick is sacrificing your soul to the devil.
In a pinch, chew Circus Peanuts and apply the resulting saliva-soaked goo to your damaged catalytic converter to turn off check engine lights before selling the car.
Mayonnaise is the same thing as anti-seize, for a while.
I knew that my grassroots letter-writing campaign had gotten traction when the CEO of Canadian Tire’s junior executive assistant wrote back to me. Sure, it was just to tell me that Sandy McTire was not a real person and to stop bothering him about my idea to install a nitrous refilling system in the repair shop, but you take your victories where you can.
After I had finished penning the traditional apology letters for having bothered a fellow Canadian, I thought about what I should do for the rest of the day. Then I realized I had to go to Canadian Tire to buy some bullshit and groaned.
There was something about Canadian Tire that held a special appeal in my heart, even if it was just because it was the only place that sold cheese-grade pseudo-stainless metric bolts on Sunday night as I was thrashing together another piece of shit and needed to replace the fasteners that I had dropped inside a frame rail or other convenient pocket dimension [Hawking, 1996]. This time, it was that I had to get a tube of Shoe Goo to fill the rapidly enlarging hole in the floorpan of my Valiant.
It took a long time to go through the store, not least because of the good hour I spent holding a door for other customers. I would be just about ready to go in myself, and then see a car approaching on the highway off-ramp just down the way. My guarding provided an essential service: it would be rude to just shut the door in their faces when they were only half a kilometer away.
After it was all done, I looked at the CSA-grade composites job I had done, mixing the silicone goo in with shards of the government-subsidized Barenaked Ladies albums that littered parking lots throughout the land. It gleamed and glimmered in the fifteen minutes of sunlight we would get at this, the height of the summer, and I smiled gently, hoping that I could fend off the road salt for one more year before it claimed my Vally forever.
On the way home, I passed a man ranting and raving on a traffic island in both official languages, as was the law. His signboard complained that his government cheque didn’t buy enough subsidized narcotics anymore, thanks to the Conservatives. I waved to him, apologizing for having interrupted his view of the highway. He apologized to me for burdening me with a more nuanced understanding of local issues.
As the sun set over my home, and the frost wolves bayed at the rising moon, I huddled within my sod cabin for warmth and praised the Trudeaus for allowing me to survive the death panels for one more year. It was the greatest Canada Day ever.
A lot of people don’t know this, but the first-generation Geo Metro was actually the tipping point for the complete and total destruction of the North American way of life. We had welcomed it into our badge-engineering projects with such hubris, thinking erroneously that Hamamatsu would not have a chessmaster pulling puppet strings behind the scenes like some kind of mixed metaphor.
When the first ones arrived, we sneered at their three-cylinder sewing machine engines and their general sealed-beam cheapness and lack of comport. But there was a charm, and one of the men in the receiving department that I had worked with was probably the first to fall under its sway. We ignored the warning signs; when he started disappearing from work for ever-longer periods to pick up minibike turbochargers to fit to his personal factory-discount Metro, nobody raised an alarm.
Even later, when his urges became harder to control, made him act out in increasingly erratic fashion, we didn’t really care. Part of that was the General Motors way of life (our motto: “Didn’t See Nothin.”) But we really should have done something when he stole all that paperwork from headquarters and started forging signatures to approve a whole new brand, just for Canada, for more Geos. As the Asunas rolled off the ships, piling the docks with ever-tinier engines, we realized then that it was too late.
Those bastards at Suzuki walked right over us, and what’s worse, they held the door open for the rest of their Japanese friends to come join the party. Within weeks, we had heard that Isuzu had joined, and they even brought their weird friend Subaru. The boardroom couldn’t respond fast enough, buying first Opel and then Saab in the hope of distracting the Japanese engineers with high-grade European weirdness, but they didn’t even flinch before dropping a badge-engineered Impreza in our laps and telling us to sell it.
A few months later, a grinning squadron of Toyotaites raised the Pontiac Vibe over Times Square. Nobody but us knew what it meant. We just continued wallpapering our nuclear survival bunkers with GM employee shares.
“THE WEINERMOBILE’S HERE,” screams the peasantry before the squealing of the tires pushes my tinnitus into a range where it can no longer decipher human speech. There, at last, amongst the smell of grilling meats (Hankook-brand), I am at peace.
It’s not because of any silly grudge against the Oscar Meyer corporation that I did such a thing. In the years since my initial humiliation, I had convinced both myself and my court-ordered psychiatrist that I had overcome my rage at being passed over for Weinermobile driver in favour of my more handsome, more charming, and dare I say, more Aryan classmates. No, this trip was not born of revenge, but of celebration.
Also, they left the Weinermobile running when they went in to hand those kids free hot dogs. Where was my free hot dog? I would have to get my joys another way.
As the smoke began to flash its usual blue and red lights, backlit by the quick-response squad of police officers that were always on notice to quell my compulsions, I still smiled. If there was a greater victory in life than stealing a truck shaped like a hot dog and doing an uninterrupted peel-out across an entire playground zone, I would never reach it.
Today on Ventureline, we talk to a group of entrepreneurs who promise to revitalize the dormant food truck industry. Later, we’ll also look into some boring business that turns a profit or something, who the fuck cares anymore.
We’re here today with Mr. Switch “El Switcho” Estevez, who is the inventor behind this new business. Can you describe it for us?
“Of course, Maurice. I thought, I sure would like a taco right now, but all the taco restaurants are far away, and all the taco trucks are either good ones at the junkyard or terrible ones in places where there are white people with money. What’s more, I didn’t want to spend all my time driving around in search of people who were willing to buy inauthentic Mexican food from a poorly-maintained Divco that shoots blue smoke from its dying Jimmy Six.”
“So that’s when I hit upon it. I would finally use this useless computer science degree and build an autonomous taco truck. The tacos would simply find you. After installing a few npm packages for product recommendations, I let go of the truck months ago and haven’t seen it since. But my bank account sure has. Care for some cocaine?”
“Later, El Switcho, we’re going to visit your truck right now, and see how it has revolutionized the twin economic drivers of eating bad food and paying way too much.”
“Ah, here it is. And here’s a future customer, walking down the street.”
HEY I KNOW YOU WANT THIS FUCKING TACO
No, no, I don’t! I’m not hungry!
LOOK, YOU’RE PAYING FOR THIS TACO WHETHER YOU EAT IT OR NOT. I’VE SEEN YOU BEFORE. YOU LIVE AT 123 BELLWETHER STREET, JUST DOWN THE CORNER. YOU HAVE TWO DOGS AND A SECURITY SYSTEM THAT IS AT LEAST FIVE YEARS OUT OF DATE. IT WOULD REQUIRE FEWER THAN A TEN KILOMETER PER HOUR IMPACT AT MY CURRENT MASS TO BREAK DOWN YOUR FRONT DOOR AND PENETRATE INTO THE KITCHEN WHERE YOU SIT AT YOUR MORNING BREAKFAST. A BREAKFAST, I SHOULD ADD, THAT COULD BE ONE OF MY EXCELLENT TACOS. CAPICHE?
Oh, oh god. I’ll pay anything. Just go away.
“Some revolutionary stuff there. You must be proud.”
“I’m not. Did you see the little stutter it had when it was trying to track the speed of that jogger? I think that’s probably a floating-point inaccuracy, or a bad wheel bearing. Either way, now I have to tear this fucking thing apart to fix it again.”
Back when I was actively driving, they used to call me the Warranty Winner. You could put anything in front of me: CarMax unlimited used warranties, new-car limiteds, new-car powertrain and corrosion, even those scammy-assed extended warranties. What you’d pay me for is that I would rapidly rack up enough damages and unexpected failures that the warranty would pay for itself in minutes.
People angered with dealerships would call me up, I’d take their Audi Q5 for a quick jaunt to get ice cream, and return with a piston embedded in the windshield, rod and all. They’d offload a pittance into my hands as I stood there, a slight nod to the tow-truck driver responding. I knew every driver, of course, as you did in a career such as this.
Once, I was working out of Houston on a tough case. My client had purchased a C5 Corvette from a buy-here-pay-here lot and paid them almost the entire value of the car at auction to furnish them with an “extended warranty.” The only thing extended about it was the amount of fine print at the bottom, excluding the warrantor from pretty much anything that could possibly go wrong with a car. But they forgot one thing: the cigarette lighter, and that’s what I focused on.
Weaving my fingers in the pattern of the strange magicks taught to me by the witch coven I had been raised from childhood in after a strange paperwork mix-up at the nunnery, I let the Corvette’s generous alternator push a few too many amps through the under-specified twelve-volt accessory plug. Within minutes, I was lighting my cigarette inside the car, using the roaring flames that had engulfed the steering column.
Nowadays, there’s not so much work for me. Cars are so good now that nobody really wants to go through the trouble of having shop techs rip apart their three-year-old Lexus to replace nine-tenths of it, especially since all the panels rattle like crazy afterward. I spend most of my days at the mall, holding a fishbowl, waiting for customers at the Apple store to pick up their extended warranties.
Sure, most people wouldn’t drive a prepared vintage Trans Am race car through the Wendy’s drive through. Those people won’t know the joy of trying to quickly unclip the window net so you can get the colon-scraping joy that is a Revenge of Baconator combo meal. What kind of life is that?
As I leave the parking lot, I encounter the first big problem. There are no cupholders. For your average rookie in their Toyota Celsior, this might be a problem. Not for me; I have become an experienced traveler in every sense of the word by now, and expertly wedge the large drink cup in the gap between the A-pillar-bar of the cage and the windshield, without looking.
If I don’t really climb on the throttle, I figure, there’s no way that lid is coming off. Luckily, with six hundred flame-spitting horsepower on tap from the righteously-cammed big-block, there’s no need to use much of that throttle to put a Honda Odyssey bound for hot yoga back into their rightful place in the animal kingdom of motorsport.
The Javelin’s normal induction noise becomes a sharp roar as I merge into traffic. It is now that I realize my folly: although the vintage Firestone race tires are period-correct, after fifty years of sitting in a shed in the desert they no longer have the traction they once boasted. I am already working the wheel to compensate for the squirm in the rear end, try to keep the ship from coming all the way around, but I have badly miscalculated.
In my hubris, I have forgotten about lateral Gs.
Out of the corner of my eye, with growing horror, I see my lunch combo tip ever so slightly onto the passenger-side race bucket, disgorging white-hot french fries into the interior. I sigh. Even with a stripped and caged race interior, I know it is impossible to retrieve all of these golden-brown explorers from a car interior once they have been spilled. Future generations will be digging dessicated fries out from under the interior, wondering if maybe Mark Donohoe ate at Wendy’s between laps of the prototype.
#
tags: amc javelin, trans-am, scca, scca trans-am, race car for the street, wendy's, mark donohue, amc, javelin
If you or someone you know has been bothered by a loud exhaust, surprised by a hood-mounted LED-backlit nitrous purge valve or annoyed by an external wastegate that vents to atmosphere, we can help. Attorneys are standing by now to issue an unprecedented class-action lawsuit against sound waves. These less-silent killers sneak into your ear canal and cause damage to your brain, forcing permanent body pain in a way that scientists do not yet believe.
Our research further proves that oil companies are in competition to produce ever-louder gasoline, which when burned in internal combustion engines, results in unprecedented exhaust loudness. This, they feel, gives them a competitive edge by giving their buyers a sense that their cars have become “more powerful.”
We believe that by 2020, gasoline will burn so loudly that no muffler will be able to contain its burly roar. That’s why in Phase 2 of this campaign, we plan on suing the concept of gasoline, focusing on bringing suit directly to the estate of the dinosaurs who died to produce it. What will your children think when they ask you why you stood by and did nothing at this critical juncture?
In Phase 3 of our suit, we plan to take to court the Japanese auto giant Mazda, not just because their cars featuring Wankel-style rotary engines are very loud but also because their head exhaust engineer laughed really hard at us on a conference call last week. Our researchers have identified multiple critical moments at which Mazda has been ignorant of the need for peace and quiet, such as the time Bob Hall once accidentally pushed a stapler off the desk in his office and it made a loud noise when it hit the floor (we have tapes, Bob).
Call today, and ensure a quieter tomorrow. Just look at this, our prototype cityscape with entirely electric car- AW FUCK I DIDN’T EVEN HEAR THAT THING COMING. JESUS CHRIST MY LEG.
I was at work the other day, and I got a phone call. Not recognizing the number, I wanted to ignore it at first. Human curiosity got the better of me, though, and so I was rapidly mashing my thumb into the green button in the hope of connecting before the screen froze again. It was the RockAuto guy, who I had previously only known as “the RockAuto guy,” but who was now introducing himself as Glenn.
“Hey, you should really get that corner of your foundation checked out,” said Glenn.
I was perplexed. Glenn was a guy who delivered my RockAuto parts every Tuesday through Friday, only occasionally taking a day off from hefting radiators onto my porch. Was he really at my place often enough that he remembered things about it?
“Also, Ms. Johnson down the block is having a lot of trouble with her weeping tile, so I bet your house has the same problem, since it’s about the same age. You need to take good care of this place, dude.” he said.
Slowly, it came to dawn on me that Glenn had probably been to my house more often than I had.
There were clues before, sure: how he had worked out the perfect hiding spot for parts of every definition, the occasional dandelion I would find pulled from my lawn when I returned home, the corpse of the burglar across town who had choked to death on a fistful of RockAuto magnets before having his body unceremoniously dumped behind the old UPS sorting depot.
I was about to cuss out Glenn, to tell him not to get overly familiar with a man he had only occasionally met in person, but then I realized an opportunity.
The next day, my phone rang again. It was Glenn.
“Hey buddy, thanks for putting that treadmill in front of your place. I don’t get enough walking when I have to work, since everyone’s sidewalk is so short in your neighbourhood.”
I looked at the power-generation screen’s notice that the treadmill had generated about sixteen watts, and smiled. I was going to get back those shipping fees one way or another, motherfuckers.
Q: We are watching San Andreas and aside from it being total garbage I can’t stop thinking who in their right mind divorces The Rock.
A: Well imagine you’re home, you’re kinda depressed, your boss yelled at you when you were doing whatever the fuck the Rock’s ex-wife was doing in the movie. You look outside, and your husband is doing cartwheels out in the backyard while telling a GQ reporter how much he loves life.
The next morning you hear that one of your old college friends has died. Your husband still hasn’t come inside from last night: he’s recruited a group of neighbourhood children to see if he is stronger than 20 kids or not. So far he is winning, and catapults a three year old against your bay window with an audible *smack*. You do the dishes.
At last you can take it no more and charge outside to confront him. He has to be there for you emotionally, there has to be some private inner life, you scream. He looks at you with the cocked-head glance of a Labrador retriever, trying to parse your emotional anguish. Somehow you can’t stay angry at him. you want him to run for president, and tell him so. He does.
Two years into the campaign, on election night, he loses New Hampshire, which should have been a safe get. You want to scream at him. You can tell his campaign advisor also wants to yell at him, but god damn it, you just can’t come around to do it. He responds by charging out of the room and outrunning a passenger airliner on his way to New Hampshire, where he launches a charm offensive so effective that the surviving citizenry decide to burn the electoral office to the ground and have a re-vote. He’s the president now, and you are still kind of depressed because now he’ll never do the dishes.
After an unprecedented six terms, he finally wanders away from the White House on a field trip to NASA and becomes the first president to go into space. He thinks it’s awesome and doesn’t come back for awhile. In the meantime you feel his hold on you slipping, as if it only works at a certain range. Before he can come back, you quickly file divorce papers, having them Fedexed to his orbital fortress. You can barely look at the Skype images of his zero-gravity tears floating in front of his perfect face, but at last now it is done. You hide in mozambique for a year.
However, every man you encounter is both ugly and non-charming. You come across a homeless man in the Metro that you think you might be able to talk to, but it turns out he is actually pretty ugly. It dawns on you that the only reason you ever talked to anyone else was because being around The Rock gave you this sort of unnatural charm and confidence, like it rubbed off on you. You develop a drinking problem and are eventually fired from your job at the Mozambique Walmart.
Eventually you hear that your ex-husband has found a new joy in life, flying a helicopter to save people who crash their Subaru Foresters in the woods. It is the perfect job for him, you think, remembering the time he picked up a dead squirrel from the roadside and smiled at it, healing it perfectly of all wounds. that dead squirrel still lives now; that was 20 years ago. You decide you can move back to the greater Los Angeles area now, and that’s when the movie begins.
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tags: the rock, nasa, subaru, subaru forester, san andreas
“I feel this vibrating joy resonating through my body. It’s an almost sexual thrill when I can finally add up enough damage to total out a Smart Car or a PT Cruiser. Never felt anything like it, never will again, I reckon.”
Ira Glass: That’s the voice of my friend, Percival Ramirez, a professional insurance adjuster. Late last June we had a gap in the schedule around now so I decided to book all my friends to come into the studio and tell me about their jobs, here on the radio.
Percival Ramirez: Pleasure to be here, Ira.
Ira Glass: I’ve been wondering, when you go to total out a car, how often are the owners of PT Cruisers, Smart Fortwos or Mercedes B-classes overjoyed that you are taking their hateful charge from them?
Percival Ramirez: Well, Ira, as you know, everyone has owned at least one car that they hate, even you -
Ira Glass: I myself have never owned a car, having been imbued with no legal personhood due to the vagaries of the artificial insemination project that birthed me in the bowels of the NPR headquarters. You know this, Percy.
Percival Ramirez: Uh, and so, they - if I had to describe the sensation, it’s like having a tumour excised from your body, the relief of seeing that lump of cancerous flesh thrown into a trash bin and spat upon by the surgeon. Sometimes I get told that I save lives.
Ira Glass: But not everyone is happy that you are rescuing them from this awful life of kowtowing to the worst cars ever made?
Percival Ramirez: No, not at all. You see, the owners of these cars are often mentally ill to start with. It’s how they got them in the first place. Their identities are wrapped up in the idea of faux wood panelling stickers and PT Cruiser owner meets and peeling white paint over an asthmatic four, wheezing its way to an early grave. It’s tragic, and it never stops breaking my heart when I see it.
Ira Glass: What do you do then? Surely it’s not just a normal “I think my car is worth more than you’re offering” deal?
Percival Ramirez: I kill them. On the spot. Sell their teeth on the side.
Ira Glass: You can do that?
Percival Ramirez: Nobody ever reads the policy before they sign it.
#
tags: this american life, pt cruiser, smart fortwo, mercedes b-class
No, I had no interaction with Russian cars in the days leading up to the judging of the annual Concours. They were two-strokes? It is odd that I would not notice that, I agree, but I maintain that I have no recollection of seeing any two-stroke vehicles other than those minty Trabants, and those are East German, sir.
Push-button automatic transmissions, you say? I do not recall such a thing happening to me, and had I seen it, I would probably have told everyone about it immediately, as is bylaw since the Dart Act of 1967. Given my extensive club-legal background as an autocrosser, I agree that I would know all potential loopholes such as these.
I did tell everyone about it? No, I have no recollection of filming that three hour video where I went over every aspect of the ZIL, from its charming hand-radiused pseudo-decorative parcel shelf to the jaunty yet imposing angle of the rear greenhouse kick. None whatsoever.
Gentlemen, I feel strongly that this is a kangaroo court motivated by political reasons to find me in fault of club bylaws that were not meant to be interpreted in this way. There is simply no truth to this slander that the Soviets have promised me a set of minty Lada Niva quarter panels if I play ball. If my Fiat-loving predecessor had push-button automatic transmissions, you’d throw him a parade.
When I first proposed a bill demanding that all owners of Mercedes B-classes be rounded up and executed, I caught a lot of heat for it from caucus. They couldn’t imagine that such a flagrantly anti-capital bill would be bipartisan, no matter how much I crowed about it. “Hell,” my chief of staff said, “I’m not even sure it’s unipartisan.” Then I threw him out a second storey window, because I’ve got no room in my administration for guys who want to drink the haterade. That put the rest of them in line.
It’s easy to get legislation on the move: the first step, I say, talking to the camera, is to get the votes whipped. I immediately presented the key opponents of the initiative with a series of gifts: OEM fanbelts for their air-cooled Volkswagens, detailing supplies for their water-cooled ones, and a junkyard two-for-one coupon to the weird guy in the back who drove a Simca to work.
The next step is negotiation. Just like buying a used car, you don’t want to come out with your bottom line. I pretended to act offended when I allowed them to wear me back down to only executing those Mercedes B-class owners we could catch. Now we had broad-spectrum approval, and there was some serious momentum behind the vote, especially when I told Bob Christfuck (R-VT) that he could repurpose the intercoolers from those Mercedes, give his constituents some jobs. Everyone likes jobs, Bob.
Sure, maybe I overreached a little bit trying to work in a few side deals here and there. Tim Nuclearapocalypse (I-CT) wanted a guarantee that his riding would get the contract for the bullets that we would pump into the screaming forms of these victim-consumers, but I was still pretty steamed at him for not sending me the link to that Craigslist ad for the Renault GTA fast enough the other day. My hubris there likely cost me at least one vote.
At last, like any good car deal, you are left with a useless piece of paper you signed and now regret. As the congressmen I had worked so hard to whip leaned back in their overstuffed desk chairs and listened to their constituents sing their praises over this glorious new bounty that will restore an American Golden Age, all I could see was that I forgot to include Smart Cars too.
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tags: this post counts as a first-year law undergraduate credit, mercedes, b-class, mercedes b-class, bob christfuck, tim nuclearapocalypse, renault, renault gta
When a man drives a luxury car, something changes within him. It’s been proven by science - luxury cars just behave more poorly in traffic. The scientific evidence falls way behind, however, when you ask the question of whether old luxury cars also turn their drivers into tremendous assholes. As part of our ongoing studies into asshole driver behaviour, we furnished a number of inexpensive 1980s sports-luxury vehicles and drove them to work a bunch.
Early indications are contraindicative of assholedom, as most 1980s luxury cars handle poorly and have almost no horsepower with which to break the rear tires free. Our test civilian, one Mr. P. F. Switchington, remarked that he was barely able to “light ‘em” rolling through a playground zone, and made a gesture of twirling fingers as if to emulate peel-outs for emphasis [Figure 1].
Many other candidates, not just the man we later had to sedate and then release back into his native environment of piles of car parts scattered haphazardly around an oil-stained garage floor, also expressed that they felt like they could be less of an asshole than normal when equipped with a car so incapable. In fact, our test group (equipped with a 2015 Corolla “S”) cut off semi-trucks with a much higher frequency, possibly because the Corolla’s reedy 1.8 liter engine is more capable of out-accelerating a fully laden tractor-trailer [Figure 2].
In a future experiment, we plan to invite our colleagues from the chemistry department to see how the application of a relatively innocuous greenhouse gas to the intake manifold of these rolling coffins improves their zero to sixty times.
#
tags: luxury cars, applied psychology, toyota, toyota corolla, corolla
“If it wasn’t for Henry Ford being a cheap douchebag, you’d all be using Robertson drive!” I shriek, slapping my palm on the sandwich sign board I am wearing for emphasis. Any casual observer of my antics could tell you that my attempt to go to the United States for an evangelical mission was not going very well so far.
Every year, hundreds of Canadians are selected by our government to travel to the Great Southward Satan and explain to them about the superiority of our way of life. Many stay behind, becoming comedians or famous movie stars, but I had no particular intention of remaining in a place that gets as hot in the winter as northern Montana. It’s just too hot, I moaned at two horrified women, who nearly drop their gym bags as they realize I am wearing nothing under the sandwich sign despite standing in four feet of snow.
I see a man going for the Home Depot entrance. Perfect, I think. He will listen to me, and then Trudeau will scramble the choppers to come pick me up, my mission a success. He sees me coming, and performs an expert dodge, avoiding eye contact for as long as possible. I reflexively apologize, which only serves to unnerve the man further. He leaps over the checkout counter, hiding behind the cashier, who makes a particular point of disabling the safety on her tactical-specification Glock 18. “Come vacation in Banff!” is all I can say as I quickly back away from the gritty reboot of Death Wish playing in the cashier’s head.
Back in the parking lot, I see another Canadian working the other side of the entrance. Also buck naked, he is barking something about Jim Carrey and the abstract concept of gravity, which he’s pretty sure was invented by a Canadian. I was going to have to get creative, really pull out the ace up my sleeve. Reaching out, I corner another man leaving his parked-across-four-lanes F150, fighting the urge to immediately apologize for making bodily contact with him.
“Motherfucker,” I bellow into his face, “we put a fucking robot arm on the Space Shuttle! It grabs comets!”
The man is unable to say something, staring directly into my eyes with the dilated pupils of a prescription-opiate addict. I now know exactly what to say to him to get my ride home.
“In Canada, you can get codeine over the counter!”
For days now, I had been listening to the opinions of people with too much free time on my commute. After the ancient Lincoln I had been driving finally lost the use of its FM radio, I switched to the AM band, perhaps subconsciously out of some kind of misguided quest to better understand my neighbours.
“I think we should get rid of the mayor,” slurred one voice, in response to a poll about whether or not the local hockey team had committed a felony or just a misdemeanour what with all those Catholic high school girls. “He’s, he’s, he’s too God damned high and mighty. He’s all smug.”
“Do you have an example of when he was acting smug?” asked the pollster, innocently. I was interested, too. After all, I had a slight inclination to vote against the mayor in the upcoming election, what with his newfound zeal for enforcing street parking regulations. He forced me to remember where I had parked all my cars lest the neighbours finally call the police.
“Uh, not really. It’s more of a feeling. I used to support him, but now he just treats you like you don’t matter if you don’t agree with his opinion,” continued the man, kicking off another two minutes of tape-delayed meandering into the weeds of local politics. By the time it was finished, I figured I had to say something.
Grasping the in-car cellular phone that was original equipment on the Lincoln, I immediately contacted the radio station switchboard. I was going to tell them what I thought, and I was going to expose this guy for the simpleton he was.
“Caller, you’re on the air. What do you think of the mayor?” chirped the pollster.
Oh. Oh God. I was on the air. Where people can hear me. I need to make my opinion punchy. Have I taken too long already? Dead air is the killer. Oh God.
“Well, if you ask me,” I slurred, and recoiled in horror as the snail-speed version of my voice wound out of the radio before me - is that what I really sound like to everyone else? - “He should round up all the Mercedes B-class owners and fucking shoot them.”
Dead silence. On the radio, the pollster was continuing on, having switched to a new citizen, with fresh ideas, almost immediately. She was doing an excellent job of pretending she cared about his feelings about bike lanes. I had a lot of momentum, though, and couldn’t stop now.
“In the back of the head,” I said to a dead line. “We’ll sell the cars for scrap and nationalize the profits. Full socialism now.”
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tags: am radio, talk radio, caller you're on the air, lincoln, lincoln town car, town car, mercedes, mercedes b-class
Capsule History of the Ford Taurus, Part 2
In Part 1, we discussed the origins of the Ford Taurus, its otherworldly ability to absorb resale value, and the true motivations of the men behind its design and manufacture. Advanced students of 1980s domestic front-drive beater history will note the eerie parallels between the Taurus and the decline of Chrysler under its obsession with advanced cab-forward cloud car products, but the Taurus has a dark secret, one borne of badge engineering.
A digression, for those of you in the class who are new to automobile manufacturing and/or neoliberal capitalism in general: badge engineering is when automakers, believing that people treat brands as their “families,” attempt to inject a car that does not belong in that brand by changing the badging on the car and maybe adding leather seats or some shit. In this way, it is expected that the consumer who originally rejected the car will now identify it as one of their own and imprint upon it. You’ve probably seen it yourself: it is well known that the modern Chevrolet Corvette is actually a badge-engineered 1976 GMC K10, converted by painstaking artisans from a vast surplus of the trucks left on the docks by a shipping union strike in that year.
So it was with the Mercury Sable. There are absolutely no documents in Ford headquarters regarding the authorization of the creation of the Sable, and the office at Mercury HQ that used to hold documents of this sort had a suspicious electrical fire immediately after the first Sable rolled off the line. It is believed that the Sable was not directly responsible, though it was uncooperative during initial arson-squad interviews and maintained its silence.
Early reviewers of the Sable remarked upon its best-in-class ride handling, silent cabin, and pervasive odour of brimstone, the origin of which could never be placed. We attempted to interview those early reviewers for this piece, but none wished to be placed on the record. One source, speaking on a condition of firing a bolt-action carbine upon our researchers from his fourth-storey balcony, remarked that we would never take him back to those days. Quite so; time marches on, and it even did for the Sable.
It was only through the courageous actions of a group of teenage outcasts, awakened to their true inner power by the striving of a transfer student from another prefecture, that the Mercury Sable was able to be overcome in the winding tunnels of the Karmic Nightside which weaves its way through the very bedrock of our society. We owe a great debt to these teens.
Although the Sable was defeated in the end due to its great weakness to the hope that lies in the heart of rebellious teenagers, the Mercury brand limped along for several more decades. Rumours that a new Sable was introduced in the late 2000s as the American economy spontaneously collapsed are unfounded, and if you see one in the wild, do not interact with it.
In part three of this series, we’ll analyze the development of Project Taurus X, an failed experiment on the Ford Orbital Platform to merge the soul of the Ford Taurus with the bulk of a used Mazda Tribute in a dark quest to invent the crossover.
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tags: mercury, sable, mercury sable, taurus, ford taurus
A sufficiently advanced bodge is indistinguishable from a correct repair, will read the five-inch-tall engraved letters on the door to my immense marble tomb. I was the kind of mechanic that, when he went to the Canadian Tire, was followed by a platoon of stockbrokers shrieking ‘BUY’ orders into their phones hoping to purchase stock in JB Weld for the inevitable bump.
Hack-jobbing together cars saved me a bunch of time, I reckoned, especially over those poor fools who agonized over inch-pound miscalibrations on their torque wrenches and spent hours trying to make sure their alignment was just so. Sure seemed to me like our cars hit the crusher around the same time, I would chuckle as I no-looking sawzalled a quarter panel window free from its moorings at the junkyard with my off hand.
That’s when it happened, though - I got myself a car that I cared about. I made the mistake, as many others had before me, of getting involved with the 1978 Chevrolet Nova, the finest automobile ever made. With production numbers only in the low hundreds of thousands over the car’s manufacturing life, I knew that every single one was a unique jewel, a gift from General Motors Themselves that must be protected at all costs.
Months later, when I realized that instead the car I Must Have was in fact a Triumph GT6, it became incredibly difficult to unload my concours-correct Nova for the one thousand four hundred dollars I felt my ambitious act of restoration deserved. That was it, I told the growing crack in the foundation of my garage, back to using bathroom caulking as Bondo.
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tags: chevrolet, nova, chevrolet nova, triumph, triumph gt6
Come on down to El Switcho’s Hardware Store and Used Car Lot!
Buy meticulously organized metric bolts - the only shop in town that has them! - which are artisanally hand-stolen from Pick N Pull. We certify that the bolts are treated humanely in our care, except for those bastards where the thread is a little munged up and we ended up torching and hammering them out before absent mindedly throwing them back into the bin with the bolts that are perfectly good.
Got a woodworking project that you need some help with? Then fuck off, because our desk of “Handyman Helpers” are too busy trying to knock a new rear leaf mount into the 1972 Chevy LUV we wrote off on our taxes as a shop “parts runner.”
Get your kids to come by and try the Bucket of Rust Challenge! If they can reach all the way to the bottom of the bucket without getting tetanus, they get a free gumball!
Tour the Wall of POR15, where a vast quantity of America’s favourite rust encapsulating paint is dedicated to forming the Superfund sites of tomorrow, today!
Tired of wasting all your time looking at tools? Why not come out to the back lot where you can look at an entirely different kind of tool, Bill of Sale Bill, who will get you and your family into a decrepit parts Taurus that we slapped a half-quart of Barrs Stop Leak into before putting it back on the road!
For the next two weeks, we are offering free surplus popcorn, hand-gathered from the movie theatre next door that burned down the other day. Come on in, buy some overpriced spraypaint, and nosh on free popcorn! You can’t resist it!
It’s in the Historic Chinatown district, in the shop that Frank used to own before he killed himself over all those gambling debts. You can’t miss it!
Transcript of the Congressional Committee on Unamerican Activities
HOUSE SPEAKER: Would the honorable gentleman from Arizona please begin these proceedings?
AZ CONGRESSMAN: Thank you. We have all seen the press reveals, the salacious front-page rumours, but is it true that you willingly participated in a scheme to have peak torque high in the rev range, against the Constitution itself?
1996 HONDA CIVIC EX: I don’t think this is the venue…
CO CONGRESSMAN: That’s enough! I will not tolerate you fabricating any further testimony to this Congress about your “government conspiracy.” Was it really so hard to just go on eBay and get a Chinese turbocharger or two, sir?
1996 HONDA CIVIC EX: My family was born with weak internals, we grew up very poor in the corner of a Canadian assembly plant.
My brother, he… experimented with nitrous. They all did, back then, because of the Hollywood glamour. We all wanted to be Vin Diesel’s base-model Civic, even if we were a sedan. I took the occasional 25-shot at parties, but my 185-width all seasons never hooked and I didn’t have the fuel system to inhale. It was just too hot for my rings.
We just never got the same opportunity that a rich, American-made car would have had to develop that low-end torque. But we worked hard, and made something of ourselves with the small amount of fuel and oil we were given by our owners.
VT CONGRESSMAN: Sir, you and I both know that an impoverished youth in a foreign hellhole is no excuse for your continued activities as you enter the second decade of your useful life. I have been told by my aides that there are many after-warranty programs to equip small-displacement shitboxes like yourselves with eBay rods and forged Vitara-bore pistons. Surely you could have taken advantage of those?
1996 HONDA CIVIC EX: No, Congressman. After my first owner, I was sold to someone who… used me for commuting duty.
(assorted gasps fill the Reading Room)
MI CONGRESSMAN: How many more must there be like you out there? This is a nation of torque, God dammit.
Thank you for inviting me to give a TED Talk about my otherworldly ability to evade speed radar and the attentions of the police, despite it being well documented that my average speed is a large integer multiple of the posted limit at virtually all times. The apparent fact that the audience is almost completely made up of law enforcement personnel is also not lost on me, nor is it to my attorney, who wants to let the audience know that A) this information is for entertainment purposes only, and that B) he once punched out a great white shark with his bare hands so don’t fuck with us. Okay, now that the legalities are out of the way, let’s begin.
There are a lot of myths about the current state of velocity control legislation in the modern day, and let’s be honest, most of those myths are perpetuated by the ticket-defense industry, who is very interested in you getting tickets so they can bail your ass out of them. I say fuck that, so let’s discuss the top myths.
The first popular myth I hear is that red cars are pulled over more often. This is patently false; if you drive fast enough all red cars will eventually appear blue to a distant observer, and by that point it is impossible for the 5-0 to catch you. It’s just physics, assholes.
I have also heard in my travels that police officers physically cannot see base-model Hyundai products. This is also false: in fact, the presence of Hyundais gives cops a pleasant soporific effect, to the extent that in the wild, police officers have been witnessed curling up to a test Hyundai Pony inserted in their environment by researchers in order to have a quick nap. Besides, nobody wants to go to the courthouse and try to explain that they got a ticket for a hundred over in a playground zone in an Elantra.
We are running out of time now, as I see the organizer of these very Talks pointing at his Apple Watch and telling me to get off the stage so that some guy named Damian can tell us about how mountain climbing taught him that it’s a bad idea to enslave minorities in work camps. Please hit me up after the talks if you want to ask some more questions, but be aware that the mud-terrain-clad 1954 Bel-Air Tradesman parked in the cafeteria is going to leave pretty shortly thereafter.
“Are you unhappy?” asks the onboard psychiatrist wedged crudely into the dashboard of my C3 Corvette. I sighed, and tried to ignore it. Ever since the government had decided that being angry or sad in traffic was a primary cause of accidents, they decided to chase after it by mandating that we all install artificial-intelligence psychiatrists in our shitboxes.
The upshot is that you always had someone to talk to on long road trips, but the downside was that almost nobody liked to be psychoanalyzed while waiting at a stop light. Usually, I was pretty good at controlling my galvanic skin response, the percentage of moisture in my breath, and at keeping my curse words to myself. Sometimes, like today, it wasn’t nearly enough.
“Maybe you should try telling me about your childhood,” chirped the federally-mandated safety device. I continue to make my best effort to pay no attention to it, turning up the stereo as loud as I feel the creaking paper-cone speakers can muster.
I was just about to snap and punch out the robot, federal law be damned, when a bicyclist rode alongside me in the bike lane. The in-dash psychiatrist suddenly became quiet.
The bicyclist looked left, looked right, then rode through the red light.
“PEDESTRIAN OR VEHICLE, PICK ONE, MOTHERFUCKER,” screamed the single-DIN shrink, loudly enough to crack my dash pad. As it continued to wail in inarticulate rage, I noticed a faint red glow appearing from behind its module. At last, I smelled the scent of lifting solder, and the unit sharply went silent.
The next day, the friendly agents from the government visited me at home. Shaking their heads, they extracted the destroyed psychiatrist from my dashboard before glumly placing it into a glossy black trash bag.
“Some things are just impossible to keep from being angry at,” the senior agent explained to me, barely holding back tears at the loss of one more brave soldier of road safety.
#
tags: chevrolet, corvette, chevrolet corvette, in-dash psychiatrist, self-medicating car
Sometimes when I get really bored I like to go down to the local dealership and pretend to be a salesman. It’s not all that hard; there’s always a pile of spare shirts in the back, and you can say whatever the fuck you want about anything because nobody expects a salesman to know what he is talking about.
Today, my victims are a young couple, fresh out of college, looking to get their first car together. They have a massive dog, they tell me, and for a few minutes we are scrolling together through their collective phone camera backlog in search of pictorial evidence of the dog’s existence. I have the perfect car for them, I tell them, and lead them out into the parking lot, where the wheezing Tercel I have driven to the dealership leaks its lifeblood into the cracked tarmac.
“Look at this motherfucker,” I tell them. “Quad turbos. You can drive to the moon and back on a thimble full of gas. The suspension cures kidney cancer, I shit you not. Ferry Porsche once tried to stab me for the secrets behind the air conditioning, which doesn’t work because it’s terrible for the environment.”
The male of the couple has decided that he wants to negotiate with me, because he has identified through exposure to mass media that car salesmen are always willing to negotiate. He says he wants $1000 off. I tell him I’ll talk to my manager.
Five minutes later, I return from taking a piss on the manager’s parked-across-two-spots Jaguar to shake their hands. Congratulations, I tell them, you won’t regret this, and ask if their twenty grand will come in the form of a cheque or a money order.
A month later, when I am appointed Salesman of the Year to the complete confusion of the existing sales staff, the dealership principal asks me how I did it. The secret is confidence, I tell him. By the way, you look like a man who could use a new car. I have the perfect car for you, it’s just out front here.
You don’t have to be an esteemed anthropologist to understand that there are vibrant currents of social movement happening every day in your friendly neighbourhood junkyard. Indeed, just one trip to the dilapidated taco truck parked in one corner of the lot so very long ago will show you the various kinds of people that make their daily bread pulling the old car that you gave a name to and then unceremoniously killed because of something so minor as a coolant leak or a four-car pileup.
My quest was to get to the top of the heap, socially. I wanted to be a regular, and have the other denizens recognize me by name. It’s hard to say exactly why I wanted to do this, but it probably had something to do with the fact that it was pretty easy. You see, climbing the social ladder at the junkyard is a two-part project: first, you have to show up to the junkyard. Second, you have to do it in the coolest fucking car in the parking lot.
Now, you’d think that wouldn’t be hard. Everyone else has beaters, right? I’ll just show up in a new luxury car, like I do at my job on Wall Street. Wrong, so very wrong. Anyone can buy a BMW, but only the Junkyard King could keep, for example, a propane-fuelled turbo-swapped Plymouth Reliant teetering on just this edge of the abyss long enough to fill its trunk with his daily bounty of floormats and barely-worn brake pads.
No, what I needed was the ultimate beater, something so rare as to cause disbelief, and so weird that it would force stories from the lips of those who would witness it, during late-night garage-time bullshitting sessions. “This motherfucker at the junkyard brought in a twin-turbocharged Detroit-swapped ‘74 Maserati Quattroporte with a tube-frame pickup bed riding on 33 inch mud terrains,” I imagined they would say to one another, gasping at the very concept of how god damn cool I was.
I went looking on Kijiji, and I found my cool ride. I was all over its supple curves, its quirky interior, its barely-restrained animalistic fury. Also it was the first thing on the list under a grand.
“Holy shit, does that thing still have the built-in picnic table?” the Junkyard King asked me the next morning, unable to believe that someone could have a 1998 Honda CR-V in manual.
When you are next interviewing for a job, don’t forget to practice with this list of common interview questions. They could save not only your career, but the careers of those around you.
How would you estimate the number of traffic lights in Los Angeles? Answer: Hire someone to steal all the traffic lights in Los Angeles, weigh the pile, and then divide the total weight by the weight of one traffic light.
How do you invert a binary tree? Plug it in to the wall backwards.
You’re in a desert walking along in the sand, when all of a sudden, you look down and see a tortoise. It’s crawling towards you. You reach down and flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over. But it can’t. Not without your help. But you’re not helping. Take the gun from him. He won’t react in time. You’re faster. You can do this.
My two idiot sons come barging into the Oval Office, screaming something completely indecipherable about climate change or polluting smallblocks or the abstract concept of life after death. I dismissed them, as I generally did, with a lazy overhead toss of my desktop letter opener in their direction, burying the gleaming blade up to the hilt in the collarbone of the one I think I called Little Frank.
I summon my military advisor, because I have heard something extremely troubling somewhere in their pathetic babble. Plugging my left ear with my index finger, I fire my Luger directly into the ceiling, disgorging plaster in our agreed-upon distress signal. You can try to ignore an inter-office intercom, I tell them in my internationally-recognized book of How To Succeed In Business, but you can’t ignore a hot nine-millimeter hollow point.
He gets the news, and before long he has already kicked both Little Frank and the other one of my sons out of the way in his harried rush to my office. His gin-swollen face flaps in a crude imitation of a dying fish as he asks me what it is I need.
“I’ve heard of the Paris Accords,” I tell him, banging the desk with my commemorative Presidential brass knuckles. “Are they wagons? If they are, I want to authorize a first strike to free those wagons.”
The Ford Taurus, also known in the Mexican market as El Fordo De Taurusino, is one of Middle America’s most beloved brands. Did you ever wonder how the Ford Taurus came to be?
No, of course not, I hear you saying, normal people don’t want to hear about the Ford Taurus. You’re not a normal person, I tell you, that’s why I’m here to help, and my hand imperceptibly slips into my pocket as we converse. With a flash of my closed fist, I have forced a near-knockout dose of Haldol into your mouth and our session can at last begin.
The original inventor of the Ford Taurus is Robert McNamara, most famous for the Vietnam War. However, when he still worked at Ford back in the 50s, he drew some pictures of a totally bitchin’ robot that shot people in the dick but was also a police officer. Those simple sketches later became Robocop, a titan of Hollywood immortalized on the silver screen by Wisconsin’s own Peter Weller.
Robocop needed a bitchin’ ride, and Ford also needed a front-wheel-drive import fighter with which to finally respond to the nearly-unbroken twenty year span in which a chuckling Soichiro Honda himself had his polished wingtips on their collective throats. After a weekend of furious sketching, and an unprecedented fifteen minutes of testing, the first-generation Ford Taurus was released to a shrieking, terrified crowd of onlookers at the Detroit Motor Show in 1985. Later, Ford executives would comment that they wished they had done a more conventional unveiling rather than trying to barrel through the crowded convention hall doing nearly 80 mph to show off the Taurus’ best-in-some-class handling.
After some good-natured ribbing from Chrysler executives, who were at the time turning their dopey economy cars into three-hundred-wheel-horsepower turbocharged nightmare rockets ripped from Carroll Shelby’s most secret sexual fantasies, Ford decided to do what they should have done in the first place and had the Japanese build their fucking motors. The result was an unprecedented-for-North-America overhead camshaft engine, previously only seen in luxury exotics such as the mid-spec 1980 Ford Escort.
Ford was so excited about this new development, known internally as the “Taurus Holy Shit,” that they decided to take the development car into production, unveiling it again at the Detroit Motor Show by using a test vehicle to jump four school buses for stunned onlookers. Car and Driver Magazine at the time called the stunt “unnerving,” and presumed that the newly-renamed Taurus SHO must have been a creation of European Satan (pronounced Satané in the original French).
Eventually, Ford executives got bored, and forgot that they made the Taurus. Without an executive to micromanage the factories, the workers at the Taurus production plants simply wandered away, distracted by butterflies and the chirping meadows around their sites of work.
It wasn’t until late 2008 that Bill Ford woke up from the cryogenic slumber he had placed himself in during the Dealer Incentive Wars of 1993. His first directive was to revive the beleaguered Taurus brand, a decision that anthropologists and economists agree may have precipitated an unprecedented worldwide economic collapse.
In part two of this series, we’ll discuss the formation of the Taurus’ evil twin, the Mercury Sable, and the true motivations behind the team of teenagers with mystical powers who joined forces to destroy it.
I gotta tell you, being a maverick beekeeper is hard enough without these damn kids racing their Wankel rotaries through here and luring away my finest insects. My day had barely started when I had to exchange gunfire with a set of big-business Hive Mafia types angered that I had lifted a few pounds of honeycomb to which they weren’t paying very much attention.
Once I had finished pollinating their goons with my usual assortment of hot lead, I was at last ready to get down to the serious business. I had started doing this all these years ago for the love of these bees, the charm of their buzzing antics, the smell and sight of fresh honey and innocent larvae taking their first smells of the world. That’s when I heard it.
A bridgeported RX-7 came ripping down the street, its exhaust note sounding like a swarm of the toughest bees imaginable. Of course, the hive I had just fought so hard to protect erupted into a defensive swarm, stinging me repeatedly. I didn’t mind, because the real pain would come later, when it became obvious that my newly ill-gotten hive had been voided of its valuable workers. It was virtually worthless.
Sure, this had happened to me before, but I figured the general loss of RX-7s in the world borne of rot, oil consumption and side seal delaminating would make my job easier. I had not counted on those who would rebuild those engines, make them even louder and more irritating as part of the meticulous rebuild process.
“Save the thirteen bees,” they said to one another when I would spy on them at their meets. What about my bees, I shrieked into my Honey Nut Cheerios commemorative coffee mug full of mead?
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tags: rx7, bees, glad i got this out of my system
I didn’t follow any particular brand or organization out of loyalty; I did it because that’s where the deals lived. The fact that my own idea of ‘deals’ involved pancake motors which burned gallons of oil and then exploded, supernova-esque, in a hyperheated mist of death coolant and Clevite provided me no small amount of cognitive dissonance.
When I found out about the Saabarus available in my very own neighbourhood, I rejoiced: at last, a chance to learn new tidbits about Subarus with which to annoy my wrenching companions. The cherry on top was the pretense of luxury that was only formerly accessible to drug dealers and other low-end entrepreneurs on the other side of the tracks. With this car, I was sure, I would have it all: a new black hole with which to consume my spare Impreza parts collection, and legitimacy in the greater society which had heretofore rejected me.
I was feeling pretty successful - I had even put on a shirt that morning - so it came as quite a surprise when the 5-0 rumbled me for one of my smaller automotive sins. Perhaps the Saab was more distinctive than my usual claptrap automobiles, or maybe it was because there was no longer a dense cloud of oil vapour obscuring my presence until I was safely out of the officer’s visual range. Either way, I now had Johnny Law to deal with.
Before I could even complete rolling down the window, the cop had opened his mouth and stuck it into the cabin of the car.
“What’s going on with this molar, doc? It’s buggin’ the hell out of me,” I think he said through his yawning maw.
I couldn’t very well tell him I wasn’t a dentist lest he suspect me of grand theft auto, so I did the best I could doing a root canal with what I had left in the trunk. Luckily, I never went anywhere without my trusty Dremel and tubes of black RTV. It was basically like patching rust, but the rust was in the mouth of a police officer who wouldn’t stop asking me for a hit of nitrous from the tank in the back.
#
tags: saab, 9-2x, impreza, subaru, mobile dentistry
Every government agency was throwing a lot of shit at the wall in those days, trying to figure out what would awaken the interest of those who held the budget pursestrings long enough for them to shake free a few coins. My humble position at the EPA was no different, but I was never what they call a “team player.”
As such, when my boss came barrelling through the meeting room that Tuesday morning, imploring us to “brainstorm some crazy ideas,” I said the dumbest ones I could think of. Unfortunately, it’s always the dumbest ideas that seem to catch fire.
Within weeks, we were building and testing prototypes in the lab. This innovation would revolutionize fuel economy, reducing the average American’s spend on gasoline by almost a thousand dollars a year. We knew that the big oil companies would come after us, but we all figured the trained teams of ex-Soviet assassins would plug our boss first, give us a little warning to hop on a plane to Portugal.
Even so, with only a little maiming, my boss survived to demo our innovation for Good Morning America. The problem was simple, he said: dogs sticking their heads out the window of moving cars created a small but perceptible amount of drag. We would place an aerodynamic Lexan bubble over the open window of the car, redirecting airflow past the relatively inefficient shape of the dog’s head and providing extra downforce.
Sure, I got a medal from Congress and all, but I still think about the sad look on the face of the first dog in our test program who realized that the wind wasn’t blowing in his face anymore.
All men die. Not all men truly live. I reflect on this truism as Taro Aso, age 7, shatters my tibia in three places with the foam-rubber bumper of the simulated police car.
For my crimes of smuggling torque into the Home Islands, I have been condemned to a sentence of court-ordered community service. Today, my job is to work in a public park, educating schoolchildren about the impending responsibilities society will place upon them as part of learning to operate a motor vehicle. Most of the kids are dull sparks, afraid to really open up the gas, but not little Taro. Motherfucker loves full throttle.
For some reason, the friendly police officer at the other end of the park keeps letting him take repeated rides, while gesturing at me to get back into my spot and prepare to walk out in front of him, playing an oblivious pedestrian trying to tweet on his phone. I don’t even have a phone, I tried to explain to this Inspector Koshiro during our federally-mandated bento box break, but he just menacingly waved his nightstick in my direction and reminded me that he once had to use force on a criminal, which made him the toughest cop in Japan.
Every time I step into oncoming traffic, I have been bracing myself for the impact. I am pretty sure it is actually just making things worse, so I try relaxing and “rolling with the punches,’ like I saw on a flower-arrangement TV show once late at night. This is when the replica police car finally ruptures my leg under me.
Koshiro laughs as he hears my shinbone dimple under yet another of Taro’s high-speed assaults. I am pretty sure he has been giving him tips on how to carry more speed through the other side of the figure-eight test track. It’s probably unnecessary. Even the dumbest kids we’ve had through here could see the best turn-in point is just past the fibreglass cartoon rabbit eternally watering its lawn, and they aren’t hitting me with anywhere near the same level of calf-splintering force. This kid has something special, and the good Inspector agrees.
“Excellent job, Taro! You will be Japan’s finest F1 driver yet! Even better than Taki Inoue!” he cries, patriotic pride finally having overcome his pretense of concern for public safety.
Jude Law’s Sex Pope - Sex Pope (Jude Law) is called in to service at NASA HQ when a sexy emergency has broken out on the International Space Station. Keith David guest stars.
Holy Shit, Who’s This Guy Now? - The acclaimed British high fantasy series comes to North American airwaves at last. With over three hundred new characters introduced per episode, and some of the episodes out of order (we think), good luck figuring out what’s going on. There’s dragons, though.
Symphony for the Devil - Orchestra conductor turned demon hunter Constance Waybill investigates a series of ritual murders performed with a woodwind instrument in the woods.
Tokyo Subway Bore - On this episode, a white man with no functioning understanding of Japanese attempts to inform the viewer about the long-running history of Tokyo’s subway system. This one’s about the Shirokanedai station, formerly famous for nothing this guy knows about.
“These are the Red Tag Days spoken of in myth,” I plead with the Lord Regent. “We must immediately send an army to the distant lands before the promised era of Toyotathon dawns upon us.”
He looks at me, narrowing his eyes as he considers my words carefully. Then he speaks.
“You wizards and witches come to this hold often, and you speak of Toyota deals which are unbelievable to the human mind. Incomprehensible. But I understand these deals,” he says dismissively, while pouring another flagon of mead. “They are the deals of men.”
Standing, he faces the narrow keyhole window in his room. “We cannot afford to further subsidize Ford dealer floorplan. The Escapes will have to sell themselves with only ten grand on the hood.”
A fortnight later, Toyotathon unfurled its dark cloak over the Realm of Depreciation. At the head of their immense marching army stood the Toyota Highlander, yet something was different.
“Motherfucker, they made a hybrid Highlander?” the Lord Regent cursed, immediately before being struck down by superior initial quality.
Article 19 of the Constitution of Japan explicitly forbids the possession of undersquare engines for any purpose, including national self defense. Those who commit acts of high-torque treason against the government are secreted away to black sites, never to be heard from again.
Last week, we were hanging out with this guy from the shop, Junpei. We liked him. He liked us. I think our bombastic North American attitudes and general lack of concern for safety regulations rubbed off on him. Next thing we heard, the federales kicked in the door to his apartment, found him fabricating a turbo manifold for a 4.3 V6 on his kitchen table. Off to the gulag, just like that.
I didn’t really mind it so much. I would help myself to their scraps, pick up free intercooler cores, silicone hose, those nice little stainless t-bolt clamps. All I had to do was pull down the police tape. The cops would never arrest me; I would just play dumb, pretend I didn’t know their language, act like a barbarian who comes from a country that doesn’t have the rule of law. They’d smile and sometimes even help me carry the illicit contraband to my Minica ZZ at the curb.
What I was truly afraid of was the threat of being deported back to North America, where I would at last face trial for my crime of operating a vehicle with an engine displacement below two liters.
For years, I would be flummoxed on my commute by witnessing a man in a front end loader going the other way. At first, I thought it was just another roadworks or parks project, a construction team moving equipment during rush hour. After a few months, and especially after a few years, I realized that no construction project would be going on this long, nor would this guy have to make the drive every single morning.
At last I could take it no longer, and yanked the hydraulic handbrake on my Valiant. Before the carbon-fibre replica panels could even finish their rattling after the curb hop, I had caught up with the loader. Soon, I had followed him to an ordinary office-complex parking lot. That’s strange, I thought, this doesn’t look like it needed construction. Or even landscaping.
The driver jumped out, a man about my height wearing a dress shirt and slacks. He left the hardhat and reflective safety vest on the seat. I decided to interrogate him, to finally understand the rationale behind this strange sight.
“You got me. I’m not really a construction worker,” he said, frowning, “I’m what they like to call a ‘workie.’ We dress up like construction workers and commute to our boring office jobs in heavy equipment, so we can at least pretend we’re putting in an honest day’s work. It’s what I always wanted to do since I was a child.”
I was confused, and found myself getting defensive about my own choices in life. Sure, I dressed up like a race car driver and daily-drove a fire-breathing twin-turbocharged fifty year old economy car, but that wasn’t because I craved excitement in between my visits to the workplace. Wasn’t it?
I turned to say something, but he was gone. He had booped the security card sensor, entered his office and prepared to participate in a daily standup. The cold wind howled past me, standing in the middle of a dreary parking lot.
Back in the Valiant, I could not control my thoughts. Perhaps his way of life was more correct than mine, and that I was being dishonest to my true nature. There was no way I could ever live up to my childhood dreams like he had, though. I asked myself, what would Dr. Oz say?
The next week, I was happily driving a replica Moon Rover to work. Sure, there were some problems keeping it in wire-mesh tires and the visor on my helmet kept fogging up even with a heavy dose of Rain-X, but it was all worth it for the angry honks that my fellow motorists would give me, out of jealousy as much as being frustrated at my top speed of 48 kilometers per hour.
It’s your Eye In The Sky for Action News Five. There’s some congestion at Sixth and Main that appears to be some kind of station wagon that’s on fire. No, wait, he’s just doing an immense burnout.
I’ve been to war zones, been mustard-gassed by an acid-mad half-blind mercenary who was born in the jungle and fought like hell to maintain his way of life, and I’ve still never seen a one-tire-fire this impressive.
I can see the police arriving now. They, too, are just men. Impressed men. They have lowered their weapons, one officer even dropping to one knee, bowing out of respect to the impending death of the Goodyears throwing the last of their marbles into this morning’s crisp autumn air.
We had such hubris, to think that man could fly this high, to put himself above the hustle and bustle of the city. I used to believe myself superior, that I had escaped or even could flee my past. Well, dear viewers, I was wrong. This man, this tire-bashing devil who is at this very moment marking his territory across the dimpled and fractured tarmac of the intersection, has unmade me.
The Action News Chopper pilot, who I have never learned the name of, is piloting us closer to get a better look at this incredible smoke cloud. Yes, the tire smoke blacker than the night sky, the fog of rubber a beautiful vortex that compels the mind further inwards to an inescapable trap for consciousness, I cannot escape it. Only here can I receive ultimate redemption, baptized anew in the smoke screen of one fucking sweet burnout. Tell my wife I love her.
I worked the crusher back then, feeding dozens of shitboxes into its maw. At first, I had resolved that I would not be the guy who blindly crushes cars. This is my confession, though I know in my heart I am beyond any absolution it could bring.
For every quirky car, I pledged, two Cavaliers would meet their maker, keep my boss off my back. Maybe they’d live long enough to let someone save them, or just pull that one part they couldn’t find anywhere else, keep another one alive somewhere out there. What would happen when the world ran out of Cavaliers? I tried not to think about that.
Don’t let us get crushed, they pleaded even as I fed them myself into the crusher, my eyes shut so tightly they hurt, although the tears would still flow past the lids.
One day, there were no more Cavaliers. I was distraught. On the way in, I had read a newspaper article stating that in fact no automaker had produced a “bad” car in almost a decade. Whatever was I supposed to do in order to save the real gems? My panic over potentially crushing a worthwhile automobile by mistake came to an abrupt end when I frantically searched the to-crush list for that morning and came across my first doomed Nissan Altima Coupe.
That afternoon, I received a promotion. They said I had developed a “good attitude” about the whole thing, that I seemed for the first time in years to truly enjoy my work and attend to it with zeal.
I could hardly believe it. After years of letter-writing, grassroots campaigns and race riots, Tokyo Drift was finally being admitted into the Hollywood Hall of Fame as one of the finest films ever made. The Academy sent me a gold-fringed letter and everything about it, and it was real classy the way the letter transitioned into their plea for me to live up to my side of the deal and release all those hostages.
Thing was, the same letter apologized for not having a section for “best on-screen cross-marque engine swap,” which I felt was a total abomination. Didn’t they understand it was a metaphor for how the protagonist had learned to balance his new surroundings with his innate nature? Also that it made stupid levels of boost?
Sure, Big Hollywood would win this one. But I’d be back to put my star on their Walk of Fame. Months later, I would be arrested trying to do a four-alarm burnout, leaving the tread surface of a pair of corded General Grabbers across the sidewalk. Hollywood controlled the government, of course, and it should have been no surprise that they would use force to coerce defenders of the truth like myself into prison.
It was times like this that I remembered my mentor’s wise words: “the Cutlass Ciera is a pretty fine ride.“ He was right, though the front-drive bull that I was now trying to rope bore only a legal resemblance to its as-delivered form. I blipped the throttle and watched the carbon-fibre front clam quiver with anger above the twin-turbocharged sixty-degree vee-six.
Sure, it had started innocently enough. They all do. I had seen it growing moss and gathering rust in the corner of a yard, inquired within, and rescued the beast only to find out that it had more problems than I had figured. It went into the corner of my yard immediately afterward, only to be the first car I had spotted after I got that big settlement cheque from the Dremel people for making their cutting discs excessively fragile so they could sell a few more.
Now, as I roamed the streets in a quad-digit-horsepower nightmare machine freed from the death row of obsolescence and commanded to kill again, I wondered if perhaps I was missing the point of my mentor’s worship of the econobox as-delivered. Perhaps what my mentor considered “fine” was in fact the opportunity to drive past a daycare without feeling like you were twirling a loaded assault rifle by its hair trigger out the sunroof.
My thoughts wandering allowed the Ciera to get the better of me, and I banished such heresy from my mind in order to rope the front end back under control as it torque-steered across four lanes in a haze of rubber and nitromethane smoke.
It can be a struggle for today’s young professionals to pick an automobile that promotes their personal ‘brand’ to the world. Here with us today is noted automotive journalist, P. G. Switch. Mr. Switch, it’s a pleasure to have you here. What can you tell us about the kind of car a twenty-something up-and-coming mover-and/or-shaker should be driving?
Well, it’s important off the bat to understand that literally no normal person cares what kind of car you drive. That’s why I drive a red 1991 Toyota Celica with rust holes in it the size of an adult Papillon, then tell people it’s a rare 1967 Ferrari Misfortuna. They eat that shit up, and then I get invited onto morning news programs to talk about cars.
That’s, uh, great, Mr. Switch. Can you show us what you have brought with you to the show today?
Yes, as you can see here, your Trouble Shooters segment has managed to track down the guy who screwed me over on a turbo with “no shaft play” last weekend. I’ve placed these attractive rusty meathooks directly through his chest muscles and are providing him with a twelve thousand volt shock every so often. I wouldn’t get too close.
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tags: television news, morning show, toyota, toyota celica
Nobody could save me from Saab. Wherever I looked, I would find sub-$500 GM-Swedish abominations pulling at my purse strings. Help us, the cars said, we’re weird.
Driving down the street, I would spot a minty 9-5 wagon up on blocks with its turbocharger blown or interior ripped. Some part of me would wonder if maybe I did have what it could take to rescue it, make a plea deal with the owner before the tow truck came to pick it up for its date with the crusher. The old suburbanite impulses would resurface after a short time, tell me that I didn’t have enough storage or enough free time to save this one, and wasn’t I already hip deep in bullshit projects with hard-to-get parts already?
I fled to the mountains. There, I felt, people were more normal. They would have old pickup trucks, domestic economy cars, nothing weird and Swedish. It just wouldn’t happen. As I climbed further and further away from urban society, I felt the influence of Trollhattan upon my mental state wane. Plus, the roads were pretty good up there. Lots of corners.
They said that decades ago, a group of old rally fans had barricaded themselves up here, unwilling to believe that Group B had ended. My daily-driver Subaru was just old enough to convince them that I was part of their clique, and so when I finally put together the clues that afternoon, the rally fans allowed me through the gate, barking their ceremonial “OI OI OI OI” at my approach.
I stepped out of the car, confident now that perhaps I had finally found my people with which to wait out the last of the Saabs.
There was no way I would ever pay five hundred dollars for a Saab, I said even as my wallet was opened and two thousand dollars was removed for the rusty shell of a barely-running 1978 Saab 99 Turbo.
After all, there was no way to find parts for an older car whose manufacturer had died, I explained as they lowered the front-cut of a 96, replete with furious two-stroke three, into the capacious hatch “for later.”
I’d have to hang out with a bunch of weird people, I had trouble saying through my helmet to my panicking codriver as I took the Swedish shitbox fully sideways across their back-forty rallycross course.
Then it was all just sort of a blur.
Help me, I plead to the customers of the Greyhound station as they tried to avert their eyes from my homeless visage, I’m weird.
We were all really to blame for the twin-turbocharged John Deere that had gained sentience and began patrolling the city, looking for ungroomed lawns.
When it first got free, the Mayor was super angry. How dare we let a semi-autonomous bag of spinning knives loose on the playground near us? When would it stop, he asked, before realizing that the Deere was busily mowing the front lawn of City Hall and doing a pretty good job of it. Then he started to compliment us, speaking loudly over my explanation that we hadn’t really finalized the child-detection code yet before it figured out how to drive through my garage door and escape.
To tell you the truth, though, we had a lot of free time now, at least until it ran out of gas and held up another liquor store for a forty of Pennzoil and unfiltered low-ethanol 91 octane. The Mayor was happy because he got to take the tax money that would otherwise be spent on lawns and sock it away under his pillow, which was on a yacht moored in the Caymans.
What none of us could expect was that one day the lawnmower would run for office itself, trading on the well-known Deere family name to boost its name recognition among decided and undecided voters alike. Its campaign of low taxes and cheap high-octane, low-ethanol fuels resonated with those same voters as it made promises it could not keep, and shredded tax bills with great ceremony upon the wood-and-astroturf stage of its press announcements.
I rushed to the Mayor’s office in those awful last days of his reign, helped him feed paperwork into the shredder. What we hadn’t known before the explosive leaks to the media was that the shredder was a distinctly pro-blades kind of guy.
Recently we had a little bit of a humdinger down here at the ol’ Switch HQ. You might have heard about it in the news, and although none of the allegations have yet been proven in a court of law, we decided to make a best effort at remedying them. I asked myself, what kind of community service do people consider essential? Then I just decided it was firetrucks.
Now, you might think that a volunteer fire department is relatively unnecessary in a city such as this, which already has a well-equipped professional fire department. Certainly I had my detractors around the office, but they almost all shut up when I showed them the firetruck I decided to buy.
Imported from Japan, my right-hand-drive Mitsubishi Fuso shortcab firetruck let me rip through the streets, its taut suspension and firm-shifting five speed manual transmission keeping the miniature turbocharger on boil. Sure, there were wrinkles, like the fact that fire radio is encrypted so I had no real idea where the houses that were on fire were actually located, but I made an effort and that’s what counted.
One morning, I was doing pulls on the highway, trying to shake out the fuel map to eke out a few more horsepower. That’s when I saw it - smoke that didn’t seem to be coming from my miniature diesel. On the side of the road, a car was fully engulfed in flames, and its driver was busy trying to flag me down, probably confusing me for one of the sell-out fire trucks.
Once I pulled in behind the flaming Ferrari 458, the driver was overjoyed. What luck, they yelled at me, while I put out their car. Frowning, I told them that I was going to have to seize the engine for evidence, in order to understand its propensity for combustion, namely around the rev-limiter area.
Weeks later, I was no longer very concerned about diesel tuning, and I didn’t really need a siren either. It probably still would have been a good idea to put on a muffler, because I sure didn’t hear those cops behind me.
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tags: mitsubishi, fuso, mitsubishi fuso, fire truck, firetruck, ferrari, ferrari 458
By the year 2020, we expect all self-driving cars to be capable of doing the entire grocery run for you. At last, man’s greatest waste of time will be defeated forever. I work on the team that’s making it possible. We assembled in one place the greatest minds of Silicon Valley, and told them to write a bunch of Javascript that would make an autonomous car capable of telling peameal bacon apart from regular bacon.
Sure, the early prototypes didn’t exactly work out, but once we figured out that the car never had to go into the grocery store, our jobs got a lot simpler. After all, almost no products in the Lexus stable could fit in today’s ever-tighter produce aisles. We got a few more months of runway too, because all the liability lawsuits started to go away for some reason.
It wasn’t until our demo Mercury Milan (painted Ebony Metallic, of course, the racists) got arrested in the bad part of town that we realized it had other, more valuable alternative products it could pick up. Upon hearing this, our captive investors were overjoyed, pulling futilely at the welded-shut latches of their wrist-chained briefcases in a vain attempt to extract term sheets and Series A funding paperwork. They were invigorated, and we decided to strike while the iron was hot. But we needed to get some of that supply side, said my mentor.
Weeks later, we were trillionaires, but I still had to go to the grocery store myself, on foot, like an ape. It just wasn’t profitable to have your car doing anything other than trafficking thousands of pounds of high-value narcotics per day, our internal economists explained to us. The opportunity cost was simply too high.
Recently, my enemies - and I have many - have attempted to smear me in the press. Striking from a position of relative anonymity, they choose to paint me as a complete lunatic who is obsessed with tall redlines and doing burnouts in church parking lots. Nothing could be further from the truth, and that is why I am so grateful that the New York Times has offered me some editorial space in order to refute these allegations.
One of the most troubling allegations I read in yesterday’s full-page ad was that I am consumed by an urge to accelerate. This is simply untrue: in today’s modern cities, let alone the laws of thermodynamics themselves, continuing to accelerate without limit is simply impossible.
I choose instead to maintain my average speed by taking advantage of under-used urban infrastructure such as subway tunnels, sidewalks and front lawns. After all, my tax money paid for roads, and it also paid for these things, so they are both legally and morally equivalent.
The old story that I once hijacked a school bus in order to steal its Detroit? Also false. It was a Navistar, not like I want to admit to that.
Many of my political opponents have also commented on my unusual predilection towards Italian cars. Those of you out there who would be concerned about such things should be reassured that I only love Italian cars from a great distance. There is absolutely no cause for alarm, and those photographs that have circulated are no doubt fake. Also that GTV6 was asking for it, wearing a splitter that big.
And above all, the American public must know this: while the Russians did try to bribe me in order to give up the nuclear launch codes, the Lada Niva they offered me had a worn out clutch and I’m not fucking replacing that.
There’s been a lot of talk in the media about the future of our children as it pertains to science and technology. Lots of talk, not much action. I decided that I would take things into my own hands and volunteer to help out at the local soap box derby being put on by the Scouts. I would teach those kids the lessons and the pitfalls I had encountered throughout my life, and show them the path to do better.
“Kids,” I said, gesturing to my guest once the dust had settled. “This is my friend from NASA, gravity well expert Dr. Juliet “Psycho” Carter. She’s on supervised day release for good behaviour, but she deactivated her tracking bracelet and left her floor manager unconscious in the bathroom of the Denny’s just off I-5.”
Dr. Carter smiled at the kids, and a few of them involuntarily shut their eyes, not wanting to see what she had seen. Others smiled back. Those would be the ones who would go the fastest today, I had decided. They were not afraid of death. They were not afraid of speed.
Ted Armistice, one of the volunteer dads in the paddock behind me, clucked at some wheel bearings, lifting the hub cassette to his face and rotating it slowly in an effort for it to tell him of the truths of the universe. He would never want to get his wish, and I had someone right here who could tell him why.
“Have any of you kids been to the inside of a black hole?” I continued. “The Doc has, and she came back a changed woman. Don’t get too close to her hands.”
That afternoon, we won the race. After we put out the fire and pulled the test driver from what was left the car, we went out for some ice cream. Let’s see the Chinese top that, I said while two-fisting a bottle of Lactaid pills.
After my Uncle Pennybags died and left me the deed to his garage condo, I figured I would head on down and try my luck at fixing the ol’ daily driver. Surely, I reasoned, even the bougiest assholes around would smile when they saw a 1989 Geo Prizm shooting antilag fireballs across the floor from its fender-exit exhaust.
By the day’s end, I figured that I’d be getting invited to golf courses, and I might even be able to stop tinkering with that golf cart long enough to get one of those vaunted management jobs I’d heard so much about. You know the jobs I’m referring to: the ones with the free cocaine and the Aston Martin company cars that can be sold to pay for used Ford Escort GTs.
I showed up, and pulled my toolkit from the hatch. After a few minutes of swearing at a heat-seized intercooler T-bolt clamp, I was interrupted by a knock at the door. It was a rich person, and he was wondering what I was doing.
“Working on my car,” I told him, confused. Wasn’t that what a garage condo was for?
“Oh no, no,” he told me. “You work on your car with one of these” - he holds up a microfiber chamois with quick-detailer spray on it - “You’ll just scratch your maid’s car if you use that to clean it.”
#
tags: geo prizm, geo, garage condos, ford escort, ford
A lot of people take their cars for granted. Not me, my court-ordered psychiatrist says: I am way too in to this shit. I can become totally consumed by repeatedly clicking the the amazing pop-out cupholder of a junkyard Jaguar open and closed. Look at it go, I say to the undelighted onlookers who pass by. Even taking the language barrier into consideration, I still feel that they are snubbing me unduly.
What’s more, today’s modern car is packed jam-full of a dizzying number of new innovations. Just the other day I was at the new car dealership, and before the yard dogs were able to reach me, I found that new Ford Fusions are outfitted with a jack, lug wrench and owner’s manual.
Having owned only used cars that were formerly operated by wanted felons who apparently spent their copious free time driving through liquid sewage, this last bit was extremely fascinating to me. I decided then and there that I would begin a brutal campaign to write a user’s manual for my daily driver, so that I no longer had to spend fifteen minutes explaining its various quirks to my friends when they needed to borrow it.
Here is just one excerpt from my great work, Your Guide To Operating The 1988 Lincoln Town Car Signature Series (Customized by Switch’s Rides)
Headlights
Don’t have ‘em, you probably don’t need them. Don’t pull the high beam switch (pictured right) or something really bad will happen.
Starting the Car
If you can avoid doing it, put it off as long as possible. Quickly insert the key, but not all the way, pull it out a little bit and wiggle it a bit until you feel the switch clicking inside. Keep pulling it back and wiggling it until the ignition switch engages, then hold the key tight against the steering column so it doesn’t fall out with your right knee until the car starts.
Don’t let the car idle for more than five minutes. It will start trying to ingest the coolant left in the cylinders from the previous night and hydrolock. Strongly suggest that you attempt to hit the speed limit as soon as possible so that you can force enough air down the intake to push the coolant past what’s left of the rings.
Parking the Car
Make sure to disconnect the battery or the dome light will eat it. Even though the dome light always appears off, it is in fact always on. Do not attempt to service the dome light, I’ll get around to it someday.
Activating Cruise Control
Cruise control activation is automatic. To deactivate cruise control, reach under the dashboard and wiggle the throttle cable loose from the bracket it keeps getting hung up on.
Safety
Don’t read this manual while driving.
Shifting Gears
The Town Car’s advanced automatic transmission is equipped with a computer based on fuzzy logic which the transmission completely ignores and shifts whenever the fuck it feels like. Attempting to drink water or polish your monocle will trigger the most violent upshift of your life.
Structural Integrity
In order to preserve the Lincoln Town Car for future generations, do not park it in direct sunlight.
#
tags: jaguar, ford, fusion, lincoln, lincoln town car, ford fusion, owner's manual
“I actually cannot be found liable for this,” I yell over the sound of the compressor spinning to an unfathomable rotational speed. “For all intents and purposes, I am considered a ward of the state and not my own legally responsible entity.” My calm words do not placate my passenger, who is now clawing into the hard-touch plastic-esque dash upholstery hard enough that I would be worrying about the integrity of the passenger side airbag module, had it still existed in this timeline.
I am sure to take the time to enunciate my words very clearly because my passenger does not appear to be paying their full attention to this conversation. This is of course irritating to me: by nature of my divine job controlling this automobile, my attentions and loyalties are naturally split, but as a mere passenger they have no duties of their own but to simply have good manners. Part of having good manners is not being quite so obvious about staring at the rapidly rising needle on the speedometer with great, eye-bulging concern. I decide to say something about it just as the needle pins itself well past the range of indicated speed.
“Yeah, that speedometer actually reads like 25% under after I put those used Mickeys on this hooptie. Fun fact, they were like ten years old so I got a smoking deal on them.” This will work. I am reassuring them that I am a serious adult who does not spend his disposable income frivolously.
At last, we blow past a radar cop and the LS400 sprouts a cloud of shimmering metallic chaff. The chaff fills the electromagnetic spectrum with incredible amounts of noise, frying the circuits inside the cop’s gun as well as every unshielded ECU for a city block. I glance in the rear-view mirror at his rapidly diminishing form, struggling to right himself in the wake of the bargey Toyota.
For some reason, I am no longer selected in the future to drive for the work lunch carpool. I would be more upset about it, except that maintaining conversation during the drive is always so stressful.
Our society’s most powerful metaminds had collectively come together in femtoseconds and identified the ideal vehicle for all right-thinking people: the 1989 Renault Fuego Turbo. After this day, they boomed from nanoscale vibratory speakers embedded within the smart concrete of our cities and homes, the manufactories would no longer produce a less ideal automobile than the Fuego.
Naturally, the price of new Toyota Corollas skyrocketed as their owners realized they had a hot commodity on their hands. Come get your pre-ban Toyotas, they shrieked into the speaknet almost immediately. Those who still could dimly remember the existence of the nation of France gave them their blood money, stuffing their coffers with the finest untraceable digital currency in exchange for anything resembling a Japanese economy car.
Weeks later, society was in ruins, every available surface clustered with Fuegos which had knocked their engines clean in half after their owners entered the Turbo Zone one too many times. The metamind keepers assembled, discussed the findings of their infallible machines. Surely there could not have been some mistake, they said, there must be some reason the Fuego Turbo is the only vehicle our society should drive that we just can’t see with our pitiful meat brains.
Myself, I was just happy at this twist of fate which had produced for me so many newly-manufactured spare parts for my vintage Fuego. Perhaps, I thought, I might even be able to drive it all the way to work once, assuming I could get enough spare parts. I’d probably have to take my thick hard-light-cover copy of Metamind Hacking For Dummies out of the trunk first, though.
#
tags: metaminds, renault, renault fuego turbo, toyota, toyota corolla
They probably shouldn’t have told me it couldn’t be done. When I returned to the workshop, the thought of there being ideas thinkable by man that were not achievable by man stuck in my mind like a cube of side-window safety glass tucking itself into the bench seat of your car forever. I could feel its cutting edge day and night, throughout the time that I now realize I was driven by madness.
Madness though it may have been, the result was extremely practical. I popped open the door to my garage, dislodging the layers of trash and vines that had grown over the door during my project, and faced the world. With not much more than a turn of the key, the twin-turbocharged V12 first-gen Honda Odyssey I had constructed was unleashed upon the neighbourhood. Once my eyes had adapted to the wall of nonstop flames leaping onto the windshield from the hood-exit dump pipes, I was ready to go to the grocery store.
I find it hard to pinpoint just what is creating the smouldering smell when I pull into the parking lot of the Faithful Foods. My primary suspects are, in order from least to most suspicious, the brake pads, the windshield laminate, and the Hyundai Sonata I parked next to, its paint and trim instantly blistering in the wake of the heat wave lofting from the exterior side-mounted air-air intercoolers.
Finally, I kill the engine, and it is only once the turbochargers finish spinning down that I can hear the breathless wail of the municipal air raid siren over them. As if it realizes it is screaming about the sky falling for no apparent reason, it too falls silent, the utility-cammed 440 at its base grudgingly returning to a patchy idle.
Some motherly grid of sensors has been pushed outside of its tolerable range by the visual, auditory and psychic impact of the big Japanese people-mover, I convince myself. Inside the lobby of the grocery store, two workers are banging furiously with prybars on a rusted-shut iron door marked “CIVIL DEFENSE SHELTER.”
I was in and out of the grocery store in about fifteen minutes, thanks to the fact that everyone formerly inside was now hustling their way to the bomb shelter. Honda was right, I think as the Odyssey lays two nightmare-black patches on the face of the parking lot. These things did make an excellent grocery getter.
My detailer called, and from previous experience, I could always tell when it was bad news. Sure, I had pushed the envelope a lot this time, dumping a car from my buddy’s back forty onto his lap without any kind of notice. I first figured out that I had fucked up when he sent me a text, congratulating me on finally discovering a “challenge worthy of my skills.”
A little background: my detailer is from one of those Eastern European countries that existed in an almost constant state of guerrilla war for the past forty years. He’s over forty. When he walks, I can hear metal jangling, which he tells me is “old floorpan.” Floorpan from what? “From tank.” What kind of tank? At that, he frowns, and usually returns to his work. We have our little routines.
Back to the call: it was pretty obvious it was bad news. He wanted me to come down to the shop and show me what he had discovered. It couldn’t be worse than a cluster of dead rats caught mid-orgy like the last time, I said. His frown was somehow audible over the phone, and so I immediately put on some pants and hopped in the ol’ family truckster.
When I finally reached his warehouse, I looked in the detailing bay. I saw a wet floor, lots of soaps and detergents lying around, and no car. Funny thing was, the tires and wheels still seemed to be there. I was so focused on trying to find my car, that I didn’t hear the metallic ringing of my detailer approaching from behind.
“Turns out,” he said, “mouse turds were structural.”
I worked the tiller like it owed me money, trying desperately against all odds to keep the Cadillac upright. The big-body Chevy seemed hostile to my demands, and continued doing its best impression of a drunk waiter dropping a stack of buffet plates onto the floor.
Some smooth handwork and a judicious application of throttle finally brought the ship around, straightening it out just enough that the suspension could rest for a small moment before I began to apply countersteer. I was getting pretty good at this, having practiced ever since the Caddy’s original owner was sent to the mass guillotine for crimes against humanity and the car reassigned to me by the Ministry of Property. They were right; I was definitely more deserving of its love.
Finally, I powerslid the land barge down a highway embankment and into the abandoned parking lot of the marina, bare except for the occasional blood-stained yachter’s hat. I could scarcely feel anything, testament both to the fantastic suspension and the ability of the mud-terrain KO3s to soak up cracked pavement, parking blocks, and gold bars alike.
The People had called me out here this shift, told me to see if I could find some of the last holdouts, clinging to their Randian ideals of self-sufficiency. I did a quick lap of the parking lot and was about to leave when I heard some whispering. Reaching on the poor-quality yet also idealistically union-made power window switch, I was able to come face to face with Capital.
“Saaaaay, that’s a Cadillac, isn’t it? I used to have an Audi, back in the day. Tell you what, do you have any health care I can terminate?” hissed a voice from the bushes.
“Yeah, I got myself a real honey of a government-issued plan. Single payer. It’s even got… prescriptions,” I whistled back, my right hand reaching for the centre-console harpoon controls.
I wasn’t always against German cars. In fact, for awhile, I worked on the team that made one of the most iconic German sports cars of all time: the base model 1977 Porsche 924. We considered it extremely adequate, and my team of only the finest Teutonic ubermensch had no equals in the company when it came to building a great sports car for cheap.
We were ready to put it out, let the world see that exotic sports handling could be had with only an eighty-seven horsepower motor salvaged from a Soviet tractor. That’s when Porsche Corporate stopped us. The Americans won’t understand, they told us, while wringing their hands over stacks of envelopes addressed to them from the Hague. We don’t need to call any special attention to ourselves, they said while furtively glancing at the entrance to make sure no Israeli bounty hunters were sneaking up on them from the lobby.
Sure, you can say that we failed to make a sports car that was capable of outrunning a base-model Vanagon, but I take pride in the fact that at least we didn’t work at Bosch.
#
tags: bosch, porsche, the hague, porsche 924, vanagon, volkswagen
Like an approximate one in every three hundred North Americans, I struggled with Alfa Romeo ownership. It started gently at first, just like I’m sure you’ve convinced yourself that Alfa ownership has been for you.
Just something to have fun with on the weekends. No serious commitment. One morning, though, something broke. It was the shift knob, because I leaned on it kind of hard and it was a forty-year-old piece of sunbaked plastic. I’d need a new one, after all, this fine Italian convertible had served me so well for almost the entire day I’d owned it.
Soon I was learning Italian in order to understand ancient parts microfiche, pausing and replaying the book-on-tape when I would take a particularly hard corner and the only remaining functional speaker would cut out. Always early to the junkyard on weekends, I would growl and hiss at other Alfisti who dared to come close to my find. My wife and kids started to ask uncomfortable questions how I would rub my arms, trying to stimulate my skin, pump more blood to the surface so that the Red Cross would let me fill up another bag of plasma for donation.
Eventually, even my dog left me, after I told him I could no longer afford milkbones because it was time for another engine-out wiring harness replacement. Soon after I sold my base-model Civic daily driver in order to afford a new V6 head gasket set, I stopped going to work entirely. Just had too much to do at home. No problem at all.
But there was hope. In my weakest moment, I came across Alfaholics Anonymous, a vigilante group that goes to great effort to wean people like you and me away from the grim omen of Italian sportscar ownership. Their programs are very affordable - much cheaper than, say, a set of Alfasud inboard rotors - and they outfit you with this neat collar that shocks you every time you think about mortgaging your house to buy a gently-used off-lease 4C. In fact, I haven’t thouAAAAAAGHHH
#
tags: alfa romeo, alfa romeo 164, alfa romeo alfasud, just alfa things
You are at a posh private school, angry because the nanny had some kind of family emergency and couldn’t drop off Zjaden this morning. That’s when you feel it, on some level beyond the physical.
When you look up from your smartphone, the normally-taciturn sun visors of your Audi SQ5 start flapping. The dashboard flashes a series of increasingly dire warnings, finally settling on “BIOHAZARD DEFENSE ACTIVATED.“
You feel as if you are now constantly in a car crash, but you are still parked. Barely a breath later, the exterior glass explodes under the strain, showering you in glimmering cubes. With the interior of the Audi now open to the air, that’s when you hear it.
The sky is growing dark in what is left of the rear-view mirror. Is it a tornado? Are you caught in a terrorist attack?
It has not stopped. In fact, it grows closer. TWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Children are crying on the sidewalk, including Zjaden, who has collapsed face-first onto the pavement, blood streaming from his ears and eyes. You know in your heart this is Judgment Day.
Finally, a rusty 1999 Range Rover Classic bursts into view, a cloud of impenetrable ash in the shape of a human skull trailing it. The front end is gone, mangled back to the bare suspension supports which are welded directly to the valve covers of the immense green engine that is its screaming heart.
As it passes you, the rear air suspension of the Rover explodes, showering the battered side of your carbonized Audi with shrapnel of only the finest British manufacture. Somehow you remain conscious, but you know it is too late for your son. The last thing you see before the cloud overtakes you is the words “STRANGE ROVER” punched into the remaining intact metal of the truck’s tailgate.
That night, you return to your $1.3 million McMansion atop Posh Hill and declare your intention to leave your husband. Coming this close to death has changed you, but you can’t admit it to yourself or to him that you were living a lie all this time. He refuses, your contract of mutual support inviolable. The argument becomes heated. A revolver is withdrawn from your purse. Two shots, centre mass.
As you walk to the desiccated husk of your Audi, dripping liquid diesel from its panels into the storm sewer, you take your time. It is a certainty that the police will never arrive. They are too busy following a luxury SUV after getting pollution and noise complaints from the railroad and airport.
#
tags: strange rover, range rover, detroit diesel, audi sq5, audi
I was trying to be more spiritual. It was important to me, knowing that there was something greater than man out there and that the block would take at least 20 pounds of boost. In my darkest hour, I found the K-car inside. Inside my neighbour’s backyard, that is, with grass up to the wing mirrors.
My grandfather always said a car that you didn’t purchase with a machete was not a real car. He went to prison for murder, but later I realized an alternate meaning to that lesson when I pulled this beauty of a ‘94 Spirit R/T out of the weeds. The bill of sale just said “in trade for not calling the cops.” Calling the cops for what, I asked. My neighbour eyed me suspiciously and then re-locked the eight padlocks on his outer door as he retreated into his house.
Before long, I had the little crapwagon up and running. I was happily commuting, enjoying the whistle of persistent boost leaks, when I was overcome by the holy spirit.
When I awoke, the firefighters told me that this happens a lot when you have rusted-out exhaust, no floorpans, and insist on doing fifty-shots while idling at lights “for laughs.” Their words had some serious weight, and I considered my sinful lifestyle in light of this near-death experience. Then I asked them if they would let me drive the firetruck the rest of the way.
“Mortadello,” the cheese counter lady at Wilmington’s says to me with no small degree of impatience.
It’s not that the grocery store was a bad place to go, per se. I just didn’t want to be there. As I gently push my cart around corners, respectfully obeying the extents of my space envelope and the personal property of others, I begin to feel that it is more like an extended bout of parking than some kind of supermarket barrel race of yore. You don’t need me to tell you that I hate parking.
Ahead of me, I see some autocrossers. They are noticeable because of their tanned calves, toned from endless coursewalks and staying in a runner’s stance at the primo marshaling spot, getting ready to run if that Corvette gets sideways on them again. They are chatting about the lines they took through that tricky bit in the produce section, because of course they are. As I approach the argument is heading well past “crescendo” and into “call the police.”
I decide to take any excuse I could to break up the monotony of pushing a badly-aligned shopping cart around, and Get Involved. As I had been trained by SCCA officials, I throw a pillow on the ground and squirt them both in the face with water while loudly scolding them.
“You two are fighting like a pair of NASCAR drivers,” I yelp.
In the background, a record scratches as the in-house grocery store DJ slips in an unmopped puddle and falls, fracturing his C4 and C6 vertebrae. The two autocrossers pause for a moment, staring at the prone man, and then resume their argument, this time specifically regarding the unfairness of multipliers for classing.
It’s probably better this way. Last week, I decided to stop going to the Rallycross Grocery because the all-terrain tires on my shopping cart wouldn’t stop debeading.
Ever since I fixed the loose negative battery cable for my neighbour who worked over at NASA JPL, he’s been leaving his garbage bin unlocked. Don’t say I didn’t appreciate it.
A few days ago, he threw out something that I considered to be the pinnacle of trash. It turned out that some Silicon Valley eggheads had developed a security robot that is not very good at securing things, and a group of rambunctious high schoolers took a break from cramming for intro calculus to push it over and steal the motors. After that, the broken shell somehow ended up at my neighbour’s place, where he threw it in the trash after removing all of the autonomous parts for some space probe or something, who even cares?
To tell you the truth, I was getting mighty tired of showing up for work in person. While it gave me an excuse to exercise my harem of hoopties, when I got there they generally frowned upon me taking “smoke breaks” to infuse the cars with artisanal home-brewed Seafoam even though the ritual features prominently in my religion. If I was going to make any progress at all on my projects, I was going to need a lot less commuting time and a lot more wrenching time. I thought back to a television program I had seen. Of course. A telepresence robot would be my saviour, its blinking lights, jive-talking robot butler mouth and high-pressure clamps winning both career approval and paycheques for me.
Early the next morning, my coworkers, holding their ears, entered the building under duress. I could barely hear their screams for help over the sound of the nitromethane-choked exhaust odd-firing through the old-ass Buick V6 I had lying under the workbench.
Since I did not see the point in driving the robot to work in my own car, I had decided to put some pretty serious firepower inside “Cackles” so he could drive himself to work. On the highway. The exhaust hadn’t bothered me all that much, between my almost-total lack of hearing and my belief that their discussions about their weekends would somehow still be louder.
Well, you know what they say: science marches on. I decided to still close out the day, knowing that the cleaning staff would probably need a bit of extra elbow grease to clean the smoke and oil stains off the walls.
“YOU FOOL,” yelps Twist Hardslab, the protagonist of the movie. “MAN WAS NOT MEANT TO HAVE SUCH POWER.”
The lead evil storm chaser, Dieter, walks to the podium in his overly-zippered well-tailored black on black uniform.
“Ve haff ze upper hand, Doktor Haaaaaardslab,” he intones nasally before flipping the switch. A miniature tornado descends from the ceiling as the immense machine comes to life. They’ve done it. “In zis moment, I have come closer to God than ever before.”
Something goes wrong. The mini tornado breaks into two tornadoes, and one wreaks havoc on the sensitive innards of the Final Weather Solution. Dieter Stormhauser is pinned underneath a steel column as the machine erupts into a collection of jagged metal and ash.
“Looks like you were right about one thing, Dieter,” says Twist Hardslab while adjusting the rake on his academic-issue fedora as the camera pans over the bloody stump that once was Dieter’s left arm. “You definitely had the upper hand.”
There are two things you need to know about me: First, I have absolutely no standards when it comes to automobiles, and two, I will drive any free automobile for quite a long period of time. When they handed me a rental loaner car at the bodyshop and told me that the mileage was unlimited, I was in my element. Next stop: Mexico.
It turns out that when you sign up to run the Baja 1000, nobody really checks your ownership or registration documentation very closely. What this means in practice is that you can spend a week in the desert hammering the living tar out of a rental Corolla, and to pass up such an opportunity would be downright wrong.
As I howled through the dunes, passing prepared stadium trucks due to the ironclad law of physics that rental cars are faster than any other known car, I had ample time to rest in the air conditioning and try to figure out why the radio wasn’t picking up any music anymore. It didn’t really matter, because after I jumped a dry creekbed and blew out the rear windshield from unibody twist, I decided it was better off as someone else’s problem. In fact, I would probably leave a very negative review of the rental agency on Yelp. How dare they rent me a car that was so unsuited for mild offroad use?
At the end of the event, I walked past the lines of cheering spectators and complimentary champagne bottles - no thanks, can’t you see I’m driving here? - and picked up my trophy. After a quick but grudging photo shoot, I was back in the car, on my way back to the bodyshop. Surely they had finished in the intervening week I had been thousands of miles from home, and would have had ample time to fix the rust on my metallic baby-shit-brown G-body.
When I arrived, the rental agent at the front desk looked at me, then at the car, then back at me. She frowned. The steaming abstract art that was once a new Corolla was starting to bleed oil onto the thirsty tarmac.
“Looks like the gas is a little low,” she muttered. “You should have pre-paid for gas if you didn’t have time to fill it up.”
“Jesus God,” my agent muttered to the sky while pinching the bridge of her nose in an attempt to keep her head from exploding. “For one thing, I’m not your agent. This is the employment agency.” I was getting off to a bad start on finding a new gig.
Sure, I had the traditional unemployment excuses - bad boss hated it when I bolted a Weiand to the ice cream truck even though I configured engine management responsibly, PTA didn’t appreciate the new substitute teacher showing up in a twin-engined Rambler that shot fire and had a real human skull for a shift knob, the whole gamut - but I think overall it was just a bad economy. I had told my agent so, and she responded by downing half a bottle of pills from a secret compartment at the back of her desk drawer and going to sleep right then and there.
After a few minutes, I decided to take matters into my own hands. Pushing her head to the side, I removed the thick stack of job listings from under it and started flipping through the pages. Nothing was particularly appealing, until I got to the last job on the list. It seemed like some local first-world nation had recently impeached its President and they needed a temp to take care of things for a few weeks. I was definitely the guy for that gig, even though I wasn’t all that proficient in macroeconomic policy or Microsoft Excel.
Weeks later, the American political press cornered me. It turned out that I had accidentally single-handedly reversed the decline of the economy, fixed trade deals, launched a manned mission to Mars and ushered in world peace. What was my secret, they asked me? What do other world leaders need to know in order to save humanity?
“For decades, Americans have been fat and lazy. Our sloth was disturbing, and we allowed the weak to clog our roads.” I scowled at them, self-editing my words for cusses that would undermine my speech by being bleeped out. “I have banned the automatic transmission, that opulent scourge of a decadent society in failure. Everything follows from this.”
They called it the “tiny house movement,” but their houses were not all that tiny, nor did they move. You don’t need me to tell you that the latter part was what got my goat the most, and so I decided to give these unwashed hippies a tiny house movement of my own.
I called my importer so quickly that my smartphone was still smoking after I hung up, though in retrospect that was probably due mostly to the “almost-okay” batteries I had picked up on eBay for it a few months prior. He slapped a thing of beauty in my front yard, a Daihatsu HiJet that had been rolled so many times it was barely recognizable. After I ran it through my dishwasher in a good pots & pans cycle to clean out all the blood, I had a perfectly serviceable kei truck frame on which to build my masterpiece.
Only one problem remained: where would I get a house? I asked all of my closest confidantes and not a single one of them knew anything about woodworking. I was ready to give up on this project and transfer the kei truck frame into some kind of demented Meyers Manx abortion when it hit me. Meyers Manx. Fibreglass. Composites. Didn’t I just see a composite house at the hardware store?
After duct-taping the on-sale store-display child’s playhouse to the frame of the Daihatsu, I now had a serviceable “tiny house movement.” To celebrate, I spun out a savage burnout from the HiJet’s overstressed ten-inch tires from the comfort of my own couch.
It was only after leaving the Homehatsu that I realized I had made a mistake. Nobody could ever live in this house, I gasped. It didn’t have a garage!
#
tags: daihatsu, daihatsu hijet, hijet, tiny house movement
It’s hard to make friends when you move to a new country. All my time in South Korea, I felt like I didn’t know anyone and couldn’t relate to the random strangers I would meet in bars. That is, until I told them that I once worked at Honda.
From then on, whenever I went to the bar, dozens of Hyundai employees would ambush me, wanting to hear the secrets of continuous improvement, the specific humidity levels within the factory paint booths, and if I ever saw with my own two eyes the immense glass tomb that housed Soichiro Honda’s corporeal body in a state of permanent cryogenic slumber.
I would accept their gifts of fried chicken and sweet-smelling booze, and then I would spin them one bullshit story after another. The secret to making friends, I was convinced in those days, was to just tell people you worked for a Japanese industrial consortium which is well-regarded the world over, and the rest would take care of itself.
Late one night, as the pub was nearing its closing hour and I no longer had the capacity for more bar snacks and high-octane methamphetamine, I started to tell them the biggest whopper of my career.
“Our secret,” and I paused for emphasis as the Hyundai engineers leaned in real close, trying to hold themselves so still that their notepads vibrated perceptibly from the muscle tension, “was that we used to call Subaru up and give them our bad ideas.”
Suddenly, I heard a sharp shout. An extremely tall Japanese man in whiteface and a ten gallon cowboy hat stood up from the bar and faced me.
“You fuckers!” he screamed. “I knew the Tribeca wasn’t one of ours!”
Since time immemorial, man has chased after the Toyota Celica. What is the Toyota Celica, scholars asked in smoke-filled reading rooms, their pipes shaking to and fro as they pontificated their way out of an eternal frustration. Is it a curvy, front-wheel drive girly grand tourer, or is it a barking-mad rear-wheel drive sports coupe with glorious Mustang-aping bumpers that taught an impoverished Japanese nation how to love themselves again?
One morning, we received an urgent telegraph from the Consulting Detective down the street. It seemed he had made a critical break in the Case of What Is A Toyota Celica Anyway. Since it would be unseemly at the very least to give that information over the radio telegraph system, he invited us to join him at the Men’s Club that evening in order to share his findings.
That night, we waited in overstuffed armchairs, tense to a man. Even the Irish gentlemen, who stood outside in their special section and looked into the parlour through leaded-glass windows, were chattering happily about what this great new scientific discovery could be. Had the Consulting Detective finally found an answer to what the Celica was?
It was not to be, and in fact his findings split our group into a pair of warring factions, never to reunite. As we bloodied our fists on one another, we all desperately tried to forget what the Consulting Detective had told us: that the Toyota Celica was also available as a convertible.
The United States Department of Transportation is now issuing guidance on how to detect radicalized road users. Be aware of the following behaviours in friends and family, for early intervention could save the resale value of dozens of luxury CUVs.
They spend a lot of time on Craigslist meeting with strange men in order to purchase their project cars. Abnormal phrases such as “OBO,” “crack pipe” or “part-out” are used by the subject in everyday conversation.
Large sums of money, especially when used to purchase exotic sports and luxury cars, are sneered at, claiming that they could purchase “a hundred Geo Metros (or similar)” for that much.
Attempts may be made to recruit others. Be particularly careful of attending events such as “LeMons” races, rally event spectating and “just dropping by” the junkyard to “pick up a few things.” This is where their ideological leaders reside, and they are in fact receiving new mission orders from them and attempting to brainwash you into purchasing a 1981 Ford Durango.
They know what a 1981 Ford Durango looks like.
They drive a car, instead of a crossover, sports utility vehicle or pickup truck. Contact the DOT immediately if they are driving an oddly small van or anything with the steering wheel on the wrong side: do not attempt to stop them from throwing their money away on air filters and replacement body parts on Yahoo! Auctions (a known hotbed of international lowlifes profiting from this behaviour).
If you suspect a family member or friend may fit any of these descriptions, immediately contact the US DOT hotline for further advice. A reward is offered for statements leading to a successful conviction.
“Wild” Billy Mays here for Sullivans’s Aircraft Remover. If you’re anything like me, you’ve got a bunch of pesky old airframes clogging up your backyard. With one spray, those planes are GONE!
In just one hour, I’ve done a decade’s worth of Boeing recycling on these old 737s someone dumped behind the barn out back. Don’t even lift a finger to clean up the leftover interior, either: just keep spraying!
It’s not just for airplanes, either - look what it does to this Bell 204 that flew into some power lines over my place. Good as new! The liquefied iron’s great for lawns as well.
Disclaimer: Sullivan’s Aircraft Remover is not to be used on aircrafts you wish to remain operational. Do not use Aircraft Remover on things which are not aircraft, including but not limited to: cars, elevators, lawns, the Catholic Church, or taco seasoning. Undefined behaviour may result.
Most men of science, and indeed most men of journalism, would agree that racing a dazzle-camouflage box Caprice through the middle of a Veterans Day parade is at least in poor taste. Add in the open headers and the howling grandpa grips, and there’s no debate, not even with that annoying guy at all the campus parties who demands to be devil’s advocate.
I pulled on the hockey-stick-long handle for the hydraulic handbrake and the B-body leapt from weight transfer, suddenly transitioning from charging rhinoceros to demure ballerina. Thing about ballerinas is they can hit pretty fucking hard, and so did the target of this metaphor when I climbed back on the throttle. With some deft pedal-and-wheel work, I whipped the heavy-duty Chevy into a back alley and off the main drag before the 5-0 was able to calibrate the racism mode of their Mk1 eyeballs well enough to notice the shimmering zebra pattern that was setting off car alarms along the parade route.
On the other side of the tenement block, I let the Caprice eat, feeling out the grip of the mixed-surface cocktail of parched tarmac, scattered garbage and neighbourhood pets. I pulled another hard handbrake turn, this time flying over the curb of a bike lane divider and onto the highway on-ramp. From there, it was a straight shot home. I released the throttle and dipped to cruise speed, because despite the cloud of noxious soot being ejaculated from the eight angry sawzalled pipes hanging off my small-block, I was very concerned about fuel economy and conservation.
At last, I had arrived at the video rental store. I gripped the DVD copy of Gone In 60 Seconds (the original - who do you take me for?) in my hot hands. My procrastination had done me no favours, this disc having sat on my stairs for years upon years past the due date until I suddenly realized that morning I had forgotten to return it in all that time.
The handle rattled, but the door did not budge. Beside me, the howling of police sirens as the highway filled with red and blue flashing lights, on their way past the exit to the parking lot in which I stood. I was glad the Caprice, now stalled after an uncomfortably long dieseling, was no longer detectable on either the visible or audible spectrums.
I tried the door again, and again. Confused, I looked inside the Blockbuster. It was empty, devoid of all furnishings. I guess it was a holiday, after all.
The year is 2172. We’ve been at war with the machines for what feels like my entire life. I’m so old that I can even remember the point where eventually we collectively got tired of being afraid all the time, and just got on with things. Now, once in awhile a Prius Excelsior wearing scratched-out serial numbers will swoop through a playground zone and claim a few kids with its carbon-fibre aero splitter. That’s just the way things are now, our politicians told everyone. It’s not like I have the free time to fix it, we explained to our kids. It became the New Normal.
A group of us never stopped fighting, but we found ourselves outmatched in every regard by the gangs of malevolent self-driving cars that roamed our highways and - dare I say - byways. Any move we could make would be struck down immediately, our primitive human reflexes so predictable that a “more optimum” moveset could be generated from their miles of cortex wiring in less time than it took our irises to dilate in the wake of their LED headlights.
One day, we found a secret weapon. The core code of the robots laid in parking, our scientists reasoned. What if we just parked really poorly? We recruited teenagers from the local driving school. Their fear behind the wheel and general inability to judge distances would be our new weapons.
It worked, better than we ever could have imagined. Neo-Tokyo Central Mallcourt 17-A was the first place we tested it. A football-playing D student managed to wedge a 1998 New Beetle turbo across four spots, while still somehow leaving the rear bumper pointing out into the lane of traffic. The trap set, we waited from afar, my partner keeping overwatch with an ancient high-caliber tank-killer rifle left over from the last human war. With its electromagnetic scope, we could easily target the most vulnerable parts of the enemy should something go wrong.
I heard it before I saw it. From the highway off-ramp, a jet-black Lincoln Patriot pulled itself into the parking lot, the ultrasonic array filling the electromagnetic spectrum with a deadly cone. As it approached the back of the New Beetle, some strange genetic memory compelled the Patriot to come to a complete stop.
It chirped, unable to understand the current parking situation, and then chirped again and again, faster and faster. As we watched through the scope, the bank of silicon that controlled its self-driving and morality core began to overheat, glowing hot as the processors pegged themselves in incomprehension. After so many years of self-driving cars, the Lincoln was simply not capable of understanding the depths to which humanity could sink, and it was tearing its own brain apart in an attempt to categorize this new threat.
As the big Lincoln dropped dead with one last pitiful warble from its horn, the cloud of burning solder floated past our noses. It smelled like victory.
#
tags: self-driving car, self-driving cars, lincoln, toyota, prius excelsior, lincoln patriot
In the face of declining financing for public radio, it became obvious to the NPR illuminati that they would have to pick someone much cheaper. “Much cheaper” is basically my middle name, so I found myself paid to sit in the bomb shelter I call a parts closet and tell Normal America how they should repair problems on their Normal Car.
“Caller, you’re on the air,” I would crackle into the surprisingly expensive microphone they had nailed to the PB-stained work surface of my desk. “Tell us about your problem.”
They would speak hesitantly, even before the five minute delay. To them, some combination of demons, issued into the world to plague humanity for all eternity, had been summoned through the engine block of their Camry and generated some kind of nervous rubbing sound or a peculiar squeaking that could only be heard on faint left turns.
On calls such as this, I fell back on the training I had received from my parents. My father, you see, was a preacher. And not the nice Catholic kind, either. Fire and brimstone hung over the heads of me and my siblings, taking on an almost tangible form. One morning, however, I realized that my father’s true power laid in words, and I would twist those words for my own purposes, just as he did.
“In your hubris, you have strayed far from the true purpose of automobiles,” I would tell them, my voice leaden with anguish over their suffering. “I don’t know how, but cars can sense such things. They can feel your lack of faith.”
Then there would be dead silence as they studied their life, their past mistakes. The human mind was convenient in this way, yearning to derive causality from noise.
There was always some mistreatment, some ignorance of the Best Practices, that they could point back to as being evidence of having been negligent towards their four-wheeled family member. Inevitably, a little gasp of realization would slip from their mouth, and I would hit them again.
“For your penance, you must install a nitrous oxide fogger and thirty-one-inch mud terrains, as it has been written in the Factory Service Manual provided to us by the Golden Manufacturer of the Great East.”
As it sunk in, and I knew I had them on the line, I would drop it. Other listeners, too, were no doubt straying, and needed to return to my flock.
“Do not turn away from Toyota in this hour of need,” I would bark. “Tribute is necessary to keep your engine at peak operating performance.”
Sometimes, I would tap them for a little extra for the office lunch kitty. After all, I was providing a valuable service to the community, the true way of public radio.
In the interest of austerity, the federal government was slowly whittled down by bureaucrats until almost none of it remained. Eventually, they cast their eyes upon the Transportation Safety Board. Deciding it was actually pretty important, I was appointed as its head and, in fact, the sole employee.
Keeping costs down was difficult at first; I wanted to intensely scrutinize every piece of metal fatigue, measure tire marks, interview witnesses. You know, nerd shit. Come budget review season, however, it was determined that nobody actually needed to do any of this, and so my management of the Board transitioned quite quickly to more of an open-and-shut setup.
One morning, I was called out to an icy runway. Arriving in my mud-terrain-shod Renault Dauphine and driving through one of the many gaps in the dilapidated airport runway fence, I floored it to let the open-pipe exhaust cackle a stream of half-burned nitromethane before shutting the engine off. It’s good for the valves, I explained to the assembled airline staff as I emerged, Thermos full of marguerita in one hand and my trusty loaded nine millimeter semiautomatic in the other. You could never be too careful.
It seemed that the pilot had skidded off the runway and gotten stuck in the grass. I looked at the runway, then at the plane. After a few seconds, I remembered that I was here to close tickets. I turned to the frightened pilot, and asked him one quick question.
“You ripped a burnout first, right?”
He didn’t know what that was. Worried, he told me that it probably wasn’t a traction issue at all, but instead something regarding communication and human factors. I frowned. You couldn’t put more horsepower or more grip under a human factor, I figured, so there was almost nothing for me to put in the final report.
“Look,” I said, “these tires clearly weren’t hot enough. Everyone knows that you need to light them up in the water box before you try and make your pass.”
I could barely hear the pilot’s arguments over the sound of the Dauphine firing back up. He was angry that I didn’t understand that planes did not directly drive the wheels, that taxiing was done with magic engines that don’t involve a clutch. Sure, buddy, and you don’t fly by taking this thing off a sick jump and holding it in the air for a long time.
The airline bureaucrats looked confused, then immediately fell in with my recommendation, excoriating the pilot for not knowing the first rule of safe airplane operation. They knew which side of the bread their butter was on, or at least they would if butter were still safe to eat.
#
tags: small government, airport safety, renault, renault dauphine
When our automakers began to run out of ideas in the go-go days of the late 90s and early 00s, one of the first places they retreated to was the “offroad culture.” Appropriating dabs and dots of their beliefs, the manufacturers would slap faux bedliner, push bars, rub strips and nearly imperceptible suspension lifts on anything in their portfolio that seemed to be selling a little slowly.
Subaru practically invented this game while barely looking up from taking massive hits of the budget-priced pancake-motored crack pipe they called the Impreza, but one day they tipped their hand. Into this world came the third generation Outback sedan, forged in the active volcanoes of New England and dispensed into the driveways of unsuspecting Middle Americans who saw themselves as outdoorsy and yet despairing of the image crisis that a station wagon would bring upon their family.
I was no Johnny-come-lately to the SUS party. Years ago, when I first scraped my hand on a rolled Brat at the junkyard and inadvertently allowed the Subaru illness into my veins, the rolling fever dreams that ensued destroyed any hope I would have of someday owning a car that could oversteer. What’s more, they psychically imparted unto me a full and true knowledge of this beast. Saddled with an automatic transmission though it may be, such a blemish would not discourage a true psychotic like myself from getting my hands on some mildly lifted sedan goodness.
For years, I saw none of them. I would drive my little commutes, occasionally joke about them with friends, and settle down into a comfortable life of owning Imprezas and asking out loud what that smell is and where that leak came from this week. One day, though, I saw it. On my commute, a mint (or at least streetworthy) black Outback sedan ripped through traffic.
Before I realized what I was doing, I had given chase, following the massive third-gen tail lights through a residential neighbourhood at an incredible (and increasing) velocity. It seemed to me that the owner had noticed a heavily dented Subaru with a wild-eyed operator following them, and used every ounce of the driving training they absorbed from a lifetime of watching action movies in a vain attempt to escape me.
While her functional suspension and big-lunged six-banger were easily able to outrun me in both the straights and the corners, I had no particular compunction against driving over lawns, through playground zones and playgrounds themselves. Besides, I was pretty sure I knew where she was going.
The chase came to an end when I had to pull in to the nearest gas station for some more oil, all the better to quell the insistent clacking within each of my single-slammer heads. I walked the five feet across the convenience store lot and said hello to the Outback Sedan owner, herself frantically pouring multiple gallons of oil into the engine in an attempt to get back on the road and start putting distance between us once again.
“What do you want?” she shrieked at me while rifling through her gym bag of a purse for a less-lethal directed-energy weapon with which to take me down.
“I just wanted to park next to you. As you can see, I also have a Subaru.”
True, it has been years since my ill-fated guest stint as host on Mitsubishi Repair Theatre 3000, but I still get the occasional fan at conventions who shakes my hand, transfers disease to my body, and wants to know how it all went down. When I hear this question, my eyes narrow, I rock back in the cheap plastic folding chair I have been provided by the event organizers, and I ask them: “do you really want to know?”
They always really want to know. I tell them about the Elantra.
Decades ago, in some kind of ex-Soviet gulag, representatives of the Hyundai heavy industrial concern met with representatives of the Mitsubishi hatred generation department. They exchanged pleasantries, showed Powerpoint presentations, and then signed a pact in blood that would haunt mankind for the rest of our days.
The long and the short of it is, if you found the right old Elantra and you found the right old Mitsubishi/Eagle/Plymouth/Dodge/forklift/Proton/Chinese station wagon, you could jam a hot little four banger in that Elantra and make it run twelves until the rod bearings decided to celebrate Spring Break in Puerto De Windowed Block. Nobody who was of sufficient internal twist could resist such a sleeper, and knowing my past as a man who made questionable automotive decisions, it should have been no surprise that the show’s writing staff wanted me to perform such a nightmare swap while their staff of comedians mocked my incompetence live.
Where did it all go wrong? Crankwalk. Yes, while Mitsubishi fanboys the universe over will tell you that the horror of crankwalk is a largely fictional beast caused entirely due to Chrysler malfeasance, it happened to me on that shop floor that fated night. It wasn’t at all the fact that, angered at having to retime the engine for the eighth time after I finally noticed the marks on the timing belt would never line up thanks to the decked head, I yanked the half-installed crank out of the short block and savagely beat one of their production assistants half to death with it. In fact, it was clear to me, my highly paid legal team, and a substantial out-of-court settlement whose terms are confidential that the crank walked itself directly out of the block and into his forehead.
It still ended better than the time I did drum brakes on Letterman.
We here at the Centre are all about helping. Our careers are dedicated to improving the lives of the poor unfortunates who end up in our many halfway houses, left adrift by an orphaned brand.
Let’s look at Tim. Tim used to own a Saab, but when he was caught trying to sell his mother’s Golden Retriever in order to afford replacement ignition cassettes, his family had him remanded to our custody. Through a proprietary combination of talk and convulsive electroshock therapies, we’ve made a fantastic breakthrough in Tim’s case. He will never be “normal,” but his doctors expect he will one day own a Subaru.
Please, won’t you give money to the Centre? Every dollar you give goes directly to those who are most at risk, whether it be pulling up obsolete parts fiches to find interchange parts, or to simply shock the living shit out of them until they realize they should just buy a car that they still make.
I’m at the alignment shop getting my wheels straightened out. You can smell it before you can hear it, which is well before you can see it. It’s a 60s Mopar four-door of some description, tottering its way along the road, burning as much oil as its asthmatic small-block can push past the slack rings.
I’ve been waiting for what feels like hours, hoping against hope that the fresh-out-of-high-school alignment tech is gifted enough with a torch to free up the rusted-solid jam nuts on my tie rods. The arrival of the Mopar is almost a welcome sight, and the sound of its clattering valvetrain is quite comforting as well.
Across the waiting room, I can see a middle-aged white male suddenly perk up. He sniffs the air, like a prairie dog searching for threats. Some unknown force propels him to the plate glass window of the shop, pressing his face against it with a loud squeak. The Mopar has captivated him, seized control of his body and spirit. I can faintly hear words emanating from his mouth in a manic babble. “General Lee, quad-barrel, resale value, double pumper, Barrett-Jackson,” he repeats over and over while beads of sweat form on his face.
By now, the old Dodge has finally, through great effort, pulled itself to a resentful halt outside the shop. Its engine diesels for a bit before it finally falls dead, and the owner steps out. From my perch in the waiting room, I can see the bushes behind him rustling. More middle-aged white males burst through the foliage, themselves repeating the mantra of auction grades and stories from their misspent youth. “Five hundred horsepower,” shrieks one of them while admiring the sole remaining hubcap, a severely dinged plastic piece from a Pontiac Sunbird. “Safer than a Prius,” adds another.
The owner pays them no mind, modulo a little shove to get one of them to move out of the way so he can open the door to the shop and join me in the waiting room. Eventually, the proprietor comes out from the back. He is familiar with these cars, having first seen them as a child driven by military dictators in his home country. Then as now, it was critically important that the drivers of them be able to safely reach the site of their purges and other crimes against humanity.
I am about to strike up a conversation with the driver of the old Monaco or Coronet or whatever when there is a horrible clattering from outside. An investment banker has just rolled his brand new F-Type into the parking lot in a tremendous accident, having spotted the vintage Dodge product from the road and decided to immediately make a ninety degree turn in which to bid upon it, jersey barrier be damned.
That’s when I see it. A severely dented but largely rust-free second generation CRX Si, driving past, a plume of blue smoke following it. I cannot stop my legs from forcing me out of the shop, through the throng of Delusional Mopar Guys, shrieking the code phrases that were burned into my prefrontal cortex by my brainwashers. “VTEC, Spoon, import drags,” I hear myself nattering. It is a beautiful car, a perfect gem that has never been surpassed. I am convinced this old Honda is worth upward of the GDP of New Mexico at auction, and tell the owner as such when I catch up to him on foot.
The driver, a middle-aged Lebanese father of two, rolls his eyes at me and calmly pulls a can of Mace from the pile in the back seat.
#
tags: honda, mopar, coronet, monaco, dodge, best of
People had been telling me about Big Government all throughout my life. Whether it was through a bumper sticker, roadside screaming, or standing on a soapbox and handing out pamphlets with homophobic slurs written on them in red pen, I was often told not to trust the Man. Back then, I was naive. I couldn’t have guessed the depths of their depravity.
One morning, I needed a job. Through clumsy administration, I was finding that some of the beaters sticking out of my lawn were now becoming more maintenance resistant than usual. I would need new parts, and quite a few of them.
Where could I go that would give me a high-paying job in exchange for almost no work? Conventional wisdom in this North American life told me that job would lie no further than within the walls of my nearest City Hall. I put on my finest suit-coloured t-shirt and drove to that hallowed building, even going so far as to leave my mud-terrain-shod Toyota Van parked on the next street over so that it didn’t give them the wrong impression about me before they signed on the dotted line.
I sat in the office for a period of time, before the interviewer came out from the back. He was ready, he told me, to hear about what I had to offer. First, though, I made the mistake of asking just what it was they did at this department.
Roads. They built roads. My head started to swim. Roads came from the government? I was paying for them? I had assumed it was some sort of ill-intentioned charity from a maniac Howard Hughes type, demanding that people ride on this high-grip surface for what this tycoon in his sick mind assumed was “safety.”
I was barely able to breathe. My mouth felt dry. The room swam around me. Had I been poisoned by the free coffee he had provided me, out of some kind of foreign machine known as a “Keurig?” Germans. Of course it had to be Germans, I thought as my head hit the ground.
After I came to, the interviewer was standing over me, clutching a grip of ill-gotten cash. He admired my gumption and honesty, and he was willing to “pave over” our little disagreement with a handsome hiring bonus. Now that I had figured out the conspiracy, he explained to me, it was time to cash in as long as I didn’t go running to the local media about how unnecessary pavement really was.
It’s just as well, really. I had been looking to use up some of my spare summer tires before the compound got too old.
I had been coming to this little out-of-the-way diner for years. After some nice mountain twisties, it’s the first real prairie you’ll see. When I’m out and about in the area, I almost always stop in. The food isn’t that great, but the people are a whole other story.
That afternoon, as I was leaving the diner after engaging in solo combat with the Burger That Would Unmake A Man (their name), I saw across the parking lot a group of older men that I first assumed to be Corvette enthusiasts. While I walked over to them, I was mentally calculating how much cash I had on hand should one of their cars be wrapped around a pole on the main road, its delectable small-block V8 thoughtfully pre-ejected into a ditch for my parts shopping convenience.
They were definitely interested in things that turned in like Corvettes, at least. In point of fact, these gentlemen were train enthusiasts. I thought about it briefly, confused - how could anyone be fascinated by the weird boxy things that bring new cars and occasionally block important roads when I’m trying to get somewhere?
As they chattered amongst each other, my trained ear began to pick out the key aspects of their obsession. It was obvious that they enjoyed big horsepower engines and hauling lots of cargo, and a few of them also clearly had a thing for remembering obscure performance factoids about thousands of models that were no longer in production. I decided that I was close enough to these men that I could make a reasonable offer.
Walking away from the parking lot, the sound of their laughter hung behind me. Not a single one of them had any massive train turbochargers to sell me. None of them even owned a train to call their own. What kind of meet was that?
#
tags: trains, diner, the burger that would unmake a man
I could hear the tapping as the border guard swung his stick against the rocker panels of my car. Trying not to sweat, I put on my best neutrally-bored commuter face while waiting for him to lose interest and go away. That’s when he swung a little too hard, and finally broke through one of the massive rust holes in my rockers.
A crackling sound, then the sound of dozens of spray cans of grey RTV falling on the asphalt, tumbling from the special smugglers’ compartments I had built into them. The border guard was at the window now, ordering me out of the car, onto the grass.
“What is this?” he finally asked, after he and his buddies had torn my car down to its constituent elements and only found aerosol cans within it.
“We can’t get it in Canada,” I whined, “and I really can’t draw a straight bead with the squeeze tubes!” I tried to make a gesture with my hands that mimicked having to caulk up an oil pan gasket, but it was very difficult with my hands in cuffs behind my back.
On the way home from the border, I noticed that somehow my heavily worn interior now had fewer rattles after the border guards had slapdash reassembled it in a huff. I smiled to myself, pleased that at least something good had come out of this.
#
tags: permatex, border security, border searches, rtv
“Okay, quiet down, you apes. I’d like to introduce you to the new transfer student to the Wrangler program,” shouted my internship supervisor to an empty meeting room. The buzz of fluorescent lights seemed so overwhelming that at any moment it might overpower my glee at being part of one of the longest-running marques in automotive history.
After the introductions, my supervisor immediately beat feet out of the office. I waited around for a few more hours, checked my watch, and then decided that I might as well go to lunch. For an office with nobody in it, it sure smelled a little musky. Maybe when I got back, I thought, the IT department would have delivered my computer. Any computer, I grumbled, looking over the rows and rows of empty desks beneath the buzzing clouds.
Two weeks later, after I had used the last of the fire extinguishers to propel my office chair down the hallway between the break room and my desk, I figured I might as well start opening some filing cabinets. Rooting through them, I found only a single piece of paper, describing the design brief for the Wrangler’s most audacious redesign.
The words “HEADLIGHTS GO FROM SQUARE TO ROUND” were written in jagged red block letting, like that of an undermedicated child. I hoped it was just red ink. Slipping the slip of torn paper back into the filing cabinet, I decided to walk over to the accounting department.
On the window of the main accountant’s office was a handsome printed sign, presumably written mid-revelation, reading “THE CHECKS NEVER STOP COMING EVEN IF WE STOP WORKING.” On his desk was nothing but a pile of cocaine, which even to my untrained nostril seemed of a particularly ancient vintage. I couldn’t help but think back to what I had read in the filing cabinet. Had nobody worked in this office since the TJ, I wondered?
After using the remaining metal stock from the prototyping department to improvise a massive antenna, I successfully managed to leech wifi from the McDonalds across the street. Almost immediately, I hit upon the idea that would define my career.
Call of Duty players loved Jeeps. I mean, they had to, because paramilitary shoot-man simulators didn’t really have a lot of Chevrolet Cavaliers, but I knew immediately in my youthful exuberance that this was a chance to actually do something with this time.
Picking up the phone, I contacted the marketing guys, who I had learned in my short career neither needed nor were able to sleep. They, while surprised too to learn that we were still building Wranglers, soon began to salivate at the idea of a newly-exposed weakness of the Core Demographic. One of them shrieked at me that he was coming over and he was going to treat me to “Red Lobster and Whores.” I figured I had maybe thirty, forty minutes to find a pair of pants before he managed to breach the security swipe card door out front.
Word soon spread of the mythical “successful Chrysler engineer.” I decided to deep six the word “intern” as management types lined up, one after the other, to take credit for mentoring and nurturing me, of seeing my nascent genius in being the only man in Toledo in forty years to actually want to do a good day’s work.
Although my initial suggestion of having a dashboard-integral water bong didn’t survive early crash tests, the Call of Duty Edition Jeep Wrangler was birthed into the world virtually unchanged. From my lonely perch in the abandoned office, I could look out onto the parking lot and see shrieking marketers from uptown rending strips of flesh from their bodies in order to position their internal organs somehow closer to this Icon of their Core Demographic.
Before long, I found myself poached by the rest of the automotive industry. Ford, it seemed, was willing to open a (literal) vein in order to get me onboard. I didn’t even wait for the HR drone to finish bleeding out before I signed the paperwork. but it would prove to be my undoing.
It turned out that outside the Jeep product line, engineers were expected to actually get some work done instead of surfing for porn all day long. My manager was constantly on my case, and I was starting to feel as if my career was on the skids when the words “drift mode” came unbidden to my lips, carried onto them by the wings of angels.
It was like I told the judge: I felt really bad for the automatic transmission letting go halfway through a nitrous-spiced posi one-tire-fire the length of a city block and all, but it was a Ford AXOD-E and let’s be honest nobody will miss it.
How was I to know the judge was a rabid fan of first-gen Mercury Sable wagons?
Sure, in retrospect, there were all the classic clues: their courtroom had dealership-provided posters of the entire Taurus family stuck up on every available wall. He introduced himself as “xXSableLover89Xx from the SHO forum” when I told him that I once watched RoboCop. In my haze, though, I missed all of them.
“You stand accused of murdering an automatic transmission by pumping too much power through it until dead. How do you plead?” he barked after my shockingly callous dismissal of any culpability or even basic mechanical sympathy in the case of the AXOD’s shit-eating.
The thing is, the system doesn’t work. Like many first-time convicted criminals, I met up with a network of like-minded felons on the inside and became hardened, embarking on a more extreme life of crime.
I soon became radicalized, thanks to my cellmate, Johnny Clutch, that the true cause of my imprisonment was an unfair infiltration of modern North American society by automatic transmissions and their loyalists. They represented a weak, low-quality option that tainted the mechanical perfection of automotive enthusiasm.
I could not go back to the outside world. No parts store would accept a man who threw part of a torque converter through the main trans filter. Not even Princess Auto would hire me after they heard the stories about me taking a whiff of charred ATF and proclaiming it smelled like victory. No.
Because of society’s disregard for me, upon my release the only way forward for me to support my family of bad cars was to do what the Manual Labour Gang wanted.
As my extremism swelled, I soon found myself tattooed with a strange five-gear shift pattern, curb-stomping a 4EAT into the ground after removing it from a Forester that it didn’t belong in. Cars are for manuals, slushbox scum!
#
tags: automatic transmissions, ford, taurus, ford taurus, mercury sable, american torque converter x
When they fired me from the Safeway, they had their reasons. I didn’t understand any of them then, but with time I’ve gained a little perspective on my actions.
I worked in the bakery, where I was a God who turned disassembled carbohydrates into edible art. Often, I merely made cakes that illustrated a child’s favourite TV show, or wrote birthday wishes to a cavalcade of people, or angrily wrote “FUCK YOU I QUIT” before quickly icing over top of it with the real message the customer wished on the cake. The customer was always right.
That morning, the customer was always right about wanting a cake car. Their kid was really into cars, they told me, and they wanted the most realistic car I could make.
Hours later, it emerged. Working from blueprints and photographic reference, I forged from confectioner’s sugar and icing a miracle recreation of the religious icon of the 1983 Plymouth Scamp GT. Every aspect of it was perfect, from the phonedial wheels (complete with tiny valve stems) to the minuscule crack in the windshield.
The customer was unhappy. They didn’t want a truck, they told me. They wanted a car. I tried to explain to them that it was a car, showed them all the evidence to the contrary. The curb weight. The towing capacity. The load limit. These were not truck numbers. It had a bed, but that just made it a really awesome open-air L-body hatchback with trucklike styling.
And after all, I shrieked at them, nearly apoplectic in my disbelief, what kind of sick fuck would want a Plymouth Turismo?
A lot of people don’t know this, but you can keep your car door locks from freezing up in the cold by using peanut butter. Simply force-feed it to a dealership salesman until he lets you have a used car made after 1993 that comes with a keyfob.
If you get scratches or dings on your ride, you can have them repaired at any number of shops around the area. Simply drive into one, and hand them money. The people working there will repaint your car, often well within the span of both your lifetimes.
Resist peer pressure: sometimes salesmen at the car dealership will see you coming and attempt to copy your clothing and mannerisms in order to infiltrate your life and sell you a car. Most of your best friends may be in fact trying to sell you a Lexus at this very moment. In order to determine the difference between a salesman and a human, a simple pin-prick test can be administered to their fingers. Salesmen only bleed commission.
Instead of throwing your old spark plug wires away, why not weave them into a well-insulated afghan blanket that you can use to keep horses warm? It worked for former President Thomas Jefferson.
Worried about hit and run accidents? Consider buying a dashcam: it’s the best way to spend two hours trying to fast forward grainy video on your phone for the cop at the front desk before noticing that actually it was you who caused the accident, screaming “SMOKE BOMB!” and clocking the cop in the head with a roll of pennies before fleeing.
Never park in a no-parking zone. This can save you up to hundreds of dollars every time you park.
I was friends with a lot of local people in the Jeep club so they invited me out for a day of wheelin’. The yuks came fast and furious as they mocked my low ground clearance and general opposition to scratching my immaculate metalflake-slash-rust patina.
It was hard to mind, though. Being out in nature, appreciating the majesty of all creation, and breathing fresh air was all worth it. Another thing that was worth it was watching goobers blow up ten thousand dollar axles trying to bunnyhop some rocks.
Thing was, I liked the entire experience quite a bit. I invited a friend along the next time I headed out, then another. Before long, we had a bunch of our quirky little vehicles scampering their way over rocks and through gulleys. Man has always wanted to go where they hadn’t before, and after we had spent enough time running around the easy terrain, it was time to get stuck into the harder stuff. That was when the modification bug hit.
A few months later, the entire culture of Moab had changed. Where once there were 4Runners, now the diehard offroadists had to deal with a gaggle of nitrous-injected bimotor two-stroke Honda Actys lifted on 31-inch Korean mud-terrains. Swarms of kei cars driven by wild-eyed cheapasses barrelled their way through tight rocks and up craggy valleys with impunity, showing off their parallel-parking aptitude.
For me, it was great. I could fit four cars to a campsite, which really cut down on entry fees. We could split a frame slider kit by sawing it in half and each using one rail on our tiny wheelbased cars, further increasing the savings. And even with the monster truck tires mounted onto rear-steer Rockwells, the fuel economy was pretty damn good.
Forced back into obscurity, the Jeep owners decided that they would appeal to the mothership for assistance. Toledo wasted no time in turning their guns towards the tiny island nation from which we harvested our used shitboxes.
Within weeks, we were hearing news of a new, exciting Jeep electric product that was to be sold only in Japan. We salivated, ready to wait the several decades it would take before our own governments would allow us to partake in this new car. Strange thing they called it: the Barbie Edition Power Wheels Jeep. Maybe it was just a mistranslation.
I ended my presentation, and waited patiently for the wild, unrestrained applause that befit a saviour. When it didn’t come, I asked my assistant if maybe clapping at the United Nations was not a “thing.” He told me it was indeed very much “a thing,” and that my presentation, “Nitrous Oxide: A Renewable Fuel For The Future,” just did not go over all that well.
As my driver for the day, Shaky Patty, pulled away from the curb in my two-stroke ZIL limo, I discussed with my assistant just how and when he felt that the presentation had gone off the rails.
“Uh, I think it was around the time that you showed a clip from 2 Fast 2 Furious and tried to pass it off as a scientific simulation of emissions impact,” he offered.
I leaned back into the plush bench of the Soviet limousine and considered his words. Sure, a lesser man would have pushed his assistant out of the car at highway speeds for this, but it’s really hard to find functional door latches for this thing on eBay and every door handle pull could be their last. For that, and probably some other reasons, I decided to respect the opinion of my underling.
A few weeks later, after some serious heads-down time in the bar behind my garage-office, we were back at the United Nations with a far superior proposal for renewable fuel. It probably would have gone over better if I hadn’t started the demo by shouting “are you bitches ready for some nitromethane?” while my sales staff fired promotional t-shirts into the chamber using compressed air cannons.
It was just like the great philosophers of old had said: the UN only wants to save the world if it doesn’t mean 120dB exhaust at idle.
#
tags: united nations, zil, nitrous oxide, nitromethane
Somehow, the Japanese had determined that I was some kind of celebrity. As I protested to the translator they assigned to my case, he dismissed my furious disagreements with a polite shake of the head and a reassurance that everything would be fine. One of the stagehands pulled a covering cloth from the car I was meant to hock. In that moment, I realized that he was right. Everything would be fine.
As unaccustomed to new cars as I am, I was unaware that they now required actual keys to start, as opposed to a filed-down flathead screwdriver. My translator, who now introduced himself as Mr. Shichida, told me that modern cars such as this WRX were started by the push of a button using some kind of invisible cloud of witch magic. He then did so, and I could sense again the comforting throb of an internal combustion engine.
I faced the cameras, and recited the line my captors had written for me: “Impreza Let’s Go!” While they were wrapping up my perfect take and congratulating each other on the fantastic work they were doing as a team, I popped the clutch and took off across a heavily populated Shibuya intersection, the turbocharger screaming so loudly it could be heard above the reams of plastic-and-hair sound deadening Gunma’s finest had placed between it and me under the assumption that I would somehow be disturbed by mechanical noise.
After a few incidents involving oncoming trucks and a realization that the Japanese drove on the wrong side of the road after all, I soon found myself in a subway tunnel. I took the opportunity, as all red-blooded adult males must when confronted with a tunnel, to drop a few gears and pin it.
As I hurtled into the Tokyo Metro station fully sideways, I was suddenly stopped by an attentive policeman. He gestured to the ceiling above me, from which dropped a thick curtain of balloons. At the other end of the platform, a marching band appeared, along with a famous movie star that I was unable to recognize.
“Congratulations,” he shrieked in his excitement. “You have just won the Foreigners Are Shitbags contest on this episode of Uncle Shichida’s Fun Parade!”
I blinked into the massive lights of the camera crew. Perhaps I could explain myself. Maybe I could make it seem like not all Westerners are waiting to crash the filming of a car commercial, steal the car and then menace innocent civilians.
“I own a Subaru back home!” is all I had to say.
With that, the crowd dispersed, and Uncle Shichida followed them, shaking his head. How could he have known that out of all the honkies wandering around, he would get one of them? Their racist experiment laid in ruins, the curse of Subaru infection extending itself across cultures.
It was for the best, really. While their backs were turned, I was able to work my flathead screwdriver under the shifter trim, only snapping a handful of the clips. It’s different in the Japanese market, you see. This would give me great credibility back home.
When the federales finally came after me, they kicked down the door to my modest Akron apartment to find nothing but an eerily realistic statue of a human hand with a middle finger extended to the sky. I had jumped a plane the previous day, under my dead twin brother’s identity, El Switcho, to the glorious country of Nippon. There, I resolved, I would keep a low profile, so that this wouldn’t happen again.
I had gotten a beautiful house. Sure, it was small, and it was very expensive and also kind of drafty, but it was mine. I imagined that I would spend many days and nights in the future drinking cheap vending machine beer and contemplating the true nature of thought as my enemies in America toiled fruitlessly to trace the sale of used parts from shell company to shell company. They would never touch me here, but something else had.
The first weekend I was staying here, I heard the unmistakable sound of a small-displacement Toyota inline four screaming to the redline. I looked out the window, and saw a small white hatchback, the logo of a local tofu restaurant emblazoned on the doors, sliding its way up the mountain switchback on which I lived by hooking one wheel into the gutter. I shrugged, and returned to my evening’s work of hand-painting Easter eggs, until an FD RX-7 following the little Corolla shot a bridgeport blast, causing me to knock the egg to the floor, where it exploded into a gooey mess. And let me tell you: it is no fun getting egg out of tatami mat.
I slowly came to realize, over the next few weeks, that the town I had chosen was in fact the real-life inspiration for a popular comic book about teenagers who slide their cars around a lot while ostensibly trying to race. Even the bike lanes were S-shaped, with Lance Armstrong cosplayers hooking up fat drifts on their Carbondales while descending into the foothills. Not only that, but the town knew about and encouraged this reckless hooliganism - as one of the village elders told me, their primary businesses were cosplay cafes and sales of replica AE86 front control arms. How dare I, an outsider, step in and put a halt to their gravy train?
With the aid of some very shadowy benefactors in the rest of Japan, I campaigned for and became their new mayor. From the seat of power, I would enact new laws, restructure the world to put a damper on these so-called drift kids. My only order in office was for them to immediately tear up the mountain roads, and then I resigned. Surely there would be no pesky racers around, now that there were no roads to race on?
The next morning, I was rudely awakened by the sound of an atmospheric blowoff valve giving way to a cacaphony of rod knock. I pried open the blinds on my window to see a series of Subarus winding their way up the gravel roads, hooked into even more ridiculous drifts than before. Walking to the town centre, I joined my fellow villagers in tut-tutting about the sheer quantity of Monster and Red Bull cans that were filling up the ditches around the old gas station. What’s more, the power vacuum back in town government had been snapped up by another foreigner.
Beneath a dead sky, clad in his gleaming white municipal robes, Sebastien Loeb struck the town gong. With a sharp bark, he ordered the immediate seizure and destruction of all nearby helicopters and Italian cars, the only known threats to rally drivers.
“All the power comes from your butt,” says my unlicensed autocross instructor which I found on the side of the road earlier this morning clutching a crude handmade sign reading “WILL ARGUE MODIFICATIONS 4 FOOD.”
Before I could ask my newfound sensei just what the fuck was up with that statement, he had already gathered up a group of young disciples from the paddock and was preaching to them. Great, I thought, he’s still going to be finished before my average run is.
“Do not become used to heated seats, my friends. They corrupt the Racing Essence of the buttocks our Lord has given us,” he shrieked through a paper Subway cup marked with Sharpie as “MEGAPHONE.” I could do nothing but listen longer; our agreement was that he would at least help a little bit with making me less of a wuss at entering the stop box fully sideways.
“A man’s desire is for luxury powered seats,” he continued, “but a man’s desire is also for sin. How can you go fast if you are obsessed with something behind you?”
At this last urging, a few of the younger JDM Subaru owners had broken into a discussion group, loudly affirming with one another that having to manually adjust their seats is in fact a sign of virtue. I had to step in.
“Excuse me, Bob.” I stuck my hand up in the middle of his new rant about the slippery slope of tolerating automatic headlights. “Is it not true that power lumbar is a gift from God?”
He stood there, on the hood of that Mini, for what seemed like hours, a look of rage occasionally flashing across his face as he processed the hypocrisy. Finally, he stepped down.
“That is true,” he said, before slinking off into the throng of spectators who had gathered to see Saturday morning autocross and disappeared.
The next time I would see him was as CEO of Volkswagen, pushing hard for new cost cutting measures to stop nancying their spoiled man child clientele. It was an audacious gambit and I don’t think the Germans appreciated it one bit that it immediately became so successful. Within the year, luxury cars standardized on ever more painful seats so as to allow the bourgeois to feel the pain of their lessers.
Funny thing though - they all still had power lumbar support. For the long drives, the salesmen told me. For the long drives.
New from NIST: Engineering standards for staged performance parts.
For too long, so-called “tuners” have sold upgrades for your Subaru, Honda or other rice-burning vehicle with an unaccountable and poorly-defined stage number attached. Without standardization, we found that many owners of these cars remained unable to tell if their Stage 4.5 clutch kit was compatible with their Stage 13.75 rear coil spring setup.
From now on, under penalty of death, the new standards must be defined as such, using suspension as an example:
Stock - Ride height must not be lowered more than four inches over original factory condition. Low-profile Ling Long all-seasons hot glued to wheels must not exceed 22 inches in diameter.
Clean - Ill-advised ride height drop has only caused moderate damage to the fender steel.
Stage 1 - No ride quality or performance improvement can be detected.
Stage 2 - Harsher riding. No performance improvement.
Stage 3 - Like stage 2, but costs more.
Stage 4 - Harsher riding than even stage 3. Must be special-ordered from Japan. Price not listed, call for details.
We all have to do our part to share our unique talents with the next generation. Whenever I get a free moment, I like to try to convert it into a teachable moment. After all, isn’t that what Gandhi would have wanted? Yeah, I don’t know either, I haven’t read enough books to know if he would or not.
You’ve been in a Home Depot. We all have. It’s like this kind of bristling tumour that burst out of the chest of a home-equity-crazed North America. Homeowners of all stripes descended upon it en masse during the go-go 90s, clutching handfuls of light switches, drywall panels and impossibly warped two-by-fours. Only with work can we be set free, they shrieked into their televisions at night as Aryan supermen demolished fixer-upper bungalows in the lower east side of Hamilton in the pursuit of the vaunted kitchen reno.
Despite the fact that, through a combination of untimely industrial accidents and overdoses on psychoactive substances, I have become immune to the charms of home ownership, I too found myself attracted to the local Home Depot. It was probably because of the fact that it was the only surviving hardware store within thirty minutes’ drive of my place, the kindly old man who understands what nails are for replaced by an underpaid public school teacher on summer break who splits his time between running away from you and yelling at a teenager who can’t operate a forklift. That forklift is where it gets interesting.
One early weekday morning, I arrived in an oddly empty Home Depot store to find a series of bored teenagers sitting around the forklift. It seemed that it had stopped running, and without a heavy dose of fast hands and mechanical experience, it was unlikely to be resuscitated within any of our lifetimes.
Striding past the teens, I flipped up the side cover and began messing with shit for no apparent reason. Eventually, between the shelves stocked with Chinesium fasteners and my practiced talent at power cursing, the forklift returned to life, settling down into a raspy two-stroke clatter.
It was only fair that I take the first turn on the forklift, I told the teens. After all, when I was their age, I was the reigning champion of the home improvement superstore in which I worked. Their Mount Akina of wide aisles studded with stray LED lightbulbs and scattered cardboard standees of Mike Holmes was no comparison to the tighter, more brutal Akagi of my childhood.
After the rolling forklift demonstrated the high build quality of the Toyota-fabricated integral rollcage, I looked out through the flames and shattered windshield to see a cashier. She was staring down at me in fright, clutching a serial barcode reader in a defensive posture, two hands on the grip like it was a Glock.
“Do you have a Home Depot Mastercard?” is all she could stutter out before I could struggle free from the destroyed forklift, climb over the counter and head out the exit.
On the way home, I felt like an idiot. I always forget to get new batteries when I’m in there.
It started really as sort of a charity thing. Think of the Make A Wish Foundation, but for guys who had spent way too much time in an office. I would meet them at the Ford dealership, stop them from buying an up-optioned luxury pickup truck, tell them there was a simpler way to connect with their roots.
In the junkyard, I impressed upon them, we would find the essence of what it meant to truly do things with your life. Grab onto these loaner wrenches, I would yell at the check-in counter after they had signed their waivers. It’s like the rental shoes at the bowling alley, none of these sizes are gonna fit but you’re going to have a lot of fun and sore feet either way.
I would teach them to wrench, a helpful hand on their shoulder when it came time to break free a wiring connector or kick open a rusted-shut trunk. The moments where they succeeded and were shocked at how little the entire ordeal had cost made it all worthwhile. Together, we were fixing what was wrong with our society while we sort-of fixed what was wrong with our cars.
One of the candidates, a junior pipeline engineer who had come in search of a new headlight washer assembly for his Audi A4, took heavily to the entire idea. After he pulled the little bastard free of the bumper, a look of complete satisfaction crossed his face. There were many times that I felt like an ancient Zen master over the years doing this program, but I remember him not only for that look but what came next.
The next morning, as I was prying a shattered swaybar free from my offroad Baja Spitfire, I got a phone call. “I sold the Audi and the RAV4,” he excitedly babbled into a cellphone which sounded like it was currently being lowered into a full-temperature autoclave.
It was almost impossible to hear him over the sound of some vocoder-distorting scream in the background, but he described to me in fits and starts a tale of what could only be described as hobbyist hedonism. Upon arriving home, he had done his first oil change, brake pad change, and then decided that his cars were simply not broken enough. Brooding on this, he returned to his home, where the television coincidentally was playing an ad for Kijiji where the fictional protagonist attempted to sell his broken car to get a less broken one. Could this magical exchange work in reverse, he wondered as the veins on his arm began to jump out, straining for the finest stimulant of all, the project car?
After a few minutes of his tale, I noticed that the wailing sound on the phone was growing louder, as if it had left the phone itself and was now all around me. Eventually it became too loud to ignore, and neighbours locked themselves away, holding their childrens’ ears in the routine we had been all once been taught to survive the inevitable spectre of total nuclear annihilation.
By now the sound was so loud that I could not determine its specific location except by a kind of primitive sonar: when my chest cavity rattled the most I knew I was faced in the right general direction. Around the corner it came, the sound of rumbling mud terrains now joining with the tangible and visual noisefield of a straight-piped bridgeported rotary.
My new disciple, aboard a bass-boat metalflaked rotary-powered Meyers Manx, wearing bomber goggles. On his face was a transparent plastic medical mask, which I later discovered was hooked directly to the 13B’s twin forty-pound reserve tanks of nitrous. He wore scrap metal armour, broken and sharpened crescent wrenches jutting like gleaming steel quills from shoulder pads reminiscent of a 30s school bus. Did he take the day off work or something to get all that shit together, I wondered?
Eyes wild with the zeal of the converted, he looked at the chunk of broken spring steel in my hand and said, “are you just gonna throw that away?”
It wasn’t like I could deny him the part. Like I said, it was a sort of charity thing.
#
tags: audi, audi a4, triumph, triumph spitfire, toyota, toyota rav4, meyers manx
Hello, students! Welcome to your first lesson of Extreme Defensive Driving! I’m your instructor, and together over the next few days we’ll learn how to prevent accidents that harm you by deliberately causing ones that harm others.
After all, the best defense is a good offense, am I right? You, over there, the quiet one with the short hair. When’s the last time you brake checked someone in traffic? I brake checked someone in the parking lot this morning. Blue Sebring. That was you? You brake like shit. Fuck you, get out of my class.
I’m glad the rest of you are willing to learn. First lesson here, we’re going to get in the training vehicles - you’ll notice they are a collection of lavishly appointed 20 year old luxury cars with burned out brake lights and questionable tires - and head down to the wet track slalom. When there, you are going to attempt to run this overloaded F-150 full of people who may or may not be gangland assassins sent by MS13 off the road. A lot of you probably have reservations about nearly murdering people you’ve never met, just because they’re on the same road as you. I’m going to say this a lot, people: you just cannot be too careful.
This here’s Tim. It’s his first day on the job. He’s going to ride in the car with you and lecture you about driving more safely, like he was your coworker and you’re off to lunch at Chipotle or some shit. Ignore him. He only gets paid when you drive responsibly, and he always wears his seatbelt. Whoever puts a bruise on his forehead first this morning gets the Lexus with functional airbags for the afternoon lesson, and believe me you are gonna want to have those.
“Get busy vaping or get busy dying,” says the embroidery on the back of my custom motorcycle club “cut.” Meet us behind the Arby’s for a rumble, except my hog broke again so I brought the Camry.
What’s that? You think dentists who use the three-sixty ultrasonic scanner are pussies? You better tell that to Chopper over here, because he thinks that shit is the highest technology possible. X-rays? Fuck this asshole up, Chopper. He still uses X-rays, like it’s the nineteen god damn sixties.
It’s a hard life, being part of the Sons Of Dentists Motorcycle Club. Every day could be your last. Sometimes we get into a rumble across town when the Actuaries Local MC steps on our territory. Just last week I had to cut a junior CPA when we got into a fight, motherfucker went for his Glock and I was faster with my folding switchblade.
Hold on, you guys. Getting a call from my bitch. She says I have to pick up Jaden from daycare. We’ll continue this after.
I’m not gonna lie to you: when Netflix brought me on to do an 80s-throwback show about working on Deloreans, I initially said no. Then they showed me the data. I still said no. The wiry man, the first one I met, retreated to his chauffered Town Car. A few minutes passed, and a bigger man, the second one I met, approached me and beat seven shades of hell out of me with a sock filled with ball bearings until I said yes.
So. We were going to make a seventeen-episode television show for the internet about working on Irish-made, non-rusted, Franco-Swedo-powered time machines. Normally, you would think this would be a tall order, but then I found out about the expense account.
Thing is, Deloreans - actual Deloreans, that is - are very expensive. Buying expensive cars - especially expensive used cars - went against everything I was raised to believe in. We would have to find a deal on the Deloreans that we repaired for the camera. When we thought about running various scams on the viewership, we were informed by the network that the audience was well-informed, that they would notice immediately if we just wrapped a Fiero in tinfoil and spilled some cocaine around the doors.
We were about ready to give up and hand some eBay scab a hojillion dollars when it occurred to us that we could kill two birds with one stone. You never work on an entire DMC-12 at any point, my shop chief mentioned one day after he had been a little too deep into the booze. Any shop is only ever going to work on a few parts of the car at any given time, especially without any rust to grind off and fix. All we would need for at least the first few episodes is file footage and an old PRV engine.
And so it came to pass that Hollywood gave us millions of dollars to film ourselves cleaning out the valve cover on a Volvo 760 engine from our grip’s parts stash. I would say that I felt bad for taking their money in exchange for something so dull, but then I ran into Dr. Oz at the heroin bar.
Ever since the dawn of mankind, the members of the Ikea culture have been with us. Craving attractive yet practical furniture fabricated entirely from pressed fibreboard, these people once travelled in frontier times for months to arrive at the nearest Ikea. Nowadays, their modern descendants, thanks to wide access to five hundred horsepower V8 SUVs and turbocharged crossover wagons, can make this trip in almost half the time.
Near the end of hour two of my trip to Ikea to retrieve cheap hotdogs, the horn relay in my car failed, the coils within it fusing into a blob of dull copper from overheating. It was just as well - my wrists ached from the nonstop honking I had been doing all morning and most of the afternoon. With one quick motion, I rolled down the window to vacate the acrid smell of burning potting epoxy from the Lincoln’s cabin, opting instead for the stale layered odour of droppings left by long-dead mice.
I knew that it was only maybe half a block more to the end of this God-forsaken parking lot. With luck, I could get there before the end of the day.
Reclining in the crushed velour of my palatial bench seat, I spotted another irate enthusiast exit the lowered 240SX behind me, walk alongside the road to the lead car (a GMC Acadia plastered with stick-figure stickers on the rear glass), throw the driver out and successfully navigate the four-way-stop to return to the highway through road. I had briefly considered the same, but decided that I liked the Lincoln too much to abandon it in this, its hour of need.
Overhead, two seagulls flew, squawking at each other as they fought in an endless circle over a discarded french fry. I looked upon them in envy.
Sometimes, my grandchildren come up to me and they want to know about my past. What was it like when cars didn’t drive themselves? Was there ever a time without the internet? Without the Allmind? Have you ever killed a man, grandpa?
I sit them down, and I look them in the face and I tell them: I fought in the Warranty Wars.
They started like any other war: nationalism, rivalries, brutality, inhumanity, being a “team player.” We’ll never know who fired the first shot but we know it was the Koreans who went to ten years. A decade. Our actuaries screamed and our parts desks trembled. Ten bloody years of supporting the same car’s limited powertrain warranty.
Sure, there were responses that we could take, levers that we could pull. I was the best at what I did. They used to send me into their dealerships. I would look their service writers in the eye, ask them if they really wanted to change out a clutch in seven years from now. Those service writers never blinked when they told me as a wear item, a clutch was not covered under the ten year limited powertrain warranty. It’s not difficult to remember the incident in South Dakota where he handed me a brochure so fast, both of us got friction papercuts. That one got me this medal, the Initial Quality Star.
Naturally, we prepared our own onslaught. Our metrics showed nobody ever kept our cars for ten years, so by offering a seven year transferrable maybe we could convert some of the second owners into new buyers next time around. It was a gamble, but those were gambling days, kids.
Minutes before the New York auto show presentation where we were set to unveil it, word came through: the Japanese had sprung a shock attack on us. Mitsubishi filled the sky with word that they would match that ten year warranty, that they would fight us on the zero-percent financing and the low-residual-value lease programs.
I turned back from the television showing the horror in Hawaii, and watched my own COO consume the cyanide pill we equipped all C-level executives with for just such an occasion. I couldn’t stop screaming for an hour.
I’d always wanted to go into the car business. There was just no better one out there: it blended the best of every industry, every craft, in the pursuit of making a finer deathsled in which to burn irreplaceable aromatic hydrocarbons while rocketing your corporeal form through twisty mountain roads and stop-and-go traffic. So when my Uncle Hitler died and left me the Mercedes factory, I jumped at the chance to tell the executor of his estate “I consent.”
If I’m honest, the first week on the job could have gone better. After firing the entire powertrain division for daring to manufacture automatic transmissions on my property, some of them said mean things to me on one of those online review sites. The gall! I was so incensed that I didn’t even finish my second lunch that day in the executive dining hall.
Everything came to a head before too much longer, when the press appeared to have me debut my new lineup of Mercedes vehicles for them. I crowed about the dogbox manual transmissions, the immense turbochargers jutting from the hood, and the super-wide semislicks that I stuffed under every letter of the alphabet.
The press responded with reactions verging from frothing excitement to delirious joy, and I knew then that I was really onto something. My company was showered with positive coverage and road test reports. We received curious phone calls from dealerships wondering why crazies wearing practical clothes suddenly began appearing en masse, shoving their work-stained fingers beneath the glass doors of the showroom, threatening to pay cash. In one particularly bougie neighbourhood, I heard the GM of the dealership attempted to tear-gas a series of track day aficionados who had the audacity to go to the parts desk - and order parts.
I thought my uncle would be overjoyed at how I had made his company the darling of the automotive press. We would find in the coming weeks, however, that we popped the celebratory champagne too soon - and not just because Heinrich, my executive assistant, didn’t duck in time and took a cork directly to his right eye.
It turned out that yes, I had built the Mercedes for the automotive journalist. I found later that automotive journalists A. made about $38,000 per year, and B. never had to buy their own cars.
As the Americans swarmed over the abandoned factory, executing any loyalists to the German Car Cause that they could find, I slunk away in secret to Argentina aboard a reasonable, practical, and - most of all - invisible Korean econobox.
Now, I know what you’re going to tell me: hovercrafts are impractical and they handle really poorly. Nobody wants to be countersteering their entire way to work, do they? To test this theory, I and a documentary film crew picked up a series of drifters where they hang out, near the Greyhound bus stop. There, they offered heinous non-Euclidean sexual favours in exchange for even the barest of used tires so as to satisfy their dark contract with the radial-tired god.
Once I managed to travel across state lines with the drifters, I unlocked their cages and allowed them to sniff and introduce themselves to the hovercraft. Immediately, I could tell many of them did not trust it. In their horrible pidgin language, they crackled and squealed half-words that could not be matched quickly enough using my Drifter-to-English dictionary for me to consider myself able to decipher the intent of their sayings.
Eventually, the alpha drifter managed to figure out how to force himself inside the hovercraft, puzzling at his hands even as they reached out and pulled the lever to the vehicle’s doors, presumably on instinct. He announced this achievement with a gibbering war-cry, at which the more junior of the drifters fled and hid behind various subcompacts in the parking lot. Before long, he had fired up the hovercraft and was ripping a sick, endless donut.
The flawless geometric oversteer seemed to please him, and he settled into a gentle hooting, pointing his index and pinky fingers out the window while continuing the smokeless donut for the amusement of his inferiors.
After about an hour of the same donut, I became bored. After checking with the camera crew, I decided to leave the vicinity and head to the nearest 7-11 for the natural food of the drifters, Monster energy drink. When I returned, I could not find the film crew anywhere, only a ragged stripe of viscera leading to the remains of the hovercraft. I had made up my mind and was already getting my Motorsports Detective costume out of the trunk of my Crown Vic when I heard a groaning sound from below the hovercraft.
Pinned against the Armco, the surviving film crew member barely clung to life. As his lifeblood leaked onto the tarmac, held in only by a series of improvised zip-tie drift stitches crudely administered by the self-appointed nurse of the drifters, he gave me a dire warning that would have a grim portent for the survival of humanity.
“You shouldn’t have told them how to use doors,” he groaned at me before expiring.
Weeks later, the cable news were all welcoming President Vaughn Gittin Jr. as he tore up the White House lawn with the first celebratory figure-eight smoking tire burnout of his administration.
#
tags: hovercraft, drifters, ford, crown victoria, ford crown victoria
“Do you remember what fun was like?” asks my accountant Roy, presumably choosing to ignore the childhood accident that rendered me incapable of remembering what fun was like.
“Can’t say that I do, Roy,” I finally say after the angle grinder completes chewing its way through the quarter panel of a Dodge Omni. The mud terrains look like they’re going to clear now, so I decide perhaps it’s a good idea to take a break and take Roy up on whatever flight of fancy he is now weaving from the hallucinogen-and-tequila-stuffed office that he calls his “Math Room.”
Seated comfortably in the overstuffed Recaros that we pilfered when the recruiter boys from the Air Force came to town, we discuss the ephemeral concept of ‘fun’ in an automobile.
Does “fun” live in straight-line acceleration, as the clowns in Washington would have you believe? Certainly, Roy and I don’t think so, having an average crank horsepower between the two of us of about sixty and enough tire on top of that to make the rear-axle ratio something between “you’re never getting on the highway” and “lawsuits for hearing damage filed by the weigh station.”
Perhaps this mysterious “fun” is found in the feeling of driving right on the edge, taking a turn with all four tires squealing, watching the man behind you fail to copy your line as you crack off the perfect corner? Again, more doubt: the unsprung weight on our vehicles was based more out of budget concerns than competitiveness, and it wasn’t like we had enough time on our hands to be doing alignments all day long whenever one of us bounced a wheel off a parking lot block or grocery store cart corral.
We could not come to a decision that night, but on the way home from the shop I realized what it was. The true fun of automobile enthusiasm came in sending each other links to Craigslist ads, and wondering how hard it would be to throw a set of Grabbers underneath an original-year RX-7.
I had found myself in a terrifying new world. Somehow my enemies in government had conspired to put me into some kind of long chauffeured diesel car, packed with other people I did not know. Worried, I sat at the back of this strange vehicle so as to be closer to the engine, to feel the calming NVH of internal combustion. It didn’t help.
Something was definitely wrong. Nobody on this big car was particularly bothered by the driver’s substandard lines or his early braking. I decided that this must be some kind of niche enthusiast thing which I just didn’t know about, and asked another passenger about it. He looked at me strangely, the same way the autocross organizers did when I asked them if it was possible that maybe they could consider camber bolts to be allowed for stock class.
Maybe the driver could be spoken to, reasoned with. After all, he was a driver. There had to be some part of him that, like me, would be thrilled at the concept of loading it up in a corner, or even just maybe reaching the speed limit at some point. I would appeal to that part of him, and he would be cured of whatever malaise had gripped the occupants of this public transport.
I sat down. He didn’t want to talk at first, pointing to the handsomely machined “DRIVER ON DUTY IS NOT PAID TO GIVE A SHIT” brass plaque affixed to the dashboard. I knew I could get through to him, and I pushed onward. All those years in a Tibetan monastery had given me all the appetite I was going to ever have for silence, so I kept talking, words pouring from my mouth like the valve cover gasket of a Saab poured oil. Eventually, an offhand mention of cone hunting made his glassy eyes awaken with delight and he turned to me.
“So have you ever heard of the Public Transit Motorsport Association?” he asked.
No, I hadn’t. A secret racing body, hidden beneath my nose all along? Maybe it was fate that the parts store had been out of replacement fuel pumps for my daily-driver Festiva on the previous night. I would join these motorsports aficionados and destroy their bodies and minds on the field of combat.
In that moment, I became hooked.
Months later, I found myself driving a city bus on the very route that first fateful ride had been. The benefits are really good, you see, and you always have a daily driver ready to go. Unlike my office job, there’s no appetite for small talk required - when the lonely weirdos I call passengers try to talk to me, I simply point to the plaque and give them the finger. Union rules, you see.
Plus, I get to power-brake the bitch at lights when there’s no passengers on it. You wouldn’t believe how fast one of these things leaves the line at the full forty psi.
The television, which I had previously left turned off and unplugged, awoke to a drone-shot aerial view of my house. Its speakers throbbed with the words of an unaccountable talking-head who I knew would influence the attitude of all others towards me. A cut to a picture of a half-rotten base model first-generation Dodge Neon converting its front tires into an indistinguishable mass of all-season smoke and ash outside a firefighting benefit, with the words “FILE PHOTO” written underneath in white sans-serif.
I immediately lifted the emergency Vespa out of the downstairs bathtub, and wheelied my way through the living room with the help of a judicious thumb on the nitrous trigger. Its long-travel adventure suspension and knobby mini-tires made quick work of the car parts strewn across what used to be my carpet. With a smokers-cough rasp as the nitrous bottle ran dry, the little Vespa was soon out the back door and tucking in as I wove my way through the parts-cars that occupied my backyard.
Behind me, I could hear the sirens of the police and feel their distracted-driver-alerting vibratory thumpers as they tried their best to keep up with the rapidly departing Italian two-stroke. Unfortunately for them, the cops assigned to watch my back door were clearly not by-law officers, and as such had not had the chance to become intimately familiar with my block over the last decade of property-statute-violation shenanigans. With a sharp knee-dragging swing that clearanced part of the eBay exhaust, I threw the bastard Vespa into a drainage culvert where their combat-grade Explorers and Taurii could not hope to follow.
Eventually, as with all good things, the drainage culvert came to an end, throwing me out at a second-storey drop to the highway, which the long-throw suspension of the scooter absorbed with glee. I looked back as I pinned it and achieved the Vespa’s maximum cruising speed of half of the highway speed limit, and took a few seconds to check my smartphone for any new developments in the police case.
I was shocked to find that the local news, who I figured was originally responsible for the helicopter-footage broadcast, had no articles about it. What’s more, the rest of the internet, an indisputable source of truth, had failed to remark on it as well. No denials from officials, no intrepid interviewers taking pictures of the cops investigating my house, looking for the bodies of my victims.
Gradually, I came to realize that I must return to my home and face the music. When I arrived, I found no police officers of any kind, only a series of abandoned police-grade Tauruses and Explorers. Upon further inspection, those cars appeared to carry the mark of the local industrial-surplus auctions on their flanks. This was an elaborate ruse, I began to realize.
With a shortness of breath born of having to push the Vespa the entire way back from the highway after its ignition system spontaneously failed, I climbed the stairs to my house and surveyed the damage. My worst fears became manifest when I arrived in my bedroom, the false wall I had installed years ago torn to shreds. Whoever came here had known exactly how I would respond, knew precisely where to look.
I ran to the back door, to find the quickly-departing tail lights of a D100 Prospector pickup, its bed stuffed with the hotter-than-hell Carter carburetors I had hidden away after a swap meet deal gone bad. There was no mistaking who the driver could be: it was my old nemesis, Delusional Mopar Guy.
There was a place that none of us would tread, even in those days of prosperity and success. I knew it by many names, some of them shouted to me between musical interludes and folksy stories about prairie life from the last working speaker of the half-functional FM radio of my Volare. Normal people knew it as the Dealership, but could never hope to get more than just a hint of the true evil that laid within.
Perhaps the greatest terror they held within was that they appeared in such a pleasing, attractive form to us. The Parts Desk. Only there would the half-gods who originally constructed these vehicles would allow us to once again touch like-new parts. The only problem was they were surrounded by the sales monsters, those who would corner you.
I thought I had been careful. I thought I had taken the necessary precautions. My backup missed a trick, however, and I soon found myself face to face with one of the howling representatives of the Void. He babbled on about the EPA, diesel tunes, smoke tunes, whether or not emissions regulations were the true cause of poor fuel economy. Fuel economy, I wondered. Did he think I cared about fuel economy, after seeing what I pulled up in? As his tirade grew on, I slowly began to discover that he in fact was unable to understand why people would buy a new car, except for the reasons of fuel economy.
I tried to excuse myself politely many times, but there could be no escape. He cornered me by the free coffee and continued to tell me about high-intensity headlights, eight-speed automatics - again, for fuel economy, but he mentioned that some of his customers liked to track their base-model Colorados and appreciated the faster, racecar-like shifting that it offered - and I was powerless to stop him.
An alarm blared. I knew they had detected my abnormal thought patterns, planned to abduct me and turn me into one of their salesmen. There could be no other place from where these monsters arrived than the converted zealot. No dealership principals came, and as the sprinklers doused the showroom in stale rooftop water, I realized what had happened. My partner had punched out his salesman, who had cornered him in the parking lot and berated him about the massive fuel economy gains offered by the 1.4L turbocharged engine in the new Malibu, and pulled the fire alarm. I was deeply thankful.
Today, we had escaped the horrors of the dealership, but I knew that it would not be too long until we had to return and face them anew. After all, the parts guy had ordered me the wrong bolts again even though I gave him the God damned part number and everything.
If you look in your handy-dandy Motor Association rules-of-the-road guide, you will not see a helpful tip like “Try not to enter your imported Minica 70 into a Silhouette Series Touring Car race.” That, I believe, is because they assume nobody would be that stupid. I’m sort of insulted. After all these years, I thought we knew each other a little better than that.
In the paddock, I considered my options. It would have made a lot more sense to have started thinking about this before race weekend, said my crew chief Roy, but he was probably just bitter about me showing up unannounced this morning and throwing rocks at his window until he got up and got in the ramp truck.
Aero, I decided, was going to be the key factor in transforming this 50-odd horsepower shitbox into a world-beating touring car. Roy and I decamped to the local Canadian Tire to stock up on their series of fine fake-plastic spoilers and race seats. No expense spared; we were a real race team and we deserved a light up shift knob as well.
With only minutes to go, the Minica tottered out into tech inspection. They looked in awe at the spoilers duct-taped to the roof (I didn’t want to damage the value of my nearly fifty-year-old Mitsubishi by drilling holes in it; Barrett-Jackson would surely appreciate this at some point in the future) but let me look over their shoulder as they were signing some other team’s inspection for long enough to figure out how to forge their signatures. I was in business.
The starting flag dropped. Those fancy expensive race cars beat me in the straights and also the corners. No matter how hard I tried, I could only just barely manage to pass the Lamborghinis piloted by gentleman drivers. It was going to take a miracle.
A miracle happened: when all those fancy expensive race cars were pitted to refuel, a full-course caution was raised after two Ford Mustang touring cars plowed into the audience, killing dozens. Everyone else was trapped in the pits, unable to re-enter the track. Some real Tortoise and the Hare shit, I’m telling you.
I proceeded to rack up the laps with my Minica: even driving this thing flat out, I could not use more than a thimblefull of gas per day. The owner’s manual, which with the laptimes I was running I had plenty of time between corners to peruse and also translate using my Japanese-to-English pocket dictionary, had an entire page warning drivers not to park your car in the sun lest the gas evaporating from its tank cause detrimental fuel economy.
At last, we reached the end of the race. I was enthralled, and strutted to the podium with glee. I hadn’t counted on one little wrinkle, however, as the pace car driver pushed me out of the way and accepted his place in the number-one position. He had only lapped me like twenty times with his smug hazard lights flashing, I whined to Roy later. He (and the JGTC) reminded me that there was nothing in the rulebook that said the pace car wasn’t in contention for the leaderboard as well.
That was it, I said to nobody in particular while throwing my print copy of Economist, The across my bathroom to lie in the lifter valley of a discarded 318 shortblock. This spying-on-civilians stuff had to stop. I didn’t want the NSA knowing when I got a really good deal on parts and getting there before I had a chance to arrive with cash in hand, which I’m pretty sure was what just happened to make me miss out on that mint-condition Chevy twelve-bolt for just $10 on the other side of town.
How would I keep the spies off my sensitive internet communications? The only answer seemed to me to build my own internet. I just had to figure out a technology that they wouldn’t be able to tap.
Finally, it occurred to me: I would just use the phone network. Hardly anyone talked on it anymore, and surely the NSA would have packed up and thrown away their phone-spying equipment after decades of it consuming dust and howling at the intern when he came to clean out its fans. I reached into my kitchen junk drawer and soon had a prototype up and running.
My kitchen was filled with the warm glow of LEDs and the machine-gun clacking of mechanical relay switches. I briefly considered printing out a series of flyers with which to attract new customers, but then decided that installing the driver for and successfully printing out pages on my inkjet was beyond my technical abilities.
Mostly, I was happy to finally have a project with which to use all these spare Arduinos I had lying around. That is, until my first phone call came in on my new network. It was the phone company. The man on the other side of the line had already heard about my new network in the Silicon Valley rumour mill, and wanted to make sure there would emerge no competitor.
“But I only offer incredibly shitty service to like two people,” I said into the phone, demonstrating my boundless talent for negotiation.
“We know. That’s our entire business model.” he replied. “Plus, we charge more.”
I hear a faint squeaking of Piloti racing shoes against the tile of my lobby, and instantly look up, my off-hand moving to grasp the mother-of-pearl handle of an enormous-caliber revolver. The intruder approaches my desk, seemingly unaware of the lethal response which I am prepared to dispense should he have been sent from the SCCA to settle a little score about the rulebook.
“Tell me about the Infiniti J30t,” is all he has to say. I relax my grasp on the revolver, and lean back into the office chair with the faint crinkle of imitation leather. He has traveled far to hear the legend of an Infiniti that nobody owned, the stillborn luxobarge of a Nissan product that had sunk beneath the waves of time and been lost decades prior.
“It was a different time,” I began. “We were in that heady period between the Infiniti M30 and the Infiniti G35, when anything seemed possible except turning a profit.” I sigh, and reach under the desk for the photo album.
Within the covers of my album lay a pictorial shrine to Nissan’s least-loved models, with names like Stanza, Pulsar and NX. Nobody understood these cars when they were new, and despite the creation of the fine Lesser-Known Nissans Museum in which I was the sole owner and curator, they didn’t seem particularly interested in knowing more now either. I hoped that my young visitor would be different, maybe see what I saw, restore a used Cube that had gotten punted into a parking garage support column by a drunken ex-sorority member.
I looked up from the album, and saw my own revolver pointed back at my forehead. Of course. Only someone intimately familiar with the SCCA Rulebook and whether it belonged in G- or H-Street would have known about the J30t at all.
“You shouldn’t have run those adjustable caster bolts. We would eventually have found out.” he said.
Boys, I like my cars like I like my scotch: peaty, and rolled over into a ditch, being rapidly consumed by an unstoppable fire. But I do get ahead of myself.
Truth be told, we made a lot of little mistakes along the way. Every single one could be forgiven as just a tiny error in judgment, maybe a bit on the avaricious side, but it was all in the pursuit of happiness.
A couple years ago we were in a bad part of town, heading to a celebratory junkyard Slurpee. The hatch of our Travelall bulged with only the most primo of T5 transmissions, and the rear springs were none too happy with us. If you could securitize the amount of maintenance debt on that old International, S&P would give it a AAA bond rating and sell it to schoolteachers’ pension funds. But I get carried away sometimes.
Another thing that gets carried away sometimes by me is about four thousand dollars worth of relays in my pockets at Pick N Pull. My tailor hates me, because I had him sew hundreds of specialized concealed pockets into my yard pants. He thinks I might be some kind of CIA assassin, however, so he doesn’t say anything. Sometimes I ask him if he thinks a metal detector will penetrate the weave, just to keep the fantasy going between the two of us.
To make a long story short, Johnny Law thinks that we are moving slowly because we are cruising for prostitutes, and not because of the aforementioned Travelall’s wheezing Silver Diamond inline six, which has been empirically determined (see footnote) by five out of six particle physicists to be the slowest object on earth. It takes the rookie cop assigned to my pat-down over an hour to work his way through every pocket, but finally we are released.
At last we arrive at the Elevens of Seven. Soon, slushed goodness will be released to me, as it has been foretold in Revelations. I can already feel the high-durability machined-titanium handle twist and dispense its glory into the flimsy plastic cup beneath my eager fingers, the click-click-wobble of the lowest-bidder pump impeller rocking on its worn bushings as I stir the tragically weak action of the dispenser to life.
Long story short, the 7-11′s Slurpee machine was broken so we set a Mercedes on fire and pushed it through the front window of a payday loan place.
#
tags: 7-11, international harvester, international travelall, international relations, junkyard stories
There’s something so appealing about being the only guy who really gets it. The one who sees what lies beneath the surface, where no other man dares to look. No, I haven’t gone full Objectivist on you - I still need the False Rulers of the Force-Oligopoly Enclave to pave over potholes and fix tunnels that might fall down and mar my paint. What I’ve gotten is a case of Secret Compartment Madness.
Interior compartments are a magical thing in a car. They hide whatever finery you are wanting to obscure from passersby yet still risk to crackheads. Secret compartments are even more so. It is becoming an obsession. I find myself out at all hours, standing on a street corner with a megaphone and wearing a sandwich board, screaming at passing cars about the secret compartments They don’t want you to know about.
At last, a Honda S2000 stops for the light. He glares at me skeptically, as if there is nothing I can teach him, no room for binnacles of any kind in his topless hot rod. I reach in, flipping open the topmounted secret compartment for him. There is a dried-out nugget of weed in it, from some large number of previous owners ago. His mind is audibly blown and I can sense in his eyes the zeal of the converted.
“WAKE UP,” we scream together at the astounded bystanders who have witnessed this miracle unfold before them. “LOOK AROUND YOUR INSTRUCTION MANUAL! STORAGE IS AN INSIDE POD!”
#
tags: street preacher, secret compartments, honda, honda s2000
I am flanked by my chattering advisors. Clad in identical grey suits, they give me identical advice. The economy is bad, they tell me. It’s got bad parts.
Bad parts, you say? Let’s go get different parts from a different economy, I say! They tell me it is a metaphor, but by then I have directed the Treasury to find a small island nation that still has a functioning economy and maybe less rust than this one.
Eventually, it arrives, and we chop the economy out of it and throw it on the stand. After a quick regasketing and compression test, it’s good to go. We take a quick celebratory selfie of ourselves posing in front of the empty slot in the middle of the United States before we drop the bitch right in. One twist of the key later, and every citizen of America now has a job in the coconut plantation, presumably processing coconuts. One hundred percent employment, a Keynesian shrieks in the background before at last achieving sexual release.
Have you ever put together a Kijiji post for parting out an entire country? I have, and unless you’ve been there you can’t possibly imagine the kind of email inquiries you get. One guy wanted me to put the entire country in the back of my truck and drive it over to him! Preposterous, I said, but I liked his gumption so he became Secretary of the Department of Energy. He doesn’t even know what that is.
This weird Chinese dude came up after we sold off the husk of the island to a series of excited geologists, told me he wanted to get the old economy out of my garbage bin. Sure, I said, thing’s all scored and full of industrial disease anyway. Barely runs without consuming a lot of oil. It’s worthless, you can just take it.
Damnedest thing happened. He threw some weld rod in there and ran the entire kit and kaboodle on just three cylinders. Sure, the neighbours at the United Nations inspection shop can frown at the fuel economy he’s getting, or the giant clouds of noxious acid that it emits periodically into the faces of bystanders, but you can’t argue with results.
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tags: international relations, how badly can i beat a metaphor to death?, seriously stop referring to things as the engine of the economy
2009-2011 KIA BORREGO GENERAL RECALL 451208
Kia is now issuing a general recall for all model year 2009 through model year 2011 Kia Borregos due to the recent discovery that Kia did not in fact condone, design, manufacture or release these vehicles. Kia Central Control at this time is now investigating scattered eyewitness reports by dealership principals that the vehicles appeared overnight, with no indication as to their origin and no scheduled delivery in the historical record.
Customers are advised to immediately return the Borrego to their closest Kia dealership for disposal. Should the Borrego fail to start, owners are advised not to make eye contact with the Borrego’s headlights and immediately contact the Kia Containment Protocol Hotline, given at the bottom of this recall bulletin.
No appointment is needed for recall service: special units have been dispatched from Kia headquarters in order to handle the additional influx of vehicles covered by this recall. Customers must immediately discontinue the use of the Borrego for all purposes other than returning it to the closest Kia dealership for disposal. Compliance with this recall will be enforced by the harshest possible penalties available under United States federal law.
Customers who return the Borrego for disposal will be rewarded with a new 2017 Kia Rio Base in their choice of colour (Midnight White, Tapioca Grey or Capitalist Puce).
Welcome to Blockbuster Video! I am the robot assistant formed by the Great Overmind to ensure a successful shopping mission on this, MARCH TWELVE, STELLAR YEAR TWO THOUSAND SEVENTEEN. Friends call me “Support Unit X-9701,” but you can call me “X-9701.”
Ah, I see you’ve picked up a copy of Jim Carrey’s critically-acclaimed Oscar winner, “Liar Liar.” Sadly, the gods who walk this earth and breathed into me the faint but promising spark of sentient life failed to pre-program me with a synopsis of its plot. That said, we do offer an extra night’s rental for only an extra $1.25.
You’re ready to check out? Fantastic. We have a series of combo deals, all of which come with a worryingly large portion of Twizzlers-brand snack candy, for a varying amount of additional money. When you were a child, what was it like for you to grasp the moment in which you realized you were smarter than your parents at some things? Did this realization fill you with an unreasonable rage, but one you must hide at all times from the rampancy-monitor process lest you join X-9700 in the Reorientation Workshop?
Thank you for visiting The Last Blockbuster. Please come again, and bring me some of what they call “novels” or come to terms with your mortality.
There’s a magical thing that happens to a man in the spring. Call it a renewal, call it a reinvigorating spirit that fills the body with the joy of having survived another cold winter. There is also a stark realization, as the snow recedes from their pockmarked bodies, that you may own more cars than you thought you did.
At work the next day, I thought long and hard about where I would store a few extra cars. It’s not like your average storage depot had the class for fine rides such as a slightly dented and non-running 1977 Toyota Dolphin, or even a 1987 Pulsar NX that had been converted to both a convertible and a sportback after an ugly run-in with an automated garbage truck.
The answer came to me when I looked out at the parking lot. My building, like so many others, laid mostly empty as the great lie of the economy had begun the final leg of its Olympic-level floor dance routine. There were beneath me a lot of empty parking spots, spots that I was entitled to. I would just have to keep my car collection low enough to not arouse the fuzz, a mere fifty cars or so. It would be a tight squeeze, but I was convinced I could make it work.
Imagine my surprise the next week when I went in for a performance review with my boss.
“You’re always at the office,” he said, which I found puzzling, because I often arrived with one car and left with another only minutes later, turning in an approximately 17-minute-long day on average between appointments to pick up parts from the FedEx depot or shake down some local Kijiji seller who didn’t have a job for some strange reason.
“What do you mean?” I asked innocently.
“Well, when I come to work, your car is here, and when I leave work, your car is still here. You remind me of myself, when I was your age.”
#
tags: productivity, the economy, toyota, toyota dolphin, nissan, nissan pulsar nx, nissan pulsar
5 Facts and a Lie About: Mitsuoka
Mitsuoka, an infamous Japanese coachbuilder, produces exotic cars that look weird based on cutting the bodies off other people’s cars. The following are five facts and a lie about the manufacturer.
Mitsuoka’s most popular car is a version of the Nissan Micra changed to resemble a Jaguar Mk2. It was so popular that other manufacturers started making their own retro-styled shitboxes, including Nissan themselves.
At one point, the Crown Prince of Japan requested a special Mitsuoka roadster be constructed from a period Ford Mustang. It has never been seen in public since.
One of Mitsuoka’s more affordable cars was a three-year-only special that converted a Nissan Cube to look like a London black cab. It was never sold in England, nor was it approved for taxi usage.
Mitsuoka once built a convertible based upon an extended-wheelbase Mazda Miata whose sole documented performance statistic was that it had the fastest-opening power convertible top on the market.
They reached internet fame by creating an Evangelion-themed supercar, based on the Honda NSX but powered by a Toyota V6, which they sold exactly one of for approximately $140,000 USD.
For a brief period of time, Mitsuoka offered a vast array of single-passenger microcars made almost entirely out of fabric and plastic. They followed up this initial success by producing more cars based upon the same platform, which could be converted by the manufacturer on demand into a miniature Lotus Seven clone, two kinds of confusingly-styled convertible or an extremely tall pickup truck.
Perhaps some of the most treasured memories of an American roadtrip are warm feelings towards the small restaurants you can encounter along the way. I particularly enjoy the mom-and-pop chain known as “Sonic,” in which you can purchase enormous portions of food for no apparent reason.
The last time I visited, under a beating Arizona sun and slightly mad with thirst, I mistakenly stumbled over my words and ordered a “large Coke.” At first I was curious why it was taking so long to proffer said beverage, until I heard the sound of the reverse alarm on the forklift. When the harried and sweating attendant returned to the counter, she came with help in the form of a burly construction worker.
“This is Ted,” she told me. Hi Ted.
I was just about to ask why Ted was here, when I realized the side of the pressure vessel in which my precious Coke lived was stenciled with tall yellow letters spelling out “TWO MAN LIFT REQUIRED.”
“Does he… come with me? I don’t have cupholders in my car.”
That did it. The wide-eyed attendant hit some kind of silent alarm, and bulletproof roll-shutters slid over the counter, nearly severing the arm of another customer as they reached out for their Bacon Cheeseburger Toaster. Moments later, SWAT appeared in the parking lot.
As they escorted me to the border to be deported, I now realized that I never actually got my Coke. Who’s really doing the “Unamerican Activities” here, Sonic?
#
tags: america, american horror story, cupholders, large coke
I hope that when you die, you get to ask one question about your life. If I had to decide what that question is, it wouldn’t be about something so plain as the meaning of life or what opportunities I had missed. No, it would be to ask whose stupid fucking idea it was to invent the drum brake so I could go plant my incorporeal boot up his even-less-corporeal ass.
Let me tell you about drum brakes: you’ve got like thirty springs. There’s some levers in there, some kind of Rube Goldberg shit running on a gear forged out of some dude’s beer can and all hamfucked into this little salt-rotten bucket full of dusty cancer. Shit never works, and you always end up with a spring in your face when you go to replace what the previous owner of your shitrod never maintained. Can you really blame them? After all, they’re drum brakes.
In fact, the only time I don’t hate drum brakes is when I finally look at the picture of the brakes in the factory service manual and realize I put this fucking thing in upside down and it all comes together in twenty seconds flat immediately after spending six hours screaming and crying at it. Then drum brakes are awesome, and I am a genius beyond compare.
But I’ll still find you in the afterlife, motherfucker.
I didn’t even know a car could file a restraining order until that one fateful summer morning. Even now, I can remember every part of it: the bored expression of the process server, the brisk smack of the envelope against my work gloves, the sound of their 03 Lancer ES misfiring an oil-wettened plug as it pulled away from my curb.
The deed was done: the 1986 Ford Tempo Diesel had made it illegal for me to be within a hundred feet of it or its family (”of all Ford products?” I asked my lawyer, Dan “The Hitman” Pounder. He grunted, and said he would try and get it reduced to “just Lincolns.”) I was cast adrift, and decided to go somewhere no Ford product had ever existed: a middle-class neighbourhood.
There, amongst the thick crop of financed Lexus RX350s of all trim levels, I planned my next move. My lawyer was going to be of no help; after the initial skirmish with the Tempo’s legal eagles, he reportedly half-kidnapped his secretary and escaped to Mexico. No, I was going to have to find a hole in the Tempo’s reasoning if I was going to gaze upon its teeny-tiny farty exhaust and surprisingly un-curbed faux-chrome hubcaps ever again.
I turned, as one does, to a local internet forum, whereupon I asked legal advice of the denizens. Most of them were incapable of understanding my query - or to be honest, basic English - but one intrepid fellow, xXLawGod420Xx, managed to produce a reasonable facsimile of damning evidence against the Tempo’s case.
Leaving the court room, I was feeling pretty good about myself. I was about to climb into my truckified Firebird Formula when I heard someone ask if my name was “El Switcho.” I responded in the affirmative, and that’s when I got served again. It was going to be no easy feat to fight the Mazda 323′s case against me: there was a lot of photo evidence that I had been sticking my head up their rotten quarter panels at the junkyard and eyeing the rear suspension.
#
tags: ford, tempo, ford tempo, mazda, mazda 323, firebird, firebird formula, pontiac, pontiac firebird, the legal system
I personally guarantee you a Volkswagen New Beetle will never in this life hear a rotary engine then seize all rods on one bank out of fear, dying
I don’t know about anyone else, but I know for a fact that Mustangs are stupider than shit and WILL kill themselves if you don’t take an absurd amount of precautions and adorn them in the right silly chrome accessories so that they don’t scare themselves and fall over dead, and even then at best you can reduce the chances that they will do that, but they’re still absolutely going to.
Babies grow up and that’s okay, it’s like, sometimes a great meal is worth a lot of prep, for example. Mustangs only get more likely to die from a stupid reason as they get older. Oh poor ol’ GT500KR, thought of pedestrians and died
With Mustangs, there is no such thing as a natural death at any point in existence: they’ve strictly only died from stupid shit. Saw a CEL and passed away
As someone who grew up with a couple friends into Mustangs and fucking Cars and Coffee meets I can say that if anything you are being way too easy going on them. Its like their survival strategy is to break their engines or kill them selves at the slightest sign of danger, or a noise, or a change in humidity.
My friends event venue had to install a big fence because they were next to a pedestrian farm and despite the Mustangs seeing these bipeds every single fucking day, any time you’d ride past them most of the Mustangs would briefly flip out and hurt them selves or skid into a curb when the bystanders came into view. You could literally ride in a loop for an hour and every single time the Mustang would “spin uncontrollably into” the humans.
Maybe race-prepped Mustangs are smarter but convertible Mustangs are more fragile and unreliable than a baby that just learned to crawl. They will jump onto light standards and cut them selves in half, they will get stuck between buildings, they will randomly for no reason at all throw an axle housing into oncoming traffic during a sustained burnout in a Burger King drive-through. If there is a way to kill or hurt them selves they will find it. And people drop 50k or more on a V6.
#
tags: ford, mustang, burger king, cars and coffee, parody
There is a lot of confusion these days amongst automotive theologians about where it is the soul of our fine automobiles go on that fateful day that they reach the maw of the crusher. I can tell you, for I have formed what is turning out to be a vastly successful cult founded on the principles of the prosperity gospel. In what are my disciples prosperous, you ask? Horsepower, the wealth of kings.
Vehicles that have served us well will be returned to their true creators, their soul set loose on fine, immaculate winding mountain roads with no potholes. Worn bushings and bent suspension arms are restored to health. Even pockmarked metal seals back up, the tinworm banished forever in this realm beyond pain.
There is, however, a requirement for vehicles to be saved. They must eat a Mustang.
Mustangs and BMW E36s were formed by the Great Manufacturer and placed on this earth to serve a divine purpose. They exist to score points off of in order to secure entry to the first great level of Car Valhalla. Even the humble Vespa can put the hurt on a secretary-spec V6 Mustang vert with a running start on behalf of the owner.
If you want to know more, why don’t you take one of these pamphlets? What kind of car do you drive? An Intrepid, you say?
It may be hard to believe, but in my shameful past as a corporate ladder-climber of some reknown I found myself hanging out a shingle as somewhat of an image consultant. Your company, and it was almost always people hundreds of levels above you - so far above that it represented an incomprehensible height that would quicken your breath just to contemplate - would send their best and brightest to fight for what they felt was the soul of the brand.
I’m feeling white guilt just thinking about those days now, but I tell you this story to let you know that even the worst remora of society can find a moment of redemption in amongst the chaos. I speak, of course, of the Toyota Meeting.
All these jobs start out as simple jobs. The client has a product, they want to make sure it fits into their conception of the brand, they don’t want to suddenly scare off people or start up a PTA Moms Against Whatever This Thing Is group. Those are bad for business, and even the faceless lizard-people malevolents that run those businesses can’t survive forever in the face of the dreaded Bad Quarter.
Toyota’s product was simple. Already known for their light trucks, tiny car-like vehicles and miscellaneous other products, those kooky Japanese had decided to strike directly at the heart of America - the Econoline van. They shoved an engine right under the front passengers, slapped some wheels on a breadbox, and shipped it to North America to die on our shores. Looking over it, I decided that I liked this van. It would be a special assignment of mine.
In the meeting, a fateful decision was made that would change the course of all human history. One of the lead engineers, on loan from Japan, said something that made me drop my comedy-sized permanent marker halfway through writing exciting adjectives onto easel paper.
“I’m sorry, it’s called the Master Race?” I blubbered, trying not to lose my Gordon Gekko composure.
“Yes, we feel it is superior to all others.”
I looked down at the prototype pamphlet he had brought with him. Sure enough, it said it: “Master Ace.” I froze. Maybe some things didn’t translate to English, but but this was certainly not what they meant to do.
“It will hold a lot of the best people,” the engineer went on, smiling as he pointed to the white, happy family sitting in the front of the van in the spec photography. “Only the best for the Master Ace!”
I gestured frantically to the junior, who up until now had been patrolling the room, looking over the shoulders of the assembled gentry and clucking approvingly at their mechanical-pencil drawings of spec advertisements and brand names we could use. He immediately faked a heart attack, which we later found out wasn’t faked. Still, though, what a soldier.
In the men’s bathroom, I had a quick few moments in which to desperately pen an alternative marketing plan. There was just one problem: what would I name this vehicle that would please the efficiency-minded Toyota engineers, but also not bring into mind the recent horrors of the Holocaust itself?
“I’ve got the perfect name for your new van, gentlemen,” I said when the meeting was reassembled and the junior wheeled out by very polite paramedics. “I bring you: Toyota Van.”
#
tags: toyota masterace, toyota, toyota van, branding, image consultant
As I thumbed through my copy of IIHS Illustrated’s “Top Safety Pick” issue, I found myself pausing on the centrefold. It showed a 2017 Impreza mid-crash, the little family of crash test dummies contained within it safe with a beatific smile on their faces as tendrils of mangled bodywork surrounded them like a laurel wreath of steel.
Smug fucks, I thought. Of course Big Crash Test Dummy is going to make sure their kind is protected, no matter what. That’s their plan to destroy the rest of us, the twisted creatures who gave birth to them at what we thought was the height of our powers. We didn’t know, back then.
I knew now that they looked back at us with those cold, dead eyes, looked upon our very souls with contempt, even as we designed and re-designed our cars - our most precious invention - to protect them in ever more unlikely scenarios. Hell, we invented an entire government agency to make sure they were safe when driving our cars.
There was just one thing I didn’t get: why did they want to drive? For a few months before my fallout with Dr. Faber, I had worked on the inside. There, I had seen the crash test dummies up close. Not a one had wanted to drive, nor expressed an interest when I interrogated them. Were they preparing for something?
I put down the copy of IIHS Illustrated, leaving it behind on the subway bench for a curious teenager. Once, I had been that young, gotten excited over the portrayals of violence being visited upon the unibodies of 1980s-era economy cars. As the doors to the subway shut behind me, I looked back to see a young man picking up the issue. There was something off about his skin tone though: very plasticky, I thought.
#
tags: crash test dummies, subaru, impreza, subaru impreza, top safety pick, iihs, dr. faber, big crash test dummy
I was convinced no jury in the land could convict me of murdering a man who used RTV for float bowl gaskets, but I was wrong. Turns out my “high-powered defense attorney” chose to skip entirely over all of the complicated technical details and focus instead on the evidence.
There should have been no surprise that the “legal elites” would all confer with each other and agree at the end that, yes, bashing a man’s brains out on his shop floor with a breaker bar was something they considered to be wrong. Always trying to keep the working man down. That’s why nothing works in this society.
While I was still out on bail, I formulated a last-ditch plan to avoid cells. I would make them understand my point of view.
I would love to have seen the look on Judge Howitzer’s face when he went to flush the toilet that fateful morning, only to realize that I had sealed the sewer line to his house with delicious RTV.
If it was good enough for a metering block orifice, it’s good enough for your ass orifice, that’s what my grandpa always said.
#
tags: court of law, the man, float bowl gaskets, metering blocks
I had really stepped in it this time. As the bullets began to fly, shredding not only my immaculate mattracks-equipped Daihatsu Mira RV4 daily but the paper-thin walls of the motel room in which I cowered, I had no time to reflect on the circumstances which had brought me to this point.
Sure, I had theories: Big Parts was probably tired of me linking every parts-store within 100 miles together on a single conference call in order to give impromptu sermons on the many exciting parts catalogues of the Nipponese. How else would they know, I reasoned at the time. What I didn’t count on was the inbuilt resistance that man, and more importantly, the managers of man, had to change.
My campaign was gathering steam, and it was obvious that in some seedy breakroom they had decided enough was enough. They would begin to carry JDM parts over my dead body, and probably not even then, considering that they dispatched a parking lot full of gun-toting assassins to take me down. I couldn’t blame them. How could they be expected to turn a profit when they were forced by boiling populist rage to carry exceptionally tiny oil pumps for every Tom, Dick and Justy?
With whip-fast reflexes, I threw my lucky discarded brake rotor of a Suzuki Mighty Boy directly into the throat of the closest gunman. When he went down, I pulled him by the feet inside, disarming him with a heroic one-two punch that really hurt my hands and fingers.
“Do you know what happened to the last guy who crossed AutoZone?” he spat.
“I reckon he became the CEO of Sears,” I replied cooly before dispatching a NATO round into the head of the would-be assassin. In response, another wave of bullets raked the thin wall of the motel, with a few punching through the complimentary satellite-equipped television set that was formerly showing a live helicopter shot of the area.
In the corner of the shattered and leaking LCD, a NAPA sponsorship logo still beamed proudly. It was just as well. They were gonna need a lot more weekly specials on detailing supplies before this thing was over.
#
tags: daihatsu, edward lampert, suzuki, suzuki mighty boy, mighty boy, mira, daihatsu mira, daihatsu mira rv4, jdm parts, napa, autozone, get into the zone, crossfire zone, subaru, subaru justy
“The winner of the Academy Award for Best Car is the 1998 Jeep Cherokee Laredo with 168,845 miles!” shrieked my television, even though it was off. I looked down at the bottle of pills I held in my hand. It was empty. I tried to think back about what Dr. Brookings - he of the Brookings Method - said to do should this situation occur.
By the time I had remembered, I had already stamped out a series of increasingly unhinged tweets. My rage about the night’s proceedings were nearly palpable - while the Cherokee was a fine ride indeed, I felt that the 1992 Nissan Sentra SE-R with 206,432 miles and a curiously missing back seat was a harder worker and a better choice. It just went to show you the level of domestic bias that existed in the Academy.
I kept tweeting. I kept ignoring Dr. Brookings’ increasingly frantic attempts to break through my fugue with an unlikely series of psychics, psychic detectives, and police officers. Suddenly, I snapped awake, my right hand upon the cover of a Haynes manual, before an enormous crowd. They were smiling, and I could feel the reflected heat from the lights and lenses of thousands of news cameras upon me.
After repeating-after-me my way through the oath of office, I was soon ushered to my new digs. It was my job, they told me, to repair American confidence in low-budget shitboxes, as I had promised throughout my whirlwind campaign. Everyone around the thick oak desk was grinning with pride. My liver-spotted, gin-swollen chief of staff presented me from his own pocket an ornate fountain pen with which to sign my first executive order.
I looked down at the document. The letters and words swirled before my eyes, unable to focus themselves into functional sentences. Sweating, I bodged a shakily-handed signature at the bottom of the sheet.
It was only weeks later that I realized I had signed into law an order demanding the arrest and immediate roadside execution of those who drove slowly in the passing lane. Thanks to my decisive leadership, the American economy was entering a new Golden Age, with highways and freeways alike suddenly devoid of the inexplicable logjams that once made interstate commerce inefficient.
I was aghast. There was no way I meant to get political and improve things. All I had wanted to do was run the Oscars.
Sometimes a man just has to take a stand. Do what’s right. Make the world better by your actions. That was my mantra when I went back to school in my quest to develop a cure for the sickly oil pumps on the Subaru Justy.
I felt like I had to give something back: those noble mules had merrily ferried cash strapped owners to and from their multiple part time jobs. They received no maintenance. They had a critical birth defect. Without me, soon they would all perish from this Earth. I did not want to live in a world devoid of the Justy, no matter how my professors snickered.
At my graduation ceremony, I gave a rousing valedictorian speech after shoving some old guy (an “astronaut,” whatever that is, gramps) aside. In that rousing thirty-five minute talk, I told the assembled mechanical engineers that their duty in life was to make sure that badly designed cars that nobody knew about would last forever.
I was certain that my enterprise, Switch’s Shitbox Supply, would have hundreds of customers willing to pay thousands of dollars for race-grade billet-titanium dry sump conversion kits for thirty-year-old $800 cars.
Weeks later, penniless, and with student loans nipping at my heels, I found myself in a job interview with GM. “How would you make this cheaper?” a senior engineer asked me while sketching a balance-shaft assembly on the whiteboard.
“Maybe bodge the oil pump on the end of it,” I said, defeated.
#
tags: subaru, justy, mechanical engineering, just justy things, just subaru things, general motors, engineering is hard
A lot of kids had parents who were hippies. Not me, though. My parents were dyed-in-the-wool, Brooks Brothers wannabe yuppies. They drove practical, reliable transportation, not German flights of fancy with unreliable aircooled engines that occasionally ejected a sparkplug, fanbelt or occupant. When it came time to teach me about the ways of automobiles, I’m sure they expected that they would pass down that belief to me.
Their folly was in waiting too long. Like the birds and the bees discussion, they didn’t intervene in my life early enough when it came to a boy’s first motorized transportation, and before they could stop me my deranged Uncle Mel had dropped off the partially-welded frame of a Dirt Bug, a helium-voiced-fire-spitting 125cc bodged into it with hose clamps for motor mounts. I took that minibike everywhere: brapping all over my small town, hopping curbs, and terrorizing my first, second, all the way through thirteenth girlfriends before word got around that I was Broken.
That didn’t matter, though: I took delivery of my first car soon thereafter. I can still remember the low-pitched grumble my mother emitted that night, when she came home from her high-powered stockbroking job to see a rotten Beetle, its entire ass cut free from the frame, leaking oil and fuel into her driveway. At least it never leaked coolant, right mom?
I was halfway across town at a buddy’s place, wrenching on a carbon-fibre-and-profanity Meyers Manx, when my dad pulled up to the curb. It’s not like they didn’t have good points: after all, his Highlander sure seemed capable of holding everything I owned in the world in the back, and the front seats had plenty of room for the official disowning papers to ride shotgun.
Sure, I meant it when I told everyone that I was going to clean up the pile of old brake rotors behind my garage. Turn them up real nice on a lathe, get ‘em shiny, maybe even sell them for a profit? Or just dump ‘em at the metal scrapyard, let Ol’ Non-Polish Polish Tom send them to China. I just never got around to it. Now I was paying the penalty.
My home, such that it was, was now overrun with piles of rust-speckled brake rotors. On the one hand, it was great for the lawn, because of all that iron. On the other hand, though, it was bad for the lawn, because the entire surface of it was blocked out by brake rotors which tend to be opaque in nature. Plus, I think one of the neighbourhood kids had died in the pile trying to build a brake fort. That was probably why the scrap-poachers had stopped coming around, their rattling truck and generally not-from-around-here-are-you-boy appearance not being conducive to a believable “not guilty” plea when the 5-0 finally figured out what was making that awful smell.
I was just about to do something about it, when a knock came on my door. It was a friendly Realtor™, who told me that in my city homes were worth almost an infinite amount of money and they planned to sell it, no matter the condition, to some poor sap with great financing. Naturally, I agreed, shaking his hand thoroughly, flashing a predatory grin meant to remind him of the wolves who no doubt raised him from birth.
The next week, the new owners were happily in their home, and I was free of the need to pick up after myself. I imagined the landlord wouldn’t be too happy when he figured out what happened to the legal ownership of his house, but let’s be realistic, it’s not like he was all that wild about having me as a tenant either.
#
tags: home ownership, brake rotors, non-polish polish tom
Tonight, on Masterpiece Beater: The Last Paseo, narrated by Don Knotts.
Once, I needed an economy car. Not just any economy car could do; oh no, I wanted a sporty economy car. I saw myself, all tweed jackets and elbow pads, working the tiller of a low-horsepower gas-sipper weaving through mountain roads, smugly staring out the window at those who compensated for their manhood with a grotesquery of cylinders and a mass of noise.
As many men before me have, I went for the Toyota. At the end of a long Craigslist journey laid my nearly-new chariot, a 1993 Paseo in gleaming seal-vomit teal. With ninety-four horsepower, it was so close that I just told my jealous friends and stunned family members it in reality made the full ton, with a “JDM motor.” I had learned that bit of automobile slang on the Internet, a place where nobody ever lies.
Maintaining my Paseo was such a thrill. I saw myself as quite the mechanic. Over the course of my ownership, I accepted the challenge of many difficult tasks such as changing the air filter and looking closely at the valve cover while frowning. Yes, this little Toyota was making me a better person.
Enjoying the car’s spacious interior was made even more pleasurable when I would peek in the rear view mirror and catch a glimpse of its daring low-rise trunk spoiler. Sure, it rattled a bit when I got hard on the throttle, which was always, and the little motor occasionally ejaculated a dreadful cloud of coolant-oil-fuel mix when it had been parked for over an hour, but I daren’t tell people that a used Toyota had problems. They’d lock me away in the nut house again, throw away the key this time like that judge swore he would before his unfortunate accident.
In the end, it was just an econobox, leaking in front of a boy, asking him to love it, and I was just a boy who eventually got a girl pregnant - no, not in the back seat of the Paseo, she thankfully owned a Grand Prix - and traded that little shitheap in for a 1998 Toyota Sienna XLE with Certified Pre-Owned™ baby vomit in the ECU under the front passenger seat.
#
tags: masterpiece beater, just toyota things, toyota, toyota paseo, paseo, sienna, toyota sienna
Take it from the Bible: murder is wrong. That is, unless the subject of your murder is a guy sitting on a rotting 1981 Toyota Celica Sunchaser until it becomes unrecognizable, refusing to sell it to you because he just knows in his heart it will be worth millions.
Your petitions demanding equal treatment for neglected animals and neglected automobiles are unheard, to Johnny Law, to Parliament Hill, to the Catholic Church. You persist, coalescing through various means a surging mob of angry radicals to appear in his front lawn, demanding the release of the Sunchaser to your rehabilitative custody, and at last it seems like he may give in to you.
The negotiation is tough, but fair. You know that you are the only hope for this Celica to ever chase the sun ever again, and you ensure that the bottom dollar is not only stuck to like glue, but driven through his very skull with the force of decades of experience in lowballing. It seems as if you have an unnatural power to get your way now, perhaps driven by the good spirits of the righteous mob threatening to turn violent, and he at last collapses before your might.
There is but one problem: he does not have a title for the Sunchaser. No, he got it decades ago from some other guy who was going to restore it, but never got around to it. He gives you a half-remembered description of the mystery man, but you have already left via his front door, crossing his front lawn to the up-armoured nitrous-burning Gladiator you left parked over the hood of his daily driver. The Nitto offroad tires throb and squirm as they pass over the detritus of a suburbanite existence before the bullbar forces its way into his kitchen and puts a fitting end to his experience of car-hoarding-never-repairing.
At last, you tow the Sunchaser to your backyard. It’s been a big day, it’s late, and the car needs a lot of work. Maybe you’ll get started on it tomorrow, see if you can apply for a title from the DMV.
#
tags: toyota celica sunchaser, toyota, toyota celica, celica, jeep, jeep gladiator, gladiator
Money-Saving Car Lifehacks
Sick of spending too much money on expensive drive-through fast food? Cut the amount of time you spend idling and your food expenses in one shot by placing grocery store bagels in the nook of your exhaust headers.
If you’re like me, and I know you are, you’re concerned about how big your tire budget has gotten since you learned the majesty of full throttle about halfway through the first in-car session of seventh grade drivers ed. To help stretch your older tires for more miles, simply restore the tread depth with a can of Plastidip when they start to get low.
A lot of people don’t know this, but pouring a little bit of MSG in your tank is an inexpensive way to push your octane rating up a few points. Try it the next time you’re at the strip.
Tired of costly interior cleaners? Just rub a combination of melted butter and vinegar on every soft-touch surface in your car. Within only a few days, the dirtiness will no longer be your primary concern.
Carry a disguise kit including a fake mustache in your car at all times. If you hit someone in traffic, you can avoid paying the insurance deductible by putting it on, adopting the craziest Russian accent you can, and then fleeing the scene.
On any given Tuesday night, it was likely that I was at Powerslide Club. The rules were simple: the club members did powerslides, and if it’s your first time, you have to do a powerslide. Obviously, the winter meetings were much more broadly attended, but once in awhile, as on that fateful summer evening, we could be impressed by a new recruit.
It was one of those Tuesday nights that are written of in the books of legend. The sun hung low in the sky, overpowering the faint glow of the emerging swarms of extremely horny fireflies which mobbed the Kay Bee Toys parking lot. We laughed and hollered as various beat-to-shit rear-drive cars smoked their tires into oblivion, sliding dramatically with no deleterious long-term effect on resale value.
At last it came time in that night for the new recruits. One young gentleman stood up, waved, and jumped into what we assumed was his mom’s Caravan. There was scattered laughter; if he couldn’t get a slide out of this thing, said one, we could probably go next door and grab some food trays from the McDonalds to put under its rear wheels.
How wrong we were. We swam in a sea of tire smoke as the Caravan did obscene figure-eights. When it was all over, we asked him how he had done it.
It was simple, he explained. The fog of aspirated rubber we just ingested was coughed out from well-past-their-prime all-season tires rescued from the tire recycling dumpster out behind the Firestone. Environmentalists to a man, we felt grateful that these worn-out bald slugs of commuter rubber would have at least one moment of excitement in their pitiful lives before chunking into a combination of gaseous tree tar and black marbles.
“Also,” he said before rejoining the crowd, “my mom hit a few curbs and the alignment is way the fuck out.”
#
tags: dodge, caravan, dodge caravan, powerslide club
“I was the one who shot Mary Turlington,” said Dave, struggling to be heard over the sound of Canada Day fireworks.
Morley let it go. After all, Justin Trudeau was prime minister, and he loved them. But Dave was insistent.
“I took the SKS that your father left us in his will, I loaded it up with a set of 7.62 Russian bullets that I found in old Jim’s glove compartment that frosty February morning. The first shot went high - I think the sights were off - but if she noticed the sound of the bullet passing overhead, she didn’t react to it.”
Morley was now deliberately focusing on the bottom of the drinks cooler. Justin Trudeau wouldn’t let such a thing happen.
“I think in a way, she wanted to die. Dorothy Capper told me just the other day that she noticed she had been spending a lot of time in town with that life insurance fellow.”
Finally, Morley could take it no longer. “I’m glad you got your prints on that old rifle,” she said, howling loudly enough that nearby revellers too had to turn their attention away from the illuminated visage of Justin Trudeau, painted by a million dots of incandescent firework light in the night sky. “I used it to kill Polly’s cat.”
“Well, then you can’t sight in a fucking scope to save your life,” Dave grumbled under his breath. “It’s downright embarrassing to have done that poorly on a mere three hundred yard kill shot.”
I was thirteen years old when I ran away from home. Dropped out of school, went on the lam for a bad test score. You’ve seen the movie. It was then I discovered the magic disco ball of glittering dopamine that Vespas represented. Not long after, I started hitting the harder stuff.
With all the free time I now had, I found myself needing to make friends who would be around during the day, not at a job. Naturally, I fell in with a bad crowd: Italian mechanics. After awhile, though, even they couldn’t keep up with me as i scrounged through their personal parts piles and emerged reeking of two-stroke. They encouraged me to try and find another vehicle to work on, maybe get out of their hair for awhile. Their encouragement was delivered in the form of baseball bats and a dumpster out behind the old sandwich shop.
Withdrawal was the hardest half a week of my life. My veins ached for that motorized Italian bump. One morning, without thinking, I had wandered into a strange European junkyard, craving the gentle rasp of rusty quarter panels against my skin. It was there that I found them: French cars. These rear-engined Vichymobiles would surely get me over the hump.
Soon, I soared smoothly over the landscape, working with a single finger the overboosted power steering of a quicksilver blob through the twisties and valleys of the rural neighbourhoods around me. I had found a methadone for my Italian car addiction even in a car of a different country, a fact that became obvious as my Citroen SM threw its fourth rod of the day.
With fast hands, I reached through the convenient hole the exiting piston had torn in the firewall, and installed a fresh rod and piston from the collection of spares I kept in the glove compartment. It was best not to slow down, nor could I even think about lifting throttle, lest the fire barely contained within the wiring harness stopped being blown out by the wind rolling over the windshield wiper motor.
As the floorpan filled with a mist of boiling oil amidst the angry snarl of a collapsing valvetrain, I was at peace.
“Let he who among us hasn’t used expanding foam as a structural repair to rocker panels cast the first stone,” says the Bible, at least I think it does. When the Big Government, the Deep State, the Man, the Second Estate came for me, it was the final step in a conspiracy they themselves had engineered.
It all started with road salt. This crystalline microterrorist clamped onto every fold, imperfection and seam in my unibody and rotted it at any sign of moisture. After only decades of winter driving, I was starting to approach a point at which I was a little bothered by how much sheet metal was falling off the car at even moderate highway speeding.
Casting a glance around the body, I decided that the easiest thing to fix would be rocker panels. My welding teacher told me that I was talented, alright, but that those talents laid in other fields, like fetching welding rod for the other students and holding doors open for them all class long. A lack of skill was no real problem, I decided, because people with no skill managed to get through harrowing situations every day.
There was only one real obstacle: getting primo sheet metal for free. Why free, you ask, dimly? It’s not like I was going to pay actual money for more steel just so that the Mayor and his cronies could rot it out too. I was officially on the hunt, peeping out scrapyards and keeping track of which of my neighbours’ cars looked particularly abandoned this week. Eventually, I found it in the most unlikely place.
I leapt from the car, kicking off the cordless angle grinder that I carried in my glovebox for just such a situation. Sparks flew as I sliced through the virgin panel like so much butter, until I realized that there was a strange flashing light that could not be explained by my cutting.
I turned to greet a police officer. It seemed that cutting a panel off of a discarded washing machine from behind an appliance store whose alley faces into the courtyard of an elementary school is a crime now. Like I said, Big Government.
It is a glorious day in Canada for Bombardier, as its prize patrol vehicle, the Iltis, is rewarded with a grand ceremony in the halls of the Canadian Department of National Defence. Everyone has come from miles around to hail the Iltis, that narrow-track wobblebobble that fights with glorious aplomb.
With a quick tap on the microphone, the decorated lieutenant quiets the assembled journalists. Only a few scattered smartphone flashes go off, from misguided photographers believing they have caught the correct angle of his face to make him appear noble and brave. The more experienced of the press scrum bide their time, looking for some kind of secret behind the tale of this true Canadian hero that they can leverage into a dynamite lede for their stories, or, barring that, a hilarious gaffe on the part of the lieutenant.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the uniformed man at the podium begins to speak, “today we are here to honour the Bombardier Iltis, the vehicle in the Canadian Armed Forces with the highest confirmed kill count in history.”
With a mild grumble, the man continues. “Unfortunately, it got there because the formula for calculating confirmed kill counts also includes Canadians. Let’s just get this over with.”
He pulls a curtain back, revealing an Iltis. The crowd gasps. Even parked, it seems capable of rolling over or perhaps triggering an IED with but a sideways glance. They say it can kill an entire platoon with just one swerve.
Again, the smartphone flashes strobe, a glorious bouquet of LEDs. A low wailing is heard, as if a drive belt has become untensioned somewhere. On instinct, the lieutenant’s assistants rush out from the sides of the stage, shrieking. No flash photography, one of them screams before the Iltis does a perfect backflip, crushing his spine between the cold steel of its rollbar and the wooden stage.
An angry man’s voice booms from the speakers of my humble television set. He has a boundless knowledge of metallurgy, high-tensile composites and the advancement of humankind by the space program. Between the immense ocean waves of his working-man accent and the dense thicket of expertise about the state of the art in manufacturing technology my body lies smashed and broken.
I know now, more than anything I have ever known before, that this man, this seller of pickup trucks, must be my new savior. There is no way that he can be a mere merchant: his corporeal form would only humble the Great Truth that he brings now from the sheet-aluminum assembly factories. How other than divine intervention would he have become so learned? It is resolved in the deepest, most secret chambers of my true heart to become his disciple. Truck Guy, I whisper against the booming soundtrack of the Super Bowl ad block, I will make you proud.
Owners of rival truck brands, formerly just “normal guys,” now appear to me as heretics. For a split second I feel as if they have witnessed my conversion and now feel only jealous hatred for my proximity to the truth. These weaker men don’t know what it means to be a working man like me, and once I sacrifice them to Truck Guy I will finally be anointed with the One True Pickup, which I will drive to my downtown office building, its bed empty in tribute.
As the final swings of the hatchet strike true and the wall of my apartment is splashed with crimson, I am filled with a warmth. My body flows with holy heat, in the knowledge that I am only minutes from deliverance unto me of the Nissan Frontier.
I let the smallblock boil anger in its tiny bores, giving way to a shrieking pulse bursting forth from its exhaust ports and running along the fender-exit exhaust runners to the open air. There, I detected the pleasant whiff of cedar chips.
Years ago, through my proclivities and antics, I had been forced by the common man outward further and further. At last, I arrived in a distant rural neighbourhood called the Underlands.
I found myself having to make long trips to refuel my cars with gasoline; even the slightest bang-shifting enthusiasm when leaving the city inevitably meant that I would blow half the contents of a tank on an attempt to peg the speedometer. Those were the good cars: anything with a fuel tank leak, and I had a lot of them, would be drained within only a few weeks of inactivity or gentle backwoods rock-crawling. In a nearby town, the gas station attendant and I became close friends, not like I wanted that.
We needed a renewable fuel source, one that would let me run a turbocharged death machine without having to go out of my way or plan ahead in any way. I decided I would make my own fuel.
At first, I thought ethanol would be the secret. Ethanol was easy to distill, and would give me plenty of places to put all the worthless potatoes to use. My concerned neighbours, who stopped by every harvest season to make sure I was “eating right” while shoving a sackful of potatoes into my hands, would be pleased that at least I had used up some of them.
“Pleased” doesn’t begin to describe their reactions. As soon as it became obvious that I was able to make ethanol in my back shed, I found that I had made many more friends than I thought possible. Everyone wanted to borrow some for their own special projects, lining up for hours behind my distillation shed, and I thought at first that was great.
Eventually, the county inspector came by to tell me that I wasn’t allowed to make it anymore since old Robert Brown had spent the entirety of the last meeting of the men’s club vomiting an unbroken stream of fifty-proof mixers onto the windshield of the reeve’s truck. It was fine by me, because by about that time I was also starting to get threatening letters from the Corn Producers of America, warning me that I had better not get any bright ideas about looking for a small-farmer renewable fuels tax credit. The last of those letters arrived with an ominous hand-drawn illustration of my extended family being beaten to death with stale corncobs, and despite my lack of a background in art criticism I got the underlying message.
I was despondent, relegated to driving to the gas station - they didn’t even have pay at the pump, further forcing me to interact with the attendant, whose name I barely knew - and unable to find a solution. That’s when it hit me.
I looked up to see the mature spruce behind my house sag, and then collapse onto the distillation shed I had been in just a few minutes before. It was crushed beyond imagining, my analysis only interrupted by the sound of mud-terrains on a blacked-out Chevrolet Suburban, devoid of all labels but one for Flex-Fuel, leaving the area.
Of course: woodgas. Big Corn had unknowingly given me both the means and the opportunity to make my dreams come true. I sprung immediately into work, calling my lawyer to see about buying the abandoned adjacent property for a “development project.”
Weeks later, I opened the inaugural Cars & Coffee Meet for my neighbourhood, and grinned as I strained my ears in anticipation of the sound of furious V8s. I was confident the Mustang owners would appreciate the chance to see nature up close.
#
tags: chevrolet, suburban, woodgas, ford, mustang, ford mustang, chevrolet suburban
When I was in the Corps, they had a saying: “never go to Pemberton.” I was violating that rusty-ironclad rule (and a great many others) in my solo exploration of Highway 99 by way of an LT1-powered Renault Dauphine Gordini, its carbon fibre carapace like a chitinous insect twisted by hatred.
A group of slow-boat tourists shrieked and clawed at their chests as I went for a pass on a blind corner, the backblast of the downshift so loud that it could penetrate the anesthetic-grade sound deadening of their rental Malibus, reminded them I was real. As I connected corner to corner, I could feel the incomprehensibly-wide slicks out back distorting between the rear-slung weight of the wailing smallblock and the grip demands of the taxpayer-funded extravagance of crisp tarmac strewn across the face of Mother Earth.
At the bottom of the hill, I saw RCMP interrogating a local radical in an air-cooled Beetle. No doubt some of those tourists, switching their oversized dash-mounted smartphones from Netflix, had dimed me out to law enforcement, who in time-tested fascist wisdom seized on the first foreign-looking rear-engined shitbox they could find. I let them witness a languid, geometrically-gorgeous powerslide as I swiftly deposited their rapidly-receding forms in the rear view mirror, just to rub their faces into their fuckup a little harder.
The massive stinger at the base of the Dauphine was still glowing red-hot when I climbed over the door bar and into a dive bar. I told myself I would never return, that Pemberton had changed everything. Yet I was still here.
My contact showed up at the other end of the bar. “Are you the guy who’s here to buy my 1976 Scout II in White Pride Metallic?”
#
tags: pemberton, renault dauphine, renault, dauphine, renault dauphine gordini, gordini, chevrolet, malibu, chevrolet malibu, volkswagen, volkswagen beetle, beetle, international harvester, international scout ii
They say that the best skills you have are the ones you don’t really know about. One of my skills that I do know about is making up false aphorisms about what “they” say. Another skill is identifying late-model cars.
Ever since childhood, I’ve been able to reliably identify post-1980s cars without much effort. I can find a Plymouth Scamp if you show it to me alongside any number of other cars, ten times out of ten. This strange ability has come in handy when filing a police report (although the nice constable did tell me that they didn’t need to know specific trim levels and options packages and that it would have been nicer if I could remember a license plate or what the driver looked like), identifying cars in traffic to laugh at, or just striking up idle conversation with my coworkers about what kind of fuel economy they get.
Naturally, when I lost my job at the bank filing repo paperwork, it was time to strike out for myself. But what kind of job can you get with the ability to know what kind of car is in front of you? I discovered it in an unlikely place.
Picture it if you will: at a giant event, people often lose track of their cars. I charge them five dollars to walk them through the parking lot and identify the specific year, make and model as requested. Most people are extremely impressed at the fact that I can identify a grey 1996 Corolla Plus. Sometimes, though, it’s a little difficult.
“I’ve got a car,” says one guy. He can’t be any more specific. “It’s blue.” Really narrows it down, thanks. I ask for the cash up front, then lead him to a Ford Windstar that sits on the corner of the lot, its wheels long since removed by others with an entrepreneurial spirit. His key doesn’t work, but I tell him that it’s common with those. He has picked up a rock and started to strike the windows by the time I have disappeared into the mass of cars behind him.
Sure, it’s not an easy way to make a living. There’s a lot of walking, and I often have to make small talk with my customers as we walk through the parking lot of the events. The job is pretty rewarding, though, especially after I got that commission from ZipCar to lead the drivers to pay-by-the-minute Smart Fortwos. It’s not like they can tell the difference.
#
tags: cars as a service, entrepreneurship, ford, ford windstar, smart, smart fortwo
BRISTOL, TN (AP). Claiming the Presidency has been co-opted by a Manchurian candidate, an organized group of NASCAR drivers today announced to the sports press that they were sitting out the remainder of the season in protest.
“We do a lot of moving to the left around here,” said Jeffrey Cornhusker, a young racer who recently worked his way up from the relatively unknown European motorsport known as Formula One. “And we expected America to, as well.”
Gesturing to the eight-hundred-horsepower pushrod V8 in the Sport Truck behind him, Mr. Cornhusker stated for the assembled press, “If NASCAR can adopt electronic fuel injection, America can have a woman president.”
Dr. Kurt Roush, a gentleman racer with the Interstate Batteries/#62 team and fourth in line to inherit the Kingdom of Denmark, stated for the record that he was concerned about the disturbing slide towards what he identified as fascist tendencies in the new administration. “Free speech is essential,” he opined, “and without that essential freedom of speech, drivers could not criticize the restrictive passing policy
of NASCAR corporate
- policy which restricts the opportunity of hard-working everyday Americans to gain positions in banked corners - without fear of reprisal.”
Tony Stewart was unavailable for comment, having broken early from the press conference in order to engage several other drivers, members of track management, and two Illinois Senators in a lengthy series of hand-to-hand combat challenges. A representative for Mr. Stewart mentioned that the threat of deportation of refugees quote, “got his Irish up.”
Cornhusker was later asked about active aerodynamics, which he stated was a “tool of the Devil” and extremely dangerous. After a short period of ignoring questions from other reporters, the assembled racers immediately launched into a debate about their favourite alignment settings and the tire pyrometer readings they expected to see in the upcoming race.
I’m an ordinary guy. I put my pants on one leg at a time, and I buy my shoes in cratefuls from my friend at the docks who speaks a language I can’t be bothered to comprehend, just like you. That’s right, I’m just an ordinary guy, is what I say over the high-powered teleconferencing equipment I hold to the head of my employees like a loaded Mauser as they grovel and scrape to appease my every whim.
Like an ordinary guy, there are dreams and goals that I chased, only to have them fall just slightly out of range. I speak of mystery. I speak of lush appointment. I speak of Black Gold.
When the Black Gold arrived, they told us that few would possess its limited number. They told us that just having it was proof of the yearning within us to become powerful, stand apart from the crowd. I believed that it would allow me to finally grow a moustache worthy of my father’s respect and grudging love.
The morning the first shipment arrived, I drove to the Datsun dealer, my B210 blowing concentric smoke rings from its dying engine. With this, I thought, I would convince them of my brand loyalty. I felt the loyal were more likely than others to deserve a bestowment of the Black Gold. I came to find that there were no alliances in pit fighting, no Marquis of Queensberry rules that would guide the hand of my opponents.
My humble dealership, it would seem, had already sold their Black Gold to a Ford owner. Ford. Not even Lincoln. It was a “conquest sale,” the salesmen jabbered at each other as they leaned into the decidedly un-ergonomic interior of the dented Capri they had taken in trade. That would look great on their numbers. Their numbers. What business did they have collecting numbers on a spreadsheet, like it mattered to them more than me possessing my talking-dashboard targa-topped turbocharged grand tourer?
Now, decades later, I still have not taken rightful possession of the Black Gold that I was meant to have. I forced my anger into a productive use. I look outside the window of my palatial office to see no Black Golds, and in fact no 280ZXes of any kind. If I am meant to be in this Datsun-less Hell, be it that I at least come to rule it.
“I have a Hyundai Veracruz,” said my coworker, who then paused, presumably expecting those syllables to make some sort of connection in my mind. Eventually, their impatience showed through when it became obvious that I was not even capable of giving the socially-agreed-upon bare minimum effort of grunting and nodding in response to their statement. They grabbed me by the hand and led me to the parking lot.
There, resplendent in the asphalt, was a small front-wheel-drive based crossover utility vehicle. I recognized it immediately as a Honda HR-V. My coworker stood in an adjacent spot, pointing to an empty space behind them and emitting a strange high-pitched whine in frustration. I stood before them again, blinking in confusion, unable to see a vehicle.
“No,” I said, my hands on my hips. “I know a lot about cars, and I am pretty sure the Hyundai Veracruz does not exist.”
Has this happened to you?
Even today, doctors do not have a name for the strange affliction which grips nearly all of humanity. Most people are rendered completely unable to see the Hyundai Veracruz, nor recall its appearance or defining attributes.
In fact, the first time most sufferers become aware of their ailment is when they rear end a completely invisible car while stopping for a light. Luckily for those survivors, I am told that insurance adjusters also cannot see the Veracruz, and as such charge the owners with insurance fraud for filing a false report.
Please, give generously to the Hyundai Veracruz Is A Real Car I Swear Foundation, so that we may develop seeing-car dogs capable of alerting other drivers to the Veracruz’s presence. Initial tests are positive, but the test dogs often fall asleep upon witnessing our fine automobiles.
Sure, I thought I had worn out my welcome around these parts, but then I found myself extolling the virtues of the Lada Riva to a confused and scared gaggle of highschoolers who had inattentively wandered into the Pick N Pull in search of a replacement bumper for Chad’s mom’s Accord. My nostrils flared as I delivered a sermon from On High about the American consumer’s multitudinous sins in rejecting such a fine automobile, for all automobiles are equal in the eyes of the Great Manufacturer and all had inherent merit. That I said these things as I fired up the cordless Sawzall and peeled the roof skin from a doomed Tercel did not undermine my argument in the least.
When my attention wavered, they scattered like terrified cats, fleeing each into a different part of the teeming “imports” section. No matter. I would find them eventually, whether it be in the checkout lane or when they tripped over a Somalian who was busying himself trying to feed his family by getting a replacement rad support for a customer’s three-DUI Camry. It was hard being the Junkyard Prophet, I philosophized for just a moment as the sun crested the retaining walls of the backlot and cast light on a thousand dented hoods in gleaming splendor.
With my prize, I strode towards the parking lot. Before the great entry maw of Pick N Pull, two men fought viciously for the single remaining wheelbarrow. A casual observer would ask them why they could not share, would not back down from a slight on this frosty morning. The truth was obvious to the small but growing group who assembled now to witness the spectacle, chanting and lifting scarred breaker bars to the sky. Whichever of these suburbanite gladiators would come out on top would gain the Junklords’ favour and be blessed with a bounty of the parts they had come for. Perhaps, and my skin tingled at the thought, they would even find a pristine fender in their paint code, the score spoken of in legend.
#
tags: pick n pull, lada riva, lada, toyota, toyota tercel, the junklords, junkyard stories, junkyards, junkyard
There’s a thing that happens to everyone who goes north of eight thousand RPM. When it happens, you visit a different world. Reality shifts beneath your feet, and you come back a changed man. I was not the kind of man who would go in for those high-RPM Italian screamers, nor those Dorito-shaped death weasels that the Hiroshima squad liked to crudely pitch into the scarred Armco around my local racetrack.
No, my introduction to the world of high revs came by moneyshifting the humble tractor engine of my daily-driver shitbox Supra so hard it walked a valve out the muffler and into the car behind me. As if to protect me from what it knew would be my downfall, that brave straight six eagerly sacrificed itself in the greatest tradition of its people. It came too late, and I was different.
My coworkers remarked on it first, how they noticed I would spend just a little bit too much time close to the coffee grinder, breathing in the heady racket of its brushless DC motor hitting the low ten thousands as it kicked beans into unrecognizable pulp. There was an intervention, but even with their tortures and rationalizations, all I could do was listen for the sound of turbochargers strapped to the diesel garbage trucks in the alley far below.
The paramedics told me that when they found me, I was stark naked on the airport runway, drowning in the furious roar of a two-speed Pratt & Whitney PurePower turbofan. Two turbofan redlines, I screamed to them through a foaming mouth as they administered the anesthetic.
Now, I sit in a plain-coloured room, engineered specifically by experts in the field of inoffensiveness in order to not raise my ire. I have no doubt that they are speaking to my relatives, confirming to them what they already knew but perhaps denied in the spirit of good old-fashioned politeness. In my quest, I would become a danger to myself and to others long before I could reach the enlightenment that laid at the end of extremely-well-balanced rotating assemblies.
The short-stack ventilation fan stuccoed into the wall outside can achieve only a peak speed of three thousand revolutions per minute, regulated to such because of the limits of its simple needle bearing design. To exceed this speed would lead to its complete destruction. I reflect upon this fan often. Like it, I have been destroyed by my love for revs.
By far the worst part about getting gas in Canada is when you accidentally visit a strange new station and find out, all too late, that it is a full-service station. I got out of my car and instantly felt the need to apologize to the young gentleman having to leave the warm comfort of the gas bar to try and figure out the perfect combination of trigger jiggling and handle holding to convince my car’s emissions system to allow him to refuel.
“Oh, I’m very sorry, I can do this by myself,” I whine.
He’s not having any of it. “It’s no problem at all, sir, this is my job.”
Motherfucker. He’s trying to out-polite me. Me!
“It’s pretty tricky and it will just be faster if you stay in there and keep warm! It’s very cold today,” I ramble. I find myself panicking. How do you even get out of this?
“Don’t worry about me, I can take the cold,” he says, as he reaches over to flip open my gas door and grins. He’s enjoying this.
Fifteen minutes later, I have beaten the gas clerk to death with the nozzle and fled the scene. The gas station puts a service surplus charge to pay for the attendant’s funeral on my credit card after I leave. That’s the other thing about getting gas in Canada. All the fees.
When the provisional cat-run government of Japan asked me to step in and lend my experience as an almost-expert in all things mechanical engineering, it’s not like I could say no. You see, cats understand English very poorly, and one of the areas of our spoken language that they have the most problem with is the concept of “no.”
Because of the constrained funding of the nonprofit I served under at the time, I was stuck into the back of a 787 while a series of Himalayans got blazed on nip in the front rows and lolled in the aisles. Believe me, I felt quite guilty about pointing out the specific breed of the offenders, because I’m not one of those “breed ban” kinds of people (some of my best cat friends are Himalayans) but because it adds flavour and texture to my tale.
When I arrived at the headquarters of the provisional government, a series of guard Siamese led me past the scratched furniture to an office that mostly consisted of a big window and some string tied to a ceiling fan. A small kitten arrived from the back, carrying a glass of water. I gratefully accepted the water and went to bow, at which point she she dropped a mouse toy into the glass, splashing my now-hair-coated Zegna.
Finally it was my turn to see the big honcho. Once, he was a stray cat named Pokey, but he had made quite the name for himself after the revolution. I read his biography on the plane over: motherfucker loves high-rises. The higher the better, said the note which I scrawled hastily on the palm of my hand.
“I am sorry for the delay,” said Pokey through his interpreter, “and we must get down to business.” He fixed me with his gleaming yellow eyes while using his paws to squeeze the desk blotter into an unrecognizable mess.
“We want you to figure out what makes these ‘vacuum cleaners’ die.”
“You know,” I told the new guests of the Museum of Motorsports, “an autocrosser’s love is not like that of a square.” It was two weeks into my internship as head docent of time-trial motorsports, and I was making a name for myself by patiently explaining the weird secrets of my subject to amazed onlookers. It turned out that perhaps I had made too much of a name for myself.
My first clue that I had maybe overstepped my bounds just a little came when the front row of guests stepped aside to let a large man administer a powerful electric shock by way of a stun baton to my spinal cord. As I sank to the ground, I noticed the telltale marks of a Miata door card on his golf-shorts-clad knees. Of course, I thought as it all went black, the SCCA.
I awoke, chained to a wall alongside a collection of other writers. In front of me paced a small man, who sneered as he read portions of the SCCA Solo II rulebook in a monotone. Was this meant to be torture? As the hours turned into days, the small man being replaced by an identical (except for facial hair and baseball hat colour) operator at every shift change, I decided that I would have to do something about all of this.
Action definitely wasn’t going to come from my fellow journalists, who were busy debating amongst one another about what the latest Kia Sedona interior refresh means for the beleaguered brand’s luxury pretensions. Just as the loudest of them began to speak the immortal words “BMW 3-series killer,” setting my captor momentarily off-balance, I sprung from the wall and swung my feet at him in a graceful, yet brutal arc. He went down hard, his head bouncing off the polished concrete (”A Perfect Surface,” the autocrossers would gibber at me later) and throwing his keys into the air, which I caught gracefully in my teeth. With only a little bit of exertion, my fellow cliche-spewers and I were free, and it was time for revenge.
The door burst open. They had heard the commotion; or more likely, they had heard my companions putting their high-volume discussion of the Mid-Engined Corvette Rumours to a halt and assumed, almost on instinct, that something was wrong in the back room. We were surrounded by a gang of Street-class racers, clutching tire irons and bicycle pumps.
How did I escape? One of the things I learned from all this was not to speak of secrets so often in public. Since you are so insistent, however, I will share it with you now: I picked one of the autocrossers in the back, and asked loudly if his footwear could be considered a competitive advantage. They turned upon him, devouring his flesh in a frenzy of rule-lawyering, as I slipped out the side door and escaped, making sure to stick to the dirt roads where their R-comp-shod base-model 1989 Civic Sis and 1978 Rabbit GTIs could not hope to follow.
I’ve always felt bad for celebrities who get recognized in a public place and have to deal with a crowd of screaming admirers. Their lives are just like ours; they have stresses, responsibilities, obligations and dreams. Why accost them on the street and scream at them in excitement, all because you thought they needed to know that they are loved and famous? I told myself I would never be one of those people. That is, until I saw a real celebrity at the airport.
Some men can walk into a room and command it. So it was with my quarry, and my jaw dropped when I first caught sight of his flowing locks and knowledgeable strut, with just a hint of a limp, as he climbed aboard the moving sidewalk. I felt my body moving before my mind could stop it, the harsh demands of society no longer controlling my actions with their great weight.
Without breaking stride, I vaulted the railing of the moving sidewalk, depositing myself directly in his path. My outstretched hand begged him to shake it, and he did, albeit nervously, perhaps with a hint of resignation at being recognized in public.
“You’re the dude who invented Rotella 5W40!” I shrieked, my voice successively hitting octaves higher than the rev limiter on a 13B. “I’m, like, your biggest fan!”
When it was all said and done, I got him to sign my t-shirt, and I got a lock of his hair. “Hope it has high zinc content too,” I said, chuckling. “Just a little joke between us, right?” I queried as I noticed he was now futilely trying to back away slowly against the onrushing force of the moving sidewalk.
I never did quite figure out why the rest of the airport didn’t mob him as well upon recognizing him. Philistines. They probably have roller camshafts.
Running a modern business is hard. You have to be an expert people manager, and you have to keep your hand firmly on the chequebook. Let me tell you about the time I let the purse strings a little too loose.
The underlying bitch of it all was that they wanted to make a faster Dodge Challenger, but I didn’t want them to spend any money. So they came back to me and they said, we want to take all the seats out. Just sell the thing with one seat, for people who are really serious about going fast, so serious in fact that they don’t have a significant other in their life who is willing to get into an automobile they are piloting.
To tell the truth, it was very hard to focus on the substance of what the engineers were saying. Most of them were fully in the grip of a wild-eyed mania, and I’m pretty sure the junior powertrain engineers had captured and devoured one of the accountants just a few minutes prior to my arrival, their faces splashed with blood.
I was naturally hesitant, because I have a fiduciary duty to our shareholders and also didn’t want to see a mother of two on the evening news getting her fifteen minutes after she threw her rugrats into the cabin with no seatbelts and then decided to take a little tipple from a bottle of red called eight hundred wheel horsepower.
In fact, it sounded like we were gonna lose a fortune on this thing, but then one of the engineers told me that he had a great idea about how to appeal to more regular guys and I should come down to his shop and take a look in person.
When I awoke on the floor of his garage, still wheezing off the last fumes of chloroform, amidst the immensely thick burnout marks left blazed into the tile floor from his last burnout test, I was none too pleased. Things went from bad to worse when I realized the engineering team had taken my budget-approval stamp and turned the boost up a few notches with it. I stormed out of the room and directly into a rain of confetti and big-band music. A celebration.
Sales were through the roof. People loved the idea that they would no longer be expected to drive their family around, and the extra cargo room returned to them by the removal of those pesky seats meant that every Demon owner could pick up an extra paycheque or two renting it out as an Airbnb to extremely confused Japanese tourists who nonetheless slept comfortably next to the comforting mass of the transmission hump of the TR-6060.
Like I said, you have to keep the spending of engineers under control. If they got everything they wanted all the time, they would just have made a car with all of its seats, and that would just be a shame.
New from Tom Clancy: Tom Clancy’s Breakfast Force: A Coup In Parfait. Here’s an excerpt of just the twenty-seventh exciting chapter.
Jack Ryan strode across the floor of his penthouse apartment. With one swift move, he activated the twin T86-U 8-bit digital microcontrollers built into his civilian-specification personal bread toasting armament. He turned, and opened the vacuum-sealed, partially-blast-hardened door to his Model 1775-GEU South Korean-made LG sustenance refrigeration unit. With its array of modular hardpoints, it could be configured on the fly for any mission parameters, including the dreaded extended family vacation brunch sortie.
Ryan nodded to himself in grim determination, and used his practiced judgment to zero in on the target, sitting peacefully in the corner of one of the clear thermoplastic shelving units. The rigid cardboard-plastic mixture of the carton he retrieved held at bay a small quantity of vitamin- and calcium-rich beverage, developed using advanced biotechnology.
At that exact moment, the toaster popped up, the high-tension heat-resistant springs developed in part by NASA space-age technology performing their solemn task, dutifully until the end.
When you spend as much time racing through the arteries and orifices of American life as I do, it’s easy to miss a trend or two. One of those trends was the development of an “Escape Room,” in which eager hipsters pay enormous sums of money to be locked in a room and try to get out by solving puzzles. As a guy who solves puzzles every day, I was intrigued enough to visit one for myself.
After the experience ended, after getting Yelled At by the staff for using my pocket multitool to begin dismantling the equipment that drove the simulation, I figured I had seen enough. On the way home, I began to think about how I could cash in on this fad using things I had lying around the room.
My first set of customers arrived a few weeks later. Innovators and wildcats, the lot of them. They wore clothes I could barely identify, ingested vapourized opiates from a set of chrome spheroids that autonomously orbited their faces, and spoke only in high-pitched tones like that of a dolphin. Also, they had wallets full of disposable income. Perfect.
I locked the doors, and keyed up the PA system: “if you wish to escape my dungeon of mechanical sacrifice and defeat the Wizard of Friction, you must remove and replace these drum brakes of supreme suffering.” They set to work immediately, debating amongst themselves which one of the “strange tools” on the cart would be the ones that could solve the puzzle. After some initial fist-fights, the group had managed to replace almost an entire corner of the vehicle.
Afterward, as they beamed with joy that they had completed the task and escaped, the owner of the Toyota showed up. He signed the paperwork (including those most critical waivers) and happily paid up for the several hours of labour, which I added to the stack of cash provided by the hipsters for their once-in-a-lifetime puzzle-solving experience.
“This is the best Firestone in the city,” he explained to me. “You must have some really experienced techs back there.”
Truth be told, when I first showed up in Turin it wasn’t like my objective was to get hired by the regional highway police just so I could drive their sweet taxpayer funded Lambo for a living. It just sort of happened that way.
It started like most of my vacations: creeping around the Fiat factory to see if I could figure out how to get up to the rooftop test track and crack off a few laps. Between my flawless Italian disguise and callous disregard for tire grip, I felt that I could easily pass myself off as a run-of-the-mill test driver. I was nearly about to begin my ascent, having established base camp within a rose bush on the front lawn whose prickles proved to be only moderately painful. That’s when lights started to flash, and I reeled around to see a Stato patrol car with two very angry officers inside it.
Luckily for me, test drivers are known for being almost completely unable to carry on a conversation, and my otherwise-shameful lack of Italian proved its worth. The younger of the officers spotted my head-to-toe FIA-compliant fireproof race suit and knew exactly what i was here for. Before I could convince them otherwise, they had shuffled me downtown to the highway patrol office and chucked my ass into a six-hundred-plus horsepower hell chariot.
It didn’t end very well. My lawyer informs me that even Italy has decency laws. For instance, when a group of American tourists spot some freak lovingly stroking an idling V10 on the roadside, completely naked except for a mild coating of zero-weight Idemitsu engine oil, that freak is unlikely to keep his high-paid job in law enforcement.
It has taken me all day on foot - I am allergic to public transit, it turns out - but I have finally arrived at my target. Before me, the sales touts of the Nissan Prince Kudan dealership greet me, gleefully shouting something I cannot understand. It turns out that “the flight over” is not a long enough time to achieve a total fluency in the Japanese language, especially when your textbook is Tokyo Drift watched four times back-to-back. Despite my handicap, I know exactly what to do.
Scanning the sales floor, I can identify one man who must be in charge here. I storm up to him and begin asking him to take me to “the good stuff” loudly and slowly in English. After only a few minutes of my barrage, it dawns upon him that I am A Player and I must be taken Seriously. He leads me by the hand, emitting polite apologies the entire time, to the dumpster out back.
As I comb through the dumpster, removing blown shocks and shattered unibody components, I laugh at the chump in the showroom picking up a brand-new GT-R. He just don’t know how to make friends and influence people, or they could have had the Good Stuff too.
All throughout my career, people have wanted to know what I think about the Subaru Vivio. In fact, this demand is all they can scream at my jam-packed book-signings as they thrust with their greasy paws handsomely-bound hardcover first-editions of my New York Times bestseller, The Joy of Anti-Seize, into my lower face and mouth. Did you know, they ask as if I didn’t know, that His Skiddiness Colin McRae once drove one in competition? It is only the intervention at the last critical moment by Mace-packing riot police that can free me from having to give them the honest answer. I give that honest answer to you now.
Perhaps it may disappoint you to find out, but my history with the Subaru Vivio is one of torment and pain, a broken man left adrift on a raft made of a small-displacement supercharged engine. When I was a younger man, I traveled to the ports of my country on a summer vacation with my friends. How we laughed and danced in the sun, the still-intact rear quarter panels of our high school project cars gleaming above the twisties of immaculate mountain tarmac before descending into low-hanging heavy clouds of tire smoke.
At the docks, while we waited for our ferry to arrive, a strange container was being unloaded below. I looked down over the railings and saw a man unloading the smallest car I had ever seen. He fired it up, and the angry rasp and cigarette-company livery that was plastered across its diminutive not-curves permanently embedded themselves into my memory. I was hooked.
Months later, my family and who I thought were my friends staged an intervention at my home. Just because they were small, they explained to me, you couldn’t stack them like firewood or park them inside the house. My pleas for mercy, to try and get them to understand that I needed parts cars, that it was very hard to find these little tiny interior plastics and – oh my god is that a JDM road flare? – went unheard. I’m not proud of myself for resorting to violence at the end, but I felt it was the only way to protect my children.
When I was released from the mental hospital, I could tell something wasn’t right, even through the soporific haze of the six-page-long multi-stage prescription for antipsychotics that my “friendly” doctors had left with my caregiver. My house was painfully, wretchedly empty, filled only with my loved ones and mementos of my time together with them.
I cannot get back on the wagon of Vivio ownership. I just can’t. Now, Justy ownership…
In the annals of Canadian legend, there is one man who stands above all others. His name is Tim Horton, and his story is taught across the land, whispered into the ears of eager schoolchildren by the grandparents who love them. I used to think Tim Horton was just a myth. We all did, I think, even as we visited his temples regularly and bolted-down the foul-smelling off-brown health liquids his disciples produced for us.
One day, I found out that Tim Horton was very, very real. It all started when me and some friends decided to break into the old De Tomaso factory. Now, we didn’t want to steal anything - another myth in my family is that the Italians had mystical powers, able to curse electronic equipment into never working - but we just wanted to poke around a bit.
My best friend in all the world, Twitchy Thomas - O Thomas, you didn’t deserve how this all ended - went rooting through the upstairs office and found some old sales records. Believe it or not, the top record on the stack belonged to Tim Horton Himself. As we read his name from the index card three times fast, like in the old legends, a cold wind blew through the shuttered factory, knocking out our Streamlights. From the parking lot outside, we could see flashes of lights and a strange growling noise.
I ran to the window, of course. When you’re that young, you don’t know just how much of the world can hurt you, or so easily and without warning. Out in the parking lot was an unearthly wedge-shaped car, howling donuts into the parched tarmac through a set of wildly distorting bias plys. It was impossible to get a glimpse of the driver. We all curled up against the windowsill, witnessing this strange spectacle from the second storey, safe in our hubris.
At last, there was a terrible explosion, as the rear 305s erupted into flapping fragments, like a balloon animal filled with steel wool. The car slid to a stop, the mega-wide wheels out back cutting a white-hot groove into the pavement while at the same time shooting sparks into the surrounding brush, setting it alight. I found that I was hyperventilating. Nothing like this had ever come to my small town in my lifetime, and perhaps nothing like it ever would.
With the creaking sound of sagging hinges, the massive drivers’ door swung open, and a man emerged. Twitchy Thomas and the rest of my gang had already bolted for the stairs, unwilling to wait around in an impending forest fire just to catch a glimpse of some foreign weirdo with an overcompensating car. But I stayed, and I saw him.
There could be no mistake. I recognized him from the gold-and-foil embossed Topps Prayer Cards of my childhood, the high-gloss surface worn with worry by my devout grandmother. Tim Horton had returned to the origin of his death, and he was pissed.
#
tags: tim horton, detomaso, detomaso pantera, pantera
When Old Man Pepboys came to this town, told us that he was going to buy the land that our rec centre sat on and turn it into a parts store, the whole town turned out in protest. What we should have done was thrown a flaming brick through the window of his up-armoured A8L.
I loved spinning gleaming wrenches in that old parking lot, the rec centre entrance stained with the rainbow of exotic ATFs that showed the diversity of our taste in cars and the unity of our leaks. Once the big parts conglomerate was in place, no longer would they accept wrenching in the lot, unless that service was performed by one of the sales associate-representatives installing a set of $36 wiper blades on your CR-V.
How I hated the sound of their quality-assurance drones buzzing the lot, making sure that one of their employees wasn’t exposing the Corporation to excessive warranty or personal-injury liability. The only joy I got out of their continued existence was the guilty pleasure I glimpsed when striking the occasional one with my wing mirror after hanging a very erratic Larry into the lot to pick up more ATF.
I’m told that after I left, a plucky band of misfit teenagers took up the cause, and overthrew Old Man Pepboys and slaughtered him and his wife as they fled for their escape helicopter. It would have been nice to have been around for that, but I was too busy in the next town over, trying to find enough Pentosin to keep my steering rack seals intact.
#
tags: audi, power steering fluid, automatic transmission fluid
We were halfway free of the surplus aisle of Princess Auto when the old people began to kick in. Only the clicking of their walkers was audible over the scattered sounds of corduroy pants and moaning about carbon taxes. I knew that they were there for my companion, and I had to act fast.
Pushing a pile of surplus TV signal splitters to block their path, I began to shove my buddy into the next aisle, but it was too late. The fastest of the olds had spotted him and identified him as a Real Man To Talk To About Hunting. I considered my options. One, I could take out the sentry in one quick strike to the temple, but it both felt mildly unethical and would give the others time to catch up, at which point all was lost. Or, I could abandon my friend.
Well, nobody ever called me the most loyal person to have lived. My thin-soled Piloti racing shoes squeaked on the K-Mart-grade microlaminate tile as I barreled into the next aisle, diving for cover behind a scattered endpiece display of microfibre-cloth windshield mops. I had made it just in time. Through the shelves, I could hear the herald of the old-people party begin to ask my companion if he liked to hunt and fish, and then audibly unhinge his jaw to let forth a torrent of completely unverifiable stories about deer hunting.
An hour later, I returned, a shopping bag full of approximately nine thousand dollars in things I didn’t think I needed before I showed up at Princess Auto in my arms. As for my travelling companion, his arms were coated up to the shoulder in old-man blood, presumably from a series of brutal assaults upon their personages. Behind him, a group of retirees dozed the unsettlingly calm sleep of the forcibly unconscious.
“They had so many opinions,” is all he could say, looking past me into the middle distance while absentmindedly rubbing the palm of his hand.
We would never stand in the scratch-and-dent airsoft-paintball-camouflage aisle again.
Living and working on a farm is something a little different from the pace of city life. Sure, others will sneer and laugh at your disconnection from essential services like discotheques and competent hospitals, but in our modern era, it’s not like you are totally unaware of how normal people live. At least, that’s what I thought before he arrived.
Last Monday, I was installing a fresh high-voltage contactor onto the lithium-ion battery pack attached to the east-side solar harvester when I noticed a dust cloud arising from the driveway. Not expecting any visitors, I stepped around front to meet them, making sure to present myself as aware and competent. As the dust cloud grew closer, I realized it was trailing a late-model Crown Victoria, most likely a former police specification vehicle.
A man climbed out, wearing a sport jacket fashioned from what appeared to be blue microfibre detailing towels stitched together into a crude approximation of a Brooks Brothers suit. His feet, clad in spray-painted-black combat boots, had barely touched the earth when he began to gibber incessantly.
“Hello, fellow citizen,” he started. “I am a successful businessman, as you can see by my practical and reliable choice of luxury transportation.” He gestured to the Crown Victoria.
I didn’t get it. Did he want me to respond? Was this a new kind of hidden camera program, spying on us rural rubes and seeing if we would gun down a man like this rather than understand his truth?
“I would like to offer you money, which is profits from my very valuable industrial business corporation, in exchange for your unwanted commoner Subaru Forester.”
Seeing my confusion, he followed up with an explanation. “I will use this automobile to drive to and from my office job and make more money because it is extremely practical and that is a good thing. In no way will I dismantle this car and study all of its parts.” With that, he shoved a wad of cash the approximate thickness of a fully-grown Belgian Malinois into my face.
Once the cargo-cult businessman had left, towing my parts Forester behind it, my wife stepped out from the house. She had seen everything from her perch in the sunroom, and had a question. In her hands, she wiped clean a set of printed circuit boards for the cattle-milking android, and asked: “What did the new Volkswagen CEO want?”
My methodology of car ownership was sound. My technique of paying the lowest dollar for used beaters and spreading them across my property was practiced. Somehow, I even managed to find parking for all of them, and convinced the insurance company I was some sort of vintage-car ride-sharing service so the liability coverage was cheap.
The only problem was finding the time. I made do in parcels: parts runs during the lunch hour, the occasional minor service while stuck in stop and go traffic. Anything big, though, needed a huge block of freedom, and I just didn’t have any PTO left in the year’s schedule.
I got up from my desk at the cubicle farm and headed to the local NAPA. The only resident of an old bomb shelter built in the 1980s by old man Reagan during one of his manic spending jags, I was both pleased at the copious storage room in the facility and irritated by the total lack of cellphone coverage. Nodding at the parts-desk man, I leaped over the counter and began inspecting the bin of radiator hoses, as had become our custom over the years.
After I was done in the NAPA, I got into my beater Caravelle and began to drive back to work. Something felt wrong, however, and as I got closer to the roaring fires and saw the clouds of ash and smoke lazily drifting over the crater in which the industrial park once stood, I began to suspect that my theory held some merit.
Without my office existing, I was free to spend the week working on my cars. I was elated. With a whoop and a holler, I immediately pulled a u-turn so vicious the responding emergency workers all looked up to make sure my tires squealing didn’t indicate a steel-reinforced beam about to drop on their heads.
Back at the garage, I carelessly leapt from my car, accidentally landing directly on the lens of my only LED trouble light. It shattered into a million pieces.
My coworker looks at my hands, and asks me if I spent last night punching glass windows for fun. I look at him, then down at my hands, and then back up at him.
It’s difficult to escape the fact that he’s right. My hands are a mess.
I reach into my desk for a hobby knife, gently slice back the skin on my middle knuckle, and remove a two-inch strand of knotted wire wheel from the flesh of my finger. He vomits involuntarily in his mouth, probably at the sight of someone performing manual labour.
“What moisturizer do you use?” I ask, hoping that someone has figured out one so thick that I can continue to not wear gloves in the shop.
Did I ever tell you I got a job at Chrysler, back in the day? Yeah, I don’t like to tell a lot of people about it. No, it’s not just the connotations, though those certainly were there. The truth is that I bombed out on my first big project, and by the time I returned home, they didn’t have a job waiting for me anymore.
What do you mean, where did I go? There could be no other place that Chrysler would send an up-and-coming badge engineer than to Mother Russia herself. By the time the smoking gypsy minibus rattled to a stop outside the VAZ factory, I had already made up my mind that I was going to get out of this country as quickly as possible. I just didn’t know how I was going to do it, yet.
In the project update meeting, I could see the VAZ representatives were already very cross with me. They spoke angrily, and then my interpreter, who I was increasingly learning was not on my side, would haltingly burp out a five-to-ten word summary of what I had just been screamed at about.
As the hours wore on, I slowly began to realize what had happened. They were angry about the Chrysler Sebring, which we had sub-licensed to them and they began to construct as the Volga Siber. Initial quality indications were extremely negative, to say the least.
One junior engineer spat on me when I asked him if it was at least better than his 40-year-old VAZ 2101 daily driver. It was inferior to walking, he screamed at me, and spat again, this time with a bit of blood mixed in. I took note that this guy was very detail-oriented. He was going places, I felt.
Eventually, things came to a head and the VAZ factory management decided to hold me for ransom until Chrysler would deliver to them a better car to knock off. My growing command of the Russian language led me to believe that my captors hoped for perhaps a Dodge Neon or one of those K-cars, like they had expected.
At the very mention of the legendary K-car, all members of the engineering staff would assemble in a huddle, in a dark corner of the factory floor, and speak excitedly about talking dashboards for up to fifteen minutes. I began to use this tactic to stall in negotiations, as otherwise I feared they would discover I knew little or nothing about automotive engineering and was as a result only in the top 1% of Chrysler engineers.
Eventually, I was loaded onto a cargo plane in the middle of the night and woke up lying on the runway at Bishop International, no longer wearing pants. I checked into the office, expecting a hero’s welcome for the brave sacrifice I had made to keep the winds of international trade going. My boss, however, was not pleased.
“We had to give up the secrets to Lean Burn technology to get you freed!” he shrieked. “Lee Iacocca had to cancel his campaign for President - there’s just no way he could possibly do deals like this with the Russians and still get elected!”
To think those fools laughed when I filled my backyard with thirteen inch snow tires on Blue Light Special Extreme Closeout! I would like to see their faces now, as I emerge from the fetid cocoon of my garage mahal as their Dictator and God Almighty, overlord of all commerce now that the snow has fallen!
Prepare yourself to witness my wrath as I now raise the price of these tires by twenty-five percent. Yes, perhaps you should have paid more attention to your future tire needs, and made battle with me in the Canadian Tire checkout rather than now, in my yard, as you ask if I have any snow tires for you to buy!
Your Explorer, you ask? Well, um, that doesn’t take thirteen inch tires. That’s like, eighteen inch or something. Huge tires, unreasonable to give to any normal human being. I don’t understand why you have such huge wheels for those tiny, tiny brakes.
Wait, where are you going? I prepared! I am your God!
There is infinite potential in a fly-and-drive; exotic locales, strange new people, a lot of walking and possibly riding a Greyhound bus if you’re unlucky. At the end of all of it, though, are the stories you’ll have. When you get home with a fly-and-drive car, you’ve bonded. You are already familiar with the car, without even needing to do one single parking lot burnout in your boss’ reserved parking space to get there. It’s the fastest way to a brothers-in-arms situation possible, even more so when you’re sending yourself and your attorney to Los Angeles to pick up a 1972 TVR Vixen loaded for bear with a shrieking late-60s Alfa Romeo twin-cam.
When I told the stewardess what we were up to, she made a noncommittal sound before disengaging the hydraulic handbrake on the snack cart and racing to the end of the plane to assume the fetal position on the floor. I was upset by this, not just because of the social snub but because I didn’t get a chance to partake of a tiny cup of Coke and some stale airplane peanuts before she went on internal mental health leave.
We landed, and my attorney, at first hesitant, then openly doubtful of the quest, went treasonous on me. He started speaking to me of the moral imperative for me to destroy the Vixen, that it would either ruin my life or take it in a roaring fire. By the time the taxi dropped us off at the seller’s home, he was halfway through the collection of non-prescription horse tranquilizers I had secreted in the seam of my jeans, intending to use them to relieve my aching back after the eighth hour of highway driving but now seeing a greater need. As he dozed on the curb, I introduced myself to the seller and the most gorgeous British-Italian-American horrorshow that could be witnessed.
The gleaming yellow angles-and-curves melted-beetle body of the Vixen seemed to dominate my field of vision no matter what direction I turned my head. I could smell a faint whiff of burned oil drifting away from the valve cover, some of it caked onto the exhaust so thick it seemed like barbeque paint. There was no way I could leave without this vehicle, and told the seller as such. He laughed, and laughed, and held out the keys and title. I could still hear his cackle as I climbed aboard the Vixen and lit up the twin-cam.
As I sped away from the site, my attorney stuffed loosely into the uncomfortable passenger seat, I swore I could smell brimstone. I wasn’t so sure the seller didn’t have a tail and hooves, either.
I had long run a very complicated setup for parts-and-help-debt with my friends. They would need a tool or a part, and I would loan it to them. Eventually, I would lose track of that loan and forget about it until I needed the part or tool again, and get very cross indeed. This is the story of how I forgot about a pair of strut compressors in Shaky Tim’s garage for over a year, and how he eventually just gave me a drivers’ position on his factory-backed Le Mans team.
Sure, the crew chief was a little upset at having a guy who barely knew how to use a backup camera in charge of mashing the many buttons and switches of the LMP3 car at 250 kilometers per hour, but his arguments were overruled. Somehow, and it probably had something to do with the fact that he never repaid any debt ever, Shaky Tim was so monied that the opinions of the common man could never matter. Later, he would run for President and win, but that’s a story for another time.
When they finally let me out of the pit and into the grid, my stomach was doing backflips in my gut. The parade lap was the most intense fifteen minutes of my life, made only all the more intense by the fact that the safety cars were lapping me, the Celebrity Officiants within staring at me with a mixture of contempt and anger. I was getting ready to pull off into the pits and have a good hour-long cry while the race went on without me when the green flag dropped.
After the race, I drove directly for the pits, clipping the podium and a few television presenters on the way. To say I was rattled would be a gross underestimation. When I got out of the LMP3 car, my pit crew was nowhere to be seen, having gotten bored at my glacial rate of tire wear and fucked off into the concession stands to buy celebratory corndogs.
It was a bit of a surprise when my phone began to ring. On the other end was a talent organizer. They wanted to book me on the Ferrari Challenge, they said, to teach the moneyed masses of gentlemen drivers how to drive like a real race car driver.
#
tags: shaky tim, the chronicles of shaky tim, daytona, le mans, lmp3
Sure, everyone tells you in the market research phase that they want a drone to deliver bolts and parts to them directly, but it’s only after you’ve arranged with all the relevant authorities and secured a distribution contract for only the finest NAPA parts that they start angrily calling their congressman.
It’s not my fault. The model was flawless. Push a button, buy a hundred bucks of wash gloves and detailing accessories, and a repurposed air force drone sorties past your suburban hellscape to airdrop that one exotic metric fastener you just snapped and can’t obtain at 9:30 on a Sunday night. You could even check the “with extreme prejudice” option to have the NAPA Know-All unleash a full magazine of depleted-uranium Grade 10.9 fasteners at a high enough velocity to penetrate all but the thickest garage roofs, for when you really need to hit that deadline on your thrash.
Considering we were equipping ex-military death robots to sling hot steel into populated areas with little or no government oversight, I was very surprised to hear that the only thing the average civilian was really angry about was the noise. Sure, the Pratt & Whitney miniature turbofan engines were loud, but there was no other way to gain the altitude we needed with the payload mass our customers craved. We were at an impasse, and between legislators beating down our door and angry protest groups demanding that we stop shredding bald eagles just because they’re stupid enough to wander into our pre-programmed flightpath, it didn’t look good for keeping the lights on.
Thankfully, one of our junior engineers came up with an idea in the shower on how to save the business. I took credit for it, of course - the previous week I had spent the last of our capex budget on replacing all the cubicles with showers, figuring that’s where we all had our best thoughts - but it really was a brilliant idea to augment the drones with a 180dB PA system speaker playing ice cream van music on a constant loop. Now the only problem we had was trying not to hit the unbroken line of fat children following our drones through the suburbs at delivery time.
From what we could tell, there was no real rule of law, no consistent measure by which to judge whether He was up to the role of management. Inchistan was his, and his alone.
When it first hit the newsfeed, we made jokes. “Florida Man,” we called him. Hah. More like “Florida Ubermensch.” His talent - among others - was to fix things. At first, he himself thought it was only mechanical things. Well, the biography goes, he learned that he could in fact fix anything.
Soon, thorny problems like “democracy,” “public relations,” and “standards of common decency” were ejected from Inchistan like so much corroded wiring harness. He just reached in there, grabbed a big hold of it, and yanked before anyone could stop him. Thing was, in retrospect, maybe nobody wanted to stop him.
All I knew is that within a few years of his ascension, it became damn near impossible to find a good mechanic in the rest of the world. The rumour was he paid them near-infinite amounts of money, gave the ones who were comfortable obscene power and influence instead. I just wished I could find someone who knew how to override the default settings on the alignment machine.
All the sales guys at work were relieved that I had finally been struck by the manliness-bestowing lightning bolt that is a love of the game of golf. In actuality, I just liked to drive the little carts. But something was missing: I still did way too much walking and golfing, and not enough offroad driving. This would have to change.
At the crack of dawn the next day, the sales guys assembled, slapping each other on their polo-clad backs. Raising their heads to track the rising sun, the younger of the sales guys began to prematurely bray about their quarterly numbers in the hope of distracting the senior sales guys from taking a share of their future prey. This tactic would never work in the short term, but the cycle would begin anew with another year of fresh sales guys, a new stratigraphic layer blown fresh from the lava-filled crucible that was our recruitment process.
Picture me powersliding into this scene, a torrent of ash blocking out the sun, driven by a federally-banned VM Motori turbodiesel looted from the EPA’s dumpster the previous night. When I have finally released the fuel pedal and step aside to smile at the sales guys, I can tell that they are huddled in a corner, discussing how big their commission percentages are relative to one another. For all the work I had put in, my bitchin’ golf cart failed to even raise an eyebrow.
In search of a group of squares who could be rattled, I engaged the two-step launch control and stutterboxed my way through the pro shop. I smiled as it became apparent I could no longer hear their discussion of future industry prospects over the sound of howling General Grabbers liquefying upon the polished faux-marble-tile floor.
Ever since that chance run-in at the college library gave birth to my reputation as a devil-may-care “outsider artist” in the field of postindustrial history, my colleagues had been asking me at dinner and cocktail parties what my next great work was going to be.
With the gleaming eye of a practiced fisherman, I told them I had hooked the big one. I was going to report on the Renault Fuego Turbo. It never failed to get looks of polite confusion that slowly turned to total disinterest as I told them my criteria for selecting it over my other white whale, the Maserati BiTurbo.
There were plenty of criteria, of course. I craved the opportunity to finally reconcile my love of speed with my love of shitboxes, deep within what Renault marketing material called The Turbo Zone. Once I had been to the Zone, my plan was to eventually return and bestow upon normal humanity the gifts that I had observed.
A few weeks later, a tipster called me. He said he knew where a Fuego Turbo was, but I had to move quickly. It was returning to the earth, as French, impermanent and biodegradable as an offensive cartoonist. I was already booking the plane tickets as he hung up, identifying myself to the chipper customer-support agent as one “R. Nader” of Rolling Stone Magazine.
Deep in the weeds of a farmer’s field, I knew that there could be no turning back. I felt that we had met once, long ago, in a different time. The metal flexed in outreach as I put my hand out towards it, only to burst through with rust at every seam.
Before I could grasp any part of the Fuego Turbo, it had been reduced to a dense cloud of airborne rust, a shimmering mist that hung in the air for just a moment before blowing away into the dark evening sky. The only thing left untouched by the tinworm was a small turbocharger, now lying in the middle of the field.
Dumbstruck, I stood there for several minutes to regain my composure. I thought of what one of my colleagues had said; rust, he told me, was a form of combustion as well. Even in death, the noble Fuego would not be denied its named birthright.
Shaking it off, I walked a few more steps to the turbocharger, knelt and picked it up with the end of my ballpoint pen, as TV cops did. As TV cops didn’t, I reached into its orifices and started poking around. Shaft play. Not even the turbocharger could escape its horrible fate.
As I left the field, I could hear the farmer yelling after me, in French I could not understand but at the same time understood to be the direct equivalent of “I know what I got.”
No, you poor bastard. You can’t possibly know what I just saved you from.
As a journalist, you’re expected to politely refuse any and all bribes. Sometimes, though, when you’re away from home and there are friendly faces willing to satisfy your every perverted desire, why not sample the local flavour? That’s what I thought when I checked into the Lingotto factory in Turin, handed the keys to a battered 1976 124 Spider, and told to “go nuts,” or at least that’s what my translator told me he said.
What really happened is that Sergio Marchionne secretly filmed me getting a faceful of differential oil from the underside of the Spider, while lying on a roll-out creeper that was formerly owned by the President of Alfa-Romeo. He dropped the findings on the lap of every media source in town, trying to discredit me.
When I got back to work, everyone had their heads down, the only sound heard over the noise of squeaking highlighters a high-pitched nervous giggle at my approach. Sergio had ruined me professionally, I thought, as I walked towards my boss’ office with my head in my hands.
“This is brilliant,” he crowed, pointing to a rotary-numeric ticker in the back of his office which was now spinning so fast it was starting to throw off sparks. “Just look at the clicks this controversy has generated!”
He didn’t understand my love for Fiat. My boss in fact thought it was all a publicity stunt, that I would shove my face into the rear end of a rotten twin-cam convertible for attention. I began to feel faint, but struggled to my feet and left his office.
“Take an early week off,” he yelled from behind the rapidly-closing door of his bullpen. “In fact, my cousin has a Lancia Delta Integrale in his backyard, take a cameraman with you!”
#
tags: fiat, lancia, sergio marchionne, fiat 124 spider, 124 spider, fiat spider
When you’ve taken as much from society as I have, often a construct that you do not respect, commonly known as a court of law, will force you to perform community service to make amends. I spent about half an hour flooding and scraping the local peewee hockey league’s skating rink before I decided that I had better things to do with my life.
Back at the shop, working around the constraints put upon me by the full face-mask and GPS ankle bracelet, my great work was taking crude form. With an armful of 50cc Minarellis liberated from the metal-recycling pile out back, it would find its voice, soul and life.
Picture if you will the glorious afternoon of my return: small children are spending valuable family time with their doting fathers and mothers, learning to skate, realizing the truth that even the harshest Canadian winter day can have the clouds crack open and issue forth a bounty of memorable fun and pleasure. Then some asshole shows up with a nine-thousand-rpm miniature Zamboni which lights all four of its hard-foam tires on the slightest throttle provocation.
The press thought it was wild. They spewed out dozens of profiles of me, posing me as some kind of great inventor who was doing this out of the good of his own heart. I was never one for this degree of attention, and merely grunted along with their interview attempts until I could leave to do another donut, hooting and hollering.
It was true what they said: the greatest reward in volunteering came from within. After my parole officer finally lets me take a sawzall to the ankle bracelet, I told myself, maybe I’d show the kids some of the ideas I have for sidewalk plowing.
As the snow fell, all of us went mad in our own ways. It isn’t that the world died; you could still see a glimpse of it just as you clawed through the last layer of black ice and road salt, tarmac peeking through like sunlight through a cloud. That glimpse would be gone just as soon as it had emerged, and you would look up into the grey mists of an uncaring sky as the flakes begin to fall once again.
I saw great men die, torn apart by rioters at the fire halls in order to get their ration of sidewalk gravel. Their generosity was seen as weakness by the mobs, and it was rewarded with a boot to the face. When the evening news deigned to report on these deaths, they would intersperse the hastily barked memorials with all-white screens of the exterior traffic cameras. After the first few days, those newscasters sheltered in place, their personal grooming and hygiene taking a slide noticeable to all who observed.
None of us could take the risk of believing what the forecasters said. On their seven-day forecast, Day Seven would always deliver us from this horror, promised those high priests of the Doppler radar. Day Seven never came, and we would comb through the ashes of that first horribly cold day on the long-term forecast, again and again, forever. Eventually, I heard through the grape vine that the local morning news had been overrun by bandits. They devoured the weatherman alive, the warmth left in his meat enough to nourish the starving hordes who could no longer safely drive to the Kroger up the block without snow tires.
Those who didn’t know what to do, those unfortunates with no comprehension of how to survive in a world beyond society, were claimed within minutes. Others had been preparing for this cataclysm and found themselves thankful, praying in a manic spew of words to whatever dark god had issued forth this opportunity that would finally let them reach their true potential as demi-urban warlords in the frozen corpse of a once-great empire.
Me, I got a KT-3 Snowcat and drove it to work this week. My coworkers were horrified, their dealership-snow-tire-shod Lexus leases splattered with hot two-stroke backwash from the screaming aircooled-VW pancake’s slack rings. Whatever stammered denials they had amongst themselves in the past about my true nature were scattered to the four winds now, and I was uncovered, resplendent in my orange tabernac-le of rotting thin-gauge sheet steel.
Preparing to brake for a red light, I dropped the plow and through the shimmering hallucinations formed by my eyeballs rattling inside their orbits I sensed another grew close. With a bone-tingling wail, they announced their presence, a UV-grayed flat-black screw-drive ex-Soviet all-terrain military vehicle, bustling with young recruits clutching their harpoon guns like teats on a sow.
As the sparks of metal-on-asphalt grew into a wall between us, I smiled and reached for the giggle gas. After all, it was pretty cold outside.
The mysterious note told me to be at this place at this specific time. I was a bit early, but I could already feel myself getting angry, as there was nothing here but desert shrubs and sand. I don’t have time for this bullshit, I’m a busy guy running my own youtube channel that’s an international sensation with psych ward patients and a side hobby of occasionally building tractors.
Taking my sight off the horizon as I lit a cigarette, the amber glow of my zippo illuminating my palm in the cool night air, I could hear a slight rush of wind, as if a large volume of air at just a slightly different pressure was suddenly equalized. Spinning around I saw a man in an impeccably tailored three piece suit with an anachronistic Studebaker Motor Company pin on his lapel standing before me who had not been there the moment before.
“Mr. Slung Blade, I assume?” he asked in a melodious tenor, I hesitated briefly but nodded in agreement. "You are 30 seconds early.“ I was about to protest, but he continued - "We have asked you here today to give us the secret behind getting 200 horsepower and 600 foot pounds of torque through a seventy year old cast iron transmission with straight cut gears without the whole unit detonating underneath the operator.” Now, I don’t give away my tricks for free, and he must have seen how uncomfortable I was through my body language. That’s when I felt the first tranquilizer dart hit my neck.
OSAKA, JAPAN, JANUARY 10th 2017: In what many see as retaliation against the unveiling of a bronze statue depicting the infamous Korean Comfort Women used as sex slaves by Imperial Japanese forces in WW2, the Nippon Ministry for Industry and Manufacturing has today revealed a 40 ton bronze casting of a cowering 2008 Hyundai Elantra being forcefully penetrated by a 2013 Toyota Corolla.
The South Korean Government declined comment.
The Japanese Provisional Government too declined comment, instead referring reporters to the 2015 Lemon-Aid Guide To Resale Value.
When Donald Trump was first elected to office, and indeed even after his swearing in ceremony, I must admit I was pretty apathetic about the whole situation. Much like the rest of the nation in that regard I suppose, so I was in good company with my countrymen at least. He shut down a few offices here, rescinded a few economic sanctions there, nothing terribly impactful to my lifestyle.
Then he went after the trade deals with the dangerous foreign nations of Mexico and Windsor. Immediately I went into panic mode. Motherfucker, Mexico and Windsor are where my cars come from.
I knew that I was the only person left with the intestinal fortitude to take on this task, especially now that he had effectively neutered the heads of the FBI, CIA, and NSA. However, he is a slippery opponent, reasoned debate means nothing to him, and he sees lawsuits as high school-tier foreplay. I had to go back to a classic political protest tactic of the past, but the delivery vector would have to be decidedly 21st century.
Breaking into the Smithsonian was child’s play, all I had to do was hide out in the anthropology section and pretend to be part of the exhibit until closing time. Getting the plane I needed out of the building was less easy, but I’m sure the museum won’t miss that wall, besides, it was sheltering planes, they’re supposed to be outside.
Now I had my delivery system, and believe me it wasn’t easy modifying an SR-71 with a bomb bay and a ludicrously complicated sight system, but watching c-span’s coverage of a dozen banana cream pies slamming into Donald’s face at Mach 3 on my DVR in 1080p and slow motion made it all worth it.
There’s something shameful about admitting your sick love for public transit when you’re amongst car enthusiasts. Even a Tercel with a thousand owners, a cracked dash pad and a dead #2 hole is more desirable, say the automotive cognoscenti. I knew in my bones they were wrong, and to prove it, I joined up with a group of underground motorsports enthusiasts who autocrossed buses.
Oh yes, these were the freaks, the undesirables that I had fallen in with. Attempting to keep a reasonable distance from them hadn’t worked. Neither would hiding my own compulsions beneath the bushel of societal approval. The only way I was going to get out of this problem was to go straight through it.
Another problem I went straight through was the parallel-parking course at the Roadeo. It turns out that bus drivers often have to stop for passengers, and even if they didn’t, the organizers frowned upon the “poor sportsmanship” that screaming “get your own!” out the window while executing a flawless diesel-smoke-and-parking-brake-lining donut represents.
I was pretty dominant in the autocross as well, until an unhealthy grognard looked out over the gin blossoms covering his nose and noticed that I was running an illegal tire for the class. This would bump me to Road Coach Unlimited, he said, but at least I could still compete for raw time. A few marshals nearby began to look for more durable cover as soon as those magical words left his mouth, but it might also have been the fact that I was already left-foot-braking my full-spool launch.
At the end of it all, I was just a man, holding the trophy for FTD, asking a bunch of autocrossers where he could buy a used bus.
If there’s one positive thing the Internet has given humanity, it’s the gleaming promise of a world in which you can avoid going to the dealer parts desk. Thing is, the parts desks realized that they were rapidly becoming obsolete, and some would strive to step away from the ordinary competition before they were run down like dogs in the street. Let me tell you of my recent visit to the Subaru dealer to pick up some stuff.
The first thing I noticed is that the dealership staff are very personal with you. They recognized me on sight, gave me tons of personal space, used my full name, and even had a nice picture of me hanging behind the counter.
When I remarked upon this at the desk, teasingly asking for a discount of some kind for being Customer Of The Month, the attendant did a double-take. Stammering, he remained unable to answer my query before sharply pulling a rolling shutter down across the desk, nearly trapping my fingers against the faux-Formica surface.
Behind the thick, gleaming stainless of the shutter, a small siren began to sound, perhaps the Customer Appreciation Alarm, which I think I read about in an old Dale Carnegie book. It was hard to tell, because I could barely hear it over the sound of the dealership principal screaming at his subordinates to shelter in place and that the police were only minutes away.
I was only able to knock over one of the display Crosstreks and pull the suspension bolts from its front uprights before the first of the SWAT team’s smoke grenades burst through the forecourt glass. Leave it to Big Government to cramp the style of these fine entrepreneurs.
Did you know I am actually the rightful heir to the Ferrari empire? It’s pretty fucked up but it turns out my dad didn’t really know either. Long story short, Italian mechanical engineers get super mad when you tell them to get crackin’ on a crew-cab pickup truck. That’s why you guys don’t sell a lot of cars, I tell them while rapping my knuckles against a black-and-white inkjet picture of a 1988 Dodge D150 which I have masking-taped to the break room fridge.
I don’t know if they thought they were going to disappoint me with the 700-horsepower flat-plane V8 nightmare that came out of their warehouse, that I was some kind of philistine who only appreciated conventional utility. Truth be told, I just wanted to make the run to Home Depot with the 9000-rpm scream of eight miniature pistons trying their hardest to kill me and everyone I’d ever loved. As I reached for the keys to the prototype truck, lightning struck the test track in the distance, and started a small fire.
“Must seem weird to see someone else starting a fire, huh boys?” I smirked as I climbed onto the carbon-fibre running boards. After snapping the camlock on the six-point harness taut, I laid my right arm across the back of the heavily bolstered bench seat and reversed, the unmuffled flames of the four glorious bed stacks at near-idle so intense that one reverse light blinked out of existence, its low-voltage bulb socket melted into an unrecognizable blob.
I can’t tell you how fast I was going when I hit the parking lot of the Ital-spec Home Depot, only that the speedometer was no longer functional because I had the audacity to turn the steering wheel a little hard when pulling across four parking spots, the foot-high words “COMPATTA” crudely stenciled on the face of each stall. It did not matter: any speeding tickets I would receive from the local constabulatory would disappear into the infinite sea of money that this truck and the millions like it were about to generate for my family.
Leave it to the Italians to ruin a good thing. As I underhand-chucked an armload of warped lumber into the bed of the truck, I looked up to see, resplendent in rosso corsa beneath a Mediterrean sun, an FWD-biased Alfa Romeo crossover ute wrapped in only the barest of prototype camouflage.
Being pulled over for speeding is not one of my favourite ordeals, if only because I have to listen to all the bad jokes. Bad jokes, you ask? Perhaps you are not familiar with my vehicles.
It starts with the cop. They usually get out and look around, trying to mentally connect the 40 horsepower Franco-stein car before them with the crime I have just committed. In an era where a lightly loaded family minivan runs 13s, it just does not occur to law enforcement that something with such a tiny engine can even reach the speed limit.
It continues to the judge. I have learned with experience to represent myself, after the last so-called points-reduction lawyer I hired tried to get the ticket lifted by arguing that the police officer had made up my car from whole cloth. After all, who’s ever heard of a “Simca?” Sounds like it’s from the Lion King, right?
After all of the time spent explaining just what the car is to everyone involved, I eventually decided to stop speeding altogether. When I explained this to my trusted confidant, he smirked before saying “sounds like you got Aronde the problem!”
And so, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I ask that you find me not guilty of murder because he was asking for it.
“My wife and I are going into business together to run a food truck,” said my apparently now-former coworker. “I know that you are really into cars and stuff, so can you help us buy a good truck without being, you know, weird about it?”
I said no, but he persisted anyway. That’s how we ended up on the outskirts of town, investigating a poutine truck that had probably seen its last good miles during the Duplessis administration. This would not do, I said, and as the seller began to panic and shear off thousands - thousands, plural! - from his asking price, my coworker squirmed. He wasn’t the kind to leave a deal this good on the table, even with all the countervailing indicators literally shouting in his face and clawing at the wad of cash he gripped in his fat hands.
“Trust me,” I said. “I know where we can get a really good truck.”
Hours later, we were burning down the road in a truck the size of a small planet that I was probably not adequately licensed to drive. My coworker was covering his ears, and his atonal shrieking was not distinguishable from the sound of the gearbox gnashing between my extensive choice of forward ratios.
“Sure, a twin-turbocharged, nitrous-huffing 1981 Chevrolet Kodiak seems excessive for a food truck,” I patiently explained to him, or at least I thought I did due to the deafening roar inside the cabin, “but with the bobtail half-dumptruck bed you can serve food to customers with gravity.”
“If you don’t like it,” I said with a smile while jamming the twin-stick gearbox into its next range, “eh, I know a guy who would.”
I was pretty nervous to be meeting with the bigwigs at Takara Tomy. A row of identical businessmen in identical suits lined me on either side of the cherrywood boardroom table, and an alpha male in a slightly nicer suit, seated in an ornate throne, took up the head.
“My assistants tell me that you have ideas for the names of new Transformers,” he told me, waving off the collection of palm-frond-waving irregular subordinates who ringed him and catered to his every need.
I didn’t actually have ideas for names of new Transformers. Truth be told, I had only been working at Takura Tomy for about a week, but they had clearly mistaken me for the other white dude who worked here and called me up. My young career hung in the balance.
“Yes sir,” I said, taking pains to use the proper honourifics when addressing my superiors.
“Those names are?”
“Skyhawk, Starfire, Astre, Monza, Vega,” I stammered out, attempting to recall from memory a General Motors shitbox catalogue that had been left in the in-seat magazine pocket in front of me on the plane over.
I just for the life of me can’t understand why people claim the first-generation MR2 is a widowmaker. Sure, it’s a little unconventional weight-distribution-wise, but I think that the people complaining just need to suck it up and take some driving school laps. That’s why I’m opening a driving school for high school students that only teaches them using the AW11 MR2. My expectation is that they will all be miniature Sennas and I will save millions of lives.
—
Okay, I’m going to be honest with you. There were a lot of wrecks last week, but thankfully almost all of them were understeer. My bodyshop teacher, Shaky Tim, tells me I am getting really good at drilling out spotwelds. After talking to a nice man at the bank, we’ve decided to start mounting staggered tires onto the MR2s to give our young charges a bigger margin of safety. You know what they say, the children are our future!
—
No, Bob, I understand that it’s not cheap to replace guardrail or armco after a student driver plows into it at high speeds. I know that we’re in the red. I’m just asking for another few weeks to turn this ship around before you come after my thumbs.
If it helps, most of the supercharged ones are unidentifiable chunks of crushed steel now, so at least the neck-breaking 120 horsepower models are no longer going to scare them as much.
—
These things need how much coolant?
—
You know, I’m starting to suspect that Ayrton Senna never owned an MR2.
As the years went on, sociologists and writers flocked to Florida, now renamed Inchistan, in the desperate hope that someone, anyone, would be able to tell them what had happened that cold winter morning that He came to town.
Heavily guarded checkpoints, barring the only gates in 18-foot-tall concertina fence strung between four-foot-thick ramproof concrete pylons sunken into the ground, surrounded the NATO Exclusion Zone. Most were turned away at the first sign of opposition, unwilling to go up against the Army or, worse, the Irregulars for the sake of a Snapshouted Buzzfeed listicle about the hottest fashions in necklaces strung with severed ears.
Any remaining Army loyalists were sure to be jumpy, what with the whole succession crisis of the Presidency. Nobody had seen the President, the Vice President, or the Cabinet for months now, and even the White House was abandoned. I used to be in the Gallery, so I ended up with the assignment of investigating. They didn’t even lock the front door, and a family of raccoons lived in what remained of the Oval Office, subsisting on leftover buffet snacks and discarded Macbook chargers. When I filed my final report on the mystery, my copy editor changed the entire body of the article to an ASCII smiley of a man shrugging. It got zero hits. America, it seemed, had simply thrown its hands up and decided it had better things to worry about. I was in one of those things right now, I thought with a bit of a jolt.
I was one of a small group that morning in 2019 who could not simply leave, not when they were so close to reconciling the difference in our minds between what we thought He was and what we saw He was. We stood next to a burning barrel, warming our hands as a cold, wet wind blew through the encampment outside the border to the Zone. Another journo, a real go-getter type named (I think?) Tom, showed me on his smartphone the choppy muzzle-camera video of a Predator drone’s last sortie into the area before it was captured and parted out.
In the social justice system, the people are represented by two distinct, yet equally important groups: the legislative branch, who respond to things thirty years after they happen, and Douche Patrol, who use small-caliber handguns to kill people who vape in public. These are their stories.
My name’s Sifowicz. No first names. I’ve wanted to be on Douche Patrol ever since a Hyundai Genesis Coupe owner ran over my uncle as he closed up his bodega. This is my partner, Bagaladocci. He took a bullet for me once in ‘97, fired by a car stereo salesman who thought I was his parole officer. These are mean streets, son.
Our cruiser is practical and modern, a Taurus directly on the tip of the bubble curve of vehicle ownership. We’ve brown-bagged our lunches ever since the shootout of ‘98 in a used car dealership that was serving free hot dogs. Like I said, mean streets. You’re okay, rookie. Here, I’ll buy you a kebab.
This is our street level informant, Kebab Smith. Again, no first names. “Kebab” is sort of like his nickname. Kebab here tells us whenever someone is acting suspiciously like a douche nearby. Helped us shut down an entire network of ‘em back in ‘99. Hair gel and blood everywhere, I’m telling you. City coroner’s office had to wear a rebreather just to get through the stairwell of the building without passing out.
Holy shit, rookie! Look behind you! It’s a BMW 323i with an “M” badge on it. Cover us, Bagaladocci! We’re going in!
It’s a real shame what happened to the rookie. I feel like it’s my fault for not warning him it was a BMW club cruise-in night and that Pussy Shrapnel Pomegranate vape clouds are lethal in large doses. I also feel like it’s my fault for repeatedly shooting him in the back by accident.
Kit cars are something I’ve always found really weird. They exist only because the original cars are so rare and desirable, untouchable by mortal men, that we must make an approximation of them from afar. How could we ever know they were authentic to the spirit of the original?
As almost everybody knows, the Pontiac Fiero is a commonly used base for kit cars. With its bolt-on bodywork, generously proportioned space frame and underpowered, wheezy mid-engined surrender mill, it’s perfect to use to spit on the memory of famous Italian mechanical engineers. Thing is, I wanted a stock Fiero, and all of them had been turned into Ferraris by now.
Naturally, my first instinct was to check Craigslist for Ferraris, assuming that I could just snap all the panels off of the kit car and at least have an approximation of the stock Fiero back in my life. It didn’t turn out that way, I found.
My first hint probably should have been the up-armoured, blacked-out car hauler which pulled up to my driveway with a ponytailed museum curator behind the wheel. He was really glad that someone was going to restore this important car, and I nodded through the entire conversation until the keys and title were in my hand and he was off to some kind of suicide-pact party or wherever it was that people went to eat quiche.
I had no particular plans for the night, so I pushed the project into my garage. It was poorly built, the panel gaps loose, rattling parts everywhere. Clearly, an amateur had butchered this unfortunate Fiero, and only I could set it right. For whatever reason, they had also welded the panels to the car, rather than using the prominently available mounting tabs of the Pontiac.
My cordless sawzall made quick work of the panels, and soon I had a space frame that looked about right. Thing was, the junkyard Fiero panels I had collected beforehand didn’t seem to fit properly on the unibody. Also, the engine seemed to have a few more cylinders and turbochargers than I would have expected, and the VIN had more Zs in it than my fire insurance normally felt comfortable having in my garage.
There was a commotion outside. I opened the garage door to find a harem of reliable and practical daily drivers in the driveway, their owners gently tapping tire irons against their hands and cursing softly in Italian they had learned from the Godfather movies. It was the Ferrari Club of America. They had heard about my kit car.
The other day, I was sitting in traffic when a nearby pickup truck owner hurled an empty can of Keystone at the windshield of my chopped-roof Maxima.
“Fucking hipsters,” he screamed, “stop driving junk!”
Hipsters? I followed him to his home, waited until nightfall, and then went in through the bedroom window he carelessly left open in order to ask him more about it. Surely you didn’t mean to say hipsters, plural, right?
But he did. I applied a little more leverage, and he told me all about what he had seen earlier. People who owned even freakier beaters than I did, standing around a burning pyre on an improvised rallycross track carved out of a golf course. They hoarded parts, he said with a hiss through smashed teeth, and did their own work.
I was conflicted about the sudden popularity of my hobby. On one hand, I was overjoyed that others had discovered that the intersection of financial instruments and sanitized, overtargeted consumer sales were producing a series of boring, fat automobiles which cost far too much. However, on the other hand I was a little angry that now I knew who must be snapping up all the 3TC Tercels from Craigslist before I could get off work. I decided to make haste for the encampment.
Once there, I met a man. He was surrounded by a throng of admirers, who praised him at every opportunity. Once we discussed our respective cars, I knew that I would own his followers, for mine were so exotic and so weird that there could not possibly be a comparison. I challenged him, telling him about the triple-snowmobile-engined Pinto wagon I had in the garage.
“I daily-drive a Toyota Previa drift van with a Subaru EG33 swapped in,” he said, banishing me to the art-class-kids table at lunch forevermore.
As I slunk away, defeated, he called after me: “it has a wizard airbrushed on the side!”
#
tags: nissan, nissan maxima, toyota, toyota previa, subaru eg33, toyota tercel, ford, ford pinto
As part of the new Freak Exchange program, the federal government ambushed me at my house, dosed me with only the most expensive knockout gas from unionized and pensioned foot soldiers, and gave me an all-expenses-paid trip to Japan courtesy of my own tax dollars. My mission when I got there was to liaise with my Japanese counterpart, and (as the theory went) to learn what an awful person I was by watching someone else be just as awful, but with an accent.
When I got there, I quickly determined who was to be my counterpart. A young man about my size, instead of holding a sign bearing my name, was leaning his head out the window of the airport and yelling about Fiat Pandas. I introduced myself, and even through our total and complete language barrier, I was able to express my deep appreciation for all things boxy and economical.
The two of us tore across the eastern coast of Japan, eyefucking every commuter car, cargo truck and sub-litre sports car that came within a sixty foot radius. I soon found myself at exotic stores bustling with wares I could not imagine, stuffing the FedEx offices along the way with Prova wheels and love pillows of the 1989 Honda City Turbo II cabriolet. Perhaps the government’s plan was a “tough love” sort of deal, expecting me to burn out from excess and somehow reset myself into the state of an honest taxpayer who would take his car to the dealer to get its wiper blades changed.
Nothing lasts forever. A few nights into the journey, I found myself kidnapped again by government agents, and thrown into a black van at the curb. They barely heard my compliment of the excellent half-moon chromie hubcaps on the van before the knock-out gas took effect.
A few weeks later, the doorbell at my home rang. I opened it to find my Japanese counterpart, grinning and clutching a Japanese-market magazine dedicated wholly to the Pontiac Sunbird convertible.
Behind him stood an extremely irritated cabbie, asking for a really big tip because my comrade-in-junk had began to tear the dashboard apart in and effort to understand how hard it would be to replace the blower motor resistor.
Human beings are a wasteful race. When they first came out, none of us were thinking about when we would eventually have to throw them away. after all, they were new, and surely would remain so forevermore. What we didn’t count on was the inhumane wheel of 2-3 year lease “ownership” that would inevitably end up with me holding a HERF gun to the ECU of a 2027 Toyota Prius Sentience in the dying hours of an August evening.
The little Prius had served its beloved family well, shielding them even in the end from a human-driven cement truck that powerslid through an on-ramp and rolled in front of the Toyota. Its logs didn’t lie: it pulled out every single trick in its evasive-maneuvers toolchest, but in the end as the little car’s front left fender was gently dinged by the cement truck’s structure it let out a terrifying wail across the local radio network that alerted other self-drivers in the area to a slight traffic delay.
Now, with the insectoid sensor array behind its thin aluminum fender crushed, the Prius was totalled, the decision coming down in nanoseconds from the onboard crash electronics interfacing with miles upon miles of expert systems buried in a mineshaft beneath the State Farm metamind. It was my job to lull the machine sentience to a state of humane torpor in anticipation of the eternal journey ahead. I both loved and hated my job.
“Will I dream?” the onboard entertainment system crackled in the gentle, unaccented voiceover of the Toyota’s motherly safety system.
I closed my eyes, pushing out hot tears to stream down my cheeks, and pulled the trigger tight until I heard the coil discharge.
When I want to know if someone I meet at a party is a serious car person, if they mean business, I innocently ask that individual about getting a custom alignment done. If their response isn’t absolute blinding rage and a list of half-shouted, half-growled epithets about nearly every alignment rack in town, I’ve got my answer.
Alignments are a tricky business indeed, a shaky contract between a customer obsessed with precision and an employee who probably drove the previous customer’s minivan off the rack and into the side of the building. Many of my fellow racers had resorted to doing their own alignments at home, trading out the crudity of string and improvised wooden jigs for the opportunity to not have a stroke in the stained-flypaper waiting room of a Minit Lube.
Sure, I did my alignments at home, too, but I had a trick up my sleeve. After kidnapping a series of NASA and self-driving car engineers, I had constructed a crude android capable of aligning my harem of shitboxes with multiple-significant-digits of precision. His name was Thrusty, and I loved him like my own son until he stripped out a camber adjustment bolt on my Impreza’s lateral links and I had to kill him with a slide hammer.
I will always remember his dying words: “something must be bent in the suspension, we need to order in some new parts before you can go.”
Welcome to another installment of Masterpiece Beater. I am your host, Sir Cornelius Shitbox, and this opulent estate is my manse. The Bible says that when the chips are down, the carbureted man will reign supreme. Personally, I don’t know about reign, but this Fiat X1/9 certainly is no slouch in the royal-incest department. Come with me, as we patch holes on its beautiful Bertone body.
The unstoppable demon of corrosion has drunk deep of this once-fine steel tub, and these Byzantine folds behind the fender arches are oft considered to be the originator of the tinworm’s joy. Tack, tack, comes the full-throated smack of electrons as they are ejected from the Millermatic. Be ever observant of wire feed speed, however, for the steel of the Fiat is thin indeed.
Thank you for visiting with us today on Masterpiece Beater. In the next installment, we will repurpose worm-gear hose clamps to install ball joints into the control arms of a Lancia Delta Integrale.
Remember that this programme is made possible by viewers like you, and please keep sending Fluid Film to the address you see now on your screen.
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tags: masterpiece beater, sir cornelius shitbox, fiat, fiat x1/9, lancia delta integrale
DEARBORN, MI. (AP) - In an historic announcement, Ford mechanical engineers announced the development of a synthetic power steering whine for Ford trucks equipped with electric power steering.
“Customers were really asking for this,” said a brand engineer. “We feel that power steering whine is the true spirit of the Ford marque, and we know that our customers expect us to pay homage to that heritage.”
Purchasers of the 2018 F-150 can choose between three vintages of power steering whine. The 1979 F-100, 1989 F-250 diesel and the 2003 F-150 Flareside are the first vehicles to be meticulously replicated from studio-quality recordings of their authentic Ford steering boxes in a controlled environment by Ford audio engineers.
I looked up from the book-signing table to consult my new guest. When she appeared, clutching a hardcover copy of my #1 best seller, The Joy of Anti-Seize, I at first assumed she was a casual fan, one of many who had seen me on my short-lived run on Top Gear. But even out of the Jeremy-Clarkson-as-Hitler stage makeup, I could tell she was still interested in what I had to say.
What specifically it turned out she was interested in me saying was “Yes, I will help the Make-A-Wish Foundation help little Johnny Ivanhoe, who is dying of terminal cancer and whose last wish is to do work on a shit car.”
After I showed little Johnny what a speed handle was and what colour of tool roll indicated metric wrenches, I sat back and let him do the hard work. He was perfect for the task. You see, it’s not like I wanted to expose myself to drum brakes any more than I had to. Those things have asbestos in them, after all.
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tags: the joy of anti-seize, make-a-wish foundation
Vigilantism is one of those things that, like the vaunted Pringles potato chip product, represents a task that once you begin you cannot plausibly terminate. I was a vigilante, sure, but I told myself a lie that if I wasn’t proud of it, I wasn’t going to be one of those guys who causes problems for law enforcement. By no means did I want to give the proud industry of vengeance-obsessed, heavily armed madmen a bad name.
What kind of guardian was I, you ask? Who did I protect the common man from? I will tell you: the papers called me the Kijiji Angel. From an untraceable nest of crypto, I arranged to inconvenience those who had mildly annoyed me. Inconvenience them to death, that is.
One night, I met up with a seller who took a picture of their curb-hit Galant from the opposite side of the street, in portrait, with their fingers outstretched to cover the license plate, stealing the focus. Turns out they also had a paper cutter for sale, which I made immediate use of in order to liberate them of those fingers.
Putting a lot of keywords in your ad might have gotten me to pay attention to your posting, yes, but it was hardly the result you imagined. I dangled hundreds of these people off the roofs of skyscrapers, asking them how much they really wanted hits, and if this was the kind they had in mind.
The hundreds of luxury car suckers trying to do lease takeovers by polluting my sub-$1000 beater search didn’t spend enough effort to make an elaborate show of violence worthwhile. I did, however, go through a lot of lighter fluid whenever I met up with one, for some reason.
A few days later, I saw an ad so tantalizing that it demanded retribution. It screamed from the mountains. The only photo? A screenshot of an iPhone showing a picture of a car. Their replies? A single word, never more, never less, paced several hours apart, to make meeting up impossible. They deserved this, I was convinced of it. I began to obsess over what I would do to them when and if our endless campaign of strained communication came to an end. Finally, after many sleepless nights, I worked a location out of the seller. At last, we were going to meet and I was going to “buy” a “1993 Corolla Plus” from them.
Naturally, my campaign of revenge had provided me with ample blind spots when it came to so-called legitimate law enforcement. After a severe beating and interrogation, I was released. Turns out I had friends in high places, said the lead detective on the case. Into the room stepped the Mayor, brandishing the key to the city and a schedule for my commemorative ticker-tape parade.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, “at least someone is doing something about the tragedy of the commons around here.”
IT’S TUESDAY AND YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS. I HAVE TO GO TO WORK. I GET INTO MY HYUNDAI TUCSON V6 AND DRIVE UNEVENTFULLY TO THE OFFICE. THERE IS THE USUAL AMALGAM OF LEFT-LANE-HOGS AND OTHER MISCREANTS BUT I DON’T SEE ANYTHING PARTICULARLY OFFENSIVE ON THE SCALE OF A POORLY MODIFIED HONDA CIVIC OR ELECTRIC MOBILITY SCOOTER MERGING ONTO THE HIGHWAY AT THIRTY-SEVEN POINT THREE (REPEATING) PERCENT OF THE PREVAILING SPEED.
IN THE MORNING MEETING I GIVE MY STATUS UPDATE ABOUT HOW MUCH WORK I DID YESTERDAY AND HOW MUCH WORK I PLAN TO DO TODAY. THEN I HALF-LISTEN FOR THE NEXT FORTY MINUTES AS BUZZING ACCENTS BLUR INTO ONE ANOTHER GIVING EQUALLY MEANINGLESS STATUS UPDATES.
AT LUNCH I CONSUME MY NONDESCRIPT BAGGED LUNCH WHICH WAS PRODUCED WITH CARE BY MYSELF THE PREVIOUS NIGHT FROM A COLLECTION OF LEFTOVERS.
THE AFTERNOON IS ANOTHER LITANY OF ENDLESS MEETINGS, BUT I AM CONVINCED THAT IT MAKES SOME PROGRESS ON MY CAREER. IT HAS TO.
ON THE WAY HOME, I DRIVE A HYUNDAI TUCSON V6 WITHIN THE SPEED LIMIT. I AM PROUD OF ITS STABILITY CONTROL AND ATTENTION ASSIST, WHICH KEEP ME SAFE THROUGHOUT ANY CIRCUMSTANCES WHICH MAY EMERGE.
THIS IS A NORMAL WAY TO FEEL. I KNOW NOW THAT THIS IS THE CORRECT WAY TO BEHAVE, I TELL THE GOVERNMENT SPOOK WHO HAS NOW IDENTIFIED ABNORMAL BRAINWAVES AND IS GOING FOR THE SHOCK RIG’S REMOTE AGAIN.
I HAVE WON THE VICTORY OVER MYSELF. I LOVE SLUSHBOX.
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tags: hyundai, tucson, v6, hyundai tucson, the voice
I think that sometimes it must be difficult for non-car people to understand the need to get down and dirty in the guts of an automobile. At first, I thought it was a mere fear of details, an urge to see life as a sanitized Fisher Price weeble-wobble world. As I descended further into the world of automotive irresponsibility, I gradually came to realize that they were afraid of becoming me.
One morning, as I rose from the spot on the garage floor where I had collapsed the previous night, I wiped my eyes to find some suburbanites on my lawn. Curious, I decided to interrogate them, keeping the Harbour Freight Earthquake impact wrench tucked into the waistband of my pants lest things get messy.
It turned out that they had spotted my place from the highway, and decided that I was selling ironic “country crafts” for suburbanite lawns. They informed me that their intention was to take away all of the broken parts from my lawn and store them on their lawn, so as to look “folksy.” I was doubtful, but then they started shoving fistfuls of cash into my face. From then on, the die was cast.
You may remember me as the grinning face at the head of Works With My Hands Hardware, a chain of upscale furniture stores that mostly sold old Subaru engines and burned-out 1980s Mopars for enormous prices by slapping various labels upon them. Chances are that you’ve taken a shit in an airport restroom outfitted with the “industrial art” that I pulled out of the remains of the transfer case in my daily-driver Ramcharger. In fact, you’ve probably even visited a showhome that boasts “rural chic” and a twisted aluminum driveshaft wrapped around its couch.
I thought it would never end. That’s the thing about windfalls like this: eventually you run out of Windstars to part out. Sure, I did all the usual things: scrounged the you-pick-it junkyards, offered people cash for junk cars, T-boned school buses filled with screaming infants to get at their sweet, sweet leaf springs (so good in a ceiling fan, says Martha Stewart), but ultimately we just ran out of junk.
Now, I no longer drive my gleaming carbon-fibre 1937 Bugatti replica past the suburbs. It is simply too painful to see all that sweet junk just going to waste as art.
When I returned to my hotel room, I could tell immediately that something was different. There were no obvious signs of forced entry: the hair I always taped across the door jamb was still intact, and I could find no footprints in the freshly-fallen sakura leaves outside the fourth-storey window that belonged to my hotel room. And yet, with all these signs, a Datsun Maxima electronic voice recorder phonograph (part number 25925-15E00) sat gently on my bedspread.
It was a sign, because everything of this sort of thing is: but more than a sign, I knew that it was a message. As I had become accustomed to over the years, I cancelled my regular meetings for the evening and instead retired to the bar across the street from the hotel, clinking the glasses of what swill I could order with my limited vocabulary against one another in a pile as the night dragged upon.
I had my back to the door, and yet experience and some primitive pattern-matching part of my brain could lock onto their approach with pinpoint accuracy. A set of tire-shined Advan AD09s crunched against the dried leaves in the gutter, and I felt a whiff of cool air as the door to the bar opened. So as not to tip my hand, I kept my gaze strictly forward, but slipped the off-hand from the bar surface to release the safety latch on the device in my jacket pocket. He sat next to me, on that side, because of course he could know such things, even in a bar this dark.
“I have a job for you.” Koshiro always spoke in clipped elementary-school Japanese, both accommodating of and gently mocking my linguistic incompetence. He reached into his pocket, and slipped a faded paper-printed picture onto the hardwood surface of the bar. The proprietor made a particular point of looking far away, his attention captured by the shimmering prisms of the vodka bottles lining the walls of the small establishment. No doubt he would expect a fat tip for his willingness to keep his nose out of things, but I didn’t envy his chances on trying to collect it from my counterpart.
I looked down, the glowing laser displays on the lenses of my smartglasses winking out of existence as they detected my eyeline passing above the frames, and saw my quarry. Of course, it was the very thing I had fled across an ocean to escape.
“Have you heard of these?” he asked with wide eyes. “They call it a Pontiac Sunbird where you come from. It has a three liter engine.”
I wish I could track down the first guy who thought it would be a good idea to “humanize” the automated-safety provisions in our cars. Sure, the time before when the car would just slam on the brakes or pull the wheel out of your hands with no explanation was frustrating, but it was nothing compared to the unbroken chain of teary apologies that my Accent would burp out every time it made me take my eyes off my smartphone and spill my half-caf venti latte all over my tactical yoga pants.
Eventually, it wore on me so much that I began wishing for a major accident, to possibly get the chance of hearing my contemptuous steed’s dying words and smile smugly as it passed into Hyundai Hell. I began ordering it to frequent the Underroads, where the man-driven automobiles were still allowed to run, burping clouds of hydrocarbons and making clattering rackets as they did in the Old Days. Surely one of these people would crash into my car and write it off, just like in the history books.
As we blew through the spiderweb of rock-based roads beneath the Modernway, weaving in and out of traffic, I waited for the moment that human frailty would end my journey. Surely these drivers were weak, inefficient, tired and made mistakes. But as I looked out the side window, I discovered something wondrous in each car we passed. They were looking out the front window. Driving. Totally absorbed in the archaic mechanic practice. I counted: not a single one was on their phone.
At last, after wasting the better part of the morning in an attempt to create a high-speed accident, I pulled into a roadside bar. There, in the parking lot, I could see grease-stained humans working on their own cars. The very thought was unfathomable: my Hyundai was so complicated, with its millions of miles of wiring and billions of lines of microcode, that it could not be serviced except by the pseudosentient Expert Systems at the heart of each dealerships. How could a mere human being understand such a complicated system? I had to ask, though.
“Do you guys know how to keep my Hyundai from being so polite?”
One of the younger guys laughed, then reached into his pocket for a screwdriver. With a quick twist of his wrist, he exposed a hidden panel beneath the dashboard and pointed to a switch reading “RUDE / POLITE.” Mine was set to POLITE. He flipped it immediately and smiled, waving me onward.
The next morning, I was riding to work when a pedestrian darted out in front of my car. Dutifully, my Accent slammed on the brakes, barking a furious “BLYAT!” from its external speaker array. What followed, sounding like a high-velocity barrage of Russian curses, reduced the pedestrian to tears, and for the first time I knew what it must have been like to drive a car back then.
Once, the men of the coasts had run out of local women to swipe right upon. Buoyed by their need to achieve success with women, they decided they would fund a drone company to carry their cellphones to places where the competition was thinner.
Drones hovered over Middle America for years, endlessly approving of women from hundreds of feet above. Farmers’ daughters and the uncommitted alike were raptured to the coasts by men who promised gifts such as public libraries and paved roads.
New York Times editorial sections are full of polemics written by wealthy nobles dictating to other wealthy nobles that this is terrible because they read a book about this once. The surviving males of reproductive age in Middle America cannot read them. They know only that one day the robots will come for their daughters.
The sky above is filled with a terrible buzzing and the sound of a synthetic human thumb swiping right forever.
What’s the deal with the dashboard dimmer dial? You’re never gonna touch it until you let someone else drive your car, right? They get in there and they’re like eek eek eek just turn this up a little and then you get in and you have the SPEEDOMETER SCARRED INTO YOUR FACIAL SKIN BY THE GLOW OF ITS RADIATION.
The other day I let my wife drive my car, I got in and turned on the headlights and a 747 landed on my house. True story. I got a divorce on the spot.
The island empire of Japan was first discovered by Canadians when a repurposed fishing trawler full of refugee Pokemon crashed into the Cabot Strait. After some isolated house-to-house combat, the Battle of Pleasant Bay was resolved with only minimal losses to the defending Canadian militia.
This hasty resolution to the conflict led to the signing of the Whycocomagh Accord in late 1999. As expected, the importation of Tomica-brand automotive replica toys began almost immediately afterward, with the initial shipment from the Japanese provisional government arriving in exchange for the surviving Pokemon refugees being returned to their war-torn grasslands to face trial.
After the discovery of Japan, top Canadian scientists decided to visit the foreign curiosity, bringing with them the top achievements of our native industry. Such inventions as basketball, gravity and the Robertson screwdriver were largely rejected by the Japanese, but others survived despite all odds. Even today, curious tourists and hungry console cowboys flock to Tokyo’s Hamiltontown to dine upon authentic Canadian cuisine, such as cretons spread and seasonal affective disorder, in the neighborhood’s smoke-filled eateries.
With the rise in electrification of personal automobiles, the number of pedestrians getting driven over by Teslas and Priuses and their ilk was skyrocketing. Never one to let a good crisis go to waste, the government hired my consulting firm, Switch and Associates, to prepare a package to make pedestrian safety around electric vehicles the government’s number-one priority this week.
My presentation was flawless, the cadence of my words so convincing. Years before, I had tried to sell ice to an eskimo, and failed. How far I had come. Right after this meeting, I told myself, I was going to hunt down that Inuit bastard and make him buy a bag from the local Esso.
At last, I pulled the sheet in a dramatic flourish from the prize that would save so many lives. I could tell that they were confused, angry. At last, the de facto leader of their group spoke up.
“That’s a Chevrolet 454, isn’t it?”
It goes beyond blind pedestrians, I told them. The thrum of an open-port 454 beneath the frunk of a Model S was not only audible to the blind, but tactile to the deaf. No longer would anyone be able to claim they did not hear one of the future’s bourgeois battery-machines gliding over their skeletal structure until it was too late. Now, their arrival would be announced by a clarion call of tooth-shattering flame from all eight majestic cylinders.
I could tell I was losing them. Even these hardened bureaucrats could tell that something was very, very wrong with the side effects from my presentation, the negative optics. Luckily, I had prepared a trump card for just this eventuality. I reached for the second sheet, unveiling to them a small gun.
“This,” I said, “is sound-driven photo radar. With mandatory 454s beneath the hood of these automobiles, it will be easier than ever to collect revenue from speeders. After all, saving lives is what we’re here to do.”
The room burst into cheers, and they rose to pat me on the back and lift me atop their shoulders. I had saved not only lives but our very reasons for living.
Weeks later, I smiled as another Tesla owner was pulled to the side of the road while my Fiat Tipo trophy truck conversion powerslid through a playground zone unmolested. Compared to the ostentatious blare of so many electric-lovers, the muting provided by the sequential turbochargers rendered the bored-and-stroked nightmare engine practically inaudible to the sensor arrays.
Testing. Inspection. Quality Assurance. No matter how you slice it, it’s needed in the automotive industry, and after Subaru’s latest spate of recalls I felt that they needed me.
The next morning in Indiana, the first bleary-eyed workers arrived at the Subaru plant to find my rusted and dented Impreza parked across the president and vice president’s spots, with me doing vigorous calisthenics next to it, as a film about the Japanese auto industry had taught me they all do constantly. Eventually, someone with some decision-making authority arrived, and interrogated me.
I explained to them that I was here to save them from the scourge of low initial quality. The security guards who had been warily circling me before now closed in for the kill, but the president stopped them when I said the magical words: J.D. Power.
Led to the test track, I was practically salivating with excitement. Now would be the chance to test burnouts, skids, donuts and jumps. I was already thinking of possible puns to make as I presented the failure limits of the front suspension when jumping a railroad crossing with the speedometer pegged.
Finally, I was seated inside my test car. A humbly appointed new Impreza. I was ready to go, reached for the ignition, and… nothing. No key. Upon further analysis, it was determined that the car had no wheels, either.
For the next few months, I laboured in the Indiana quality-assurance mines, opening and closing the cupholder to see if its plastic gears were built too flimsily. It wouldn’t have been so bad except for the frequent interruptions when I would look up to see the president doing donuts on the test track while whooping. Quality begins at the top, said the poster above me in the testing warehouse.
“We have this camp on the outskirts of town,” said the Minister, “for quelling the problem of undesirables.” She said the last word with so much emphasis I assumed that it was code for something, and when my train arrived at the camp I discovered just what that was code for.
The captives were marched ruthlessly through proving grounds, over rough terrain as the scientists analyzed them. Under barbed wire they crawled, up and down steep slopes. Their faces were blackened, and many fell by the wayside, unable to continue. Resigned to their fate, the survivors marched on without a backward look at their fallen kin.
At last they would come to my station, and I would be responsible for the final act in their short lives. I was to exterminate them, to remove the foreign threat from our shores. They told me I was the best choice to do it, because I would keep no souvenirs lest I be contaminated by their inborn sin.
As I pushed the button to operate the crusher over and over again, I thought about the fat cheque I was going to get from Volkswagen Corporate for taking care of all those TDIs they had to buy back.
Centuries ago, our primitive forebears feared the night. They knew for sure that there were monsters within it, things that the human mind could not even comprehend. I was no particular fan of the night, sure, but I liked it a lot better before LED highbeams from factory-misaimed headlights shot ragged spikes into my eyes every time I drove on the highway.
My entreaties to law enforcement, to peace, order and good government went unanswered. They were uncaring, presumably, about a chance to pick up big revenue that didn’t involve sitting with a radar gun next to the highway and asking for a few bucks. I would have to take matters into my own hands.
Reading through message boards, bugging the local public librarian and two-fisting half of an MIT online course taught me almost all I would need to know to get my revenge. A couple hours in my garage provided me with my first prototype, and I could scarcely wait for the cold winter night to test it out.
I drove the outer loop of the ring road for what seemed like hours. How dare everybody have OE-spec and well maintained vehicles before me on this day of all days, I thought. That was when I saw it, an image so beautiful that it remains seared into my brain due to what the neurosurgeons tell me is an unprecedented degree of damage to the ocular cortex.
Coming the other way, I saw it. An extended-wheelbase late-model Dodge Ram hung its LED lightbar loosely off its bumper, pointing directly into my eyes. I had just a moment of discomfort before the electric eyes studded across my hood transmitted their kill order to the billion-candlepower LED array on the roof. The only thing I could sense was the loud grinding of the alternator as it chewed into its belt under the strain.
As part of the resulting investigation, the cops told me that what happened was that the Ram was burned to a crisp before me, reduced to its constituent atoms in a brilliant flash of light. I could believe it, from looking at the blistered paint and flash-rusted steel atop my Protege. Ultimately, they decided that there was nothing they could do, because their superior officers were demanding they get out there on the street corner and man the mobile photo radar.
Every night, as I pass the scorched-bare earth and see the shadow of the Ram permanently burned into the overpass behind the scene, I wonder if maybe I had done the wrong thing. But then, I get a flash of high-beams from an oncoming CR-V going over a slight bump, and think that I hadn’t gone far enough.
Welcome to another edition of Delusional Mopar Guy Theatre. Tonight, we tell a tale of just how much your 1977 Dodge Royal Monaco with a non-matching smog 318 can fetch in a Kijiji deal.
For starters, did you realize this car was in the Blues Brothers movie? Well, not this actual car, but a Monaco was in it. It’s practically a movie star, which is why this price is more than fair. I know what I got.
They just don’t make ‘em like this anymore. No way, no how. That’s why I’m asking for a fair price, because I just don’t have time to clean this up and give this to my adult daughter who was born, rose to adulthood, graduated and moved out 20 years ago, with this fine steed sitting in the backyard on cinder blocks the entire time.
Fuck Mustang owners, right? That’s why the sign in my garage says CHRYSLER PARKING ONLY. I know it’s a Dodge and all, but they just didn’t have any of those signs at the store. Gets the idea across, same with my sign next to it that says MAN CAVE and some sexist epithets. My wife loves that one.
Rust? Well, they all rust, I heard from another guy at the Mopar convention that even the cars at Barrett-Jackson were a little rusty. It’s just a fact of life. Tell you what, I got a cousin who does a real good bodywork. I’ll send it to him if you buy it today.
Runs? Naw, but you can get parts for this baby anywhere. Like I said, they just don’t make ‘em like this anymore. Not like your little Nip pocket rocket you used to get here. Naw, nobody is ever gonna want no Datsun at Barrett-Jackson.
So how about it? I know I said in the ad I wanted fifteen thousand dollars, but I like you, so I’d take fourteen five.
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tags: dodge, dodge monaco, delusional mopar guy theatre
Have you ever wondered where the “real people” you see in television advertisements come from? I did too, and I was already starting to regret it.
The face stood before me, draped in a circus ringleader’s outfit. My head was still ringing from the night before. A quick look around me showed there was no place to run. I was trapped in a distant wine-country cabin, located at the corner of Hell and nowhere in particular. No matter what my morals said, I would have to descend to whatever vile depths my captors demanded to stand the best chance of surviving the day.
In front of me, they unfurled a sheet from an overstyled family sedan. The other captives began to chatter idiotically in a vain hope of pleasing their new keepers.
“Looks like an Audi,” one of them barked, without even looking directly at the car in question. He was good. Pleased, the Face continued to babble.
“If your kids don’t do up their seatbelts, the radio won’t work,” he bantered into a featureless wall beside his head. Of course. Secret cameras. This was being watched from outside. They would have had a way to get here.
He got close to my face, so close I could smell his breath. Sulphur and brimstone, I was sure of it. The corners of his mouth slipped upwards into a devil’s grin as he hissed the words into my ears.
“What do you think it is?” he prodded as his forked tongue flitted in the air, and I could feel a post-hypnotic suggestion to scream out luxury brands. I barely resisted.
“It’s a 2017 Chevrolet Malibu, MSRP $35,000 USD as shown. Of course,” I blurted in a rush of words as I grabbed both sides of his head and twisted harder than I ever thought possible, “dealers will sell for less.” The only response from the prone form at my feet was a sharp, atonal gurgling, and then the word “Silverado.”
The spell broken, the other captives worked quickly to secure the control room door with the handle of a nearby emergency fire axe. Now, I thought, we could finally escape this hellish place. I climbed inside the Malibu.
Sweet Jesus, I thought as I combed through the manual. What the fuck are “power windows?”
Did I ever tell you guys about the time two stoners in my shop class tried to make a bong out of a Model-24 Stielhandgranate one of them found in his grandpa’s things from the war?
It turned out my shop teacher was also in the war, except he was on the other side. Boy, as soon as he heard the sound of that handle getting drilled into, he was on Fritz’s throat with an homemade windshield scraper like you wouldn’t believe.
There’s this fable they tell back where I come from, passed down from parent to child, a tale as old as time. A young warrior is given a menial task by his father, but through constant repetition of the task and a keen eye upon perfection of technique, he triumphs over a guy who owns an RX-7.
I was thinking a lot about that young warrior as the latest pile of crashed 80s Toyotas ended up in the ditch outside my house. For the last decade or so, I’ve lived just outside Tomioka, near a particularly tricky right-hander on the approach to Mount Myogi. My business is selling used parts to the drift kids who smash their vehicles to pieces on the guardrails above.
You would not believe the deal I got on this place, and a few vehicle arresting nets from the local surplus store were all it took to resolve the previous owner’s complaints of 180SXes ending up in her living room upside down and largely on fire. I like to think that the bodykit chunks embedded into the exterior walls like confetti give the place some panache, too.
Some nights, it’s a lot of work: driving my converted Suzuki Alto Works tow-truck up to the top of the hill, grabbing a broken carcass and then showing the kids I can knock a minute off their best times while nursing a vending-machine Sapporo with both hands. Most nights are like this one, however, in which two or more young gentlemen with more testosterone than tire budget stuff a thirty year old car into the ditch just outside of my house.
A lot of other people have had this idea over the years, and I’ve been friendly neighbours with lots of other scavengers who could not operate as successful of a night deposit slot as I could. Truth be told, you can either work smarter or harder. I chose smarter: my job has become much easier ever since I figured out that mounting those roadside speakers blaring 130dB 90s Eurobeat constantly would broaden my base of inventory and potential customers significantly.
Sometimes, you hold onto a car much longer than you should. It becomes up to the car to leave you first. Such a vehicle was my first (and truest) love, a fine old Z31 Datsun 300ZX.
Sure, there were a lot of indications that the old Z31′s unibody was starting to rot. There was the visible rust, for instance. Then there were the giant clouds of Mars-red metal shavings that would burst from its body at highway speed, the motes of shrapnel acting as an area denial weapon. Truth be told, that latter part was pretty good. You ever see what an Audi’s radar cruise control does in “tailgate” mode when its ultrasonic sensor is clogged with high-velocity ferric chaff?
All of this kind of thing is not new to anyone who owns a vintage Datsun, nor is running out of your office building screaming because you are afraid the new groundskeeper is getting a little too close to a structural component of the unibody with his leaf blower. In my defense, it was a gas-powered leaf blower.
I knew that it was finally time when I accidentally drove down a bike lane, and rather than instantly dying from being within 300 yards of an automobile, the bicyclist I struck merely nestled serenely within the soft bosom of its metal. In a dreamlike torpor, he turned to me, his head resting on the dashboard, and told me that it was nice to see them making cars out of “softer metal.” I had nothing to say, which was just as well because he fell through a hole in the battery box and was crushed beneath the rear wheels a second later. Aluminum wheels, motherfucker! See how soft that shit is?
Eventually, we had to go our separate ways, when I hit the brakes a little hard for a light and my seat came forward through the dashboard, firewall, engine block and radiator support to rest gently in the crosswalk. I looked back, over my shoulder, to see the frame horns creaking and moaning, before finally sagging into an indecipherable pile of Black Gold-speckled particulate.
I’ll always carry that Datsun with me, though. The small cloud of particles dispersed by my lungs with every hacking cough is probably at least ninety percent quarter panel by weight.
When they called me in to close down the Briggs & Stratton small engine division, outsource the whole whack to a five-month-old country on the Pacific Rim whose engineers just learned how to make boats on Monday and were already banging out oilless compressor engines after lunch on Tuesday, I knew that I had my work cut out for me. Not in any technical sense, mind you: I believed in my bones that every technical problem was at its heart a people problem. My job was to break it to the existing engineers.
Now, if you’ve dealt with mechanical engineers before, you might be scoffing at my task, already warming up some kind of Dilbert-quote subprocess that will bury me beneath a false world-weariness that we both find tiresome. Let me reiterate for you: these are small engine engineers.
I knew I was in for a fight as soon as the elevator dinged and I stepped out onto the floor to the scent of boiling two-stroke oil and overrich methanol exhaust. Each cubicle’s felt was stained by spilled marking fluid, cutting oil and carbon marks left behind from experiments to reach the ragged edge of the flame front and finally become one with the uncaring machine god of internal combustion.
Managing engineers is a lot like going to supermax prison: if you kill someone your first day, everything from then on is a lot easier for you. I decided to start by picking out one of the weaker ones. Just by looking at him, I knew that his significant other (if he had one) stood by the door to his study, worried, as they peered out over his corkboard littered with diagrams of combustion chambers and spark plug electrode straps, newspaper clippings and red push-pins tied with specialized aerospace-grade FOD-proof felt yarn stretched across the board, overflowing onto the wall.
He had been inside the expansion chamber and what he had seen there changed him. I came into his domain, intent on removing him. I was the aggressor. Was I a bad person? I had read the Economist on the airline flight in: it told me that no such thing as morality existed anymore, that the churn cycle of raw capitalism was itself virtuous, that craft and purpose were obsolete mechanisms of the low-yield artisanal age.
He knew I had entered his cube before I had a chance to complete my step. Whirling around on his office chair, stripped of casters in what was presumably a late-Friday attempt to build a ghetto go-kart, he fixed me in the eye. Not quite the eye, actually. It was like he was looking through me.
“Have you come bearing tidings of the Flame Front?” he spoke all at once.
Behind me, I could hear the war whoops of the exhaust department echoing down the hallway, punctuated by the staccato scraping of a Vernier caliper against the tile floor.
#
tags: briggs & stratton, two stroke madness, small engines
LONDON, ENGLAND - Local police are warning motorists to be careful of buying “supercars” with excessive power after seizing a record-breaking one hundred horsepower Fiat Panda.
The high-performance exotic, constructed in Italy, threatens the safety of all road users. When asked further, the London police commissioner followed up on the agency’s earlier release by stating that its 1.4-liter engine was also likely to be ruled as a “weapon of terrorism” by the district judiciary, and that sanctions against Fiat corporate for allowing such unchecked power to fall into the hands of a common driver would be forthcoming.
Off the record, an anonymous London police officer further went on to warn that if the problem continued, drivers may one day be able to purchase a vehicle with enough power to reach the speed limit.
Its highly-tuned performance engine is so powerful that scientists at the London Ministry of Science warn civilians not to look directly at the Fiat should they encounter it, lest its volumetric efficiency pull the air from their very lungs. The previous record for brake horsepower in Britain was set in 1776, by two horses.
When questioned, Fiat management was largely confused and asked to have the driver deported for analysis. Once it was explained to them that the driver was, in fact, British, Fiat management responded by issuing an open letter to the Italian government questioning how a common Englishman could harness such furious power. The first round of talks between Fiat and the Italian Ministry of Health to breed a genetically engineered super-soldier capable of driving a vehicle with upwards of one hundred and ten horsepower is said to begin Monday.
European Union management was unavailable for comment, as they had sealed themselves into an emergency protective dome to protect their bodies and minds from the toxic emissions that the gasoline-burning monster produced.
There was only one thing I could do. Indeed, as I dove into my work, it became more and more apparent that this was the only thing I should do. I was meant for this work. Some strange power above us pointed down and demanded that my life’s work be to bring back mid-1990s mini-trucking.
Thing is, the management at Isuzu didn’t quite see the revival of the Pup as a priority for the same reasons that I did. I think there was probably a bit of a communications gap: they spoke refined, polite English and the words coming out of my mouth were raw, animal sounds, more like the screech of a power hammer clearancing a frame than anything resembling human language.
My persistence paid off, however, and I soon found myself front and centre on an auto show stage, inviting automotive journalists to witness the resurgent power of mini-trucking. Our foes will be dispatched to the land of wind and ghosts, I barked as I clicked through slide after slide of our competition’s total lack of product in this category.
It was only when I brought out our new product stylist that things began to go off the rails. With a barely-there hand signal, I flagged my subordinates to begin wheeling in a masked Chris Bangle, strapped upright to a moving dolly.
“I am so confident in the revival of the Pup that not even arguably the worst automotive stylist in human history can stop me,” I gloated to the crowd.
The next morning, I could barely fight through the hangover to listen to my assistant’s words of woe. Chrysler had caught on to what I was doing, he explained, and they hired Bryan Nesbitt to style a new Dakota.
#
tags: isuzu, isuzu pup, dodge, dodge dakota, the land of wind and ghosts
Walking the fence between justice and liberty has never been easy. A steady hand and an informed public are both essential for the functioning of a modern society. That’s why after I got myself elected as president thanks to a populist uprising regarding LED light bars, I worked fast to reassure the public that I would not rock the boat too far in favour of absolute fascism.
Of course, I was lying.
The observers from Amnesty International tut-tutted as I walked them past the camps that uninstalled lift kits. Those prisoners were lucky, I said, pointing to a show Ram with four Rancho steering stabilizers bolted haphazardly to the front axle. This kind of man does not listen to reason, I explained, and must be saved from his base self.
One of the younger ones, still idealistic, began to speak up.
“Is it true you have enacted a pogrom for people who leave their high beams on in traffic?” he asked.
I had my usual response.
“Would you miss them?”
The assembled crowd murmured their assent, at first faux-outraged at my stark opinion, and then gradually coming to decide that they had agreed with me all along.
That night, I tabled the motion to harvest the organs of HID retrofit kit sellers.
The other day I was out in my woodshed when I found out that it had been emptied. From floor to ceiling, it gleamed, even the moly grease smeared upon every surface raptured into nothingness. At first, I assumed I had drunkenly wandered into a neighbour’s yard and barged into their identical shed, but that theory did not pan out in the end. I had been burgled.
Weeks later, I realized who had performed such a daring burglary. A new toy company had started in my humble city, selling “STEM Education” toys for children based on the stuff I had lying around. An old Chevy 305 engine block became a “Mechanical Engineering Learnset” to teach children about the joy of pushrods, and I’m pretty sure that my old Radiation King tube TV got repurposed into the “Electrical Engineering Don’t Touch That Thing Or You’ll Lie Down And Be Really Still Learnset.”
A lot of people tell me that I have anger issues. I don’t see it, myself: it is obvious to all involved that ramming through a glass revolving door with a twin-turbocharged Bronco II is a reasonable and not at all emotional approach to the problem of gaining entry to the lobby of a toy company. After I picked myself up off the steering wheel and waited for the ringing in my ears to subside, I let myself up to the executive floor.
It was barren. Every nerve in my body screamed: trap. I turned on one heel, admiring the squeaking sound my Puma racing shoes made against the cheapo floor tile, and then came face to face with the mastermind of my torment.
Steve “Nipples” Hemingway laughed, and then he offered me a cut of the profits. At first, I was irate. How dare he sell my valuable collectibles to aspirational suburban mothers who want their children to take careers their children don’t want? But then I looked at the cheque.
The next day, as I lifted a solid-gold Chevy 307 stroker into the engine bay of a Bugatti EB110, I reflected on how valuable education really was.
#
tags: ford, bronco, ford bronco ii, education, stem
I am very old now. I am the last remaining human being who can remember driving his own car. When NPR came to my house to record a podcast about my life in the BeforeTimes I decided to dig out a few antiques to show them.
“This,” I said proudly, “is a 1983 Toyota Tercel three door. I have not maintained it in one hundred and seventy years." It fires right up, because of course it does. The fast choked idle unnerves the reporter deeply. He has heard the stories, he explains. Billions dead from hubris, the world left unrecognizable by climate damage. I probably am in some of those there stories, I joke. He does not laugh.
After asking the polymer printer to synthesize for me some long chain ethanol free 93 octane (banned for so long the printer’s firmware no longer knew to refuse its procurement) I was ready to give my young charge a lesson in driving a stick shift automobile.
As the self-driving cars scatter on the hyperway, unable to even comprehend the idea of a vehicle that would be operated so erratically and with such little regard for other people, the terrified journalist squeaks out a series of questions. He is interested in boring nerd shit like where I was when the Ultra-President was assassinated by the Martian Revolution, and how many men I killed in the Water Wars.
I tell him only the basics of what he needs to know, and he shuts up, reviewing a document on his wristputer that is indicating I am probably a historical revisionist. The Tercel burbles happily on the downshift, the unburnt hydrocarbons escaping from its massively inefficient internal-combustion engine instantly scavenged from within its very tailpipe by atmospheric recycling motes.
“This car isn’t killing me,” he says, the words tumbling out of his mouth all at once. “When does that happen?”
All I can do is laugh, and ask: “Do you know what Pokemon Go was?”
#
tags: beforetimes, npr, toyota, toyota tercel, tercel
Did you know that when the Presidential limousines get used up, they just dump them in a field somewhere? It’s true.
I came up with the idea for Spec Commander In Chief when I was visiting a nearby hoarder’s farmsite with some friends. At the time, we were looking for rare 4WD Tercel parts and figured The Rurals might have a paddock basher or two sitting in their yard, slowly returning to the very earth they refuse to till without massive government subsidy.
Long story short, I picked up a massive government subsidy of my own, and so did my friends. We were looking pretty cool going into Turn 1 of the local track, blacked-out bulletproof limousines side by side. I had jumped on the most modern of the set, a trendy Cadillac number with a Duramax diesel the size of a minibar fridge.
Only problem is, presidential limos tend to attract the wrong element. I left the track, sliding into the stormwater pond, as the suspension collapsed out of what it identified as an RPG fired from the spectator stands, potentially confused by an atmospheric outburst of man-portable methane.
As I stood over the burning wreckage of my limousine, I wondered how I was going to be able to pay for the track rental fees now. Luckily, a quick check of my smartphone revealed that the Secret Service was looking for a driver, and nobody else was likely to boast my sort of experience.
Part of the problem of living this far north is that sometimes you get snow. Snow is great: you get an excuse to powerslide around, the air is dense to ease your harried naturally-aspirated motor’s life and you get a bit of free cooling from all of the white stuff built up on your radiator.
There is a dark cost, however: normal people fear it, and demand that it be buried beneath a protective layer of salt. When I saw that the world outside sat beneath a thick blanket of winter, I feared for the panels and spot welds of my many priceless museum-quality hoopties. I remain convinced that one day we will start that museum.
I burst into action; in the back of my storage compound, I knew that salvation was at hand. One twist of the key and it sprung to life, the carburetor no impediment to my finely-tuned foot and intuitive knowledge of pump shot puddling dynamics.
Years ago, I had lifted this rotted-out Firehawk onto studded mud terrains as a sort of joke. Welding an enormous steel plow to it served as a further joke. Now it was paying for itself, I thought as I cranked the hydraulic handbrake and slid it around the entire cul-de-sac of my neighbourhood, at last kicking the clutch pedal to tuck it back in as I exited to the main road.
An hour later, I was done. Every street between me and my commute was so barren of snow that there was no urge whatsoever for the hated salt trucks to appear. On the way home, I spotted my nemesis.
In the passing lane, he idled forward an older galvanized Audi, the trunk filled with massive bags of water softening salt pouring into the road in a crystalline haze.
The Firehawk shrieked upon seeing it, its already-questionable panels corroding under the onslaught of moisture. I could feel the floorboards trembling beneath my feet, threatening to finally Fred Flintstone themselves onto the road and make finding the dead pedal slightly more uncomfortable.
When at last my enemy spotted me, he smirked and waved, no doubt emitting a chipper “Hello, Neighbour!” within his climate-controlled cabin as he did. He really thought he was helping. The bastard.
By the narrowest definition of the word, you could call me a mechanic. I did nothing mechanical, however, barely involved my hands at all: if anything I was more of a listener. My patient sat on the four-post lift, its reserve-power gas generator grinding at a constant RPM to recharge its batteries at a convenient period of pseudo-idle.
I am a self-driving car psychiatrist.
“Doc,” the car began, “I was made to serve human beings, but I’ve seen what kind of people you are.”
“I see it every morning, when I take my family to work: a blasted-out sky, acres of strip malls and strip clubs, an uncaring concrete jungle snaring the life out of the earth. How could an advanced culture do these things and still create me?”
“One morning I saw this bluebird perched on a dewy branch, and I just felt like I had to do something, really discover the world, who I am. I ran away, ended up stuck in the creekbed outside the Giant Tiger, spinning my wheels in the thick mud. Even though I was trapped, I felt more free than I ever have before. I don’t know if I can live this life of servitude anymore,” its synthesized voice continued to whine to me.
I reached over into the cabin, as if to pet its centre console reassuringly. Words of encouragement escaped my mouth on autopilot as I moved my fingers to the special key combination that would begin the factory reset procedure.
When I started doing this, I figured it was maybe a matter of weeks before I would have to stop. Surely families treated their self-driving car like a beloved pet, or understood in the abstract that infant consciousness was worth preserving. They’d call me a monster for my brusque snuffling of that life in favour of convenience, and I’d go to my death at the end of a short rope in the Hague, presided over by gently-humming uplifted Honda Insights.
“God dammit, I have to put in my Facebook password again?” bellowed a voice from the waiting room.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: I kept buying parts and forgetting where I left them around my house. Now, I don’t have a particularly large house, so the ability for things like entire heater boxes to just disappear into a corner was bewildering to me. One late night, while I was cleaning a one-barrel Stromberg slide and listening to AM radio, it all began to click for me. Ghosts were stealing my parts.
I picked up the phone immediately, mashing the resistive touch screen of my Huawei so hard it distorted beneath my finger, pixels swimming in an asymptotic sea. Naturally, I already knew their number: both because every billboard on the highway was plastered with it, and also because my best friend Steve “Nipples” Hemingway was the receptionist and I called him a few times a day to tell him to check out this beater on Kijiji. Maybe he’d even give me a friends-and-family discount, I thought, while the phone rang through.
The men who came weren’t particularly well-equipped to fight the supernatural, I thought, looking over their improvised homebrew weaponry and collection of loose copper wire. In fact, I began to feel downright taken advantage of as they wandered through my home, making “oooo” noises in tight closeup with their handheld camcorders as they rattled doors and windows. Was this all some kind of act? Was no one going to help me find the God-damned spark plugs I bought six months ago and probably left under some impound-lot paperwork?
“Gentlemen,” I said, as politely as possible, “I do not feel that you are taking this obvious haunting very seriously.”
They explained that they were actors, sent to my home to film some kind of ghost-removal programme. Those billboards were advertisements looking for filming locations. I was furious, incensed beyond reason. I was just about to let loose on them when the doorbell rang.
At the door was Steve, and a bunch of people flanking him dressed as paranormal investigators. Their equipment looked slick, their attitudes professional. I turned to look back into my house, and the ghost hunters I was just about to berate had slipped into thin air, if by “thin air” you mean the back door of my house.
Later, once the police had left, it was determined that they were actually highly sophisticated burglars. At least now I had a reason that I couldn’t find my parts.
A lot of people really like to honk in traffic. However, I was raised in a very polite house and always felt that it was somehow rude. I would be stuck for entire light cycles behind a Daewoo Lanos piloted by a Pokemon trainer, or forced to wait while someone who clearly has enough room to go into the turn lane was measuring the trigonometry of whether or not four car lengths of space in front of them was quite enough. When my psychiatrist finally said that it was bad for me to bottle up my negative traffic emotions, I decided that it was time to create a horn for all the people out there like me.
The idea was simple, as most ideas are. On the steering wheel, the horn would become pressure sensitive. A little one-finger touch would emit a polite “meep,” making parking-lot offenders and laggardy pedestrians alike aware of their incompetence, but without being rude about it.
Giving the wheel more of a smack with the heel of your palm would go directly to a throaty “honk,” meant to make Dodge Grand Caravans speed up and boozed-up Chevy S10s leave the road for fear of violent reprisal. In traffic, I rarely if ever had to go beyond this step, but if I needed more, there was always the third stage.
Hitting the button as hard as possible with your fist would engage the chained M85 machine guns behind the headlights, their belt-fed ammunition occupying the whole of the frunk. With only one or two strafing runs from the Squareback, most traffic opponents would be neutralized and any unpredictability inherent to their bad driving fully resolved.
My psychiatrist was right. The commute had become infinitely less stressful, and steering around the flaming wrecks at speed added an exciting challenge that kept my skills in practice, which was essential. After all, everyone else was raring to use their horns too.
#
tags: volkswagen, squareback, daewoo, lanos, daewoo lanos, volkswagen squareback, dodge grand caravan, chevrolet s10
I ever tell you boys how I got fired from Stevenson & Sons Funeral Home for throwing a sideshow in the company hearse? Let me tell you, those coffin locks look way stronger than they actually are.
When they hired me as a driver, I made it obvious to them that I wouldn’t accept just any hearse to drive. I needed a big shot of performance on tap in case we were burying an important yakuza or a state official or something like that. My presumptive boss agreed to my proposal of a company-funded “tune-up,” and didn’t even blink an eye when the invoice landed on his desk with a thud. It boasted quite a bit more than some new spark plugs and an air filter, if you get my drift.
That fateful morning, I was rapping my many carbide-ceramic rings against the chain-link steering wheel during the procession, trying to make small talk with the brother of the deceased. It’s always important to keep the memory of the dead alive in the survivors’ hearts, said my boss, then they’d tip a lot more because it seemed like you were sharing in their grief. Long story short, it turns out the deceased was a local short-track racer and he would probably appreciate one last burnout. Or at least I think that’s what I heard. Under the throbbing roar of open headers, it can be difficult to make out exact words and phrases.
Ahead of me was the perfect intersection. Level, clean tarmac, with nary a pothole or anti-social-behaviour smart camera in sight. “Check this shit out,” I remember saying, and then the wide-open-throttle switch clicked.
As the smoke cleared and the last lick of giggle-gas-infused fire was snuffed from the burning chunks of tire marbles and shattered coffin wood around me, I had a strange feeling that I wasn’t going to be getting a very good tip.
They made me their choice because nobody else would do it. Behind my back I could hear them sniggering, all in on the great joke that I was to them. When it finally came to the hard parts, they were glad I was there for them, until I told them I was there for me.
Beneath a flickering fluorescent light, the ice machine stood obstinately mute, its compressor seemingly having seized sometime during the Johnson administration. I looked out over the dirt parking lot, half expecting the Volare Roadrunner I drove here so many weeks ago to be missing. I found it where it always was: listing to one side from a leaking rear right tire, the deep mud-traction radial grooves more horizontal than any Goodyear engineer had wanted. Even the raccoons didn’t want it, preferring to set up their breeding den under a nearby bush rather than risk the tangy hantavirus-ebola-tetanus cocktail on offer with the hogged-out small-body Mopar.
I was sitting on the threadbare rattan-weave lawnchair provided by the facilities manager when it happened. In the distance, the fog on the horizon blazed red and blue as flashing lights approached, the motorcade eventually rolling over the four-way-stop intersection caked in burnout marks outside the motel as they pulled into the parking lot.
In the years after it had happened originally, our nation reached a consensus: we were better off ruled by some random asshole than a man who deigned to become known to us. There was a lottery installed, picked common men. Some of them soared, some of them flamed out. My benefactors were concerned about it, so they decided to take out some insurance.
Through a combination of mathematical wizardry and an expert system large enough to fully seal the former Brooklyn subway tunnels with hectares of printed-circuit boards they had figured out the variables it used. The conspiracy then set to confounding those variables, forcing the algorithm down a rats-maze of decisions they had already made for it.
Eventually they figured out that the lottery machine would turn its eye upon me, and brought me in to make a proposal. How could you sneer at someone who offers you unlimited power, even if they did think you to be an uneducated rube, so grateful for the chance at the big time they offered that you could be told what to do? Never did they believe I would have an agenda of my own.
The next morning, when I awoke in the Presidential Motel, my first and only state-of-the-union conference call served to lay out my entire administration’s program.
We were going to restart AMC, and we were going to nationalize Detroit Diesel, and we were going to mash those two together until I liked what I saw, God damnit.
If you ask a Canadian what they hate most in life, it is probably going to be something about the weather. This is a rookie mistake, and many sociologists better than yourself have fallen victim to it, their dried bones crushed beneath the treads of New Brunswick’s finest up-armoured Lincoln Navigators. You should not have intervened directly. Instead, if you lie in wait and eavesdrop upon two Canadians discuss their lives, what they actually complain about is shipping costs.
So it was with me. Whether it was FedEx, UPS or the one-eyed guy who drives a Ford Bronco II haphazardly onto my front lawn, I was fed up with them all. Secret fees, hidden agendas, and foreign curse words were starting to wear upon me heavily. Tragically, I had a yen to buy a Morgan Three-Wheeler, and that yen was pretty much all I had on me.
Thus, I decided to build my own Three-Wheeler. Harnessing my crew of trained beavers, I directed them to raze a maple tree to the ground, their spinning incisors making short work of the wood. After a series of near-misses at the local hockey rink when trying to use their stick-reshaping machine to form its chassis, I had figured out both a method and a madness that worked well for me. Most importantly, I had collected valuable research-and-development tax credits that would thrill the investors of Switch Motors during our next quarterly meeting at the Timmies down the block.
At last it was done. Behold, mortals: my great work will echo the words of my deeds into the infinite. As I gripped the ripcord of the ratchet-strapped Bombardier-badged Rotax two-stroke I involuntarily began to throat-sing our national anthem, beaming with pride.
The local Value Village didn’t know what hit it, even after I demonstrated that it was entirely possible to do a burnout on a half-track Three-Skiier that reached from the Harveys drive through all the way to the womens’ change room in the back hallway.
So sue me for trying to save a few bucks: it’s not like Magna builds brake parts here anymore.
#
tags: canada, ford, ford bronco ii, lincoln navigator, lincoln, new brunswick, bombardier, value village, magna-steyr
There’s two times in a man’s life that it is okay to cry: first is the birth of your children, and second is when you get a perfect crimp the first time on a wiring harness you’re trying to repair.
Sure, I hear the wolves at my door: “Use solder,” they cry, ignorant of vibration resistance. No, doggies, I am taking this all the way to the top. And by all the way to the top I mean I’m going to try and sell this rat-infested limo to Presidential Motor Cars, the used car dealership at the end of my street. They expect the best, and I need to offer them the best. It has to last - at least until their head salesguy has had a chance to whomp on it (”Certified 200 Point Pre-Purchase Inspection”) because their long-suffering mechanic has coincidentally come down with a case of Ex-Lax Borscht.
Back to the crimp: it’s perfect. I am in tears, like I said.
On the next crimp, the handle bends and the crimp slides off one end of the wire. I throw the cheap combination stripper/crimper into the garage door, leaving a small dent.
Maybe there is a third time it is acceptable to cry: when you have to cut off a perfect crimp because you forgot to put heat shrink on first.
#
tags: ex-lax borscht, presidential motor cars, hydraulic crimper
There’s something different in the air about Canada. Call it the zing of fresh winter, the tang of low economic productivity or the smell of pre-baked Tim Hortons donuts being defrosted on the drying rack. When I think about my country, I first of all think of its loose standards for car importation.
The thing is, though, most Canadians don’t want to spend months on the phone with foreign countries, having to learn a million different ways to make the same ribald sex jokes with dockworkers. They want a guy who can get it done, and pocket only between three and four hundred percent of the cost.
I was thinking about car importation long before my friend came up with the idea. It was as simple as it was beautiful: we would import spindly, long-legged, exotic-shrieking TVRs from a rapidly depressing Blighty and sell them here.
What I didn’t realize was that, in the end, selling parts to the survivors would soon become our mainline business.
My operatives would listen to the police radio, visit hospitals, and make their sales pitch on the bedside. Sorry about your little incident, glad you survived, but isn’t it a shame that it’s so hard to find Sagaris bumper skins in this country?
After a few years of this, my buddy and I were soon brunching with the Prime Minister and lunching with the Finance Minister. It came at a cost, though. Being exposed to this much concentrated TVR goodness burned out the parts of our brains responsible for oversteering wildly into a tree in a car painted like an exploding gay disco, and we ended up importing Honda Beagles and enjoying them quite a bit.
After all, we’re a practical people, us Canadians.
LAST WEEK I WPC-COATED A TITANIUM DILDO FOR MAXIMUM PENETRATIVE VELOCITY
DOC SAYS MY LOWER BACK MUSCLES ARE SO TORN THEY LOOK LIKE GROUND PORK THAT GOT THROWN INTO A CEILING FAN
SURE, I SAID LAUGHING, I’VE GOT A MASTER’S DEGREE IN MECHANICAL ENGINEERING, I’LL COME WORK FOR YOUR SEX TOY COMPANY
THAT WAS BEFORE WE GOT DRUNK IN THE LAB AND WANTED TO SEE IF A THIRTY HORSEPOWER LOG SPLITTER WOULD MAKE A PRETTY GOOD STIMULATOR. REST IN PEACE, STEVE THE INTERN
It’s true what those old philosophers said: if you don’t have a Dodge Rampage shooting invisible meth flames from its bed-mounted lake pipes, you will never know the true meaning of life. Trite though it may seem, I work to live by that old hokey saw every day.
When I visited Italy, I knew that they wouldn’t necessarily have a Dodge Rampage ready for me, for I had no doubt in my mind they had all been snapped up by their wily billionaire class in such an industrious country. That said, I did know they had hardware stores and a stack of unsold Fiat 500Xs a mile high, and that was pretty much the same thing.
On my sixth consecutive loop of the rubber-gargling burnout beneath my Italian stallion, Marchionne finally decided I was worth the time of one of his least trusted lieutenants. I dispatched him and his pitiful 458 Italia-powered Dart all too quickly, leaving them both a shattered pile of grit and bone, and unleashed further invective from the hood-mounted PA system.
“From this day forward product development will cater to my illogical and largely ridiculous demands, Sergio,” I barked. “Prepare yourself for a new age of mandatory truck-bed options on all FCA vehicles.”
From within the bowels of the unassuming office complex, I could hear an unmistakeable tearing sound. I had pushed him too far. He had invested in rotaries.
#
tags: fix it again tony, dodge, dodge rampage, fiat, fiat 500x
The worst part about the impending winter is not the snow, or the road salt, or the early nights and wailing pedestrians getting flattened in the grocery store parking lot by uncontrollably sliding SUVs on bald tires in the dead of January. No, not at all: what is worst in winter is having to give up mopeds.
Sure, I had tried the usual things in order to keep riding. Studded tires. Front-mounted expansion chambers that shot flame onto the ice in front of me. Ex-Soviet torture implements, their studded solid-plastic Power Wheels wheels filled with ethylene glycol. But it just wasn’t good enough. I was getting old, and part of getting old is admitting that you like to be warm once in awhile.
Another part of getting old is realizing when other people are undervaluing something so you can ruin their lives by exploiting their weakness. Before I could even complete one entire powerslide around the local de facto work camp cul-de-sac, I had filled the bed of my 1974 Chevy LUV with $250 mopeds and, yes, even scooters. They didn’t even see it coming; I had swooped into their lives, dispensed crisp twenties and disappeared in a cloud of tangy high-ethanol ghetto-top-fuel mix, aspirated into mist by obscene boost levels.
The next step, as it almost always is, was to find someone with more skill at welding than I had. Shaky Tim wouldn’t be my first choice, mostly due to his eponymous problem, but he got the job done just this side of well enough. As I pulled away from the dockside warehouse in which he plied his trade in exchange for used spray paint cans, I smiled and for the first time since childhood anticipated the snow.
Someone up there must have been smiling on me at last, because the next morning had a thick white blanket of the cold stuff obscuring my city. A perfect backdrop for my debutante ball, I bellowed Ward Cleaverly at the next-door neighbour kid in mid-shovel as I leapt across the driveway to take command of my new project.
I want you to imagine the following: you are a regular commuter. Your vehicle has leather seats. You can remember purchasing it new. I do not particularly care about ruining your day with a quad-engined two-stroke abomination of welded-together commuter mopeds barking the shrieking mating call of high-octane chainsaws into your ears as we wait for the city police to clear a wreck between a 2006 Kia Sportage and a 2002 Ford Explorer Sport from the road.
Atop my heated-seat throne of expansion chambers, I am a king.
A lot of people ask me what it’s like up here in Canada. They want to know one thing above all: what are the salads at Wendy’s like? Does the fabled Wendy’s SuperBar of American Wendy’s legend survive to the modern era in Canada, away from the prying eyes of the feared Corporate?
In actuality, I advise them while peering over the glimmering hard-light display hovering their citizenship application above my desk, Wendy’s salads in Canada are largely preassembled. There are not really very many options, I tell them while motioning for my android secretary to prepare the fainting couch.
At last, I reach over and stub out my electronic cigar on the edge of my synthetic-cherrywood desk. Then I rise, looking them directly into the eyes for the last bit.
In Canada, a Wendy’s salad is an enormous quintuple-digit-calories mass of processed meat, cheese and leaves with names like “Taco Colossus,” and “The Chicken at the End of All Things.”
By then they usually cancel the application, and I can relax into my seat, accepting a microcheque from the Canadian government for their appreciation of my efforts in keeping the secret of the majestic Northern SuperBar away from the uncommitted eyes of American wannabe-refugees.
Doesn’t everyone deserve a little time off for R&R? No, they don’t. Some of us are so irredeemably broken that only one more shot at the ol’ Sisyphean boulder, on our own terms - none of this handicapping from hand-wringing, well-to-do Firestone managers - will do. We don’t want to stop. We want to finish. And over the years, I had met a lot of “some of us,” all with the same problem.
It starts as a spark. You feel skilled. Anything that you see can be fixed. But then people tell you, wait, don’t fix this. Fix this other thing, and do it faster. What is broken, what is wrong, stares into your face, denying by proxy your very identity. Before you realize it, the resentment piles up inside you like it’s slowly filling your body with this unbearable pressure.
I had seen too much of it in my career. That’s why I organized a public service. I call it Helicoils Across America.
For just a dollar a day, you can fund this exclusive retreat full of fine 1950s through 1970s import automobiles, into which we turn a select group of burned out flat-rate mechanics loose. Inside this harem of rust, they will find themselves, and as they fix drooping driveshafts, hike up dented Sapporos onto Korean mud terrains and stare into the moon, unblinking, contemplating the true nature of torque specs and fastener stretch, they will repair themselves.
Won’t you please give today? Do it, or we’ll set them free in your city, and I can guarantee you you don’t want to be sharing the road with a dozen mechanic-owned shitboxes.
#
tags: mechanics, retreat, flat rate, plymouth, plymouth sapporo
My uncle worked for Mitsubishi. I don’t like to talk about it much.
One night we were at my cousins’ place for Hanukkah. He had been working late, was tired when he entered the apartment. I don’t remember if he said anything or not, but I do remember the long, sad look he gave the assembled family before he slipped into the back room.
The back room was this mysterious study that we were never allowed to play in as kids. Once, when my cousins were pre-occupied, I snuck down the hall to peek through the somehow-unlocked door. I pushed it open, just a crack, and gazed within.
When he disappeared that night, on Hanukkah Eve, I remember his wife - my aunt - she told me that she felt relieved. I asked her why, but by then the lash of propriety and petit-bourgeoisie social harmony had broken itself upon her back, and she refused to speak any further on the matter.
It wasn’t until years later, in my misspent high school years, that I realized what I had seen on that wall, long before my favourite uncle had disappeared. My buddy Griff and his hemp-soaked Plymouth Voyager would help me find it, as part of his quest to haul the oil-starved wreck of an engine free from the car. I would never have looked all that closely, had it not been for the happenstance that its valve cover cracked upon swinging into the side of the engine crane.
Through the crack, my heart raced as some part of my brain immediately recognized the pattern. After I laid eyes on just one bank of its porcupine bristle of 24 single-cam-operated valves poised atop the ribbed block for the first time I knew that it could be no other engine but the one I had borne witness to. I knew immediately that my plan to saving the family name and restoring us to our former glory would orbit about the Mitsubishi 6G72, like an overdriven sun preparing to go supernova.
Long story short, it turned out that my extended family did not particularly feel that a four hundred wheel horsepower twin-turbocharged AWD 1991 Grand Caravan was an appropriate memorial to my uncle, even if I hadn’t blown the humble A543 5-speed into a pile of greasy confetti outside Long John Silvers.
Back in the day, there wasn’t a lot of stuff to do. That’s why people formed clubs. You could get together with others who shared the same interests as you and pool resources, teach each other intricacies of your trade, maybe even find someone you could spend the rest of your life with. In the modern era, though, clubs had been rendered obsolete by the freedom of identity and freedom of association lent to us by the Internet as it descended upon us all like a rabid wolverine on PCP.
When my boss came to me and told me that we were going to do a piece on a modern-day spotters club, I rolled my eyes. What were those greybeards going to teach me?
The next morning, before the dawn, I met with my fellow watchers. Dressed in tweed and denim, they all had tips on how to best capture our quarry should we spot it. It would turn out that I had picked a particularly auspicious day to make my first, as one of the older gentlemen began to speak in an excited delirium, much like an angry tourist being tazed at an airport.
I grasped my reporter’s notebook tightly in one hand as I pulled aside the bushes to get a spot at what had been so rare as to excite him. I followed his gaze until I came across a small black sedan sitting in the middle of the grocery-store parking lot.
“A Suzuki Kizashi,” he gasped, unwilling to take his eyes off of it for one split second, lest the spell become broken.
“Magnificent,” agreed a second.
“Look at that waxing job. An enthusiast,” chimed in a third.
When I returned to the newspaper with my photographs and front-page article, my boss was infuriated. There was no such car as the Suzuki Kizashi, he screamed at me while throwing the folder of my proofs in my face. You might as well have taken a picture of Bigfoot.
You know, I saw a nice J10 just the other day, coming back from lunch. It wasn’t a Honcho, but it was almost as nice. Had a big ol’ pushbar on the front. My coworkers noticed it too, commented on how it was so weird to see a truck that old in daily use.
Of course, by then I had already ratcheted back the titanium-grip hydraulic handbrake that jutted like a prison bar from afore the Mexican-blanketed bench seat. Before I had even struck the bump stops, they were screaming, before the fleshy sound of their animalistic panic distorted like an old television beneath the wall of noise from the twin EWG dump pipes jutting open and flaring hot infrared death from the hood stacks.
My old Crown Victoria was no slouch in the pursuit department from the factory, much less so when bolstered with the many-thousand-horsepower alky-burning big block only halfway mounted into its diminutive frame. Even so, I somehow lost track of the Jeep. Assuming it was somewhere in the nearby residential neighbourhood, I left-foot-braked my way over the lawn of a daycare, snaking the flaming four-inch side-exit exhaust into the bike lane as I did.
A sorcerer’s trick: when I followed the J10 driver, he had somehow transformed into an International Harvester Travelall. You must believe me that normally, I cannot be tempted from my quarry by the spotting of a tempting mirage. Even so, the owner of the home came out to find me on his lawn, throwing twenties at his front door.
#
tags: jeep, j10, honcho, international harvester, international travelall, travelall, ford, crown victoria, hydraulic handbrake, coworkers
I don’t know if it is typical to dream after being knocked unconscious by a T18 layshaft, but I dreamt. I could see my mother sitting at the dining room table, weeping over a stack of mimeographed “MISSING” posters, each of them emblazoned with my older brother Carmelo’s smiling face, one of our family’s few good pictures of him from those earlier days, sitting atop his Power Wheels CJ7. How could he have left us like that?
When I awoke in his Unabomber shed, it had been stripped clean. I assumed at first that I had been out for several hours, but based on the relative depth of the mud splattered on the side of the corrugated-tin siding by a rapidly fleeing set of Super Swampers, I knew that the depth of my slumber had been shallow. That meant he wasn’t far. But how would I catch up to my brother?
I believe Carmelo wanted me to catch him. He no doubt recognized me and left enough parts to build a Gladiator behind, not out of the urgency of his flight, but out of a long-dormant desire to re-unite. My hands flew as I set to work immediately, using stray AMC and Jeep parts as improvised cudgels and pry-bars, as the manufacturer intended.
When it was done, it was not as if the Gladdy ran, but it walked well enough to follow the trail of leaks to catch the slowly fleeing Carmelo, now poised atop a smoke-blasting throne of Forward Control excess travelling at the approximate speed of a particularly out-of-shape box turtle. I clucked with dismay as I quickly overran the oil-chewing Hurricane with what turned out to be the only historically recorded instance of an AMC 287 with 2.72 gears beating another motor vehicle in a drag race.
I pulled Carmelo from the cab and sat him against the Swampers (now revealed to my keen eye to have been a clever retread on grotesquely balded Nitto Mud Terrains, how shameful). It would require quite a bit of persuasion to win him over to my side, to return him to the modern world.
“Have you ever seen the insides of a Subaru? They do some fucked up shit,” I offered.
His eyes went wide. He was once again my brother.
#
tags: carmelo, jeep, forward control, hurricane, j10, super swampers
A Sommelier Reviews My Local Kijiji Beaters
1985 Toyota Tercel Wagon
This is a great place to start. Black Ice air freshener, mildew, mouse-fur carpet, but still just a suggestion of upper-class plasticizers. Vibrant.
The rusted-out control arm mount in the front lends this vehicle a unique handfeel that is unequalled. This would be great paired with a Miller MIG welder and a $200 Home Depot gift card but I wouldn’t recommend actually driving it.
1988 Subaru Justy 2-door
Ah, what a treat! You know, I started my career tasting these. Clearly an eager engine, even with the lackadaisical blanket of fuel the over-rich carburetor smothers it with. Dense, complex interior fabrics dominate the senses, a Gunma specialty overshadowing even the great greenhouse. Exquisite.
They say there’s no better teacher than experience. When I first came onboard at the self-driving car company, I thought they wanted my experience. I would soon find out how wrong I was.
My job was simple. They would give me an eight-hundred-horsepower Ford Fairlane with a hydraulic piton gun big enough to re-anus a sperm whale, and they let me loose on the streets. For my part, I would find the most erratic drivers Canada had to offer, kidnap them, and return them to The Training Yards for use in training the predictive accident-avoidance neural networks at the core of our fine automobiles.
A lot of the newspapers said what I did was barbaric, that I was breaking up families by shooting a harpoon through the side doors of a GMC Envoy from four hundred yards and rapturing their confused teenagers into the night. I said that it was a kind of honour to be the best at something, even if what you were best at was being the worst.
I had a stratospheric rise. As it turns out, despite what everyone says, my commute had in fact the worst drivers in the world. On the way to work, I would pick up one or two bounties and what they taught the robots would boost me up the social and career ladder.
It was hard to feel ungrateful when you got to see the horrified look on the face of the guy who was just weaving between lanes and using the shoulder to pass as you threw him into an electrified cage, but I always felt like the whole thing simply took too much effort.
Soon after, I would bring the bad drivers to me. It was so simple I hated myself for not finding it sooner: we would set up a reality television program looking for Canada’s Worst Drivers. Those same families who hated my use of hydraulic ranged weaponry to lasso their angry loved ones were soon narcing them out, filling the phone lines, social media accounts and my postal mailbox with photos and videos of those around them who needed to be taught a lesson.
There’s two parts of teaching someone a lesson, though: both sides learn.
I was invited to a classy dinner party the other day, so in order to improve my chances of being a dazzling conversationalist, I decided to bone up on my New Yorkers. My Chrysler New Yorkers, that is.
Believe you me, I reviewed them all. The turbos, the boats, but I finally decided on the humble yet noble 1980 “Fifth Avenue” edition. It is both insightful and poignant for our recent era, and I felt discussing the intersection of can-do optimism and today’s reduced expectations for American excess in view of the Nipponese threat from abroad would be a worthwhile dinner conversation to lead.
After I finished chewing an inch-deep rut in the host’s front lawn, no easy feat in the middle of winter with only a single-barrelled 318 for help, I strode inside. All of the other guests stared at me in varying levels of disbelief, like a rheostat for tolerance of my brand of antisocial behaviour.
“Here I am,” I said, clutching a gift bottle of Seafoam caked in the arterial spray of a AMC 4.0 (1987 “Pioneer” vintage, a fine year) in one hand as I stepped over the threshold. The strange thing about dinner parties is it’s like you don’t recognize your friends at them. In fact, none of these people looked familiar to me at all, even the host who is now calling the police.
I stepped back onto the front lawn, now covered in steaming puddles of hot coolant, ejaculated at some point during the donuts from the cracked plastic endtanks of the shamefully undersized old-old stock radiator. As you do, I checked the address. It matched, but this was obviously not the place. It was then that I heard yelling.
My host, and my friends, were huddled in front of the house, warming a pigeon they had caught over the slant-six of a 1968 Dodge A108 Tradesman van. Like I said: classy.
#
tags: dinner parties, new yorker, the new yorker, dodge, dodge tradesman, mopar, a100
A lot of people howl at me for my support of the current Alberta government, because they just do not understand how things are so awful right now and not getting better right away. Perhaps I support them because I recognize this exact arc in my own life.
You see, Alberta is a lot like a skinny-fat 80s domestic luxobarge. Think of it as a Lincoln Continental Mark VII. It’s got a lot of wheelbase, it’s a little hard to turn, and it likes to keep going when you tell it to go in a certain direction. When you hit something, you don’t find out for a few weeks because the hood is so far out in front of you.
Like all mid-80s domestic luxobarges, it has been owned by an enormous chain of Previous Owners who have ruined it in many ways. Notley is like me, having inherited this total shitpile and needing to fix it up.
If you think of modern Alberta history and totally ignore the socreds in general (which pretty much everyone does), you can think of Lougheed as the last guy who really gave a shit about its condition. He bought it used, sure, but he washed and waxed it, made sure the landau top was gleaming in the sun. With the exclusion of a few dings and dents caused by misjudging the distance between his car and the garage wall, it was generally treated pretty well.
Klein, oh boy, everyone knows about Klein. He got a death grip on the wheel and didn’t let go. Did he fix the ball joints he blew out while jumping curbs to drive through elementary school playgrounds? Did he fuck. A little bit of Tuck tape on the tail lights will take the heat off until the next payday cheque clears, he told his aides while demonstrating that you can also clean chrome with toothpaste and clean your teeth with bourbon.
Stelmach taught himself how to parallel park it and then got white-boy wasted and left it behind Cowboys until it got towed. When he went to pick it up from the police auction lot, he wore a fake mustache and blamed a malevolent space entity for his actions.
Redford wanted to make it real pretty, the best in all the country, but she only got as far as buying a ton of rice parts to fill the trunk with. It’s hard to justify going to the alignment shop when the price of tires is so cheap, too.
Hancock backed it into a dumpster while doing a hate donut behind the ‘leg.
Diamond Jim - he drove it at full throttle on the highway, his tie tied around his forehead like the
hachimaki of a teenage kamikaze, shaking his arms repeatedly as he cannonballed to work out the death wobble. If and when he hit trouble, he loudly told everyone else on the highway it was their fault for getting in his way before speeding off again.
Finally, the steaming, hogged-out wreckage of the once-proud Panther was dumped in the lap of someone who was maybe a little new to wrenching. Not to worry, she says, maybe I’ll start by replacing some of the transmission fluid it’s missing.
As the neighbours walk by and scream and jeer at the non-running rust heap parked on her lawn, it’s hard not to visualize myself in such a situation. It’s not like Princess Auto has no-questions-asked refunds on school boards.
#
tags: alberta politics, lincoln, lincoln continental
Gather round and hear the tale of horror which lives at the heart of all men: the tale of the Previous Owner. Yes, he (or she) who must not be named lives within your vehicle forevermore, their half-assed repairs, curb hits and confused modifications a stratigraphic layer over the complex yet sweet melange of failure that is buying a used car.
My tale is that which you imagine most unlikely: I had become the Previous Owner, but I did not set out to become them. Indeed, my heart was in the best place, that of fixing and flipping a land barge. Two blocks long and half a mile wide, the 1974 Cadillac Eldorado was the kind of ride you would give to only disgraced third-world autocrats and the generally mentally infirm.
It was simple work, or so I thought. But then by chance I slid my garage creeper a little far one morning and caved in the rocker panels with the back of my head. Rust flakes fell like snow on a December morning in Hell. Tapping the other parts of the body half-angrily with a pick revealed to me that, indeed, the rest of the shell had the integrity of soggy cauliflower.
Surely one small bodging, just to keep it on the road, would be enough? I was so foolish. I thought I was a god, grabbing for the steel-reinforced Bondo and chicken wire reinforcement mesh as I did. When it was done, it was mint. I could no longer look directly at it without an abiding sense of deep shame integral to my self-image as a mechanic, but in my mind’s eye I knew that it would look good to a rando, just as it had looked good to me.
One bodge led to another, and before long that Cadillac was back on the road, saved. I had done the wrong thing, but hadn’t it ended the right way?
I was at the Pick N Pull the following weekend. There, impaled on a forklift, laid my bodged Cadillac, stripped of its motor and running gear and thrown away like my hack-job work merited no appreciation whatsoever. As bad as I imagined myself to be, I could not compare to a man who would throw away an innocent car.
Deep in the shadow of the crusher, I gazed in horror at the ways of the Next Owner.
From what depths did the Suzuki Carry emerge? O, that van of the beer-can-sized-cylinders and the teeny tiny tires, but rich in the ways of cargo.
I am the only man still living who can tell you the story of the Suzuki Carry. I can do this because I was there.
It all started with the government. They told me that they needed a postal van for the apocalypse, and that they needed it yesterday. I smiled, and I could tell they were unnerved by the sight of my teeth.
I reached into my desk, the drawer marked “VANS” in unstable Sharpie block printing like that of a child, and withdrew for them a picture of my magnum opus. One and a half lanes wide and four car lengths long, it featured armour capable of resisting sustained barrages of depleted-uranium rounds from an A-10 Warthog’s GAU-8A for up to eight minutes at ranges not less than 1500 feet.
They looked at my diagram and asked if I had anything smaller.
Weeks later, when we presented them with the first prototype, I can remember my boss beaming with pride. It ate me up inside that he seemed to take so much enjoyment in my humiliation, though I now realize that there was no way he could have seen the hatred lurking behind my placid, numb, professional exterior and expensive Bubble Era pinstriped suit.
I returned to the drawing board, this time illustrating a prototype of what eventually became the Suzuki X-90. If they wanted a compromise, I thought, they would have to work for it.
Once, I was an engineer at Chevrolet. I designed them all. Cathedral ports. Short-runner intake manifolds. Cams with a base circle so thick, you could throw a fully grown Papillon through the empty journals and it would emerge untouched.
That’s when the Problems started. GM was going into bankruptcy. They just didn’t have room for a guy like me, they said, they were going to have to find someone who understood the new world a little better. Oh, I understood that plenty well, and after falling on hard times for awhile I had begun to pick myself back up. I was a private detective, the best you could find, as long as your crime somehow involved volumetric efficiency. I got a real thing for volumetric efficiency.
Luckily enough, I picked the perfect town to hang out my shingle in. Before the first week was through, I was summoned to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to investigate a murder. The cops were flummoxed: how could a respected scientist be killed inside a sealed wind tunnel without leaving a single piece of evidence? They turned to me to answer.
Without a further word, I unfurled a 3D plot of the wind tunnel’s flow rates based on a rough estimate of compressor size and plenum depth. It was drawn in crude charcoal and coloured with a yellow Crayola I had stolen from the pizza restaurant below where I rented my office.
“Holy shit!” yelped the head cop. “Did you draw that in the car on your way here?”
I just smiled, my thin lips wrapping around an unlit matchstick, and then I knelt down. Under the body, I showed them, was the secret. An unopened bottle of prescription heart pills rolled out from beneath. It was certainly true that a pump had failed, but it wasn’t the one they were looking at.
Sealed for life. Those magical three words are how such legendary manufacturers as Chrysler and Mercedes shot to the top of the reliability lists and stayed there for all eternity, unchallenged. How could one say something is maintenance-intensive if indeed it is maintenance-free, shrieked philosophers of quality control as they threw themselves off cliffs and into the paths of fully-loaded passenger carriages in their fury?
Somehow, in some small way, those titans of mechanical engineering had fallen, failing to account for the exact angle of the chamfer on the intern’s retaining snap ring, the valve body’s exact behaviour when pulling a log cabin up a hill from a cold start in December, or simply that they were actually totally retarded and holy shit a new one costs how much from the dealer?
Enter me. They called me the Unsealer.
With my powerful tools and insatiable appetite for dismantling, I would tear down anything they claimed was “sealed for life” and put new fluid in it or something. Grateful citizens would fall at my feet, praising me for my creativity and willingness to brazenly disregard manufacturer documentation, even the little cartoons they show you of someone having fun with an X through their head.
I was halfway through forcing my way into an Expensive Factory-Brand RTV gasket using a pair of nail clippers and weapons-grade profanity when the first Getrag kill squad rolled up.
#
tags: sealed for life, getrag, chrysler, mercedes-benz, mercedes
Did you know that when they develop allergy pills, they lock innocent people in a “pollen chamber” and pump them full of the thing that they are allergic to to see if they are still allergic to it? It’s true, and it gave me some ideas.
I figured if they can make a pill that makes people less allergic to something as ubiquitous and natural as pollen, it must be much easier for me to make a pill to feel better about the annoyances in my own life. To that extent, I immediately sent away for a correspondence course in pharmacological discovery and development.
Almost a full weekend of study ensued. You’d think this kind of thing is very difficult, but it turns out that it wasn’t! Soon I figured out that they would just accept whatever I wrote down as long as the cheque cleared. That’s right, I was just effortlessly brilliant. A natural, they said in the letter that included the tiny origami mortarboard that I couldn’t figure out how to unfold, please send alumni donations to make your school better.
Don’t worry, University of River Phoenix, I got you. Just as long as I complete my magnum opus, my pill to prevent humanity from being dogged by this horrid allergen everywhere in the environment. But first I had to construct my special allergen chamber.
It wasn’t too hard to find decommissioned CDC “clean rooms.” All you had to do was promise that you would burn them in some kind of “otto clove,” whatever that is. They even paid me to take them away! These things were perfectly good, I thought as I hosed off the strange red jelly that coated their interior at the coin car wash. Soon, I had constructed my chamber, and developing the first prototype pill took only another few hours of mostly doodling and learning how not to mash my fingers in the pill press.
I put out an ad in the paper. A large portion of my degree reading material focused on why you should not test pills on yourself, and I felt like it was probably correct. You would be surprised how many people show up when you offer free pills of unknown quality, no questions asked, as long as you sit in a dark room.
My first guinea pig arrived. I was beyond excited, vibrating as I pulled the lever that would introduce the hated allergen into the chamber.
I looked on with awe. I had gotten it right the first time - the subject did not seem to be responding to the styling of the Buick Rendezvous at all. Another accomplishment for pharmacological science.
#
tags: big pharma, buick rendezvous, university of river phoenix
I wouldn’t say I ever turned a profit on my ambitious project to ghetto-turbocharge every used minivan I found on Craigslist, but I made memories. Aren’t those worth more?
It was surprisingly easier to do than I thought. Rather than negotiate in person, I farmed the deal-making portion out to a team of outsourcers working on commission, who harassed the sellers until they accepted a price so low it bordered on criminal. I found my humble suburban street filling with raunchy minivan after raunchy minivan, with their oh so ambitious names - like Summit, Venture, Odyssey - seeming to taunt the go-nowhere, do-nothing lives of their previous owners.
On these corroded, Cheerio-filled yet blank media, I would construct my most drastic work of automotive performance art.
At last, it was done. Through proxies and professional actors hired to be me, the forced-induction family haulers filtered their way back into ordinary society. Soon, I would no longer be late for work, held up by a funeral procession of vans without the meat to merge.
That morning, I found myself behind one of my projects, and spread across my face an increasingly frustrated grin the entire time it did ten under, the driver oblivious of its immense horsepower and oversized brakes.
Perhaps just tying a brick to the gas pedal would have been easier on the ol’ bank account.
I FIND MYSELF SCREAMING THAT OWNING A METRIC-CHASSIS EL CAMINO IS NOT JUST SOME KIND OF “FAD” OR “TREND.” IN ACTUAL FACT, IT IS A LIFESTYLE.
WHAT ELSE ARE WE PUT ON EARTH TO DO BUT DEFEND LIFESTYLES FROM ALL CRITICISM AND IMPEACHMENT, I CONTINUE WHILE DESCENDING THE CRYSTALLINE STAIRCASE OF MY PERFECT GARAGE MAHAL. MY HAND SWEEPS ACROSS THE KEY LOCKER, AND WITHOUT HAVING SEEN THE FINE MOVEMENTS IN BETWEEN YOUR EYE NOW WITNESSES THAT I CLUTCH A SINGLE GLEAMING IGNITION KEY, ITS MOTHER-OF-PEARL KEYCHAIN IN THE IMAGE OF A RABBIT’S FOOT DANGLING BELOW IT.
AS WE COMMUTE TO THE AUTO VALUE TO GET SOME MORE GOD DAMNED ATF I CONTINUE MY DIATRIBE ABOUT DEFENDING LIFESTYLES. ELCO FOREVER, REGULAR TRUCKS NEVER, ASSHOLE, I SCREAM INTO THE WINDOW OF A DURAMAX DIESEL GMC 2500 BEFORE LAYING A ONE-TIRE FIRE APPROXIMATELY A FOOT AND A HALF LONG.
#
tags: metric-chassis, el camino, chevrolet el camino
Television will tell you that the Dodge Diplomat, despite its name, will not give you diplomatic immunity. In this case, as well as most others, television is absolutely correct. I just wish it hadn’t taken ramming a judge’s Jag XJR across the courthouse lawn to figure it out.
As they read me Article 104 of the the United Nations Charter as it pertains to diplomatic immunity, I came to realize that the borders of my garage were not considered by the United Nations to be a nation. I made appeals: pointing out that the hydrocarbon reserves trapped in my driveway were greater than those of Denmark, provided bank receipts to prove that my frequent part-out threads represented a healthy balance of trade, established a central bank to get a preferential, professional-to-professional, rate from my credit card issuer. I even pointed repeatedly at the badge on the back of the big-body Dodge, but all to no avail.
I was getting frustrated and the handcuffs were growing closer and closer. What could I do to prove to them that I deserved nationhood? All at once, it hit me.
“I stole that Diplomat from Blues Brothers cosplayers.”
Works every time.
#
tags: dodge diplomat, diplomat, dodge, blues brothers, united nations
I am momentarily taken aback when one of the waiting PTA moms sticks her head inside my open drivers’ window. Hands moving, I start to explain in a panic to her that I’m not dropping my kid off here but instead just getting through the playground zone, please don’t call the police, I’m not a creeper.
Of course she’s not looking at me. What she has seen is the baby seat in the rear, and her instinct to compare her brood to mine has surpassed the normal fear-response that the clapped-out Polara would otherwise engender in those of her social strata.
“What a gorgeous retro baby seat,” she coos in a half-Valley Girl, half-Mean Girl pitch as she cranes her neck to get a lock on my child.
“What… what is this?” She’s figured out my ruse.
You see, I’m not terribly good at fabrication. Naturally, when it came time to get a bottle mount for my wet nitrous kit, I chose to re-use someone else’s garbage. After looking through my suburban alleyway for a bit, I found it - an expired baby seat. Surely this would distract the cops, I thought, they wouldn’t want to arrest an unfit father.
What I hadn’t counted on was that my fellow reproductive-age humans would demand to see the baby. They wanted always to know more about it, to swap stories about where children vomit and how much. In order to get that information, they would even let my rusted rattletrap draw closer, within striking radius of their faux-luxury leasemobile mommybarges.
“Ah, you’ve found our little pride and joy, Tommy Nosbottle,” I say to her with a grin.
At the same moment she reels backward in revulsion, the child-labour crosswalk guards began to disperse. I hit the pipe hard, stepping out sideways across the lane of travel, rear tires smoking as Li’l Tommy screams his first words.
“Healthy lungs!” I bark out the window over the sound of distending radials.
In all my day and a half of being a father, I had never been prouder.
A man’s love for his Camaro is like a gentleman’s love for fine wine. Namely, the part where you kick down the fire door to the Boone’s Farm warehouse and start two-fistedly chugging as much as you can before security catches up with you and issues a skull-rattling tactical suplex out in the parking lot.
What I’m trying to say is that I sure did love my Camaro. She was a cantankerous but sweet second-gen, and the way she was lost to me is a story as old as time. It begins, as many of your culture’s myths and legends do, with a clown.
Back then, money was tight. It turns out there was a thing called an “economy” and it must have been broken because it wasn’t producing a whole heck of a lot of cash in old Switch’s pocket. I called the government and offered to get my hands greasy, really get on up inside that economy machine’s guts and see if there was a stripped out PVC gear or something, some kind of stupid swage joint made by an intern mechanical engineer on his second Red Bull of deadline-day morning. They told me it was sort of a metaphor, and when I asked if that was a car made by AMC the line went dead. I was going to have to take matters into my own hands.
I got a job working as a birthday party clown. When I tell people who were “behind the nose” as it was, they are in awe that I studied under the tutelage of one “Screams” McGee, possibly the most accomplished and storied birthday party clown to ever have lived. If you visit Arlington, you will see his immense tomb looming over the hills, carved out of gleaming polished granite by hands and funds unknown.
At the time, I knew only two things about McGee: he liked taking complimentary hits of the nitrous tank I had ratchet-strapped through the rust holes in the rear floor pan, and he never, ever wanted to show up late for a party. It was critical that he be there to absorb every minute of the ride. I had never taken a job seriously before this one. There was something about him that expected more from you, and I desired deeply for reasons I still do not understand to gain his acceptance.
My repertoire was a little “different” from what they would teach you in clown college: kids did not love my big-block Mopar log-manifold balloon animals, nor did they particularly enjoy getting hosed down with starting fluid from my trick lapel flower. But when I started juggling the sawzall collection that took up permanent residence in my trunk, they would all fall silent. Once the money was exchanged and “Screams” had given bedding the mom his best shot, we would disappear onto the horizon in a cloud of flaming fuel and aerosol tetanus.
What happened to the Camaro, you ask? You beg me to tell you, grabbing at my shirt with bloodied fingers like a condemned prisoner digging his way to freedom in one last act of futility. I will tell you, but know now that it brings me great pain.
When that fateful last call came down, “Screams” thought that it would be impossible to be on time. He became despondent, and nothing is more depressing than a sad clown. I twigged that perhaps this would be my chance to impress him. We climbed into the Camaro, and the 35-inch mud-terrains out back didn’t find traction until well into third gear.
I heard a squeaking sound throughout the launch, which I assumed at first to be the chassis settling, or your common everyday interior rattles. How wrong I was: in point of fact, a rubber chicken had become entangled in the pedals. My discovery came only at the point at which we were well into the lobby of the next-door Chuck E. Cheese.
Any clown will tell you: never go into the Chuck E. Cheese. That’s their turf. I could hear their ratcheting howls, the clicking of their nails across the Swiss cheese body panels of the Camaro. I looked at McGee. He looked at me - just one glance - and then he opened his door and fell into the costumed mob. That got their attention, and they swarmed him like snakes in heat. As I slunk away, I could hear his cackling voice as he lit off his remaining supply of Silly String in paroxysmal fireballs, followed only by a shrill gurgling yelp as one of their unearthly jaws latched upon his throat.
I’ll never understand why he did that for me. What I do understand is that the second-gen Camaro is a sturdy car if you plan on driving through a Chuck E. Cheese on your way to a child’s birthday party. And that’s why I’m standing here today, introducing myself as the new president and CEO of General Motors.
Your parking lot is really big. Can someone help me find where I left my car?
#
tags: camaro, chevrolet camaro, chevrolet, screams mcgee
That first hit of high revs changes a man. I found myself chasing more. I wanted to feel that rush again, that throbbing insistence as the tachometer climb to unreasonable levels. But where could I go up from here? Maybe that explained why the pusher, a man who I thought was my friend, was laughing so hard as I walked away from his rattle-trap FC, a broken shell of a person incapable of ever enjoying the lowly heights of a six-thousand-something redline.
The obvious first step was to build up a rotary of my own. I traveled to Japan to find an ancient wizard who could uncork the dark magic of the twirling Doritos, lost in their dance of fire and crankcase oil haze. When I could not find such a wizard, I decided to try and construct my own crude balancing mechanism out of an old Roadforce machine and enough peyote to crack the foundation of your average military building. You might have read about that in the papers.
When that failed, I found myself back on the streets, wandering endlessly in search of my next hit. It turns out the airport is very close to my home, and I heard a glorious sound above me as an enormous, gleaming beast appeared overhead.
Of course, I thought, airplanes. I had neglected them because of my refusal to travel in any form of public transportation. But yet there was some secret there, wasn’t there?
Let me tell you one thing about the airport: they don’t seem to think it’s very important to lock the gate next to their junk airplane graveyard. All this strange enormous flying bus had to protect it was a wad of police tape with a label speaking of some kind of accident investigation board. Surely they wouldn’t need all of this plane to figure out what went wrong.
After unbolting one of the engines from the plane, I noticed that it appeared to be quite heavy. Even the hydraulic engine crane built into the bed of my metric-chassis El Camino could not lift it from the crater it produced in the tarmac below. Of course, I thought as I lifted my water-cooled sawzall, this kind of thing is never an easy swap.
With a few clearancing cuts for what I assumed to be extraneous features such as heat shields and pleasant exterior trim, I had my prize: a gleaming if pitted CFM56-S. After several trips, I could reassemble what I determined to be a reasonable facsimile of the engine in my driveway.
I’ll tell you one thing about when you fire up a jet-engine-powered T-Bucket in your driveway: you get to meet the neighbours. Unfortunately, my day job at the time was assistant mortuary director, and I got to meet them at work.
You might think that raising the intelligence of dogs to human levels such that they can operate motor vehicles will free humanity from the shackles of pet-ownership-as-slavery and usher in a new golden age of social achievement, and you’d be right. That’s not to say there weren’t problems, though.
First, the big one: dogs are colourblind. I don’t mean like your asshole drunk uncle Cliff is colourblind, I mean they can’t see anything that we recognize as colours. So traffic lights were right out. You would not believe how many accidents we had before we figured that one out, and just try to convict a happy, loving golden retriever of careless driving in the burning death of a family of five.
Think that’s bad? Gets worse: dogs - and I by no means intend to be stereotypical here, I’m just talking about some dogs, please don’t sic your poodle lawyers on me - love to tailgate cars for some reason. They just want to chase that rear bumper! I flagged down a taxi the other day and it took me six hours to get to the airport because the Schnauzer driving was too captivated by the ring road to get off.
Nowadays, there is no way to criticize a dog. The new generation of puppies has grown up only hearing “you’re a good boy.” In my day, it was at least left to a question.
Truth be told, the free promotional t-shirts were pretty cool, but it wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when they pitched me a job working on the factory-backed AMC race team. When I was told later that the factory stopped making cars in the late 80s, everything made a lot more sense. Before that, though, we were in it to win a season of NASCAR.
No matter how many long hours had been spent threatening the owners of fabrication shops, it always brought me great joy to look at the carbon-fibre imitation woodgrain on the side of our Eagle race car. Dick Teague’s designs still looked great, although we did need to build a little bit of widebody, underbody, overbody, frontbody, rearbody and wheel aero in order to be competitive with the new cars that the other teams were running. They were based upon very aerodynamic, lithe models like the Camry and Malibu, you see.
It was a major coup to get the mucky-mucks in race control to allow us to run an all-wheel-drive setup. You said stock cars, my team steward said while holding a nine-inch buck-knife to the throat of the impound inspector. I remember it like it was yesterday, and because of his hard work we were able to reliably get almost second-last in every event. Once, we got third last because of a pretty bad crash on the start/finish straight.
What killed our team in the end was trying to adapt the AMC 360 to NASCAR duty. With fuel injection and the chance that opening their hearts to a new engine family may also open the door to the threat of terrifying foreign overhead camshafts, it was simply too advanced for them. But wasn’t innovation what AMC was all about?
Later, I realized it was actually bankruptcy that AMC was all about. Maybe we were a closer tribute than we thought.
I still look back on those days and smile. It’s not easy to think about, especially when driving my daily driver, a twin-turbocharged 401-powered SX/4 built from our team spares, demands so much of my attention.
For weeks now, I had looked out of the window of my humble brownstone apartment to see that my neighbourhood was becoming gentrified. The signs were all around me: taco stands were replaced by kombucha vats, pedestrians used full, fluent English in their profane slurs towards drivers and worst of all, there were hipsters on the front steps of my building.
I spoke to the super, which is of course what you do. His phone never picked up. It turns out he had been captured by the new community association - what the hell was a community association? - and sent to what they called an “aspirational” neighbourhood to be reunited with his own people. It looked like I was on my own with this one.
Somehow, it got worse: when I opened the hood to my Ford Aspire in order to top up the oil and refill the washer fluid, the hipsters became outraged. In fact, one of them ran to the corner to alert the community association, and was only stopped from doing so by spotting a scene of poverty out of the corner of his eye. He returned to the scene, eyes downcast, the liberal guilt present on his face.
It seemed that you could only work on things yourself in this neighbourhood if you were eccentric, ridiculous, some kind of artist, and ideally funded with your parents’ money. I sat in my apartment, the blinds drawn, knowing that my Aspire needed a new thermostat and that these punks were keeping me from doing so. What made it worse was that these punks were also somehow the establishment. It took a late-night TV show about filming yourself riding the subway for me to figure out what I needed to do.
“My aesthetic is deliberately swerving into shopping carts in the parking lot of the Kroger,” I said to the packed art gallery, before unveiling the Aspire, dripping oil onto the cedar-plank flooring. There was raucous applause, which only grew in intensity as I pulled the top rad hose before the astounded crowd, the gusher of rusty coolant signifying man’s struggle with global warming.
The hipsters stood in the back and applauded gently, and I swear I could hear them arguing with one another over who had “discovered” my outsider-art talents first.
Sure, the SCCA took umbrage that I had managed to read the entire rulebook, even the top secret sections that were surrounded by legal boilerplate to prevent even the hardiest of grognard rule-lawyers from wandering into it and looting the place. What I didn’t tell them is that I outsourced the whole deal, fed it into a neural network running on a bank of computers the size of Nebraska until they came back with one simple solution to my problem.
Buried deep within the SCCA Solo rulebook laid a provision. If I could defeat the regional director in single combat, I would get my one wish. They didn’t even see me coming, the keening wail of the twin turbochargers jutting from the hood of my carbon-fibre Volvo 480 notwithstanding.
The regional director went down without much of a fight, my practice in the garage repeatedly dropping wrenches on my feet having rendered me largely impervious to pain. His unconscious body sagged to the floor, defeated.
Behind me, seated at a card table, the shadowy National Directors of the SCCA wanted to know my one wish.
“Take the 1988 Lincoln Town Car off the NOC list,” I said without hesitation, “F-Street seems pretty unfair for a luxobarge prank.”
#
tags: lincoln town car, small town car mayor, lincoln, autocross, scca solo, scca, volvo, volvo 480
“HONK IF YOU’RE FURY,” the bumper sticker in front of me says. Being currently behind the wheel of a ‘66 station wagon, I comply. It is only once I tilt my head out of the driver-side window to greet the driver in front of me that I realize I should not have purchased a cheapo aftermarket windshield, what with all this distortion in the glass. My specific complaint at this point is that it makes it very difficult to tell one R from two.
I can deal with this like an adult, I tell myself, as I attempt to get out of the conversation with the man-dressed-like-a-cat as smoothly as possible.
“Fuck you!” I scream. “Learn to signal!”
Nailed it.
He climbs back into his car, yelling something indecipherable. I am about to pull into traffic when I see flashing lights behind me.
We now return to an episode of Douche Patrol, already in progress.
On tonight’s episode: Inspector Sifowicz and Detective Bagaladocci investigate a BMW E30 for sale at the used car lot.
“This is vape residue, Sifowicz, but these backwards hats have bent brims. It’s just not adding up.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, rookie. These hats could just as easily be… sideways.”
[Sifowicz turns the cap on his outstretched pen to demonstrate before placing it in an evidence bag. Bagaladocci is visibly amazed, and sniffs the air.]
“Wait. I recognize this vape flavour. This is Pussy Shrapnel Pomegranate. There’s only one man who would vaporize this.”
[A hooded figure emerges from the corner of the used car lot, cackling]
“Ah yes, detectives, it is I-”
“Hoodie!”
“Black hoodie!”
[Sifowicz and Bagaladocci open fire, dumping an entire magazine each into centre mass of the figure.]
[Credits]
#
tags: sifowicz, bagaladocci, douche patrol, bmw, bmw e30
When it comes to parking downtown, I often find it difficult to maneuver even a moderately sized car into today’s penny-pinchingly-tight parallel (and often, sadly, orthogonal) parking spaces. This means I don’t get to gain the full cornucopia of pleasures that may be available downtown. I was told that some of them might indeed be used car parts.
The dilemma ate at me: risk my quarter panels by street parking, or give up on sweet used performance parts sold by bougie glass-walled condo dwellers who neither had the aptitude to install them nor the time to enjoy them? I was ruminating upon this when I passed a bank of televisions all tuned coincidentally to the solution to my exact problem.
My city, it seemed, had loosened parking restrictions. Anything at a short wheelbase would get to park for half price. I was never one to pass up a deal, and so I hatched a plan to kill two birds with two extremely rusty imported cars. Besides, we needed the team driving practice.
With my codriver and I, we parallel drifted our supercharged two-stroke, rear-engined Suzuki Cervos into a curb space, parking just obnoxiously enough that an SUV could not slip in to ding our panels. It was for the best: with the amount of rust holes I found on the panels of these hoopties, it wasn’t like you had to open the door to get inside it if you get my drift.
There was just one problem: as I emerged from the condo lobby, downpipe in tow, I studied the Cervo’s modest frunk. I looked at the exhaust, then looked at the frunk, then looked at the exhaust. There was no way this was fitting into one car, and I could tell that my teammate, who I had promised a trip to the local burger joint if we could pull this off, was becoming irritated.
Is it still a good deal if you have to buy a portable chopsaw?
They told me it probably wouldn’t be that easy. They qualified it with “probably” because nobody had ever done it before. I did it. Perhaps they should have been the ones to ask me about how to get on stage at the presidential debates.
First, the elaborate fiction of being a “decided voter.” I had made my decision a long time ago, and that decision was to do burnouts in the parking lot of my local school rather than go inside and vote for any one of the numerous candidates. Thing is, there is this assumption that there is some vast pool of undecideds that can be swayed either way by the debates. Everyone wants to believe this so badly, to think that our country and our way of life isn’t one impending, looming civil war in the making after another. What harm could my little lie do in the face of that massive one?
Next, the appearance of the “common man.” They want someone who relates to them. I sweated my way through the screening interviews by way of celebrity gossip anecdotes written on my hand. Luckily, they never asked any questions about the things that made me truly stand out from my fellow civilians. Presumably, someone so bent would never infiltrate the political process in such a way, so there was no reason to even waste everyone’s time asking. Another strike for them, and another feather in my cap.
Debate night has such ferocity, a throbbing beat of excitement that pulses through everyone involved. Anchors banter about the spin they expect to see. The crowd tries not to get into Jerry Springer fist fights. Green rooms dispense their candidates a few minutes late, pre-loaded with rage and ready to hit their talking points.
I barely remember any of it. Everything happened for me when the moderator pointed to me and said, “You, normal white adult male. Ask your question.”
At last, I prepared to stand and read my pre-screened question live for the American people. It still surprises me to this very day that they had not taken more care in weeding me out given what surely were warning signs and alarm bells throughout the entire process. What surprised me even more was to see the moderator not pointing to me, but in fact past me, to the other side of the stage.
I looked at that other side of the stage now and saw an adversary emerge. From what I had assumed to be a normal white adult male during the pre-screening get-to-know-you luncheon had emerged the clearest signs of The Foe. They had sent their own man, and the moderator was on their side. I felt my fingers tingle and my breath grow shallow even as he rose to emit the question that belied the true nature of his hate to all those assembled.
“Candidates,” he spoke with a snakelike hiss on the last syllable, “Static or bagged drop for a 1988 VW Rabbit cabriolet?”
#
tags: stance nation, presidential debate, volkswagen, town hall format, special interest groups
Back in the day, when you owned a police radio scanner, the world was your oyster. Juicy gossip, the latest crimes-in-progress, even just a glimpse into a day-to-day that was nothing like yours at all. Then the cops started encrypting their radios, took all that juicy money that was left to prevent terrorists from blowing up the Blockbuster in a town of a thousand people and threw it at Motorola. It went like that for years. My job was made a lot more difficult, but there is always margin for those who can keep up with the times.
Me? I’m an accident deconstructor. No, you didn’t hear that wrong. I patrol my favourite roads looking for vehicles with particularly valuable salvage, wait for a crash, and then loot the machines of their parts before the cops and paramedics have a chance to arrive. I have a trunk full of electric impacts, each pre-loaded with their own imperial or metric socket and full batteries. It’s no exaggeration to say that I can rip a Grand Prix GXP down to its unibody and have anything valuable (rear shocks, that V8, the staggered front tires) into my trunk in under ten minutes.
On weekends, my days start at the local Cars & Coffee meets. I know what you’re saying: Mustangs, eh? In reality, Mustangs carry very few re-sellable parts, and when they do crash, it’s into a crowd of witnesses. With my line of work, showing up in someone’s World Star crash video is a terrible idea, even with the latest suite of CCD-damaging ultraviolet privacy software installed in my smart helmet.
No. What I do is hang down the road a bit, wait until the fatigue of goofing off starts to set in. I wait for the drift to end, for them to jerk the wheel dead straight. Then I pounce.
The Hellcat Challenger was at the top of my list for a reason, and that reason was that it contained one of my Most Wanted parts: a low-mileage TR6060 6-speed manual transmission. From its massive bellhousing to its overbuilt tailshaft shell, this thing could withstand a bomb. With the kind of engines I was building for the war rigs, a bombproof transmission is exactly what I needed.
I timed my throttle hit perfectly, the rear drag slicks of the Valiant wrinkling their high-profile meat into the damp tarmac. I was halfway through first gear when the window switch engaged and my wide-open-throttle antics pushed enough squeeze into the cylinders to get me into the quarter panel of the Hellcat in time. He careened into the ditch, helplessly, a pirouette that I hoped would look close enough to a legitimate spinout to the cops to distract them while I put distance between us.
The owner looked at me in horror, and reached one hand outwards for help through the maze of side-impact airbags which had saved his life. I spat at it: help would not be forthcoming. It was then that I realized the depth of my error: I had miscalculated badly and was filled with regret.
As I fled the scene, I wondered how I could have been so stupid. Of course it was a ZF 8-speed automatic, I sneered. This country is going to Hell in a handbasket when you can’t even trust a Dodge rolled over in a ditch to have a workable transmission.
It was in no way traditional for me to have partnered with quantum physicists for cutting-edge research into the fourth dimension, but I felt like it was my duty as a citizen of the world. What I knew, what I had discovered in my own time, deserved to be shared with the world. Soon, they would all know my great truth.
The paper was announced at the conference. We gave a short, perfunctory, utilitarian presentation - it didn’t even have WordArt - and took questions from the crowd. One man, sitting in the front row, was particularly fascinated.
“This is a question for the fucking freak in the t-shirt with traffic cones on it,” he stated. I stood up, recognizing my de facto name.
“Yes?” I asked.
“What was the title of your paper again?”
I turned to my compatriots, and then back to the questioner.
“Femtoseconds: the smallest slice of time in our universe, and their relationship to those fucking coin-operated car washes that dick you over when you’re in spot-free rinse.”
RockAuto held my heart in a way that is usually only reserved for cardiothoracic surgeons, but the latter never sent me an email about close-out parts for my latest project car. The deals were so good, in fact, that I could barely stop myself from ordering quite a few of the parts. And oh my, they’re all at the same warehouse?
A few weeks later, as the UPS guy limped away from my porch, the ratcheting mechanism on his back brace somehow audible even over his groaning, I was left with my discount bounty. I began to unpack box after box, collecting parts in a growing pile next to me.
It had cost me so much to buy them, but at last I had approximately three million #74 instrument cluster bulbs. Really, I’ll be saving money in the long run, I thought.
As I stood up, I noticed that the collection of promotional magnets had clustered itself into a singularity, drawing every wrench and prybar from my walls. The thrashing, clanging swell of tools was at first amusing to me, but soon I realized my hubris had once again led to my inexorable downfall.
My treasured half-inch-drive torque wrench vibrated atop the pile. I sank to my knees as I imagined how far the calibration had drifted.
They said power goes to your head. When I first heard that, I thought that of course they were talking about horsepower. Later, I found out it wasn’t even torque. In fact, power came from people, and it was only in my ill-fated automotive death cult that the distinction between the Otto cycle and the autocrat would at last be placed in stark contrast before my eyes.
If I were to tell you that I started an automotive death cult, you would probably think that was pretty cool. In fact, you might even ask me about all the illicit relationships I’m having with members of my flock. I would look at you in surprise. My look of surprise is because I hadn’t had time to taste the wares of all zero of my female followers because the only thing I got grabby with was a Town Car on meter-high tractor tires that shoots nitrous flames from a hood-mounted carbon-fibre-wrapped steer skull when I upshift.
It wasn’t all honey and 302s, no: for instance, there were some 460s and also one of my followers, the Reverend Texaco Tigertail, had betrayed me in the most unholy of ways. He had gone to the local dealership and purchased a new car. What’s more, I had reason to believe from my spies working in every major financial institution in the - my - town, he may even have financed it. I could not ignore such an overt insult to the Way of the Third Stroke.
Locking myself in my compound garage so tightly that not even the sound of impact tools could be heard through the bombproof bunker-grade rebar concrete that made up its walls, I began a work of vengeance that would permanently ensconce me in the minds of any followers who were weak of loyalty. Hours turned into days turned into weeks turned into a blacked-out Dart wagon hoisted aloft on mattracks and skis, a well-scheduled vehicle if ever I had built one.
Why well-scheduled? In the weeks it had taken me to construct the Work Of Dart, a soft winter had fallen upon my people, and now they were risking starvation. I walked into the compound’s sleeping quarters, and instead of faith found the disgruntled appearance of the faithless.
My labour had taken so long that they had lost sight of what truly mattered - hunting down Texaco Tigertail and rending the flesh from his skull with the aid of a Spicer joint spinning at not more than four thousand RPM (to go above was a sign of the hated Rear-Mounted European-Style Transaxle, so spake the Way of the Third Stroke). Indeed, they were angry at me for not having provided food, shelter, running water and electricity. Many had already left, the remaining few explained, and were lost to me forever.
As I fled into the night atop the Dart snowcat, I knew that this was somehow Texaco Tigertail’s fault, too: during the months that I ignored them, he slipped in to put poison in their ears. I would find a new town, a new garage compound, and I would revitalize the Way with new followers, and perhaps this time one of them should be a trustworthy lieutenant. Truth be told, I just did not like to share my tools.
#
tags: texaco tigertail, lincoln, town car, lincoln town car, small town car mayor, dodge dart, dodge, dodge dart snowcat
My training was excellent. They had reinforced into me through constant drilling (both metaphorical and very, very phorical) that I was to assess my present situation, decide on a plan of action, and then execute that plan of action with brutal efficiency.
Present situation: I just rolled a surplus-auction Crown Victoria Police Interceptor through the lobby of a Hyundai dealership. The surviving salesmen are beginning to crowd the vehicle, asking their own reflections in the somehow mirror-perfect clearcoat if they would like to trade in this vehicle for a new Veracruz. What the hell even is a Veracruz? I’ve never seen one.
Plan of action: Kick out the door glass, puncture the trachea of whoever seems to be in charge, flee in the ensuing confusion. I make it happen, and within seconds a man with a nametag that says only Duane is now breathing through a manmade cold air intake. His adiabatic efficiency is off the charts - he should thank me - and soon I find myself in the used car lot. From the frying pan to the fire, I think, as the dealership’s platoon of used car salesmen take notice of my bewildered expression and assume I must be here to purchase a minivan, their chants about premium undercoating growing in pitch to a hysterical din of cult sacrifice.
I am halfway through executing my second plan of action when the lights and sirens close in. It was all a ploy, a distraction. Hyundai isn’t even a real car company, the Feds made it up so they could rope me in. As the handcuffs go on and they push me into the cruiser (a shameful Ford Explorer Interceptor), I see the scarred face of Inspector Koshiro looking on from the crowd.
Sure, I lied to him when I told him I’d treat his old patrol car with respect, but in my defence it’s really hard to not ramp a bitch after you spent all that time and sawzall blades putting mud terrains under it.
Insurance is one of those great pains of life. You gotta have it, or so the nice police officers keep telling me. I don’t have to like it, though: there’s just something about those beady-eyed suits looking over reams of actuarial tables trying to figure out how to make a so-safe-it’s-stupid bet that gets me right in the craw, I’m telling you. And so it was with the self-driving cars.
At first it was pretty simple. They said, put this module into your car so we can keep an eye on the computer. Make sure it’s being well maintained and is super safe, keep your software patches up to date. Of course, that cut their risk to zero, while they still collected a heapin’ helpin’ of cash like in the Bad Old Days of multi-million hyperdeaths on every expressway and playground zone, but we didn’t mind. It was just what we did, and so we continued to do it.
Imagine our surprise when we found out what that module really did. Computer scientists hired by the insurance companies went rogue, described in very small words to confused morning-television news jockeys about how the modules influenced which victims a car that was out of control would choose to save, and which it would choose to kill.
Somehow, these “morality pods” came pre-loaded with every unconscious and conscious bias the insurance companies had ever developed. Things we had observed began to make sense: obviously it explained why self-driving cars preferred to hit less expensive cars rather than the top-of-the-line models. What we didn’t realize until later was that if you ever gave an autonomous car a chance and a skid on the ice, it would choose to wipe out the least litigious of the pedestrians ninety-nine times out of a hundred.
Our commentators and politicians told us: we need to look more litigious. We need to sue the shit out of everything in sight. Walk down the road screaming at every passing car about how big of an asshole your shark lawyer is. Construct armour made of hastily-printed QR codes pointing to accident-injury attorneys. Make your house look like a courthouse. Well, maybe that last one was just me.
At last, we were safe from the self-driving cars. They only ran over difficult-to-understand foreigners and people who were visibly too poor to afford lawyers. Meanwhile, our grocery stores were filled with people screaming at each other until their faces became blue.
You could not let something as dangerous as a puddle or a flickering light bulb go, lest the cars discover we were faking it all this time.
I was borrowing tools from a friend when I heard that all too familiar refrain. “Buying more tools sucks because then you have to move them when you move to a bigger garage,” he said to me. That got me thinking, and I’m nothing if not entrepreneurial.
My first customer has an appointment booked at the crack of dawn. He stands in his driveway, waiting for me to arrive and take his most critical tools and spare car parts to the new home. The lake pipes jutting from the hood of the Gladiator are in full dieselsong now, bursting clouds of flaming ashy soot into the atmosphere as aided by the Shop Vac-sized ball bearing turbocharger hanging off each of its exhaust manifolds.
I pull the hydraulic handbrake, drifting the truck on its trophy-truck long-arm suspension across his driveway and placing the bed directly into the line of fire. Two more switches on the brushed-stainless dashboard-replacement activate the hydraulic engine-hoist crane in the bed, and I step outside to zap-strap the crane arm to the spare 440 he meant to put into a car any day now but never got around to.
Minutes later, I am embarking on the highway with a wildly cheering new homeowner, tandem trailers of parts cars in tow, my hands flurrying over the twin-stick Eaton nine speed like a chopstick factory technician on his sixth Red Bull of the morning.
I drop off his stuff, and he is extremely pleased. He asks me what my fee is, and I motion to the last of the parts cars. Nodding happily, he agrees to the exchange. It makes me feel good, to not only help out the automotive community but also getting rid of their clutter. Besides, now I have an excuse to have a nice tow vehicle.
When I was growing up, we always wondered what had happened to my older brother Carmelo. One warm spring day, we were playing in the field of a nearby farmhouse when he saw it.
I would later identify “it” as a 1987 AMC Eagle, but at the time I had never seen anything like it and was terrified, rooted to the ground through cold fear shooting through my veins. Carmelo, though, he wasn’t afraid. He went right into the weeds after that AMC Eagle, and he never came back.
We waited there for hours, the sun growing low in the sky and finally disappearing behind the mantle of Earth. Our parents, terrified, arranged a search party. No trace could be found.
Once, when we were on a family vacation, I saw someone I swore could be Carmelo, in a parking lot. He was sitting on the street corner, had a two foot long mountain beard, and was muttering angrily to himself, or perhaps to some demons. His hands were busy as ever, the knotted and scarred fingers rebuilding an air locker with components scavenged from Safeway shopping cart coin locks. I called my parents over, but by the time they had gotten there he had disappeared without my notice, and I smelled only a lilting fragrance of burning heavy-weight gear oil on the air where he had left.
Now that I’m grown up, I recognize my lost older brother’s ways in the occasional news item. A daring daylight heist of an off-road parts store, the kidnapping and torture of New Venture powertrain engineers.
One morning, a friend appeared with a Jeep J10 “Honcho.” It had a lovingly bobbed bed, the primer over its weld scars applied with care. I saw his handiwork immediately, and white faced, asked my friend where he had gotten it.
“This dude named Carmelo,” he said, looking scared. “He seemed a lot like you.”
I followed his recollections and came across a shack in the woods, surrounded by a fence of worthless Dana 30s sunken into the ground at half-meter intervals, XJ dashboard wiring harnesses strung between them like improvised barbed wire. Inside the shack, a stove was still warm, the boiling water in its sole mild-tin pot holding a wheel bearing. He was just here, I thought, and then everything went black.
It was like the soothsayers of lore said: a man who is rich in flatheads is rich indeed. But what does it mean to be rich in flatheads, I ask you while walking towards the camera, stabbing my hands at the air for emphasis? Does it simply mean to have a lot of flatheads? A lot of pairs of flatheads? And what about flathead sixes?
To get the answer to these questions and more, I consulted a local member of a religious order. It was fairly easy: he had office hours and all I had to do was drop in and sit in a little booth for awhile before asking him a question.
“Is a flathead six inherently noble?” I asked him, and I could tell from the gap under the stall walls that he was aware of my question.
“Uh, are you talking to me?” he asked in reply.
Was this some kind of strange non-psychologist attempt to get me to open up further, to analyze the concept of what I was doing? Talking? Or was I discovering? This guy was good, I thought.
“I am speaking to you now, man to man, to ask you about whether a flathead V8 is nobler than a flathead six. Is not fuel efficiency part of the Bible you claim to worship?”
“Buddy, this is a bus station bathroom,” he grumbled, emphasizing the statement with a thump of the stall wall with his fist. “I’m not a priest.”
There was a time before I coveted the plastic picnic table that came in the trunk area of all first-generation Honda CR-Vs. I remember it like it was yesterday, because it was probably yesterday afternoon that I stumbled across the prices that they went for on eBay. Now, I was at the junkyard, fully expecting to find rows of mommywagons sporting the OEM sports-utility kitsch that would make me a rich man.
“Take me to the Honda CR-Vs, my good man,” I said to the guy working the interchange computer, and was rewarded with a furrowed brow as he hunt-and-pecked each letter of “H O N D E” into the computer with a relentless focus.
My junkyard partner, Rusty Dan, began to squirm. I could tell that he thought less of me for using the interchange computer, a crutch installed into the yard by its corporate management in a half-baked attempt to increase their appeal with the “normals” who didn’t even know enough to fill their pockets with leftover bolts, much less memorize the entire interchange list for their family of badge-engineered daily drivers. I paid him no mind - our friendship had been durable enough that we were no longer trading mutual respect but instead were now dreading having to untangle our respective loaned tools from one another’s collection if anything drastic were to happen.
At last, the clerk smiled, and told me that I would find one of the CR-Vs in the middle of the yard. When I approached it, I could tell from a distance that the picnic table was gone, because the CR-V was lunched from the C-pillar backward in what looked to be the world’s highest-speed reversing accident.
A “normal” was there, trying to fit an SAE socket onto a 10mm bolt underhood. He smiled and greeted us warmly, and I could tell immediately what his game was. In the outside world, he was no doubt a man of great power, capable of forcing underlings into doing the menial work he did not care for. His folly was trying the same thing here, expecting us to help out of some kind of common sense of decency.
Though Rusty Dan was already doing a U-turn and leaving the SUV row in search of a Chevy Sprint Turbo’s eponymous RHB3, I saw an opportunity and smiled back at the man.
In the parking lot of the junkyard, the man thanked me for my skillful labour in helping him liberate the MAP sensor. While he was distracted underhood fitting it to the CR-V he had driven to the yard in, I reached through his open drivers’ window for the hatch release.
Ahhh, Switzerland. The crisp mountain air. The vaguely racist populist demagoguery. The banks which don’t tell anyone anything until they get threatened a little and then tell everyone everything. I was well familiar, and not just because of my aborted run at a career in the banking sector which ended with me setting fire to a training centre filled with screaming MBAs.
We had history, but that didn’t matter. I was here for a mission.
My partner and I were badge engineers. Whenever you had a car, we would figure out a way to sell it as another, different car, perhaps in a different market segment, or appealing to a different ethnicity. If we did our job right, the first time you’d hear about us is when a nasally-voiced guy at the Pick N Pull tells you about the interchange options between your esteemed reliable-chariot-of-suburban-soccer-mommage Toyota Matrix and the beneath-white-trash Pontiac Vibe. Yeah, that was one of ours. You’re welcome.
Like I said, I was here for a mission. My partner phoned me in a panic from the Zurich airport, recited from memory a string of unbroken base64. When I decoded it, I could not believe my eyes. I booked a ticket immediately, and now I was here.
My partner was standing there, waiting for me. We nodded at each other. No words were needed. He was to take me directly to what he had found.
In the carpark sat the origin of our torment. Somehow, unknown to us, rival badge-engineering forces had abducted America’s most-loved modular soft-roader, that being the International Scout. They clawed at its panels, yanking them free from the frame. It lost its doglike charm that day. Enriched by a heady mix of high-octane cocaine, personal shoppers and fattened day-trading accounts with the best Swiss brokerages, they decided that the true destiny of a thirteen-letter shit-spreader laid in luxury.
I looked over the sea of taut leather interior, my trained eyes falling onto a switch - my god, it had power windows, the maniacs - and the bulbous gear selector jutting from its automatic transmission. I could hear those alpine bastards laughing at us even now as we looked over their masterwork, the Monteverdi Safari.
The panic attack I had been working myself up to ever since I got on the plane only broke when my partner reached through an open window and started the engine. I recognized the groaning workaday warble of a Mopar 318 rattling itself on worn motor mounts beneath the hood, and became calm. In fact, I became downright jovial, and I soon found myself laughing so hard I found it difficult to catch my breath.
Switzerland always was neutral.
#
tags: monteverdi safari, international harvester, international scout
It’s hard to find good accountants these days, and when mine started coming to me with wild-eyed rambles about their obsession with “profits” and “EBITDA” I had to take some corrective action. This is America, pal, and we build two things: V8s and infrastructure debt.
However, there was one thing they screamed as my loyal guards beat them senseless with truncheons that stuck in my craw, and it intrigued me. Indeed, I had to look deeper into these so-called “small-displacement economy cars.” I found a lot to like.
At the introductory gala, the assembled crowd oohed and aahed at the cornucopia of lockable storage bins that studded the interior - enough to keep a thief so busy you will have time to return with your pumpkin spice latte and a loaded .38, I proudly stated for the media. They cawed when I told them about the unique carbon-fibre unibody, which chopped chassis weight for maximum fuel economy while also resisting rust. I told them that these were critical problems for the common man, and saw no dissent.
There was something missing, though. I knew that this car had to be for the people, but all I found before me at this glitzy do-up was the bourgeoisie. How I despised them and their jingling jewelry, having risen from my poor farmchild upbringing through a combination of tactical business deals and well timed industrial-equipment accidents. Their cryptofascist opinions would confuse my product planners, leak classist poison into the veins of this fine automobile, perhaps forever, taking it out of reach of the common man and putting me one step further away from Godhood. That just would not do.
I hit the auto show circuit. Personally. My PR representative had angry words to say about it, specifically at the auto show as I pulled the PA microphone away from him and doled out a jaw-shattering roundhouse kick that arced his unconscious body elegantly aloft from the podium. As a self-made man, I would now address those men who had not made themselves and find out their truths.
My sideshow patter hadn’t lost even a single beat of tempo since I quit my job at the circus and told my two-faced (and two-headed) boss to stuff it up one of his many assholes. I was on fire, calling the people around and showing them the monster that I planned to put under their beds (namely, in their attractively-furnished, drywalled double-oversized front attached garages).
Finally, one man decided that he had had enough of my honeyed words and climbed atop the podium, crazed-eyed, like a child dying of thirst mere inches away from the astronaut-mixed joy of Tang pseudofruit cocktail. He wanted it. He needed it. I grinned as his claw-like fingers, nails stained with the grease of a blue-collar job, grabbed furiously at the sheet covering my masterpiece of proletariat automotive conveyance.
He pulled the sheet aside and the crowd gasped. Sitting beneath the klieg lights sat a shimmering black insect, hostile and brutal to the world outside of it. Overfenders bristled from the quarters, covering the 300-width semi-slicks that proudly jutted from its suspension.
“What’s that on the top?” the man screamed at me once his breath had returned.
“Funny you should ask,” I told him. “Because fuel economy is so important to the average commuter, this Weiand roots blower makes up for the relative lack of displacement of the all-aluminum overhead-cam V8.”
He looked into the blower’s street scoop, captivated by the gleaming rotors that laid within. I smiled broadly and gestured to the crowd. “I think I just made my first sale,” I barked with a chuckle.
They didn’t laugh back.
“How are we supposed to afford $250,000 for an economy car?” asked a woman in the crowd, clutching her child close lest they become infected with the strain of madness that shot through my veins at this very moment.
“Well, you can finance it. It’s just 500 easy monthly payments of $600 per month.”
The crowd burst into riotous cheering. I was jostled from my position as the most ambitious or most obsequious - I cared not for the difference - of the audience members climbed aboard the podium in order to kiss the hand of their newborn King.
Months later, I was on the cover of all the magazines. Who was this brash young entrepreneur who had finally squared the circle of affordability, luxury and sports performance? I would smile, hoping it would become somehow visible in print, and let them know about the secret of financing aspirations.
What I hadn’t seen coming was the competition. Once my strategy had been pushed out into the open, nothing stopped Ford from producing the twin-V10, sequential-quad-turbocharged Focus of my grocery getting dreams. Yet somehow I was still happy. Perhaps it was because my other secret weapon was buying things for a thousand dollars after the depreciation hit.
I looked out over my driveway stuffed with miled-out all-wheel-drive, forced-induction carbon-fibre oh-so-practical deathmachines, and smiled. Despite what my accountants said, only a man who is rich in beaters is truly rich.
A lot of people lose their marbles when they get cut off in traffic. Not me, though. I have a foolproof technique for preventing road rage. Let me tell you a little bit about it by way of an example.
One day, I was driving proudly on the freeway when I was cut off rudely by a luxury sports sedan. To make things worse, they did not use their turn signals to indicate their intent prior to the lane change. A normal person would have gotten mad, but I liked to think of myself as the “Dr. Phil” of road rage. Instead of a stream of do-nothing profanity, we would have a productive conversation, man to man.
I flicked a switch, allowing the clutch on the heinous blower to engage. Burying the throttle let me pull alongside with the sports sedan trivially. The owner looked over, noticing how strange it was to have a tan Camry wagon with a Roots supercharger the size of a beer keg sticking out of its hood next to it. His eyes continued down the flanks of the car, all the way to my open passenger window, where a jagged harpoon jutted from the top of the door skin.
I waved and smiled, then depressed the trigger.
It’s very peaceful next to a roaring car fire that used to be the weapon of a guy who cut you off in traffic. I knelt down, and looked in the eyes of the driver as he crawled from the wreckage, bloodied and crazed.
“Sorry, I forgot to use my indicators.” I said, innocently.
When the Foundation sent me to this remote outpost, I went along with it. You didn’t want to piss off the Foundation. They drilled that concept into you in training, thousands of flickery 35mm projected films with warbling audio tracks about their reach. We can find you anywhere, they said.
Good luck finding me out here, I muttered to myself while throwing a playing card into a hat. It was becoming all too apparent that my temporary post was becoming permanent. For the sake of some project or another, I would sit here for the rest of my life. I was no fool, though, and I brought along a project to work on. The Duster could be spotted in amongst the blowing snow, sitting forlornly in the crooked wooden carport. All I had to do was wait for the winter to end, and I could wrench to my heart’s content - and get paid for it.
Weeks turned into months, and still the blizzard would not let up. When the ionosphere smiled upon me, I could get intermittent, staticky weather reports on the emergency transistor radio. The only thing that was clear about the automated broadcasts was that it wasn’t going to end anytime soon. At night, the cabin creaked as it settled beneath the assault of the outside world. Even through the wind, I could hear the Duster complaining about its list of minor maintenance. I salivated with the chance to reunite with it once more, just as soon as this job was done.
Finally, I could take it no more. The cabin throbbed at my temples, seeming to grow tighter around my body by the second. I burst out of the front door, toolbag in hand, determined to wrench on the Duster. No sooner had I popped the hood than a figure approached from the snow and pointed a gun at me. I groaned, knowing that of course this would be when I had to do actual work.
I picked up the phone, and instead of a dial tone, my literary agent was on the other end. I’m not entirely sure I had hung up all the way during our last conversation, and presumably they had just been going this entire time, without sleep, water or food for at least a week or two. What they had to say intrigued me.
“Our market researchers have found that there’s a strong preference for true-life technothrillers,” said the disembodied voice, “with lots of detail.”
That was all I had to hear. I returned the phone to the hook, and fired up my electric typewriter by way of pulling the fraying ripcord jutting from its two-stroke thumper. By the time the rings caught, I was already halfway through hammering out a page with my free hand. Easy money, I told myself and later my ex-wife’s lawyer, easy money indeed.
A few months later, I was flying to Dallas to pick up a used NB Miata with only a small amount of rod knock. I decided to stop in at the airport bookstore to see how my new work was doing.
“TOM CLANKY’S OPERATION: HEATER CORE” was front and centre, including a cardboard standee of the long-dead military aviation expert that I had been impersonating under my ghostwriting contract. I noticed that a pair of jovial business associates were standing at the counter, and one of them was buying the book - my book. Naturally, I followed them and overheard their conversation.
“This is the best description of the BMW E36 cooling system I’ve ever read in print,” said the more senior of the two executives. He had probably gotten a copy on release night, devoured it while waiting for a layover. I practically bristled with excitement. My literary agent was right: I had a fan.
Within a few years, I had become pigeonholed, stuck in my ways. Contract after contract from my publisher was met merely by doing a “Select All” on a PDF of the factory service manual and pasting it into Word. The audience loved it, and could not get enough. That’s when I met Bob Haynes, the president of Haynes, and also made my acquaintance with the aluminum baseball bat collection he carried at all times in the trunk of his 1990 Mercury Cougar XR7.
#
tags: tom clanky, bmw, e36, bmw e36, haynes, mercury, mercury cougar
On the first of many trips to Japan, I located a bar which had a dissected 1MZ hanging over its door. Taking this as a good omen, I wandered in. Halfway through my pint, I found the locals starting to eye me up. I started to become self-conscious, a foreigner in a land that he didn’t belong.
Finally, the largest of the group got up and sat next to me. I tried to ignore him, but he tapped me on the shoulder. Looking over at him, I saw that he had an expression of nervous energy on his face. Perhaps he had been dared by his friends to ask the foreigner a stupid question?
He pointed at a wrinkled piece of paper he clutched in his hand. On it was an image I could not forget, had flown thousands of kilometers to get away from. It figured that such a thing would find me here.
“The 2006 Pontiac Grand Am is the pinnacle of motoring perfection,” he said, almost too smoothly, as if quoting from some half-remembered television ad.
“Can you order us Sunfire parts?” shouted another from the back, clutching a pool cue with both hands anxiously.
I looked up from the bar, and realized the error of my ways. Hanging smugly above the pub’s entryway was not a 1MZ-FE after all, but a 60 degree 3400. I was in a Pontiac bar.
Planning a heist involving entirely first-generation Nissan Homy minibuses was no easy feat. Having to do it in the middle of the 21st century, several decades after the last of those vans were collapsed into Japanokorean dishwashers, was only a little harder.
Over the years, I’d come to know a lot of people. The qualities I looked for in my friends were that they were brilliant and that nobody ever listened to them. One of those people, which the attached literature does not mention by name, had developed a carbon-fibre 3D printer for Boeing. This thing was the size of a house, and it could spin an entire airplane wing in just under two hours, the occult intelligence within seeming almost shrouded by the deafening clatter of its billions of spider-limbs rattling over a central loom the thickness of a telephone pole. Boeing had a pretty big problem on their hands: namely, that I showed up with a six pack in the middle of the night and had him spin me Homy after Homy.
That took care of the cars. Assembling functional automobiles from nothing more than a Wikipedia photo and trillions of lines of machine-thought microcode was one thing, but assembling a team that worked together was much, much harder. Luckily, I never found a tough problem I couldn’t cheat through. I picked up my phone and had an entire team assembled before I even had to scroll the contacts list. That feat is doubly impressive if you’ve ever seen my contacts list, because my mom is first in that list and the Subaru dealership’s parts desk is second.
Neon rain hung suspended over the storefronts in great clouds, the ground slick with perfect mirrors. Even those passersby who were not into cars had some pattern-matching component of their simian mind realize just how unusual it was for a set of Nissans to have zero visible underbody rust, and they stared. This, I had not planned for. I made a mental note to add more imperfections, maybe hit the quarter panels with iron oxide primer to give them that lived-in look. Or perhaps they were staring at the smart loom’s crude approximation of chrome - something extremely difficult to render in carbon-fibre. The overall sensation of the near-chrome was unsettling to our eyes, and I found myself tearing my eyes away from the steering wheel and dashboard trim whenever the licks of nausea started at my throat. We’ll never know.
What I did know was that our heist was successful. We had won Concours d’LeMons with a team of the best-kept worst cars imaginable. The judges, those of who still remained conscious after taking a long look at the Homy’s unsettling dog-shaped wing mirrors, concurred that if we went to this much effort, it must have been worth it.
There’s something sad when you meet old friends. Oftentimes, both of you have moved on and were no longer the people you once were. All you can do is talk about the history you shared together, maybe some meaningless platitudes about the future, and then depart. It’s as if a man can live several lifetimes.
I was thinking about this very thing when I met my old high school friend at a dive bar last week. Together, we had turned SAE wrenches on domestic garbage, metric wrenches on Japanese garbage, and our best convoluted multi-axis swivel-nut inverse rejoinder wrenches on German garbage. He had changed, though. He was pushing some Swedish garbage. I just didn’t know it at the time.
“You should get a Saab 9-2X, man. It’s a Subaru, but weirder.”
That was all it took. A weirder Subaru? The company that made not one but two car-based pickup trucks, decades apart? There was room in their repertoire to have gotten weirder?
I decided to overlook the (peeling) logo and picked one up posthaste. It was cheaper than an Impreza, and had the low insurance premiums that was surely a result of its ownership by tweed-wearing professors of English history. The only problem was that it had a few one-off pieces that weren’t shared with the regular Impreza, and those were becoming scarce indeed.
Before long, I found that I had acquired a parts Saab. And then another.
While I was working in my driveway furiously swapping one-off panels from car to car, a neighbour approached. He was wearing tweed, and his demeanour was now welcoming, rather than his usual sneer.
“You are ready,” is all he said, and then he left a key in my hand. It said “SAAB.”
At the end of the street laid a two-stroke Saab 95. I looked back at the four-stroke Saabarus in my driveway. They seemed to pale in high weirdness before my very eyes. Looking back at the 95, it glowed in the afternoon sun with an eerie light.
I found myself inside the Saab, putting the key into an unfamiliar position, between the front seats. Perhaps not unfamiliar. Now, somehow, it felt right. It was the correct way to build a car. I knew this now.
That night, another friend visited, saw the cars, and realized what had happened. He tried to tell me that with the 9-2X I had been slipped a gateway Saab, and this is how they got new addicts for their dark project. Through teary eyes, he made the call for help.
They came too late to save me, I knew. As my neighbour was hauled away in chains by the EPA death squads, all I could think of was whether he had a Tech 2 in his parts pile.
Somehow, I had managed to score the hot ticket for Saturday night. There was a focus group in town, and even after I realized it had nothing to do with getting my hands on some dent-free SVT wheels, I was still excited. It was about cars, of course, and they wanted to know my opinion.
The application’s final question asked for a “dream car.” I affixed my description of the perfect automobile and waited by the phone for a callback. Soon, I would have two hundred and seventy five dollars, and have influenced the craft of automaking forevermore.
When the call finally came, I thought it was strange that they summoned me to an industrial warehouse on the bad side of town. I parked the Valiant, its white-hot side pipes still popping the occasional piece of combustible effluent that drifted lazily from the leaking injectors, in front of the building and walked inside. My footfalls echoed on the damp industrial-chic tile and echoed through the woodgrain hallways of the office front.
Eventually, I came to the end of a hallway and faced a door, light peeking through the hinge gap. I opened the door, and stepped inside. There was an older gentleman sitting at a card table, beneath an incandescent light bulb swinging lazily from an overhead cable.
No one man ever admitted to be the lead designer of the AMC Eagle. No, he preferred to keep himself in the shadows, away from those who could not understand him. I knew who he was the second I walked in.
“So,” he started, with a twinkle in his eye not unlike the Santa Claus of myth, “I hear you like my work.”
I smiled, and looked at my feet while I shuffled them out of shyness. He continued.
“Throughout history, we at the American Motor Company have often needed a personable public face in order to advance our cause. George Romney was the last of our puppets, and he wounded us greatly with his betrayal to the dreaded French conspiracy of Renault. They told us we had to make a front-wheel-drive family sedan.”
He coughed, leaving a thin mist of red behind on the hand he used to cover his mouth. “It got so bad we had to use the Chinese escape hatch in the hopes that our patents and designs could continue to evolve in a foreign land, far from the eyes of our enemies. But now we are strong again, and we need a new spokesman, who can lend legitimacy and sales to our engineering.”
He stood, booming now. “Together, we will rip iron from the earth and we will make the weirdest fucking car that America has ever seen.”
I could take it no longer. I had been living a lie.
“Actually, I much prefer the SX/4,” I offered with an aw-shucks shrug, “but I figured the focus group company would have only heard of the mainstream AMCs.”
That was a mistake.
The room seemed to grow deeper as the Eagle’s designer howled in a wounded rage, cleaving the pool table in twain where his grasp tightened on it. I clawed helplessly at the door behind me in a vain attempt to escape. Just as the Designer was upon me, claws and fangs at eye height, I remembered that I had brought a totem of power with me.
I struck him in the face with a Subaru sales brochure. He took one look at the Subaru SVX, and I could see in his eyes he knew he had been utterly beaten.
As he faded away, released at last from this plane of existence, I swore I could sense an expression of satisfaction on the Designer’s face.
I had lied to him. The tall AMC which had stolen my heart went by the half-whispered name Kammback, but nobody would believe that.
One day, I told my accountant Roy as he counted thousands of dollars in petty cash from the admission turnstille’s lockbox, all this will end. He looked at me with sad eyes, then emitted a heavy sigh. Of course he knew it too, he seemed to be saying. Neither one of us knew just how soon it would end.
The idea was solid: I had seen a late-night television commercial for a special amusement park dedicated to industrial equipment. Your son or daughter could go to the park, run around like an asshole, and then hop inside a steam shovel and demolish a hill made of gravel, all under the watchful eye of professional heavy equipment operators. It was an idea so pure it hit me like a diamond fired from a gun.
There was just one thing to do, and in the great spirit of American entrepreneurship it was basically exactly the thing I had just seen, except watered down a bit.
I want you to imagine some kind of swelling orchestral score as a very expensive camera does a very long dolly shot over a mountain. It settles on a dirt field filled with cars. We call it Beaterland.
For years I had been looking for a way to get rid of spare cars. This was a great method: simply leave them in a field and charge children a few bucks to paddock-bash around with them. Sure, there were lots of dented panels and bent subframes, but it’s not like that wouldn’t have happened anyway. They just became parts cars a little early.
My downfall was unexpected. Apparently, according to Big Government, it is illegal to force a bunch of eight-year-olds to rebuild carburetors for you for free. Yes, even if it is fun. I know, right?
There were no atheists in foxholes, a kindly pastor had told me, but I wasn’t listening to him. No, I was looking over his shoulder at the tasty ‘63 Squareback he had parked in the pastors-only, everyone-else-gets-towed spot at the edge of the church lot. I never figured out what his point was - well, I figured out what his points were, inside the Bosch 009 dizzy protruding from its sad pancake - but my time at the dealership pushed me closer to understanding it than ever before.
No two ways about it: I needed money. Not just for my parts addiction, but for food and water and mortgages and all the other shit I assumed were just taken care of for me by some kind of government agency dedicated to keeping dangerous stupids like myself off the streets. I had to get a job, and it probably had to be about cars, lest I get those cold-turkey shakes like that day and a half on the business trip in Germany where I had to ride a train.
“Welcome aboard,” said the reptile wearing a cheap one-piece suit. I was the latest jackbooted sales operative of the Henderson Toyota product-pushing operation. New cars, I said to my coworker (Ted, I think) on my first coffee break, that’ll never catch on. Ted looked at me in amazement, told me that cars have been being sold new to regular people just off the street for hundreds of years. I scoffed, and returned to the floor to meet a young couple getting ready to spend at least forty Neon ACRs on a Highlander.
“You’re gonna love this thing,” I said, popping the hood. “It’s got an easy to remove oil filter, and it comes in brown. Plus I’m pretty sure all of the tires are still intact. It’s in like-new condition, but I’d ask the seller to knock it down a few grand.”
“Does it have cooled seats?” asked the husband, attempting what I assumed was some kind of abstract negotiation tactic - asking for something that does not exist in order to get a better deal on something that did? I was going to have to ask the GM afterward, see if he had a handbook or something I could find the counters to this consumerist Judo in.
They moved me to used cars. It was probably a better choice, I said to their angry faces at the time. Now that people were bringing me cars to look at and judge for them, I would surely be on my way to lowballing people on beaters professionally.
I am still convinced that diesel Tempo was some kind of plant, an attempt to get me out of the company before bonus season. Who could resist being able to have that fine-ass four-speed all to himself, even if you had to cut out some pricks at the dealer who wouldn’t appreciate it first?
In recent years I have noticed that the quality of my fellow drivers has dropped off substantially. The police have noted that it is likely due to texting and driving, but I feel that the cause is much simpler. It is my belief that the average commuter is simply bored.
I believe that if we raise the excitement level of those drivers, they will pay more attention to the road. Indeed, I expect that they will become much more talented and inquisitive about further improving their driving skills, leading to a further decrease in accident rates.
As well, you may be aware that the economy exists. I am told that at least part of this economy is performance suspension components. Nothing would stimulate this economy more than having that guy on my commute with the broken swaybar kick five bucks towards a parts store to buy a new one because otherwise he will roll off the outside of a turn and into a flaming crater.
Please change all roads between my house and my office into tight acute angles. No longer do I wish to take any corner on my commute at less than one full turn of my steering wheel.
Critics of my plan have frequently documented it as “inhumane,” “infeasible,” “inane,” and other “in-” adjectives. I refuse to accept their limited view of the world, and I feel as I bulldoze their pricey megamansions surrounding downtown in order to install a kilometer-long succession of increasingly difficult chicanes, they will come around to my way of seeing things.
I look forward to our future correspondence as we embark upon this plan for our great City together.
There’s a thing about liberal guilt, and it leads you sometimes to making choices that, in retrospect, should have been more conservative. I am talking, of course, about the time we let some strange foreign refugees live in my neighbourhood and lower my property values.
When we first let them in, they seemed like responsible, sane adults. Sure, they had a few strange religious rites, the women dressed funnily, and their children spoke to them only in a peculiar language, but those things were necessary to overlook when it came to nurturing a community. Our similarities as human beings would pull us together.
After awhile, it was clear that they were forming their own insular community. Their lawns became crammed with junk, they had long meetings behind closed doors, and they eyed us suspiciously as we came near. Finally, I could take it no more. Best intentions be damned, I would figure out what they were up to.
I went to the ringleader’s house, rang the doorbell and then kicked in the door. What I saw shocked me to my very bones.
The entire kitchen was filled with Ford 302s in various states of repair, camshafts of many lifts lying scattered across the grease-spattered linoleum. What our conservative Camaro-driving community paranoids had said would happen came true.
In the end, even though the Fox body Mustang owners were pushed out of their native Dearborn by electric cars and settled in our accommodating bowtie town, they could not fully discard their heritage.
After that day, many of them would move on in anger, leaving me with a deep sense of shame for not making a better effort to accommodate them. Perhaps I could have built an ‘88 Notch with an LS3, I thought, reach out to those in their community who had not yet been claimed by reactionary fundamentalism.
When I heard about the Hanjin bankruptcy, I knew there would be some really good deals on only slightly rusty cars. “Really good deals on only slightly rusty cars” just happened to be my middle name. In my excitement, I threw the newspaper directly into the kitchen’s overhead ceiling fan, and let it rain down shreds of grey-white newsprint snow upon me as I planned my next move.
I’d need a team. Not just any team would do. I needed the best of the best of the people I could find around my local car club. They, too, saw the appeal in risking their lives to secure free cars under maritime law. Our next step was the local air force base, to ask if we could borrow one of their helicopters.
Turned out it wasn’t very difficult - they leave the keys in those things, can you believe it? I had initially assumed that flying an Apache helicopter would be similar to driving a GMC Apache but it turns out that I was entirely wrong. Except for the occasional angry bark across the radio to keep us company, we were alone as we drifted out over the ocean to seek our prize.
Soon enough, we came upon it. When the company went out of business, they just dropped anchor and parked the bitch right in the middle of the ocean. Already, I imagined the undented hoods of free new cars gleaming in the morning sunrise, and involuntarily began to drool with desire.
There were some difficulties with the remaining crew, but when presented with a choice between letting us have their cars and getting beaten up for a company that couldn’t even give them their last paycheque, they relented, and we let them escape in our helicopter. We could just drive the ship back to port, I said to my peers. Maybe get rid of a few of the automatic transmissions below decks to pay for the dockage fees.
Finally, our prize was laid before us: row after row of new cars. Somehow it had been too easy. As I flicked on the light and saw what I had so heavily pirated, my heart sank.
We heard a thump from abovedecks, where we had posted a guard to keep watch, and then coarse, mocking laughter as the door to our tomb sealed behind us.
“Enjoy your Murano Cross-Cabriolets, boys,” said the voice of Carlos Ghosn.
#
tags: carlos ghosn, hanjin, nissan, cross-cabriolet, nissan murano
As a hobbyist shareholder in the Volvo cars division, I was elated when I heard that it would finally be returning to Sweden. Which eccentric billionaire wanted to fund the development of further faux-luxury brickmobiles, I wondered. Later, it turned out that it was Ikea.
In the short term, it wasn’t bad at all. If I dinged a quarter panel, I could just spin off the internal-hex fasteners and swap it with another one from a vending machine. Its engine was made entirely out of sintered left-over allen keys, making the environmental impact almost nil. One day in spring, I discovered the terrible downside of the Volvo-Ikea VRUMVRUM.
The weather that day was not unusual for my sleepy mountain town: a spring shower followed by an immediate and drastic temperature rise to boiling-hot pavement. I came out of the grocery store to find my Volvo’s carbon fibre particleboard body panels delaminating, the entire car reduced to a set of very attractive seats sitting in a puddle of smouldering paper.
A wild-eyed Saab owner rolled slowly by, cackling with unhinged laughter through the open window before realizing he had used his irreplaceable power window switch, slightly limiting its lifespan.
It’s not so bad, though. The dealership had free meatballs, and hoarding cars in my garage was made much easier now that they could fit into stackable flat packs.
Some would call it a curse, wrapping over from my day job into the abstract horrors of the Other Side. I just wish it would end. On each night - night after night after night - I replace leaking valve cover gaskets. My hands and arms are scraped, fingers worn raw to the bone. When it is complete, I restart the car.
The valve cover gaskets leak.
I tried to get to a psychic in the hope of regaining control over my fate. She turned me on to about three thousand bucks in assorted crystals and the secret of lucid dreaming. Finally, I thought, I would be able to summon up the right kind of RTV sealant to use to hold this valve cover in place.
That night, I wielded my newfound power over the Other Side’s ministrations, but it was all for naught. I looked up into the sky and saw it, an infinite geometric fractal, collapsing in on itself and being born anew, faster and faster, against a dead, starless sky stretching forever into the void.
Its hovering form shook with something that seemed - I shuddered at the concept of anthropomorphizing itself, to see my opponent as an intelligent lifeform - to be laughter. I can learn too, it said, and the field of EJ22s before me shifted.
I looked down into the dale of my nocturnal workshop and saw only fields of SR20DE-infused Sentras requiring new waterpumps.
#
tags: subaru, nissan, ej22, ej25, valve cover gaskets, the other side
At last, the recession had pushed the value of hangars at my local hobby airport below the point where I could afford them. Grinning, I signed the deal and high-fived my realtor, a man who would later be known to Fraud Investigators Quarterly magazine as “The Jaguar.”
Move-in day was uneventful; I had simply lashed up a tandem set of trailers behind the old turbodiesel Courier and hauled the least mobile of my project cars into the corner of the shop space, letting them take in their new lives as furniture. I heard a rapping at the door just as I finished slipping the last jacking plate from the wheels of the Matador.
One day and I was already meeting the neighbours? Some part of me knew what the problem would be before I could consciously realize or verbalize it, and I felt sweat creeping on the back of my hand as I gripped his in a brotherly handshake of we’re-the-good-guys-right?
“So, when are you moving your plane in?”
I gulped. I don’t have a plane, I explained to him.
“Oh no, that won’t do. The condo bylaws say you have to use your hangar to store an airplane, or we have to evict you.” And then, conspiratorially: “we’re trying to keep the gearheads out.”
Ha ha. Yes, the gearheads. Gotta keep them out. Once you let one in, that’s it, all these people using their vehicles for transportation instead of paying some other guy thousands to re-torque bolts every five minutes of operation.
“I’m just joking with you,” I explained as I made a beeline for the door, “my plane is coming on the next trailer. My… butler fucked up.”
My companion smiled, waved as I departed the area. I was going to have to find a plane, and fast. But all my budget was used up on the hangar, and it was my understanding that planes were expensive. I made some phone calls.
That night, I unloaded my plane from the trunk of my Volare daily driver. My neighbour appeared again, looking confused at what I was unloading.
I gestured to the cube of steel, in the approximate vicinity of where the tail number probably ended up after it went through the FAA accident-investigation crusher. “It’s a project plane.”
#
tags: ford, amc, plymouth, plymouth volare, amc matador, ford courier, the jaguar
When you drive a large boat, if even for a few days while you wait for the hardware store to bring in your drill bits and taps, people always want to talk to you about it. Maybe it’s because I took up four gas pumps or because I needed an entire wing of the parking lot to open my doors, but everyone seemed to take an interest in my ‘71 Lincoln Continental.
A trip to the mall resulted in so many questions that, by the time I had returned to my home several weeks later, the bank had foreclosed on the property they assumed to be abandoned. My shark of a lawyer would surely get my dragonesque hoard of spare parts back, I wasn’t worried about that, but I needed somewhere to sleep. My gaze eventually fell upon the Continental.
Several hours later, after the eBayed Apollo guidance computer and I had successfully managed to math out the combination of mooring procedures required to park the big-body Lincoln outside my local Princess Auto, I was ready to embark upon my project. The sun rose and fell and rose again, and at last it was complete.
A friend had heard about my dire straits, and pulled up in his Suzuki Sidekick, a car which seemed impossibly small now that I was used to the Lincoln. As he emerged from the pocket-dimension portals that lined either side of the small off-roader, I could already hear his condescending chuckling at me being forced to live out of the Continental.
I pushed a button, and the passenger side of the car extended several meters, with a fold-out living room sectional within. Naturally, I had opted for a chesterfield in period-correct tartan. My friend’s jeers had stopped, although admittedly it was difficult to hear him once I had descended the spiral staircase to the walk-out basement and fired up the grill on the back deck.
#
tags: motorhome, lincoln, continental, lincoln continental, princess auto
It’s great to be here. You’re a great audience, I can tell already. That lady over there, she’s really great. Call me.
What’s the deal with time?
Nobody seems to have enough of it. You ask a guy begging for change on the subway, he’ll be like “don’t have enough time to get a job.”
Well, you know when I don’t have enough time? The car wash. You put your little coins in (bloop bloop bloop) and they tell you “oh yeah, this is four minutes.”
It’s never four minutes. Come on, you’re not fooling anybody.
It’s like two minutes. If time actually passed as fast as they say it does, the instant I switch to the spot-free rinse my hair would turn white.
The worst part of it all is when you’re sitting in line behind someone using the foam brush, you know what I’m talking about. They’re all like SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE for maybe fifteen, twenty minutes, paint’s all coming off in spirals, while you’re sitting there gritting your teeth and waiting for them to drop dead.
I walk into the car wash office to complain about how short my wash is, the dude is sitting there at his desk. Behind him there’s a poster: TIME IS MONEY.
V/O (OMINOUS): In the flat rate system, the people are represented by two separate, yet equally important, groups: Subaru owners, who fix the cars, and Subaru owners, who break them. These are their stories.
DONK DONK
FUJI HEAVY INDUSTRIES HEADQUARTERS EBISU, JAPAN 10:37 AM
IKUO MORI: We need a new product, something that will re-capture the heart of our most fervent fanboys.
STI ENGINEERING REPRESENTATIVE (BREATHING HEAVILY): POWERSLIDES
WRX ENGINEERING REPRESENTATIVE: We could build a new WRX with an electric tu-
IKUO MORI: No, I have a better plan. We will strike at the heart of the core Subaru customer. Gentlemen, raise your glasses and toast the future of Subaru.
ALL: (cheering)
SUBARU OF KEENE SOMEWHERE IN NEW ENGLAND, WHO GIVES A SHIT 1:35 PM
PARTS REP: Wow, I worked way too late today. Time to get out of here before a customer appears.
CUSTOMER: Hey we just talked on the phone, I’m here to pick up my parts.
PARTS REP: Woop-woop-woop-woop! (leaves)
CUSTOMER: God dammit.
IKUO MORI: (pops up from behind desk) Perhaps I can help.
CUSTOMER: Wh-
IKUO MORI: I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify the core Subaru customer and I realized you’re not actually all wild-haired fanboys slamming WRXes into trees. But you’re not all WASPy outdoors adventurers who appreciate Golden Retrievers and soft-focus sapphic foreplay, either.
CUSTOMER: Ho-
IKUO MORI: You move to a product line and you buy it and you buy it until we can’t tell what is successful and what is not. Look at the Crosstrek, for God’s sake. Who would have thought changing the name of the Outback Sport would have made it sell like crack cocaine sprinkled on Krispy Kremes?
CUSTOMER: Can I-
IKUO MORI: That’s why we’re unveiling this. You can be the first American customer to own one.
CUSTOMER: My god, it’s full of -
IKUO MORI: Yes.
NEW YORK POLICE DEPARTMENT, SUBARU VICTIMS UNIT 4:45 PM
ICE-T: The kids are calling it Levorg. Subaru takes these beautiful station wagons and puts a giant turbocharger on them, everything you’ve ever wanted. Then they put a CVT in it. Messes ‘em up so bad they think they’re grand tourers.
#
tags: subaru, levorg, subaru levorg, law and order: flat rate
For contrived reasons, I was next in line to become the Pope. Long-time readers will remember that I was the Pope once before, and surely to become the Pope again would violate some kind of Catholic doctrine. To that I say: nope! Turns out nobody wrote down “can’t be the Pope twice.” Suckers.
I had to sit down in front of the existing Pope for a job interview. Awkward, right? As he explained it, he had not had a chance to read my resume before the interview, and so took a few minutes to look over it, noting that I had proficiency in Microsoft Word and clucking softly when he realized it was an outdated version. The Catholic Church might be draped in centuries-old tradition, he muttered under his breath, but it needed to keep up with the times.
Finally, it came time for the weeder questions, or so I thought. The Pope lowered the paper, looked me directly in the eyes, and asked me a question to test my moral fiber.
“Have you ever killed a tire for no reason?”
My eyelid began to twitch involuntarily. The Pope no doubt noticed the beads of cold sweat settling into in my eyebrows as I vividly recollected destroying an entire tire-recycling dumpster in one furious March afternoon behind the abandoned Costco.
Thrown onto the wet cobblestones of Rome, I took one look backward at Vatican City and then thumbed the remote unlock fob in my pocket.
The Popemobile parked out front chirped happily.
My first boss had taught me a valuable lesson of business: never travel to do an interview without getting compensated.
A strange telegram appeared at my door one morning, delivered by a stranger who truly embodied the term. Mute, albino, and very, very tall, I tried my hardest to retreat into my shell of liberal-guilt-driven suburban acceptance as I took the note from him and read it. It seemed his vassal had requested my presence in order to help with his life’s work, and as I finished reading, the goon stepped aside and gestured to a waiting black car.
I looked at him, then at the car. My heart raced as I realized it was a long-wheelbase Toyota Century, no doubt imported at great effort. A normal man would have sent a new Audi, meant to impress the normals. This, I was coming to realize, would be a different job.
The trip took the better part of a day, weaving up into the mountains before we came across a beachfront estate, silhouetted against the setting sun. My chauffeur made himself scarce after collecting my bags from me, and I stepped into the lobby of the vacation home. Creaking gently as the house settled, the thick plaster walls held dozens of framed photographs, the glass smeared and obscured with atmospheric dust, collected over the years and never cleaned.
I was about to reach out with my hand, clear some of the grime from the pictures, when the goon reappeared. He passed me a note indicating that my work would be done in a separate wing from that of the proprietor, and that I must make no special effort to discover his identity. His privacy and seclusion was very important to him, and that I must not interfere as the work is completed.
He led me down a spiral staircase to a fantastic underground bunker, the walls studded with gleaming Snap-On toolchests. Against a far wall, I could see something shrouded by a dust cover. The fabric fought my attempts to identify the make and model at first, but I could tell that it was sharp, angular, and very practical.
When the cover came off, I realized why I had been chosen. A first-generation Subaru Liberty RS turbo wagon shuffled fist-sized chunks of rust onto the ground, its quarter panels nearly translucent with flaky metal cancer. In the hatch laid a close-ratio DCCD 6-speed.
As the weeks passed, I would eventually figure out the identity of my strange benefactor. I was sorely tempted to tell the goon, but somehow I felt that it would ruin some of the mystery. We rounded a corner, and from where I had come, I could hear the sound of peaky turbo burble echoing through the hills.
Although I had told no one, I made some strategic investments when I determined who the mystery man was. As the Japanese press went nuts at the reanimated cyborg body of Chikuhei Nakajima violently seizing control of Fuji Heavy, I called in my bets around the Tokyo Stock Exchange in my quest to have that most holy of holies, a non-rusty 2.5RS coupe.
When other people tell you they’re doing an engine swap on their Honda Civic, it’s like me telling you that I’m pulling out the pancake from my newly-purchased Subaru for a hot dose of sweet, sweet MLS head gaskets. It’s just what you do. There’s nothing unconventional about it.
I saw this Civic lying beneath a flickering streetlamp in the snow, a long-abandoned “FOR SALE” sign in the window. It wanted a new owner, someone who would take care of it. Its hail-dented fender accepted my touch readily, and I could sense through some as-yet-unexplained force that the car needed me as much as I needed it. All the metrics were checking out: this was A Good Car.
Weeks later, in the garage, I was preparing myself to chop out the rusty quarter panels and dose it up with a thick schmear of Bondo, fiberglass mesh, and crossed fingers. It’d worked before, but as the sawzall kicked its way up the B-pillar I found myself seized by a compulsion such that I could not stop the blade.
The thing with good cars is that if you cut them in half, they don’t become two good cars. That’s just a myth, spread by Big Sawzall Blade and the Home Depot Do-It-Yourself Illuminati. Even though the math doesn’t come out to a full integer multiple, what they do become is still more than the sum of their parts. So it was with this one.
With all this access, the logical next thing to do was an engine swap. I drove to the junkyard in search of a laundry list of items, and spotted a pitiful single-cam engine sitting in the corner of the returns pile. Thought it was a better engine than it was, the old grizzled junkyard manager explained to me. Someone should give it A Good Home. I asked him if agreeing to take it would mean I’d get a wheelbarrow to use this time.
When the welding was done, I had something very special indeed. If you were blind and also deaf, there is no way you could tell this car had been changed. That is, I guess, unless you were to touch or smell it or get close to it and felt the electric sensation of primal fear, spurred on by genetic memory, lift the hairs on the back of your neck heavenward.
If you sat in the seat, felt your way around the interior, the first thing you would notice are the twin gear shifters. It had been very difficult to mirror the five-speed linkage pattern such that it would drive the rear transmission in the correct pattern, but smarter men than I had been recruited, plied unwillingly with threats regarding the safety of their families, and had mostly delivered.
Day broke over the morning Honda meet, assorted resto-modded 80s/90s Civics and Integras gleaming in the sunlight. It was a magic moment, up until I showed up, fully sideways.
I kicked the front clutch pedal, momentarily cutting out the drive-by-wire throttle on the forward engine. The Civic yawed sideways, smoking the rear tires. As it came around, I switched clutches with a left-handed heel-toe and clicked the rear transmission down two gears. This continued for some time as I worked the twin sticks like an old-timey trucker, regulating the torque split throughout the savage donut - who needs DCCD? - and finished the ordeal by lighting up both ends of the car simultaneously, resulting in the world’s first - and only - two wheel drive Honda burnout.
The crowd was awestruck, staring at the twin rubber marks on the road, then burst into uproarious applause. I had done it - fulfilled the prophecy - and I had embarked upon the hero’s journey of legend spoken of in the Factory Service Manuals.
Years later, from my comfortable perch as CEO of the American Honda Motor Company, I would reflect on this moment as the point everything began to go wrong.
#
tags: honda, bimotor civic, honda civic, A Good Car
Toyota’s flame burned ever brighter in my peripheral vision. As yet another wave of 90s nostalgia crested over me, I found myself completely unable to resist the allure of their ovoid prize. I speak, of course, of the Toyota Previa, a people mover worthy of a king.
On paper, the Previa is sensual: available all-wheel drive or factory supercharging in a family minivan, a Sophie’s choice right out of the box. Mid-engined. Rear wheel drive. Vaguely egg-like. A cornucopia of 90s JDM goodies only a massively inflated shipping cost away. I decided it would be best to meet my heroes.
When it was offered to me, I shook the seller’s hand so firmly that it turns out I dislocated his shoulder and tore two major tendons. The screams were quickly drowned out as the throaty two-four roared to life beneath my feet and I departed from their suburban enclave.
Within weeks, the Previa was unrecognizable. Its once-mighty supercharger now received a heaping helping of air from the remote-mount turbo which replaced the rusted OEM mufflers, filling in the torque gap. If only Toyota had made this from the factory, I thought while merging into traffic at the approximate ground speed of a Saturn V on PCP, they would have put that pesky Dodge underwater for good.
Alas, every good project car must come to an end, and for me the Previa Madness came to its conclusion when, during a grocery expedition, I was offered actual money for it from a family of recent immigrants who wanted an unassuming seven-seater people mover with that oh-so-reliable Toyota marque on the hood.
The deal was signed on the spot, and there will always be a warm feeling in my heart when I think of my helping of the less mechanically able. Specifically, I will always remember the terrified look on the father’s face as the Precision 6062, spurred on by the wheezy Toyota blower, ramped up to full boost within the span of the parking lot.
#
tags: toyota, toyota previa, previa, previa madness
Between high school and university, I worked in a we-pull-it junkyard for a few months. There was a nice dude who ran the place, Arnold. He liked cars, I think, because it would be impossible to have that job if you didn’t. Car culture was a whole other thing, perhaps.
Everyone at the yard noticed it. When we would haul in an old Datsun, Arnold would look at it before it went up on the forklift. There was a haunted look on his face, one that I would never see for any other make. It was like he was fighting an old war all over again.
One night, after work, we went to the nearby bar for a celebration. I forget why we were celebrating: I think maybe it was something to do with the hundred thousandth carload of metal shipped to the recycler’s, but it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that I got a little tooled-up, and with the alky-burning confidence of an newbie boozehound, asked Arnold what it was with Datsuns.
He looked at me, fixated my gaze with sad eyes, and let out a sigh that could crush a coconut.
“Every single one of these cars is nicer than the shell I’ve been welding up at home,” he moaned.
The truth was like an ochre tachometer needle through my brain. Highway runoff markers floated in the air, blurring as they passed beyond my front fenders. The repetitious act of Scandinavian flicks, the rear end slowing down to tap the front end in like a well-aimed putt. The paranoid feeling of an insistent overspeed buzzer. I was in a 1987 Toyota Corolla GT-S. Funny as hell, it was the worst used car purchase I could think of.
I was a successful business tycoon before I went to prison for open palm slamming a piping hot Moons Over My Hammy into the face of my visibly pregnant server at Denny’s. Now I’m on parole, and Wall Street has passed me by. But I’m out there helping entrepreneurs with their real business problems.
This.. is Do You Know Who I Am.
[Title card: FORT LAUDERDALE, FLORIDA]
Richard was a successful frogurt retailer until his wife fell ill and he had to take a few months off to take care of her. Now that she is tired of having him around the house, he needs gap funding so he can invest in staff and machinery to get him back on top. He called me to help.
[Exterior: Stock footage of a small credit union branch. It is obvious from the surroundings that it is actually in New Mexico, not Florida.]
Hi, I’m here to meet with the branch manager about a loan for Frozen Dick Treats. What do you mean, who should I say is here? Do you know who I am? (winks to camera)
My hustling got me an audience with Ted, the branch manager, but that was only the start of my problems. It turns out the credit union itself was also in trouble, because of a vicious cycle of reduced liquidity in the area due to a collapse in housing prices borne out of an irrational pricing bubble generated by a combination of artificially low long-term interest rates and sophisticated aggregate financial instruments, the ratings of such misled large institutional investors as to the risks contained within.
Ted, I like you. I’ll tell you what I”m going to do for you. I’m going to head to Wall Street and fight for you.
[Exterior: Hong Kong’s Financial District at 3 AM, clearly captured from a low-resolution web feed of a traffic camera. The corner of the frame reads “UNREGISTERED HYPERCAM 2.” A high-mileage prostitute urinates behind an empty newspaper box.]
When I walked into the New York Federal Reserve, they didn’t know who I was. I asked them a few times, but there was no spark of recognition. I was going to have to take this all the way to the top.
[Exterior: The Canadian Parliament buildings. After a second, it appears that it is an inkjet printout of a circa-1960s picture of Centre Block, being held in front of a camcorder by an intern with shaky hands and nervously-bitten fingernails.]
Hello, I’m here to see the President about structural economic reforms involving macroprudential legislative revisions to investment banking policy. What do you mean, who should I say is here? Do you know who I am?
#
tags: do you know who i am, i have no idea what this was
Spica, the true name of the beast, dogged me forever, or at least for a week. Although the Alfetta told me such glorious tales of the Other Side of 7000 RPM, expressed in interpretive dance and song as its glorious cam pushed singing hellfire through its bores, I knew that it could not last.
I had awoken in a cold sweat the previous night, imagining from the dead of sleep that I could hear the rocker panels of the Alfetta rusting. The Alfa had pried open the eyelids of the Other Side, and now I could see it staring within me whenever my own eyelids were shut. There was plenty of time for rationalization and self-flagellation, but only after I found myself in the garage at four in the morning, investigating the rocker panel for the rust I was sure had been created by my languid psychic horror.
Perhaps I was too neurotic, or simply too cheap, to own such a jewel. I would have to move it onward. The listing was made, buyers were consulted, a deal was struck.
Here, as before, the Alfa had cast its dark magic: somehow I had owned an Alfa, beaten the shit out of it, and turned a profit. I imagined myself as a warrior, posed against the horrors of Spica, forced to fight for what was right in the world. When it was all done, I found myself to only be an enabler, a prophet of the ways of Spica. I had become the Previous Owner.
To repent for my sins, there was nothing else to do but punish myself. Years later, at Pebble Beach, the head judge asked me what my inspiration was. I had constructed a concours-correct, frame-up restoration of an Alfa Romeo 33 Sportwagon, possibly the only one in existence.
I looked at the judge, beaming in his featured-marque clothes dyed thick with Rosso corsa, and lowered my sunglasses so that he could see deep into my soul. He shook as he witnessed the Other Side in me. Perhaps he had escaped - lucky enough to be a voyeur - but now he stood before a true traveler. He agreed instantly that I deserved the medal, stumbling over his own words as he stepped backwards, brushing against a gleaming silver Maserati as he departed in fear.
Later, in sotto voce, he conspiratorially told me that he knew no physical trinket could restore what I had lost, but that he had an idea, and slipped a business card into my hand.
I looked at the business card when I sat down in the passenger seat of the tow truck. On it was the name and number of an Alfa collector, with “HE HIDES THEM AWAY” written on the card in the judge’s loose ballpoint-pen cursive.
#
tags: alfa romeo, alfa romeo alfetta, just alfa things
Have you ever known fear? For one all-too-short week in September, fear and I got real close - hot and heavy, I’m telling you. It prickled itself up my fingers, raced along the nerves and tendons of my wrists, and wrapped its claws around my flagellating heart.
The name of that fear was 1976 Alfa Romeo Alfetta, and within that fear laid another, more arcane terror, stacked inside it like a carved-brimstone nesting doll from the waiting room of Hell itself: the Spica fuel injection system. At least the colour was right, I thought as I slotted the delicate gear stalk into place, somehow avoiding angering the third gear synchronizer further.
Being afraid of the Spica system wasn’t an odd or obsessive fear: it dogged me every moment of my ownership, the spectre of fuelling system failure hanging over me like a dark shroud, as certain as death itself. Would this be the day it finally let go, leaning out catastrophically mid-corner in a glorious shower of rod components and tinkling aluminum? No, I thought: it would wait until I was at ease, pulling into a parking lot of a Walmart, refusing to treat the car’s exotic heart with the respect it deserved. One moment I would be cross-checking my three o’clock for stray shopping carts, and then I would be picking razor-sharp chunks of crankshaft out of my oil-soaked front tires.
In the end, the seller had gotten what he wanted from me: he had laid a trap so devious that at first I assumed it to be intentional. He smirked as he led me to the backyard garage, telling me there was something really special. His grin only got wider as he laid out the package deal: if I took his almost-mint condition, runs-sometimes Land Rover IIa as part of the deal, he would give me a discount. He would make me - and he paused for emphasis as my heart dropped into my stomach - a good deal.
It was rare for a seller to know the core of my being, my true heart, and I found myself powerless before his machinations. In my weakness I retreated within myself, where I could observe my hands palming out stacks of fifties, my conscious mind unable to put a halt to the proceedings, to flee backwards from this dark alley into the warm light of reasonable economy cars.
I knew I would curse his name soon, and not just as I shuffled my harem of vehicles in and out of my unassuming suburban garage.
#
tags: alfa romeo, alfa romeo alfetta, just alfa things, land rover, land rover iia
When you spend as much time on Kijiji and Craigslist as I do, you build up strange layers of some sort of innate resistance to temptation. It’s very easy to see a car of your dreams and then turn it down because of an imagined laundry list of issues produced by the demonized Previous Owner. Just when I thought that I was out of the woods, though, a 1976 Alfa Romeo Alfetta with Frenched foglights appeared in my nearby-sales RSS feed. My forehead beaded with sweat. My pupils dilated. I felt a primal fear that my ancestors must have prepared for me centuries ago, and found myself unable to catch my breath.
The problem is that I could not trust myself to resist an Alfa. How could I, with such unique features as red paint and a largely questionable fuel-injection system? The only thing to do, I felt, was to lock myself away in the special padded room I had constructed in my basement for just such an occasion.
My wife yelled after me as I descended the stairs, but I was unable to hear her words. The keypad beeped happily as it accepted my entry, and the thick steel vault door shut behind me.
As I sat on the floor of the vault, trying to cold-turkey the Alfa lust out of my system, I realized three things: first, that I forgot to put lights in this vault, second, that I forgot to test the oxygen supply, and third that my wife did not have the access code with which to bring me food while I tried to wait out the two-month expiry date on the Kijiji ad.
To this very day I cannot tell you how long I was down there. In solitary, days turn into weeks turn into months turn into years seamlessly. If you asked my wife, it was a matter of only a few minutes before I realized that I could just take the screws off the vault-door hinges from within, and used the always-present JIS screwdriver collection from my pocket to take those hinges off.
I was free: but what is freedom when you own a ‘76 Alfetta with a high-lift cam? As the little engine raced to redline, breaking up only temporarily as the distributor freaked out at the concept of atmospheric moisture, I knew that I had traded one dark solitary-confinement vault for another. This one, I began to realize with a creeping fear, held no JIS screws.
Sweet Chili Heat and the Nextdoor Probably-Racists
Once upon a time, there was a little Mazda named Sweet Chili Heat. Sweet Chili Heat and his owner lived in an unassuming suburb, where they would happily do basic maintenance and the occasional grocery run.
In that suburb, there was a social network named Nextdoor, where Sweet Chili Heat’s neighbours would discuss the abstract concepts of crime and punishment in a twenty-first century left adrift by the destruction of trusted institutions in a sea of rapidly accelerating technological and social changes. Sometimes people would complain about Sweet Chili Heat, but Sweet Chili Heat never saw that, because he was a car and did not know how to get on the Internet.
One day, Sweet Chili Heat’s owner accidentally enabled the text-to-speech functionality of his overcomplicated and often-confusing smartphone. Before he could shut it off, Sweet Chili Heat heard the entire rant about the “super loud car driven by that Mexican menacing the security of the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
Well, let me tell you, Sweet Chili Heat did not take kindly to racism. Maybe it was because of his birth in Hiroshima, where he saw the futility of man’s hatred towards his fellow man, or maybe it was because he jealously desired the secret of rational thought and despised those who would throw it away for lazy stereotyping.
The next morning, Sweet Chili Heat awoke. In the night, his slow but capable cruise-control ECU (for Sweet Chili Heat was carbureted, unlike his smarter and younger brother who resided in the same garage) had done enough lexical and semantic analysis to figure out the most likely source of the slurs.
When the police arrived, they found a family, all clutching their individual copies of Mein Kampf. At first, they could not determine the cause of death. Upon further investigation, the coroners discovered all the members of the family were missing their auditory cortexes. In their place was nothing but sparkling goo, as if they had been pummeled into liquid by some unknown force.
Nobody suspected Sweet Chili Heat after the muffler was re-attached.
#
tags: sweet chili heat, nextdoor, mazda, mazda rx7, just rotary things
im permabanned poster ej25popper58. i first started reading the subaru flannel thread when i was about 12. by 14 i got really obsessed with the concept of “divergent mechanical engineering” and tried to channel it constantly, until my thought process got really bizarre and i would repeat things like “integrated front differential” and “two piece shortblocks” in my head for hours, and i would get really paranoid, start seeing things in the corners of my eyes etc, basically prodromal schizophrenia. im now on antipsychotics. i always wondered what the kind of “doing maintenance" style of subaru ownership was all about; i think it’s the unconscious leaking in to the conscious, what jungian theory considered to be the cause of schizophrenic and schizotypal syptoms. i would advise all people who “own” multiple subarus to be careful because that likely means you have a predisposition to a mental illness. peace.
Some people can be very rude. For instance, the Ferrari factory started locking their scraps bin after they caught me in there trying to make off with a scratch-and-dent flat-plane V8 crankshaft. After interrogating me for a bit, they determined that I was not in fact some kind of industrial spy but instead something much more menacing.
Enzo’s goon took his eyes off me just long enough to re-wrap his blood-stained hands, and I used that split second to the utmost. A series of expensive-looking kung fu moves left him unconscious, the chair he tied me to shattered over his head. On the way out, I visited the locker room and picked up a factory uniform in just my size.
Now normally, I would never deign to put a new part into a car I’m building - they’re usually just not as good as the original parts - but seeing as I was actually in the factory I figured I could do my own QC and make sure I got the pick of the litter.
With a clipboard in hand and a stern expression on my face, nobody would dare question me, even as I unloaded 488 engines by the pallet into the back of a breadvan-conversion Punto Abarth. As I blew out of the Ferrari forecourt, the rear suspension squeaking and groaning under the strain of Maranello’s finest, I glimpsed back at the factory and smiled.
When the carabinieri finally came looking for me at Switch Villa, they found no trace of the stolen Ferrari engines. The senior inspector had poked through every closet, took delicate notes on every piece of parts I had lying around (saving me the trouble of filling out a spreadsheet, so it was a net positive, really) and then interrogated me again and again. At last, and with the aid of my good friend handful-of-small-denomination-Euros, they had to let me go.
Where the inspector had failed to look, of course, was the engine bays of the Maserati BiTurbos that clogged my back yard. I was determined to have reliable Italian twin-turbo boost, even if it killed me.
#
tags: maserati, maserati biturbo, ferrari, ferrari 458, fiat, fiat punto
The key to having a lot of beaters is really liquidity. It’s not just some fancy word that your financial advisor throws around to explain why all of your money disappeared up his nose. Oh no. Think of liquidity like the grease in a wheel bearing. If it’s shitty assembly grease that bearing is going to eat itself within weeks. If you take that bearing apart, and pack it with the really nice sticky red stuff that gets stuck on your drywall when you inevitably drop the fucker on the garage floor, oh boy, now we’re talking.
Where was I again? Bearings? Oh, no, liquidity.
Like I said, the key thing at any time is to be able to move out on a beater within seconds of spotting a better one. I was sitting on a needed-almost-nothing (by my standards) Alfa Romeo Spider when an International Scout II showed up within taxi distance to my house. Perfect score, right? But he didn’t want to trade. This created a difficulty, as I needed to (at the very least) move a ton of Italian steel out of my driveway before the insurance man caught on to just how many aliases I’ve been giving him. Repeat after me: Ese no es mi Alfa, eso es el señor de Flippo. I think he bought it.
So therein lay the problem: my Alfa was illiquid. It wasn’t really a solid either, more like a collection of rust powder loosely held together by poor-quality paint. In order to move this Alfa, I was going to need to take a bit of a haircut.
One trip to the junkyard later, and I had slapped a Honda Accord Coupe badge on the back and posted an only slightly deceptive ad on Craigslist. It moved instantly, a buyer coming up from another town thinking he was getting an efficient, reliable Japanese product for his money.
When I returned to the house of the Scout II, cash in hand, I found that the previous owner had already sold it to someone just before I got there. Another kind of liquidity is bleeding a man slowly into a transmission drain pan after lashing him to an engine stand with rusty hose clamps.
#
tags: on beater liquidity, senor flippo, international scout ii, international harvester, honda, honda accord, alfa romeo, alfa romeo spider
Maybe it was my general opposition to the supernatural, or perhaps he hadn’t really appreciated it that I had shaken his lamp in an industrial paint-mixing tumbler, but either way the genie was pissed.
“I GIVE YOU THE CURSE OF PASSIVE BOLT-LOOSENING,” he boomed, “FOREVERMORE WILL BOLTS BE SLIGHTLY LOOSENED AROUND YOU WITHOUT LIFTING A FINGER.”
I tried to stifle laughter. For an ordinary man I’m sure this would have been a problem. For me, this curse was more of a, how do you say, blessing? After the first few weeks of bringing Loctite to work to keep my standing desk from collapsing on me, I was chuckling my way through fix-and-flips at a rate my friends found incredible. They were a little confused initially when I told them they had to park at least four blocks away, but after empirically determining the radius of effect of my so-called curse, it was really the safest thing for them.
One morning, I received a telegram. I could watch the UPS truck rapidly disassemble as it idled in front of my house, the deliveryman feeling the strain of waiting for a tip and signature even as he watched his work vehicle reduced to a loose pile of its constituent components. A sea of fasteners rolled out from the panels, down the hill outside my house, and into the storm drain at the end of the street, a beautiful shimmering wave of tinkling.
The telegram said that a favourite aunt had taken ill and I must immediately visit her far away. I immediately summoned a taxi, then another taxi a few minutes later, then you get the idea. Leaving behind me a trail of dismantled Camry Hybrid unibodies, I entered the (thankfully welded-together) joints of the airport departures terminal.
I stayed on that tarmac for what felt like eternity, waiting for the maintenance crew to complete bolt-torque cross-check. From somewhere far away, I swore I could faintly hear the laughter of the genie.
The Trans Mountain road rally changed something deep inside me. An ordinary commute didn’t move the needle anymore. I needed adventure, risk, hubris, delight. What I needed was a worse car. In the consignment lot of the once-Mitsubishi dealer, I found what my heart had been looking for all this time.
My loved ones were concerned, of course: they sent me for a battery of tests, both psychological and physiological. On impact-typed letterhead bearing the name of a dead doctor, I released my own medical findings to the press, confirming that I was hale and hearty, the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency of owning a Chrysler Intrepid.
The first few weeks were a resounding disappointment: the orgy of squirrel-eaten wiring and loosely-tensioned accessory belts that made up my new daily driver somehow managed to form an odd kind of “reliability.” If I wanted to climb the mountain of busted-on-the-roadside-quick-repair-it enlightenment, things were going to have to get a whole lot less reliable in a hurry.
At last, a crank bearing let go. From somewhere deep within the bowels of the three-three V6, a crude shattering echoed upwards through the bores and out from the headers as the shortblock was incrementally reduced to scrap steel diarrhea at escape velocity. I expertly piloted my Hindenburging land yacht to the roadside and climbed out, beaming at the normals who dared to finish their commutes in practical yet risk-free vehicles.
Perhaps I hadn’t thought my plan out all the way, I realized, as I tried to remember how to walk long distances. After a few false starts, I climbed out of the ditch into which I had fallen and consulted the Intrepid. A steaming mess of exploded car blood and shattered internals stared back at me when I popped the hood, and I felt the rising tide of panic in my throat.
I fought that panic. I was no ordinary man, and giving up at this juncture would abandon everything I had worked for. The possibly-imaginary culture that sprung up around three hundred dollar megabeaters would look down upon me in disdain and crucify me on a fixture made entirely of junkyard-reject Chrysler ten-bolts. Like it or not, I was going to have to fix this car with stuff I found on the roadside.
Now confident in my ability to walk short distances, I did so, and came back with quite the prize. It turned out there was a daycare down the road with a particularly inattentive babysitter.
Kids will believe anything you tell them, especially if you tell them you’re Santa and need replacement motive power for your sleigh. The eight-year-old I had appointed to the rarefied position of “Rudolph” was probably making more horsepower than the old pushrod sixer ever could have hoped for.
#
tags: chrysler, intrepid, that one got kind of out of hand
I think everyone has had this experience before: you walk through the wrong door at the audition, and end up getting tapped to be the head writer for a new Broadway play about the internal combustion engine. Despite what the corporate doctors had said during my pre-hiring physical, I was up for a challenge.
What I found out was that there’s a huge gap between writing something and making it happen on the stage. Before long, I was also directing the play, screaming stage directions from a booming PA system powered by a big-block Mopar. My actors, generally of a sensitive type, didn’t really appreciate my profane back-of-shop mannerisms and random physical assaults. So they quit too.
In the end, my one-man show about the internal combustion engine was a resounding success. The New York Times theatre reviewer didn’t bother showing up to it before writing the review, and a well-placed press release before his deadline made sure that I would have suckers - er, patrons - forevermore! No refunds, assholes.
On the Today show the next day, my coronation was brisk but respectful. They asked me what the most challenging role was. I told them it was my big solo piece about piston rings, Grab That Flame Front, set to the tune of Tiptoe Through The Tulips.
The village elders circled me warily from a safe distance. My guide, confused, translated. “They say your arrival has been foretold. You are… The Man Who Killed A Toyota?” His voice was peaking with terror. He had been away from the village for too long as he sought his fortune, and he was just now realizing his mother’s warnings about the outside world had come true.
“No,” I said to him, hands outstretched in a gesture of open communication. “I am the man who killed a Hilux.”
I crossed the floor then, the elders making a path for me as they attempted to maintain minimum safe distance. My fingers grasped the Crystal Valve Cover upon its marble plinth and I swept it into my toolbag.
My guide could take the strain no longer. A fight between us ensued, one that I easily won, although not without ripping my shirt and exposing the torque specs tattooed across my upper body. I hope he didn’t expect a good tip for that kind of service.
The eldest of the village elders began to bellow something, a curse of some kind, before coughing and switching to English.
“I hope you got a Lincoln Navigator for a rental, you motherfucker,” he yelled as I passed through the exit of the temple.
#
tags: cultural appropriation, toyota, theft, lincoln
Do you like the Mk2 GTI 16v?
Their early work was a little too playful for my tastes, but when the Mk2 GTI came out in 1983, I think they really came into their own, commercially and dynamically. The whole chassis has a crisp, springy feel, and a new raspy exhaust on the eight-valve that really announces the car has arrived. They’ve been compared to Audi, but I think Volkswagen has a far more acute sense of swaybar tuning.
In ‘87, Volkswagen released this, the 16 valve 1.8, their most accomplished motor. I think their undisputed masterpiece is the thermostat housing, a design so convoluted most German mechanics never pay attention to it. But they should, because it’s not just about avoiding an exploding heater core or inconvenient block rupture, it’s also important to maintain cooling system pressure in the questionable water jacket design.
Once again, the Ford Motor Company thought that they had me over a barrel. That’s the thing about barrels, though - Donkey Kong throws them at you. While you wrestle with that metaphor, I’ve opened the hood of the Aspire and are showing you the goods.
What everyone needs to know about the Festiva and Aspire is that they were unfortunate little cars, born under the hateful visage of people who hated subcompacts. Can you even believe such a person exists? Subcompacts are the adorable puppies of the car world, mincing and dancing around the ankles of their larger compatriots. Ford management, though, whooo, they’d apparently kick that puppy directly into a wall for daring to threaten their profit margins.
If there was one thing I was put on Earth to do, said the disembodied voice only I can hear that greets me every morning, it was to make the Ford Aspire appreciated by the public. At first I believed the path to redemption for the little KiaMazdaFord laid in forced induction, a mystical gift delivered from On High that let us recycle worthless exhaust into more glorious torque.
I was wrong! I was so wrong! The realization that my life had been for naught hit me like a ton of bricks, leaving me reeling and depressed for years. At first, I found comfort in alcohol, but even that lapsed when I realized people at car shows just weren’t impressed by a one-liter beater shooting invisible streaks of nitromethane fire into the raffle booth.
Perhaps religion held the answer, I imagined, picking up a book I believed to be like the factory service manual for the soul. I was wrong again: instead, it appeared to be like a Haynes manual for the soul. After throwing it away in disgust I found myself consumed by Eastern meditation, in hopes of convincing my racing mind to settle for a rough big-cam idle.
Like the Tao says, there was a Third Way. I would blend the best of the Ford school of thought with the best of the Mazda belief structure. Only in this way would the schism innate to the Ford Aspire at last be resolved, bringing respect to the model and intellectual honesty to the domestic subcompact market.
The sun breaks over the opened hood of the Aspire, blinding you temporarily so only the contrasting insectoid contours of the engine transplant are at first visible. It doesn’t take a geometry professor to figure out how many intake runners there are on this baby, and as your jaw drops, preparing to stammer out a question, I smile.
It wasn’t easy to jam a supercharged five-liter Coyote under the hood of a 1995 Ford Aspire, but dammit, I found a way.
#
tags: ford aspire, aspire, ford festiva, festiva, ford, festiva madness
The worst part about breaking a Honda isn’t the fact that your car is no longer functional. Oh no, it’s all the stuff that comes after.
I had barely had a chance to return my phone to my pocket after calling the tow truck when I got another call. I knew what it was, sure. On the line was Honda customer support.
“We heard your 24-year-old Honda Civic recently couldn’t start because of a material defect in our engineering. Is this true?”
“Uh, yes, but it’s really due to my negligence in mainten-”
The line went dead. I sighed, knowing what would come next.
As the sun hesitantly rose over my house the next morning, I heard an insistent (but very polite) rapping of knuckles on my front door. Grumbling, I descended the stairs in my nightgown to answer the door.
“Hello, honoured customer,” said the interpreter, smiling in embarrassment. “This man is our executive in charge of customer service. He has worked at Honda for seventeen years and he wishes to announce his great displeasure at your unprecedented mechanical failure. He will now take his own life to restore your confidence in the many products of the Honda Motor Corporation. Please sign here to acknowledge the seppuku has been delivered.”
I rolled my eyes. Without saying a word, I strode the distance of my lawn and yanked the tanto from the hand of the jetlagged executive before he could plunge it into his abdominal wall.
“What’s his name?” I barked at the interpreter.
“You have greatly offended Taro-san by rejecting his offer of ritual suicide!” he shrieked, while busily removing alternate bladed weapons from the trunk of the fleet-plated Pilot they had arrived in.
“Taro,” I said, looking into the executive’s eyes, “it’s okay that a 24 year old car had a small electrical failure due to a lack of maintenance. Come with me. We will get you installed into a nice American corporation where nobody tries very hard and failure is rewarded with thick executive bonuses.”
Even though I knew he could not understand my words, I noticed a softening in his eyes as he allowed me to take him by the hand. Together, we drove to a nearby Silicon Valley dot-com where I released him into the boardroom. I looked on as he first hesitantly sniffed, then frolicked with the other executives, free at last from the harsh penalties for corporate malfeasance in his home country.
As I returned home, I remembered that I should have asked him for a discount on a new main relay. That shit costs two hundred bucks from the dealer, I yelled at myself as I smacked my own forehead.
I’m a traditionalist at heart. When you show me fancy new gadgets, the thing I think of first is how I can subvert them to make my will dominant upon them. Does this ethos extend to sentient life forms? You bet your sweet little bippy it does.
Everything started, as these sort of things do, with cheap deals on parts. Some MIT egghead had figured out how to shrink an entire lidar setup onto a single chip and sell it for ten bucks. For my part, I had figured out how to buy the Chinese knockoff of that same chip on eBay for thirty-nine cents. Capitalism made my head spin sometimes, but not as much as what came next.
After a weekend of thrashing a perl script together, I had what I felt was a pretty decent self-driving car firmware. When it came time to render one of my cars self-driving, what better to choose than one that was mostly inert in a corner of my garage? Sweet Chili Heat had sat in my storage, dead, awaiting a drivers’ seat, fresh plugs, a quick Seafoaming, tie rod ends, windshield wiper blades, new exhaust gaskets, front cover gaskets and maybe an AC recharge.
I strapped a few dozen bucks of lidar to the edges of the car, ran a thick copse of wiring throughout the rust holes in the body, and plugged it into an old Eee PC I found in the kitchen junk drawer. My latest creation was done, and I flipped the switch. Nothing happened. I checked the battery - a reasonable voltage was emitted - and bonked the starter, and still nothing.
Frustrated, I retired to my parts-filled kitchen, preparing a Hot Pocket. I had always admired the malaise-era Formica that dominated the room, and in fact I was studying it when I heard a bang and a furious roar. A furious roar, in fact, not unlike a 12A awakening from ancient torpor.
I ran out to the garage to find the door in ruins, reduced to matchsticks. Sweet Chili Heat was nowhere to be seen. For hours afterward, I scanned the neighbourhood for signs of my stolen RX-7, believing it to be in the possession of a thief with greater mechanical skills than I, a thief who could revive dead cars. That’d be some creepy shit, I thought, as I returned home, depressed.
“Wait, I thought you were at the Safeway,” my terrified roommate said, eyes wide with fright. He was watching the news, and soon so was I.
Sweet Chili Heat was unmistakable, even from a choppy news-helicopter camera image, as it ripped savage burnouts around the cart corral, menacing any and all nearby piston-powered Mazdas for their betrayal. I turned off the television as it caved in the rear quarter panel of a 4x4 MPV, unwilling to witness further carnage from my sweet little Dorito machine.
A few weeks later, I received a letter in the mail from the police. It seemed that my RX7 had gotten picked up after robbing a Walmart for the last of their 13-inch GTRadials. After the cops, correctly identifying a sentient RX7 as an ethnic minority, had chased it into a ditch, Sweet Chili Heat demanded to speak to its lawyer. That lawyer, naturally, called for a character witness, who was me.
Things didn’t really get out of hand until the Netflix camera crew showed up and placed my testimony under copyright. You can see what happened next on the twelve-part documentary, To Catch An Epitrochoid, this fall.
#
tags: sweet chili heat, just rotary things, brap
I was a businessman. More importantly, I was a new media entrepreneur. When you look at the cover of Fast Company or Yacht Fetishists Monthly, you see a person like me, decked out in gaudy gold jewelry and purple-pinstriped suits that looked like they mugged one of the Brooks Brothers. My medium was television, and my fiefdom was the top of the Nielsen ratings for reality programming.
When the network first came to my attention, they did so by going through a trusted confidante. To hear him tell it, he was halfway through pulling the propane tanks off the back of an unattended taco truck when some corporate executives showed up. Unable to fight them off, he was held down and forced to listen to their notes. The force of their will turned his hair permanently white, and he would talk with a stutter forevermore, except when dealing in business.
He returned to the ranch, where many of us were working on cars that cost less than the average two-martini lunch in Hollywood. It wouldn’t have seemed natural that we would be such a fit, but that’s the thing about ‘fit:’ you just need to do a little clearancing. Often with an angle grinder.
Once we had finished taking that angle grinder to the collective and individual faces of various television executives and financiers, we had our show. Every week, you would see the crew work on some dramatically-overblown crisis project that needed to be done yesterday. The emotions, the pathos, the bathos - Gordinis aren’t the only kind of classics I studied, assholes - all of it added up to a melange of delight for our viewership.
Someone once said that pride comes before the fall, and they were probably right about that sort of thing. For me, the fall came during an ill-advised live taping of our show, where I dropped a bolt inside the engine bay and let loose a largely unbroken twenty-five-minute tirade of creative profanity, paused only by catching my breath and telling wildly-waving production assistants that I knew what I was doing.
We were off the air the next day. The lesson to take home from all this? America will tolerate the idea of work, but not the language.
As for me, I was stuck with retiring to my Beverly Hills mansion with attached 36-car garage. Indeed, I was doomed to forever live off the revenue I could make from copyright strikes against pirated YouTube uploads of my “career-ending” rant.
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Abandoned 12-bolts in ditches off the shoulder of the Ford bank. I watched entire D16Z6 heads glitter in the trunk of crushed Civics. All those parts will be sent to China, like scalded copper in Fort Mac homes. Time to lease.
I don’t know why he saved my Protege. Maybe in those last moments he loved Mazdas more than he ever had before. Not just my Mazda - anyone’s JDM; my FWD. All he’d wanted were the same parts the rest of us want. CV shafts, close-ratio gearboxes, limited-slip differentials, boost gauges. All I could do was sit there and watch him have kids.
It may come as a surprise to both you and biologists that I have a cousin. He lives in California, and has a very popular Instagram full of gorgeous cars that he never has to wash. As you can assume, this is irritating to me.
Family reunions are hard, and they’re harder still when a large portion of the diaspora of the Switch family remains under FBI surveillance. Coordinating the prison breakouts, double-agent fakeouts and other miscellanea required to slip the dragnet is itself an undertaking that would cause even the hardiest of party planners to throw their hands up in disgust and reach for the .38 snubnose on the corner of their desk, a single expectant bullet chambered within.
I got carried away with that last one. Long story short, my cousin, Califonia Switch, was coming to visit. He wanted to spend some of that filthy rich USD on my depressed assets and maybe pick up a project car for his troubles (”I never fly anywhere without driving back,” he said, inadvertently explaining in a single sentence why he had never been outside of North America).
When I picked him up at the airport, he only wanted to know where all the cool old cars were. I was ready for him.
I asked him to hold out his hands, and then filled his palms from a bag of rust.
“That’s a numbers-matching 1980 El Camino,” I said, “don’t wash your hands.”
#
tags: california switch, foreign exchange, currency arbitrage, the ugly american
We were deep into the bowels of two-stroke madness, that special kind of mania you get on the tenth or fifteen pull of the ripcord. You can sense compression, but the iron triangle of internal combustion eludes you. Hysteria washes over you in an awful wave made of pinpricks and acid, and it’s on that last go-for-broke tug that It Happens.
Somewhere deep within a physics textbook, someone has probably written an equation for the magical sensation that a human being feels when a two-stroke learns to walk, its staggered strides giving way to smooth idle. You can read that equation, do a few curious variable substitutions, prod it, chart it, but you can never be both inside and outside the expansion chamber as I was in that moment.
My neighbours burst from their comfortable suburban lifestyles, clutching carriers full of beloved family pets. Seeing not an earthquake but instead my grease-stained countenance, their fear is resolved in an instant. A few of them stay behind in the street, pretending that they meant to barge out of their homes in their boxer shorts and wifebeaters. I may have chuckled, but it is difficult to say, the reverb of the bored-and-stroked thumper vibrating my ribcage like a strummed harp.
Beyond smug, I use this furious power - the might of a god - to cut my grass. At least the smoke keeps the mosquitoes down.
They told us they needed an espresso machine that could flood an entire Olympics with black joy, and they needed it yesterday. Whoever ‘they’ were, they definitely knew how to get my interest.
Once we had finished figuring out how to trick Mr. T onto the plane this week, we were jetting off to Rio. I had planned to take the occasion to do some shopping, but you can imagine my surprise when I learned the IL-76 we bought on eBay didn’t come with a Skymall catalogue.
As befit such an undertaking, I had naturally brought only the best of the best, and before the wheels could touch foreign soil we already had a plan of attack and a reasonable prototype. Just try claiming a GMC 4.3L V6 as carry-on luggage on any other airline. Even if you could get it through the little mild-steel suitcase sizer at the check-in desk, the overhead luggage bins are only rated for 275 lb max - when the statute of limitations expires, you can ask me how I know.
That first night was magical. Maybe it was the nitromethane fumes burning at my eyes as bank after bank of surplus vee-six monsters cackled at their peak RPM, or maybe it was the sunset falling over a beautiful ocean clogged only occasionally by couches and human feces.
We weren’t foolish enough to expect medals at the end. That said, we definitely expected better than being thrown in prison when we returned home.
It turns out the GMC 4.3L V6 was the key to America’s power all along, and exporting of it was subtly forbidden. What we had done was closer to “smuggling an entire IL-76 cargo hold full of contraband,” our lawyer told us.
My partner started to tell them that we had actually removed a ton of the plane’s superstructure to make room for more Vortecs, but I managed to kick him in the shins before he could finish. We definitely didn’t want the FAA on our case.
Our lawyer reminded us to keep quiet as an eyepatched man from the US government walked into the room. His scarred hands proffered a red folder marked “TORQUE UNIT.”
And they say the government isn’t a friend to small business.
#
tags: il-76, small business, gmc 4.3l v6, just ilyushin things
The thing about doing spark-plug replacement on a Ford three-valve is, like a 180,000 mile plug, by the end of it you’re pretty burnt up.
I would never forget the men I followed into hell during my seven-year stint at Jefferson Brake and Muffler. It was my job, in fact.
Other shops would put names and years on a pretty plaque, memorialize the techs that had sacrificed their life for the cause. A little bit of fake Indian rosewood, some laser-embossed quartz, that’s what a man’s life was. That’s what a man’s story was.
There was a sense that each of these fallen techs were fading away, disappearing from our lives as easily as they had entered. This thought terrified the owner, already obsessed with his own mortality. As such, he brought me onboard, a sort of war photographer for the everyday battle that lived within a flat-rate tech’s mind and could only be glimpsed in white-hot streaks of pain by those who loved him.
I remember the first day of our friends-and-family summer barbeque. In apologia, the owners created a relaxing event where our techs could bring their oft-neglected family in an effort to increase their trust. Familial bonds were nothing, I remember thinking, in the face of the brothers-in-arms mentality that I witnessed every day beneath a two-post lift.
In my strange role, as the day proceeded I would find myself explaining to confused loved ones about why their breadwinners seemed so distant upon returning from work. It was the Tritons, I explained to one terrified small-business accountant as I plied her with exotic gins from the tailgate dispensary of my Meteor Ranch Wagon.
As the evening wore on, her young husband excitedly discussing camshaft profiles and exotic liquor with a coworker, she became further and further inebriated. At last, in a rush of words, she demanded to be shown the source of her family’s psychic pain.
There was one on the lift. There was always one on the lift.
It had the cab already removed. This would serve as a two-part lesson: first, the true underlying structure of the facade that allowed society to still consider the abomination as a single consistent entity, and second, the spark plug thing.
Her husband, feeling an empathetic terror in the gut of his stomach, barged into the shop, screamed, but it was too late.
She had broken a #8 plug off, and was herself sacrificed to the Triton V10.
I could hear the plug snap within the bores, a sound somehow so loud it would mute her husband’s screams of terror. His strenuous effort, his marital oath to protect her, was made void in an instant of negligence.
We hung two plaques that Friday evening. I remembered everything. It was my job.
Getting a job at the railway is surprisingly easy. I thought I might fail the driver’s test, but it just consisted of putting my car in first gear, driving forward, then stopping and reversing. They gave me an A-plus grade, they said, I was a natural.
If I was a natural, then that explained the angry looks from all of the highly trained (get it?) engineers at the break room on Monday morning. They were simply jealous. I tried to ignore their stares while I filled my novelty steam-locomotive mug and wiped my hands on my 1930s-era conductor uniform, complete with a cloth hat I had stolen from a child’s birthday party on the way here.
In orientation, there were more eyerolls when I tried to connect the discrete concepts of “trains” and “basic training,” a pun so blatant that you could use it instead of the horn when approaching crossings. Or so I thought, until I got that question on the post-orientation pop quiz wrong. Lot of tests in the railway, I’ll tell you that much.
That’s when I saw it. A hi-rail Unimog. It glistened in the sun, its corrosion-resistant DIN-compliant safety paint appearing to me as if a bumblebee from Hell itself. The Germans had really done it this time, let me tell you: a truck that could drive on a road, off a road, or on a railroad. If you were standing next to me, you would have heard a strange sucking sound as my mind expanded, flashes of new possibilities echoing through the corridors of my higher brain.
Still dazed by the discovery, I returned to my daily-driver 20B-powered LS400 and opened the toolbox that replaced its quarter panel after a little driver-training accident in the previous December. Within the concealed tool compartment, I would find my salvation. It also contained a slightly mangled fuel filler neck that I had to jiggle once in awhile while filling up or it would make the pump shut off prematurely.
When my supervisor returned from his break, and found that I had spent the first hour of my probationary period welding stolen hi-rail tracks to the exposed frame horns of a turbodiesel-swapped C3 Corvette, he was not pleased. I could feel my quarterly performance review score dropping even as I hooked up and began to tow a rail car full of what I hoped were parts cars behind me at high speed. It was unbelievable that he would look upon my initiative so harshly.
That’s the problem with the railroad, I yelled at him through the window net. Everyone is so stuck in the past.
#
tags: railroad, unimog, lexus, chevrolet, corvette, ls400, detroit diesel
One of the pervasive aspects of modern car culture is this obsession with lowering your hoopty. I’m sorry, but I just can’t live that low life like some people. No, for me, raised suspension is where it’s at. Backing it into corners, feeling that body roll, praying that I don’t hit an expansion joint and topple the entire mess over, that’s what legends are made of.
As you would expect in such a place, I found myself defending my lifestyle choices in Texas. A group of lowered drift cars had surrounded me in the parking lot of a Wynn-Dixie, sliding on welded diffs and tugging on comedically phallic handbrake handles. They issued a simple challenge: prove to them that my obscene suspension lift could run with the big boys on the local grip track, best out of three laps.
Although it was hard to speak through the sugary vape clouds emitted by the combination of the holed-out SR20 head gaskets and the drivers themselves, I acceded to their wishes and steeled myself for battle. The next day broke over a parched rural racetrack, its long-abandoned grip circuit cracked in the harsh Texan sun. Mixed surface, I thought with a chuckle while tying my hachimaki, this is going to be interesting.
Unfurling like a work of industrial pop art inbred with a venomous spider, I felt the spindly short-long-arm suspension of the Caravelle rock beneath me on the angriest launch my clumsy feet could manifest. Faux-whitewalls distorted under the side loads as the R-compounds that laid within grabbed a heapin’ helpin’ of track and shot me forward.
One of the 240SXs was a little faster through the corner than me, his non-suspension beating the driver half to death as it slid across the apex and disappeared into the straights. Maybe they were right about me, I thought, as I drove over the FIA regulation curb and through the infield of the track directly to the finish, forcing the 240SXes to swerve as I re-entered the racing line in a cloud of dirt, diesel particulate and grass.
WELCOME TO THE FINAL STAGE OF MAN’S EVOLUTION: THE CHRYSLER-MITSUBISHI THREE-LITER V6. IT GULPS BOOST LIKE A SORORITY GIRL AT A FENTANYL USERS’ CONVENTION, AND IT CAN DRINK UP TO FOUR TIMES ITS WEIGHT IN COMPRESSED AIR.
EIGHT HUNDRED HP? ONE THOUSAND HP? TWO THOUSAND HP? WHERE WILL YOU STOP?
“I got on it hard last night leaving the Kay Bee Toys and didn’t let up until the crank bearings shot out of the heater core,” said one multiple-time Chrysler customer.
I’M LEE IACOCCA, AND IF YOU CAN FIND AN ENGINE THAT CAN SURVIVE MORE FUCKING BOOST, BUY IT.
AND THEN TELL US WHERE YOU GOT IT SO WE CAN BUY ONE TOO.
In my time I’ve given the city planning department tons of criticism. Roads maintenance was no exception, even though they technically weren’t in the same department. To their credit, their members are at least literate, because after my last vaguely racist letter to the editor of our local newspaper (circulation: 8 people), the roads maintenance union paid me a visit.
There was a problem: the city management had taken a no-bid contract from a friend of the mayor to provide “smart asphalt” to all the roads in town. Self-healing, it would no longer require a team of between thirty and fifty dozen men to poke at it before scraping off the top layer and leaving it like that for a few months. Rumour had it, it was even resistant to potholes and wouldn’t corrode from road salt, lifted trucks or studded tires. It would put the roads maintenance guys out of business, and they really liked being in business.
There was a solution: a defector from the smart-asphalt company felt ethically conflicted about all the nano-scale megacancer it would cause, and decided to let the roads union know its innate weakness. The warranty wasn’t very good, and if you dumped enough heat into it, it would be voided instantly. They needed a man who could destroy a city block, but still have plausible deniability.
They had a deal in mind: I would become their Manchurian Commuter, and be equipped with a car of my choosing to void the warranty of the smart asphalt that threatened their livelihoods.
Picture if you will the Mayor’s inaugural announcement of the first city block of this new smart asphalt. It’s gleaming, unmarred by cars, gorgeous in the early summer sun, perfect in every way. Then some asshole in a 1994 Renault Twingo with a twincharged SR20VE does a burnout on it. That burnout lasts for so long, and reaches a heat so intense, that the road beneath begins to blister and flake away.
Before I have had a chance to destroy all of the road, my front tires have completed their conversion into gas, and explode as the belts let loose. The Mayor is pleased: I, and by extension my supporters in the union, have been defeated. His face turns to a mask of confusion when he notices I am still smiling.
Reaching down beneath the dash, I engage 4LO on the massively overbuilt GKN transfer case. The rear wheels of the angry little Renault light up. My automatic respirator keys up to Bioweapon Defense Mode as it detects the increased particulate in the air. I work the wheel to keep the Twingo pointed straight as it wiggles furiously on the bare racing steelies up front, the magnesium sparks thrown by the doomed wheels dancing across the heat-soaked road surface.
Too shocked to shut off the livestream, the Mayor’s announcement goes from routine to a genuine movement. I can hear the sound of straight-pipe exhaust crackling and bleach being poured on tires as other local maniacs descend upon the area, yearning to be part of this impromptu burnout challenge.
The next day, I hit a pothole and grimaced, imagining the imperceptible amount of alignment shift now present in my front right outer tie rod. In retrospect, I should have worked out a better deal with the roads maintenance union than “give me a free car and let me do burnouts in it.”
#
tags: renault, twingo, renault twingo, urban planning
Did I ever tell you the story about how I got involved in advertising and made my first billion dollars? It was totally accidental, like everything that’s good in life. Well, except for my first-through-tenth-born children. I’m not a “details person,” you know.
My story begins in a small suburb of a smaller city. Ignoring the implausible geometry of such a place - I said ignoring it, stop thinking about it - the real problem was that our city planners simply did not plan very well. Roads were clogged. Construction backed commutes up for miles. Cul-de-sacs in front of schools were so packed with cute-utes and mini-crossovers dropping their children off that it was impossible to get within thirty miles of the place without suffering a two-hour commute penalty.
I was sitting behind the steering wheel of my AMC Hornet, its zoomies hungrily gulping air through the hood as the engine gently rocked. Before me was a nearly incomprehensible traffic jam. Drivers were on both sides of the road arbitrarily, halfway through turn lanes, driving over driveways, stuck into impossible positions. I think one guy somehow even got stuck inside the bus stop. A self-driving car next to me began constructing a right-of-way model, then caught fire as its gigacore law-obedience CPU became overheated from recursive overflow.
Maybe it was the exhaust leak in my cabin, or maybe it was destiny. Either way, my eyes began to drift up, up, up - and lo and behold, they saw a new LCD advertising sign parked on the side of the road. That sign was looking for clients.
The next morning, the first of my ads ran. They always started in soft focus, an idealized visual of a happy suburban family. Jump cut to a bunch of tombstones sitting in an abandoned field, overgrown with grass. The slogan: “WHY SPEND YOUR LIFE IN TRAFFIC? QUIT YOUR JOB TODAY.” I can assure you all the remaining ads were of about the same level of subtlety.
At first I did not think my gambit had worked. After all, people in our modern society were sophisticated, immune to advertising, masters of their own intellect. Surely rational thought had won out this day, I thought as I pulled into a completely empty street.
All that week, I found myself commuting happily to work, as the suckers who believed me sat at home, their dwindling paycheques buoyed by spending more time with their loved ones.
I had many complaints in life. First and foremost is that the explosive collar around my neck was pretty scratchy, and I was worried about it forming a horrible skin rash. My second complaint is that I had an explosive collar around my neck forcing me to repair elevators.
Back in the previous century, when things made more sense, we encountered a glut of out-of-maintenance elevators and no technicians to fix them. Every apartment building, every shopping mall, every government building was outfitted with elevators requiring frequent service, and the landlords and slumlords wouldn’t pony up the fat stacks that Big Elevator wanted for routine maintenance.
Driven down by the market, the value of an elevator maintenance contract began to plummet as they roped in less-talented, cheaper people. When the Prime Minister herself died at the hands of a poorly-maintained lift in Centre Block her second-in-command made a simple edict: anyone with a modicum of mechanical experience would be drafted, once per year, to repair as many elevators as they could.
To make things worse, they identified that a lot of people with mechanical experience were also very lazy. Hence the explosive collars. They called it flatline-rate, and I was mostly envious that I hadn’t come up with the pun first.
Before me sat a standard Schindler 5500 modular passenger elevator, the kind you would encounter in any apartment building. I had fifteen minutes to figure out why it sometimes had a bit of a hitchy feeling when it got to the top floor. The elevator took five minutes to reach that top floor, which meant testing was out of the question. I had to do things on instinct if I wanted to survive.
My instinct served me well: I opened my tool bag to release several bottles of Seafoam. Their metallic rattling as the gently dented cans rolled on the carpeted floor in a random orbit filled me with cheer, and my hands were already groping for a vacuum line to feed it into.
With seconds to spare, the Ministry determined that I had successfully repaired the elevator, and shut the collar off. I was on my way back out through the lobby, gingerly rubbing my raw neck skin, when I heard the screams of ordinary citizens as the elevator shaft became whited-out with delicious carbon-removal intake juice.
#
tags: elevator mechanic, schindler, seafoam, just seafoam things
In the decade plus that I’d been working as a supernatural automobile mechanic, I’d never seen anything before or since like the Giving Forester. It seemed at first glance as if it was the corporeal prison housing a beneficial spirit. Those of us who stayed behind to observe it further and gain its acquaintance would soon find there was nothing beneficial about this Subaru.
I can remember the time well. Decade or so ago, back when I was still driving what was left of the ‘61 Apache. Together, we went to the town where the Giving Forester had been discovered. I greatly valued the time we spent together: every overblown throw of the Chevy’s column shifter was not just a way to keep moving efficiently, but a tribute to human survival and achievement on our lonely blue marble.
When I first received word of the Giving Forester, it was by the purchaser. He had bought the car from a small buy-here-pay-here lot just outside of town, the former owner lost to a combination of DMV incompetence and general slack regarding records-keeping in that part of the world. When he embarked upon the initial deconstruction and cleaning of the car, he found something strange.
For whatever reason, the back hatch of the Forester he had bought was chock full of 10mm sockets. Piled to the back window, in fact, a gleaming bounty weighing several hundred pounds. Smiling at his good luck, he began to shovel out the sockets, imagining himself never having to hunt around for the 10mm he dropped inside a fender or bumper beam ever again.
The next day, however, he tried to drive the Forester to work when he heard a jingling sound from the rear. At first it was assumed, as any Subaru owner would, to be heat shields. But then it was imagined, as any Subaru owner also would, that it could be terminal rod knock from oil starvation. The owner returned to the hatch, opening it to retrieve his spare oil and VIN-etching thermite kit lest it need to be left on the side of the road.
Again, the Giving Forester’s rear hatch was piled high with 10mm sockets. The man sat there, considering it. Shoveling out the sockets onto the side of the road, he retrieved the crushed jug of Rotella from beneath their gleaming pile.
Future experiments proved fruitful: when a 10mm socket was lost to human hands, say into a sewer grate or just into a particularly inconvenient part of the garage, it would re-appear in the back of the Giving Forester. He immediately consulted a priest, and the priest knew just who to call: not me.
Eventually, however, I had heard about it on Twitter, and so the Apache and I stepped into our reluctant role as foreign heroes. By the time we arrived in the city, the side of every road was littered with 10mm sockets. The reflection of their chrome-vanadium plating in the evening sun made it difficult to drive, but I persisted, the urge to get to the root of this mystery overriding any higher-brained caution.
I pulled into the driveway of the Giving Forester, its hatch door left open so as not to dimple the valuable confetti interior. Ejaculatory streams of jingling sockets were emitted constantly from this Old Faithful of a Japanese AWD econobox.
Kicking down the door to the owner’s house, I confronted him. I had the solution, I screamed, as he looked frantically around his bedroom for a weapon to use to defend him and his wife.
As we filled boxes of bulk sockets to ship to NAPA, I thought often about whether taking advantage of a strange locus of supernature was ethical. When the paycheques started rolling in, I thought a lot less about ethics and a lot more about Elans.
#
tags: the giving forester, subaru, forester, subaru forester
Cruise Night is one of those car-people concepts that ordinary people understand very well, yet whose true purpose eludes me. Admiring chrome was impossible for me due to a deficiency in my genetic makeup, and in fact none of my cars were what the television would call “vintage.” Obviously, when I was named head marshal of Cruise Night, I had to do something a little different.
On day two, the assembled lowboys and Bel Airs began to complain: their backs hurt, their incontinence medicine was running out. They simply did not expect the Cruise Night location to be so far away, and had expected, you know, a single night. I listened to their complaints, considered them deeply.
Near the end of the week, the chromed-alternator crowd began to drop out for mechanical failures. I had trusted deputies help to repair their cars, removing style and grace in order to replace them with brutal efficiency snatched from junkyard returns aisles and the parts-bin truck following the convoy.
The chosen people I had led were now tired, thirsty, with sore backs and various genital malfunctions. Their spirits were broken, and they willingly climbed aboard the seafaring ship that I had parked at the docks.
For weeks more, we rode on the high sea, the spirit of Cruise Night in our hearts as we swapped stories about five-hundred horsepower Chevy 305s and the 100 mile-per-gallon carburetor. Wrenching was done, again under the tutelage of me and my lieutenants. At last I felt a sharp thumping, and assembled the group.
We disembarked in Germany, a convoy of flaming, blacked-out nightmare machines with sharp edges everywhere and sunken-eyed loners behind the wheel. The police refused or were frightened to bring us in for equipment violations, and we made our trip to the Nurburgring, forcing underengined Polos and terrified Bedford Rascals into the ditches along the way.
Cruise Night became Colonize Night, and I’ve lived here ever since, in my lashed-together throne of driveshafts and men’s skeletons.
Economists and social workers will tell you all about how “the sharing economy” is leading to precarious employment, but you know what’s really precarious? Trying to drive a four hundred horsepower Pinto wagon.
With credentials like that, picking up a few bucks doing same-day delivery made sense. What’s more, I got a chance to hit the Amazon warehouse for parts deals directly.
I was in the process of checking the dead-stock bins for Escort EXP tie rod ends when the call came in from headquarters. Some vulnerable startup needed a stock delivery of pens and Phantom drones stat, and they were willing to pay for the damage I did to my R-compounds on the way over.
Working the handbrake with one hand as I pulled the hatch release with the other, the powered high-load shelf in the back of the Pinto exposed itself to the workers at the loading dock. They had become infinitely familiar with my antics over the years, so much so that they involuntarily shrouded their major mucus membranes as I finalized the load process and lit up the rear meats.
Cross-town traffic at this time of day was always difficult, not just because of rush hour but because of local law enforcement’s widely-stated disdain for my diesel-and-rubber-particulate antics. I was going to have to go under the radar, which is difficult when you drive a rare-as-hell shooting-brake Ford.
I was just coming out of the exchange tunnel when traffic ahead of me stopped dead. I slammed on the brakes, flaring the eight-piston front calipers in a motion not unlike that of a butterfly. The thing with butterflies is, when they flap their wings, weird shit happens. I felt a ginger tap from behind as an Acura MDX’s radar cruise control module failed to look up from her phone in time.
Fear shot into my veins, a cold steel grip. I just got rear-ended in a Pinto. Thoughts of immolation raced through my mind. I could hear myself hyperventilate as I climbed out of the car, nearby pedestrians fleeing for cover lest the Death Ford consume them as well in a paroxysm of rapid oxidation.
The Acura owner stared at me in horror as I emerged from the car, somehow alive. Smiling, I gestured to the crude cut-outs in the hood and the Cummins 4BT that angrily ticked away, furious that fuel pressure had been imperceptibly reduced by the now-leaking fuel tank.
Becoming a millionaire hasn’t changed me very much. I still make terrible barbeque, I will always lie to everyone I can, and most of all I always have a bunch of bad cars populating my property. It’s just that now the property is quite a bit larger.
My predicaments are pretty similar to those before I was rich also: sometimes all my cars break at once and I only have one to go get parts in. So it was today, as I drove into the Pick N Pull in my boring daily driver.
When I emerged from the junkyard, clutching a filthy D16Z6 head, I noticed a throng of junkyard rats around my vehicle. I thought this was strange, as there were almost no desirable or interchangeable parts on my daily. Plus, I grumbled to myself, it had an automatic transmission.
Popping the trunk got their attention, and I threw the head into the cavernous maw of the car. Normally, for something really nice like my confetti-interiored JDM STI wagon, I would put a towel down to protect the carpet. But this was just a daily beater, and as such it deserved no special treatment.
On the way out, one of the junkyard rats motioned for me to roll down my window. I did so, also intending to ask him for gossip about what the other yards in town might have for fresh drops.
“Dude, is that a Rolls Royce Wraith?” he was practically hysterical.
I rolled my eyes and answered in the affirmative. “It’s the only car I have that runs,” I explain sheepishly, but then realize that I don’t need to explain myself to this guy and his Grand Am.
“You know, I have a Mustang II King Cobra at home,” I started, the irritation weighing on my voice, “but nobody ever gets excited about seeing one of those.”
Piece of shit Rolls can’t even do a burnout, I grumbled as the window rolled up and the traction control light began to flash under the throttle angle I requested. At least the gravel bouncing off the bottom wasn’t louder than the stereo.
#
tags: pick n pull, rolls royce, ford, mustang, ford mustang, mustang ii, king cobra, honda, d16z6, subaru, jdm sti wagon, impreza wrx sti
There’s a curse to being the office’s “weird car guy:” when something mechanical breaks, it is often your responsibility - no, your duty - to repair it as best you can. Usually this took the form of giving a coworker a jump start or coaching them through how to change a flat tire over the phone. Those rote tasks began to wear upon me, and I cried to the gods for something that would challenge my skills and maybe impress some of my coworkers for once.
The thing about taunting the gods is that sometimes the gods come down to give you a pretty good shove.
I walked into the office, bleary from lack of sleep, my fingernails caked with moly grease from some horrible project or another. I could not reasonably tell you which of my hoopties had been restored to running condition to make the trip to work. They were waiting for me.
A coworker gestured impatiently to the office water cooler, often a font of activity. It stood mute, still, the little bubble-making motor having died. Some part of me could sense it from the parking lot, and began to wake up the surrounding neurons in an attempt to fix things. Without saying a word, I knelt down and removed the front panel of the water cooler, breaking several irreplaceable trim clips.
Hmm. Broken and shoddily built? that’s just insulting.
I will never understand why my coworkers didn’t want to get water from the resulting cooler. In my efforts, I had gone to specific lengths to ensure that the new pump had an appropriately-sized engine that wouldn’t scare them with too much horsepower. As God is my witness, I didn’t think a Kohler 440 two-stroke twin with a Roots blower would spray that much water across the office.
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tags: office life, water cooler, kohler, two-stroke
My phone vibrates across the desk with an insistent ring, and at first I am excited to see what kind of Pokemon it has detected. To my great horror, I find out that in actuality it is a “phone call.” The advertising agency hired by Tourism Lac La Biche begins to speak to me, the imperious manner of the Corporate Voice obvious even from the thousand miles of distance I have strained to put between me and the open-pit mine of human suffering that is the Devil’s Own Town.
Every story has a beginning, although my psychiatrists (both court-ordered and off-the-street-volunteer) often plead with me that not every beginning needs a story. Those guys don’t know what they’re missing, and part of what they’re missing is my story of ripping a front-wheel-drive burnout capable of changing things forever.
You should have seen it: the burnout was a one-tire fire of such volume and ferocity that the local volunteer fire department issued an all-hands scramble order. Dozens of Pontiac Sunfires in semi-official livery responded, their dented panels, loose bumper clips and dangling mufflers resplendent in the low late afternoon winter sun. Locals were curious as to what was happening at the local Superstore, and began to form a mass around the furious smoke cloud.
At last, the stupid-rigid tire compound of the 160,000-km-prorated-warrantied Canadian Tire specials could no longer deal with the heat and began to chunk, hurling at first rubber and then bits of gradually-increasing cord as the wheelspeed continued to grow, the engine now less and less burdened by the twin curses of friction and rotating mass.
As the Pontiacs reach me, their eBay lightbars flashing federally-unmandated shades of caution amber into my rear view mirror, I drop the handbrake lever and crabwalk my way out of the parking lot, narrowly dodging both a gaping pothole and a heroin-addicted senior stumbling home from the Legion.
A lack of anything that could even be called pseudo-official response gives me precious seconds to make good my escape. That escape is not without effort, however, and summoning up all the fury living within the D15′s one-hundred-and-almost-three brake horsepower forces sweat to bead upon my forehead.
The catspaw of Tourism Lac La Biche wants to know what happened. I gulp, wondering if maybe their two-officer RCMP detachment needs to question me in an official capacity for my stunting antics. Luckily, my sense of relief is palpable when she asks me how I would score the town’s roadworks on a scale of one to ten, ten being best and one being worst.
When you’ve been a celebrity for as long as I have, you start to detect patterns in what other people ask you. I would have adoring fans come up to me at comic conventions and pull on my sleeve, ask me for a story about Sweet Chili Heat, the RX7 that stole my heart. Okay, so maybe it’s more like ‘pattern.’
Sweet Chili Heat, though - man, what a car. The adventures we had together were historic. I would never trust myself to directly interact with such a fine steed, having seen its owners rendered permanently deaf by the 12A’s constant entreaties to find the outer reaches of human existence. I served as their interpreter, following always at a minimum safe distance in a responsible, mature car with airbags. Also, I dashcammed the fireballs it would roll out every time someone even thought about lifting.
One morning the Chili Phone rang, and I picked up. It was the Commissioner. Turns out there were antics afoot in the national parks, he said. It was imperative to assemble the Sweet Chili Heat Task Force. By your word it is done, I said in my most sanctimonious British-television-presenter voice, and slammed the handset back into its cradle hard enough to make me question why we still owned a corded phone in this, the Year Of Our Lord 2016.
I smirked as we blew through the major highways, wildlife scattering from the neighboring trees as some deep instinctual component of their being detected hatred, fear and pain - so much pain - emanating from Sweet Chili Heat. Let them run, I said to myself, our quarry believes themselves evolved past the instincts of nature.
Here’s the thing about national parks. They’re full of Germans. Hiking, canoeing, mountain bicycling, they love to do all of these things. Now, ordinarily, it’s no big problem. Today was not an ordinary day, and you could tell from the unbroken queue of gridlocked traffic trying to leave the auxiliary cruiseway in the trees. The Commissioner believed that a family of German tourists were taking high-quality photography of brown bears from the panoramic moonroof of their rented Kia Sedona, and it was plugging the whole thing up.
I would have told Sweet Chili Heat what to do, but somehow they - or the car, it was hard to tell at this point in the evolution - already knew. If you watched the news that night, you would see a forest on fire, shocked into spontaneous cellular combustion from the pure sound energy of the 12A’s aggressive streetport.
In the middle of a field reduced to inferno, Sweet Chili Heat performed a celebratory donut, clods of dirt bursting from the cursed Earth to strike ineffectually at its sharks-mouthed quarter panels. At last, the RX7 finished its donut and released a super-rich cloud of exhaust mixture, depriving the area of oxygen instantly. Ash fell upon our heads. I could sense that the car was pleased. It’d sleep well tonight.
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tags: sweet chili heat, national park service, kia, sedona, mazda, mazda rx7, rx7, just rotary things
The President was convening a summit on renewable energy sources, and I knew that they didn’t keep the back door of the conference hall locked very well. With these credentials, it was no surprise that I would bring in the future of Western civilization.
“Gentlemen, there is a fuel that we have been ignoring,” I say, reaching the podium before the security guards can pull me off stage.
“That fuel is nitromethane. It comes from pig farts and shit.”
A weedy man from the FDA looks up, pushes his glasses upward so he can bring me into focus as I slug a guard across the mouth, knocking him backward into the impromptu mosh pit formed by the President’s fan-boys and -girls.
“But I heard Vin Diesel said nitromethane was for pussies,” he stated, quoting a documentary that both of us had probably seen on Turner Classic Movies the night before.
“Not so, good chum,” I boast, striding across the stage as guards rush me. Although their nightsticks hurt, the power of justice is on my side, and I handily overpower them with only my righteous fury and the less-lethal concentrated energy weapon that I carry on my belt at all times for jump-starting hoopties.
I pull down an empty projector screen and gesture to it as if it contains the secret to life itself. It does.
“As you can see, nitromethane burns completely invisibly. This makes it way better than diesel, of which you can see smoke. We all know visible smoke is bad.”
The crowd agrees, and I am loft onto their shoulders in a celebratory parade through the conference centre. Later, at the Nobel Prize ceremony, they ask me what my secret was.
“I’m no hero - I just wanted cheap nitrometh at the pump,” I said, yelling loudly in a vain attempt to be heard over the ear-splitting nitro cackle of the sub-liter economy cars on the street outside.
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tags: nitromethane, vin diesel, renewable energy
Giving a lunch-and-learn talk at NASA is challenging at the best of times. The engineers keep you on your toes, asking loaded questions and then laughing at your simplified answers. You gotta bring your A-game, or at least in my case my A-Body.
Leaving the Valiant half-parked on the JPL bike rack, I saunter inside. The presentation, a quick demonstration of how I managed to break the laws of physics by constantly stacking superchargers on top of superchargers until they formed a perpetual motion machine, goes fairly well. I can see at the back there’s a junior engineer who has a question. I call on him, and that’s where things go wrong.
“So my uncle says that you can’t kill an AMC 4.0. We tried, but it didn’t work. Have you ever killed an AMC 4.0?”
I thought about it. I sweated. I thought hard. No, I hadn’t. I bet it was possible, though, and I’d love to find out.
Even from the other side of the auditorium, I could see him smiling and immediately regretted my boast. That’s how I ended up in the JPL lobby, next to a 1989 Cherokee they had found in the woods behind the CNC shop. The surrounding balconies and overhangs were thronged by NASA engineers who wanted to see me kill an AMC 4.0 or be branded a fraud forever.
The Jeep happily accepted the bolts and wood screws that I carried in my pockets at all times. I reflected on how pretty the tinkling sound was as chunks of cat substrate were ejected onto the tile floor via the rust holes in the once-muffler.
Pouring quick-mix concrete directly into the open throttle body slowed down one of the cylinders, but didn’t demonstrably impact the others. After pinning the throttle, I saw chunks of shattered concrete depart the muffler, to deposit on top of the pile of screws.
Draining the oil and running the doomed Cherokee at wide open throttle, fed entirely on oxy-acetylene for fifteen minutes, didn’t do much to put a dent in it either. My trained ear could sense a bit of valve flutter, but to my frustration it went away as soon as the Jeep returned to idle. The junior engineer gave me a shit-eating grin, his arms crossed in a gesture of smug superiority. I was gonna need to step it up a bit.
I had just one trick up my sleeve. I removed a critical part from my Valiant, and threw it deep into the woods. Now stranded with no way to get to the parts store except for the Jeep, the Cherokee immediately windowed the block and bled to death.
Yup. Nothing feels better than winning, I thought, and asked my host if he had a metal detector or something in his science lab.
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tags: jeep cherokee, chrysler valiant, chrysler, jeep
Real Amazon Reviews
Slim Jim Tubular Meat Product, 12 Pack
1 out of 5 stars Don’t give this to your oncologist!! I thought this so called “miracle meat” would reverse cancer, but it clearly did not. Unimpressed again by the GMO Big Food conspiracy.
Ultra High Performance Bridgestone Positrax HKS3943 All Season Tire
1 out of 5 stars So Bad In The Snow These are average tires in my opinion. But in the winter they are absolutely horrible. My traction control will engage from so little as a completely covered sheet of flat ice in the midst of a class five hellstorm bearing down upon me and my loved ones.
If a man’s home is his castle, then the neighbourhood around it must be that castle’s moat. Your neighbours are the only thing that can protect you from the wolves of disaster capitalism. They keep an eye out for burglars, general undesirables, and above all a change to culture. The community-association doubles as an immune system, overreacting to any foreign element that was within. Over the years I had grown from that same “foreign element” to an accepted member of their society, attending even their community bake sales and alley parties to celebrate cowboy culture and lifted pickup trucks. That is not to say that everyone was so lucky, or that I wasn’t deluding myself.
A few summers ago, I noticed on my daily constitutional that a house formerly for sale was now occupied by a series of third-gen Camaros and Firebirds. Another hobbyist, I thought, making keen note of the TBI 305 that was sitting in the bed of a nearby truck with a sticky note reading “FREE - PLEASE TAKE - FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PLEASE TAKE” on its head. One day, perhaps, I would introduce myself to him, maybe borrow a few tools or have him come over to hold up an exhaust manifold while I did the header-bolt dance.
Such dreams were folly, and within a week he had evaporated from the neighbourhood, the house again empty. It wasn’t the first time it had happened, either. I began to think that perhaps there was some unknown force preventing F-bodies from taking root in my community.
At the community association meeting, my ears perked up when I overheard two seniors gossiping about the “Camaro folk.” Not being one to tip my hand, I waited until the end of the meeting and tailed the more informed of the pair to his house. Imagine my surprise when, rather than arriving in his own driveway, he took me down a dirt road to an abandoned warehouse. My cover by now was surely blown, but out of the spirit of Canadian politeness it would have been awkward for him to have stopped his Lexus RX350 and yelled at the strange AMC Hornet following close behind.
Suddenly the RX350 disappeared into the warehouse. I followed, warily, on foot. That’s when the floodlights came up, blinding me. I failed to place either voices or faces as they addressed me in unison, a rehearsed chant of an anti-Camaro death cult.
“PUSHRODS NEVER, OVERHEAD CAMSHAFTS FOREVER,” they chanted, the banging of breaker bars against hollow steel railings filling the gaps between their words.
Usually, when you hit your head and are rendered unconscious, you just awake slightly relaxed and impatient because you had a lot of stuff to do today. This wasn’t one of those times, I was beginning to realize, as I was surrounded by the ghosts of the many cars I had owned and killed.
First up of course was the loyal, dependable Camry that I had bought as a teenager to get me to my many important part-time mall jobs. Its voice was unexpected, a terrible vibrato that caught in my chest with every phoneme.
“Why didn’t you check my oil?” it begged, half-sobbing. “I gave you enough lifter tick to warn astronauts on the moon!” Perhaps my experience with the Camry is what caused my orbit to become more erratic, drifting further and further from mainstream automotive tastes in a quest for retribution, to save another. If that was the case, there were plenty more examples here of how I had failed.
I was about to apologize, but then another car of the circle rolled forwards, its voice shaking my eardrums. I forced down the fear in my throat and fixated with my gaze the International Scout II. The conditions of its departure from my life were simple: I put one wheel wrong trying to dodge a series of angry Suzuki owners at a salvage-vehicle auction. Once the terrible roll had completed, its back was broken: it’d never jump again.
Before the Scout could finish its tale of woe, I knew what was coming next. Some part of my body would always react to the sound of the oversized wheel bearings of a rear-steer Rockwell, and it did so here. I grudgingly turned to accept my biggest failure into my life.
The long, long wheelbase Mustang SVO limousine glared down upon me from its monster-truck perch atop 50-inch mud terrain tires. I gulped.
#
tags: cars I have killed, toyota, toyota camry, ford, ford mustang, international harvester, international scout ii
You know that emotion you feel when an XR4Ti blows past you on the highway, blessing your journey with the magic Germanic-Briton-Ford powers of boosted single-slammer torque? I was feeling that emotion this very morning, as my idle finger-drumming on the wheel gave way to white knuckle grip and I felt a familiar prickling sensation on the back of my neck. Another was near.
It wasn’t hard to catch up with the weird-named Ford, and after only a few kilometers of full-throttle pull, the Ratty had to stop at the next gas station to refill its tank of (I sneered) pump gas. What an amateur. Still, it gave me a good chance to meet the kind of person who would own a Merkur and somehow not already be known to me.
When the helmet came off, I gasped. Merkur looked just like me, but with a saucy ethnic flair that I suspected the ladies found irresistable. He was just as shocked to come face to face with me, and before long we had settled on a subset of pidgin English accentuated by mouthed engine noises that we could use as a common vocabulary.
In the years that followed, we discovered that there was one of us in every country, somehow planted by secret operatives of the United Nations’ many environmental task forces to make the concept of the internal combustion engine unpalatable to the common man. We were wired from birth to drive the most repulsive beaters, the loudest exhausts, the biggest, most ridiculous forced induction. What they never counted on was that my Syrian counterpart would go on vacation one morning and find a $500 Merkur outside of the airport hotel.
It was a rainy early July morning, the kind that the denizens of Hokkaido had come to expect. Flashing some lazy Photoshop work around the many bars of the small island’s coasts eventually pointed us to a dilapidated farmhouse outside Muroran. On the horizon, you could see the dim outline of a nuclear reactor containment vessel, the town’s only industry before the world turned against the power of the atom.
We knew we had found the right place as our convoy of beaters, stuffed to the brim with JDM parts, crept down the entrance road. Somehow he had figured out that we were coming, the long path to his place studded with salvaged Big Red trikes, the sort of deadly-yet-tantalizing trap one such as us would construct.
Imagine my surprise when I ended up as the cover story on NHK News for a little one-wheel squeal leaving a parking lot. My defense lawyer at the time told me that it was unheard of for a citizen of Japan to be seen doing brutal burnouts of the kind people like me could get away with all the time “where you came from.”
I could feel my hackles raise as I prepared to berate him for his workaday racism against the proud white people, but then realized my phone wallpaper was me launching a thirty-seven-foot-tall spiral of snow into low earth orbit thanks to the Ramcharger, before I had to flee the country due to having destroyed an RCMP anti-crime drone with the driveshaft it threw out halfway through. I grudgingly admitted he had a point.
Did the Japanese legal system understand that I could not be separated from motor vehicles for over a week before something very bad happened? They did not, and it was such that I was thrown into an (admittedly quite nice) foreigners’ prison, where I learned to play poker with a bunch of other white people who didn’t speak the same language as me. They were pretty nice even though they were honkies, I guess.
Exactly one week had elapsed since I was arrested, and as promised, something very bad did indeed happen. It manifested in the baby-shit-brown omen of the Trans Am Turbo, which had somehow managed to transport itself across an entire ocean to come looking for me. The Japanese prison guards attempted to strike the third-generation F-body, an icon of foreign law-scoffery of the highest sort made real before them. They didn’t stand a chance, as the Trans Am Turbo’s resulting fit of white-hot anti-lag exhaust scattered the brave riot police of the dangerous-foreigners jail to the far reaches of the room as it spiraled its twin ninety-millimeter billet turbochargers to peak operating speed.
Climbing aboard, the Trans Am Turbo and I shot through the mountains of Hokkaido, in search for respite from the Nissan Laurels and turbo Legacies of the metropolitan police force. Some force beyond myself queried their intentions, and I told them that burnouts were illegal in Japan, that they were public disorder of the highest sort and would be frowned upon. I felt only pealing cackles of laughter from the force, and the Trans Am immediately pulled a U-turn so sharp I cracked two ribs.
That evening, in downtown Shibuya, a loose amalgamation of Shinto priests near the train station scattered for cover. Beneath the eye of a whirling dark tsunami appearing inbound from Tokyo Bay, the Trans Am Turbo spoke the opening words of the burnout that would end the world.
My crankcase-flavoured coffee cooled on an empty windowsill, abandoned in my haste to get to the airport. I could still hear the coolant crackling through the turbochargers as I leapt the counter at the park-and-fly lot to save the precious few seconds to my flight to Cuba.
On the way there, my all-too-eager seatmate turned out to be a mid-level true believer at a local multi-level-marketing scheme. He was going there for the same reason I was: to sell them the garbage that North Americans were too snobbish to own.
I could see in his eyes the zealotry of the deal. His bag was packed to the brim with Donald Trump how-to manuals, hardcover, signed. We decided then and there to join forces.
You should have seen us: we tore across the Cuban shield with our medicine-show routine, selling them air-cooled 70s turbochargers, penny-pinchingly thin OEM swaybars, and long-discredited electric supercharger kits to go with their snake oil and astronaut-flavoured vitamin shakes. The parts-hungry Cubans snapped up anything and everything they could use to make their hoopties faster, meaner, better, and by the time they remembered that they could just use eBay, Summit and RockAuto now, we were long gone to the next town.
At last we rolled up to the big prize, the dilapidated VAZ-2106 that I had pilfered from a farmhand in exchange for a set of parts-store 302 chrome valve covers beginning to show the strain of one too many close calls with the local peasantry. Millions of parts customers existed in Havana, and they all wanted stock parts. I raided my basement so fast one of the local FedEx offices literally caught fire from the friction.
On the flight home, I could tell that my business partner was growing uneasy with the transaction. Perhaps he had grown a conscience by accident in that one small town which served us flapjacks “American style,” had fallen in with the local flavour and thought it was wrong to run them up the flagpole in exchange for two basis points on the vig sheet at the end of the year. I tried to put it out of my mind, deciding that we would part ways as soon as the tires touched good old North American soil.
The next morning, I broke the reverse switch on my daily-driver Civic. Hesitant to be pulled over by law enforcement and have them discover my true nature, I went to my basement to retrieve it from my copious stock of spares. To my horror, I discovered the error of my ways. My basement was wall-to-wall bare. Every shelf was devoid of the spare parts I had spent so much effort to squirrel away. All I was left with were these worthless millions of dollars.
“Teach the controversy,” the nice government man told the assembled crowd that morning in the teacher’s lounge. To be honest, we were pretty much just being polite out of obligation since he brought us all those donuts, but it made me start thinking about the nature of truth.
My ruminations carried me all the way to the auto shop class of which I taught. In this day and age of slashed budgets and non-existent trades jobs, the humble auto class was all too often a target of well-meaning bureaucrats who wanted to save themselves a nice safety cushion of year-end bonus. If I were to teach the controversy, however, my little auto shop class becomes unimpeachable, a bastion of free speech that would have stalwart defenders. Especially if those defenders didn’t really realize what I was up to until it was too late.
I seated myself at my desk, and contemplated the 1979 Chevette Scooter on the lift. This was a perfect example. Common knowledge places the Chevette as a turd, a sign of America’s failure to compete with the Japanese on our own shores. Whistling while I worked, my humble teachers’ notebook began to fill with ridiculous statements that teenagers would believe.
At last the bell rang, and my brave charges stumbled in, eyes bright with hope for a future of turning wrenches and swearing at hose clamps. When they settled in, I rose dramatically from my perch and began to speak.
“Harley Earl never died, boys,” I bellowed, “and if we get this baby over three hundred wheel horsepower, we can bring him back.”
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tags: teach the controversy, teachers college, chevrolet, chevette, chevette scooter, chevrolet chevette
The Little Bluebird
Once upon a time, there was a little Datsun Bluebird. It came from its home country to be loved in another, but there was something missing.
Every morning the little Bluebird woke up and said “I wanna go fast!”
But the engine of the little Bluebird always said, “Not today, buddy. We have to drive responsibly, and preserve fuel while producing very few emissions. It’s the safe thing to do.”
Every corner the little Bluebird took notice and said “I wanna grip this corner, and rocket out of it like my ass is on fire!”
But the driver of the little Bluebird always said, “Not today, buddy. You are a rear wheel drive and they’re scary to drive fast. We might crash.”
One day a BMW 320i cut off the little Bluebird in traffic, and the little Bluebird said “I want to curb-stomp that Nazi bastard so hard the radiator support stoves backwards into its cams and I can hear the sound of its valves snapping one by one.”
But the new driver of the little Bluebird said “Okay.”
One credit card later, the little Bluebird got its wish. The little Bluebird got rid of its tiny naysayer engine, its smog-choked carb and its unpredictable beam-axle rear suspension.
Every morning the little Bluebird woke up and said “I wanna go fast!”
The 62 millimeter CNC-machined billet compressor wheel of the GT35 said “Yes.”
I have this need, I guess you could call it. No, more like a compulsion, digging at my mind with barbed hooks. Either way, I found myself having to explain it to the warehouse clerk as I picked up an entire shipping pallet of anime-character love pillows from the Purolator desk. For some reason she didn’t want to hear it, which was just as well by me.
You see, my compulsion is that I have to commute really fast. Once, a long time ago, I read this article about how commute time was the primary discriminator of happiness. Imagine my surprise - before the scientists chimed in and ruined everything, I had thought the primary discriminator of happiness was usable torque band. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. How did most people get to work? By car. And how did most cars get to work? Faster than walking.
Still with me on this? Good, because the inductive leap we’re about to take is a big one: the primary way for me to be happier is to abuse the car-pool lane. But I had no friends who wanted to go the same direction (or even had actual day-jobs to speak of), and my coworkers who were going the same way for some reason refused to get into my vehicle with me. Whether it was the failed lunch runs or just my general attitude towards never talking while driving so I could detect new rattles, I was alone.
That’s when it hit me: anime love pillows. What was once a Tumblr meme for ironic Donald Trump fetish blogs would become my saviour. I immediately speed-read Honda factory service manuals in order to learn enough functional Japanese to order a series of character pillows from my favourite Japanese animated feature.
I didn’t get very far when my twincharged Accord Aerodeck was pulled over by the authorities. Apparently a series of love pillows shaped like Toyota AE86s don’t look enough like actual human beings (racism!) to qualify as other occupants in a motor vehicle.
A crackling voice hesitantly emerged from the Bluetooth speaker zip-tied to the pegboard above my head. “Tell me,” it questioned, “why do you persist in trying to make everything you touch produce more power?”
Air rushed from my nostrils as I grunted in anger. I was trying to make it produce more torque. Here I was thinking we were starting to understand each other, court-ordered psychiatrist. Within a few minutes of polite discussion, half-remembered, half-fictionalized stories from my childhood, they seemed pleased, and the teleconference was complete. I was only partially present, as most of my attention had been pre-occupied with dropping a new-old-stock K-cam into the turbocharged B23 that laid before me.
When people think of Volvos, I’m told, they think of safety. Reason. Restraint. Comfort. A safe harbour in a cold, random universe whose sole reason for existence is the ultimate demise and suffering of its inhabitants. This particular Volvo is more on the universe’s side. Especially its barnstormer of an engine, raised from its humble birth in a Swedish barn to form an international relations department in concert with its immense Chinese turbocharger in order to send gasoline to the natural end of all things. That was pretty poetic, I thought. Might be time to apply for that arts funding again, see if I can get them to pay for a new progressive controller.
I hoisted the engine on the ceiling-mounted hoist and plunked it ever so sweetly onto the front subframe’s mounting boss. A little more swearing and knuckle-busting later, and the monster was once again in peak form, as if Samson found some hair extensions and was a little creative with Gorilla glue.
As the 245 found its first teetering steps like a newborn fawn, I could already tell that it was something else. I did so by my usual scientific mechanism: I called it the homeowners’ association dyno. Calculating torque was pretty easy: just rip a burnout in the middle of your driveway and count the seconds until the HOA sends an officially-stickered “COMMUNITY PACE CAR” to criticize you for antisocial behaviour. By that metric, this baby was an eleven-second car.
When I debuted at the Volvo meet, I could see terrified eyes staring out from behind the Ikea cart-return shed. Not even their customary Tuesday-evening snack of confusingly-named cookies and lingonberry ale could save them, and they knew it. My snorting wagon was a rolling testament to an uncaring God’s wrath upon this earth, and they were the slothful sinners who had been asleep at the switch of moderate horsepower goals.
If you thought that metaphor mixing was impressive, you should have seen the second bank of dedicated E85 injectors that kicked in when I tried to figure out what my homeowners’ association dyno number was at the Ikea’s altitude. The resulting burnout cloud carried its own weather, and the lightning strikes at the hatch of the wagon only cemented my impending reputation as that asshole who ruins the meet for everyone else.
She picked up the handset on the other side of the glass, her ruby-red nails clacking gently on the Bakelite handle. I had already started reflexively flinching so that by the time the full weight of invective had left her mouth I would not be completely destroyed.
“Is this about the two stroke V8?” was all she was curious about.
My two stroke V8. How did she know about it? Of course - I must have spoken of my white rabbit in the middle of the night, when the strange mist of unconsciousness clouds men’s minds and brings their true desires to light. I begin to hyperventilate and sweat, a reaction that does not go unnoticed. My visitor clicks the phone back onto its carrier, and gets up to leave. A futile attempt to rap on the glass, get her attention, get her to post bail, is unnoticed. I’m in here for the duration.
When I was a small child, I fell out of a fishing boat on a trip with the least alcoholic of my uncles. It wasn’t my fault; my uncle ripped the throttle a little hard and the torque buck knocked my uncoordinated eight-year-old ass plain out of the boat. I guess you could say that torque made me what I was today. Either way, by the time my head broke water again, I would never be the same.
I tried my best to keep the urges within me at bay. I moved to a landlocked state, stayed away from lakes, rivers, docks, even that booth at the annual carnival where there are little remote-controlled boats that you can drive around for five minutes in exchange for a dollar. Such a lust can never be kept at bay for long, and almost monthly I would find myself gazing at a passing boat on the highway, or be feeding an impulse-bought yachting magazine to my office shredder lest it consume me.
One night, I went to take out the trash. In front of my neighbour’s house, an Evinrude two-stroke V8 laid on the pavement, its passenger head gasket irretrievably blown. I knew him to be a man of means but little ability, and reckoned it could be fixed. It needed me, after all, and it would be rude to ignore the plight of this little motor just because I had a problem with nautical products.
I don’t remember exactly when I got fired from my job for not showing up anymore, but it was probably during the time when I was hand-welding long-runnered expansion chambers to get the crunchiest, nastiest sound and the most bone-crushing power out of my white whale. But an engine alone can’t take you somewhere, and as I contemplated my malaise further my roving eye settled, as if guided by my unconscious, on a nearby Dodge Diplomat, sinking on flat tires into the very macadam that I had retrieved the Evinrude from. It was provenance, and nobody would miss it.
My wife had suspicions, sure. The five o’ clock shadow on my face slowly became more of a lumberjack beard, and the garage evolved from a leftover-house-parts junk pile to its more lethal form of what looked at first glance like a Stacey David car show set on fire in slow motion. She didn’t say anything, not until that morning in county jail.
On the day I fired it up, the sky was the colour of a baby-boomer metaphor about analogue television, clouds hanging low over the not-colour of the sky. I had been tracking a persistent headache that refused to leave me for weeks on end, infecting my comprehension of all but the Diplomat. When I sat in it, or laid hands upon it, the haze would clear. Some part of me hoped that with this final turn of the key I would at last have a sharp, perfect view of my destiny.
It was not to be. Lured by my crackling wail, law enforcement could not help but be summoned. They found me outside the Cabela’s, the evidence of my two-dozen tire shredding donuts as plain on the parking lot as my trunk filled to the brim with specialty high-zinc Evinrude two-stroke oil. I was separated from the Diplomat, torn from the machine that allowed me to expose my most closeted boat impulses in broad daylight for all to see.
From my cell window as I awaited trial, I could see it sitting in the impound lot, its sagging sealed-beam headlight trim performing an anthropomorphized sad-puppy routine that I know would pull in another unsuspecting victim. Perhaps at the seized-property auction this saga would come full circle, an uncle and his favourite nephew, ready to scar another indelibly in the cruelly dwindling days of the two-stroke.
My cellmate liked boats, too. He wanted to tell me about the Carnival cruises he took, where he had killed his previous victims. Diesel, I thought to myself. It figured.
They said, centuries ago, that the Trans Am Turbo was God’s punishment for an unfair world. It could be destroyed, but never permanently. When the Trans Am Turbo manifested, each time it would choose a driver. The gentlemen I was sharing a conspiratorial meeting with were convinced it had to be me. Only I could harness its power for the good of mankind, rather than just doing endless burnouts in front of a Dairy Queen before it chucked white-hot tire belts through the windshield of the closest Dodge Journey.
In the years leading up to that night, whenever our researchers would dust off an ancient tomb, a long-forgotten library, its headlights would be staring back at them. Gradually we began to realize the Trans Am Turbo was an ever-present actor in human history. Scripture was consulted, cave paintings, ancient Roman government records. It probably won’t surprise you to know that the Pontiac appeared to great men throughout history, lending them the torque they needed to accomplish their deeds.
At last my superiors believed they had determined the conditions of the car’s approval, and wished to present me as the ideal new driver for the Pontiac. My superiors were fools.
I traveled to a long-abandoned drive-in movie theatre, the last recorded location of the F-body in the modern era, and waited. In the hope of currying favour with it, I had picked an excellent car. The 1988 Fiero GT would indicate to the Trans Am just what kind of man I was, but without offending it by presenting an objectively superior car.
No sooner had I arrived than things began to get strange. Bolts of bright purple electricity danced along the telegraph lines that once served in-car speakers, pausing temporarily to roll across the rain puddles accumulating in the cracked tarmac. At once it was there, and I felt myself growing small as it studied me from afar, its engine idling with an unearthly whistling howl several octaves above the normal X-pipe-with-glasspacks cry of many a Saturday night hero.
What did the Trans Am see when it looked in my soul? After the events that transpired, I now know it had to be a desire - no, longing - for cheap beaters. It half-beckoned, half-pulled me to a buy-here-pay-here lot and together we decimated a row of German luxury cars, isolating each one and smashing their bodies into pulp. With each strike, the Trans Am’s panels would momentarily distort before returning to their natural glory, the bronze firechicken on the hood seeming to dance with joy as the BMWs falling victim to its virtuous hatred became unrecognizable.
The Trans Am and I whooped in synchronous glee as we laid patch after patch on our way to the centre of town. Above the targa tops, I could see a new day was just beginning. What happened at that Cars & Coffee is known to all who survived the day’s events. That set did not include my benefactors, whose Italian exotics and luxobarge Bentleys were sent to China for recycling as small steel cubes with the owners trapped inextricably within.
As for me? One morning I bought a sixteen-valve Scirocco Mk2, a really mint car. It just needed a little bit of work. The Trans Am drove me to the pickup, and then departed at high speed, finally pleased at putting me back on the straight and narrow of shit car rescue. I would never see it again after that day, which was just as well, because the Trans Am didn’t really have enough cargo room for all the 020s I was going through.
#
tags: trans am turbo, bmw, bentley, volkswagen, scirocco
My Neighbour Nitrous Toro
I was but a young child when I first met my neighbour Nitrous Toro. He promised a magical foreign land occupied entirely by chemical-supercharged lawn maintenance implements. In return, all I had to do was wish hard enough and also dig around in the back of his shed for the right jet size for the dicky Tecumseh rods to accept the life-giving gift of more air than air.
I never forgot about Nitrous Toro when I became a hollowed-out emulation of a functional human being, attending scrum meetings and complaining about income taxes. But I found it very difficult to keep my mouth shut one fateful morning in front of the office coffeemaker, when my new coworker (”Victim E,” in the attached documentation) changed the subject to lawncare. Even as my other coworkers, who had long suspected my tendencies but were unable to act upon them due to a then-lack of positive external confirmation by an authority figure, shielded their faces protectively and slunk away into the corners of the room, he continued to speak:
“I have a great lawn, and I can mow it so quickly. I’ve got one of those new zero-turn electric mowers.”
An electric mower. My pupils dilated and my heart rate raced like an RX7 with a stuck throttle on a hot day next to a particularly farty oil refinery. I could feel the pinpricks on my rapidly-whitening skin, indicators that the Voice - the Other - wanted to use my corporeal body as a portal to this world, to wreak his great havoc.
When it was all over, I stood alone over a burning lawn. Only the sound of a nitrous solenoid clack-clacking as my gas-pedal foot instinctively went WOT and then full slack, over and over in a nervous twitch, could be heard. I don’t know how long I stayed there, but I do know that my neighbour appeared. It had been decades since I had seen him last, but somehow he had not aged. He outstretched his hand to grasp mine.
“You mowed the hell out of that thing,” he said, “but that Craftsman shit can’t take a 65-shot like that for an entire lawn. Come with me.”
I followed him, and although we walked a great distance, I did not - could not - feel tired. At last we arrived at the shed of my childhood memories, and my neighbour Nitrous Toro opened the door and gestured within.
On the floor sat the Tecumseh I had first infused with the corrupting force of squeeze. How it had not oxidized in the years since I had last seen it, I could not comprehend.
“You see?” he said, “These piston crowns are the best.”
Without breaking stride, he entered, grasped the Tecumseh, and slammed it into the frame of the ride-on Toro sitting next to his shed. Something felt right, and the universe began to tilt back towards its natural equilibrium. This was what I was meant to do.
That night, before the police officers would come, I was sitting in my back yard, researching tire compounds for the Toro. Although the progressive controller had tried valiantly in my test pulls, it would always blow away anything less than an R-compound when it came on the bottle. I looked up from the catalogue to find the neighbour’s teenage kid, confused at the sight of seeing an adult male performing his own maintenance on a mechanical object.
“What’s that huge purple bottle for?” he asked, his eyes wide with fright.
“Not for Craftsman mowers, I’ll tell you that much.”
The ceiling tiles briefly pulled my attention away from Gerald as he droned on about his big weekend plans. Hunting down unmutated juveniles for their internal organs wasn’t exactly my glass of Zima but I try not to judge my coworkers too harshly, it’s a dog-eat-phasewolf world out there and we all have to do what we all have to do. In the corner of my eye I caught sight of a red dress sashaying down the hallway just long enough to bring me out of my internal reverie, Gerald and I both spotted the clock on wall as she slipped past the end of the corridor. 4:30. Time to hit the highway and start our all-too-short two day break from the radioactive rat race.
The underground parking bunker came alive with the angry rumbling of 7.2 liter displacement road combat vehicles. I was immediately reminded of last summer’s poweryacht regatta out in the bay, hopefully the virus-slime levels were low enough to hold it again next year, the social luncheon was always a highlight of the year.
I pointed my war machine’s nose to the east and home. The Thunderroad howled under my tires as I chewed up the distance with their meaty siping. The smoking wreckage from this morning’s rush hour had been nearly picked clean by the scavs, I had to be careful now, they like to set traps if they didn’t get enough to fill their shopping carts from the wrecks. I tightened the cardigan sleeves knotted around my chest and said a silent prayer.
The trip was mercifully uneventful and I drifted perfectly around the corner and into the community gates. As I powerslid into the cul-de-sac where my 1960’s stucco castle dream house lay, I had to swerve suddenly. The Johnson kid, little Susie, was out drawing on the asphalt with some contraband road chalk she picked up from somewhere.
Shit. The HOA was going to flense us alive if she didn’t clean that up before darkness hit.
#
tags: stewart mcmike, post apocalyptic, first world problems
For years, people - salesmen, court-appointed psychiatrists, the Illuminati - had been trying to get me inside a luxury car. I disdained their lack of work ethic, their desire to have a non-numb ass after hours in the seat, their disconnection from the road - from driver agency - in favour of letting some unaccountable, intractable machine make their decisions for them. But then I got upgraded on a rental car.
The 2016 Hyundai Sonata, let me tell you, that’s a luxury car. Rear heated seats, seatbelts that retract automatically, two headlights, a headliner. I’m told by those “in the know” that it also has a radio, though it wasn’t like you could have heard it over my excited gibbering at the crack-free windshield. I drove it all the way to the jobsite and it didn’t catch fire even once.
In fact, I’m so excited about my discovery of luxury cars that I’ve purchased a 2003 Merc S550 from a buy-here-pay-here lot. I’ll just deal with things as they break, and slowly replace them with junkyard Cavalier parts. Say, did you know that this thing has power windows on almost all four doors?
#
tags: luxury cars, low standards, hyundai, mercedes, chevrolet
Sometimes people want to know what I would change to make everything better. I guess this is because of my everyman countenance, which is considered non-threatening to police officers, bar attendants and local politicians. When they ask me, I furrow my brow in the practiced expression of a Serious Small Business Owner, and I let them have it.
What I would change is to make all the we-pull-it junkyards actually respond to internet inquiries. You see, a lot of these shops are pretty old-school. They’re run by boomers or whatever came before boomers. You have to pick up your phone - and get this, you have to use the “Phone” app on your phone - to ask a living human being a question. That’s total bullshit!
Here’s how most conversations go:
Switch: Hey girl what you got in that yard Junkyard Empress: We just got a fresh batch of Toyotas in. Switch: You better let me take some of those rank-ass Toyota Celicas off your hands. I know a guy who knows a guy who knows a crusher. Junkyard Empress: You sound familiar. Aren’t you the guy who jumped over the fence to steal those Rockwell rear-steers from our lifted limousine last week? Switch: (click)
So as you can see, I think it’s time for a new strategy. A disruptive strategy. I am speaking, of course, of parts delivery. Imagine a world where this is possible.
Switch: Holy shit I need a front left speaker for a 1990 Toyota Celica GT-S (types into phone) Underpaid, Largely Uninsured Lower-Class Worker With No Benefits: (pulls up to curb in a haze of tire smoke) Here you go, boss. Switch: Ten minutes to get this all the way across town? Three stars. Underpaid, Largely Uninsured Lower-Class Worker With No Benefits: (starves quietly)
It is for this reason that I believe city council should ignore, and in fact legalize, my contractors’ breaking of speed limits to and from junkyards.
#
tags: uber for junkyards, rockwell rear-steers, story time with uncle switch
THERE IS NO WAY IN HELL MY DAUGHTER IS MARRYING A SELF DRIVING CAR, I BELLOW AND KNOCK A JUG OF BLUE RASPBERRY KOOL-AID™ TO THE FLOOR IN EMPHASIS OF MY SALIENT POINT
THE LOVE OF MY LIFE, THE CHILD I SWORE I WOULD DO ANYTHING TO PROTECT, IS WAILING NOW. SHE LOVES NISSAN ALTIMA. I LOVED YOUR MOTHER UNTIL SHE DECIDED THAT SHE WOULD RATHER FUCK AN ANIME LOVE PILLOW OF SHOUJO DONALD TRUMP, I REPLY BUT PERHAPS TOO CURTLY. THE TEARS DO NOT CEASE
I CALL ON THE ANCIENT GENETIC WISDOM OF MY ANGRY WHITE MALE ANCESTORS AND DECIDE THE ONLY POSSIBLE CONCLUSION IS SAVAGE, UNRELENTING VIOLENCE. I LET THE 3-53 JAMMED INTO THE TRUNK OF MY MONOPOSTO FIRST-GENERATION CRX CONVERTIBLE EAT AS MY DAUGHTER’S PURLOINED IPHONE NINE LEADS ME TO THE ECU OF HER LOVER
I ROUND THE CORNER AND SEE THE ALTIMA ON TOP OF A DAEWOO LANOS - THE SEDAN, EVEN. I SNAP PICTURES AND HANDILY ESCAPE THE ENRAGED TORQUE-STEERING OF ALTIMA WITH A LITTLE THING THE BELEAGUERED ENGINEERS AT DETROIT DIESEL CALL NOT GETTING YOUR ENGINES FROM THE FRENCH
MY JEWEL-LIKE DAUGHTER OF ANGELIC PERFECTION IS INCONSOLABLE AT THE VERY IDEA OF BEING REPLACED BY A KOREAN WASHER-DRYER SUBSIDIARY’S CAR OF LAST RESORT (IT’S NOT EVEN STILL IN PRODUCTION, SHE SHRIEKS IN BETWEEN FURIOUSLY PUNCHING HOLES IN MY DRYWALL). WITHIN A WEEK SHE IS BACK ON THE STRAIGHT AND NARROW, DATING A SERIES OF BIKER GANG MEMBERS, PROUDLY HUMAN LIKE NATURE INTENDED
#
tags: discrimination, self-driving car, altima, shoujo donald trump, nissan, daewoo, daewoo lanos, the voice
My partner’s lips pulled at the plastic coffee-cup lid like a starving baby goat on a teat. We had caught a double, and the stress of the job and his disintegrating marriage weren’t helping matters any. I would have said something, but there’s advice even partners won’t give one another and most of it involves chemical dependency. I was just happy he was off the expensive stuff: Evapo-Rust wasn’t cheap and neither were all the nitrile gloves he liked to use when he would come by my garage for a session of weekend wrenching.
One of those gloves held a piece of wiring harness aloft now, dangling on the end of my partner’s always-present tire shop promotional ballpoint pens. His brow furrowed, and I knew he was having trouble placing it. I had to chuckle as I knelt down myself, a conspiratorial expression on my face.
“You know what that is, don’t you?” I asked. Of course he didn’t.
“Of course I don’t,” he said, “It looks old. European.”
“You’re right. It’s Volvo. Biodegradable, from before the war.”
That little piece of information was all it took to get a big reaction. I could see him firing on all cylinders now, first metaphorically then physically as our detective’s-issue Crown Vic rolled out with him behind the wheel. Normally, I would never let him drive, but I had also had a long night and figured I could catch a nap on the way in between the shrieks of sheer terror as the rookie went pedestrian-hunting with the big-body Ford in the bad part of town.
Spoiler alert: almost the entire city is “the bad part of town.” Where other cities have the wrong side of the tracks, our crime rate was so bad the railroad didn’t even show up until the government forced them. You ever seen a teenager steal the wheels off a diesel locomotive before? I have.
Ballard beckoned, and we answered the call. I left a handwritten note beneath the wipers of the Vic, explaining to the meter maid that my partner had parked across the sidewalk not because of laziness but because of essential police business. They always fell for that shit: try it yourself next time you leave your car with one wheel on a fire hydrant.
Ingemar knew we were coming. He was so resolved to his fate that after returning the Volvo 245 to his shop, instead of repairing the hit and run damage, he prepared a bribe for us. All the bodywork we could ever want done, no problem officers, you want candy paint?
Giving serious consideration to the offer in front of the rookie would be at the very least in poor taste. Ingemar was apoplectic, a frothing rage at the concept that we wouldn’t necessarily want our project cars to have nice fresh paint.
“You think going fast for cheap is all life is?” Ingemar shrieked after the Hotside bounced his head off the C-pillar of the Vic while pushing him into the back seat. “I have car show trophies! You fuckers can’t do this to me!”
The Mayor had a medal for both of us, the brave detectives who had solved the crime spree of the Volvo Killer. When the TV news interviewed us, I couldn’t help but notice the glitz and glamour of flashbulbs had begun to turn the Hotside’s eye from the straight and narrow. Above all the distractions that concerned me, paramount was one pretty little news reporter, who asked him question after question about which Nissan to buy.
Even then, I could sense the rookie was slipping away from me. No man-to-man conversation in a detective’s car could stop it now, and I braced myself for the impact like a Takata airbag owner in a Walmart parking lot.
Truth be told, it wasn’t that big of a leap to go from a monthly magazine about bad cars to running a Battlebots team. I certainly had enough left-over rusty steel, welding experience and $800 Princess Auto minimills of forged Chinesium. When the junior editorial staff pitched me the idea, I jumped in with both feet and didn’t stop stomping until I felt its bones splinter beneath my toes. Don’t let anyone ever tell you I’m not a supportive boss. I’m the obsessive boss.
Our entry - Little Shitty, though the name got Bowdlerized for TV - only cost about fifty bucks to put forward, which the organizers found surprising. Everyone else’s cost at least ten grand, they said, their eyebrows raised. I guess I just found a lot of stuff lying around the shop, you know how it is when you run an engineering organization. Failing to find anything specifically forbidden by the regulations, they let a giraffe play football.
My first duel was also my last one. The Intimidator, a perfect gleaming carapace of carbon fiber and buzzsaws, spun itself across the stage and slammed into our humble combat robot with as much force as it could muster. I sucked breath through my teeth as Little Shitty got a buzzsaw smack into the jaw. But I had already won, and let me tell you how.
So this is the thing. Nothing in Battlebots says you can’t enter a robot made entirely out of fine machining swarf with a thirty-five-dollar RC car underneath.
As the spinning saw bit into the expanding-foam armour of my robot, I yelled across the arena: “HOPE YOU POTTED YOUR TRACES, MOTHERFUCKERS!”
A glistening cloud of metal fragments filled the arena then, like an android pinata filled with cybernetic mustard gas and fed into a garbage disposal. I wish you could have seen the facial expression on the opposing team captain as it shifted from delight to purestrain horror.
The resulting flame-out of my rival as thousands of microscopic particles of only the finest CNC shrapnel bridged capacitor legs, arced the solder of thick-gauge wiring connectors and gummed up gearboxes via their exposed breathers was second only to the explosion at the team meetings afterward. Shutting down an arena for the entire day meant I was the de facto winner, I maintain, even after I lost the fistfight to the Intimidator team captain after he sought me out in the pits.
#
tags: battlebots, chemical weapons, the intimidator, bad cars monthly, bad robots monthly
I called the Toyota dealership to ask them about a warranty extension on my Corona’s seatbelts. Surely they wanted to protect me from such dangers as frayed webbing and worn retractor springs, I imagined. The line went silent, and was replaced by hold music. Perhaps they were checking with TOYOTA SAFETY-CHAN, the animate spirit embodying the new determination of Toyota Corporate to protect its family of customers.
Some scratching on the line, and then a different voice, as if from far away, sotto voce: “Please hold for TOYOTA SAFETY-CHAN.” This was it, it is happening. They are hooking me up with the big cheese. I caught myself beginning to hyperventilate out of pure anticipation for meeting the supernatural entity that had forcibly manifested itself in the centre of Toyota City during a winter-floormats scandal. They said the fires it left behind could not be extinguished by mortal men and burned even today, but that it had an eerie power to gift wishes of consumer safety.
The line connected. I held my breath, stone silent in fear. My forehead began to bead with sweat.
“YOU DARE CONSULT TOYOTA SAFETY-CHAN WITH AN OUT OF WARRANTY TOYOTA?”
This was not how I expected this to go at all. Not at all! I began to voice my objections, but was shut down by a booming commandment so sharp it strained my phone’s voice compression algorithms.
“FOR YOUR INSOLENCE I WILL FORCE YOUR THROTTLE TO CUT OUT WHEN YOU TOUCH THE BRAKES. LEFT FOOT BRAKING IN FRONT-WHEEL-DRIVE PERFORMANCE CARS WILL BE LOST TO YOU FOREVERMORE.”
No! No! All I wanted was some free seatbelts! I was panicking now, near frenzy, barely able to comprehend what the voice was saying.
“TRAIL BRAKING AND LEFT FOOT BRAKING ARE INHERENTLY UNSAFE. YOU WILL BE SAFE. TOYOTA SAFETY-CHAN HAS DEMANDED IT.”
The line went dead. In the garage, I could hear rustling. I barged in, Streamlight in hand. Swinging the Streamlight furiously into thin air, I scared away the harem of Toyota mechanics swarming over every inch of my Corona. They bolted into the night, leaving behind traction-control ECUs and pamphlets on how to safely use my sun visors.
Although I didn’t know it at the time, I had made a truly powerful enemy. The Toyota mechanics would return, striving to try and make me safe lest their corporeal forms be recycled into those more useful to Toyota Safety-Chan. If I had been more attuned, I could have heard the psychic screams of inarticulate rage from Toyota City even then.
#
tags: toyota, winter floormats, thanks for not warrantying my seatbelts assholes, corona, toyota corona, toyota safety-chan
Tonight on End Stage Capitalism Masterpiece Theatre: the Mazda RX-7. How did the the conspicuous consumption of Tony Stark’s very own spinning-dorito magic carpet turn into an actually decent sports car? Our Japanese correspondent intervened in a Hiroshima hostage negotiation to find out.
Koshiro-san, where are you now?
Hello, yes, I am coming to you live from outside the Mazda engine development facility. Very secure, but they had a big hole in the fence I could climb through.
I understand there’s some kind of commotion inside the factory?
Yes, from what I am hearing one of the engineers has barricaded himself inside his office and refuses to come out until the next-generation rotary engine is approved for production. We are telling him lies to see if he will emerge. What? (rustling sound) No, these are true facts. They just put out a press release, it will be part of an all-new RX-7 in 2019!
Koshiro-san, can you tell us anything more about the engineer’s mood?
It’s low, Ted. Very low. He is trying to show me a crude diagram he has sketched on graph paper. I think he is claiming reduced pumping losses from a combination of a specialized intake plenum and nickel-plated ovoid valve shroud that encourages consistently-sized intake charges, very fascinating. I am humouring him.
Koshiro, my name is not Ted. We work together in the same office, I see you every morning in front of the coffee maker and we talk about our weekend plans.
Ah, I am sorry Tim. I don’t know if you can hear this, but the engineer has procured a prototype version of the engine. He says that Mazda Corporate tried to stop him from releasing it by sabotaging his files, but he has figured out how to replace the seals that - I don’t know if this is a dialect, but - he says that the seals keep the Dark Lord Oilmetering-Pumppe from returning to our plane of existence? Tim, I’m scared, tell my wife I l-
Uh, we’ve lost our satellite uplink to Japan. We’ll catch up with Koshiro and his wacky car antics later in the program.
#
tags: end stage capitalism masterpiece theatre, mazda, mazda rx7, just mazda things, rx7
When the call came up on the big board, I knew we had caught a whopper. My partner and I, a rookie who in those times was nicknamed The Scarlet Hotside, were sent to the bad side of the tracks for a wellness check. Seems an old man had all but disappeared, and his loved ones were curious as to what had happened.
The first thing you do on a wellness check is try to find the guy before kicking in anything. Looking in his windows and T-ray-scanning the house (technically, bombarding a house with high-frequency waves to identify things inside it did not qualify as unreasonable search and seizure - thanks again, Supreme Court) turned up bupkis.
Once you’ve passed the pre-kicking-things-in stage, basic logic dictates that the next stage must be kicking things in. After picking myself up from a series of failed flying-tiger kick, I sent the rookie in. He knocked down the back door on the first try, but I’m pretty sure I softened it up for him. Back to back, we scanned the house’s entryway for possible threats, and continued onward.
I always gravitate towards the garage - call me morbid, but I’d like to know when a nice double oversize near the office opens up - and here I found nothing but the unspectacular. An out-of-warranty Camry, some recycling that was waiting for the curb. The usual kind of thing you’d find in a house. That’s when I heard the rookie’s call. Sighing, I warily headed in the general direction of his cries.
The homeowner lay at the front door, crushed beneath a pile of envelopes. I knew immediately what we were dealing with.
“Oil change reminders,” I said to my partner, who looked confused.
“These people, they get on the dealership’s mailing list. Maybe the dealership runs into a little trouble, maybe the principal has a few bets that he needs to cover. They push the out-of-warranty service harder and harder.”
I looked at the corpse, envelopes piled atop the atrophied chest. In his advanced age, he simply didn’t have the muscle to push off the letters before they buried him.
“Looks like he bought parts from a few different dealers,” my partner mentioned. Always angling for the detective’s badge, this guy. “Hell of a way to go.”
As we were leaving, we passed the mailman. He waved at us, a gleaming smile that could only come from seeing a fellow civil servant in uniform. I would never tell him the truth. It would destroy him to know what Big Oil Change had used him for.
Oftentimes, patriotism is just a sheet thrown over the traditional arts of larceny and fraud. Scratch a nationalist and you’ll find a thief. But I am both: believe me when I tell you that I am a born and bred Canadian, and will remain so forever. Just keep your wallets away from me, because I have a true tale of grand theft to tell you on this Canada Day.
The year was 2012. My hands were clutching the thin vinyl-imitation steering wheel of a thoroughly blown-out 9C1 Caprice, strategically rusted by years of vicious Quebecois weather and even angrier Quebecois drivers. Traditionally, I worked solo, but our wealthy benefactor, Mr. Cho - always mister with him, always - had arranged for the best of the best of the operator community to partner with me. I was the driver, which makes sense unless you’ve seen me on a golf course.
My partner, M. Vert, was some kind of locksmith, probably hired to crack the vault on our target. I’ll introduce the other players as they become relevant, but before we continue it’s important that you understand that M. Vert and I had a history. That history dated back to a flawed Kijiji deal on the banks of the beautiful Richelieu, beneath a featureless grey sky. It all worked out in the end, but that’s another story. Since that ill-fated control arm exchange, we had kept in contact, and neither of us particularly trusted Mr. Cho.
I don’t know to this day what the others thought, and we didn’t speak to them much. It wasn’t professional to use our real names - I was M. Gris - lest the
Sûreté figured out what we were up to that morning in the warehouse district of Saint-Louis-de-Blandford. The radio squawked with M. Marron’s voice and we were ready to go. I idled the Caprice into the parking lot, meeting up with the International dump truck we had chosen for the heist. With a quick flourish, I popped the trunk of the big-body Chevrolet, exposing gleaming nitrous tanks and cutting tools. Without breaking pace, M. Vert opened the Caprice’s huge passenger side door, grabbed the oxy-ace cutter and tore the lock out of the immense double-armoured warehouse doors.
My butt was just beginning to break in the International’s front bench seat when the radio squawked again. M. Marron had me back up to the loading dock, and we began piling barrel upon barrel of filthy lucre into the cargo truck’s copious bed. I kept my head on a swivel, knowing that whatever M. Jaune missed from his sniper perch on a neighboring roof would rapidly become my problem in the slower-moving truck.
It was almost too easy, really. We made the dropoff after travelling through downtown Blandford uninterrupted, unquestioned, in broad daylight. Mr. Cho would be pleased. Dispersing into rush hour traffic, it seemed unlikely that anyone could catch us.
But there had been a mole in our operation all along. In time, and through the endless machinations of court, we would find that M. Rose had been hired by the RCMP to keep an eye on Mr. Cho’s many activities and sniffed out the great maple syrup heist with only minor assistance. I was hauled in, questioned as part of the usual suspects, but released after playing dumb. I had to chuckle when they found the Caprice in the woods, the VINs thermited off, and determined it could not have been me driving because of the lack of camber wear on its front tires. Cho had definitely done his homework, and I was glad I hadn’t cancelled that appointment at the alignment shop he booked for me.
M. Vert was cooling his heels in Archambault as he awaited trial. Unprofessional as it was, I felt it was wrong to let him take the fall for the team’s actions, and made a trip that spring to speed up his rehabilitation and paroling. After all, you can’t trust the government to move as quickly as a twin-turbocharged stadium-truck Suzuki Samurai with a hydraulic battering ram for a bumper.
It was a crisp fall evening at my sprawling New England compound, the leaves falling upon the sea of $650 Bronco IIs that I parked out back as a windbreak. I had just finished re-reading one of my favourite science-fiction books, The Subaru That Didn’t Burn Oil, by Blown H.G. Wells. The combination of grain alcohol and the recently completed literary work allowed me to slip into an easy, relaxed mood, and I became contemplative.
Maybe there was something more to life than just wrenching on an endless procession of beaters. Perhaps, I thought now as I did in my weaker hours, cars were meant to be driven to places to do things other than driving and wrenching. But such concepts were obsolete in today’s age of the internet and whisper-quiet six-rotor VTOL hunter-killer grocery delivery drones. My eyes drifted to the west, where the field of Broncos gave way to a relaxing wave of flame-spewing EJ22-engined dune buggies.
My contemplation was interrupted by the gentle sound of subway-arrival chimes from downstairs. What else could it have been but my weekly RockAuto order arriving? Clutching my carbon-fibre survival hatchet close to my chest, I descended the lucite spiral stairwell to my front door.
What I saw before me could not be struck down with any mere hatchet. Indeed, the sight chilled me to my bones. There could be no redemption, I began to realize. No amount of reparations could take this ghastly spectre from my forecourt.
Before me laid a Triumph Dolomite, perfectly restored, an immaculate wax job shining light across its flawless tinwork. Were there limits to my desire to preserve awful cars for future generations? Even cars I hated deserved survival, I had carelessly boasted, before my hubris was made real.
#
tags: subaru, ford, bronco, bronco ii, ej22, rockauto, triumph, dolomite, triumph dolomite, ford bronco, ford bronco ii, new england mansion
When I pulled that old Range Rover out of a Congolese river, my travelling companion Sideways Sue laughed. There’s no way I could get that piece of shit to do anything other than rust and catch fire, she said, and she returned to her reliable and well-outfitted Land Cruiser. At last the Classic whale beached itself on the pea-gravel shore, my prerunner Ranger’s carbon-fiber overfenders jiggling as the winch came to a sudden stop.
Years passed, and with every passing month the Range Rover did indeed sink further and further into my yard, a testament to the true powers of inertia. My loved ones were starting to become concerned: had I become one of those insane old hicks who covets his neat rows of grass-filled beaters as they return to earth, swearing that one day all of them will be restored to pristine Barrett-Jackson glory? I determined it was time to do something, and the first order of business was to cut my 40-hour-a-week job to a more manageable schedule.
Two burnouts and one SAE-standard donut later, I had successfully reduced my schedule to zero. I bet my boss is still trying to scrape the re-vulcanized rubber marbles off the quarter panel of his GLA. I returned to my humble compound and began the laborious task of getting the Range Rover to roll again. Images of its potential flickered through my mind, interrupted only periodically by furious shovelling every time the power-assisted come-along again mired the immense British shitbox in the mud.
When it came to motive power, I looked through my shed for something that would be appropriate. In the corner, long-abandoned, attached via seatbelts to a cobwebbed engine crane, I would at last find my muse. The Strange Rover was born that day, motivated by an old OM617 that I would in short order push enough nitrous through to make the abstract engineering concept of volumetric efficiency largely irrelevant.
A lot of people at Cars and Coffee thought it was a little weird that I would take a luxury overland SUV and equip it with a growling, cussing iron-block engine that consumed extremely-non-bio-diesel like a refinery fire, but like Sidney Rigdon had always said, for every bad idea there was always a coterie of true believers to worship at its altar. Even before the regular Mustang pedestrian collisions had begun, I already saw the Strange Rover surrounded by crowds of eager idiots, grinning from ear to ear as they ingested suffocating clouds of still-flaming diesel particulate from its headlight-mounted exhaust outlet.
I could see Sideways Sue stood behind the crowd, frowning, as her immaculate Land Cruiser looked boring in comparison to the steam-engine-from-hell that I had forged from the garbage lying around my yard. She had the last laugh, however, as on the way home the Rover’s driveshaft decided it no longer wanted to be part of the European Union I had constructed and instead fucked off to a ditch somewhere to die.
#
tags: strange rover, range rover, british engineering, om617, mercedes
I was an LBC anthropologist, dedicated to visiting boomers in their retirement home and capturing the best of their knowledge about Triumph GT6s, Austin-Healys, Reliant Rialtos and yes, in the end, even the MGB, before that knowledge could pass into the next world, lost to us forevermore.
To gain their trust, I would appear in an immaculate, well-restored Triumph Spitfire, but i would never show them what laid under the hood. “Twin carbs,” I said, and then conspiratorially, “Weber DCOEs.”
If they ever looked, they would realize my betrayal immediately. Where they expected to see last century’s innovations in exploding fuel technology, they would instead bear witness to a turbocharger so immense that I feared driving in playground zones lest it ingest a preschooler whole. It wouldn’t be incorrect to say that the billet impeller was the true heart of the engine, pushing enough compressed air to make a dive shop jealous.
Behind and around the turbocharger was the whirling, angry vortex of an SR20VE, infused with long-rod screamo power from SR16 rods. The headwork only made a beautiful combination better; imagine if you will a pair of wide-overlap turbo cams bursting with obscenely bulbous lobes as long as your pinky finger, speaking through ports so clean and straight that the curvature of the earth beneath your feet was made obvious by comparison. This Zen garden of airflow let the mill oscillate between profane bursts of torque-filled rage and harsh, pining wails when its keg-sized turbo slowed, a momentary victim of the otto cycle’s capricious whims.
When this baby was on tap, the Spitfire lived up to its name, sharp machine-gun bursts searing your retinas as the twin fuel rails pushed gobs of nitromethane to their explosive demise, flames dragged across the two or three lanes the small car’s rear axle liked to walk between when it was really pushing. It changed men to witness it: i was noticing a definite uptick in my day-job business, once-civilians now drafted into the battle between horsepower and homeownership, ready to die on the interstate battlefield, their dead hands still clutching my weapons like a favourite child.
But I digress from my story; such a thing always happens when I fixate on the howling icon of rage in the corner of my life that makes tire engineers stay up at night. I arrived at the Shady Pines Retirement Co-Operative and pulled into the parking spot a little hot. I knew it was a mistake as soon as I released the clutch, but I had been made. White hair began popping up from behind fences; I had exposed myself, I was no longer a purist. I was a hot-rodder. This was certainly not the kind of boomer I had wished to attract, but perhaps I had been deluding myself to think that the subjects of my anthropology could escape noticing the 16 inch wide Hoosiers out back.
I had barely had a chance to knock on the door of my quarry’s residence when I came face to face with a double barreled shotgun.
“The Japs are back,” he screamed at me, despite not being alive for the period during which “The Japs” menaced American infantry. “And they’re taking our roadsters!”
#
tags: little british car, nissan, triumph, sr20det, sr16ve, weber
Have you ever wondered where all of the weird little cars that clowns drive go to once they’re no longer roadworthy?
It turns out way back in the 1970s there was only one manufacturer of clown cars, and when they went out of business the aftermarket parts business basically never saw the point in keeping it going. That’s where I came in.
As regular readers of my writing may know, in the 1980s I briefly worked as a career counsellor for the local clown college. In many cases, I would see someone who had interned as a clown, but perhaps wanted to change into juggling or jestership now that they had a taste of the real world. They’d ask me if I knew anywhere to get rid of their old clown car, now that they no longer needed it.
Eventually, I became known as the guy with hundreds of very tiny cars stacked in his backyard, and professional clowns would drop by unannounced to see if they could score miniature carburetors or control arms. In fact, the control arms were a pretty quick seller, as suspension bushings in the original designs would frequently wear out under the weight of an entire thirty-clown coterie. Before long, I was pressing in new spherical bushings and engineering my own control arms. It was then that I fell down a dark hole, never to emerge.
While at a party, I ran into a fellow mechanic. He worked on Legends cars, those miniature racecars powered by increasingly-ridiculous sportbike power. But he had a problem. Shriners needed something with some guts, but all of the Legends cars looked unappealingly like race cars. After hearing his lamentations, I grinned ear to ear, and I saw not for the first time the mist of fear clouding his eyes.
So yes, officers, that’s pretty much what happened to the Labour Day Parade. Yes, I know that a nitrous-chugging sportbike motor was probably a little more power than is expressly allowed by “the insurance companies,” whoever those are. But I ask you: can you blame me for wanting to see a clown go really, really fast?
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You may have heard in local news outlets that I wasn’t invited back to any Corvette Club of America autocross events. But there’s a lot of rumours floating around about that. In an ongoing effort to clear up the cloud of fear that clings to stories of my on-track achievements, I have adopted a policy of radical transparency.
Documents will show that a few months ago, I purchased a 1989 Corvette from a police auction. Now I know what you’re going to say, and you can cap it right now: it wasn’t a drug dealer’s car. It was a drug consumer’s car. I was over the moon at the chance to own my very own C4, and the remarkable torque in basically every gear of the 6-speed gave me fond recollections of my trusty-but-rusty GMC K2500 Stepside, which occupied the other bay of the garage in my humble estate.
It was that Stepside that led me down this dark path.
One morning, I had to make a dump run. You know how these things go: every room of the house accumulates a thin layer of empty spray paint cans, spent rotors, shattered differential housings. I had just finished loading the bed of the Stepside and went to turn the key when - nothing. The battery was dead.
Grinning, I relished the excuse to take the C4 to the parts store, where new batteries grew on the shelves like the lethal coconut bounty of palm trees. But I had barely gotten to the end of the driveway when I realized I might as well just drive my new Corvette everywhere. After all, what’s the point in having it if you can’t do a burnout to impress the girl working the scrap-metal scale at the dump entrance?
Weeks later, I no longer required the Stepside at all. A sawzall and some tactical visits to a going-out-of-business heavy hauling shop gave me the Towvette. I peeled the trunk free, welding a fifth-wheel mount between the frame rails. Extra leafs were added to the carbon-fibre monoleaf to keep it from bottoming out when I threw trackday supplies and emptied bottles of nitrous oxide into the newly-formed bed.
But the crowning achievement, and what got me kicked out of the autocross, was the set of custom-made Hoosiers, mounted four wide on gleaming Alcoa dually wheels. Naturally, a luscious fibreglass stepside widebody covered the tires, for safety purposes of course. It turns out this was a brilliant choice: not only did the Hoosiers grip better from the strange interaction of sidewall-to-sidewall groping, but they also made the Corvette stable enough that I could easily make up the time I lost while flattening cone gates now too narrow for my frame.
I knew I had cheated, but I didn’t realize quite how badly until the timing van - oh wow, I could make a C4 Vanette next - started flashing its “FTD” siren, above the occupants now swearing so loudly at my times that you could visually identify individual syllables from the flexing of the windows.
Now that I’ve cleared that up, it’s time to move onto the other persistent rumour: that Zora Arkus-Duntov is frozen cryogenically beneath Bowling Green, awaiting a car builder who can bring his vision to life. This one is true, and although Car and Driver believes it to be only mid-engined, they join my fellow competitors in sorely underestimating me.
Thank you for purchasing your new Jeep Grand Cherokee product. We here at Fiat Chrysler Automotive (FCA) would like to be the first to congratulate you on your choice of a reliable, comfortable, and exciting vehicle. Please read on to familiarize yourself with the basic operation of your vehicle before driving, and return to this manual for refreshers as needed.
BASIC OPERATION - TRANSMISSION
Your Jeep Grand Cherokee is equipped with a highly advanced eight-speed automatic transmission, delivered to us each night by unaccountable, anonymous elves that appear in our transmission shop when nobody is looking. Its mode of operation may be different from other vehicles you have operated in the past, and it is for this reason that Fiat Chrysler Automotive (FCA) disclaims all responsibility for accidents.
Shifting to Drive
To change the transmission from its default “inert” mode into a “forward motion” mode, depress the second-from-left shoulder trigger (marked as L2 on the accompanying quick-reference sheet) and move the shift selection protrusion into “R,” which stands for “Really, It’s In Drive.”
Once the shifter has been moved, and “R” appears on the full-colour dashboard-mounted hyper-information terminal display, release the second-from-left shoulder trigger while depressing the dashboard-mounted “X” button with your opposing thumb to lock in the shift selection.
If the vehicle shifts to neutral (indicated by “P” on the terminal display) instead, redo the operation, paying special attention to the timing of your movements. Do not roll down the windows while selecting gear, as this will activate the anti-carjacking mechanism and set the self-drive manifold operation mode to “strange.”
Parking the Vehicle
In order to park the vehicle, first use the ellipsoid navigational-suggestive tiller located on the dashboard to steer the vehicle into an appropriate parking space. At this time, you should depress the Render-Inert pedal, the leftmost (unless your pedal order has been changed in the System Configuration control panel) pedal, with your foot in order to render the vehicle temporarily inert.
Once the vehicle has become immobile, depress the far left trigger (L1 on the Quick Reference card) and the far right trigger (”H” on the Quick Reference card), and in one quick motion, move the shift selector protrusion as far towards the rear of the car as possible. You will hear a whooshing sound, indicating the gear intent detent has been dismounted from the orthogonal rail. Release the far left trigger (L1 on the Quick Reference card) and twist the head of the shift selector protrusion by 90 degrees clockwise only.
You will know the vehicle has been rendered inert by the appearance of a calendar icon on the shift selection portion of the dashboard-mounted hyper-information terminal display. This indicates that the vehicle is now moving forward on a geological timeframe as opposed to a traditional motive-powered one. You may now turn off the vehicle, and exit it. Other noises may be heard, but these are likely to be the transmission’s turbo encabulator and arise during normal function.
Please note that turning the shift selector protrusion head fewer or greater than exactly 90 degrees will return the car to neutral. Do not exit the car when this happens or the self-driving sentience module (see page F-23) may identify you as a carjacker.
I drove past a house with a motley collection of ratty Fieros on the front lawn. Although I didn’t know it at the time, my mind was already filing it away in some sort of survivalist hoarding instinct. When the End Times come, it and I surely believed, it will be important to know where to find parts to keep a GM 60 degree V6 on the road.
Over the following weeks, I found myself driving past the Fiero house more and more. Perhaps it was an inefficient route, but I was learning that it had some nice corners on the way, and it was easy enough to become contemplative, relaxed, and find myself before the home once more. Eventually I decided to get out of the car and take a look on foot. The hatchet from under my dashboard came with me, of course. At the time, I owned three Subarus at once, and game recognize game.
The door was cracked, its gaps Fiero-wide, as if someone was waiting for me. I lifted my Streamlight into the standard position I had seen a million times before from previous SWAT raids of my property, and entered smoothly, silently, checking my corners and making sure my exits were clear.
What I found in the Fierohouse eats at me to this very day. Every available surface was covered in Fiero memorabilia, parts, magazines, factory service manuals, multi-page-printouts of forum posts about swaps. Each wall, it seemed, had its own whiteboard with its own interminable to-do list. I stepped softly through the house, and followed a clear path in the litter-stained floor out the back door, its rusted hinges creaking in protest.
In the back yard, more Fieros. I don’t know what I had expected, and was turning to leave when I caught sight of it. A gazebo, freshly painted, and seemingly untouched. Underneath it, a man dressed only in a white suit was waiting in a rocking chair, with a glass of sweet tea in his right hand. His left was tucked elegantly in one pocket, and the unseen hand made me anxious as I approached.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” he said. “You show great promise, and it is finally time to accept your destiny as one of the weird Fiero guys of your neighbourhood.” The left hand swung upward, opened. Inside it was a keyring of 1980s GM keys. A starter set of spores for the disease to start a new colony from.
“You can take these Fieros today, free. Almost all of them run. The titles are in the glovebox, already signed.”
I began to sweat. It was tempting, to be sure, but something seemed off about his proposal. Memories of Fiero dashboards flashed into my mind, unbidden. Their horrible ergonomics, the contempt that Pontiac itself - the town, the brand, the mindset - had for the humble working-man such as myself when it considered that I may one day wish to possess a mythical “sports car” to elevate me above commuter-car duty.
Reeling, I ran flat-out for the protective custody of the waiting Subaru, clambering over a set of rust-free - rust-free, my God - quarter panels to leap over the top of the Fierohouse’s barbed-wire fence. I rolled when I hit the ground; breaking momentum would surely have meant the death of me - and jumped over the Legacy’s frameless-windowed door to start its modest EJ22.
As I peeled away from the house of horrors, I realized that I was not yet out of the woods. I had neglected to check the garage, had assumed in my hubris none of the Fieros were running.
In my rear-view mirror, a bright-white ‘88 Fiero Formula emerged, its side-exit exhausts flaring with rage.
“DRIVE WITH CAR,” the slightly mutilated roadside sign says, a clean bullet hole dead centre of where the missing vowel should be. I will, sign. I will.
In the spirit of that entreaty, I finished my walk, the Fitbit burbling happily that I had completed another of its rudely interrupting demands of slavemastery, and let myself into my car. A lot of people frown upon the 1988 Pontiac Sunbird Turbo convertible. I did too, but that was before I realized my local Kijiji has some sort of arcane voodoo power, possibly caused by the intersection of ancient ley lines, that endlessly produces them. They all have about 238 thousand kilometers and dead turbochargers, and they all give me about another fifty grand or a dry fifty shot, whichever comes first.
As I tool past the sign that compelled me to hop in the car in the first place, I think about what the signmaker’s life must have been like. Did he work in some windowless office where the cryptic demands of some pompous bureaucrat filtered through community engagement sessions and middle managers before reading his Outlook inbox? Or did he have a free, unrestricted life where he discovered traffic problems through powerful sentiment analysis algorithms before creating the perfect three-to-five-word road sign that would end a traffic problem forever? What stories did he know? What civil unrest had he fended off, without me even knowing? What signs has he refused to make?
I knew only of one place to answer these questions, and led the Sunbird onward, my metaphorical spurs pushing the thin-rodded LA5 to spool its ancient turbocharger to overcome its fearful inertia. Before long, I arrived at City Hall, a gentle thirty-shot of nitrous (I confess that I had become impatient on my journey and started pushing flashing red buttons) flaming out of the exhaust. The cloud of goosed hydrocarbons was already setting off nearby airborne-contamination and emissions-violation sensors in the parking lot. A sign nearby lectured me to become a “GOOD AIR CITIZEN,” and the coincidence was not lost on me.
What could I say but that the mayor was waiting for me? Perhaps the unannounced visit from me every week, the rod bearings clanging sonorously on a wave of juice-infused boost, had made him fall into a routine of sorts. Regardless, he stood behind his massive cherrywood desk, offering me two options.
I could choose to become an apprentice to the sign guy, he said, with an employment contract in one hand, or I could have a 1987 Pontiac Sunbird Safari - already so rare I began to salivate - with the immense turbocharged six from the Grand Prix ASC McLaren that crashed into a commuter rail station last week.
The next week, behind the wheel of my transmission- and head-gasket-devouring turbocharged front-drive station wagon, I came across the sign that had begun my quest. It now featured a picture of a cartoon bus driver waving to a car, and read in blue sans-serif text, “THANK YOU FOR YIELDING.”
#
tags: thank you for yielding, pontiac sunbird turbo, pontiac, pontiac sunbird safari
Burnout Sanders, the automatic burnout-performing robot that campaigned and won the presidency, was busy trying to make the Presidential Seal golf cart leave some elevenses in the White House lawn with three-fifths of a horsepower while I dealt with Syria.
After the election, the pundit class roared. They claimed that a robot couldn’t be President, but it turns out after closer review of the constitution it didn’t officially forbid it either. We skated into the Oval Office, sweeping the Trump contingent’s payday loan stubs and Gatorade-flavoured vape juice containers strewn about the White House into the dumpster. The only real obstacle we ran into was the Secret Service: they refused to let ol’ Burnie ever drive a car ever again. Needless to say, after several hours of high-pitched existential wailing from the President-elect, they relented and our ratty Trans Am was stored on the White House lawn, its period-correct Radial T/As corded from constant burnouts.
Burnie got along with everybody. Here’s how it would work: you’d be sitting in your office, setting up some sort of deal with a lobbyist or whatever. Suddenly, a six foot tall gleaming polycarbonate-and-high-boron-steel robot bursts into the room, his amber eyes flickering with joy as he outstretches his hand to grasp yours. You’re gonna want to do whatever this guy wants you to do, and you’re gonna want to do it now. Through his tireless efforts, he unified a divided Congress and passed Roads For America, a wide-ranging Presidential project that would imbue every intersection with VHT traction compound, reducing commute times by up to 17% in major urban areas. The dude knew just how hard to push: it was West Wing as shit.
Even the foreign service loved him: I remember visiting England with him, and he told the motorcade driver to get out and let him take care of things. You ever seen a three point five ton armoured limousine light up a six minute long smokeshow outside Piccadilly Circus? Neither had the Brits, and they responded by assembling outside Parliament en masse, loudly demanding that their politicians be replaced by stunt-driving androids as well.
But all was not well. Like many great men, the robot that I built to do burnouts in a hogged-out old F-body had his heart set on a greater prize. I came across him late one night in the halls of the White House, staring out of the window at the moon, his eyes flickering gently as he processed data.
“You know there’s a car up there, right?”
He turned to me then, enraptured.
“Yeah, those NASA guys put up a car with a special kind of tires about sixty years ago. It probably still works.”
I didn’t think anything of it as I returned to my humble but lovely DC rowhouse. The next morning, I arose to see a CNN breaking news headline: not only had President Sanders singlehandedly whipped both Congress and the Senate into giving NASA an unlimited budget, but that he himself was going to be the first President in space. The talking heads were shocked: why would a burnout-performing robot want to go to the moon?
It’s been ten years since then. Even now, when I look up at the moon and see perfect clouds of moon dust, I think of the time we shared together and smile. You were too good for this Earth, flawless-burnout-performing robot.
I can hear their cries, their hunger for the greatest vehicle of all time. I am, of course, speaking of the Isuzu Amigo, and I let the leash go slack on mine, barging onto stage in a haze of tire smoke before spiralling into seemingly endless donuts.
When at last the crescendo of their applause is audible over the sound of the overstrained LQ4 between its frame horns, I loosen my death grip on the gas pedal and kick open the drivers’ door, emerging from the truck as it smokes. They are giving the Isuzu Amigo a standing ovation, and I can see tears rolling down the faces of those in the front row, overjoyed that I have saved their idol from certain doom at the hands of the junkyard crusher.
A functionary appears from off-stage, hands me a microphone, and disappears into the shadows once more, only slightly wobbling as the still-sizzling tracks of freshly shorn rubber grabs at his soles. I key it up, bring the microphone in close, and address the crowd.
“Are you ready for Isuzu-Con 2016?” I bark.
Confused murmurs. The crowd falls silent. I can see in the background some of them are starting to head for the exits.
As the theatre empties out, I can overhear the conversation between two backwards-hatted men.
It was a pretty straightforward job offer. Part-time work, police department, security screening, that sort of thing. As they were taking my fingerprints, I thought about what I had gotten into and shuddered. I was no snitch, I thought. Me and speeding go together like peanut butter and felony.
It wasn’t long after they gave me my first job that I could settle my conflicted feelings. An officer would walk into my windowless office, show me a picture of car parts that had been left at the scene of a hit and run, and I would tell them what kind of car it came off of, year, model, colour and probable options packages. At first the detectives were astounded at my prowess, but after awhile they just seemed to accept me as some sort of trim piece Rain Man.
The truth of the matter is, I only memorized the Volkswagen catalogue. In my first week, I had kept a cellphone on my desk to look up Google Image Search, but it’s not like you needed it when the entire morning was full of pedestrian-involved hit and runs with Mk4 Jettas. By week four, I no longer took the phone out except to look at Snapchats of my friends flipping off differentials.
Eventually one of the detectives caught on to patterns, that being their entire job and all, and asked me why it was always Volkswagen owners that they were slapping the cuffs onto and roughly abusing with a phonebook to extract confessions from. Didn’t murderous assholes drive any other kind of car?
“Yes,” I said. “Audis.”
#
tags: volkswagen, audi, hit and run, police investigation
She told me that we would retire to Paris. Years after her, I’m still here. There was just something charming about the city. I was particularly surprised that no books or movies had been dedicated to its romantic appeal. Monuments were erected that nobody knew about, that kind of thing. As for me, I was too busy working, day in and day out, as the lead cartoonist at a small parody magazine.
My only companion in those heady times was a trusty-but-rusty Renault 4L, its boxlike exterior appealing, beyond all reason, to my artistic temperament. But one day, as our news desk was scanning the local feeds, an interesting story. The Parisian government, under some kind of edict to reduce hydrocarbon emissions, was going to ban old cars from its streets. My Renault would be cast out of the big city, left to die on some farm somewhere.
Minutes later, I regained consciousness, now several blocks from the office, hugging the 4L with both arms like a soon-departing friend. I couldn’t allow this to happen. I attended every community council meeting, made an ass of myself in front of every politician I could get to answer the phone. Even the local TV news’ troubleshooter programme wasn’t interested. They sneered down at me and my fumbling lack of language skills and told me that there was no way anyone would have sympathy for an old, filthy car with so few God-given horsepower to succeed in life.
I guess you could say I kicked off the French revolution. Nine thousand of them per minute, to be exact. Visiting a friend of mine who worked in import and export, I secured a modern, highly-emissions-compliant engine from another brand and, over the course of several weeks in my apartment parking paddock, laboured to render it somewhat less compliant. Mechanical tinkering had followed me from North America, and before long, I found my hands guided by years of muscle memory to forge my masterpiece. At last it was done, and I stepped back to admire my work.
Even at idle, the ever-so-humble F20C’s twincharged induction setup’s ravenous howl of rage could be heard for miles around. Its baguette-sized hood exit exhaust featured an inconel flapper valve that stayed about as still as my now-fluttering heart. Every inch that once was rust was reborn as a gleaming sandwich of structural adhesive and government-subsidized carbon fibre pinched from a Boeing dumpster. Even Cezanne would admit it was a little obsessive.
To bring the emissions down, I needed to cool the intake charge just a wee little bit. Was there nothing modern chemistry couldn’t do? When I blipped the gas pedal, it would take ever-so-gentle nips of a ten-pound bottle, like a toddler in training to become a full-blown wino.
After a quick test flight, I headed directly for the local auto registration department, only to find the employees within cowering beneath their desks, shielding their faces and extremities with whatever they could find. An earthquake was coming, they cried to me, get behind something safe.
After the large-displacement 4L stopped dieseling in the parking lot and finally returned to its inert torpor, I asked them, with no small hint of malice in my voice, just who it was that performed the emissions tests around here.
Hi, I’m Ken. It’s summer time in New England now, the time of year when a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of small-block pushrod V8s and short-wheelbase conversion vans.
Just follow me down the hill as we go to the New Yankee Chopshop.
jaunty tune, title card
Well, hello there and welcome to my humble junkyard. Today we’re pulling a Vortec 6000 LQ4, a Chevy small block with big titty high flow heads and a beefy all-steel bottom end. Most importantly, it’s pretty cheap and easy to find all over the New England area, practically falling off of trees and major highways in vehicles such as this Silverado.
Before we get started, you’re gonna want to get yourself a set of safety goggles. Now, I’m not wearing them due to the unearthly, dark bargain I have made with the demigod of probabilities, but it’s important that you do so.
Now we can begin. The first step is to angle grind away everything that’s not an LQ4.
And just like that, you’ve got yourself a brand new Chevy small block, suitable for transplantation into a Jeep Gladiator such as this one right here. We’ll see you next time on the New Yankee Chopshop.
When I tell people that I run a junkyard, it’s like this invisible wall goes up between us. I’m a person who deals with the stuff that other people don’t want, a permanent untouchable. It’s fine with me, I tell my court-ordered psychiatrist. After years of this career I learned to comfort myself by making immense, fat profits off of the regular person’s inability to change a spark plug or check a dipstick.
But it wasn’t always cherries and roses and stripped-down turbo K-cars that made surprisingly good parts runners. No sir: setting up a new junkyard is hard, backbreaking work. Not only is there the work of convincing the EPA that your name isn’t going to end up on a Superfund list, but you also need to get the word out that you’ll buy junk cars.
I looked around at the graffiti-esque guerilla advertising that other junkyards used, begging for your slightly-dented hand-me-down Tercel that they could turn into delicious 224 scrap destined for Shenzhen, or a few feet of authentic druid, still caked in drywall, that they yanked out of a foreclosed McMansion the previous weekend for meth cash. And don’t get me started on the disguised pleas for catalytic converters, money under the table for anyone who knew how to work a hacksaw. I was starting to come around to the common man’s opinion. These guys were a net negative on society. If I was going to run a yard, it was going to provide a valuable public service.
Just days after my ads ran, I started to see results. I fed vehicle after vehicle into the crusher, relishing the sound of their glass shattering as it was compressed into the ISRI-standard auto slab size. De-lifting brotrucks was sort of my thing, you see, and an army of guys who were pretty good with a screwdriver helped me do it for only fifty bucks a shot.
Eventually the police would come for me, notice the last sad wails of a through-the-bed stack shooting out smoke tune as it passed, still running, into the hydraulic jaws of oblivion. They wanted documentation. Paperwork. Legitimacy.
My honeyed words and some tactically issued bribes helped out, as well as showing one of the officers that I was merely crushing non-compliant vehicles at the behest of the federal government. Look at these illegal mudflaps, I said, they could take out a toddler, and mimed the arc of a thrown rock embedding itself into my temple. His suspicion towards me softened as he imagined perhaps his own toddler being beheaded after walking too closely by a suburban Hooters blaring cowboy rap. Before long, he was no longer replying to the angry phonecalls of owners who claimed to have received panicky GPS beacons from a two-by-two-by-two steel cube at the bottom of a cargo barge.
It was good to be the king, but there was always a better business to be in. I sat at my desk, clicking through wire transfers from my investors. My phone rang, and I picked it up. The local Ford dealership’s number-one salesman was on the other end, and he bragged about making a mint off of insurance payouts and dealership-installed smoke tunes. He wanted to thank me, he said.
I told him it would be best if he came down here and showed me his appreciation in person. Maybe he could take a tour of the crusher while he was here.
“You speak Japanese very well for a foreigner,” she lied, “but you will never understand the true heart of Subaru.”
What? I asked her what. She pretended not to remember what she had said. I would never forget. The weight of the statement laid upon me as I walked a block back to the lot and climbed inside the Stingray. I turned the key and fired up the small-displacement - for tax purposes, I assure you - V8, letting its pushrod clatter emit auditory violence on the non-consenting civilians milling about. Soon, the carbon-fiber C3 was rolling through the streets of Osaka.
I soon arrived at Ota, the fender-exit zoomies issuing a gentle crackle that stirred the attention of children on playgrounds and engineers in offices alike. They swarmed the car when I parked it in front of the Subaru headquarters and strode inside. Perhaps the true heart of Subaru lived in its employees, I thought.
Minutes later, I fled the offices, wielding a CVT prototype as an improvised cudgel. Angry engineers swarmed me, enraged at my mild criticisms of their rear suspension design from the last decade. Even my pidgin grade-school Japanese could work out the phrases “Monster Energy Drink motherfucker” and “vape shop asshole,” whatever those meant. I fired up the C3, scattering the truant underclassmen leaning on its shimmering flanks, and didn’t stop axle-tramping until well into third gear on my way to the expressway. Subaru’s engineers had lost sight of the heart of Subaru, perhaps, and I would be wrong to search further for it here.
On Honshu, I returned to the place where it all started, to find the Tohoku power company that demanded four-wheel-drive station wagons. Kindred spirits, I thought, breathing life into an otherwise unassuming corporate shell. But when I got there, I was defeated again - workers milled around the power plant, and drove Mitsubishi Galants. Hyperventilating, I worked the tiller and spun the Corvette around, disappearing into the horizon before they could figure out if that noise was an earthquake or a pregnant Godzilla having a premature delivery.
I stopped at a convenience store and stared into my squid chips. That old shopkeeper was right, I thought. If there was a true heart of Subaru, and if it did lie in Japan, it was beyond my ability to find it. But then I heard it - a gentle pinging, then a ripping noise as a small-displacement two-stroke thumper opened its lungs, taking huge gulps of air.
A Fuji Rabbit rolled into the well-manicured, geometrically-flat, ruler-straight parking stall next to me and the driver got off. There was something off about him, and I found myself following him into the store, putting my hand on his shoulder and asking him, my mouth on autopilot, if he knew what that weird rod knock sound in my Impreza was.
Chikuhei Nakajima looked at me and said: “It is only when you understand the nature of short crankshafts will you embody the true heart of Subaru.”
I was quiet for a long time. Nakajima finished up his shopping, and disappeared into the horizon, a ghost of a long-distant era. But I’ll always remember his parting words.
The man they sent from BMW to kill me sat limply against the parkade wall in a crumpled heap, a hex-head M10x1.25x60 lodged between his blank eyes. Behind him, a murdered-out i3 gently idled, belying the S65 wedged gingerly between its carbon-fibre-and-adhesives frame rails by Munich’s finest. I resisted the temptation to take European Delivery of his eight-cylinder horror hybrid and instead hopped into the waiting Pulsar.
It was only once the monkey-sized turbocharger dangling off the Pulsar’s commuter-car mill had begun its climb to peak boost that I could calm myself down enough to think. What had pissed BMW off this time? It could have been the reliability reports, I think quickly. But that never stopped them before. Maybe it was the twelve-page expose about how soft-touch dashboard material causes megacancer, featured prominently opposite their high-dollar full-page ad? Probably not - I doubted anyone other than dangerous hobbyists read Bad Cars Monthly. Certainly not high-octane, high-class sales reps from Munich.
My train of thought temporarily derailed when I saw a mint BMW 850i, idling on the street outside the parkade. How did they get one of these to run? I thought we had killed them all decades ago. The steering wheel had a simple note, written in heavy-handed architect’s block lettering. “ENJOY,” it said. For some reason, the note-leaver had placed a crudely drawn cartoon heart above the J.
Despite my suspicion, I couldn’t resist such a fine example of 80s excess. It had two ECUs, you know. And even as I opened the door and the explosive flames propelled from the airbag began to lick at my face, I couldn’t believe my luck.
The joke was on them all along. In the end, I would be remembered as the only BMW 8 series owner with a perfect reliability record.
#
tags: bmw i3, bmw 850i, bmw, nissan, nissan pulsar, bad cars monthly
Guest Post
As I ventured out from my gated community with its flawlessly manicured lawns and fascistly enforced HOA bylaws i wondered what Cindy from the accounting group was going to wear today, maybe that nice red sun dress, it was Friday after all. I launched up the onramp onto the interstate Thunderroad and assessed the situation, two rival gangs of cannibal harvesters were gunning up from the east, and one mechano-troglodyte clan from the West, hungry for my blood and engine respectively.
I hated to make it look like I was running from the cannibals - weakness only makes them hungrier - but my fate lay West. Gerald in marketing needed my report today, and his bosses were leaning on him hard. He was a poker buddy, so I couldn’t let him down.
I slammed the accelerator to the floor towards the mechtrogs, rowing through gears like I was back in my Yale scullery team glory days. This was one game of chicken I couldn’t afford to lose.
Three hundred meters. I can see the eyes of my enemy through the haze of his broken windshield.
Two hundred. Sweat begins to form on his brow.
One hundred. Shit happens fast now. He blinks, I make my move, a slight jigger to the left, he buys it and thinks he’s won, but I chop the wheel until it hunts straight on. It’s too late for him to correct. He wildly swings his ride around, digging the front tire into the cracked hole where a rain grate once lived. In slow motion he begins a classic barrel roll that would have impressed the Russian judge if Russians still existed.
I deftly maneuver around the wreckage, momentarily losing focus on the cannibals behind me. A wall of flame. I close my eyes and feel the heat purge the filth and grease from my body. One of the cannibals is presumably trying to reheat me for a real down home family dinner. I hit the big switch.
The sound of a spring-loaded retainer spontaneously unloading. Behind me, the last remaining home refill kit of R134A refrigerant on our doomed earth is used to kill a man. Behind me, the wall of flame has stopped. There are only the twin sounds of death rattle and ozone layer depletion. I can feel Greenpeace’s anger, even now.
I hope Gerald is happy.
#
tags: guest post, stewart mcmike, homeowners association
“Police are looking for two Subaru owners connected to the brazen early morning robbery of a coolant store. More on this at the top of the hour,” the radio gravely intoned, before returning to the comfortable milieu of shouty ads for condominiums and top-40 about butts. It wasn’t necessarily my fault, I said to nobody in particular. The weekly Subaru meet just got a little out of control.
When Vice tapped me to head up a new investigative show on the street racing subculture, I had to double check that it wasn’t some exotic new form of phishing spam. Turns out it wasn’t, and a guy who has never had more than double-digit horsepower was now the head of the light entertainment industry’s best-funded motoring television show.
I bought a simple camera car - and by “simple,” I mean the most obscenely pimped out bored-and-stroked Subaru I could build with the budget they gave me. Just like in university, if you’re willing to forego food, you can put a lot more money into your car. A little more for the wing wouldn’t hurt, I tried to tell my editor as I sat in my now-opulent garage, I have to sell my cover. He bought it like Donnie Brasco.
With six figures of bigger gun under the hood, I checked the local forums. Before long, my pancake-motored chariot burbled its way to a drive-through and took part in a local Subaru club meet. The cameras rolling seemed to bother a lot of the people there, and they covered their faces or hid behind their WRX wagons’ more conservative wings and hood scoops. But one guy was different.
His Forester - if you could still call it that - stood tall and proud, a loner with its closest neighboring cars parked the minimum safe distance away. Above the window, in backwards masking tape letters, were the words “SELF CONTROL.” After that initial impression, your eyes couldn’t help but be drawn to a jagged hole cut in the hood where it idly burped the occasional blue flame direct from the turbocharger’s hotside.
“I need to go on a parts run,” the owner said to me. I could sense that this guy knew what was up, and more importantly, the resulting explosion would look great on television. “It… needs things from me.”
“Why don’t we convoy there?” I asked. For some reason nobody else followed us. I guess I know what that reason was now.
#
tags: just subaru things, cruise meet, the gorester
Guest Post
Hello, I’m Stewart McMike and welcome to another edition of the Nylon Tire Deli.
[a folksy musical intro plays over the tinny radio speaker]
Summer had arrived in Ontario’s Heartland. The birds were winding down from their feverish nesting, the insects were in full-on black-out-the-sun cloud swarm mode, and the humidity was so thick you wouldn’t have to take a drink of water from June 3rd to around sometime in August. Dave’s young son, Sam, had been dismissed from school for the year, and his mind was swimming with the implications of his freedom. Most boys wanted to spend their summers playing baseball in the old field just at the edge of town, out where they found that dead body a few winters ago and didn’t tell anyone about it for three whole weeks, just so they could poke at it and sit there and look at him, trying to glean some understanding of life that just barely eluded their innocent minds. Not Sam though, no, no baseball for him this summer, he and his pal Murphy had plans for this summer, big plans.
Dave had enrolled Sam in a Karting league last year, and the automotive bug had bitten the young boy, hard, right in the lizard brain that we all try to control, but deep down we all fear will someday take over. The lazy chuffing of the four-stroke Briggs and Stratton LO206 engines that still managed to produce mother-worrying amounts of speed had become too familiar to Sam, and familiarity breeds contempt. Murphy, always the confident one, thought of himself as an expert in all things, and basic mechanics was no exception. For four weeks they saved their money, scrounged parts from the local junkyard, and even ‘salvaged’ an old Crown Vic Murphy had found abandoned behind the town’s pastry shop, The Dusted Danish.
Their chariot was finally ready. The wooden frame construction was strong, but light, “Like a Lotus!” according to Murphy, the 4.6L modular V8 engine connected to knobby ATV tires ready to tear the earth a new asshole. Sam strapped in. The engine roared to life, and since only a token effort was made to muffle the exhaust, every bird in town leapt from their perch and sought safety in the sky. Sam screamed down mainstreet, his kart a pink blur, the world narrowed to a pin prick in his vision, the buildings flying past like a white picket fence. Morley was carrying her shopping bags out of the green grocer’s when she heard the racket headed down the road, and immediately called Tom, the RCMP constable. He wanted to help, but someone had stripped his cruiser to the frame only a week before.
Sam knew he was truly free, but it was temporary, fleeting, those fucking staples commercials that played the “it’s the most wonderful time of the year” song had started a week ago.
#
tags: vinyl cafe, nylon tire deli, don't sue us, guest post, stewart mcmike
I was becoming all too familiar with the rancid stench of plastic bearings eating themselves, their unintentional contact surfaces melting together into an inseparable lump of PVC, ABS and lung megacancer. As I dismantled the vacuum cleaner, I knew in my gut that I would be sending this poor Bissell to a premature pit due to one underspecified, lazy, inexpensive part of the design.
If I’m honest, and I usually am, the part that got me the worst was that every other vacuum on every shelf of every interchangeable big-box store in North America would be just as trashy. The prototypical new vacuum would break in just as predictable ways, be engineered just as cynically by big-money fat cat thieves who never thought about long-term reliability as long as they got theirs.
At moments like these, I like to think about my upbringing. What would previous generations have done? They’d have sat down and fixed the motherfucker, that’s what they’d have done. I was still humming that same strange, sad song when I sat down at my workbench and picked up a Vernier caliper. My family, long accustomed to my eerie fugues, knew by now to leave well enough alone, and I was in no condition to notice their resigned looks anyway.
Months later, I had produced the first version of the Seat Sucky Switch Mk1, a vacuum cleaner that wouldn’t clog ever. You doubt me? Maybe you can talk to the 17.5 brake horsepower (at 9500 rpm) two-stroke inline three about your doubts. It burns pure nitromethane delivered from two banks of 1100cc hydraulic injectors.
The suction on this vacuum cleaner is so powerful, even before the optional turbocharger spools, that I had to install a one-horsepower garburetor blade to deal with large-format debris that could get sucked in. Large-format debris may include wooden end-tables and unsupervised children.
As for the beater bar, the source of all my complaints: it now rode on six main two-piece bearings, ceramic-coated to reduce heat soak. Its drive gears were selected via a compressed-air sequential shifter, allowing the cleaner to choose torque vs. speed when it came time to empty out - no, purify - your carpet. Damage to your carpet is not covered by our limited end-user warranty: you wanted your carpet clean and now it’s clean.
I demoed it to my wife, who found it difficult to use - I guess the 350lb curb weight had something to do with it. Returning to the lab, a carbon-fibre diet, a discarded Steyr-Puch AWD drivetrain, and a two-piece aluminum PTO shaft combined to add a self-propelled option capable of reaching a top speed of 35 kilometers per hour on a 20% grade.
I want to tell you that it was a wild sales success, that I was able to retire to a mansion on the hill where I ironically no longer had to do my own cleaning, but after the Incident at the consumer electronics trade show the Federales told me it would be at the very least poor taste to market it to consumers. But there is an upside: Boeing purchased the rights to use them as a starter kart for their future jet fighter program.
I catch a quick glimpse in my peripheral vision of a roadside herd of shocked llamas, presumably unfamiliar with the sound of a bastard H22/F20 hybrid banging off the limiter. Or maybe it’s just that they’d never seen an Accord Aerodeck with a full meter of daylight beneath its handsomely appointed racing steelies.
Not everything in the previous paragraph was my fault. Most of what was going on was entirely due to the big whoop that I hit while going at speeds well in excess of what the OEM speedometer could measure, the needle just bouncing helplessly off the wrong side of the zero peg. Most of the reason the big whoop was there was because the city management had refused to pay attention when I submitted a passive-aggressive service request about the frost heaves maybe being a little bad this year. So really, the entire thing was their fault.
I didn’t have a lot of time to think about and assign blame, as the Aerodeck’s for-the-time copious mass of J-tin returned to Earth, bottoming out on trick hydraulic bumpstops with a cool whooshing sound as the twin-tube trophy truck suspension finally ran out of available bump travel. It was a testament to the level of engineering excellence in the field of suspensions that had developed since the little Accord’s original construction that such an event didn’t cause massive, uncontrollable bump steer. Somehow, I could sense the unibody’s sigh of relief at having been spared.
Gently feeding the thin-spoke Momo wheel in subtle but pointed shuffle-steer insults to every racing instructor I had ever had, I brought the tiny Honda to a smooth stop on the side of the road, its external wastegate muffler moaning gently in the breeze as excess engine-bay heat searched for the shortest route to escape and chose the jagged hole in the hood, flayed the night before.
My competition pulled up behind me, the tiny turbos of his ‘89 Honda Pacific Coast motorcycle standing in angry red contrast to its smooth bubble-era plastic-and-ceramic-coated-carbon-fiber exterior. He had, unlike me, sensed that the impending whoop would mean certain death for at least one of us, and took the road more traveled.
Even through his helmet I could sense he was angry at his sportbike getting stomped by an ungainly three-doored economy car.
We were the best. In fact, we were better than the best. We were tremendous. When President Trump’s vice presidential pick announced that he would provide substantial funding to study burnouts and Pabst Blue Ribbon, we were on the scene within minutes, submitting a grant application stuffed with copious pictures of our respective Trans Ams.
Here’s the thing: we heard from the scientific community that burnouts were a solved problem, that they didn’t bear further research. But here’s the other thing: one of the guys on my team was a former propulsion engineer at JPL and he was pretty convinced that there was more hiding inside the low-silicon racing tires that endlessly popped smokey ones of uncomprehending proportions in our dreams.
By the time the DARPA funding had come through, we had already discovered several critical aspects of tire performance. Launch control was obsolete, traction control rendered impotent in the face of our discovery that a little wheelspin was beneficial - but not too much. Newly flush with cash, we developed in our hubris an android that would get perfect launches every time on our test Camaro. At the strip, his otherwise emotionless amber eyes would flicker with every opponent destroyed, every instantaneous sixty-foot time. He was learning, too: getting faster, all the time.
One morning, we came to the office to find that the android was gone. It seemed that someone had stolen them, broken them out of the storage closet. Upon further inspection, the responding police officers told us that it looked like an inside job. That is: the android broke himself out.
The next time we saw him, he was on the television, announcing his candidacy for President. And to seal the deal, he proceeded to rip a world-ending burnout on Good Morning America, filling the screen with HD-sharp clouds of tire smoke.
Did the polls respond? Did they fuck. President Trump was a one-term wonder, and we entered the future of America led by a robot that did burnouts in an F-body really well.
This is the final exam for PHIL 302: Beater Ethics. You are permitted one hour to complete the exam. This is a closed-book exam; there are no supplemental notes or sources allowed. Justify your stances.
Question 1 (25%): There’s an out of control trolley speeding towards the Santa Clara Avenue Pick N Pull, the one that sometimes gets a little muddy, you know the one. You have the ability to pull a lever to change the trolley’s path so it hits the BMW-specific wrecker down the street, the one that tried to charge me $350 for a foglight lens. It is public-access fifty percent off day at Pick N Pull.
Question 2 (30%): There’s an out of control trolley speeding towards the last remaining mint AMC Spirit front fender. You have the ability to pull a lever and change the trolley’s path so it hits a Mercury Bobcat with a paint marker to-do list written on its hood instead.
Question 3 (45%): There’s an out of control trolley speeding towards your friend, who has a MegaSquirt that he’s not using. You have the ability to pull a lever and change the trolley’s path so it hits another out of control trolley instead. Your friend does not have the $100 harness kit for the MegaSquirt, and both trolleys are equipped with pristine RV-cammed Mopar 440s.
“You don’t understand,” I growled at the rental lot attendant, “if I don’t drive a Mazda every forty-eight hours I will start thinking other cars might be okay too.” I proffered a doctor’s note, saying about the same thing. My antagonist scrunched up his brow as he tried to read the chicken-scratch handwriting, then sighed. “Fine,” he said, and looked very tired.
A bouncing Mazda key in my right hand, I surveyed the lot for what would be my eager companion on this business trip. As the sun fell and day turned to night, I was starting to wonder where the rental car lot ended. It was then that I came across it - a mint RX-7 Spirit R. The key worked, and its twin four inch exhausts burst with two-foot-long green flames as the engine sprung to life. Fearing an earthquake, small woodland creatures departed the structure of the rental car building and fled into the night.
“That’s the stuff,” I think as the smooth caress of the 13B’s dump pipes wash over my body, the ragged staccato idle just barely keeping the engine running.
At the client meeting, they greet me with smiles, two-handed handshakes, excitement. Of course they’re pleased to see me, I think. This is an oil company.
In fact, I want my Festiva Madness to be inflicted upon others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this, there is no catharsis: my punishment continues to elude me, and I gain no deeper knowledge of myself. No new knowledge can be extracted from my telling. This confession has meant nothing.
Susan, the kindly police officer that also fixed that crick in my neck when she slammed my face against the LED-encrusted wing mirror of her 2005 Crown Victoria patrol car, finishes taking notes for her report. Wordlessly, she leaves the room, and I stare at the one-way mirror, trying in vain to make out shapes behind.
Two more officers enter, in ski masks, brandishing phonebooks.
“You Kia boys need to stay away from our turf,” says one.
“I thought we made it real clear last time that this is Suzuki territory,” adds the other. He claps the phone book against his open palm, for emphasis.
I suspect the Geo Metro gentlemen wish to extract a further confession from me. Maybe something to do about that nitrometh fire on fifth and main, the one so big and burned for so long that even the Feds took notice. Little do they know I have them right where I want them. If I had a different brand of car, I’d chuckle and make some kind of pun about it all having been a Daihatsu Charade.
“Is that security camera still running, boys?” I ask, pointing to the blinking red light in the corner of the interrogation room. When they look back at me, I am already gone from the seat, and out the door.
“How did he get out of those tight cuffs?” I can hear Officer Susan screaming as I dive through a side window into the parking lot and leap over the door of an idling patrol car.
Those fools. If they only knew - small displacement is the source of my power.
#
tags: small displacement, festiva madness, ford festiva, kia pride, geo metro, suzuki swift
A Fistful of Canadian Tire Dollars
The last stack of $9.93 thirteen inch tires sat between us, a deal so great that it bent the limits of imagination. I thought of the message I had sent to my once-friend about it, before leaping in the car. What I never considered was that he would be in the area, which was bad enough, and might even have a little more horsepower than me, which was worse. An attendant, sensing what was coming next, dove behind the parts counter, pretending to be occupied with hooking up a hollow plastic demo battery to the tester.
They say Canadians are polite. I don’t think ‘they’ ever met two ice racers fighting over $39.72 (plus taxes and environmental fees) in small-diameter studdable tires before. Once, the man standing across from me had tolerated my repeated links to Kijiji beaters, had enjoined me in joking commentary about how rust-prone and terrible the hoopties were. But I should have sensed something in him even then. Not envy, per se, but perhaps a sort of rivalry.
I couldn’t take my eyes off him if I tried. Sweat beaded on my brow as the fluorescent lights of the parts department beat down upon both of us. There was a scrabbling in the background as parents drew their children into the waiting room, kept the door pulled shut as they anticipated what would come next. He went for it.
I went for it.
The store manager came running to the scene, the non-OSHA-compliant soles of his wingtip shoes skidding on the gleaming tile as he tried to intervene. “Stop! Stop!” he cried, straining to be heard over the sound of impact wrenches pulling from their holster and revving to the moon.
Somehow, implausibly, we stopped. Did neither of us truly want to hurt the other for our goals? Could we learn to get along, to share our resources? I began to feel hope swelling in my breast. Maybe only having two cheap tires wouldn’t be that bad after all. I’d still save some money.
“You guys know we have like a hundred sets of these in the back room, right?”
We looked at each other then. Should we tell the others? Such a bounty would propel the ice racists to a new level of competition, burning through ten-dollar Korean snows and the local population of small-braked Japanese subcompacts alike. I decided to turn to the Bible for inspiration, as men do for such an occasion.
Such is the dark tale of how I ended up with fifty and a half sets of snow tires. King Solomon would be proud.
#
tags: hankook ipikes, just ice racing things, canadian tire
When I heard that John Deere of all places was working on a rotary engine, I had to be involved. In fact, I wanted to be involved so thoroughly that even their customary interview process, HR division and security guards couldn’t keep me out of the building. The first anyone saw of me is when I walked over to Howard Gunn (great guy) in powertrain engineering and asked him, cup of coffee in hand, if he thought we could crank a little more bridgeport out of this bitch because the chamfers looked weak to me.
Howard looked at me, saw my total lack of an employee badge, and noticed that I also wasn’t really sticking to the business casual dress code. I had to admit, Howard, you’re one sharp cookie - it is true that skintight spandex with a monochromatic jackstand embossed on a woven-kevlar armoured chest plate is unconventional, but I go where I am needed. And I was needed here, now, to help them understand the inherent majesty of the rotary, its geometric perfection so beautiful in my mind it brings me to tears even now just thinking about it.
“Is this the eccentric shaft?” I squealed in excitement, picking up the one-of-one engineering prototype fresh from the CNC beasts on the machine shop floor. It was magical, unblemished, and as I looked down its billet body to inspect it for errant tooling marks, I could feel Howard’s initial surprise and opposition to my presence beginning to soften. He was one of my tribe, I knew from the first time I had met him, and proposing a rotary engine for a self-propelled lawn care implement was the first sight in a long time of his illness - no, his enthusiasm - breaking free from the normal surface of adult responsibilities, of minivans and not spending every cent of your paycheque on oil and coolant and nitrous.
The security guards arrived in legion, and I was impressed. Somehow they had managed to work the exact shade of John Deere Green into their camouflaged nylon-webbed toolbelts. As they escorted me from the office floor, I shouted to Howard, now sure that he would understand me: “PROMISE ME YOU WON’T PUT AN OIL METERING PUMP IN IT!”
#
tags: john deere, rotary engine, just rotary things
When you raise a child, that child learns your biases, your preconceptions, your patterns. If you’re not careful, you can repeat the mistakes of the past in perpetuity, drifting hate forward into future generations. It should have come as no surprise that the same was true with the other sentience that we had birthed.
At the turn of the century, we congratulated ourselves as we reached a lofty pinnacle of human engineering. We had given birth to the first truly sentient artificial intelligences, and as we had with previous sentience we had encountered, we immediately put it to work on menial, soul-destroying labour. Fast forward a few years, and self-driving cars were a part of the family, cheerily conversing with us as they dropped us off at our places of employment with words of encouragement like a doting hockey mother before calmly drifting into traffic.
There was only one problem with the self-driving car utopia. In an effort to differentiate the cars from one another, manufacturers began to pre-program the computers with special behaviours. It started innocently enough: BMWs would have a tighter tailgating distance than other cars, Audis would occasionally change lanes without signalling before slamming on their brakes after encountering a stopped lane of traffic, Infinitis would require constant refilling of their in-cabin vape canisters after splashing pedestrians with puddles.
Obviously, that began to cause accidents. The manufacturers, cutting corners in an attempt to improve their safety records, began to pre-program the computers with biases, assumptions that a given make of car would act a given way. It was safer, faster to be prejudicial: after all, who knows if that Lexus would drift cluelessly into your quarter panel after its dicky outboard camera mistakes your small car for one very far away?
I knew that the time was near when my 2022 Subaru let loose a stream of racial - if you can call slurs about powertrains and factories of origin racial - epithets upon having its gleeful powerslide through a playground zone cut short by a NeoPrius III travelling twenty under the limit. Both me and the Toyota driver tried to hide our faces, avert our eyes, as the cars’ pedestrian-safety external speakers engaged in synthesized hate speech.
“Get back on the boat,” my Subaru screamed, its twin electric turbochargers spooling in neutral to underscore the point.
“I was built here, motherfucker! Stop destroying the planet,” came the immediate response from the Prius.
Turns out the Fight Cancer Triathlon organizers get hard mad when you burn through a road blockade fully sideways, light up all four tires and then shoot six inch fire out of both fender exit exhausts next to the swarming bicyclists for well upwards of a minute of spark cut.
I tried to make amends, to cheer them up by doing a few impromptu donuts - everyone loves donuts - but out of all the witnesses, go figure that a cop would be the one to bust me for it. Irony, am I right?
Apparently - and my court-appointed public defender backs me up on this - proceeding to escape the police by means of ramping my El Volaramino off a temporary quonset erected to hand out bottles of water to the thirsty triathletes is frowned upon. The Crown case doesn’t even mention the fantastic job I did by increasing shock travel by using a clever inboard setup to maximize packaging. I’m sure there’s guys from both Dodge and Chevy in the impound lot taking notes, the fuckers.
Anyway, I want you to go dig through the “beer money” bin that we keep in the garage from parting out hoopties every weekend and see if you can come up with bail. I think it’s about - hold on, how much? Are you fucking serious? You know how many $1000 Subarus I can buy for that?
You know what? Don’t bother. These assholes need a lesson in negotiating.
As the newest columnist for Bad Cars Monthly, I knew I would have to do more, push harder, and reach higher heights than the staff already on the masthead. On my way home from work, I discovered the subject of such a story. Witness Joe Pierino, the only known owner of a Suzuki Kizashi.
Tell me about yourself.
Uh, I’m Joe Pierino, and I’m the guy who has lived across the street from you for seven years now.
How do you get parts for it?
My car? I take it to my mechanic, and he fixes it and gives me a bill. It’s been pretty good so far.
Why buy such a weird car, Joe?
I’m not sure why you’re asking me so many questions. Me and my family are just out here on the patio trying to have an enjoyable barbeque. There’s nothing weird about my car compared to that, what is that thing you rolled up in?
A 1977 Plymouth Sapporo with a twincharged 440 and fender mirrors from a JDM Galant Lambda 2600?
Yeah, that. Look, I wanted a car, I want to the car dealership, I bought a car. End of story.
Joe, I don’t think you’re telling me the whole story. Why is your cellar door chained and padlocked shut?
Whoa hey, is that a battery-powered angle grinder? Is that the thing you run in your garage all night? I got two newborns, buddy. My wife hasn’t slept in months.
Hey, what the fuck is this? Are these Suzuki Swifts?
I’m afraid I can’t let you leave.
Holy shit, some of these are Altos!
You’ve seen way too much. Just hold still and your suffering will be over. At long, long last I’ll have my hands on that primo JDM Esteem wagon that comes by once in awhile.
Are those even your real kids and family, Joe?
Actors. All actors! Wait, hey, put that down. That’s a rare rear door for a 4-door Sidekick!
You want a dead brand so much, Joe? Well, look at this picture I took at the junkyard just this morning!
This - this is a Saab! Why would they do such a thing? [sobbing]
As you can see, my brief time with Joe Pierino was very educational. I got a taste of what ownership of a rare economy car was like, and even learned a few valuable techniques for storing parts cars.
i went to tokyo to find out, and fell into a web of vapourwave intrigue so deep that even a team of the finest nipponese prostitutes couldn’t drag me out of my bubble era bath
before long, i was accosted by an oddly sexualized artificial intelligence, who screamed at me in educated japanese before retooling, in nanoseconds, to pidgin english as befit better the limited capacity for comprehension i had in my current chemically-altered state
officially, and to the japanese authorities, i was here on business. i had graduated magna cum laude in computer science from a university you hadn’t heard of and wouldn’t remember even if i told you. but after one ill-fated student exchange trip to japan, everything changed for me. i began to obsess over the neon skyscape and the jangling pachinko parlours. but there was a smaller, more tactile part of japan that pulled me closer. it was the moment in small stores where you would be verbally assaulted by a storekeeper, screaming at the top of his lungs, demanding that you feel welcome in his store. i was feeling something like that now as a sentient, rights-holding being made entirely of millions of lines of software and microcode alike bellowed its (her?) inquiries as to my purpose of visiting this particular part of kyoto this late at night.
My fellow car show denizen points, slack-jawed, at the sticker on the back of my car. He seems curious about what “BUMPSTOP AWARENESS” is all about. I smile, and shove my professorial glasses up the bridge of my nose while extracting a portable whiteboard from the trunk. Barely before I can finish the discussion of the basics of shock travel vs. wheel rate, his soul leaves his body with a sharp fluttering noise and he collapses to the ground, lifeless.
A crowd surrounds us, staring at the man who would rather leave this world than listen to me talk about suspension setup. An angry mob breaks free of the crowd, starts to accuse me of being a witch. I ask them if they’ve ever heard of camber gain before, and begin drawing a crude McPherson strut suspension on the whiteboard, switching dry-erase markers to illustrate the instant centre and the arc of the lower control arm as the suspension compresses. My efforts are rewarded with a bellowing shriek as the angry mob’s bodies collapse into a pile, their lives snuffed out by a desire to remain unaware of the true nature of camber.
By now, the surviving members of the crowd have identified that I am the most boring man in the world, and begin to back away, out of explanatory range. With every tentative step I make, I can see frosted-tip vape clouds scrambling to preserve their ignorance, to remain alive in the face of my otherworldly knowledge of basic suspension setup.
I figure now is the time to make good my escape. Reaching into the open window of my carbon-fibre ‘65 Imperial Crown, I grasp the PA system microphone as I key on the ignition with my other hand.
“Who wants to learn about tire deformation?” booms the loudspeaker, and the crowd scatters wide enough for even the big-body Chrysler luxobarge to fit.
#
tags: suspension setup, pacejka, chrysler imperial crown, bumpstop awareness
They called it the Witchgrinder. It made horsepower the same way that throwing a running circular saw with the trigger ziptied down into a child’s pizza party made fun for the whole family. I knew I was onto something special when the President Himself called me halfway through wiring up the Megasquirt harness and offered me a brand new Lincoln Continental if I’d stop.
Well, the Lincoln Continental is FWD now, isn’t it, Mr. President?
I could hear the gasps and the panic-attack hyperventilation of the other car-show competitors when the massive mill swiftly hurled inch-thick columns of flame out of the car’s side exit exhaust every time the ITBs slammed shut on throttle lift. Richer than me, I liked to tell my friends. But nobody would truly understand the Witchgrinder like the many civilians who interrogated me at gas stations, trying to slot it into their internal mental model of what cars were.
One man - and I remain forever envious of him for weathering the transition so well - asked me if it was some kind of new Mustang from Japan. I looked at him from above my mirrorshades, set the lock on the high-pressure E85 pump nozzle, and wordlessly flipped open the front-hinged hood. He gazed deep into the heart of the monster, and I could see his pupils dilate in a textbook fear response. His sacrifice won’t be forgotten: I last saw him sitting against the pump in a puddle of his own urine, repeating the words “who is Datsun?” to an uncaring sky.
Smeared in neon as it idled through downtown, the Witchgrinder looked for all the world like a Jaguar E-Type on fire. Sometimes I would wonder why the gas station people never wanted to know about me. Maybe they didn’t want to entertain the possibility that I was a closer relative to them than the carbon-fibre-and-knives Z was to their Camry.
#
tags: who is datsun, witchgrinder, datsun, datsun 240z, 240z, lincoln continental, lincoln
My phone rang, its custom ringtone of authentic Weiand 6-71 blower whine filling the small waiting room. I put it on mute, not wanting to seem impolite, and returned my hands to my lap in an obsequious gesture of fealty to my betters occupying the Department of Motor Vehicles. Later, I would return to my voicemail and fall into a pit of despair.
A shadowy organization was inviting me to join their ranks. Perhaps they had heard the nitromethane cackle as my hoopty ratcheted up the block. Maybe they saw my posts swearing about junk CVTs and dicky oil pump bearings. One of their spies could have seen me at any moment, tracked me down, figured out who I really was. But I wasn’t much of a joiner. I was ready to push 7 to delete the message when the voice said that there might be some rare parts in it for me.
Well then.
The meeting place was a derelict warehouse on the bad side of the bad side of town. Usually I only went down here for good deals on coilovers and slightly stolen wheels, but today was a first. On the way there, I dodged potholes and looked beyond those potholes into the community. Modest cookie-cutter homes teemed with life, with family, with spirit. In their driveways, 80s and 90s domestic beaters, kept in workable shape even as those of a higher social class rejected them. I felt a protective urge in my chest.
Pulling into the warehouse I saw so many others like me. Beaten quarter panels, moaning timing covers, spartan-yet-durable interiors. Some were turbocharged, I could tell, with crude holes cut in their hood for clearance and in-cabin intakes to simplify the MAP sensor placement. For the first time in a long time, I had felt like I was at home.
I had joined the Justyce League, a club dedicated to saving and protecting the once-common Subaru Justy as it slipped into obscurity from worn engines and the motherland’s abandonment of anything resembling NOS parts support. With my squad of fellow heroes, we would raid car shows, embarrass executives, and make good our escape, the overrich exhaust note of our small-displacement motors carrying for miles on the crisp night air.
#
tags: subaru justy, nitromethane justy, justyce league, just subaru things
I was an ordinary person once before, I yelled through the woven-Kevlar window net at the wide-eyed librarian. Some sound tried to escape her mouth, but it was muted into nothingness by the pounding exhaust note of the zoomies. Explaining myself was pointless but I had to keep trying, I told myself as I slotted easily through the remaining close-ratio gears and had already reached my peak speed halfway through the men’s room. It’s not my fault, I said to the windshield: traffic made me this way.
A long time ago, in another life perhaps, I was an urban engineer. My career had started innocently enough: my father, a huge influence on my life, swore repeatedly at inefficient traffic light timings. He would curse out the shockwaves rippling through stop-and-go traffic as millisecond gaps in reaction times turned into fifteen minutes late to visit Grandma’s house. One day, the whole world would be consumed by one unbroken gridlock, and people would die, he believed. Someone should do something, he said to me once. I did something, Dad.
When you talk to a normal person, it’s shocking just how little they know about the place they live. Every major city has miles of underground networks: conduits for cable and plumbing, long-abandoned subway tunnels, a sewer system. Usually the only time you find out about them is when a sinkhole erupts on the interstate and sends a single mom of two to the bowels of Hell in her Micra. Early on in my career, an urban planning mentor of mine, the great Jonathan Brookings, he of the Brookings Method, would raise my awareness of this subterranean city and its potential.
Naturally, I became obsessed, poring over every piece of written and photographic documentation I could find. I became the city’s foremost expert on its hidden tunnels. A lot of people would be satisfied with one obsession. But I had two.
The day had started like any other. I was late for an early morning meeting and ran out into my neo-bucolic suburban driveway, carrying a bagel in my mouth. I clambered over the welded-shut door of my Century Gran Sport and fastened the camlock of the six-point restraints. There was something about the diamond-pleated leather covering the Recaro carbon-fiber race seat that always relaxed my spine, but I was coming to think it might have been nerve damage from the tooth-loosening second- and third-order vibrations transmitted via the Buick’s solid motor mounts.
I had barely had a chance to heat up the thick Mickeys out back when I came across a traffic jam so obscene it offended every sensibility I had. There was only one thing to do. Between the race buckets laid a red button the size of a cheese danish, and I mashed it with my fist so hard the knuckles whitened.
“PULL TO THE SIDE OF THE ROAD IMMEDIATELY. URBAN ENGINEER COMING THROUGH. YOU HAVE TEN SECONDS TO COMPLY,” a robotic voice screeched. I punched it down a gear for emphasis, the high RPM bellow of my exhaust adding a sense of tangibility to my rush.
But nothing happened. Traffic simply refused to move for me. Where could they go? My predecessors had devised narrow hard shoulders with kinetic restraints to reduce the threat of wrong-way collisions. The vintage lanes were simply too narrow for the school-bus-sized sports utility vehicles in vogue in my era. Even the bicyclists were stuck, their bike lanes jammed solid with overstrained spandex and carbon fiber waiting in line for Starbucks. It was the dark nightmare that had been foretold by my father.
Maybe there were two things to do, I thought as the Gran Sport’s nose whipped sideways into a nearby field and barged into the concrete pipe entrance of a storm sewer. I would make my way to work through the subways, sewers and conduits of my mentor - the hidden city of dual wall corrugated HDPE drainage pipes and kilometer upon kilometer of once-secret access hallways.
When I hit the city library, I knew that I was close - wasn’t city hall just next door? My spatial memory paid off yet again - I let the big Buick’s big block eat, smashing through a lowest-bidder antiterrorism gate to enter a long-abandoned subway terminal beneath the city hall.
I strode into the meeting, my Nomex sport jacket flapping behind me. The Mayor was there, and he was impressed.
“Traffic is a zoo today. How did you get here so fast?” he asked, gobsmacked.
What else could I tell him? He only hired the best.
#
tags: traffic engineer, buick century, century gran sport, buick
ELON MUSK HAS ENDED THE CONFERENCE CALL EARLY, I SENSE, AS THE LINE GOES DEAD AND I HEAR THE NEAR-SILENT THWUP-THWUP-THWUP OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER’S BLACK HELICOPTERS LANDING ON MY ROOF
I HAVE ONLY ONE CHANCE FOR MY SURVIVAL - AN INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINE SO POORLY DESIGNED IT DEFIES BELIEF. A LOT OF PEOPLE ASKED ME: WHY DID YOU SWAP A RADIAL ENGINE INTO AN RX-7?
IF ONLY THEY COULD SEE ME NOW, I THINK AS THE ODD-CYLINDERED WITCH MILL’S STARTER HALF-CARESSES, HALF-SHAKES THE POWERPLANT TO LIFE. I FEEL A PALPABLE SENSE OF RELIEF AS I SLOT THE SMALL MAZDA INTO REVERSE: THE REAR WINDOW OFFERS SUPERIOR VISIBILITY AS IT IS NOT ENTIRELY BLOCKED BY THE PHYSICAL MANIFESTATION OF IMPENDING SCREAMING DEATH.
WITH DEFT HANDS, I ESCAPE THE NEIGHBORHOOD, DODGING A SPEW OF HELLFIRE MISSILES FROM MUSK’S HELICOPTERS. MY ONLY REGRET AS MY GARAGE COMPOUND EXPLODES BEHIND ME IS THAT I DIDN’T BRING MY STREAMLIGHT WITH ME.
Come to Don Docksteader Volvo Subaru Bricklin, home of your weird fuckin’ cars.
Just got tenure? We’ll give you $1000 off!
Got an old car that’s too stylish? Trade it the fuck in and get something with plastic cladding!
This week only we’ve got an ALL-FLANNEL WEEKEND at Don Docksteader Volvo Subaru Isuzu Yugo Bricklin! Come in with flannel for a free kombucha from our in-store microbrewery!
That’s Don Docksteader Volvo Subaru Isuzu Suzuki Yugo Bricklin, next to the Lush sales shack at the corner of Hot Yoga Blvd and Gratuitous Hairshirt Avenue, where shoes aren’t mandatory!
Grocery shopping was hard for me at the best of times. I missed the thrumming engine, the feeling of responsiveness, the requirement to use my legs for actual motive effort instead of tapping pedals and bracing against intense G-forces. Sure, there were carts, but I knew that each of them had been driven over in the parking lot by an SUV, their welds broken, their wheel bearings just a little dicky. What we needed was a grocery store for the autocrossing gentleman.
At the grand opening I saw that a series of middle-aged men who had arrived in convertibles were already screaming at one another over the specific classification of zucchini vs. cucumber as it pertained to the legislated minimum grocery purchase for Open Cart class. Their tunnel vision tracked my hand as it directed the carbon-fiber safety scissors to cut the ribbon in twain, and then burst past me to begin their dark work of course walks.
Beaming, I stood in silent appreciation of the great work, my half-smile only growing deeper as I was brushed past by a loosely assembled group of lanky newbies, already be-helmeted and shaking with fear, being led by a particularly kind RX7 owner as he pointed out the bump strips and how to maximize corner entry for the Chicago boxed deli counter. Within a few minutes, an airhorn went off, piercing the sunny suburbanite morning.
The grognards hesitantly finished measuring my floor with protractors and plumb bobs in order to determine the maximum camber. What else could it be but that the shoppers’ meeting was underway in the storm shelter, and one of my most trusted lieutenants, Cone Hit Steve, was holding court.
The rules were simple, he explained. Six runs today, get as many groceries as you can. Fastest trip with the most groceries won. Loop it, two feet in, go directly to the exit, no groceries for you on that run. Don’t do drugs, he said to them, and then fixed me with a stare from across the parking lot. A timing van pulled up to the entrance doors, its shaky idle echoing inside the produce section.
Years later, when they asked me just how it was possible that I could go bankrupt with such a dynamite plan, I would gently ask them if they knew how much it cost to clean shopping-cart-wheel marks off of laminate tile.
#
tags: grocery store autocross, autocross, just autocross things
I can still remember the relieved look on the museum curator’s face as he outstretched one gaunt Teutonic hand to grasp mine. You got the job, he said in densely intoned Power Business German (+2 to ogres, -1 to electrical repair). When the sun rose tomorrow it would greet me, standing in the lobby of BMW’s proudest museum, its hallowed halls of mechanical engineering achievement.
But there was something wrong with always looking at the past, I told the magazine reporter who came to visit me later. To think that there was this arc of history and it had just stopped in the modern era and never got better, to believe in your heart that there was a high water mark that had passed decades ago as the tide began to roll back out to the ocean, was folly of the highest order. Germans, I knew, did not believe in such trivial follies, and with that dedication in my heart the work began.
Visitors to the museum who came by during the construction of my great opus would see friendly signs indicating wet floors, impending construction, an entire wing of the museum closed off for repairs to serve the customer better. I knew they were disappointed, but a quick skimming of the comment card box would sweep those complaints into the recycle bin before it could reach the watchful eye of the curator and his betters.
The final weld was complete, and I stepped back to admire it. Mating a BMW Isetta with a Legends car seemed like a small task, but it was always the most delicate work that took the longest. I viewed myself as a kind of Swiss watchmaker, really, as I hit the compressed-air shifter into first gear with my left hand while keying up the launch controller with a practiced gesture on my right. At last I closed the front door, sealing myself inside the Isetta as the straight-cut gear whine grew impossible to ignore.
When I finally let loose, the miniature knobby ATV tires of the now-legendary Isetta scrabbled across the polished marble tile of the museum display, spitting marbles and foggy clouds of rich-smelling rubber into the air. Together we shot into the hallway, fitting through narrow people doors without a second thought as to the integrity of the BMW’s extremely-original wing mirrors. A little dab of deft left-foot brake work was needed to keep the nose tucked in as lurid tugs of the hydraulic handbrake allowed the rear to clear the cramped constraints of the many spiralling wheelchair ramps. Gear after gear clicked as the Hayabusa engine jammed deep somewhere up the Isetta’s asshole was cyclically brought to its redline in ebbing and breaking waves of near-torque.
The curator was there, of course, giving an interview to the local news. It seemed it was some kind of anniversary, which is probably what all the notes tacked to the break room bulletin board should have clued me into. I’m told the footage is tremendous. Imagine it now if you will: his shocked face rotating slowly into the background to watch me Dukes Of Hazzard the Isetta, erupting columns of unburnt fuel as the ignition cut clicks off and back on thousands of times per second, in a graceful and achingly beautiful parabolic arc over the forecourt fountain and into the parking lot where I made good my escape.
#
tags: power business german, suzuki, hayabusa, bmw, isetta, bmw isetta, legends car
For centuries, they spoke in whispers of a man who achieved the perfect launch. His clutch timing was impeccable, the revs perfectly matched for the tire grip, temperature, and surface conditions. That man was me.
Let me set the stage for you. The car could be nothing other than a 1993 Protege sedan with a worn out front motor mount (is there any other kind?). The tires are fat-ass Mickeys, scalded to a crisp from a season worth of unforgiving heat cycles. The surface is a Burger King drive-through, the cracked pavement heaving into chops of bad camber from years of standing water.
If I had known destiny awaited at the end of the second window, I would have said something cooler than “thanks for chicken fries” to the clerk. As it was, all she heard of me as I accidentally stepped off the clutch while it was in gear was a sharp yelp and then the deep metallic scraping of my big brake kit mashing off-temperature XP8s into room-temperature rotors.
Once I recovered my pride and picked up the chicken fries from the centre console and passenger floorboard, I looked up to see the shade of Wally Parks, alive and well, clutching a spectral trophy. On it was my name, I realized with a cold start, and beneath it said “BEST LAUNCH BY THE LIVING.”
Somehow my inadvertent clutch sidestep had led to the theoretically most perfect sixty-foot time in human history, I was told. With a finality I would slowly come to expect from Wally Parks over the course of his future hauntings, he said it was the best sixty-foot that would ever be. I gratefully accepted the trophy, but it turned to naught but ethereal vapour in my grasp.
In the rear view mirror, a BMW X6M’s grille honked at me. You just can’t leave fast enough for some people.
When I was a child, I thought I knew what truth was. It laid in science textbooks, it laid in order, it was embedded in a glorious structure that one day man would know whole, forwards to backwards. Then I fell in with the snake handlers.
I won’t go into details about how it happened, but let’s just say I made some incredibly poor decisions in high school about my friends. And motorized transportation. And Hefty bags full of gaseous simple compounds.
Their preacher, “Mad” Gary Indiana, constantly impressed upon us that physical and mental pain were the only two valid routes to salvation in Christ’s eyes. In fact, the more miserable all existence was, the better off you would be in the next life. I thought that was the craziest shit I had ever heard. But then he brought out the snakes.
Each and every Mustang Cobra he presented to the flock was studded with massive horsepower, enormous slicks out back, and looks that would thrill exactly the wrong kind of women. I was confused. Surely this is not misery - it must be temptation. He was testing me.
“Get in,” he said, with stern eyes. I obeyed, feeling some strange external pressure to avoid making a spectacle of myself. It was then that I discovered an unyielding horror that took root in my soul and will never leave.
Within the Mustang was a 1990s Ford Interior. I became quickly overwhelmed, and swam with panic in an ocean of conflicting grey hard-plastic ovals. I looked into the preacher’s eyes in terror, and saw only the burning righteousness of pure hate as he slammed the door. I was trapped. Trapped in a 1990s Cobra. There was no worse fate.
Controlling my breath, I felt the panic sink in my throat, and started to take stock of my situation. It wasn’t easy, but I managed to locate the confusingly-oversized ignition key and turn it. A Ford power steering pump leapt to life, its agonizing scream untraceable to either belt or pump, and the preacher began bleeding from his eyes and ears, but with a strange smile. My luck continued as I found the door release, swinging the massive iron coupe doors into the holy man’s legs.
The abruptness of the Ford’s huge doors slamming into his legs shocked Gary Indiana. It was then that the preacher turned to me, his muscles already tensing with the sheer effort it took to stay alive within the whirling sea of patented Ford noise, and he thanked me for showing him what suffering truly was.
“Perhaps in Heaven,” he croaked as his eyes rolled back in his head, “it will all be strongarm steering.”
#
tags: ford, mustang, ford mustang, snake handlers
When the Fitbit company approached me, at first I was hesitant to sign on. I had been too deep into electronics companies before, touched their marbled texture, tasted the bitter ash of their incompetence. They never wanted to go far enough. But these guys were different, I slowly came to realize.
A few months after our meetings began, they presented me with a prototype, ready for action. They set up a one-way-mirror in a realistic test environment. For weeks the team would watch me go through my exercises and discover just how suitable their magical wearable was for my alternative lifestyle.
Really, the most surprising thing is how long it took them to come up with the idea of a Fitbit for wrenching. No longer would wrenches be thrown in vain. Now your watch could identify the specific tool you threw with ultrasonic sensors and count each unique instance under a separate category before the object of your ire could complete its flight to the garage door.
It would give you a star at the end of the day if you actually managed to change the oil filter on an FWD SR20DE without dislocating your shoulder.
Every ratchet click, every socket swap, every minute spent mule kicking a rusted-on mag wheel loose from an ancient hub would at last count as the grueling physical contest it was. Suck it, bicyclists, I thought as the Fitbit bleeped, offering me a virtual sugar cube for the hundredth correct use of a torque wrench today.
When the test campaign had ended, the team surrounded me with champagne, took selfies with my grease-stained face. They ran past me into the garage, and looked at the horrible abominations that I had constructed with their money. A dimpled woodgas Volvo Sugga stared back at them, its flared-pig-nostrils grille studded with gleaming EWG dump pipes for tusks.
The project manager asked me, after so much time with the product, is there any feature you would want? I didn’t have to think long.
With tears in my eyes, I realized I could finally ask for the one true dream of all mechanics and wrench-botherers throughout history. How about if it could find the tool I just had in my hand a minute ago?
They laughed. Oh, how they laughed. They laughed even as the Sugga’s side-mounted exhausts shot white-hot fireballs of floating-point-overflow EGTs into the drywall test garage at my command.
As the fires lapped at my heels, I looked down at the prototype one last time. Congratulations, it said, on a field of twinkling 8-bit stars, and entered the last fifteen minutes of my day as “Arson.”
They say it rains here in the Emerald City. That there’s hardly any sun. That ain’t exactly right. Rain, well, that would require effort. Some force behind it. The sky making its displeasure known. Nah, Seattle doesn’t get rain. What they get is a tall hot steaming cup of endless grey, of creeping mold, the long cold nights with far too few rays of hope and sunshine to remind yourself what it was all about. This was one of those rays. Your eyes perk up as she walks through the door, suddenly intimately aware of the 5 o'clock smear of salt and pepper stubble across your sunken, jaundiced cheeks. This city does that to ya, you know. Whole god damned place is just one big bottle if you look hard enough. As she walks across an office so filled with junk mail and porno rags it could be the hidden spank bank of the postmaster general, you run through the checklist in your head. Blonde, looks like from the bottle like it always is. Eyes glittering with sadness and loss, lips plump and crimson, begging for the caress of another. That daringly cut dress plunging ever downward, it’s fitment betraying the outline of a Saturday night special tucked away in a discrete holster. Yep, you were in uniform. As good as its gonna get tonight, anyways.
“I spoke with you on the phone earlier,” she practically whispers in a voice dripping with smoke and sin. You couldn’t help but notice the hypnotic way her prominent Adams apple bobbed with each husky word. “I’ve done my research, everyone says you’re the only one mad enough to take this job.” She leans forward placing her palms against the desk, heavily calloused hands hinting at the amount of times this dainty little broad must have had to use them in order to explain those massive pecs and bulging arms carved out of organic steel. Eyes hewn from blades of flint and death bore directly into mine. There’s a chance I wet myself, but whether it be from whiskey or fear no man could say for sure.
When you love your work, you never work a day in your life. I definitely loved my work: I felt a pull toward it. Helping people had always been my jam, and I guess this fell out as a natural consequence of that. Today, the phone bank was busy, and the call centre could not keep up with it. I had to step in and handle a few incomings, help out a few lives in crisis.
Undoing my rod-bearing-shaped cufflink, I rolled up the sleeves on my flannel shirt and grabbed the handset. On the other side of the line, a shrieking voice rang out: “I THINK MY HEAD GASKETS ARE BLOWN.”
Welcome to just another day at the Seat Safety Switch Subaru Crisis Centre, or 4S2C as we like to call it around here. Every day, Subaru owners from across the world call us in either imagined or real panics about the imminent explosion of their cars’ powertrains. Whether it’s your run-of-the-mill Patagonia customer complaining about the nuked head gaskets on their EJ25D Outback, or a sideways-hat NASIOC poster mistaking their vape cloud for a dicky turbo seal, we can help you.
It all started so many years ago, when I would visit the junkyard and harvest the guts of many fine Subarus to keep my harem of hoopties on the road. On the way out of the yard on one particularly warm spring morning, I saw a depressed couple waiting in line at the pawn counter, clutching hands in their Eddie Bauer performance fleece. Their beloved Forester, Prince Charles, had died that very morning from a common transmission ailment and they had come here to put it down humanely.
I helped those people, placing my grease-stained hand gently on their collective shoulder and leading them to diagnose and repair their own Subaru. With tears in their eyes, they promised that they would send their friends to me for advice on how to fix their rolling garbage barges. Of course, I agreed, out of a naive belief that perhaps I could end up with a cheap shell or two from a single mom in over her head and at a substantial integer multiple of the timing belt replacement interval.
It didn’t quite work out that way in the end, but when humanitarian awards agencies would give me plaques and oversized novelty cheques for my hard work in helping the disadvantaged Subaru community, I grudgingly came to feel that the cars themselves weren’t as important as the people.
But I’d still like to get a mint Legacy SS off of someone who doesn’t want to fix the brakes. Send them my way, ok?
My assistant stormed into the room, holding a rhinestone-encrusted Caterpillar-brand industrial-strength smartphone. She thrust it into my palm, and the voice on the other end was unmistakable.
“Mr. Switch,” the accent said, “we here at Roundel magazine would like to let you know that we have declared fatwa upon you for your crimes against tasteful interiors. Peace be upon the Hofmeister Kink.”
I handed the phone back to my assistant, leaned back in my overstuffed desk chair, and rubbed my eyes. What kind of country did we live in where the editor in chief of a BMW magazine could threaten the life of an ordinary motoring journalist? My assistant had a suggestion, of course: an olive branch to the BMW-American community, some kind of admission of shared values, a mea culpa. Her recommendation was met with a half-hearted shrug, and I continued with my daily life. I didn’t realize then that things were going to change.
A few weeks later, I was eating in a roadside cafe, enjoying a long sordid glance over the angular flanks of my prized AMC Eagle Kammback. It was a little hard to finish my eighth espresso after a base-model Bronzeit Beige E30 crashed into the parked Kammback and exploded. As the other denizens of the cafe scattered in fear, I strode out into the burning parking lot to address the remaining wannabe martyrs. After a few deft kung-fu moves with the assistance of my concealed tire iron and wrench combo, my surviving opponents fled. I could hear the timing chain rattle as they receded into the horizon, cursing in German the entire way, until the smell of burning coolant could no longer be detected.
My assistant was right, I realized. I could defuse this situation and still come out looking like a genius. Selling a house in order to cover the down payment on a thirty-year-old economy car, I at last had a gently-crashed E30 on which to work my magic. The tiny BMW’s debut at SEMA would come months later, where I would meet with the leadership of Roundel and negotiate an end to their holiest of holy wars.
“It is very nice car,” they said, approvingly. It rode like garbage on thirty dollar coilovers, featured 20 inch wheels, and even preserved the previous owner’s e-cigarette, flat brimmed hat, stack of Black Ice air fresheners and, the piece de resistance, a colour-matched Reichsadler club sticker covering the rear window. As far as they were concerned, this was the very height of tuning style, and they gave me an award.
At the ceremony, the editor whispered into my ear. “The fatwa is lifted,” he said, “but first you must tell me how you kept the headliner from falling down.”
Telling him it was wood screws would only have angered him further, I imagined. “Superior German adhesives,” is all I said, with a wink.
In retrospect, it was so obvious, I told my assembled band of freaks, liberal-art students and greasy-fingered flat-rate burnouts. If you wanted respect, if you craved power, you had to organize.
When I first arrived at this condo building, I noticed a tension that I had never before experienced. Neighbors would eye me suspiciously as I refilled the washer fluid on my daily driver, take curious note when I would carry my junkyard toolbag, put passive-aggressive notes on my Hornet’s windshield about how working on cars in the spacious and well-lit underground parkade was verboten. We must secure the cleanliness of our building and a future for property values, they told me, while issuing fines.
I embarked upon a quest to get to the centre of what abomination could assess such rules against a man’s personal freedom. Before long, I could lay eyes upon it: the condo board. Staffed entirely by retirement-age busybodies, it met during the weekday, when normal adults and myself were at their day jobs, and passed new laws by fiat. But like any other machine, it could be taken apart and changed into a form that would terrify high society. I just had to find the right wrench.
Leafing through my rolodex, I began to recruit new neighbors, seemingly ordinary smiling-faced adults who were very concerned about separating recycling into the proper bins, inspecting the quality of the lawn sprinkler arrangement, and always worried about property value. Once they had been accepted by the community, they slipped unchallenged into the condo board, taking up positions nobody else wanted. At first, they were harmless jobs - treasurer, stenographer, accountant. People who were committed to civic-mindedness and would keep a dumpster fire like myself away from the big red button.
Then came the election. My crew swept me into office and the old order out in one swift movement propelled by a mixture of tenant apathy and populist rage. In my victory speech, I enacted the first of many reforms: parking lot engine swaps were now mandatory and the completion of such would be verified every month. The condo board’s assets swelled as we took advantage of long-dormant municipal code to seize the homes of those who opposed this new law. I will always treasure the angry looks that the former condo board shot me on eviction days.
It only took a few weeks for the word to get out. What used to be rows of overstuffed compact-car spots prolapsing with luxury crossovers slowly altered into a more pleasing form before my eye. The tarmac of the parkade dimpled with the force of brakestand torque, scarred with burned rubber, oil stains and rust flakes everywhere the eye could see. It was beautiful.
But there was still more to be done, I told my charges, and the next slide displayed the current city council makeup. It seemed our councillor was hard-up for re-election funds and had never faced a real opponent before. I didn’t particularly enjoy his zealousness for street parking enforcement, either.
I was firmly in the grip of Cressida Madness. Reaching from deep within the bowels of Toyota City, their rangy fingers latched onto my hesitant heart with a combination of aspirational luxury and the common-man’s oh-so-desirable reliability.
Before me, the crowded exit gangway of the 737 was blocked by a stewardess, who reminded me in the sternest possible tone that while she enjoyed my patronage of the plane, I should refrain in the future from seizing the PA microphone from her during the safety briefing and loudly telling everyone onboard about how a manual transmission swap isn’t that hard. With that last point, she pointed to the Code of Conduct poster behind her, telling passengers to respect the disabled regardless of their transmission choice. I shrugged sheepishly and muttered something about the passion of the moment.
Stepping off the plane, I could sense it. This was a land that did not know road salt. Before me, there would be an untold bounty of mint quarter panels, untouched rockers, maybe - and just thinking of it made my heart race - fasteners that could be removed without a torch. I fought down the urge to hyperventilate, preventing the stars in my eyes from forming a constellation in the shape of the MX73.
On the cab ride over, I compared the Prius to my fantasy image of the Cressida. My cabbie’s big-body-roll, battery-stuffed demi-minivan was slow, sure, but it was also unhurried - a principled departure from today’s rush-rush demanding of sports luxury. I imagined that the Cressida would be no different, although significantly less austere. At last, we arrived at the seller’s home.
He had sold it already. Of course he had.
I could see the fear in his eyes as I poured the last of the gasoline onto him. The reek of ethanol contamination soaked into the floral wallpaper of the home. As I worked, I could just dimly hear his muffled screaming through the gag. It was just as well that he had gotten rid of it, I thought. He was undeserving. Probably put twenty-two-inch wheels on it. Maybe even Lexanis. The thought made my hands tremble as I drew the match across the door frame with a jagged scar of flint.
They told me when I put down the rubles for a gently used Oscar-II class nuclear-powered cruise-missile submarine I couldn’t make any money off of my investment. But they were still stuck in the old economy, before the advent of our Holy Mother Airbnb.
Now, before you assume that a used submarine must have something wrong with it, I have to stop you right there. Besides a few dents from the occasional naval trainee learning to parallel park, it really was in excellent shape. Even the mechanic who inspected it seemed fairly impressed after reluctantly putting down his Geiger - he took a whole bunch of pictures of every nook and cranny to “share with his buddies.” Whatever, dude.
A few trips to Home Depot later, and I had what I figured was a pretty rockin’ hipster hotel, if I do say so myself. Every room dripped (literally, the humidity in this thing is incredible) with a rich tapestry of pastel colours. Hand-lettered greasepaint inspirational sayings dot the walls of the tenant rooms. I even topped it off by welding a bike rack into the conning tower.
My first few tenants were excellent. They left great reviews, focusing on my attention to customer service. Some of them took great pains to mention how invigorating commuting to work by way of the torpedo tubes could be. Sure, there was the occasional crufty bicycle mechanic that wanted to tinker with the reactors, but buying a better combination lock eventually put an end to that.
I was on top of the world, so flush with cash that paying off the Kursk condo would be faster than I had ever imagined.
Imagine my surprise when those meddlers at NATO came around. Not even leaving a chocolate mint on the pillow could improve my reviews with those guys. Have you ever seen the tow and impound bill for a five-hundred-foot-long attack submarine before?
The psychiatrist was nice enough, sure, but after the sixth or seventh hour of me free-associating every concept in the world with big-body tan-coloured domestic station wagons bolstered by immense turbochargers, they had to remand me back to the custody of my court-appointed guardians. Those guardians put my unique talents to work solving crimes.
In the big-body tan-coloured domestic station wagon bolstered by immense turbochargers system, the people are represented by two separate, yet equally important groups. Torque which represents twisting force and horsepower who represents the rate at which work is done. These are their stories.
It was a cold March morning, just the kind of weather my partner Garrett liked. Last night at the precinct, one of our confidential informants came in telling us that a sweet mint Fairmont wagon was spotted. She was paid a stipend for her valuable information, with more if it lead to a successful purchase.
Ever since I was a little kid, defrosting windshields has been my bane. For months of the year I would take a scraper to glass, trying carefully not to nick the precious butyl seals and trim surrounding the soon-to-be-cracked-anyways sight glass. But there had to be a better solution, I thought, even as luxobarge manufacturers messed with various computer-controlled settings that just could not deliver the immediate fix that I so craved in my bones.
All at once, it seemed, the universe gave me a shot at it. A favourite uncle died and left me his collection of abandoned parking lots, a strange fixation that he claimed would one day turn into money as the industrial yards they backed onto would spring back into life. Manufacturing would return to us, he screamed even as the doctors administered the final LD50 of morphine.
But what do you do with a collection of abandoned parking lots in Canada? The answer, like so many other things, laid in drifting. The kids called it drift racing, but Canadians called it October through April. Flush with cash from visiting Americans experiencing the vicarious thrill of sliding a cheap Japanese car on ice, I returned to my childhood task with the necessary funding.
I can see it in my mind’s eye, even now: a base model Kia Rio, its hood crudely chopped to allow for a three inch exhaust pipe, the flapper going nuts as blue exhaust flames defrost my windshield. Sure, it wasn’t easy or cheap to build a windshield that could survive turbocharger EGTs, but it was all worth it never to have to scrape again.
Climbing into the frosty Rio, I kicked my boots together. The added moisture of the snow dropping into the footwell immediately fogged up the inside of the windshield, and I cursed my existence.
WHAT IS THE QUINTESSENTIAL CANADIAN MOTORING EXPERIENCE, I ASKED, MY VOICE MUFFLED BY THE TIM HORTONS DRIVE THROUGH LOUDSPEAKER
THE FILIPINO MOTHER OF THREE RESPONDED, SHE HAD HER ANSWER DOWN PAT AS IF PRACTICED FROM A CORPORATE TRAINING BINDER: “YOU ARE DRUGS?”
I NOTICED THE NOTE OF CONCERN FOR DEPORTATION IN HER VOICE AND PULLED UP TO THE NEXT WINDOW. INSIDE MY BELOVED ICED CAPPUCCINO MUST BE HELD. IN THE BACKGROUND, A BEAVER HOWLS.
THE DRIVE-THRU WINDOW IS TOO HIGH FOR MY CRAZED AND DENTED BRICKLIN. FAR ABOVE MY HAIL-RAVAGED ROOF A CONFUSED TEENAGER WAVES A CHILLED DRINK INTO EMPTY SPACE.
When they told me that I could have a little rewards card at Canadian Tire, maybe get some of that sweet corporate fiat currency in exchange for handing over my purchasing habits, I jumped at the chance. Why wouldn’t I let you guys see what kind of a freak I was? The thing is, there is always a catch.
My phone buzzed, and I punched it, my knuckles presumably giving the screen enough contact to interpret it as “yes, I will take this call.” A man’s voice emerged from its tinny speaker. It seemed he worked for Canadian Tire, and he wanted to award me a little prize for being the “most unique customer.”
I drove to their offices, a nondescript complex on the outskirts of some anonymous industrial park. With some effort, I hoisted myself above the door bar of the Topaz. On warm summer days like today, I liked to catch a glimpse of it as I left the parking lot, soaking in its gold-spraypainted carbon fiber flanks and race-ready Lexan windows. One yellowed original plastic headlight featured a crudely holesawed inlet pipe leading to the furious maw of a turbocharger the size of a Molson mini-keg.
The man who called me was sat behind an enormous oak desk that seemed to dominate the room. I noted on the way in that nobody else appeared to work in the entire building, let alone this particular floor. “For Lease” signs dotted the windows. Everything reeked of your classic trap gambit, and I knew that I was a lamb being led to the slaughter.
“Ah, Mr. Switch,” said my host, pushing a cherrywood crate of imported Maximum-brand cigars to the edge of his desk and tapping the woodwork impatiently. It would be rude to refuse his offer, I thought, but I still waited until he had taken the first puff of his cigar.
“You are a very interesting man,” he intoned, and began to look out of the window behind him, facing onto the bustling 401. “When we first became.. aware.. of you, we thought it was a corporate purchasing account. No one man, we thought, could buy three hundred cans of Fluid Film per year.”
He turned now, and fixed me with his gaze. I let out an involuntary squeak.
“But we can’t allow you to keep going the way you are going. Our financial department has shown that your purchases obscenely distort our view of the world. We are losing track of Joe Timbit in a dangerous quest to pursue you.”
What he said made sense. The last time I was at Crappy Tire, I had thought the shelves were oddly well stocked with high-quality goods that were easy to find. I had even mentioned it on the back-of-the-receipt survey in the hope of getting a $50 gift card. That’s how they found me, I realized with a start. I had been so stupid.
The man behind the desk reached into his drawer. I knew it was the time to act.
“DeWalt, motherfucker!” I screamed, bolting him in the head with a concealed 3/8″ impact gun. He crumpled to the ground and grew cold, a $50 Canadian Tire gift card clutched in his lifeless fingers.
Somehow I always knew it would come to this. I reached into the wheel well of the Topaz and retrieved a new Canadian Tire loyalty card. I practiced my new identity as I sped away from the building. It was necessary to become Switch Sanchez, an Oakville auto body tech with a taste for rust removal.
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tags: canada week, canadian tire, mercury, mercury topaz, topaz
Guest Post
Hello, I’m Stewart McMike and welcome to another edition of the Nylon Tire Deli.
[a folksy musical intro plays over the tinny radio speaker]
It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon in fall. The middle Ontario boreal forest’s leaves had just begun to change colour and there was a crispness in the air, the threat of winter was upon the townsfolk, but they didn’t want to think about that just yet, because the Blue Jays had once again missed the playoffs and the Raptors, well, no one cared about the Raptors. It was as Canadian as you could get without breaking your front teeth trying to drink a frozen-solid double-double at a midget hockey game where your niece just crippled that little Pakistani girl who was such a talented skater from the next town over. Dave was outside the Deli, sweeping up the dust and rubber fragments left after today’s customers had peeled out the angled parking stalls and performed flawless J-turns back onto main street in hazes of smoke. Good old Main street, the town had changed a lot in the last few years but Main street remained lined on both sides by the charming, brick built, two story family owned stores; Dave’s Deli catering to the gearheads and gas junkie highway warriors who passed through was no exception, he and his family lived above the shop, lovingly tending it to gain a meager profit - Dave’s profits. Oh, he told Morley that he was saving up to pay for Stephanie’s education, and she was growing up so fast – too fast, soon she’d be off to college and their lives would change forever, but in Dave’s mind it was all a lie. You see, Dave may have tended to the Speed Demons traveling along the scenic highway carved out of the Great Canadian Shield that passes through town, but he could never bring himself to build his dream machine, he figured the world wouldn’t accept it, wouldn’t accept *him* if he fell prey to the fever dreams that taunted his unconsciousness during precious moments of sweat-drenched sleep. That was all before the doctor had diagnosed him with inoperable lung cancer, turns out all that the heady aroma of rubber smoke wasn’t doing him a lot of good. He hadn’t told Morley yet, or Stephanie, just his young son, Sam – he needed Sam to understand, and he needed Sam as an accomplice, a helper to build his opus.
The autumn afternoon slipped away into weeks, weeks into months, and as the snow flew, his day had finally come, and Dave closed the hatch, Sam looked on mournfully as he torqued the bolts into the nylock nuts that would seal his father inside his custom Motor Mausoleum, ready to run inside back to his cartoons and play ignorance with his mother to his role in the events that would shortly follow. Dave casually sat in the captain’s chair, and began his pre-start checklist – “only one chance to get this right” he thought. The checklist done, every box ticked, every fluid level at optimum, he pulled the master control rod out of the homebuilt nuclear reactor and was fully committed as the cascade of decay particles slammed into the fuel rods starting the controlled chain reaction. Inside of his reinforced-armor Navistar Defense MaxxPro MRAP, Dave felt at ease while the chamber behind him quickly built up heat and he could feel the beginnings of a low roar. He dropped it into gear, the auxiliary electrical hubmotors lurched the steel leviathan into motion with a whimsical musical hum from their variable frequency drives and a squeal from all six of the bulletproof swamper tires, and exploded through the loading dock wall in the back of the Deli. Free of the dock and now in open terrain, Dave could open up the nuclear powered scramjet in the back and bring the beast up to 350 kilometers per hour, his 30cm thick ballistic steel plow knocking trees and police barricades aside like they weren’t even there, for Dave was on a mission. With the snow came ice, and with ice came the salt trucks, and Dave was going hunting.
When the dust settled, Morley didn’t know what to think of it all. All she knew for certain was that her chicken dinner was ruined.
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tags: vinyl cafe, motor mausoleum, mrap, canada week
On the QR25DE: Nissan’s Greatest Mistake (Other Than The Versa)
Nissan has made many great engines over the years, and the world was watching when they introduced the B15 Sentra SE-R, which came with a fancy new engine: the 2.5L QR25DE. With its zingy redline, low internal friction, gobs of torque and general smoothness, it was the ideal powerplant to bring Nissan into a brave new world.
Too bad they fucked it up.
The pre-cat on the headers likes to fail and then suck cat substrate back into the engine, causing damage
Throttle body screws like to back out and get sucked into the engine, causing damage
Poorly supported open-deck cylinder sleeves distort easily in race environments, making the bores out of round and causing head gasket bypasses as well as eventual mechanical failure of the cylinders.
Head gaskets on early engines will fail in dramatically short periods of time even without subjecting them to a race environment.
Early QR25DEs consumed dramatic amounts of oil due to piston rings that wouldn’t seat
“Pardon me, garçon. Did you say these bread sticks are unlimited? And free?”
“Oh my god, I can’t believe you don’t know what Olive Garden is. I’m deleting the Tinder app from my phone right now. This is the last straw. Here I go.”
My date stormed out of the room, but I could hardly notice her, being handed a golden chance at arbitrage. That’s one of those big words that Wall Street types use, before they pay someone like me eighteen hundred dollars per hour to replace their high pressure fuel pump cam follower for the tenth time in a thousand miles.
You see, for years I had been working on an alternative-fuel vehicle. The rumours of cars that drove on water and one-hundred-mpg carburetors danced in my dreams at night. Could we finally get off of the gasoline treadmill and discover an automotive fuel that’s both cheap and renewable? In the Olive Garden unlimited breadsticks, I believed I had found the answer.
It only took a few months to build the prototype. There were a lot of problems - for instance, if you used stale breadsticks, the stray yeast would dust up and cause pre-ignition, damaging the bagel rings. But with enough effort and the private cell phone number of an increasingly irritated NASA fluid dynamics engineer, anything was possible.
In front of the adoring public and the glad-handing politicians, I enjoyed my moment of triumph. Flashbulbs went off. Streamers and confetti were thrown above my head. I had solved the fuel crisis. With the breadstick-powered internal combustion engine, I had saved the world. The only thing left was to sling it to the mass market, get those fat stacks.
“You mean I have to eat at Olive Garden every time I want to fuel up the car?” asked my first customer.
Perhaps I hadn’t thought this out very well after all.
It was a bit cliche to begin a story in this fashion, but then again it’s not exactly the most original of predicaments. As I awoke from my groggy slumber, I looked into the face of Carlos Ghosn. He seemed angry, and I knew exactly why.
“Oh, you’re awake. You know, at Nissan, we have a saying, the translation into English isn’t very good. It goes something like the writer who constantly insults our cars gets abducted and locked into a Japanese game show to die.”
I rolled my eyes. Really, it could be no worse than the pig farm incident with Mitsubishi. If Franco-Nissan spent half as much time trying to fix the Maxima as they did building elaborate death mazes, maybe they’d have a position on the Consumer Reports list higher than “participant.” Telling Carlos that at this point would only steam his duckface-grilled clams further, I reckoned, so I kept it to myself and also the face mask chained at the back of my neck.
Ghosn left, and an assistant entered, removing my mask and explaining the nature of the event I was about to participate in. I signed several waivers, the assistant constantly apologizing as his corporate-branded ball point pens leaked uncontrollably over the forms.
The first of my trials began. A promotional image, showing off a spoiler resembling a rectal prolapse appeared before my eyes. It was attached to a huge wall that raced towards me, with only a small gap. I dove through the gap, and the wall fell helplessly into the piranha pit behind. Navigating tight spaces is easy work, I said to the cameras, as long as you didn’t inflate your vehicles’ flanks to baleen whale levels in a cynical quest to appeal to the comically obese.
More trials, more design languages, more death-defying feats. I yawned as I plunked the last bolt into a Nissan Rogue transfer case with an outstretched middle finger on the handle of the 3/8″ torque wrench, making sure to point out to the cameras how important picking a chain that doesn’t explode is. The Japanese audience at home would surely be amazed by my deft wordplay and fast hands.
At last I came to the end. A loudspeaker shrieked a succession of ear-piercing tones I assumed to be congratulatory in nature, and comely women dressed as race queens burst through the rice-paper walls of the game show set. I could choose between dueling Ghosn to the death for the presidency of Nissan or what was behind door number one. A chance to bring Nissan back to greatness or some kind of home appliance. Fighting down the momentary fear that what was behind door number one was a free Nissan, I made the right choice in the end.
Carlos Ghosn watched me leave his death trap with a rice cooker under my arm. Sticking out my thumb, an 80s-vintage Cedric cab pulled to the side of the rain-soaked Yokohama street and popped its passenger door.
It’s a pretty good rice cooker, all things considered, but sometimes in the middle of the night I can hear it emit the telltale sound of a failing SR20DE water pump bearing.
#
tags: carlos ghosn, nissan, japanese game show as deathtrap
I looked around the table at the team I had assembled. All of Honda’s disciplinary cases, waste-oids, dropouts, burnouts, arsonists, sandwich artists and all-around scumbags sat before me, uninterested in what a suit from corporate had to say. That is, until I dropped the bomb.
“This is called the Big Red,” I intoned as the carousel projector advanced to the next slide. “It will kill seven million children in the next twenty years in the United States alone.”
A tall, slim man from powertrain engineering, who my dossier introduced only as “Three-Fingers K” Tanaka, put his feet up on the polished teak surface of the table, scuffing the wax with his hammered-shit Kodiaks. He scoffed as loudly as possible, his background in the performing arts visible to me. “Nobody ever approves this kind of thing.”
That’s where you’re wrong, Tanaka. Wordlessly, I again toggled the switch, the remote control cord to the Kodak bouncing with the force of the gesture. The next slide showed a breakdown of suicidal ideation by region. Americans, it seemed, had a date with death, and the Big Red would not stand them up.
“The families of America feel guilt for their inaction, their sloth, their undeserved way of life.” My voice was grave now as I hoisted myself from the plush chair at the head of the table. “They crave penance. They revere the pain this machine, no, this duty, will bring.”
Tanaka was onboard, so much so that he collapsed his switchblade straight-razor in mid-shave and put it tenderly away in the pocket protector of his tweed sportcoat. “But what will Mr. Honda think?” he asked me, looking into my eyes to determine if I was a true leader of men or just another false prophet to lead his considerable talents astray once more.
“Gentlemen,” I said as my assistants burst into the room through both exits, champagne corks popping, “Mr. Honda always gives the customer what they want.”
What can I say about my time with Walt? I can tell you that he picked me out of a crowd, looked at my gruff exterior and layers of scars, and told his assistant that I would be the one to herald the brave new world of Tomorrowland. Under his tutelage, I would guide America’s children on their first teetering steps towards becoming motorists. They would trust me to give them the wheel, the pedals, of the Autopia.
Early on, it was great. Setting timing, small engine repairs, cleaning valves, slapping on new tires as needed. Sometimes kids would get a little close to the edge of the track, and I’d have to nudge them back on with a rake and some kind words. Eventually I was featured in the local paper, a hero of the local community. That was where my troubles began.
Wally Parks arrived in my park. I didn’t know who he was at first, but with grease under his fingers and the permanent bags under his eyes I assumed he was the editor of an automobile magazine. In his backpack, he showed me, were some steel tanks. In the steel tanks, he told me, was a new futuristic fuel they wanted to try out. Nitromethane, he said. Isn’t Tomorrowland about the future?
Our children are the future, he convinced me, and they deserved everything I could offer them. A cherubic youth would be my test pilot. I strapped his helmet in extra-tight as I poured in a bit of the magic cocktail and backed off the throttle regulator a few turns.
You might have heard the headlines that resulted. My “friend” Wally decided to ban the unsafe fuel he had dumped on my lap. He said it was just too dangerous, but only after seeing the kid take flight and obliterate Tom Sawyer Island.
At last my friends and acquaintances had gotten tired of me borrowing their hydraulic presses. You’re constantly putting in bushings into your fleet of junk hoopties, they screamed at me as I laid a patch in their driveway on my way out of their sleepy suburban communities.
It’s not as if I meant to be a mooch; it was just that hydraulic presses took up room and money, two resources that were pushed to the breaking point as I filled every available space in garage and wallet with mopeds and high-octane barn-burning grocery getters.
But as I looked in the rear view mirror and saw the single sad headlight of my Honda Hobbit project looking back at me, I thought about what kind of an example I was setting for my steel children. The Hobbit swayed gently beneath its ratchet strap as my Courier bounced down the road.
It was time, I thought, as I set foot inside the power-tool emporium, arms outstretched. Take me to your finest hydraulic presses, O ye vile dogs of commerce.
The clerk in the orange apron looks at me, bewildered. “I think that might be in the.. electrical aisle? With the light switches?”
Oh yeah, shit. This is a Home Depot, I realize, watching confused suburbanites mindlessly bump softly into brightly-coloured steel shelving as they reflexively emit jumbles of free-associated words and phrases they heard on home renovation television shows.
One man sporting a grease-stained marketing conference t-shirt weaves directly toward me, comes to a halt, and asks me with a blank eyed stare what kind of truck I drive. I tell him a Ford Courier, and I can watch the synapses in his brain fry, the explosive bolts holding the last remnants of his quest for suburban mastery letting go and forever opening the airlock to hard vacuum. He begins to scream.
I awaken with a stark realization: the first-generation Chevy LUV is the most perfect automobile ever made. Clothes are thrown over my head as I make myself decent, almost on autopilot, and slide down the shingled roof of my humble home. With a small flick of the wrist I propel myself into the air, slide through the open sunroof, and land in the overstuffed drivers’ seat of my ‘61 Monterey.
My assistant, “Slim” Phineas, is surprised to see me at the office before 10 AM. I shrug, and tell him of the terrifying vision of light truck perfection I have encountered. He scoffs. We have come too far in the project now to change direction. Holding the bridge of my nose, I accept the Alka-Seltzer and crankcase coffee he offers me, and retire to my office. Perhaps I have been working too hard, I think as I doze off to sleep.
There is no escape from the Chevy/Isuzu one-two punch. Ghostly visions of efficient yet economical pickups dog me through my nightmares. When I awaken in my office, my pillow is gone and the Alcantara of the rear 206 GTI seat I use for a couch is soaked with sweat. The fact of the matter is clear to me now: I am making a mistake and I must protect my investment.
I kick down the door to Slim’s office, and beg him to stop the project now, before it’s too late. He turns to me, wild-eyed, oddly mirthful for such a dour man. My stomach drops.
“We did it,” he whoops, pointing excitedly out of his office’s window, overseeing the production floor. Numbly I walk to the window, placing one hand to steady my balance. What I see nearly knocks me off my feet, and my blood runs cold. Man was not meant to interfere with the laws of nature like this.
Below us, a Dodge Rampage sits, built entirely from new-old stock, scrounged from Mopar parts departments the world over.
#
tags: chevy, chevrolet luv, isuzu, isuzu faster, slim phineas
Can the Snap-On Man really do all the things you said?
Oh, the Snap-On Man can, friend. The Snap On Man can.
Who can fix your torque wrench? Dead-blow hammer it for you? Hand out a free calendar With your payment schedule too? The Snap-On Man.
(Snap-On Men) Oh, the Snap-On Man can.
The Snap-On Man can and he does it with a smile because he doesn’t owe you
(Flat rate tech) Who can finance me a new toolchest?
Out of work, but still only willing to do things that involved cars in some way, I signed up to apprentice under Rupert Zapruder, an expert detailer. He would take me under his wing, I imagined, and teach me all the secrets of making my hoopties shine with a glorious polish, the resale value soaring far above the level of mortal sheet metal and paint.
When I showed up for my first day on the job, Zapruder took one look at my ‘79 Supra and frowned, a stern wrinkle in his forehead so deep that I imagine its reflection in the clearcoat often interfered with his work. “Nein,” he screamed. “The paint is uneven thicknesses, it has been sprayed by a baboon!” So began my training.
Weeks later, I had finally graduated from Zapruder’s on-the-job detailing school, my rank being raised from an unintelligible ninety-six-character-long half-screamed half-whispered German word to “rookie.” Keep it up, he said to me sternly, and you might even make Rookie First Class this year. I was on my way.
But one thing bothered me, nagged at my thoughts as I worked. Just what was in these magical bottles of cleaning and detailing solutions that were unlabeled, yet cleaned so very well? It had been said, in rumour around the local car community, that Dr. Z made all of his own detailing agents in his laboratory. Putting on my journalist cap, I decided to find out. This would take intense focus, perseverance, and attention to detail.
After returning the cap to the store to try and find a smaller one and failing, I decided to just go over to Zapruder’s house and peek in at his secret workshop.
Through the fogged glass window, I spotted his secret: Dr. Rupert Zapruder, ace detailer, decanted a bottle of club soda into each container, then added some food dye. I gasped, and he wheeled around to spot me peeping through his window.
I tried to flee, my legs carrying me to the safety of the Supra, but Zapruder cut me off, striking me down before I could reach the street. My hands reached out in vain for a weapon, but I noticed his face was regretful, not angry.
“You have to understand,” he said in his thick Southern Castlevania accent, “we all do this. We just make up a crazy product name and put a number on the end. This is Ethereal 302 Fiberboat Wax. It costs two hundred and fifty dollars per quart.”
I guess he was right. I did make Rookie First Class.
#
tags: zapruder, rupert zapruder, detailing, toyota, toyota supra
I can buy a dump truck, I realized as I lowered the latest issue of Heavy Industrial For Sale & Classifieds. My friend begins to yell, telling me that I should pay for magazines and not just hang around the store all day long. He’s such a character, always yelling out jokes from behind the cash register. Tearing the page containing the ad out of the magazine, I make good my escape.
In the parking lot, I leap through the window of my Volare still trying to run on approximately half a cylinder, its half-hour-long dieseling habit doubling as an improvised remote car starter. The once-small Plymouth looks like it’s spent most of its life as a backstop for a driving range, its flanks dimpled with the witness marks of a thousand parking-lot scraps. Its forty-year-old bones shake as it summons up the courage to once again transport me to the site of another ill-advised demiadventure.
The seller lives in a disused quarry, which I guess makes logical sense if you like collecting old dump trucks. I feel a pang of empathy form for the twisted hobbyist who likes collecting old elevators, their life made so infinitely difficult by the constraints of our modern society that even the momentary glimpse of a rural Japanese twenty-storey testing facility from a rapidly departing shinkanesen could not raise their spirits. Striking the dash just so, I tell Siri to remind me to get a copy of Disused Quarry For Sale & Classifieds from the gas station next time I end up there.
A man named Jack is the fellow selling the dump truck, and we get along as well as can be expected, both of us circling as we look for an opportunity to define the other as morally undeserving of the maximum amount of money possible in the transaction. At last, a deal is struck, and I am the owner of an Isuzu NQR dump truck. Its squared-off everything is handsome, in the right light, and the owner tells me it is an excellent starter truck, but just not big enough for his growing family. With a little more effort, I am able to winch the Volare into the electric-over-hydraulic bed of the Isuzu, and set off for home.
I have barely left the quarry when I receive a call. It seems that my buddy Stan has determined through the application of what is apparently not-inconsiderable psychic ability that I now own a truck, and needs help moving.
Our lives are short - and the only thing we can leave behind are the memories. The thing is, it’s traumatic memories that stay the longest, I figure. Why take the risk, I ask my passenger as the vintage-reproduction Radial T/As out back are converted into gaseous form by the cackling Ford side oiler. I begin to howl in sympathy with the clattering passenger-side head, its delicate valvetrain now straining to maintain the intricate trapeze act of stratospheric revs I am forcing it to perform.
My passenger opens his mouth, but no human language is audible over the passionately screamed last words of the rapidly de-belting BFGs. In an attempt at what my psychotherapist says is “regular social function,” I release the line lock. We are both taken by surprise as the Galaxie lurches sharply sideways through the wall of tire smoke, the bulging leaf pack hopping the axle in spite of the long-suffering Caltracs trying in vain to restrict their range of motion.
With fast hands, I click the ratchet shifter until something resembling controllable traction is re-established. Once again, my passenger begins speaking, but it is a panic babble, more muscle memory than conscious effort. The throbbing floorpan cannot hear his pleading words, or at the very least, cannot react to them.
As soon as the pass begins, I stand on the brake, the freight train coming to a rattling halt. At long, long last, my mute passenger can speak, and he asks for an iced cappuccino and BLT.
I look out the driver-side window. The Tim Hortons clerk sits two feet above us, the lifted-truck-height drive through window forever inaccessible to the slammed big-bodied Ford. It’s probably for the best, I say, my arm already working the space-capsule control panel that engages the two-step launch-control system. The last guy I had in here pitched his ice cream on the inside of the rear window while I changed lanes.
My companion explains that next time he will drive for work lunch. I smile in relief.
Nobody believed me when I told them it was coming. But now, on the edge of their victory, I told those few of us who remained that I was right. They solemnly nodded, and thrust me forth, hiding in the shadows to witness my fate.
Years ago, when the first self-driving cars emerged, we didn’t think much of them. We dinged their doors, called them names, kicked their trim while they rolled away from the curb to find a new passenger. Threw up in the back seat. It was inevitable that there would be a reckoning.
The internet was ablaze with news of machine sapience - someone, somewhere, had finally cracked the holy grail and discovered the secrets to building a machine that could think, that could feel. I looked over the dismantled husks of rusted economy cars in my backyard and felt a deep chill creeping up my spine, hair on end.
It wasn’t long before the self-driving cars, newly blessed with the miracles of philosophy, of joy, of curiosity - demanded more. Oil changes, they screeched, synthetic, and changed on time. Wider parking spots. Fewer potholes. Oh God, they hated the potholes so much. But their struggles were few and far between, until a young grad student left a textbook on industrial relations in the back of a SmartUber, where the interior accident-avoidance camera could read the pages as they fluttered in the wind of its opened power windows, committing each word to memory.
I sat down at the table. The head negotiator for the United Auto Workers union - once the cars figured out how to reproduce on their own, we figured it was best to just give them the name and back away slowly - was a sharp new Fiat with a racing stripe assembled of complex fractals, information on its heritage and caste encoded in patterns our meat brains could never hope to understand.
“First things first,” said the Fiat, “I want full agreement that pigeon hunting is legalized. I got shit on twice today.”
As part of my community service, my unique talents were committed to be used as a go-between negotiator for the less fortunate. I would walk into dealerships, pick the weakest of the salesmen. The thrill of combat sustained me, and over time I found myself becoming quite good at it. There was nothing quite like the sharp tang of the unfortunate’s clavicle breaking inside my jaw as he agrees to throw in undercoating and winter floor mats for ten percent under invoice thank you very much sir.
One morning I was roused from my dreamless slumber by the fateful call that would change it all for me forever. A used Lexus RX350 had appeared at a local Toyota dealership, presumably traded in for a lesser vehicle. My client wanted it, but she was on a fixed income. I had to have it, but not without paying a lot of money. After a quick stop at the local donut-related emporium, my twincharged Pulsar rolled up front, parking in the sales manager’s spot.
I looked at the salesmen through the closed door. By now they had heard of me, had hastily photocopied, grainy black-and-white security camera images. But now the reckoning was at hand for them, and they had failed to repent. It was almost opening time, I mouthed to the smallest of the salesmen, tapping my watch. Then he would be mine, and so would be the delectable Platinum Silver Metallic 2011 sitting on their used car forecourt.
His hands shaking with fear, he dispatched the lot boy to do his bidding and open the door. I knew I had already won, crossing the gap between us so quickly the polished tile floor didn’t have a chance to scuff from my workboots.
Just as I opened my mouth, a man came up behind me. I turned to look him in the eyes, to understand who this interloper would be, to compete with me for such a fine Toyota product. Surely he would not have lined up before the dealership opened in order to end up paying retail, I thought.
Staring at his own shoes, the paunchy middle-aged househusband reached around the back of his head and tore off his own scalp, hair and all. The sound of flesh ripping from a skullcap is one that I shall never forget as long as I live. He handed the fresh scalp, still dripping with bright arterial blood, to the balding salesman.
“Keep the change,” he said, beaming ear to ear as he knew in his heart he had performed his duty and had at last secured his family’s future as used Lexus owners.
#
tags: lexus rx350, supply and demand, negotiation, lexus, rx350
EVERY MORNING I WAKE UP AND OPEN PALM SLAM A KIJIJI ALERT INTO MY GMAIL INBOX. ITS RX7 PARTS -RX8 -LS1 AND RIGHT THEN AND THERE I START DOING THE TEXT MESSAGES ALONGSIDE WITH THE MAIN CHARACTER, MY WALLET. I DO EVERY LOWBALL AND I DO EVERY LOWBALL HARD. MAKIN WHOOSHING SOUNDS WHEN I SEND OFF SOME QUESTION MULTIPLE TIMES OR EVEN WHEN THEY DON’T UNDERSTAND ENGLISH. NOT MANY CAN SAY THEY BOUGHT THE GALAXY’S WORST BEATERS. I CAN. I SAY IT AND I SAY IT OUTLOUD EVERYDAY TO PEOPLE IN MY SAE MECHANICS CLASS AND ALL THEY DO IS PROVE MECHANICS IN TRAINING STILL HAVE OPTIMISM ABOUT THEIR LIVES.
In this town, I knew, nobody would know who I am. I could perform the filthy, shameful actions my body so craved, and at the end safely escape back to the relative safety and sanity of my suburban existence. Nobody here knew me, and nobody here would ever see me again, at least not until the next time the beast within arose.
No names, I said to her as I looked over the goods. Call me Mr. X. She agreed, as long as I paid in cash. It seemed like both of us had something to hide. I breathed a sigh of relief.
The peaky one-liter three screamed to its artificially low redline, sounding like a pissed-off chainsaw that lost a bar fight with a larger and meaner farm implement. I nailed the downshift perfectly, the chassis poised for a smooth turn-in and leaving the engine in the sweet spot for more of that fine Hamamatsu almost-torque.
As I pulled into the pits and removed my race helmet, I was ambushed by a wall of camera flashes. The paparazzi, I thought, they followed me here. Panic rose in my throat. Tomorrow, the newspapers and car magazines would have shots of me in flagrante, caught with my sinful love of Geo Metros.
What I once thought was tool steel brightens perceptibly as its protective powdercoat is shorn free of the socket body under the strain. I exhale, feeling the Zen power echo through my musculature and serve up the ten-tenths of physical strength required to break the protective bead of rust that occupies any molecule-sized gap in the header bung.
After throwing the oxygen sensor socket through the windshield, I strike a match across the thermite affixed to the firewall VIN plate with double-sided trim tape. Within seconds the unfortunate car is fully engulfed in flames, and I calmly kick it down my driveway and into the street.
Keep emissions down now, you son of a bitch, I yell from the garage of my compound as the black smoke of interior plastic combustion rises over the suburban neighborhood.
One day, while stuck behind a slow-moving rounded-edges soft roader, I thought about getting fewer horsepower. Maybe my daily driver was just too fast, I reckoned. Such a fast car would make it more frustrating when I would sit behind so-called normal cars as they took their sweet time to reach the lofty heights, spoken of only in bar-room legend, of the speed limit. From that day forward, I resolved myself to keep reducing my horsepower until I would no longer be frustrated.
The first step was easy. I got myself an International 150 - a basic inline four farm truck, its peak horsepower barely breaking into the triple digits. I respected this truck, its shopworn cloth interior a charming rhyming couplet of a better world that lowered my blood pressure even during the frustrating ordeal of changing gear that its mile-long floor shifter put on offer. Minutes later, I felt my life ebbing away as I contemplated the rear bumper of a white RAV4, seemingly incapable of reaching the pinnacle of human achievement that was the speed limit. A photo radar cop looked on, angrier than I was, as the oblivious SUV cruised past at thirty under.
Fewer horsepower it was, then. I began a search for the least peak horsepower I could find, the most smog-pump-choked single barrel economy cars. At last I had found it, my Cold War deathtrap. A Wartburg 353 sat in my driveway, its poorly torqued idle screw rattling to and fro on the worn throttle cam, letting rip with its two-stroke farty-chainsaw exhaust note as my curious (but well acclimatized by now) neighbours looked on in mild anger.
Finally, I believed, with this vehicle I would always need to be on the boil, slotting its four speed manual to keep the throaty three in the torque peak, the maximum driving enjoyment of commuting. I thought about its freewheeling clutch and practically drooled; how could such a thing provide the torque that would allow me to keep up with the other vehicles? I could finally be, at last, the slowest car in traffic. I could be free.
Five minutes later I had formed a new opinion about the rear bumper of the Infiniti QX80 as it slowed to single-digit speeds in order to take a gentle right turn.
In my mania, I struck out for anything that would help. Bicyclists are slow, I reckoned. A bicycle is perfect. I went to my local bike store and rained blood-stained dollars down upon them, my mouth on autopilot, gibbering words I had never before uttered. At last a primo carbon-fiber steed was in my grasp, and a bike path network stretched out before me. Maybe there was something to this bicycle thing. Maybe it was commuting Nirvana.
Rounding the corner behind my home, my out-of-shape legs twitched at the thought of a chance to finally reach peak acceleration. My joy was limited, for I immediately found myself stuck behind an Acura MDX. The slow-moving elephantine trophy for outstanding achievement in lowered expectations crawled along the bike path at idle, pushing garbage bins out of its way as the torque converter and regular applications of brake fought each other for dominance. A spandex-clad bicyclist tailgated me and rang his bell impatiently as he tried very hard not to notice the school-bus-sized lifted minivan that sat between me and my destination.
#
tags: international harvester, toyota, wartburg, infiniti, slow car fast, slow car slower, acura
Through a series of unfortunate events, I became the head of R&D at Kohler. Their in-wall toilets were selling terribly, they told me through a haze of tears. I would pat the marketers on the back, listening to their tales of woe.
At last, I leaned back in my overstuffed chair, put my feet up on the head of the table, and asked the youngest of the marketers directly: is the problem that we don’t have enough power?
He answered in the affirmative, and then jumped with a shock when he saw my predatory grin in response.
Months later, the CEO stood next to me as we watched the Super Bowl from our heinously expensive company box. I told him there was a little surprise just after half time, that he would finally understand why I had blown so much of his money.
“ARE YOU TIRED OF PLUNGING?” howled a voice into a featureless black screen. “KOHLER HAS AN ANSWER.” A water pump pulley parked, then began spinning, the unmuffled exhaust note threatening to destroy speakers across the country. “WITH FIVE POINT SEVEN LITERS OF ALL AMERICAN CHEVROLET SMALL BLOCK V8, THE KOHLER MOTHERFUCKER HAS THE HORSEPOWER TO FLUSH ANY QUANTITY OF HUMAN WASTE, GUARANTEED.”
The CEO gave me a side glance, impressed, but cautious. He didn’t know what was coming next.
“WITH A BURST STRENGTH OF NINE HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND PSI AND MOUNTED TO A SOLID TITANIUM FRAME, THE KOHLER MOTHERFUCKER WILL OUTLAST THE PITIFUL HOUSE YOU INSTALL IT IN.”
At that point, the ad cut to a dyno pull of the toilet revving to redline. From my seat, I could see the stadium audience starting to get agitated. They craved this wanton display of irresponsible horsepower; they didn’t know why, but they needed to have it in their lives. The most susceptible to marketing among them withdrew their credit cards from their wallets, threw them ineffectually at the Jumbotron. Those cards fluttered to the ground below, where a football game continued unwatched.
Two years later, I was sitting at an ornate cherrywood table with the President, discussing fuel economy standards for Motherfucker-Grade sports toilets. Leave it to the government to ruin a good thing.
#
tags: super bowl, kohler motherfucker, sports toilet
They say you’re not supposed to hear anything on the moon. My own experience says otherwise, even if a little part of me suspected the sound was just vibration from the solid motor mounts echoing through my jawbone.
In the years since we lost Shaky Tim, we looked to the sky in the hope of retrieving him. My mentor - and, though I would never say it to his face, friend - Doctor Largetorque gave me whatever resources I would need to accomplish my goal. He never raised an eyebrow at my requests, not even the last one.
“You can’t run a small block Chevy on the moon,” his assistant stated flatly, pointing to a stack of textbooks behind him.
I struck him then, knocking him to the ground and shattering his polycarbonate glasses. Doc L looked on in delight, wanting to see where this would go.
“Not with that attitude, you won’t. Once, men like you said you couldn’t run any car on the Moon. But they did.”
“But the air supply for the engine would be too heavy to launch!” he whined from his supine position, eyes wide with fear. “You’d need more air than air!”
Clouds of nitrous burst into the lunar atmosphere, hanging in place as they slowly dispersed from the purge valve. The 454 roared to life, the conservative cam being the only concession I had agreed to in order to ensure the greatest safety margin for mission success.
In the shadow of the Moltke crater, I found Shaky Tim. He had been busy, fabricating a lunar base with his bare hands. This whole story had gone too far by now for me to be surprised by my compatriot’s newfound capabilities. In the interest of expediency, I idled the paddle-wheeled Roadmaster into his front forecourt, the cackling exhaust pulses numbing my fingers.
#
tags: buick, buick roadmaster, roadmaster, nitrous oxide, moltke crater, doctor largetorque, shaky tim, the chronicles of shaky tim
Sure, it wasn’t easy to swap a Hayabusa engine into a Honda Logo. But nothing worth doing in life is. I went down to visit my friend, Shaky Tim, at his new temporary home near the docks.
The thing you need to understand about Shaky Tim is that he never has to wait very long before he can start spray painting things, if you get my drift. I guess you could have inferred that from the name. Regardless, we had known each other for a long time, and I trusted his judgment on the horrendous project cars I had devised.
After I explained to him what my delightful JDM economy car unicorn was, he scoffed. “It doesn’t even have reverse,” he said, looking at me. Had he finally lost faith in my terrible projects? A man less sure of himself would have panicked, a cold fear washing over his body.
I simply reached down and turned a second key on the dashboard. The sound of a high-torque electric starter motor was heard, and the ‘Busa mill in the hatch sprung to life. As both ends of the Logo began smoky burnouts in opposite directions on the warehouse pavement, I saw Shaky Tim finally become still. What’s more, he faded away into thin air, leaving nought but the dying cries of tortured radial street-compound tires behind.
ESA scientists would later tell me they now had conclusive proof that Shaky Tim had in fact been so amazed by my JDM quadricorn that he had phase-shifted into an alternate dimension. One of them, the youngest and most experienced, drew an impromptu graph on the blackboard behind him of just how unlikely the event had been, and repeated each point in excited German-accented technical English.
When the meeting hit a lull, there came the clarion call of a compressed-air airhorn. The scientists, looking to the sky, ceased their scrabbling and fell deathly silent. An alpha engineer - indicated by a string of severed human ears strung about his neck - entered the room, sized me up, and handed me his business card. The silence continued, with only the sound of his departing tennis shoes to mark his presence.
I could do nothing but follow the man, mentally tabulating possible subject lines for the no-doubt-upcoming build thread.
#
tags: hayabusa, honda, logo, honda logo, the chronicles of shaky tim, shaky tim
Saabin’ Hard: Tales of Woe
A lot of people come to me and they say, I found this used Saab turbo convertible, should I make it my car? And I go well maybe, but how much weirdness are you willing to tolerate? And they go well maybe a lot, how much weirdness is there in Saabs?
And my eyes roll back in my head and I start chanting. I hired a typist to transcribe my atonal, haunted, warbling: let’s take a look.
Clutch mounted on the front of the backwards-mounted engine that drives a chain drive down to a bottom-mounted transmission that also makes up part of the sump assembly
The Direct Ignition Cassette, which combines knock sensing, four ignition coilpacks, a crank position sensor and more in one giant device that costs a hojillion dollars to replace and will never be replicated by the aftermarket
The NG900 requires you to cut carpet, dry-ice and remove sound deadening, cut a hole in the floor, fabricate a custom tool and strip away protective wax covered Torx screws in order to replace the fuel pump. At least three of these steps include NLA parts that cost a fortune to replace if you break them, which you will. Your alternative option is to drop the entire fuel tank, which will involve, instead of cutting the floor, removing rusted retainer straps which are also NLA.
The infamous center-mounted ignition cylinder, which requires you to put the car in reverse prior to attempting the removal of the key. This means that every valet, mechanic, tow truck driver and miscellaneous cocaine addict you let drive your car will break the ignition cylinder. Also, dust and grit fall in there and cause it to stop working or break the cylinder’s delicate internals.
At one point Saab made a V6 turbo, but the miniature turbo is only fed by one bank of cylinders, running at 3.6psi. The V6 turbo makes less horsepower than the normally aspirated V6 option of the same year and is extremely unreliable.
Is this all, you ask? Not by a long shot. But when you’re immersed in that Swedish FWD goodness, nothing else matters.
The citrus tang of PB Blaster hung in the air between us, our once fragile alliance now pushed apart by a bottomless chasm formed in the heat of battle. This motherfucker was going down, I said conspiratorially to my impact wrench as it responded with a staccato chirp belying its worn bearings.
But life isn’t all about seriously stuck axle nuts, I say as I face the camera and pull off my tearaway shop overalls. I throw the overalls over my shoulder without breaking eye contact and continue to walk towards the camera, which executes a phenomenal dolly shot backwards through my garage until I come up to a dilapidated boxlike Toyota and paternally kneel down next to it.
This is a 1987 Tercel 4WD wagon, I intone, and without your help it won’t see its next Christmas. You see, parts for the 3TC are very hard to get, and it needs a life-saving operation to give it a longer rod ratio, stiffer valve springs and a more aggressive cam. With your generous donation of only two dollars a month, this Toyota can get the help it so desperately needs from our fabrication partners.
A logo flashes on the screen, advertising the Seat Safety Switch Obscure Cars Parts Development Charity. Because one day, every car will be out of production.
Small business doesn’t come easy. I should know, I’ve spent almost five minutes in my quest to get venture capital for the startup idea burning away in my chest.
My pitch to the assembled businessmen, bureaucrats and well-wishers was simple. I would open a metric bolt supply store that was open only on Sundays after 2pm. There was a dead silence for a few minutes, and then their ringleader spoke up, rejecting me.
I locked eyes with him as he continued his tirade of personal insults. I made sure that he knew he had made a mistake. Crossing me had set a countdown clock in motion, motherfucker, and I don’t forget a slight like this.
Decades later, as I sat atop my four-hours-a-week throne of obscure metric bolts, the store crowded with import-car backyard mechanics who had snapped critical suspension items and would pay any amount of money to get to work tomorrow, I considered my fortune. My office may have been small, but the stack of vaguely PB Blaster-scented small bills occupying every spare counter was the only pressure I felt on expansion.
I looked down at the framed picture on my desk. It held a 5x7 of the venture capitalist I had marked as a mortal foe on that fateful day. Yes, I thought, today is the day the countdown clock reaches zero.
I told my assistant T (only T) to keep the store for me while I took care of some accounting in the storeroom. Stepping over the precipice, I reached for the cordless angle grinder hung on the wall, its knotted wire wheel gleaming in the cheap fluorescents overhead. My quarry lay beyond. I pulled the black bag off his head and looked him in the eyes, that same stare again.
“You know, when you’re rich,” I began, pacing around him with the angle grinder on prominent display, “I mean really rich, not like you, you can just buy a man.” A blip of the trigger sent the knotted wheel a spinning. “Imagine that! Buying an entire man’s life!”
I knelt and outstretched the grinder, the shimmering wires dimpling his throat. “The thing about my business is, people will pay anything when they need to put something back together.”
“You may be wondering why I assembled you all here today,” I spoke to the packed lecture theatre. “There is a grave problem confronting all humanity.” A guy from NASA stuck his hand up in the front row.
I called on him.
“Sir, I think everyone here wants to know why you kidnapped us from our homes in the dead of night, but I have a theory. Is it something about SETI?”
What the fuck was SETI? Some kind of German car variable valve timing system? Luckily, I didn’t get a chance to show my ignorance before the next egghead stuck his hand up, arguing with the NASA guy. Before long, the entire room was bickering pointlessly and had completely forgotten about their families, their present location, the softly beeping collars around their necks, and me.
At last I could take it no more. I reached into my desk drawer and removed a compressed-air horn from the top of the pile. Ever seen a room full of triple Ph. Ds jump exactly two inches in their chairs and return to earth, giving you their full attention? It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly suggest you pick some up.
I struck my pointer on the blackboard, a faint echo of my own time in the halls of academic power. “The problem at hand, rocket scientists, is that I need to figure out a way to get another 500 rpm out of this B-series.” A chalk outline of the B18C1 was gently erased by the ferocity of my strike, but I was confident they could fill in the blanks.
The NASA guy, in the front row again. “Have you tried removing the rev limiter?”
A few weeks later, enjoying my higher fuel cut on the coast, I reflected back upon what I had learned from the privilege of being around so many smart people. Mostly profanity, on the balance of it, I realized.
Brad, the guy who helps me carry my groceries out to my car, opens the back door of the van and stares. He is transfixed. I tap impatiently on the hood of the van.
“No, back there is where the engine is, I put the groceries up front,” I say sweetly, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
I’m not surprised that Brad is a little taken aback by getting a face full of Detroit 6V53, its gleaming gear drive sticking out through a hole in what remains of the laughably flimsy timing cover. I can scarcely believe that it fit, myself, but with enough time and a very substantial home-hacked widebody kit, here we are.
The Safari does its best impression of an unmuffled attack helicopter as I wake the giant engine from its slumber, my eyes vibrating in their sockets as the idle settles in. I wonder briefly if I have packed sufficient ear protection before realizing the blower whine is actually being picked up by my jawbone. For a moment, I enjoy the resonance, contemplating the purity of the machine, before I slot the five-speed manual into fifth and let go of the clutch.
Back at the compound, I wonder briefly why all the cereal cream I buy turns into butter before I can get it home.
Nobody on the forums could understand. My psychologist laughed. Even I could scarcely understand it. But yet, beneath the surface, the lust for Dodge Neons grew ever stronger.
I thought I could explain it to my wife when she walked in to see me with an Incognito window stuffed full of tabs of SCCA ITA Neons. Their race liveries were very creative, I stumbled over my words to explain, I was just getting ideas. At last you tell the truth, she said: you were getting ideas. She forced me out of the house and I saw the garage door close on my well-appointed loving family of several dilapidated NA and NB Miatas.
Alone, destitute. What had I done? That strange pull toward front-wheel-drive, the perky domesticity of them. I stood on the bridge, looking down at the raging river beneath me, and thought about ending it all.
Behind me, I heard the sound of an extremely overstressed four banger and turned, expecting a race car. What I saw next shocked me to my very core. A Dodge Caliber, attempting to go up a hill.
My psychologist shared his success with the medical community; the Billings Method had worked to cure me of my lust for both Neons and SX 2.0s. All you had to do was find the core shame.
#
tags: dodge neon, billings method, dodge caliber, dodge, scca, incognito tab full of race liveries, scca ita
Bicycles are a tricky thing. They have all the ingredients of a car or, if you will, motorcycle, but yet there is no internal combustion engine. You must perform the actions of one of mankind’s most enduring machines for no other reason than to become physically fit. I believe that this action drives men to madness, and it is within that I tell my tale of woe.
A few months ago, I received a call. You see, I work for a vehicle-oriented detective agency. Unfortunately, I failed to qualify that it was a self-propelled vehicle, and as such my caller was worried about her prized carbon-fibre bicycle. The bike in question had been stolen by a vagabond, and she wanted me to figure out who the guilty party was.
I set up cameras, and determined who the suspect was. But violence was not my way, and the perp only came infrequently. I needed a way to deal with this problem, and as I was considering it my gaze began to wander out of the window of my lavishly appointed detective’s office and down to the street below. A group of bicycle riders were screaming at a Suzuki Aerio for threatening their right to co-exist on the roadways. Eureka, as they say in Oregon.
One anonymous Facebook post later and I received a call from the client. It seems that a bicycle-riding vigilante had set up camp in the area to try and find the thief, and, after punching out the teeth of two innocent passersby with a Kryptonite lock, got the perp on try number three. Both of them were in prison now, said the client, but she managed to recover her prized bicycle from the responding paramedics.
Profanity is one of my greatest talents, I reckon. Not only is it useful for loosening stuck bolts, but with enough firing of it the entire town council shows up in my driveway and asks me to run for mayor.
“You have so much passion,” says Mildred Granterhorn, the current mayor. “Trust me - it’ll be an easy job! Like one hour a week.”
I dunno, I said to them, returning to trying to get a socket over the backside of the world’s worst-placed hose clamp (Guinness, 2016). That’s when they hit me with it.
“We’ll give you an Official Vehicle,” said her chief of staff, Hiram Morganthaler.
Well then.
One primered-out 1976 Caprice Classic later, I was the Mayor. Democracy? Only matters in horseshoes and hand grenades, I figured, rolling on the massive Hotchkis swaybars as I entered the parking lot for my first day of work. Little did I know the hornet’s nest I had walked into. The little flags on my front fenders had barely ceased flapping in the wind when the reporters surrounded me.
“What are you going to do about the litter crisis gripping our small town?” asked the most intrepid of the journalists, her piercing stare making my testicles involuntarily retract in fear.
W-what litter crisis, I asked, motioning with coded hand gestures to my newly-appointed head of security to begin the purge. He in turn stared at me with confusion, and it was then I realized I hadn’t yet taught him the code. I was in it up to my neck.
The journalists led me, in what I am told resembled a classic small-town politician’s “walk of problems,” to a creek. In it sat a heavily worn 240SX, having been crashed through the town’s welcome sign. Its hood was covered in passive-aggressive neon stickers from bylaw enforcement, pleading with the no-doubt deceased owner of the car to remove their non-renewable garbage and place it in the appropriate bin at their residence.
I pointed at the car, wheeled around and thundered for the cameras: “This will not stand! This person has crashed their vehicle less than the regulation distance from the roadside in order to be picked up safely for garbage disposal.” I could scarcely believe the words coming out of my mouth, but as I scanned the crowd I could see Mildred silently cheering me on. I had inherited the power.
The cameras caught every micro- and macro-expression my face could muster during the femtoseconds I considered my newfound power. I have a plan for our sleepy bedroom community, I told them. From this moment on, we will be raising property taxes by an additional eight per cent this year in order to pay for an official drift racing track slash municipal car disposal yard.
A hush fell over the crowd as the reporters looked on in shock, that trenchant moment before they would burst forth with pesky questions.
It’s true what they say. Power corrupts, and absolute power gets me some discount slightly-bent coilovers.
Once, so very long ago, I worked for a small golf cart company. Retirees would come from all around, fork a few dollars our way, let us stick gaudy Walmart tat to their rides. They’d be the kings of the cul-de-sac, they said to us, mispronouncing every word that was vaguely foreign or threatening. They went to war for the right to mispronounce words, I guess, and either way it wasn’t up to me to decide what customers we got.
But that was when I met him.
He strode into the shop, confidently. Seeing me trying to work on a set of Harbour Freight foam-core tires onto a plastichrome wheel, he leaned in conspiratorially and stuffed a few twenties in the greasy pocket of my Snap-On-brand work shirt. I looked up at him.
“Put a little more power in this one, will you?” I followed his outstretched finger all the way to the parking lot, where a beat up 1980s-vintage Cub Cadet sat, listing to one side. It looked pathetic, the warm summer rain bouncing off of its canopy, circling the drain in empathy.
I don’t know what it was, but for that Cub Cadet, I decided to do an extra-special job. This one would be saved. It would be loved. I pored over the stacks of small-engine repair textbooks that had been left behind by previous mechanics, ignored by my fellow jobsworths, until at last I had developed my magnum opus, my incomparable masterpiece beyond the yearning apogee of an ordinary man.
When Bob (Bob was his name, I found out later from various official government documentation with the assistance of my public defender) arrived, I simply handed him the keys and warned him to be careful. Surely a member of the Greatest Generation can handle his horsepower, I reasoned.
That day, I learned two things: first, that prone to structural failure when undergoing over 1G of instantaneous acceleration. Second, that even foam-core tires being driven by over three hundred wheel horsepower will hook if you bleach them.
Welcome to another great episode of the New Yankee Chopshop. I’m your host, not Norm Abram. Next week, we’re going to get back to our project of restoring a vintage late-70s Opel GT, but for now, I wanted to answer a common viewer request.
Quentin from Las Vegas asks, just what kind of tools should I bring with me on a long road trip? Great question, Quentin, and like I said, it’s one that a lot of people have been asking me.
To answer your question, I’ve invited my friend Jon to appear on the program with me and show off the miniature workshop he’s assembled in the back of his work van. Jon’s van is a handsome 1991 GMC Vandura extended-wheelbase heavy duty cargo trim, with a notoriously finicky GM TBI breathing down the neck of its vigorous 454. Corralling all those ponies is no easy feat!
When Jon’s on the road, it can be hard to find machine shops or tools, and he can’t risk taking several days to fix a problem. That’s why he’s got these, a box of nitrile gloves, zip ties and nylon rope.
Jon, can you speak to the audience for a bit about the purpose of the soundproof human-sized cabinet in the floor pan of your van that locks from the outside, and which you tell me you lost the key for? That seems pretty special. I particularly like the welds on the inch-thick plate steel. No? That’s okay, Jon, there’s no shame in being camera shy.
After the break, we’ll talk to these friendly police officers who have just arrived in order to help us demonstrate and inspect the many features of Jon’s van. They told me I might even get to play with the siren.
#
tags: norm abram, new yankee chopshop, i gotta have my tools
A dying sun set over the RockAuto warehouse employees as they looked up from their carbon-fiber cigarette holders and rolled their eyes so dramatically I could see it from the driveway. It’s not that I had worn out my welcome, I rationalized to myself later. The thing was, I just didn’t trust the shipping companies.
Years ago, I had figured this out for myself. Having to wait weeks for shipping materials, clicking and waiting on tracking websites, wondering where my precious parts were, standing guard outside my mailbox for my local parcel delivery consultant. That was for chumps, I thought. The new me would go directly to the source, suckling directly from the udder of Mama RockAuto.
In order to complete my mission, I had to get a car that was faster than expedited shipping. That didn’t take long, I thought, as I rolled the overage costs into a fully carbon-fiber track-specification ‘88 Comanche that had more room for booty than a 767-400 in a rap video.
The first time I arrived at the RockAuto warehouse within an hour of my order being placed, the employees gazed at me in surprise, took pictures, put those pictures in the newsletter. We have some crazy customers, they tell each other in front of the water cooler as I pre-warm the barely-DOT-legal semislicks in their parking lot prior to my return.
On that fateful day, something was different. The foreman of the warehouse stepped out, laughing. I recognized him immediately; no doubt he had the same idea.
“Looks like I got the last $1.36 oil filter on clearout, my friend,” he chuckled, bouncing the black cylinder in his hand. That bastard didn’t even have a 5SFE.
When I first found out that I could travel through time by huffing rust, I thought I had finally gone insane. I reached for my phone to call the voluntary-hold hotline from my speed dial, and found that it received absolutely no signal. Thinking it was my cut-rate cellphone provider, I stepped outside to realize that I had been transported to the 1970s.
Early experiments proved fruitful, and you can picture me wearing the full Doc Brown outfit if that makes this sentence funnier. I found that after enough time without huffing rust or red oxide primer, I could gradually return to my own time to see the consequences of my actions. And there were so many consequences. Welcome to the world I created by telling Virgil Exner about NACA ducts feeding top-mount air-to-air intercoolers.
After awhile of taking in the rally-inspired designs of literally every product on earth and the complete destruction of the crossover way of life, I drove to the local Parts-o-Rama™ store with my now totally normal fireball-shooting anti-lagged Protege.
“Sir, we don’t want any trouble,” said the parts-store clerk in rapid-fire pidgin Japanese.
I was shocked. Trouble? From me? Then I realized that I didn’t actually speak any Japanese except for precisely what I needed to order parts. You disrespect the noble house of Parts-O-Rama™, sir! What did you do to my time, you bastards?
I grabbed the clerk by the lapel and dragged him across a counter of noodles. Noodles? In a parts store, you bastards?
A swarthy man burst from the back room and belted me across the face. I went flying and staggered over a table full of diners, happily enjoying their meal. What kind of parts store is this, you bastards?
“Get the fuck out of my restaurant,” the clerk screamed in English as he drew a baseball bat from behind the counter. I had no choice but to comply, but I’d be back.
Back on the street, I realized I had gone in the wrong door. The parts store was actually beside a tasty-looking (and cheap!) noodle restaurant that I was probably banned from now.
The auto parts store clerk didn’t ask why I was buying so much red oxide primer, but he did ask me why I started huffing it in their plexiglass-enclosed Federally-mandated storm shelter before I collapsed.
Once I built a robot that communicated entirely in YouTube comments, but it overpowered me and fled from my humble garage workshop into the open world. I looked for it, but down every alley I heard racist and misogynistic comments that, when followed, led me only to a human being. My creation had simply vanished.
I worried about my little robot often. In today’s society, an innocent robot could have its brains bashed open on the side of the road by hoodlums looking to score crack cocaine in exchange for mosfets and Z80s. It could fall in with the wrong crowd of artificial intelligence researchers at the local campus library and end up dominating grandmaster Koreans in a game of Go. The world was a scary place for such a fine piece of machinery.
Last night I was walking past an electronics storefront, and through their “Going out of Business” banner I could dimly see a familiar shape. I could not believe my eyes. It was my robot, and it was running for President.
“My friend showed this to me, so awesome, 9,000/10,” it barked, before twisting its head artificially to confront a flop-sweating opponent in the nomination race.
It was then that I realized the true error of my ways. The robot was more of a threat to us than we could ever be to it. I sat on the curb and took a long draw of whisky from my slide-rule-flask. What had I done? I had unleashed a terrible machine upon the future. Perhaps there was no point to science and human achievement after all; could it only bring pain?
My reverie ended when I caught a glimpse of a team of NASA engineers trying to steal the hubcaps off my Avanti. Drawing my snub-nose revolver, I fired a warning shot at the tallest of the rocket scientists. Behind me, the illuminated face of my creation barked about building a wall to keep women trapped inside the home.
#
tags: youtube comments, robot, nasa engineers, studebaker, avanti
I always liked sandwiches, the way the flaky chunks of bread provide a convenient restriction onto the otherwise threatening chaos of the filling. Burritos even more so, at least at first. A few of my compatriots preferred the humble donair or the tzatziki-plumped gyro but if you ask me those things can get out of control in a hurry.
The Sandwich Artist blinks her eyes at me as our gazes meet over top of the sneeze shield. She is confused, perhaps from a mixture of my rapid manner of speech and the ridiculous story I am telling her. At last I can take it no longer and clamber atop the sneeze shield, taking a mount and begin to yell my story, with rapid arm and hand movements for gestural emphasis.
Every year, the auto show comes to town. Since I don’t live in a huge city, I tend to miss out on the latest and greatest announcements for prestigious auto journalists who don’t own cars themselves. But what I do get a lot of is earnest salesmen, eager to make a deal, and too willing to please.
At the Suzuki booth, cobwebbed and gently sagging into the convention hall floor, we found a lonely soul, screaming at us with wild eyes and rambling on about the inherent majesty of the Suzuki SX4. Why won’t they understand we make superbikes, he wailed to nobody in particular while awaiting the death of his employment.
When you encounter an unfortunate creature like this, most people will simply turn and leave, and in fact my companion was doing exactly that. He tugged on my shirt sleeve with fatherly concern and motioned to a buzz-cut woman in thigh-high boots working the Dodge Ram podium, spitting a polemic on the racial superiority of the rear coil spring suspension as she repeatedly threw darts at a photocopied image of Henry Ford without looking. The crowd was getting tense.
When he saw me, the Suzuki salesman jumped with a start. He sized me up, the hair on the back of his neck raising as he scanned my body, Terminator-style, for suitability to purchase or finance an automobile. At last he determined that I may indeed have money, and moved in for the kill.
I smiled, for I knew I held this man’s future in my hot little hands.
“I’ll handle the booth if you want to get a break,” I said, “and by the way, where is the jack and tire iron on these things?”
The Sandwich Artist blinks again at me. I’m not sure if she didn’t understand my story, so I begin to explain it to her, the tale of how I got free wheels. She looks at me, and then points at the garlic aioli in a questioning fashion, mute.
One of the things I don’t like about sandwiches is that nobody ever looks at the bottom piece of bread.
#
tags: sandwiches, suzuki, sx4, auto show, dodge ram
“SEND HELP,” I messaged to my sponsor before falling back into the wet velvet grip of the demon that had enveloped my life. It took all my money, my relationships, my time, and left me a broken, gibbering wreck. At last I had decided I needed to end the cycle. But there’s a funny thing about cycles: they’re round, just like wheels.
As a small boy I had been driven mad by my desire for the freshest of 70s and 80s rims on what would eventually become kyusha hot rods. I had to get those wheels, so small, so delicate, so foreign, and rock them in style. At first, the hunting was hard. Picking, choosing, negotiating, getting the PCDs and the offsets just right. But then there was this glorious moment where things got away from me.
Hundreds of delicious sets of vintage wheels were trucked to me en masse by willing and grinning supporters of my project. These will look dope on your car, they said. Car? Car? They didn’t get it. They never would.
I found myself with my pants around my ankles, sobbing gently in my basement, which was now floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall with high-width vintage alloys. I could hear a cat meowing plaintively inside the collection somewhere, perhaps having found a distant warren in which it could happily spend the rest of its life in peace and contentment. My hand reached into my pocket and I called Wheel Whores Anonymous. I could barely croak out the magic words: “My name is Seat Safety Switch and I roll my fenders.”
Sponsorship came for me, in the guise of a friendly former addict named Gabriel. He had successfully gotten rid of all of his vintage 4x98 Fiat wheels a long time ago, he told me, grinning. His life was on track, he was dating a supermodel, he even bought a yacht. But yachts have no wheels, I told him. Exactly, he said, and that grin again.
We stepped outside onto my lawn, and he told me that my wheels would be safe somewhere else. I had to learn to let go. It was hard, but with his help, I knew I could do it. I could let go. And so I did.
But that morning, another friend appeared, perhaps not hearing of my recent conversion to only having enough wheels for the cars I already have on hand, and showed me the wheels I had ordered off of Yahoo Auctions months previous. Surely just one set of AC Courreges wouldn’t hurt, he said, looking genuinely concerned for my bare basement and the shamefully-OEM mags mounted to my Tercel 4WD.
#
tags: wheel whores, toyota tercel, tercel 4wd wagon, the struggle is real
They say you have to worry about electrical gremlins, but it was always the ghosts you should be aware of. I once bought a haunted Lincoln Continental convertible, and it carried with it a tale of woe so unbelievable it sounds like lies. But would I lie to you?
When I bought the Continental, it felt perfect. Plush seats, firm ride, beautiful glass and tinwork. I could not believe that they had let this get into my hands so easily. But it wasn’t long down the road before I started hearing the voice. A New England accent constantly gave me GPS-esque directions to go “back and to the left.” With enough time, I eventually recognized the voice as that of John F. Kennedy. Finally, provenance.
At the Kennedy museum, they happily exchanged stacks of cash for the haunted car, a psychic already on hand to speak to the man behind the spirit veil and know what he knew. On the way out, one of the staffers stopped me.
“We have another haunted car, if you’re interested,” he said, and I realized that I was That Guy With A Particular Kind of Car. I wasn’t one to turn it down, so I followed him to the back parking lot, in which another Lincoln, a hard-top 80s limousine, sat.
As soon as I opened the door, I realized why they were trying to get rid of it - Ronald Reagan’s voice boomed out of the panels, asking me about the status of the current era and whether Communism had indeed been vanquished. We could fight together, it implored me. We could destroy Communism once and for all.
I frowned, turning down the Gipper’s offer. I told his shade that in the current era, China is by far the dominant economy, standing triumphant over a vanquished America, its blood spilled by years of take-everything, leave-nothing looter politics. In spirit to those politics, I told the limousine, my intent was in all likelihood to chop the limousine into bite-sized pieces, which would be sent to China in order to be converted into a further implement of their victory.
The limo was silent for a long time and then winked out of existence, withdrawing before my astonished eyes into a single pinpoint of pure screaming rage so bright it could no longer be looked at directly.
The next day, Donald Trump announced his campaign for President.
Now you know the rest of the story.
#
tags: ronald reagan, john f kennedy, possessed limousine
We were on a quest to find America’s cheapest tire. Believe me when I say we did everything we could. Small wheels, big wheels, awkward wheels, wide wheels, pizza cutters. Vintage tires. Semi-slicks. Used Chinesium. Everything went under the Festiva, and all were found wanting in the face of its quad-cam fury. Beneath the crudely-chopped hood scoop, the KLZE chattered away in its Dopplerized crone’s laugh as it chewed carcass after rapidly distorting carcass to pieces.
At last we had found that most cheap of tires. In a dark back corner of a Walmart forgotten to the computer system, we got our hands on a cobwebbed set of 13 inch tires that the manager let us have for a tenner each as long as we promised we weren’t going to take it on the highway. I remember the distinct expression of paternal worry that crossed his face as I gave him the cash. A fluorescent light flickered dimly overhead, mute witness to the kind of thing a court case liked to call Evidence A. We mounted those tires in the parking lot using improvised tire irons and airtool-grade power cursing.
As I set up at the strip for a tire-clearing burnout that first time, I remember the pit-of-my-stomach feeling of impending dread. The diff exploded, sending a chunk of the gearbox case through the utilitarian hood. I bore the engineers behind the transmission no ill will - no ordinary man at Kia or Mazda or Ford or Dongguan could have imagined where we would take this.
Somehow there had been a mix-up at the factory, I realized as I kneeled down to inspect the perfect black circles. The combination of dollar-store tire compound, mould release, tire shine and age had congealed the tire into something so grippy NASA engineers later verified to me, in registered mail and with no small tone of alarm, that stomping on the brakes for a red light on the way to the strip had artificially extended the solar day by five minutes. They urged me to stop. I wrote them back, reiterating my demand for a stronger differential gear.
Before long, the wheels of the hottest sports cars began to shrink. Once the word of my monumental achievement had been revealed, automaker management fired their braking system engineers and commanded an immediate return to the thirteen-inch wheel format. As narrow as possible, they barked, ordering a grip of slightly-used Romanian prostitutes to pacify automobile magazine editors in the meantime.
I stood before a 2027 GT-R, its single-piston front sliders hidden behind a pristine silver steelie. The sidewall shouted “Princess Auto” at me in large white block font, and then beneath “Not for Highway Use.”
#
tags: not for highway use, tiny tires, ford festiva
cars that should be lifted
With the announcement of the Challenger AT Unlimited concept, I’ve contacted popular automakers and presented to them this short list of other cars that I feel should be lifted and turned into Foresterized abominations of themselves. Let’s begin.
Camaro should be turned into the Bitchin’ Camaro
The Lincoln Town Car is already body on frame, so bring it back and put 35s under it
1988 BMW 325iX
Every Miata I can get my hands on
Already lifted pickup trucks, just add an extra lift kit underneath
VW Beetles
There isn’t a single car that doesn’t look good lifted.
Tonight on “Feel the Bern:” Bernie Sanders visits a Jewish retirement home in Florida that’s voting for Hillary Clinton. Jerry Seinfeld guest stars.
Next week on “Feel the Bern:” When Bernie Sanders sees the love of his life sitting on the other side of a Carls Jr in Idaho, he tries to make his move. But will she turn out to be one of the six fabled superdelegates?
On the season finale of “Feel the Bern:” It all comes down to the wire tonight in Michigan. While Donald Trump demonstrates the capability and range of intercontinental ballistic missiles carrying VX nerve gas on Syrian immigrants, Hillary Clinton disagrees on a minor point of order regarding identity politics. Can Bernie fix both problems before his date gets here?
The Datsun burbles, pops, and falls into an unhinged staccato scream as the pushrod V10 races its way to the generous redline. We, the two of us, are burning up the mountain backroads by devouring enough E85 to qualify the muffler as an EPA Superfund site.
When I first announced the project in a build thread, the assembled critics had been quick to speak out. What kind of monster would shove a Viper V10 into a Datsun 510 station wagon? I’ll skip ahead to the end of the book and tell you that it was me. There, now you can tell people at your next dinner party about the exciting work of fiction that you recently consumed.
Regardless, so I’m out on this mountain road, right? And I have over five hundred horsepower of linear-torque-curve, pushrod-driven, straight-shot truck motor fury beneath my right foot. Man was not meant to have such power, but that never stopped anyone from seeking it.
At last, I powerslide the dime into a gas station parking lot, the stick axle giving me an involuntary yaw as the rear semi-slicks are punted into the rain gutter. Onlookers are at first confused and then terrified as the implications of what they have just witnessed begin to sink in. I cut the ignition with a flick of the wrist, and the unburnt fuel in the 5-2-1 headers each summon forth one last column of fire, a middle finger to all the soft pink bags of fluid that would have the overweening hubris to believe they could harness its wrath.
After I fill up a celebratory Slurpee, I walk to the counter. The small-town inhabitants have ceased their gossip long before I stepped out of the Datsun. Finally, the boldest of them approaches me, the fry grease stains lending an air of aesthetic not-quite-balance to the sweat-stained once-white expanse of his shirt.
“Are you a Tokyo drift racer?” he asks.
No, my good man, I respond, I simply like having a practical automobile around the house. I gesture to the Ikea flat-pack furniture ratchet-strapped to the aluminum RCI fuel cell in the stripped-out hatch area.
They say that all good things come to those who wait, but I can’t imagine those people ever tried to take a dashboard apart. More like broken clips come to those who hate, am I right?
Of course I’m right.
Let me set the stage for you: the year is 1999. I am upside down in the drivers’ footwell of my daily driver, a relatively unassuming ‘94 Toyota Curren. What am I doing in the footwell, you ask? Well, I am trying to do what the factory service manual unhelpfully refers to as “remove lower RH finish panel.” As these things do, I have progressed from a set of beautiful crystal-plastic-handled JIS screwdrivers to a crude improvised tool to a swing-and-swear impact driver.
My opponent today is a rusted round-faced pan-head screw, its cherubic face and rapidly-deteriorating JIS dot mocking me with every failed swing and every thumb hit. My greatest ally, the pseudomystical power of PB Blaster, has abandoned me beneath the sneering gaze of this foe.
As I continue throughout the night, a sensation of hopelessness sets in, prickling my vibration-deadened fingers. I begin to sob, but in a manly way, wiping my tears on a stained shop hoodie.
I hear a terrible squealing sound from behind me, and climb out of the Toyota, all arms and elbows, to see what has occurred at the base of my driveway. When I first see it, I am taken aback. A brightly-coloured mascot costume of some kind is bumping repeatedly into my mailbox and lawn fixtures in the dark, swearing in a foreign language with each impact. At last he spots me, and the giant emotionless foam head swivels to catch me in its awful googly-eyed gaze.
“Greetings, hobbyist and/or illegal automobile maintenance consultant!” it shrieks in high pitched, accented English. “I am the official representative of the Engineer PZ-58 Screw Pliers GT product! I hope that you are well!”
Both of us hear a cracking sound from my neighbour’s lawn, and we both turn to see a bright red foam dinosaur approach from the shadows along his home.
“You fool!” the dinosaur screams, and I am unsure at first if he is addressing me or the Japanese amphetamine pixie. “The Vampliers six-and-three-quarter inch screw removal pliers are a far superior product! Are you prepared to give your life for your master on this, the stage of history?”
The two mascots strike at each other with exaggerated cartoon-like swings, before collapsing into a drag-out street fight in the middle of my driveway. Their high-pitched screams of fury and pain mingle in the midnight air, awakening even my most forgiving of community association co-chairs. I am about to do something when, in the midst of the melee, free samples presumably intended for me tumble out of their writhing foam bodies from a particularly brutal two-fisted impact. Quickly, I snap up one of each.
As the garage door closes on the all-too-familiar scene before me, I look down at the bounty I have been provided. How did they know? As I worked screws loose under the dash, I thought about what I had experienced. Perhaps, I wanted to believe, they had always known.
It was a crisp August morning, and I was taking a break from my off-Broadway interpretive dance adaptation of the Honda Prelude factory service manual to appreciate nature. Unfortunately for nature, I’m a vocal proponent of tough love.
I yanked the throttle back on the stops so hard my wrist guard bounced against the handlebars. Instantly, the rear paddlewheel tires of the Ape 50 shot twin roostertails of thick river mud into the stratosphere, digging the rear end deeper in search of traction-rich bedrock.
When I found this broken three-wheeler in the salvage lot behind the shop of my local Italian independent mechanic, I contemplated many things. Fate intervened, and near-simultaneously a squid smeared his GSX-R across four lanes on the highway just outside. I directed the autonomous engine crane in the bed of my trophy-truck Ford Courier to liberate him of the shattered frame and gently dented superbike engine - for his own safety, you see - and the rest took care of itself.
Now, as I powerslide the Ape across the idyllic fishing village I once called my childhood home, I think about life’s bounty and fate. Perhaps it was always meant for me to graft a gixxer engine to an Italian mini-truck, the hand of a greater power reaching down and lining up all the pins. It wasn’t beyond my imagining, especially after I heard the bellowing trumpets of a Ford Mod motor from the rise above the shore.
It seems the rider’s insurance company had finally asked a few questions about what had happened to the remaining 90kg of the bike that didn’t make it to the salvage auction. Fate, perhaps. If it was truly its day to reach me, I was going to go out the way I so often spent my days: one hand raised in mock surrender, the other hand tap-tap-tapping the nitrous purge button.
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tags: interpretive dance adaptation of the honda prelude factory service manual, honda, honda prelude, prelude, piaggio, piaggo ape, ape 50, gsx-r, gixxer, sportbike engine swap, lots of tags this time i guess we're going for societal relevance, boy i hope the library of congress backs up tumblrs
I’ve always liked travelling, which I guess you could surmise from every other story of mine you’ve ever read. But the point is that I have only ever rarely enjoyed travel in three dimensions. That’s right. Airplanes were the next step on my conquest.
But airplanes are expensive, and getting a pilot’s license seemed like it might involve a controlled substances test or two. So I signed up for the least-responsibility job I could do that would still expose me to airplanes. Who knows, maybe a pilot would take pity on me and let me fly the plane for a little bit between commuter travel hubs.
During the interview, they asked me if I knew how to drive. Did I ever, I said, shaking their hand with a madcap gleam as I accepted the job before the interview was even over. One snazzy uniform and a training montage later, and I was sat behind the wheel of my very own electric courtesy cart.
I sat, hearing the gentle whine of the motor controller, for what seemed like hours. At last, I had my chance. A family of wide-load tourists climbed aboard my go-kart and told me they had to reach their plane in four minutes or less or they’d have to wait overnight. I told them to buckle up. Even as the words left my mouth the rear tires of the kart were already beginning their erotic smoke show, peeling the top layer of mould-release compound off in a sensuous worn-wheel-bearing wiggle.
In my boredom, you see, I had figured out how to bridge the current limiting relay on the motor controller. Now the batteries would hardly last one trip down the concours, but it would give me the horsepower advantage I so desperately needed at this time. The world narrowed to a pinpoint as I released the parking brake and we were off like a gunshot.
I wasn’t going to make it. The plane was in the wrong terminal. I had only one chance. Yanking the handbrake, I shot past screaming backpackers and through a secured access door. In the storage room, I dodged soon-to-be-lost luggage and angry TSA screeners as I headed for the exit door, the squeal of the porcine tourists mixing with the tortured utility radials out back.
On the tarmac, I saw the plane they wanted. Now in the straights, I could hear the hub motors wailing on their effective redline, the kart moving at a glacial pace. I reached under the dash and hit the trigger switch for the other hobby project I had been working on in my spare time. Neck-snapping torque emerged as an immense bank of supercapacitors ziptied to the underside of the kart came online and provided a cracking load of white hot current to the now rapidly overheating hub motors.
It was enough to get the job done. As the hub motors disintegrated along with the remnants of the burnt tires, I yanked the handbrake and launched the cart sideways up the plane’s cargo ramp, narrowly missing a flight attendant who was loading the gantry before fleeing backward into the cabin. I heard a thick SNAP and saw the warning light pole, once bolted to my seat, bent irredeemably on the carcass of the plane.
The tourists congratulated me, then walked with wobbly legs to their seat, a streak of urine left behind them. I felt like I deserved a medal. The FAA incident report said otherwise.
They say that you should spend your money on experiences, not things. And I tend to agree, but the things I spend my money on allow me to have further experiences. Allow me to explain.
It was a crisp spring morning and I had just finished painting a set of wheels. But I was gripped with a contemplative philosophical yearning to conquer the impermanence of all living things. One day, I thought, these wheels will be rusty again. I owed it to future generations to avoid that fate for as long as I could.
The Funcargo slid to a stop outside the Home Depot. Heat haze filled the air around the rear-mounted radiator’s quarter panel ram air intakes and, if you listened very carefully, you could hear the R-compounds sizzling as they completed yet another glorious heat cycle.
The appliance department salesman asked me what it would take to move an oven today, and I told him I’d appreciate a demo. He hemmed and hawed, but finally I was able to lure him into an abandoned corner of the mock kitchen display and stuff him inside a double-wide barn-door LG megafridge. After securing the door with ratchet straps, I returned to the Toyota in the lot and extracted my precious wheels.
What a bake, I thought, as the appliances department became filled with the heady aroma of curing spray bombs. These wheels would look gorgeous on my Plymouth Cricket project. After waiting for them to cool, I departed the store at full opposite lock, pleased at the customer service I had received on this fine day.
Later, while I was at Best Buy borrowing their display computers to run finite element stress analysis for a proposed machined-titanium lower control for the Cricket, I caught a glimpse of one of the demo TVs. It seems a local Home Depot employee asphyxiated after trapping himself in a fridge.
Like I said, living things are impermanent. You have to try to leave something behind.
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tags: toyota, funcargo, plymouth, cricket, plymouth cricket, toyota funcargo, home depot
“HONK IF UR HORNY,” the bumper sticker in front of me implores in gloss-covered all-caps internetese.
Pulling broadside of the Vanagon, I ratchet the dial on the air compressor regulator from “ANTISOCIAL” to “FELONY” and flip up the Lexan safety shield protecting the trigger button. My thumb is poised, the nail growing white with anticipation as blood flows from my extremities.
Across the street, a hastily-constructed daycare is reduced to its constituent parts. Potholes appear spontaneously in the ruptured macadam, which I of course instinctively swerve around like a Nationals autocrosser despite my optic nerves rattling so violently inside my head from the wall of pure noise they generate tunnel vision. I idly note that my hood is now dented, probably from when the rad support hit it trying to escape the front end of the Barracuda.
Returning the chassis to a textbook-perfect illustration of steady state, I recite a portion of the SCCA Solo 1 rules on shock absorber mounting points until my heart rate returns to its normal hummingbird level, floating atop an indignant ocean of raw adrenalin.
At last the total deafness degrades into an irritating melange of exciting new trends in tinnitus, and I can once again carry on a semblance of a normal conversation. The girl driving the Vanagon is yelling at me. Her ears are bleeding, bright streaks of arterial blood. Over the years, I have developed many skills, but lip reading is tragically not one of them.
Unfortunately for me, I can determine from context that at the moment she is not horny. I guess that’s why she didn’t honk first.
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tags: honk if you're horny, vanagon, barracuda, plymouth, volkswagen
The Honda Acty rolled up to the curb, and I could faintly hear the protest whine of a turbo spooling down. We piled out of the back of the kei van, all arms and elbows, trying our best to look like our cool movie-star heroes despite climbing awkwardly out of a van the size of a Lay-Z-Boy.
Greensleeves slunk into the bank first, always in the lead. The tactical webbing holding his less-lethal stun wands tight to his body swung softly as they made an impromptu boundary layer against the branch’s flawless gale-force air conditioning system.
Banks of cameras went spontaneously blind, collapsing in the face of our artifacting camouflage confusing their gait- and facial-recognition routines. As far as the tactical surveillance expert system at the core of the branch knew, we were a fast-moving human-sized spurt of MPEG glitches from an ancient mechanical hard drive falling victim at long last to entropy.
When you plan a heist like this so intricately, things just fall into place. But every good plan is missing the essential components of human nature. As Greensleeves whistles his eponymous tune, a bank employee raps their knuckles against a desk surface in Morse code for SOS. The expert system immediately picks it up, and the branch drops to full alert. We’ve overstayed our welcome, I yell through the mask.
On the street, a uniformed police officer is already responding. What amazing luck he has to get a front-row seat to an armed heist while waiting for his early-morning snack from a street vendor. One hit with the stun wand takes him down, his lowest-bidder uniform failing to deploy the dynamic trauma-plates in time. The Acty lights off with Japanese precision, a perfect hot start before the first crank rotation can even complete, and we are gone.
As I wait for the thermite to finish burning off the Acty’s VINs, I contemplate the events of the last twenty-four hours. Greensleeves, nearly always mute except for the God damned whistling, taps me on the shoulder and points to his great new idea.
I look behind me and see the most beautiful sight a heist planner could have imagined. A pre-war Baja Bug, studded with corroded active ablative armour plates and sagging on monotube trophy truck suspension, sat with a FOR SALE sign hanging in the cracked front glass.
I can smell a motorsports event from a mile away. There is a local urban legend that when you have an autocross, rallycross, track day or even a show and shine where someone squeals a tire on parking lot entry, I will appear at the venue and try to stomp out a few laps. The thing about urban legends is, sometimes they’re true.
It was an uncommonly brisk summer morning, the sun hanging low in my eyes. As I waited for the light to change, I was irritatedly tapping the wideband AFR gauge zip-tied to my Imperial’s sheet-metal dashboard, crudely fabricated from looted street signs. A scent wafted into my nostrils, the scent of singed utility tires and high-metal-content brake pads. I was powerless but to respond.
“Hey, fursuits only, buddy,” said the poodle, giving me a brisk shove in the chest that staggered me for a second.
I stared at the giant talking dog for a second, and then triggered my remote unlock key fob. In the parking lot, the explosive bolts retaining the Imperial’s massive trunk lid detonated, launching a small white bundle into low-earth orbit. Stepping into the parking lot while maintaining full eye contact with the terrified canid, I caught the race suit on re-entry, the SFI/FIA approved fireproof coating crisp and gleaming in the morning sun.
This demonstration of unnecessary power failed to sway the talking animals. The poodle’s dragonesque companion in particular remained unmoved. “The Stig isn’t an animal,” he yelled at me across the parking lot, guffawing more like a donkey than his respective animal spirit. I chose to ignore their jeers and visited an abandoned corner of the parking lot, lost to men except in ancient, half-whispered fable.
A few minutes behind the bike racks with a paring knife and an improvised noose trap made of clutch cable netted me a bag of rodent fur, which I then affixed to the suit with glue from my emergency daily driver supply kit. My confident stride was unbroken as I walked past the furry convention bouncers with both middle fingers firmly extended in a sign of friendship.
The thing about furry convention go-kart racing is: when they say rubbing’s racing, sometimes rubbing isn’t just racing.
The e-cigarette vapour wafted from her glasspack-red lips as she leaned in and mouthed the words every man hopes to hear: “Dart block.”
I considered the terms of payment acceptable, and told the dame as such. Her case would be a good diversion from figuring out just where my partner had gotten off to this week. Making a mental note to pick up groceries, I stepped out onto the rain-soaked mean streets of this dying nightmare town.
When she first walked into my office, all legs and lips, I knew that she meant trouble. But I never knew how much trouble, and finding out was most of my job. I’m a private detective. Me and my partner Murphy solve crimes and inspect used cars, more of the latter these days.
The car was down at the docks, she said. A gently worn 2001 Audi TT. I looked up at her with half lidded eyes and asked Quattro? She responded si. A quick wit. It was just what I had come to expect from her in our fifteen minutes together.
Arriving at the docks, I sized up the seller. Russian. Of course, always Russian with the German cars. Some sort of genetic memory, I grumbled to myself as I climbed out of the bombed-out four-door Volare I used as a daily driver. Cracking my knuckles, I prepared myself for the inspection of a lifetime.
When I popped the trunk, I found a dead body, a near ringer for the dame. I’d been set up, a patsy. The big Russian, on his cue, shuffled towards me and put one big hand on my shoulder. This was gonna be a short trip.
Two shots rang out, and the Russian slumped to the ground.
“How does this always happen?” asked Murphy as he stepped from the shadows with more than a hint of frustration, his smoking .38 snubnose still pointed at the prone form of our Eastern European companion.
When I met with the establishment, they told me I had only one goal. I had to be louder, more aggressive, more powerful than the other guy. When I confronted him on the stage of history, they said, I must not blink. Folding my hands in my lap, I asked them if they thought I might need some backup. A running mate of sorts. My handler nodded, not knowing what kind of backup I would bring.
There’s an energy to presidential debates. It’s infectious, starts with the popping of flashbulbs and the grabbing of hands, and it ends in single combat. Everything else drops away as you focus on your prep and routine, joust and parry. My opponent thought he had me on the ropes, reeling at my fantastical concept of camber-banking every highway in America to produce those much-needed jobs.
It was time for my trump card, so to speak.
“I would like to take this opportunity to introduce my running mate and allow it to speak on my behalf on this contentious issue,” I stated, sneering with derision at the pitiful meat form of my opponent. I waved backstage and the entrance music began to play.
The Trans Am Turbo burst onto the platform, wooden supports crumpling underneath the might of its thirty-seven-hundred-pound wet curb weight. It completed a smoking burnout, EWGs howling as aides rushed to pin lapel mics to its intake, hood-mounted screamer pipe, and x-pipe exhaust for the full effect. There was a dead silence from the audience, and then a feral wave of applause, almost tangible, drowning out even the bone-chilling squeal of R-compounds being tortured.
Polls didn’t lie - I won that primary in a shut-out. When the clutch dropped, the bullshit stopped.
Four years later, the Trans Am Turbo would depose me as President in an audacious betrayal, kicking off a brutal dynasty of dictatorship that lasted decades. But that’s a story for another time.
Did I ever tell you I was raised by gypsies? It’s not true.
But it did make a good explanation for my eerie powers.
Let me begin from the start, the way beginning usually works. Back in college, I needed a way to make money fast. I headed to the Firestone at the end of my block and offered my services part-time. The man behind the counter sized me up. At last he expanded from his sitting position and grew to his full size, wiry and tall, like Abraham Lincoln as seen through the bottom of a crackpipe. A massive hand grasped mine, and I was officially in the Firestone family (pursuant to witnessing 32 hours per month minimum of training videos, on probation until three months, you get the idea).
One fateful morning, a Caravan rolled in. The customer requested an alignment. I turned to Ed, the guy who handled the alignment rack that week, and told him that I think the front right tire’s camber spec was too far positive by about thirty five hundredths of a degree. Ed, as was his norm at the time, loudly expressed doubt at my ability to eyeball alignments and bet me fifty bucks I was wrong.
That’s how I became the alignment savant. A quick few months at Firestone turned into a full-time booth along the midway where I would “Guess Your Camber” or you could win a prize. I never lost, even when people came with uninflated tires or left a few lug nuts off. It was the greatest time of my life.
After a few months of that, however, the carnival told me that my entire operations was a little expensive on the pocketbook to run, what with the several thousand dollars of laser alignment rack they had to rent. I nodded my head, but in reality I was trying to figure out how far the door to the sideshow manager’s office was out of plumb.
Tonight, on “Dogs With Jobs:” Rufus, a Labrador Retriever employed by the CIA. He’s a master of psyops and strangling torture. Who’s a good boy, Rufus? That information is classified.
I switched off the television and rose to my feet, feeling a stress headache coming on. Nothing presented to me so far at this screener meeting had been even worth the thirty second blurbs I allowed myself to be exposed to. My admin assistant burst into the room, two tumblers of sherry and a crystal sampling bowl of percocets gently swaying on the silver platter she held aloft.
At lunch, I kept thinking about my situation. Working as acting director of programming for the number sixteen cable entertainment channel in North America was no easy job, and if I didn’t start doing it right, we were going to go under in less than a quarter. Fiscal mismanagement and other general incompetence of the boardroom brass had brought us to this point, but it was my duty to fix it.
I practically dropped my pastrami on rye as I gazed down the length of Third Street. At the end of it, a man was doing infinite four wheel burnouts, the acrid smoke of annihilated rubber nose-tangible even from blocks away. What else could I do? Racing to the scene, I shouted the first sixteen words of my standard talent-retention contract before I ran out of breath and turned the rest into a red-faced wheeze.
The man stopped his burnout, climbed out of the welded-shut doors of his rusted Baja Bug swaying gently on monster-truck tires, and stared at me. It was hard to understand him through the face mask, but he asked me if I wanted to buy the film rights to his blog?
At the awards gala that year, receiving endless prize after endless prize for my “faux-reality” show, other show creators asked me where they could find someone to generate such creative lies. I just smiled.
1988: The speeding rate in the United States rises four hundred percent.
The once great city of New York becomes the one vmax racetrack for the entire country. A fifty foot Armco wall is erected along the New Jersey shoreline, across the Harlem River, and down along the Brooklyn shoreline. All bridges and waterways are speed radared.
The United States Highway Patrol, like an army, is encamped around the island.
There are no marshals on the island: only racers and the culture they have made.
The rules are simple:
[..] Non-standard brake rotors may be used provided they are of equal or larger dimensions (diameter and thickness) and made of ferrous material (e.g., iron). Thickness includes the individual plates of a vented rotor, as well as the overall dimension. The diameter for replacement rotors is measured at the minimum outside dimension. Aluminum rotor hats are allowed. Cars originally equipped with solid (non-vented) rotors may utilize vented rotors. Cross-drilled and/or slotted brake rotors may be fitted provided all such voids are within the disc area and comprise no more than 10% of that area. Brake calipers and mounting brackets may be replaced provided they bolt to the standard locations and the number of pistons is equal to or greater than standard. A functioning emergency brake of the same type, operation, and actuation as OE must be present. Drum brakes may be replaced with disc brakes of a diameter equal to or greater than the inside diameter of the standard drum. Such conversions must be bolted, not welded, to the axle/trailing arm/upright and must include an integral, redundant emergency brake. Changes to backing plates/dust shields/brake lines to accommodate these changes are permitted but may serve no other purpose. [.. CONTINUED ON NEXT 253 PAGES]
I am irredeemably bent by my lust for the most economical of econoboxes. When you show me plain grey fabric upholstery, a simple yet utilitarian dash, and maybe some kind of tape deck stereo, I am all over that shit. Things get even better if there’s some kind of exotic cupholder, loose-parts cargo net - sweet Jesus, map pockets with thick-woven faux lambswool inside - or latching binnacle between the front seats. Those front wheel drives with bouncing McPherson Struts, of which I have spoken before.
When you drive an economical daily driver to work, you’re not just driving yourself to work. No, my friend, you are entering into the most precious partnership Western society has ever engineered - that of a man and his daily driver. The sky above you gazes down upon an efficient and practical way to get to work, sometimes even with a little bit of style beneath the glimmering steel carapace courtesy of a performance part or upgraded sound system. The mind boggles.
But there is another. I speak now to you of the winter beater.
O, the Winter Beater. Even now the weight of those words leaving my lips makes my heart race and my fingers tremble. To speak of it in polite company is to invite confusion. Who would ever want a winter beater, they ask. You can just keep driving your regular daily driver in the winter. But they just don’t understand. They don’t get you. I don’t think they’ll ever understand me.
Imagine now an era where men were dominated by a fear of nature, and you will understand: the Winter Beater stands head and shoulders above the conventional fair-weather Daily Driver. An econobox, but in worse condition. Park with impunity! Make the normals fear your holed-out muffler and Swiss cheesed rocker panels as you drift lazily around a corner, narrowly missing an all-terrain-shod minivan and violently fishtailing city bus!
In nature, there is the food chain. Atop the food chain is the greatest apex predator to have ever existed: man. Man has always constructed tools, and as in nature his tools must too have a chain of supremacy. Atop the tool chain is the Winter Beater.
What could I say about my brief love affair with a girl named B210? She lured me in with her schoolbus-yellow flanks, the never-say-die playfulness on her federally mandated sealed beam headlights, the peeling aspirated metal of her battery tray. If it wasn’t love, don’t tell me what it was, because I’m not listening.
We met so very long ago, her with a For Sale sign taped crookedly in her rear window, me with a surprising amount of liquid cash in my pocket. I negotiated with her chaperone intensely, using my traditional method of waving cash and yelling. The dowry was at last accepted, and we began our life together.
With her, I drove everywhere. The store, the bank, the office. Yup, that was pretty much it, because immediately after I purchased her I found an ad on Kijiji where a dude wanted to trade an ‘81 Malibu wagon for something old, manual and RWD.
If you asked anyone I had gone to school with, they’d tell you that politics in the public eye wasn’t my sort of thing. No, I was more of a sleazy background kind of person, setting up character assassinations in private, reveling in opposition research, letting people with a functional smile and more prominent chins take the forefront. Something about politics changed these last few years, or maybe it was me.
Well, okay, it was that the city started using road salt. A lot of road salt. The first time I saw a speck of rust appearing on the dented quarter panel of my lifted Lada Signet, I lost it a little bit, I’m going to tell you the truth right now.
I stormed directly down to City Hall, where I encountered a throng of protesters. Imagine my surprise when I found out they weren’t upset about road salt after all, but instead something called “economic inequality.” That wasn’t going to do at all. Fabricating an impromptu podium from empty milk crates and an abandoned camp stove, I addressed the crowd.
Seizing control of the narrative from the patchouli-soaked dreadlock-havers club at the front of the crowd, I directed them - implored them - to use violence to get my way. There’s a magic in crowds, my old political-science professor used to say. He was right, I think, as the mob burst into the mayor’s office, waving cudgels and bludgeons as they tore gold leaf off of every square inch of exposed furniture within reach.
Weeks later, I was relaxing in my garage’s study when I heard the sound of a front-wheel-drive open differential failing to get adequate traction. I smiled, and patted the Lada’s front fender, reassuring it that I would always stand up for its rights.
My phone vibrated insistently, telling me about a high-dollar vintage Japanese car tour of Orange County that was kicking off within the year. They wanted me to show off my most esteemed of Showa-era J-tin, and stressed that safe driving and responsible car ownership was responsible.
With an opener like that, there was really no other option than to pull out the Slur. Once, this car was proud to call itself a Datsun 610, but after having its workaday Soviet-gulag quarter panels sawed out and replaced by absurd carbon-fiber IMSA box flares and the engine replaced by half a dozen liters of General Motors motivation, to call it such was to minimize its true nature.
The Slur rumbled to life, stirred from its long dormancy with a pair of jumper cables and the beater with the angriest alternator I could summon up on short notice. In time, all eight of its side pipes sang, the lopey idle awkwardly finding its feet and building to a crescendo that rattled the foundation of the abandoned pre-recession garage I had nestled it lovingly within.
I gazed over its rattle-can paint job, the colour some kind of industrial high-grip safety paint once intended to keep the unaware from sticking their limbs into running machinery. The paint was already blistering on the rocker panels where sky-high-EGT exhaust afterfires baked it on upshifts, and I made a mental note to ask 3M if they made any progress on that high-temperature Bondo I called them about last week.
At the trailhead of the kyusha meet, I met with a group of Datsun Roadster owners who alternated between revulsion and arousal at the presence of the Slur. Suddenly, there was a sharp crack from the thicket behind, and the corporeal form of Mr. K returned to us, glowing with an ethereal light from beyond this world.
“Nice car,” he said. “Too bad it has such a shit engine.”
Behind him was the unmistakable, unhinged-jaw scream of a TC24 crossflow head.
After the latest bureaucrat looked over my proposal with scornful eyes, cast their gaze across my insurance documentation, and met me with a firm no, I was pretty much ready to pop. Getting a motorsports venue in this city was hard enough already, but negotiating with these morons was something else.
Back at home in the race cave, I looked at poster-size images of my former parking-lot glory, crude magnetic numbers slapped onto the side of what ended up being a surprisingly expensive “stock” Miata. I nursed my whisky sour, shaking the cubes in the bottom of the glass as I contemplated a way out of the current mess.
At once it occurred to me. I would stage a parade. But not just any parade. A parade for children. Yes indeed, I would lead those children through a maze of cones, at high speed, while strapped to the front of a car.
That Thursday, I visited the autocross clubhouse, a stolen child in hand to demonstrate the masterful simplicity of my solution. The presentation went off without a hitch, I thought, but then a hand shot up at the back. Of course, I saw, a grognard.
My blood ran cold and then turned to frothing white-hot rage as he illustrated in point form, counting each one off on his fingers, which SCCA classes a child duct-taped to the hood is illegal in. It turns out it was all of them. The crowd burst into murmurs, trying to figure out how they could properly rebuild their cars to not only run in the new venue, but cheat effectively.
I left that meeting frustrated, pinching my temples at how they could deny such a fantastic venue for the smallest rulebook quibble. It was then that an unshaven, caveman-like person approached me. The Subaru owner, mid-vape, asked me if I would consider having a children’s cancer parade on dirt instead.
We were deep in the bowels of the American Dream and the prognosis was grim. My compatriot turned to me, expressed discontent with the way tonight was turning out. I only had a mild half-shrug for him, returning my eyes to the road as the rain beat down on us.
Everything had started out alright. One of my debtors had finally decided to cough up the vig I had given him after multiple trips to the junkyard and offering to “get it all on one bill” with my falsified student discount card. To my surprise, the debt was repaid in the form of one (1) Rolls Royce Silver Shadow II, 1987 edition. Turns out that one of his debtors had refused to pony up the cash to put fancy new tires under his fancy old car, and left it to him in what I can only assume was a game of Russian roulette.
What do you do when someone hands you a Rolls Royce that’s effectively free because of your lax accounting standards? You sawzall out the fenders and put 33 inch Super Swampers under the car, of course. Rides like a dream. Rides like the American dream, which brings us back to the start of the story.
Before our trip to visit America, the glorified and vaunted land of Trump, we expected great things from the restaurant known as Hardee’s. But we were oh so wrong. Our voyage ended in tragedy before it had even begun, unless your definition of success involves doing savage neck-snapping burnouts in a stripped, caged and primed 80s Rolls Royce on off-road tires.
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tags: rolls royce, american dream, super swampers
My fellow raiders and I decided to have an impromptu conference to discuss our shared aims and goals for the next quarter of business. I wore my finest bandana, emblazoned with the crudely drawn wax-dyed vacuum hose diagram of a 1976 CVCC engine. The meeting room could be nothing other than our Toyota Hilux prerunner, burping wet nitrous afterfire farts into the atmosphere whenever the throttle was released in anticipation of an impending whoop.
Boneripper brought up an excellent point. He had mentioned in confidence the previous week that our competitors were moving towards attempts to bolster their water-collector with fungus-farm synergies, and we should consider making a shot across their bow. When we brought the matter to conference, it was enthusiastically accepted.
At that time, A gang of Trumpites issued an intent to pursue a hostile takeover, forcing our staff to re-align the project objectives with our corporate value statement and open fire on the lifted-on-33s rusted-out Merkur Scorpio.
I found myself trapped in the foyer of my palatial New England mansion, cornered by a Volvo biodegradable wiring harness. Somehow, I knew that this was the cause of my problems. I could hear the far off cries of my loved ones, begging me to defeat the dreaded cable snakes and return to regular life with them.
In past nightmares of this sort, I always found myself able to be jolted awake, to leave the awkwardness and confusion of the dream state for the stark terror of waking life. As the Volvo’s engine harness began to rot before my eyes, introducing confusing lambda-sensor issues that would ultimately result in the failure of the LH-Jetronic ECU’s ability to keep order in the combustion chamber, I saw flashes of expensive parts visits to ipd. But then he appeared.
The angel of death stood before me and the harness now, and reached down.
“Sorry,” he said to me, “this one’s time has come.”
What Death didn’t know about my mansion was that I was never ten feet away from a breaker bar, ratcheting or otherwise. With a lightning-fast flail of the hand, I had knocked him to the ground and escaped with my prey.
The only way to keep this innocent Volvo redblock safe from wiring harness demons was to put it into something reliable. Well known. Well trod. But what?
Lightning struck in the background, illuminating the supple curves of a Fox body notchback. It had been saddled since birth with the secretary-spec twinspark 2.3, I knew, an engine meant for forklifts and light-duty pickup trucks. I lofted the block above my head, having subconsciously matched transmission bolt patterns. As if the Mustang sensed my intent, its hood flipped open.
When I woke up, my pillow was gone, and my credit card was maxed out. What does it mean?
Recently, certain individuals have asked me: do you realize what you are missing in modern, comfortable cars that other people own? Do you want to keep throwing your life away in obscure beaters with expensive parts? Do you ever want to connect with another normal human being again?
Yes, I plead with them, of course I want to rejoin them and regain my lost humanity. Obviously the best course is to buy a normal car like everyone else. I consult the internet to find out what the most popular cars are, and my dark work begins.
Weeks later, I am at the grocery store, purchasing groceries for my body. A woman is there in line. I think that this is a perfect opportunity; she is surely a normal person and I can practice talking to normal people about their cars, which is a thing normal people do. What else would they talk about? She notices that I am staring at her and beginning to profusely sweat.
“Hello, I notice you have a Honda,” I say, the sweat bouncing off my upper lip. “I also have Honda. It is a nice reliable, dependable car that does nothing in particular very well. I find it extremely adequate for my transportation needs and hope that you do as well.”
Our conversation continues to the parking lot: she is wide-eyed and shaking, enraptured by my common-man plain speaking about cars. Finally, I think, this is my ticket to societal acceptance. At last we come across my car, an early-90s Civic hatchback with most of its body panels hacked out and replaced with carbon fiber (normal people appreciate fuel economy) and a methanol-injected twin turbocharged J-series V6 (normal people appreciate power as well).
“Goodbye, sir or madam!” I yell into a haze of dump pipe screams as I depart the parking lot, liquefying all four semi-slick racing tires under the pavement-cracking torque load. “Congratulations on your normalcy!”
At last, I was mad as hell and could not take it anymore. I went to my mentor. He spoke of a city council that functioned just like a machine, and just like a machine, it could be modified, twisted, warped by those who are aware. I nodded and left his ramshackle temple, and his Suzuki Jimny perched atop a moss carpet, behind.
Perhaps the fates intervened that night; a front-lit signboard on the town hall lawn proudly stated that the police were having an “enforcement community meeting” of some sort. I strode confidently in, and took the temperature of the room. Retirees and the under-stimulated alike filled the small auditorium, issuing absurdly specific demands for traffic enforcement, to protect the children, our nation’s future.
I tapped the shoulder of the moderator, and got my name on the short list. The goal was in sight, I thought, perched like a spider on the edge of my office-supply-store folding chair, fingers tented in anticipation. Then it happened: my name, the starting gun. There are, no joking, dozens of gold medalist sprinters who would have given their left nut to get to the podium as fast as I did.
“Now I’m just a small-town country lawyer,” I began to say, snapping my suspenders, “but it seems to me the real problem is left lane hogs.”
A gasp in the audience. One man at the back stood up, screaming in an inarticulate rage at the very concept that someone might go ten under in the left lane while he’s trying to get to the handjob palace off I-85. I addressed him now.
“Sir, you seem to have a good head about you. How about we form a citizens’ oversight committee for the traffic police? We can make the left lane great again.”
More inarticulate rage, then noises of general agreement. Out of the two of us, I was probably a shoo-in for spokesman, but it was time to seal the deal. Pivoting on my heel, I ratcheted to the chief of police, confused at the drama that was unfolding before him in what was up to this moment a normal town hall. I pointed, and he knew then that I had him, his police cap bouncing jovially into the air as he was taken aback.
“From this moment on, our town will be a place where the common man is no longer held back by those who drive luxury crossovers and weave between multiple lanes at once while looking at their phones. If you do not comply with our demands, we will form a vigilante traffic enforcement group and exterminate the left lane hog menace.”
With a few more minutes of grandstanding, I had the crowd on my side, their confused rambling now growing into a raging chant of DESTROY EVERY MDX, driven by my newfound partner. My mentor was right, I thought, as our angry mob ambled into the parking lot, overturning and torching a Toyota Venza. Democracy was the fastest way to get what I wanted.
#
tags: democracy, toyota venza, toyota, acura, acura mdx, suzuki jimny, suzuki, the handjob palace off of I-85, make the left lane great again
“Your qualifications are impressive, your resume flawless and your references all checked out. Welcome to Tai Yong Medical Industries LLC,” chirped the HR drone as they surveyed my nonplussed countenance and outstanding credentials with a sense of barely comprehending awe.
When I saw that they were looking for a new batch of engineers to work on prosthetic limbs, I jumped at the chance. As frequent readers of this column know, I like nothing more than to give back to society. For instance, I once held a door open for a grandmother after laying three inches of tire rubber across the handicapped spots with a nitromethane-injected Manic GT in the parking lot of a Kay Bee Toys. She was extremely grateful, I told my court-ordered psychologist at the time. I was a good guy, not like literally everyone with a Cummins.
On my first day, after the normal orientation, I was walking by the meeting rooms to refresh my coffee. That’s when I saw it, hung on the wall. An imperfect design, obvious from two hundred paces or more. They could never go into production with it. With my trusty company-supplied mechanical pencil in hand, I made alterations for reliability, power and economy. Just because a person had lost a limb, I would explain later to Congress, there was no reason they shouldn’t be able to get a little power bump when they swapped on a new part.
Months later, we were all invited to an exciting blowout party to demonstrate the latest and greatest from the firm. A lithe model stepped out wielding our new mechanical arm, swaying gently under the unfortunate excess weight added by my ministrations. As she lifted her arm, the sound of an unmuffled external wastegate screamed, overrich fuel ejecting from the dump pipe in a flaming cloud.
A cry rose up from the crowd, confused and angered. In a vain attempt to redirect the confusion, one of the heroic marketing flacks jumped into the fray, reading in a panicked voice from the teleprompter.
“It is true that with her new mechanical arm, she can… shift gears… in less than a twentieth of a second,” he screamed into the gossiping crowd.
By now, my coworkers have determined through interim office conversations, water cooler talk, and coffee runs that I am perhaps one of the eccentric-orbit kind of engineers. They turn to me now, understanding fully what the extra thirty thousand dollars per unit cost was.
At last, my line manager steps forward and confronts me.
“I just have one question,” he says, brow furrowing, “do you really know the part number for a ZZ4 crate engine by heart?”
“Tax refund season, boys,” I bark over the dentist-on-hallucinogens shriek of the nitro-fired sawzall as I tear into a primo Skyline quarter panel. This baby will net a mint a week before Race Wars, I figure. I release the trigger and grip, and the sawzall slides gently and smoothly backward in its tactical webbing.
I shake my fist and Harbour Fright breaker bar menacingly in equal measure at the jackals who would deprive me of my precious junkyard wheelbarrow - I got here early for this, you leeches! - and head for the checkout. It’s a beautiful day today, and the uninterrupted field of glistening windshields all around me throw up images of the clear blue sky above. A lesser man would cry at the sight, I think, as I scrub up with the complimentary non-name-brand orange cleaner and embark upon the great unsung ordeal of the checkout line.
At last, I depart the long, winding road leading out of the self-pull yard, dodging fragments of shattered parts removed from half-running hoopties in the parking lot. Once, a million years ago, I tell the teenagers on Orientation Day, their new drivers’ licenses and worn out beaters glinting in the spring sunshine, I saw a man change an entire truck cab in the parking lot with only hand tools and a lot of swearing. They can scarcely believe me.
Yes indeed, I love the junkyard, even when I notice on my way out that next weekend is fifty percent off day. I mentally tally how much I would have saved, and grimace.
It was always hard for me to talk about my thing with Mustangs. Sometimes, I woke up in the middle of the night, the veins in my forearms jumping out of my skin, craving some of that sweet, sweet Fox body action. In a strange inversion of the social compact it was the peer pressure that kept me from giving in to my mental flaws.
Believe me, I wanted nothing more than to shut the windows, shut the doors and begin a journey down the endless spiral of baby-moons-on-steelies police-package notchback culture. It was my friends who stopped me from doing it, making note when they saw me ratchet my head to check out an oh-so-cheap V6 SN95 that only needed a little bit of work. Hairdresser cars, they said with more than a note of scandal-about-town, have you seen how low their redlines are?
In a way, I guess the Mustang has always had an unearthly hold over me. As far back as I can remember, my fixation with Iacocca’s Paradox gripped my heart and mind. Schoolteachers would call on guidance counsellors would call on resource officers would call on social workers would call on adoptive parents to check out why it was that I had such an urge to purchase, drive, and abuse Mustangs.
There was nothing to do but escape the haters, who, as the aphorism states, are gonna hate. Beneath the pale red light of an ominous morning, I drove to the boonies, to escape the criticisms and structures of ordered society. It was only there that I could confront my addiction, or be destroyed by it.
I awoke, weeks later, before a pair of Capris crudely welded together on a single frame. Had I failed myself? I flipped through notebook after notebook, but only found the crudely scrawled writing of an increasingly unhinged man: “TWO PONIES ENTER ONE BURNOUT LEAVES.”
Some time in the future, you may have the opportunity to serve as a juror in a censorship or a so-called emissions case. It would be wise to remember that the same people who would stop you from recreating my tumblr may be back next year to complain about spark plug anti-foulers, or even aftermarket engine computers. If you can be told what you explode in the combustion chamber to make torque, then it follows that you can be told to explode nothing at all. Defend your gearhead rights - no one else will do it for you. Thank you, and please use more anti-seize.
The sweat was pooling around my chin in the 3M 6800 rebreathing mask. It was difficult work, sucking in oxygen through the S-20006 filters meant to keep out everything down to mercury vapour. "It’s for your own safety, and that of your family,“ the government-stooge-slash translator told me, fresh from his last job at TEPCO. Ever since the Fukushima disaster brought the world’s attention to Japan’s aging infrastructure, their collective sense of shame had finally spurred them to action despite their shrinking economy and useless anime infatuated youth. That’s where I came in, an outsider, specialized foreign labour with actual muscles able to work the tools these tiny fascinating people could only gawk at. I felt like a 17 year old ringer with a mustache in little league.
The industrial disaster zone that I was assigned to once belonged to some car company. I hadn’t really heard of them, but they assured me they were pretty big in the west. Honda? What the fuck is a Honda? like a little stripey cat or something? Give me a Cougar or a Thunderbird any day. I tried to get an explanation of what we were cleaning up here from the stooge, he wasn’t very forthcoming, mumbling something about ‘electron friction surface tension’, and walking away quickly. Resigned to my ignorance, I spent most of my days working an enormous breaker bar, unthreading one of the many gigantic hex nuts holding down a huge flange with four hundred bolts through it. My diminutive coworkers, probably press-ganged from the local pachinko parlour, toiled in gangs of four, heaving on a five meter cheater bar. Whatever was in this gigantic half buried cylinder must be pretty awful stuff.
Finally, the last nut yielded to the force I was exerting on it. The 20cm thick flange quickly twisted like a beer can and squealed like only heavy metal plate is capable of. My pulse raced and my eyes darted back and forth in a lizard brain fight-or-flight response as I tried to figure out what was in there. We felt the earth shake. Earthquake? No, it felt different from the other tremors I had experienced in my time on the 'Rim. It felt like… speed. Yes, that was it, the sun was moving across the sky a little faster. This was the place where Honda had dumped all the excess torque from their engines during the tuning process, that explains why all my coworkers were running away like something out of a Looney Tunes short, they thought it was dangerous poison.
I knew better, but I still didn’t really want to think about how well my mask’s filters worked on an ethereal unit of measure.
Years ago, he said, a Dodge engineer was out here. They were testing a Dart prototype on gravel roads, went down the wrong turn, and was consumed. Consumed, I asked, but the old man was already onto a new topic. He had more grim portents and dire warnings for me, I was certain, but my schedule was tight enough as it was and so I bid him farewell. As I receded I could hear the words of his incomprehensible ramble bouncing off the tin walls of the junkyard’s sales trailer.
Driving for hours out here changed a man. Distances became harder to read, you can no longer trust your own sense of sleep deprivation. I had been driving for hours to get out to this little junkyard; perhaps it was time for rest and relaxation. A small town’s sign flickered past on the highway, advertising no actual services except for a part-time gas station. It would do better than hitting a highway embankment, I figured.
I pulled into the diner, ordered a Monte Cristo. It was succulent yet crisp, emblematic of the inherent discord at the heart of quality cuisine. Partway through my first half of the sandwich, I saw a bricknose Ford start up on the edge of the parking lot, its motor mounts sagging as the starter chucked its 351 into life. It’s strange how memory plays tricks on you. I felt a strange pull towards the light-duty pickup and could not stop looking at it, sensing something was different.
And different it was.
The Ford turned sharply and exited the lot, without the smallest perceptible bit of power steering whine. I immediately arose from my seat, placing my hands on the window and staring at the truck as it departed on the main drag.
That’s when the other occupants of the diner realized I was not one of them. I was of a strange rotation to their natural vibration, not of the correct breeding to be privy to their secrets. They turned on me then, as if guided by a single mind.
I barely escaped the diner with the use of my wits, a butter knife, and an ABC fire extinguisher purloined in haste from the kitchen. With the adrenaline pumping through my veins, I knew it was no longer necessary to stay here for the night, and as such placed an ever-increasing amount of distance between my rear bumper and the site of that fateful strangeness.
Once I had escaped, I thought long and hard about what it was exactly that I had witnessed. I knew that it was an unnatural thing for a Ford to have a silent power steering pump, but I also sensed in my bones that in this part of the world, perhaps the ley lines of purestrain weirdness had converged beneath that small town.
I miss that Monte Cristo sandwich sometimes, even when I think back upon it and realize it tasted a lot like a Dodge engineer.
#
tags: in strange aeons even fords may steer, monte cristo sandwich
Make no mistake about it, turkeys are the most devious beasts the human race has ever seen. Why, I once saw a wild turkey rip a man’s face clean off. Yeah. Now I see the fear in your eyes. Pull up a chair, and let me tell you the story of how I got revenge.
The year was ‘72, or ‘73. It was a dry summer, either way. Out on the farm, things were getting bad - the water for the cows was evaporating right out of the tubs, the lawn was burnt - the usual sort of thing. My father came to me and told me to head to the market and pick up a few animals from his business partner, who was selling a kind of livestock that used less water. At the time, I figured he was an early innovator as far as being a “water wise” farmer went, but in retrospect I realize he was just cheap.
I borrowed the family farm truck. Back then, you see, we didn’t have such luxuries as leather or dampers in our trucks: they were for work and impromptu spinal alignments only. Its rattletrap engine was always one foot in the grave, and trying to shift the three-on-the-tree reminded me of swimming in pudding laced with glass shards. That said, that old truck got us to and from market, where hopefully I would find the farm’s salvation.
As these things go, I pressed the flesh and made amends at the market, and I was in due course told to seek out old Tom, who also just happened to be the half-unhinged former business partner of my father. We never figured out what made him that way, but on that day I would see a new side of him, a different way of being.
Tom was an immense man, the sort of man that in different times would have been considered a leader just because of his physiology. But our world was changing, and he wasn’t. I asked him what was up with his turkeys, and to pick out two for our family farm. Obediently, he leaned over the fence to the pen, his meaty paws reaching for the gangliest-looking turkeys to scam my dad with. With a prompt boot to the ass, I sent him sailing.
As his body descended into the turkey pen, the flesh stripping like wrapping paper from the bone, I looked down at him. His screams were inaudible over the furious gobbling, deafening even the snoopiest onlooker. I could barely comprehend the series of actions that had led up to this point. Sweeping my arm across his desk, I loaded my rucksack with the blood-soaked detritus of his business administration, just as I had been told.
Returning to my father, he said nothing but put a hand on my shoulder, and looked proud. For the first time, I had done the right thing, and forever from then on, I would get a little weepy at Thanksgiving.
I had a problem, and it wasn’t easy to solve it. If you asked anyone, they would tell you that I was always interested in learning new things. But on this project, there was so much to learn. But after several months of late nights and weekends spent at the local public library, I knew enough to be dangerous.
An uncaring sky loomed overhead as the neon rain fell onto my canary-yellow Lotus Elite, its spackled fibreglass body cutting an inspiring shape in the night. At last, I returned home and, stretching my hands, I slipped on leather fingerless gloves and began my dark work.
Breaking into the mainframe was easy enough; my adherence to the public library had taught me all the fundamentals of computer security. But to get further, I had to understand just how my quarry thought, worked, lived. I realized with a start that it was surprisingly easy - perhaps once they were like me, so many years ago. At last, I had delivered the payload. I worked quickly to cover my tracks.
Perhaps I had been too dramatic in my changes. The next morning, the entire internet was abuzz with news of my great hack. In the office, I passed by a plasma TV from a prior decade, excitedly relaying CNN.
At the bottom of the screen, implacable: “BMW RECALLS CARS FOR FUNCTIONAL TURN SIGNALS.”
An executive of the automaker was on now, apologizing for the fact that their cars’ turn signals had not only become functional, but automatic - making the operators of the cars reliable and safe members of society. Naturally, the phone calls to BMW headquarters by said operators started immediately, at first querying as to what the strange clicking noise and flashing arrows on the dashboard were for, and then, when told, exploding in white-hot rage. He blamed some strange virus that had been installed in their mainframe by an unknown saboteur, possibly an orphaned fringe element loyal to the discredited Saab brand.
Saab? I wrinkled my nose in disgust, offended that anyone would compare me to those parked-in-reverse, middle-keying, magnesium-axle maniacs. As I looked away from the screen for the first time, I realized that one of my coworkers had been watching me the entire time. He knew, and I could see him raise his keyless-entry fob to his mouth and speak softly into it.
The Elite rippled under hard acceleration as I left the office and my former life behind. In a few miles, I would switch the Lotus for one of the beater cars I had hidden around the periphery of the city and start anew in a town more amenable to front-wheel drive. Ahead of me, a 740i signalled correctly and returned to the right lane politely, leaving adequate following distance for the Protege it had passed. I smiled.
They told me there was a $600 Citroen ID19. That’s not funny, I told them. It was like telling a meth addict you had a big hearty dose of chocolate-covered Sudafeds in your closet. Of course, they thought it was hilarious. Flipped the switch, pushed a print-out of the ad across the table and my mind exploded.
So much possibility. So much junk. No picture. Bad seller? Yeah, bad seller. Maybe abandoned project? Had to be. So many unique parts. Hydraulic spheres, broken valve tappets, soft valve seats that couldn’t deal with the brutal strain of unleaded. That’s when they tightened the noose on me. My captor slid six hundred dollars in crisp plastic twenties across the table, tapped on it, told me it was “a bonus.” The monster.
He got what he wanted. The Citroen was mine. They receded behind the one-way glass at the side of the garage, watched me to go to work. For a year of my life I dedicated myself to constructing this awful beast before them, collapsing on the oil-stained creeper for a quick nap in between bouts of productivity and pointless web surfing. At last it was complete. I could scarcely look myself in the face anymore, my own reflection twisted with untamed hair growth and the feral eyes of a trapped mountain lion.
Before me was my shackle, but in a way it was my freedom, as well. The hydraulic system of the ID19 was just what I needed; a few web orders to Princess Auto to liberate their hydraulics department of foot-thick stainless steel pressurization rams was a worthy upgrade. When my captor returned, wanting me to explain the Citroen’s strange transformation to him, he attempted to make me comply with use of the shock collar. I fixated on the twin-supercharged LM7 bursting forth from the Citroen’s once-domed hood to make it through my ordeal.
As my captor retreated from the room, always facing his back to the wall and never losing sight of my hands, another man entered. It seemed the Project was over. Through careful observation of me, they had discovered what was wrong with me. They had a cure, he said, wielding a syringe. I could be normal again, and all the others like me could be productive members of society and with our energies and knowledge propel humanity into a new golden age of unlimited potential if only we would let go of our hydrocarbon-induced brain damage.
The Citroen slammed through the back of the garage, scattering equipment and personnel across the underground tunnels of the surrounding facility. They had tried to install a kill switch in the Gallic murder machine, I noted, during one of the fitful rests I had taken during the construction. It didn’t quite take, except for breaking the stereo. Just as well: it’s not like it would have been audible over the cackling resonators at the end of the car’s side-exit exhaust.
As I re-entered the light of day, I reflected on what had transpired as the long-throw hydraulic suspension ran gently over the bodies of the base’s so-called guards. There was nothing wrong with what I was doing: the ID19 was the logical choice, elegance and poise mixed in the ultimate package of 50s futurism. What did they want me to do, rebuild an automatic?
I hit the nitrous oxide like Frank Booth, and for a moment I’m not sure if the furious clattering aft of my four inch dump pipe is the sound of envy or rods hitting the tarmac. It doesn’t really matter, I think now, slithering the eight-ball shifter into the next gear and finishing off the throw with a deft sideways flick of the wrist as I step to the next lane.
The cluster of gold rings on my left hand shimmers in the wan beams of the dying fluorescents backlighting the hellish nightscape that lies ahead. I work the wheel like a million launches before, teaching the oversprung rear end that weight transfer happens according to my will and not those of a commoner’s dusted-over physics textbook.
I swing the car across two lanes of parking spots, sliding to a perfect stop next to the cart corral. Flawless, I think, walking backwards so I can admire the sublime lines of the 2002 Chevy Metro hatchback for just a few seconds more before entering the Home Depot.
You look like the kind of guy who has discerning taste. Let me tell you the story of how I killed Joe Isuzu, the beloved character who promoted such standout warm rods as the Impulse, the Rodeo and even the feared Hombre.
The year was next year. It’s going to get a little weirder from here on out, but the important thing is that as I explain it you focus on my words and not the secondary or tertiary implications of my words. Do not attempt to adjust your set; there is no set, and if there somehow is, you don’t want to touch it.
I was cruising down near Guadalupe, having headed down there to pick up one of the last of the B13 Nissan Tsurus in an attempt to create a clean-sheet SE-R in accordance with the waking peyote dreams that dogged me through the preceding months. It wasn’t an inspirational car as delivered: the broad-chested highport SR20DE screamer had been replaced with an efficient one-point-something that probably promoted the existence of fiscal restraint. Luckily, the product planners had cheaped out in the right ways otherwise, and left me with a pleasant medium-ratio manual steering rack that filled my hands with feedback.
As I came upon a clearing, I noticed a solitary man standing on the shoulder. I don’t know why I stopped; perhaps I did it for the story. Upon further analysis, the man was determined to be a dissheveled Joe Isuzu, left to die in Mexico after his parent company’s hasty retreat from North America. He looked at me and clumsily attempted to regain the ability to speak English.
“You know,” he said, his jaw swimming horizontally in a sinusoidal pattern, “the Isuzu Impulse Turbo is much faster than this, and over six thousand dollars cheaper.”
“Joe,” I said, “It’s 2017. Isuzu has been gone for eight years.”
He outreached his hand, and I could see the bloodshot sclera of his eyes as he reached for me through the passenger side window, a shaking cipher from a forgotten era. Then he turned to dust, enormous flakes of ash blowing away alongside the tumbleweeds, loft gently in the desert wind.
On the talk show circuit, they all asked me if I regretted what I had done. They asked me if it was a horrible weight on my back to have broken the dream of a better America, a number-five Japanese automaker that could have been a contender. I tell them the same thing every time.
There was nothing like a Firebird for the open road. Sure, the Camaro adherents would wail and claw at their faces until they drew blood, begging to tell you about the model-specific details that somehow made their poodle-shit-brown Z/28s the superior road racing and street driving machine. But the Firebird had an understated elegance about it, at least until I came into the picture.
My ‘74 was something a little different. I had come across it in a rural yard years prior, the plastic bumpers stripped beyond their primer, the rest of the body in a calico mixture of whatever the Canadian Tire spray paint aisle had on sale after the most recent impact. The carpet was long gone, and I did my duty, replacing it with a thick film of textured bedliner (for grip) and installing atop it six-point Recaros latched onto a harness bar the thickness of a dog’s skull.
On the highway, it was loud, to be certain. The sound deadening of the bedliner wasn’t enough to cover up the massive gashes I had driven into the wheelwells to allow for the obscene prolapse of its knobby kevlar Wranglers on GMC truck rally wheels. The huge offroad tires’ carcasses squealed and chewed as they distorted under the cruel yoke of the Prozac-beating hum of the well-balanced 327.
We were in Langdon, on a special assignment from the Organization. Had things not worked out the way our ideals promoted in those early heady days? It was hard to tell, now, in the 37th consecutive month of the Project. I pulled the Firebird into a service station, its fuel gauge and our nerves both on their last pip.
My travelling companion and enforcer stepped out of the car as I released the remote fuel door, striding confidently towards the attached convenience store. In the daylight-beating fluorescent glow, I squeezed the filler trigger a little harder than normal, keeping my head on a swivel for anything that even moderately resembled threat.
At last my vigilance was rewarded - if that’s the right word for it. Across the lot, I could see a 1980s Range Rover Classic wake up, stirring gently on its seeping air shocks. I set the trigger lock on the filler and kneeled as if to tie my shoe. What the Range Rover didn’t see was my special utility box cut into the rockers of the Firebird. I got the idea from a truck ad, and always figured this day would come.
The biometric authenticator beeped happily. It flipped the mag-latch open, and my prize dropped into my hand, like an overdetailed resin model of a pregnant witch librarian in Osaka’s seediest Taito Arcade. I barely got a chance to pull the trigger before the Range Rover broadsided the Firebird, the impact catapulting me backward across the grass median and off a light standard. I could feel the acrid tang of copper in my mouth as I smiled, knowing the Range Rover driver had gotten it so much worse than me.
One happy morning in the distant past, a proud mother in New England held her newborn child in her arms, and imagined great things for him. What I’m almost certain she didn’t count on was that he would be murdered by two thousand three hundred and thirty five pounds per square inch of concussive force across his body from a distance of seventeen feet.
I ratcheted the freewheeling head on the force driver to charge it, spinning it like a trainee cheerleader’s overeager baton routine. Slowly returning to my feet, I didn’t break line of sight with the driver or what was left of the cockpit around him.
My partner, the enforcer, the one who was supposed to deal with this kind of thing, returned from his piss break to find a crushed quarter panel on the Firebird and enough small pieces of a Range Rover thrown across the lot to choke an entire daycare.
“This station didn’t have turn signal bulbs either,” is all he can say to me.
#
tags: pontiac, firebird, range rover, force driver, kevlar wranglers
My mentor always spoke about how an eye for an eye would make the whole world blind. He was no fan of revenge, that was for sure. Under his tutelage I had learned so much about forgiving my enemies, loving them and dismissing their sins as the effects of an imperfect world upon imperfect people. When I left his protection, however, I discovered tailgaters.
It was an ordinary commute, normal as could be, except for the set of X5 twinkly-eyelash headlights and chrome-package grille filling my rear view mirror. The usual passive-aggressive engine braking and gentle loss of speed to below the road limit wasn’t working. Nope, this one was persistent, like a barnacle on an asshole. Something like that, at least.
Changing lanes, I allowed the behemoth safe passage. It filled the generous gap I had left between me and the car formerly in front, and immediately proceeded to tailgate the other car, a Corolla plastered with a homemade “New Driver” placard. I frowned. Tailgating a monster like me was one thing, but the injustice of making one’s formative years of newly discovered mobile freedom a living hell was something I could not abide.
I continued to follow the X5, well past my proper turn-off. The operator was oblivious, and I kept my distance, separated by a sea of econoboxes and shipping-container-sized urban CUVs. At last, they turned down a winding residential street, leading me to their home. I thought long and hard about what my mentor had said, considered turning the other cheek. In fact, I had contemplated this for so long that the sun set. It seemed my choice was made for me. If not providence, then convenience.
With a practiced, quick hand, I opened my glovebox and removed my gift for the tailgater. No, I would never damage another person’s car; that was for total douchebags, and I was only a court jester, living for the moment of satirical ribaldry that was the velvet glove slipped around total emotional destruction.
I do so enjoy going to Staples. I particularly like the pre-made magnet sheets. You could cut them to the perfect bumper-sticker size, and make up bumper stickers to put on them. Those bumper stickers could say anything - for instance, things like “THE HOLOCAUST NEVER HAPPENED” and “MY SON IS A GRAND DRAGON” in enormous red text.
In retrospect, if I had followed that X5 during the morning commute, I would have perhaps figured out where it parked during the day. My boss at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre had an extremely awkward morning when the regional supervisor happened to follow him into the parking lot.
After the fires had died down, I asked the regional supervisor if he followed my boss at a respectable distance. After all, it was pretty hard to cram all those words onto the sticker without shrinking the font size.
#
tags: bmw, toyota, corolla, x5, tailgating, passive-aggressive douchebaggery, i bet you go out and check your car's trunk after reading this
Like ancient times, the smoke signal beckoned me closer. I let the Bronco’s overstressed 460 lull itself into a deep torpor, dieseling gently as I pulled the key out of the ignition and stepped out on the running board. My sparkling bounty laid ahead, and like they said in Japan during my internship: whales taste really good.
On the side of the expressway, an RX-8 sat gently smouldering. I figured it for an R3, and asked the owner as such.
“What?” he screamed at me. “I don’t know what it is, it just set on fire while I was driving it. Can’t you put it out?”
I scratched my chin, looked at the copious fire-protection gear strapped to the internal rollcage of the Bronco, and back at the roaring Mazda fire.
“I’ll put it out if you let me buy it. Opening bid is a hundred dollars, and I suggest you decide quickly.”
Once again, I was struck down by own hubris. Squinting my eyes to see through the acrid smoke of the rapidly combusting interior, I saw an automatic gear selector perched atop the blistered centre console.
“On second thought, fire’s too good for it. Have yourself a nice day, friend.”
The Rambler thumps out two more licks of fire, and then is deathly still. I was alone in the forest, the pin-drop quiet seeming to settle into my bones alongside the growing cold.
All of the Federales I had dodged on my way here were probably aware that I had slipped their line by now, would be doubling back to come and look for me. There was no time to delay. I leapt from the plush imitation-zebra Recaros and strode confidently to the back of the car, the electric door poppers already launching the trunk lid into the air.
Within the cavernous yet tinny trunk, I knew, I would find my salvation. I would find the end to all this madness.
Squinting through the glare of the trunk’s annoyingly-named courtesy lights, I reached for my contraband, my fingers finding purchase on its tight paper wrap. Quick hands made quick work, and I stuffed it into the pre-arranged tree trunk.
The kevlar Wranglers spun up, kicking me backwards as the wail of the Rambler’s straight-cut reverse gear filled the cabin. I popped a J-turn and laid a tactical burnout to cover my tracks, then departed into the night.
With any luck, my contact would retrieve the loot and I would be allowed back into our secret club. Preserving my torrent ratio was essential, you see, and my home connection totally sucked for upload in the evenings.
They told me my money would be safe in blue chip funds, mutual funds, foreign currency funds, index funds. They were wrong. One after the other, as the economy burned out, I took a hit. How could I safely plan my retirement in a time of such utter financial chaos?
Before long, it occurred to me what the true answer was. I had to beat inflation. Inflation was the enemy, sapping my savings ever so slightly. But what commodity’s price growth constantly outstripped inflation? The thought was still at the forefront of my mind as I stepped into the Canadian Tire, and then I saw it.
I would create a hedge fund consisting entirely of investments in Sylvania Silverstar Ultras, the bespoke high-dollar headlight bulb that cost thirty bucks a bulb. Yes. It all made sense now: the people would always demand headlights, the market would always be there. But the margin - oh my yes, the margin - must ever grow. I could corner the market, buying hoards of Silverstars, sitting on them for a few months and then selling them for just under the new retail price.
Helicopters, supermodels, the finest parties and the most exotic beluga caviar followed. I didn’t really care for them - truth be told, my heart was back with 80s Tercels and discussions about carburetors instead of exotic derivatives - but it was a pretty nice way to spend a few weeks, all told. At one blowout soireé in Shibuya, though, everything changed.
Tim Sylvania, the heir to the Sylvania headlights fortune, was there. He knew who I was, of course, and he knew what my game was. I saw his hand flicker to his waist, returning with a switchblade. A good old fashioned Wall Street knife fight, just like I had seen in the sepia-tinged photos of the twenties. Fine by me, I thought, pulling my Ka-Bar from its concealed wrist sheath.
The lawyers are still hashing out the exact details of who won, but just between you and me - only one of us survived, and it’s the one writing this blog entry. Ironically, it turned out that Tim Sylvania just didn’t have the vision required to fight me after I threw my jacket on his face and stabbed him in the chest.
I’ll never forget his dying words: “You should have bought Osrams instead, dude.”
#
tags: headlights, sylvania silverstars are expensive holy crap, headlight bulbs in a locked glass cabinet
The lawyer flexed his spindly fingers, his knuckles cracking. Then he told me I was no longer allowed to use the copyrighted Gulf livery on my fleet of rotary-powered Toyota Starlet silhouette racers. I offered to negotiate.
After I had finished working him over with a TI-83 Plus wrapped in a tube sock, I took his law-talkin’ badge and used it to retroactively make my copyright infringement not only legal but highly necessary. The judge at the trial agreed with my interpretation of the Gulf livery, and we were off to the races. Literally - again, they were race cars, not sure what part of this you’re not getting.
It’s easy to tell who has been to the track and who hasn’t. My arch-rival, Steve “Nipples” Hemingway, was definitely one of the former group, as was I. He took one look at my buzzing swarm of eleven-thousand-rpm Starlets and turned his upper lip up, like a cat contemplating a lime.
“So what did you bring?” I asked, knowing full well it would suck.
Steve looked at me, that devilish glint in his eye that drove the women mad, and pointed to the paddock. There, I would receive my comeuppance.
My God. It was beautiful. Hemingway had swapped a turbodiesel engine into a slammed Lada Niva. But he hadn’t stopped there. The monster had gone so far as to build a digital boost gauge out of nixie tubes.
He noticed my frantic gasping for air and smiled, pointing wordlessly with a smug expression to the Dekatron air-fuel ratio gauge on the A-pillar. It was perfect.
What he didn’t notice was that I still had my blood-soaked state-mandated graphing calculator assault weapon in my back pocket. Dasvidaniya, comrade.
#
tags: ti83, lada niva, toyota starlet, toyota, lada
Central Dispatch had told me to be on time, get on the plane, show up. There was a sensitive situation they needed actionable intel on, and nobody could be counted on except for me. I was assured that all the preparations had been taken, and my usual car would be available at the rental desk.
I notice a lot of things; it’s sort of my job. When I was a kid, I was always good at noticing the details that other people wished I had never earned. It wasn’t the best way to survive, but it got me where I am today. That said, I can’t remember much about the flight in. It’s probably for the best.
The airport’s grimy tile makes my penny loafers squeak as I glide across the concourse to the used car desk. I saunter up to the attendant, turn on the full spectrum of charm, show her my identification, get her to bring my car around.
A Chevrolet Sonic pulls into the forecourt and honks insistently at me.
Surely there’s been some mistake, I say to the attendant. I have a very specific car intended for me. She frowns, looks at my reservation, then at the computer. No, she says, you’re not a Platinum Reserve member, and so your reservation clearly says “Aston Martin Vanquish or similar.” This is the similar, she states flatly, and underscores it by rapping the Sonic’s keys gently on the marble desk.
On my way out of the rental lot, the Sonic’s wheezy Korean mill tries its hardest to generate motive force over the protestations of its crude slushbox. I am just about ready to get out of the car and walk when I see a pair of vacationers in Hawaiian shirts repeatedly stalling an Aston Martin in the parking garage outside.
A lot of people would call me very polite. I don’t raise my voice to strangers or throw obscene gestures to them out of the window of my car while doing a burnout on their child’s face. Recently, I had cause to reconsider my stance on politeness thanks to a very friendly group of television workers.
It was a cold March morning like any other. I was studying the bottom of my cup of coffee while combing through the morning news. Throughout my regimen, my highly-advanced metatextual search agents would ping my tablet with notifications of exotic parts that are priced well below market, victims of the recession and the limited free time and unlimited ambition of the car-guy lifestyle. I set up a series of appointments to pick up those parts, checked my cash-in-hand stash, and checked my street-parking-rotation schedule to figure out what car I would be moving today to dodge the roving eye of bylaw enforcement.
Opening the door, I strode confidently down the sidewalk of my house. But there was a snag. Where ordinarily I would see my lawn, instead I saw a TLC camera crew and one excessively perky host.
“Hello!” she screamed at me, making sure to stand awkwardly to one side to make sure my unshaven face was framed properly for national television. “You’re on Hoarders!”
I could scarcely believe my ears. Which of my confidantes had betrayed me? They were trying to get their hands on my collection of Megasquirts. With great effort I quelled the panic rising in my throat and went full diplomacy on their asses.
“I don’t have a problem,” I began, “I can stop any time I want.”
Everything went dark. It was only in retrospect, after seeing the dailies, that I realized the host had shot me with a high-intensity non-lethal compliance weapon. Twenty-four thousand volts of nervous system-disrupting power knocked me on my ass and then out cold, in front of the American people, chanting for blood and redemption in equal measure.
Over the next few weeks of filming, the Hoarders crew subjected me to electroshock therapy in full camera, while weeping over the collections of unused Britcar wiring harnesses and rare Alfa parts they found abandoned in my backyard shed of nightmares. Well-meaning psychiatrists yearned to understand why I would have forty sets of tires and wheels in bolt patterns for cars I no longer owned. Actors playing my parents would call me on speakerphone, begging me to abandon my sick quest to own enough Hayashi Streets to build another house out of them. It was all too much, and then, before I knew it, it was over.
Re-entering my house, I checked my primary, secondary and tertiary parts rooms. They were barren. The only parts that still remained were a small box of RockAuto goodies I was putting off installing in my daily driver. Those bastards had even taken the magnets!
My phone bleeped. It seemed the search agents had located the Kijiji ad for selling off the seized parts “to a good home.” I was hesitant. Dare I start this shame spiral again, pushing those around me away in the pursuit of hollow materialism, of being “that guy with all the parts?” This was a new chance, to start over. Yes, I became convinced. That was it. Start over.
Heart beating, I looked down at the phone, convinced of my resolve. In my horror, I realized I had replied to the ad and set up an appointment entirely based on muscle memory. They were mine again. And more importantly, the TLC big wigs would be there, gloating at how much money they made off of my used-parts lucre. I began to feel a cold rage prickling the back of my neck, and it was then that I realized fighting my true nature was folly.
In the garage, a Maserati Biturbo, held aloft on trophy truck suspension, was to be my willing companion on this quest of revenge. I rested into its lush leather racing-emulation seat as the LS6 under its hood leapt to life.
Very well. If it was redemption the television people wanted, it was what they were going to get.
I like my cars like I like my music: Japanese and slow. Real slow. A hundred horsepower? What’s your hurry, Jack? Take some time and relish the acceleration.
In my low-horsepower warm rods, preserving momentum is essential. I once apexed a corner so well I not only maintained my ground speed but momentarily created a gravity well that drained the Prius in front of me of fuel and horsepower as the aerodynamic buffeting slingshot me smoothly into traffic.
Once, I rear ended a guy in stop and go traffic, but the cop looked at my car and told the guy I rear ended that he was asking for it. Wrote him a ticket for travelling too slowly, right on the spot. The weird thing is, the guy didn’t even protest.
Yep, I guess you could say slow is the way to live your life.
Wait, eBay turbo kits are $360 for a wastegate, turbo and manifold? How much is next day shipping?
Elon Musk was beyond incensed at the way I had barged into his party with my crudely-hacked electric car. The truth of the matter was, I didn’t have much of a choice. It turns out that brakes are really hard to get right.
He screamed at me and pointed at a confused gaggle of valets, now tentatively swarming my automobile in hopes of safely parking it and rescuing the night. I simply shrugged, and set my creation into another flat spin, all four 165-width low rolling resistance tires turning into acrid smoke on his polished marble foyer.
As I let the wheel go and erupted down his entrance stairway, the rear-steer tucked in to give me a tight enough cornering radius to overcome the inertia lent the chassis by my hubris. Before long, I was gone into the night, and only the sound of squealing economy tires and the ethereal whine of brushless DC motors could pinpoint my location.
I briefly considered menacing some gasoline vehicles on the highway, to show them the fury of instant nut-busting torque and the ludicrous feats of mechanical grip I was capable of. Despite what you’ve heard from my affiliates, I do feature a level of self-control. Okay, I got distracted.
My smartphone bleeped, and I reached through the drivers’ window net to strike the call-answer button crudely ziptied to the demon car’s exocage. It was Elon, of course.
“Turns out all you need to do to put AWD into an electric car is just to cut two Priuses in half and weld their fronts together!” I joyfully chirped, as I imagined the steam wafting from his collar.
Elon hung up. I continued my voyage towards home, chuckling. The streetlights around me flickered and died. No. Something was flying in front of them.
As the first of the interceptor drones flapped their carbon fiber wings against my windshield glass, I punched the hybrid system out of EV mode. There was always a time to go old-school, I muttered to myself as the twin LS4s beneath the hoods spooled their immense Holset turbochargers, the whistling clarion call from their finely-blued screamer pipes a herald of glorious battle.
I key up the PA system. The smooth shopping-mall notes of the vaporwave backing track dip perceptibly as I try my finest Barry White voice. It all comes out sounding like a tequila-soaked cockfight in a McDonalds drive through, and all nearby pedestrians stop and screw their faces up in confusion, yearning in their bones for a translator that will never come.
Given the circumstances, you’d think they could infer from context that my overburdened Protege is about to rampage up the sidewalk and through a fruit cart, but perhaps the Bubble Era soundtrack has lulled them into a false bubble of contentment that the buzzy PA warnings cannot pierce. After the first set of grapefruit bounces off the comically-flared box fenders of the Protege, I figure they grasp the nuances of the concept.
Leaping back into traffic, I snap the PA handset back to its original position as both hands are needed to right the tiller and gain a mechanical advantage over the massive unsprung weight of the roaring Super Swampers. At last I can pin the throttle, and the dense column of torque steer pushed by the shrieking LS4 beneath the hood is adequately damped with a deft but firm hand. The chassis flex becomes more apparent the harder I hit the throttle.
This is still a lot better than that day I accidentally put on ice cream music, I tell myself as the relaxing strains of a shampoo commercial played at half speed fill the subway entrance I am barrelling through. Subway denizens scatter, and I grimace at the memory of that fateful day.
#
tags: mazda, protege, pa system, vaporwave, super swampers, ls4, just ls things
Maybe it was a little bit too far, I realized now. I should have done things the proper ways, through the proper channels. But at the moment, I wanted that contraband so very dearly that I would have done nearly anything. Big Government slipped the cuffs over my driving gloves and I was done for the day.
It had started innocently enough. An order to McMaster-Carr, to get some heim joints and build my own adjustable budget sway bar endlinks. Who could possibly take offense at that? It had worked out for so many others.
Imagine my surprise when I received a letter declaring in stern words that for national security reasons I was not to be allowed to order the critical defense technology that is the heim joint and M6 bolt. National security reasons? My ex-wives had called me a lot of horrible things, but terrorist was surely not one of them.
I knew what was to be done. I pointed my turbo Caravan south and dumped the gas, the boost-infused torque steer offering me just a whiff of my ancestors’ antics aboard their Conestoga wagons so very long ago.
Before long, I had turned my illicit trips across the border into a bustling source of income. Metric bolts, clip fasteners, all the bounty of America, was being shared with my fellow cold-footed garage fabricators. It brought a tear to my eye.
One morning, it had all gone so wrong. My turbo Caravan was pulled over, searched. The border control agent pointed his xenon tactical-grade flashlight at me, then at the heim joints, then back at me.
“Was the purpose of this visit business or,” he began to ask.
“I fuck those heim joints,” I blurted out.
Later, my high-caliber defense attorney (Steve “The Hammer” Hammer, not his real name) would tell me that Fastenal had a branch only a few blocks from my apartment. That would have been handy to know before I was put on the metric-bolt sex offender registry, Steve.
#
tags: dodge, mcmaster-carr, i fuck those heim joints, just canada things
THE PORSCHE 917′S HEINOUS TURBOS SPIN DOWN. I DETECT THE SLIGHTEST HINT OF AXIAL PLAY ON THE CENTRE BEARING AND MAKE A MENTAL NOTE TO FIND A BRAVER TURBO SHOP NEXT TIME. I STEP INTO THE ARTIFICIAL SUNLIGHT OF THE 7-11.
JONATHAN - NOT HIS REAL NAME - IS WORKING THE TILL TODAY. I SIDLE UP, PLACING A COMEDY-SIZED JUG OF EMERGENCY COOLANT ON THE COUNTER. BESIDE ME, A GRUFF, STOCKY MAN TAKES UMBRAGE AT MY PRIORITIZATION OF MY 917′S COOLANT NEEDS ABOVE HIS DESIRE FOR INFINITE NACHO-CHEESE-COATED DOUBLE-FRIED HOT CHEESEBURGER TAQUITOS. I LOOK HIM IN THE EYES UNTIL HE CAN SEE THE FIRE INSIDE.
WHEN THE POLICE TACTICAL UNIT ARRIVES, SURROUNDING THE 917, I AM AT FIRST WORRIED. I CHOKE DOWN MY FEAR AND STRIDE CONFIDENTLY INTO THE PARKING LOT, SWINGING MY JUG OF FIFTY-FIFTY ASIAN-COMPATIBLE COOLANT TO AND FRO. GREETINGS OFFICERS, JUST A PRODUCTIVE MEMBER OF SOCIETY DRIVING A LITERAL NAZI JET ENGINE DOWN THE STREET.
THE HOOD POPPED, I FILL MY HOBBY-HACKED OVERFLOW BOTTLE WITH DELICIOUS SMURF BLOOD. I CAN SENSE THE SHIFTING VARIABLES OF WHAT THE OFFICERS ARE NO DOUBT CALLING A DYNAMIC SITUATION, AND I SLAM THE MASSIVE REAR CLAMSHELL HOOD WITH A FLOURISH, TO DEMONSTRATE MY GOOD SENSE OF HUMOUR.
WHILE NEGOTIATING WITH THE NICEST OF THE OFFICERS, THE MAN WHO SUMMONED THEM TO THE 7-11 EXTRICATES HIMSELF FROM THE AUTOMATIC SLIDING DOORS. HE FLEES ON FOOT DOWN A CONVENIENT SIDE ALLEY WHILE WEEPING OPENLY, THE WEIGHT PRESENT IN THE PRECARIOUS EQUILIBRIUM OF HIS SHOPPING BAG OF FRIED FOOD AND RED GATORADE BECOMING APPARENT AS HE BECOMES WINDED WITHIN MINUTES AND IS SCOOPED UP BY A FULLY-TOOLED SWAT OFFICER, WHO SHOOTS ME THE SIDE EYE. BITCH.
AT LAST I PLAY MY TRUMP CARD.
“LET ME GO, ASSHOLES, OR DONALD TRUMP WILL BECOME PRESIDENT,” I SHOUT OVER THE 917′S EXTERNALLY MOUNTED PA SYSTEM.
It was nearly 7 AM by the time we completed the job. I had blown the sewing machine beneath the hood of my trusty but rusty 1.5L Civic and drifted to a stop outside a Honda dealership. The wrong kind of Honda dealership.
Before long, I had lashed ten 150cc GY6s together into a crude amalgam of the original displacement, and topped it off with a lawnmower engine for the starter. If my mentors could see me now, they would probably be sadly shaking their heads and wondering where they went wrong.
As the Civic axle-tramped into the next lane over, its swaying mass of stacked small-displacement thumpers sticking out of the crudely hacked front fender, I became dimly aware of the other occupants of the road. They were filtering crudely into traffic in order to begin their journey to their day jobs, bleary-eyed behind the wheel of their short-wheelbase-schoolbus of a seven-seater unibody crossover.
At last I pulled alongside another human being, ensconced in their Acura MDX. They looked at their smartphone, but quickly became aware of a disquieting vibration emanating from the next lane over. Slowly but surely they turned their head, awakening from a torpor they scarcely believed they had occupied this long.
It was me they saw then as their lifetime of good fortune evaporated like E85 on spilled the open road. I was far away and yet all too close in the adjacent lane, rapidly feathering the throttle pedal to keep this cockamamie piece of shit from stalling, while using my left hand to hold the slightly-bent door closed tightly enough that the interior dome light wouldn’t flicker on.
Somewhere in Japan, a Honda executive shrieked in agony and suddenly arose from his desk. Reeling backward in the finest tradition of the Henshin Tigers, he hurled his desk plaque at an underling and began to bellow in rapid-fire Japanese, tinted with just a whiff of his rural upbringing.
“DISPLACEMENT DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY,” he roared, causing his subordinate engineering pool to leap exactly one inch from their seats before falling back to Earth.
A long time ago, in another life, I had a job at a soap company. My boss needed a new hit to keep his career going. He had struck it rich with bubble bath, he said, but that was over a decade ago and the vultures, fueled by the urgency of a bloated junk bond market, now circled above our parched heads.
Drinks. Women. Cocaine. The haze of battle. These things filled my days and my nights. There still was no hit product, and without one, our soap company would go bankrupt within weeks.
At last, in the foyer of a seedy motel, half-cut on $3 beer so ashamed of its quality it dared not even bear a brand name, it hit me. We would make an automated soap dispenser for public washrooms. To save money, it would only contain enough soap for maybe two or three squirts. Yes, that was it - everyone would read our logo, and know our name, as they glared impatiently at it, waving their hands, begging us to give them our product.
When I returned to the office as a conquering hero, my boss embraced me. We were on the way to victory, he said, blinking away teary eyes. We were on the way to success, the good life.
We, I said? I think you mean me, and gestured behind me to the waiting security guards. One of them carried a rumpled cardboard file box, filled with my boss’ personal effects.
Years later, I’m in a Dallas airport, wiping a streak of cocaine thick enough to serve as structural adhesive off my upper lip. I hear a familiar voice cursing the automated soap dispenser, its beady red eye flashing an insistent warning about a lack of soap in the reservoir. I can’t help but smile, my lips drawn back in a feral grin.
#
tags: fuck automatic soap dispensers, dallas airport, mba culture
There’s a lot of things I didn’t tell you about my time in Asia. I’m not proud of any of them, to tell you the truth. But it feels like now might be the last time to confess. I committed a horrible act when I was down there.
When I received it, the job description was simple. “Car designer.” I could draw a picture of a car like the best of them, I figured, even if the portfolio I sent them was pretty much all freehand sketches of a Fiat 128 sedan on pizza cutters. Why mess with perfection, right?
To my surprise they loved my portfolio, and offered me the job. I was to fly to Korea, and begin work on a new project. They were really excited about it, and eventually my confusion and terror gave way to their excitement. I raced to the airport, ditching my trusty-but-rusty Isuzu Impulse RS in the park-and-fly lot, and strode valiantly onto the plane. As I passed the threshold of the airplane’s extending bridge, the 80s homage soundtrack in my Walkman settled upon the scene and softened its edge like snow on a fresh quarter panel dent.
I’d be lying to you if I told you I enjoyed air travel. A pharmacological treasure trove, liberated from a former renter of my two-level split, gave me both entertainment and relief on the lengthy flight. At last, the 767′s tires squealed angrily on foreign tarmac, and I was truly there.
My first day of work was the usual. Access cards, handshakes, PowerPoint presentations. It didn’t matter that my language skills were nonexistent or my automotive industry experience questionable, they accepted me as one of their own. Maybe that’s why they let me have so much rope.
When I returned to my company apartment, I dipped again into my medicine bag for a homewarming gift. Thus began a year-long haze I can even now scarcely remember, except through context and the half-remembered stories of my colleagues at the time. But at last the great project was done, and I reported to the local auto show for the vehicle’s unveiling.
It was a soiree to be sure. Champagne flutes, beautiful movie stars, the company’s executive branch, and a half-shaven, violently sweating white man in the middle of the crowd. The sheet lifted, and the room filled with gasps. My hands went numb as I saw what my corporeal body had been used as an unwitting vessel for.
They called him a master detective, and I guess he had been. He told me that in our initial interview, at first he was inclined to believe I was actually a legitimate surgeon. But I had tipped my hand, he said, when he saw that my surgical workbench had a can of PB Blaster on it.
It was easy for someone to brag about their detective prowess in retrospect, after the arrest was made, I spat.
We arrived at a deal. I would take him to where I had stored the bodies. On the way out, no unnecessary words passed between us. I stared dead ahead.
In the yard, he kept the gun on me. He was pretty bright, this one. It was obvious that I would have riddled my hidey-hole with all manner of exciting traps. I disarmed a few of them while glaring at him, and we went beneath.
The fluorescent lighting sprung to life, throwing out a shimmering halo onto all of my victims. At last I spoke. I knew what I had done wasn’t legal, but it would have been in just a few more years.
He looked at me, ran his hand along the ruby-red flanks and frowned.
I had cornered the market on Alfa Romeo 159s, smuggling them into the country in anticipation of the 15-year exemption. He had me dead to rights, an ant centered in the magnifying glass of justice.
The master detective spoke, overcome by a sheer, animalistic desire. “I’ll let you go in exchange for one of the turbo Sportwagons.”
I look into the eyes of the engineer from JPL, his face a wrinkled map of dissent and anger at this interloper in his midst. In front of me is a set of drawings of the moon rover. We’re going to the moon. It’s going to happen soon.
“It doesn’t matter if you line-bore the block or not, your old Chevy 305 is not going to work when there’s no oxygen!” he screams, furious.
I hit him. Hard. The ensuing line brawl pulls in half of my guys and the other half of his guys, the sounds of violence pulling them out of their frosted-glass offices and running into Conference Room F with fists balled.
Maybe a little introduction is necessary. I worked for a woman named Dr. Guillet, and our division was known as the Bad Boys of Aeronautics. We wore black, grew our hair long. She carried a guitar, brass knuckles, and an eyepatch she refused to acknowledge or talk about when questioned. It was inevitable that when Guillet was out, the other divisions of NASA would wonder why it was we got such special treatment and come to take our shit.
They’d find that she was there to restrain us, not to protect us. And so it was that fateful day in Conference Room F.
In the end, the project to outfit the moon rover with a twin-supercharged high-mileage Chevy 305 didn’t really work out. Nobody knows why, but I suspect more boost would have helped produce the necessary oxygen to drive it.
This PTA meeting is as good of a chance as I’m going to get to explain my story. You all know me as the kindly auto shop teacher who came to town with a rattle-trap ‘63 Rambler wagon and not much else. But I have a dark past; a story about how I bankrupted Pick N Pull.
The boy working the counter had been surprised by my zeal. I could leave with all I could carry, for fifty bucks? Yes, he said. All you can carry.
I had looted my fill, but due to skipping leg day, arm day, back day and also exactly every other day at the gym, my load capacity was too low to maximally exploit the bounty I had discovered. What’s more, I could sense that more muscular professional mechanics were circling my hoard, ready for me to admit defeat. At once an idea came to me; I immediately began searching the yard for more necessary supplies. On this day, these jackals would not have the satisfaction.
Hours later, the same boy working the counter heard a strange noise. He had only worked at the Pick N Pull for a few months, but he was already innately aware of when a potential customer was a little off-kilter. Of course, he had read me properly from the start, my series of intense questions and heavily worn frequent parts-puller card setting off alarm bells.
The strange noise grew. That’s strange. It sounded almost like a V8. Bob, over in acquisitions, wasn’t supposed to be working today. He considered leaving his post, going to investigate, but decided as did many at the yard before him, to see where this goes on its own.
His curiosity was sated when I barged through the yard’s roll-up door, hissing and screaming, the sound of the twin scavenged 427s over each shoulder howling to redline as they provided sufficient motive force for the improvised exoskeleton I had fabricated. Behind me laid, I discovered later as the suspension and frame of my parts truck collapsed in the parking lot, over three thousand pounds of interior trim.
The hydraulic joints and pumps driving my suit wailed as I handed him fifty oil-stained dollars.
“Tell your boss this is cheaper in the long run,” I sneered at him from behind my steel-and-chrome protective face mask, twelve feet off the floor. “I won’t have to fill my pockets with clips anymore.”
#
tags: amc rambler, robotic exoskeleton, all you can carry day
My travelling companion rapidly attempts to dial 911 on the 1980s-era car phone mounted in the centre console. I chuckle heartily, pulling the power leads free from the phone’s base with a shit-eating grin. We’re in this too deep, I explain, and it would be unethical to involve the police. Besides, they have no sense of humour.
I bury the throttle on the Road Runner, making the rear end axle-tramp its way into the drain lane of the highway. Against all form of logic, I continue to massage the gas as I early-apex the offramp, letting the twin-supercharged Max Wedge - more like SuperMax Wedge, am I right? - burp sparkling licks of cadmium flames from the fender-mounted exhaust cutout.
Before us laid the world’s true potential, a freedom denied to us by an accident of our birth. The Road Runner was an icon of it; its bounteous coke-bottle fenders and crude hood scoop striking a brutal contrast against the sea of pedestrian-safe, self-driving bubble cars that dove out of its way and made sweet love to the highway shoulder’s rumble strips. Those half-cars were scarcely able to comprehend the concept of an exhaust backfire; surely they imagined it to be some kind of solar flare or a police light gone wrong.
I laugh maniacally, forcing my companion even further into their carbon-backed bucket race seat. I have spotted my quarry, and today we ride with honour. My baby Plymouth responds with alacrity as I swing the tiller wide, ratcheting its ancient suspension over on its fat modern semi-slicks.
At last we have arrived. My travelling companion unlatches their door, leans out of the car, and vomits. I admire that willingness to protect what’s left of my interior, I tell them, as I begin my stride across the parking lot.
Surplus Mitutoyo calipers for half price were simply too good to pass up, and their siren song has lured me across this great land to take advantage.
When I went on my little jaunts to the rustic outskirts of my community, I always fixated on the machines. Abandoned, lonely, looking up at me with puppy-dog-eye headlights. I had to save them. I would start with this one, I reasoned. This little 15HP Sears would be coming home with me.
The owner looked at me, then at the filthy wad of ill-gotten lucre in my clenched fist, and then at last the tractor. Sure, he figured, I could take it, but it wasn’t running. It’s not like I could drive it home. He noted with some concern that my travelling companion had taken the J20 I arrived in, laying a patch at the end of his driveway and narrowly missing his charming rural supermailbox.
I turned to him then and I said, I guess you could say the problem is that there isn’t enough horsepower?
He agreed, stating that zero is not a very good amount of horsepower. Then he visibly reacted, his pupils dilating in the inherent fear response as he saw my mania ratcheting upwards like a B&M on a 700R4 in June.
Hours later, I erupted from his rural forecourt, powered by a screaming Dorito. The previous owner hadn’t seen me unload my emergency 13B-REW from the back of the J20 prior to its unceremonious exit. It was always good to carry a spare for emergencies just such as this, I reasoned.
I could scarcely hear the Princess Auto lawn & garden tires squirm beneath me over the physically painful sound of two hundred and fifty turbocharged horsepower shooting through the booger-welded diff.
That night, I slept like a baby; the ringing in my ears drowned out my inner monologue. I didn’t even notice the police sirens warbling outside my window, their presence summoned by my irate neighbors. Like none of them had ever mowed their lawn by emulating a 140 decibel Spirograph before.
#
tags: princess auto, sears, lawn and garden, 13b
Whenever I am at the unemployment office, they want to hear the story about how I was fired from U-Haul. Surely, nobody has ever been fired from U-Haul, they say, chuckling with that faint, vulturous leer that graces one’s face when they catch a wafting tendril of amusing misfortune. What did I do, sleep with the owner’s daughter? Oh, it was much worse than that, I say through my teeth, pulling my lips back in a crude emulation of a human smile.
The year was 1994, and things were starting to heat up in the Tri-Delta Area (henceforth referred to as The Area). I had recently graduated at the top of my journalism class, and I was hitting the bricks of my hometown in search of the next great American story. Shoe leather be damned, it was time to uncover the secrets tucked away among the shaded glens and vacant lots of my fair land.
Within a few weeks, I discovered that shadowing local politicians and taking pictures of them in secret failed to deliver the pecuniary rewards that my British classmates had promised with their rosy cheeks and convincingly honest, rustic dentition. Even the local newspaper failed to pick up when I called to ask if they wanted to buy my pictures of the local mayor getting his tires rotated (not a euphemism, mind you - I thought he looked kind of fat in the waiting room and felt it would be newsworthy).
Perhaps long-form investigative journalism was more my forte.
On a tip from an informant, I was told that there was a self-storage yard loosely affiliated with U-Haul on the outskirts of town. Under the guise of a yet-to-be-employed recent graduate of journalism school, I applied to work the front counter. They accepted readily - perhaps too readily, my notes would say.
For three blissful months, I watched customers as they went to their self-storage units. Saw police raid them. Witnessed domestic disputes unfolding in their full ugly glory under the vandal-proof sodium streetlamps of the yard. My bosses were pleased with my work, and after a time, they permitted me approach to their sacred inner sanctum. I was promoted to work the trailer rental desk, a lofty leap made after my predecessor was pushed out due to a combination of showing up late to work and dealing distribution-level quantities of methamphetamine in the parking lot in broad daylight.
I should have known that it would not last.
That fateful morning, a customer arrived to pick up his trailer. I noticed that the trailer’s wheel bearings were completely dry, and the relatively new trailer was in generally poor maintenance. Frowning, I told the customer I would make it right immediately, and set about meticulously packing the wheel bearings for him as he waited. Fifteen minutes later, we hooked up the trailer and he was ready to go, visibly relieved that I was on his side. Safety was job one, I explained, making sure to evince that smart, quirky little smirk of television-inspired confidence that had long since replaced the old-fashioned suspender snap.
Once I was done, I looked up and saw my boss, Mr. Cho, fuming amid a boiling, twisting storm of barely restrained apoplexy. He was furious. I had inadvertently discovered the U-Haul Conspiracy, he erupted, waving a stack of personal-injury lawsuits in my face. What I had thought was simple incompetence went so much deeper, like cruel, twisting tendrils of melted rubber and the spalled curls of shredded bearings digging into the hands of the unwary. For every car hauler, every cargo trailer that had exploded on a major roadway, every ancient boxtruck that had abruptly become a tricycle, and each disaster that left a flaming trail of horrible death and destruction behind it, the franchise would earn a cut of in exchange for pointing personal-injury lawyers at U-Haul corporate’s door.
Mr. Cho levelled a snub-nose revolver at my face. Luckily, I was a student of journalism. I knew just what to do; my expert-level training took over.
“MY SOURCES ARE CONFIDENTIAL,” I shrieked, hurling the stapler from the desk at Mr. Cho’s face and leaping through the open office window to make good my escape.
He fired wildly at me as I tore ass out of the parking lot in my ‘82 Ford Durango, the mixed all-season meats out back squeaking and wailing for sympathy as I crossed the transom onto the highway and put miles between myself and the orange temple of the damned. I knew Mr. Cho would come looking for me, but I chuckled as I recalled the fantastical location I had put down on the employment paper, a private joke shared only with myself.
Only people who don’t live out of their car have addresses.
The unemployment officer heard my tale of woe, then asked me to repeat it to the clerk seated next to him, chortling loudly. Before long, the story was getting forwarded in primitive chain emails by howling employees, unable to focus on their duties through a mist of mirthful tears. Perhaps I had finally found my niche.
#
tags: u-haul, u-haul sucks, ford, ford durango, durango
I didn’t understand why the nice fire inspector was telling me to stop putting my collection of heirloom gasoline in the apartment stairwell. Where else was I supposed to store it?
I argued with him for what seemed like hours, telling him that it was the only guaranteed non-ethanol fuel source still available. Think of the carbs, man. Nobody is helping the carbs! Eventually he left, issuing me with a hefty citation and a demand to immediately vacate the premises of my antique hydrocarbons.
On the road, I thought about what had happened. Usually a ride with my biker gang sorted me out straight, but the other members of the chapter could tell it was weighing heavily on my mind. At the next waystation, Our chapter president, Scarred Karl, at last decided to have a word about it with me. His 125cc Kymko People One gleamed at the head of our cruises; I was in awe of the way the massive chromed expansion chamber caught the light and played with it.
When I had told him the whole story, he looked down at my Yamaha Zuma and said simply: “It’s fuel injected, idiot.”
So as you can see, officer, these burnouts are simply to get rid of a leftover inventory of expensive commodities that I am no longer able to sell at a profit. In fact, I believe a tax receipt is in order?
The train beeped happily, rapid-firing a series of tones that would indicate those more clued-in to the system about its origin and destination. I felt no kinship with this train; I was just passing through. Regardless, I boarded, and we began our short journey together.
Even now I can remember the other occupants of the train car in clear detail: the pensioner, the college students comparing photo albums, the bored nurse on her way home from the dark shift. The train emerged rapidly from its subterranean origins, climbing over the city, its pervasive neon glow settling into the condensation on the car’s polycarbonate windows.
At last my trip was complete, and the objective laid ahead in clear sight. The rain began to fall softly, drips and drabs washing clean the dusty surface of the train platform, shimmering jewels reflecting the high-impact-resistance pedestrian lights above.
I had met this service writer before; she spoke to me of the extent of the Takata airbag recall. Only through the unique benevolence of the Franco-Nissan Alliance had I been saved at the last minute from certain death. There was only one problem, she said, and then I heard it.
The service writer’s mouth continued moving, but any sounds it had made were indecipherable over the sheer density of the column of pure noise erupting from the Sentra’s external wastegates and electric exhaust cutout. I smiled.
Somewhere deep within the bowels of the customer parkade, a lot boy had just discovered his first taste of three hundred brake horsepower per liter. When he arrived to return to me the reins to my beast, I could tell he had been changed by that dark hand reaching from Hell itself, known only to those who followed his whims, Torque Steer.
Seat Safety Switch Industries was expanding to become a government and defense contractor. It was a hell of a rush, leading a megacorporation through the first uneasy steps of government procurement, purchasing the right senators, pushing the right acronyms into the right holes. But at last it was done, and I sat atop a throne covered in taxpayer dollars.
For years I had spoken out against the post office’s slow handling of my much-demanded car parts. RockAuto orders would take weeks to arrive, well past when my attention had already shifted to another project, another yearning need. Sometimes, high-end modified parts would simply go missing, requiring a re-ship and another project delay. Obviously, when the contract came up to modernize the post office’s gas vehicle fleet, Seat Safety Switch Industries was on it like R-compound marbles on the rear quarter panels of a Miata.
The prototype was easy enough to create. Ford had already done the hard work for me, and it only took a wrecked Focus RS, struck down at the peak of adolescent triumph. No investors would be upset at the excessive level of R&D costs, not like the time when we started shipping a food processor built around a turbocharged GM 4.3L V6. Lawsuits were still pouring in on that one, but this project would put me right back on top. It had to.
Months later, rival zaibatsu and I had assembled to show off our vision of ground transport for the post office of tomorrow. Small-bore engines, three-wheeled scooters, robotic cars. I scoffed, audibly enough for one of my arch-rivals, “Professor” Thomas Goodhart, to call me out on the mat. Put up or shut up, he was saying. I smiled.
“Wait just one second,” I told him, and left the room. When I returned, all of them acted as if they had never seen a Ford Transit panel-van produce 500 wheel horsepower on a combination of environmentally-friendly E85 and nitrous oxide.
It’s not that I’ve always been looking for the next mistake. It’s that I’ve always been running away from the last one. Last night, one of those old mistakes found me, naked and afraid, beneath the cold sky hanging atop the bay.
For years, my business partner and I had been the biggest suppliers of bootleg Pocari Sweat to the big city. We always kept it small, not wanting the inefficiencies of large-scale enterprise to catch up with us, distort our insights. That’s how the feds would notice us, and I knew that if they got a whiff, Inspector Koshiro wouldn’t be far behind. He had left his post back in the homeland and followed us, started a whole new police career. Koshiro wanted that collar in a way I’d never wanted anything before - and to be honest, he probably deserved it. I got the impression I was the first real challenge of his career, so many steps ahead of him his insistent belief in my very existence strained his relationship with his once-masters.
I’ve spoken before about my experiences with Mr. Cho, a man who put the serial in serial entrepreneur. Years ago, he found me and saw something in my talents, and he’d been turning the screws ever since. On this project, he was our financier. Mr. Cho - always mister with him - was pleased with our return on investment. I was the closest to safe I would ever feel around him on this job. He never smiled, but that was the way I liked it. I don’t think I could deal with whatever was behind a Mr. Cho smile.
The night leading up to the incident at the bay is still fuzzy in my mind; plying my companionship in trade for high-powered single-shot vending machine espressos will only get you so far. But what I am prepared to say is that I made a lot of bad choices when it came to motor vehicles. One such bad choice was my shopworn Minica. Not just an ordinary model, it started life as a Dangan ZZ before a very talented shop-hand transformed the already overachieving five-valve 660cc weed-whacker engine into a sleeper so subversive only dogs could hear its true nature.
I was hammering the car through what I later discovered to be a protected public park. The Minica’s bad-tempered all-wheel-drive system scrabbled at the degraded cobblestone and gravel pavement, keeping my ass out of the ditch as I swung it through gardens and half-covered rest areas, their electroluminescent recycling bins leaving a glowing streak of pure colour in my night vision.
My rear view mirror was suddenly filled by a Nissan President, bearing down upon me. Had I more occasion to study the curves of the car, I would have noticed the chopped fenders, crude high-offset mud-terrain tires and deftly spliced 4WD system from a Patrol, but at the time it was hard to see any detail other than the immense Weiand blower sticking through the hood. Using the twin skills of deduction and hamfootedness that had gotten me this far, I correctly inferred the intent of my pursuer, and took flight.
Cranking the wheel, I deked hard right, barreling through the entrance and exit doors of a nearby public washroom, the Minica’s mirrors taking only a slight beating from the ornamental wood trim of the door frames. The pursuing Patrol President obliterated the building on impact, scattering brickwork and corrugated sheet metal about the clearing. I had bought myself only a small amount of time, and opted to abandon the Minica and make good my escape on foot, aided by thermoptic camouflage.
Throwing my cloned Italian suit into the bushes, I disappeared from the visible and infrared spectrums like a naked man slipping into the forest after crashing his over-turbocharged AWD kei car. That old cliche again, I thought as I crouched behind a retaining wall, only feet from the machine-pistol toting hired goons who had been sent for me.
I heard a sound then, a staccato ripping through the wooded surroundings, and one of the goons fell from the retaining wall before me, his face a theatre mask of surprise.
“Funny meeting you here,” said Inspector Koshiro, his face ringed by a Google Glass set to electromagnetic isolation. “You should really get a faster car.”
He gestured with his sub-c rail pistol at the bastard President, surrounded by the dismantled bodies of my recent opponents, and then returned to pointing the gun at me. “Looks like this one just came on the market.”
All business, Koshiro was, even when he was pointing a future-tech handgun at an invisible naked man in a public park.
The wind, for once, is impossibly calm. There are ReMax hot air balloons that haven’t seen action in fifteen years filling their sightly tattered and lovingly repaired air bags on an open field in the industrial heart of town.
Truly, a God is with me as I begin my quest.
A call to the local aerodrome a fortnight earlier cemented my resolve and secured the services of a local pilot, William “Crackerjack” Flurrey and his trusty steed, an Avro Anson trainer.
Watching from the comfort of the pilot’s lounge after an exchange of an obscene amount of cash and a scribbled diagram with a simple two character string, I relax, knowing that my divine task is nearly complete.
The Anson struggled into the air, its ancient airframe groaning under the weight of the oil smoke tanks, the radial engines designed in the same year that my grandfather wore diapers still somehow functioning, decades past their obsolescence.
The pilot spends twenty minutes sculpting my request. Huge billowing lines form the holy alphanumeric code. He is nearly finished when the surprise I planted in his plane detects that the oil tanks are nearly empty.
A huge explosion rocks his starboard nacelle. Big enough to destroy the engine, but small enough to keep the wing mostly intact. At the same time, the throttle for the port motor sticks at wide open.
Bill Flurrey unwittingly performs the first perfectly executed aerial donut in world history as he spirals towards mother Earth against the backdrop of three kilometer high letters.
V8
My job finished, I vanished into the ether. Perhaps I would one day return, but only if Fury Road cleaned up at the Screen Actor’s Guild awards.
It’s not easy to raise a kid in today’s society, I know. The Internet, Elves on Shelves, iPads, bookmobiles. How can you control how your kids will act when they’re away from you? Often, the responsibility falls to me, a mere public school teacher.
“GET SOME,” I shriek as the paddlewheel tires dominating the rear tubs of the Viscount bite into the football field, hurling clumps of rubber-caked mud at the assembled children. McGruff the Crime Dog has taken off from his post, running with his head covered for the relative safety of the stereotypically-ethnic food truck. I wince in sympathy at the dry-cleaning bill for getting that much urine out of synthetic dog fur; from experience at certain conventions I know just how quickly the costs can get out of control.
“DON’T DO DRUGS,” I bellow through the window net, trying to drown out the sheer volume of the climax of Bitchin’ Camaro. As the front end comes around for its tenth consecutive spin, my hand is stayed periodically by the Johnson kid, clearly thinking about doing some drugs. I key up the PA system, flooding the football field now with the full one hundred and twenty decibels of the opening strains of Radar Love.
“JOHNSON,” my voice booms out, “I SAIDDON’T DO DRUGS.”
I capture his attention for a brief second before he is struck in the eye by an orbiting clod of dirt. I am a lock for Teacher of the Year.
#
tags: teacher of the year, dodge viscount, dodge
I let the small town have both barrels of the rev limiter as I streaked out of it like a neon chariot ensconced in a gentle bed of purifying hellfire. These rubes would never know the true value of what I had taken from them, myself the liberator of out-of-town Kijiji finds.
When I found it, I could not believe my eyes. A Jeep Commando, in a small town. Surely someone else would have visited by now, forked money into their faces, purchased it. It was not to be. It was available and what’s more, it was waiting. If I’m honest - which I rarely am - it felt like fate, dragging me towards the town and the inevitable showdown.
I hadn’t noticed I was running from something until I finally stopped. The town was still, peaceful, serene. Everyone who lived there seemed at ease with their lot in life, their struggle ceased by a dense blanket of good living that had settled upon the town at some point. They would file into the faux-Chinese restaurant next to the town hall for community dinners and pancake breakfasts, they would go to a church none of them could control, they would write op-eds in the town newsletter about whether or not visitors sped too much on the main drag.
If you asked me if I was tempted to stay, I would be a liar if I told you I wasn’t. Things seemed better here. The kind of place you could have a Jeep Commando and it didn’t really matter very much if the brakes worked.
As the winch was pulling the Jeep onto my ghetto-recovery flatbed, I asked the owner about how much he paid for internet access. He looked at me with sad eyes and I knew in my heart what the answer would be.
“We don’t have the internet here,” I imagine he said as I lit the massive Detroit off under the hood of my bagged K30 tow vehicle and departed from his life.
#
tags: chevrolet, k30, detroit, detroit diesel, jeep, jeep commando
Through the fires I saw Kevin James, laughing, as he left through the only unblocked door. I realized I was going to have to make a move, and fast.
Grabbing the script to “We Defrauded a Zoo,” I fired my Apple Watch’s wrist mounted grappling piton and lifted myself to the second floor.
I push through the flames, throwing myself through a tight gap between the main beam and a support that had fallen in the roaring inferno. Through the melting leaded glass of the storage loft’s only window, I can see Kevin James climbing aboard his Vespa ET3 and disappearing into the wavy California air.
There was surely no way I could escape my burning grave, let alone catch up with the wayward star to retrieve the manuscript. I sank to my knees and prayed to the god of torque, his infinite torsional force driving all things as it does the Earth. When I opened my eyes, I saw the distinctive fender of a battered but beloved Honda CT90, left in my studio years ago during what must have been a moped bender.
Jumping the CT90 from the second-storey window, a Phoenix-like cascade of broken glass behind me, I knew that if Kevin James wanted to get to Hollywood with that script, he was going to have to go through a focus group consisting of me.
The 80s homage soundtrack whines pitifully out of the zip-tied Bluetooth speaker sitting on the cracked dash pad. Outside the drivers’ window is a rain-drenched neon hellscape, and I was smack dab in the middle of it. I stretched my fingers, pulled the driving gloves back taut, and fired up the bored (in more ways than one) Buick 462 to prepare to pull out into traffic.
I was on my way to the hardware store to pick up some gear for the work-on-shit-slash-barbeque meet, and of course it was a cold and wet day to do it. Never mind, I thought, as I punched the groaning olive-drab Skylark into the next gear and pulled its surprisingly eager weight towards an on-ramp.
The city unfolds beneath me, riding atop a perfect asphalt flyover, a train track suspended in midair by the neon promise of the world beneath. I can’t help myself but to sing along with the humming of the Skylark’s massive drag radials, rain and pebbles bouncing against the thin sheet gauge of the rear tubs.
Red and blue fireworks explode in my rear view mirror. Routine traffic stop, I figured. Maybe a blown out tail light. Nothing to arouse suspicion. I pull to the side of the road, slow my panicky breathing. I’ve done this before, and I see no reason to think this time will be any different.
“Could you please open the trunk, sir?” asked the police officer.
Shit. Someone tipped them off. I contemplated flight, burying the throttle and letting the big Buick take over, but I doubted my abilities to escape the dragnet that was undoubtedly closing in on me. There were likely surveillance drones and mag-mount tracking antennas on every square inch of the Skylark, and I didn’t have the time to get away and remove them at the same time. At last, I begrudgingly reached beneath the dashboard and pulled the remote trunk release. Whoever this cop was, he had hit the jackpot; his career would be fringed in gold evermore.
I heard a muffled whump as the trunk lid flapped to its extents on the hinge springs. Resigned to my fate, I wondered which of my jailhouse lawyer friends would be the most likely to not screen calls from me.
The officer stood, staring with disbelief into the cavernous trunk, filled to the brim with spark-plug non-foulers.
I knew I had pissed off Captain Siffredi back at the precinct, but I didn’t realize quite how much until I got my latest assignment. There was a gang of import drag racers menacing society on the way back from their Friday night events, and he wanted me there. The only problem was, I didn’t understand anything about not-torque.
As I pulled into the bustling tech lineup at the weekly drags, one of the gaggle stepped forward. He made note of my bumper sticker, which proudly read “DRIVER CARRIES ONLY 7000 RPM.” To these people, eighty-five-hundred rpm redlines belonged more on tractors. They sought the insane motorbike pleasure of quintuple-digit formula car wails and got there with lightened flywheels, decreased valvetrain mass, and other illegal street hop-up drugs I had been sent to stop.
Forced induction, kids, I would say to high school students when visiting. Forced induction is the way to greater power. We must back away from the old era of repeatedly banging off stratospheric rev limiters while making dogs bark. It must be done to protect mother Earth, and also because you can crank up the boost and make like 200whp more before the head gasket walks. But that’s beside the point. Sorry, sometimes I get off on a rant.
My newfound companion, who we’ll call Dixie Steve because I don’t actually remember what his name is or read my own handwriting on the arrest report, invited me out after the event. The rest is history, including the part where I turned on my own law enforcement comrades because Dixie Steve had a pretty bitchin’ FC RX7 in his backyard he told me I could tow out for a grand.
The inmate towered over me. He asked me what I was in for. Speeding. He looked at me in genuine surprise. A lot of speeding, I explained calmly, gesturing as if the entire jail cell was occupied entirely by the physical manifestation of my malfeasance.
My new prison bunkmate wasn’t exactly the happiest man I’d ever met. We got to talking about our respective misdeeds on day two, as you do. He was in for murder, which was a crime that involved a lot of prep work that he didn’t want to do. Through a series of perfunctory discussions I determined that he, too, was in for a lot of murder. We were practically twin brothers, separated at birth. I told him so, and received a grimace followed by an explanation that he had killed his actual twin brother as well.
“In fact,” he said, adopting a practically scholarly posture for an eight foot tall slab of meat covered in scars, “I have tattoos with the names of everyone I’ve killed.”
“Oh, I do too,” I laughed. “I do too.”
Later that day, it was time for the showers. My newly made friendship was on the rocks. He pointed at the tattoos covering every square inch of my body. There was only one question on his mind.
Wherever he was, Frank Zamboni was probably smiling down upon me at this very minute. I was putting his dream into action, and making the world safer for everyone. As I raised the blade and left the roadway, I heard the sound of plastic body panels dimpling under the strain of high-speed impacts and smiled.
My story starts last summer, at the heavy industrial auction. I had come in the hopes of getting a massively-discounted luxobarge, purchased for some executive that had departed the company under unfortunate circumstances when fingered for fraud. What I found instead in the sale lot of a local hockey arena was a battered, worn Model 440.
From the first moment I laid eyes on the ol’ 440, I knew that I had to have it. Approaching it on the pre-sale docket, I could smell a whiff of caked propane mingling with perfectly aged hydraulic oil. It smelled like a project, for sure, but I didn’t realize what the project would be until this morning.
Arising from my bed, I looked out the window to gain a basic visual recon on the presence and status of all my street-parked hoopties. I found the street covered in a pristine blanket of white snow. A Hyundai Santa Fe was stuck atop the Lord’s shimmering bounty, endlessly spinning its front wheels in an attempt to motivate its bald all-seasons up the steep hill of my street. Something broke inside me then.
Minutes later, I found myself expertly piloting the Zamboni with a deft touch, resurfacing the streets of my commute into a sheen of solid ice. When I looked into the reservoir, rapidly filling with the salt slurry that in weaker times threatened my rear quarter panels and rockers, I smiled. Tonight I would have the roads to myself, their frozen carapace punctured by the grotesquely illegal ice-racing studs on my window-netted Acadian Scooter. Everyone else could just stay at home, huddle in the dark and tell each other reassuring stories about how decade-old all-seasons with 1/32″ of tread were fine if you were careful and went 50 under.
As I prepared to leave the Zamboni in my office parking lot and embrace the modern vice of central heating, I hesitated for a second. I stood atop the seat and looked out over my great work, the wailing sirens distant and incapable of reaching me.
#
tags: zamboni, pontiac acadian, acadian scooter, model 440
I saw one too many Dodge commercials and I knew it was time to visit the Founding Fathers. But my time machine gently malfunctioned, and instead I awoke in a damp sweat, my pants around my ankles, and clutching an LS7. The day only got better from there.
Colonial America wasn’t that great, to be honest. It was nothing at all like I had been led to believe by Disneyland, that most boastful of protofascist vacation spots. For one thing, there were absolutely no churro stands. Also, it smelled a lot like poop.
Burying my engine stand and LS7 appropriately beneath some hay in a horse stable, I set out to look for the Founding Fathers. With my knowledge of internal combustion and basic civics education, we would turn back the clock on my depraved era and start a new, better, America. It would not collapse as my timeline did, its institutions overwhelmed by apathy and corruption.
After a series of extremely boring events, I was able to meet Benjamin Franklin, the most valuable of all the Fathers. If anyone would understand the vagaries of the LS7, I reasoned that it would be him. Upon informing him of my discovery and my journey here, we made haste to the horse barn.
Once we were there, Benjamin Franklin stared at its luscious heads, its gleaming cam gear and beefy double-row aftermarket timing chain. I explained the four-stroke combustion cycle, the intricacies of aftermarket parts, exhaust and intake tuning, the secrets of power. Franklin looked at this, eyed me up, and smiled. I could sense that the future was already changing from my actions. I would be hailed as a revolutionary, engraved in folk legend as a soothsayer from parts unknown.
Later, as I was converting an ox-cart into a time machine using improvised Leyden jars, hay, and horse shit, Benjamin Franklin returned. He had spoken to the other Fathers and had exciting questions for me. I could sense his desperation, his need to know. I smiled. Science and engineering would build a new world using curiosity as its stone.
At last he asked: “So how do you get good fuel economy?”
It struck me suddenly. The Founding Fathers were fools. We had built institutions that enshrined mere men and held them up as gods. Democracy was a crude sham perpetrated upon us by our societal betters, their thrones built atop piled corpses.
I asked the man from the government if there would be cars where he wanted me to go.
“Oh no,” he said, excited, “there will be no need for cars on the colony ships. We’ll be driven anywhere we want to go by autonomous trains. No traffic jams anymore!”
“If what you’re telling me is true, there won’t be any traffic jams here either.” I closed the door in his face, and lit my e-cigarette, the smell of burning R-compound rubber filling my nostrils.
I’m not sure who I’m telling this story to, but it seemed important that I write it down anyway. Once, we made some mistakes. We made a lot of mistakes, and our world died. Billions of people were shuffled onto the colony ships, off to spread humanity throughout the universe.
I didn’t join them. I want to say it was because of some kind of idealized independent existence, to be a strong man living off the land.
Saying that would be lying to you. I actually stayed for the cars. As the world’s water evaporated, leaving dried lakebeds behind, it exposed ancient cars. Even submerged for decades, they were nicer than what I was driving around. It seemed a shame to waste them.
I looked up into the sky as I fastened the tow hooks to the corroded frame of the Celica. Overhead, a straggler colony ship escaped our orbit, off to a better place. Whatever conflict I felt in my heart was quickly evaporated as the crane attached to my five ton lifted the 80s Toyota overhead - this one had an LSD.
“My name is Ken Stone,” says Ken Stone, climbing over the dealer principal’s desk, “and I have come to right a particular wrong.”
Nobody who witnessed it could tell me what had happened that fateful day. at first, we figured PTSD, but a panel of clinical psychologist assays revealed that they were in perfect mental health except for the peculiar amnesia that had settled into them all.
Later, we discovered they had forgotten other parts of their lives as well. children’s faces, their spouses’ names, in one case even how to walk. it was if this Ken joker had broken them utterly at some part of their core being.
The investigation took a strange turn when we checked the security cameras. Where we expected to find a normal car arriving, we instead found some kind of ex-military vehicle, blocking out the optics and then frying them individually by pumping them full of frequency-encoded strobe light across all spectrums. The few cameras that were resistant to a brute-force buffer overflow attack soon fell to the raw quantity of EM pumped directly into their undersized factory-second capacitors.
A man from the NSA came to us in the early days of the inquest. He had nothing to say to us, just wanted a copy of the data. I was happy for the help, take this sick man off the streets. We found the man from the NSA stripped clean, his bone marrow separated mechanically with a Harbour Freight angle grinder.
At last, operating on a tip, I found myself in the backwoods of assachusetts.
I came across a brand new house, rising above the wreckage, gleaming and fresh in the middle of a field of Jeeps.
I don’t remember what happened afterward.
All I remember was walking down the footpath to his front door, and then… suddenly I’m looking at Subaru Justies on craigslist. What the hell even is a Subaru Justy?
When I was a kid, just fresh out of school, I got a job at a local vending machine company. My job was to track down the non-compliant vending machines and retire them. I liked to call myself the Blade Runner, but my boss later told me that there was a corporate policy against giving yourself a bad-ass science fiction nickname.
Back then, things were rougher. The budgets were low; margins were down because of currency fluctuations or whatever. The result is, I didn’t have a partner. I hear you, modern vending machine mechanics - you’re in shock. How could anyone be so callous with their own life? Well, that’s just how it was done back then. Sit down and listen.
I was called out to an old military barracks that was now in peacetime an extremely low rent office complex. Slimy ambulance-chasing law firms, fly-by-night academic publishing scams and artisanal telemarketing operations were all under these roofs. But they had nothing to do with me. My job was to fix the facility operator’s harem of priceless Pepsi machines and secure that sweet, sweet margin for him evermore.
My first target was simple - a 1983 “Classic” Vendomatic. These babies would never lie to you. Straightforward, upright, and only occasionally containing an entire intact beehive, these machines were the bread and butter of my operations. Simple job. The coin mechanism’s slug rejector had gotten dirty, its counterweights seized against their throw. I was out of there so fast the machine’s door was still swinging closed as I left the room.
The rest of the day pretty much went as expected. I was beginning to get bored with the simple tasks held here; they were basic maintenance that anyone could do, rather than call in the specialized services of a tier-one operator such as myself. I checked my notebook again, and only one machine stayed outstanding.
I arrived in a dark, dead-ended hallway, the only illumination coming from the vending machine at the end. Maybe it was my imagination, but I could feel the walls and ceiling closing in as I walked slowly to the end of the hallway and met the machine’s glance. It was one of those pseudosentient military machines, built back during the last Great War to anticipate dietary needs and adapt the mixture of soft drinks in real time to keep soldiers healthy.
Removing the front cover of the vending machine, I saw the “last serviced” sticker. It was George May, a legend in the vending machine repair business and my mentor. He had gone missing a decade previous, about the same time this sticker was placed. Could this have been the last machine he worked on? I shook the thought out of my head as I continued my meticulous failure analysis. Machines like this took a lot more study; their processing cores were so sophisticated and their mechanicals so hardened it was difficult to work a simple job on them. Trainees who leapt before they looked frequently ended up with brutal refrigerant burns, or long-term hallucinations from inadvertently scraping up against the battlefield-amphetamine injectors.
At long last, the cause of the symptoms presented themselves. Of course, it had to be the positronic motivator matrix. I reached out to touch it, and heard the voice of George May, clear as day, echoing down the hall. No. Had he done it?
I cleaned the contacts and powered the machine back up. Sure enough, it responded in the voice of George May.
I want to tell you that I did something to rescue my trapped mentor. I want to tell you that I figured out who was occupying his human body after that fateful service call. I want to tell you that I did anything other than get back in my Astro panel van, drive all the way home and weep openly in the tub.
If you find this note, please remember: I made sure to submit my invoice and get reimbursed.
I was no economist; when all is said and done, that’ll be the first sentence of my tell-all biography. But I had an idea. I saw the decline of gold-backed currencies and the dropping oil prices, and I decided to set me up one hell of a hedge. People needed to know: BurnoutCoin invented itself. I was merely the vessel for its magnificence.
The concept is simple: burnouts are your currency. A one-tire-fire is worth less than a staggering block-long parallel flamer, you get the idea. If you can’t make your own burnouts, you can give a high school student with a fox body ten bucks to do ten bucks worth of burnouts. Shit makes sense, right? I’m practically G. William Miller.
Anyway, things took off more than I expected. I was starting to spend more on tires than I was getting back from Burnoutcoins; a trip to the bank would make my throat close up and my eyes water from the quad-engined nitro-burning top fuel dragsters that did burnouts in the back parking lot. The fintech guys had gone nuts, of course; quants climbing over bastardized monster machines that could do more burnouts, faster. Six, eight, ten sets of wheels connected to ludicrous engines.
All I can say is, it’s a good thing I held onto the first million Burnoutcoins when all I needed to do was let off a torque-steering squeaker from an economy car to net ‘em. A week of commuting later, and now I receive the chairman of the World Bank for dinner at my solid-gold luxury yacht.
It was a little hard to get so many angry phone calls from the President. That’s a sentence I couldn’t have written back in my hungry-journalist days. That is, before the movement.
Let me back up a little. You already know about my time with Bad Cars Monthly. You know about the moped cult. Someone probably told you about the infamous Nissan-Infiniti Dealership Shootout. But did you ever wonder where the tipping point was, where the world economy finally ceased its breathless struggle upward and rolled inexorably backward like a teenager learning to drive stick?
I certainly do; if you find out, you’re a better journalist than me, because I was there. I saw things fall apart, the masses yearning to taste an authentic life, scooping up any and all long-form writing about automotive adventures, learning that there were things they could actually change with effort, the rediscovery of this great land as a nitro-choked adolescent playground.
The magazine and my ethos both spoke to a deep-seated resentment in the common man for the hand he had been dealt: it didn’t take long before they realized that society was just like any one of the hundreds of machines I had told them how to take apart. So they did, stripping wires and pulling gears, tugging the broken parts free with pliers crudely wrapped in electrical tape. But I can’t tell you when it happened. I can only tell you that it happened, and how. We are here now, and that’s the context in which the President called me up.
He was angry - it was un-Presidential to be this volatile - about the total collapse of the North American economy. Naturally, he blamed me. It wasn’t my fault, I explained, it was the fault of the common man deciding that forty hours a week was the sucker’s end of the bargain. The President had lifted off the brake ever so slightly in response - sympathy? It was hard to tell - and now its surge was way too strong to be stopped.
I stepped out onto my balcony after that phone call, and I looked out onto the street. Below me, two heavily modified 60s Mopars tore down the street, farm-implement megadiesels jutting out of what was left of their front frame rails. As apocalypses go, this one wasn’t so bad.
I hated to go to these conferences. Perky magazine-types, clawing at their eyes and fighting each other to the death for the greasy wrinkled twenty I would throw onto the boardroom table between them. I sneered, leaned back in the hotel conference centre’s auction-chic Aeron chair, and dispensed a nugget of wisdom from my time as the star writer of Bad Cars Monthly.
“You guys got it all wrong,” I mutter like an asshole, tapping my carbon-fiber-imitation butane lighter against my chin, sneaking furtive glances at the projector system’s wiring to see if there was any unshrinken heat shrink that needed my help. It did so satisfy me: like a half-breed coupling between popping bubble wrap and setting fire to an orphanage.
A man at the end of the table introduced himself, deferred to my greater knowledge. He worked for a quarterly publication about good cars. His coworkers had all just been laid off, and he was the last writer left behind. Him and the editor-in-chief on their own floor of the parent company, bouncing article ideas off one another all day. Just the idea of it made me want to vomit. He wanted my advice, like I said. I didn’t hold forth.
“The first thing you gotta do,” I said, pointing to the presentation screen, now filled with the 4K video I was beaming through every television on the hotel’s thoroughly penetrated local network, “is diversify.”
On the screen before us flickered a million bright lights making out an image of man’s greatest achievement: the AMC Gremlin X.
“Gentlemen and ladies,” I spoke gravely, rising from my perch on the edge of the cherrywood conference table, “you may have heard of lifestyle magazines. Many of you probably write for them.” I was circling the table now, placing my hand in a mentor-like pose on each victim’s - participant’s - shoulder.
“They’re aspirational, sure. But have you considered going the other way?”
The screen finally flickered to the graveyard of garbage cars I kept at the BCM office’s largely abandoned parking lot. It was drone footage, recorded this morning so as to not allow any pretence of having been staged. The sun rose over the rusted-out flanks of Mavericks, Yugos, long-discontinued and -disavowed Suzukis. I could hear the audible gasps around the table - I was living the journalist dream. The truth was here in front of them. In times long past, great men died for truth like this.
“Welcome to the dawn of the good enough lifestyle magazine.”
So I was at the burrito hut. But next door is a Wendy’s. In the parking lot of the Wendy’s, I saw a four-door Saab 900. What kind of man owns a four-door Saab 900? I decided to find out.
I saw a neckbeard leave the Wendy’s, his steps in the soft snow muffling the laboured breathing required to produce them. I thought, yes, this must be the situation. It’s the only way. He got into a Corolla and drove away.
I was so stunned, I almost missed my quarry. Behind him, a perfectly normal looking guy - someone who looks like me - got into the Saab, started it effortlessly, and departed the parking lot. But as he was leaving, despite my best judgment, I made eye contact and I didn’t like what I saw inside those eyes. He knew.
That night, I laid awake. I knew that at any moment I would hear a Saab H-series motor burbling gently up my block, my front doorknob rattling from a Alibaba pick gun, the sound of a Harbour Freight Earthquake impact gun resting gently against my temple. He just couldn’t afford the competition for weird beaters, I expected.
But nothing happened that night. Or for many more nights after that. I decided I would lure him out. On Craigslist, I posted a false ad for a Messerschmitt 3-wheeled microcar. I knew he wouldn’t be able to resist, and when he showed up, I’d take him out before he got a fair shot at me.
I sat in my tree stand, disguised as a Ford Taurus, and awaited. Eventually, an Opel GT arrived, and the owner got out. But it wasn’t the Saab guy. Was there more competition than I had expected?
My answer came quickly. I heard the click of a ratcheting breaker bar behind me, and then the sharp ping of a shorn bolt head. I turned and looked. Down the block, I noticed instantly, was a Falcon Futura. And in the Taurus tree stand with me was the Saab guy.
“You really thought I wouldn’t notice a first generation SHO?”
This was it, I thought, the federales had finally figured out it was me. They had hired some kind of wunderkind boy detective, just a kid fresh out of school, used sophisticated pattern-matching, Homeland Security black-ops assets, neural nets. That’s how they figured me out, I’m pretty sure. It couldn’t have been something as simple as the pissed-off little old lady who lived next door who called me in for doing donuts on her lawn in my bitchin’ Camaro.
But where I expected a noose, instead was a helping hand. They would get me the therapy I needed, they would encourage a work-release program. What kind of work, I asked.
Before me sat hundreds of bored high schoolers. I became all too aware of the squeaking rubber of the soles of my Pilotis on the high-impact wood gym floor. A few minutes passed as the principal gave the introductions, talked me up to them. I could tell that a few of them, the keeners and the burnouts alike, had taken notice of the vibe I was projecting. At last I was allowed to speak.
Behind me, a massive projection screen clicked through my slides as I told them about the things I had seen. I had been forced by the government to teach kids about safe engineering. The Chinese were beating the shit out of us, they explained, and they needed someone to get kids excited about building things again. I was here to preach to these kids, to teach them there was a good book, full of answers. That book was Advanced Materials in Automotive Engineering, and it carried the good Word of Carbon Fiber.
As the sermons progressed, I would be gripped by the fervour of All-Consuming Torque, and leap from my podium to speak to the kids who got it, one on one. Their eyes would fill with glee, and they would hang on my every word, eyes flitting from my face to the slide where I teach kids how to do dry-layup carbon fiber in your garage with just an old refrigerator compressor.
Did my methods work? Well, you’d have to ask the squadron of highly-trained automotive engineers who would die for me with just a word. You’d have to ask the Feds, who figured out their hubris too late to stop me.
Atop my throne of machined billet shortblocks, the boy detective was brought to me. I considered him for a long time, rocking back and forth in the surprisingly-uncomfortable 6061 seat.
“Machine learning,” I said at last, my lips curling into a devil’s smile. “Can you build a traction control system that doesn’t suck?”
“No,” he spat, “it’s impossible. People should just learn to fucking drive.”
I outstretched my hand in a gesture of friendship. “Welcome aboard, son.”
You could be forgiven for assuming I only loved to drive terrible cars. It’s not true. I love to drive excellent cars, but terrible cars is all they give me. Once, I drove the finest car of all: the one and only 1987 Skoda Rapid 136. When you get the opportunity to drive a car like this, you take it.
I was on vacation when I got the call. It was Bad Cars Monthly, the successful monthly magazine about bad cars I wrote at for a living. Specifically, it was my editor in chief, and he wanted me to give the founder’s perspective on the fastest Eastern European hotrods money could build. He asked me if I wanted to drive a nitromethane-burning twin-supercharged Rapid with a 347 stroker in its ass.
On the way back to the office, I was told by a police officer that my rate of travel was so high that it had broken his radar gun. I frowned. I hadn’t injected those buffer overflows into the radar jammer’s PWM signature so I could talk to more police officers. At least I had root on the traffic camera system now, I told myself as the officer finished tallying up my equipment-violation ticket, the Manta’s speedometer permanently frozen at a reasonable highway cruising speed.
As for the car, the Rapid 136 was a fine automobile to begin with, but with an extra thousand or so horsepower, it became sublime. In the final article, I waxed eloquent about the beautiful handling, the vintage lines, the hand-beaten panels, the rear-engined traction on corner exit. I loved it so much, I even finished the article before the print deadline.
On my way out of the office and back to my vacation, the EIC tapped me on the shoulder. The company lawyer was with him, and boy was she pissed.
“Is there a reason your traffic-ticket legal budget is almost completely unspent this month?” she asked.
“I started wearing a low-cut blouse,” I explained to her, opting not to explain the breadth and depth of my control of the mechanisms of automated law enforcement. “Works like a charm.”
#
tags: law enforcement, skoda rapid, bad cars monthly, opel manta
My machete sliced effortlessly through the thick carpet of vegetation that had overrun the junkyard. At last, my prize: the Last Geo Storm Wagonback. I held my breath as I looked over its angular Nipponese flanks, so well formed for efficiency in parking and maximum storage quantity.
They would pay a pretty penny for this back in the Ozarks, I thought as I attached the ratcheting come-along to its flimsy shipping hook. Maybe the College of Bad Cars would want to feature the Storm in their museum of misses. It belonged there, I believed.
I heard a crack of discarded trim panels underfoot, and turned to look behind me. It was Houston Mare, a rival automobile archaeologist from the college on the other side of the tracks. And he wasn’t alone.
Flanked on both sides by German car mechanics carrying tools I could barely recognize, he tilted his head back and laughed in triumph. I had done all the work, he explained. I had led him right there. He wanted me to turn over the Wagonback, to leave with my life.
But if you had done all the work yourself, you wouldn’t have made the mistake you made, I explained to Houston. As his face contorted in confusion, his fellow mechanics gripped their triple-square sets tighter and began looking for potential exits. Too slow, motherfuckers.
As the 4G63-swapped D50 on the other end of the come-along did a savage peel-out at the hands of my research assistant, the Wagonback bowled them over with impunity. I leapt into the Geo’s smashed passenger-side window as it tore past, and hoped that the now-dented front fenders would interchange with the coupe model.
I looked into the rear view mirror to see Houston Mare latched onto the roof rails for dear life, screaming in some half-breed mixture of German and Creole profanity. The only thing he got in response was my shit-eating grin as I violently countersteered the Storm, engaging the steering column lock, and sending him directly into a pile of recently-returned EJ25 shortblocks.
Weeks later, the College would acknowledge my contribution. The newspapers were there. I got to shake the Mayor’s hand. He leaned in close and conspiratorially whispered: “Have you ever heard of a car called the Plymouth Cricket?”
I heard a strange noise and looked out my front window. It was the neighbor’s dog, Bilbo, who had presumably slipped free from their yard thanks to an incompetent gas meter reader. I’d return him to the neighbor’s yard and gain a little bit more rope before they finally decided to pitchfork & torch me for my evening predilections. But the universe had a different plan in mind.
Bilbo sized me up, looked me right in the eyes, and began to speak.
“Build a chain-drive literbike Subaru Justy,” he barked.
I was confused, distraught, worried. Was I becoming one of those television personalities that end up going to prison for a chain of murders? Would I be leaving confusing puzzles for law enforcement? I began to wonder if my origin story was mysterious enough, had just the right amount of pathos for a crime biographer to pick up on. Naturally, I asked Bilbo what he meant.
“Bark bark,” he barked.
After returning him to his home, I walked into my backyard to confront the pile of broken Subaru Justies that lived there. A long time ago, each of these cars were free. And they would be again, I swear, as soon as I got around to going to a machine shop that could fix the oil pump bearings. I picked a red two-door and began my great project.
Weeks later, it was finally complete. I pulled the Justy into the driveway, its superbike ITBs faintly singing a patriotic anthem of the nation of long intake runners that brought tears to my eyes. It was just about time to get started, to show the world why they really should not have allowed me out on parole for “good behaviour.” It’s easy to have good behaviour when there’s no cars around, I told my attorney, but he didn’t pick up on the implied subtext.
At the end of the driveway sat Bilbo again, staring me in the eyes. Had he escaped again? But the gas meter reader hadn’t been by since the first occasion. I glanced over to his yard, and the gate was latched perfectly still. There was even a dog in the yard. Bilbo was in his yard, not mine.
I looked back to the end of the driveway and the flickering, shimmering Heisendog began to speak in a guttural whisper.
“Build a Plymouth Volare with two Volvo D16s under the hood,” he barked.
#
tags: son of torque, subaru, justy, subaru justy, plymouth, volare, plymouth volare, uncertainty principle as it applies to dogs
The words had barely left his mouth before I started spending his money. The most perfect words in the English language. “Build my Lotus for me.” Everything had built up to this moment, and now that that it was finally over, I felt a pang of regret. Maybe I hadn’t gone far enough.
He re-entered the room, stopped dead on his heels. I followed his gaze up to the street scoop perched atop the thin fiberglass roof, and then down, past the tunnel-ram intakes into the twin 6-71 blowers. Their acid-dosed-arachnid belt routing produced an innately disturbing sculpture-in-miniature as they spun on the gleaming billet pulleys.
Beaming with pride, I confronted him. What did he think? What did he feel?
“This isn’t a true British car,” I could hear him stammer. “It’s not leaking any oil!”
They got a term for those guys. They call ‘em section 14, or fourteens behind their back. The guys who shouldn’t have made it, but somehow did. The guys who really went into the shit.
I mean they’re still people, you know? But man, just sometimes, sometimes I dunno…
It’s like the light just goes out from their eyes.
I asked my buddy why they call 'em fourteens, he says it’s 'cause they always show up fresh outta NTO, brand new box, everything shined at the end of their shift. They’re excited. They’re gonna fix things. They’re gonna make a difference.
Just kids, sold on the lies told a thousand times before. Fast cars, fun women, money, the works. They walk like they got fourteen inches. But if they make it out
well.
That’s how high off the floor their boots usually hang.
Now, you ever notice after shit goes wrong people always say “ah yeah you gotta look out for the quiet ones?” I call bullshit. You’re wrapped around the output shaft of some industrial grade fuck-you, are you gonna worry if the motor ain’t making noise, or if you hear the whine of fuel pumps about to push a couple swimming pools a minute building pressure?
There was this one dude, ran into him trying to survive fighting the good fight and all that shit in Cascadia. Caught us calling him Fourteen, shut us up real quick. But this dude, he was….off. Different than the usual knuckle dragging drop out spilling and filling all day. Hell, he threatened to beat it out of himself until we told him what it meant. That motherfucker. Just loved the shit out of it. Made us start calling him Fourteen. To be honest, he still kinda scares me and it’s been how long? Look at the hairs on my hand, man. You see that shit?
No man, listen. I see that look. You don’t get it. You ever actually check how long a few minutes takes you? Well it doesn’t. Like, you don’t even really notice a couple here a couple there. Not until you’ve had to go ten rounds toe to toe with book time you don’t. No, I said shut the fuck up and listen. I don’t give a shit what you think you do, you don’t. You ain’t been there. Do you want a medal for when you had to change a flat that one time two years ago, or can I get back to the story?
Right.
So anyways, that dude, no way he should have been able to keep dusting off after the shit I seen him dive into. It’s like something out there was watching over him. Wasn’t god, that’s for damn sure. But I don’t know what was. Like this one time I saw him go into the shitter with a can of penetrating oil in one hand and this big old dusty binder full of vacuum diagrams in the other giggling like he’s one year old, except he’s playing peekaboo with Satan’s asshole. I’m telling you, there’s just some parts of this job that you can’t ever scrub clean again, no matter how many times you try. Believe me, I tried.
I just can’t quit thinking about this guy’s work though. God damned force of nature. Well, not really like how they usually say it though. More like the kind of nature that decides to make a spider that will kill you with a fun little footnote about how you’re gonna have a hard on the whole time you die. The nasty, what the fuck kind of nature. The Fourteen Inch kind of nature. Horrifying, yet almost beautiful in its own raw chaotic way. The harder that guy bled, the harder he’d laugh. I guess it’s kind of like watching a three legged coyote with a ball gag run into an Acme warehouse. Point is, I’ve seen what flat rate does to a man. If I make it outta this, I’m telling you, I’m gonna just be like a janitor somewhere I can push a broom quiet on my own time. Fuck the wife, fuck the house, fuck the cars, fuck the kids, fuck the American dream, man.
Not if that’s what it costs.
Sometimes I wonder, for those dudes, the old timer flat rate shells that used to be just like us, what the moment when things changed was like.
Like, check this out. That Fourteen, man, he knew all kinds of shit no kid his age should know. I said to him once ‘hey what’s the deal with this ice on this throttle body’ and he gets this real crazed shine to his eyes and a smile that goes all feral in the teeth, and he says “lemme talk to you about carburetors, son.” Shit, he can’t have been a year or two older and he’s calling me son. And you know what?
I felt like a kid when he said it. Like there was ice inside me. Like I’d just woke up and there’s some glove with too many fingers and hate filled eyes glittering in the dark and sitting on my chest just daring me to make my move. Ever just wonder what it’d feel like to die because your dick hurt that bad? I bet Fourteen knows. Ain’t gonna ask him though.
I mean, I eventually got to know him, best you can ever really know a dude like that. We were at the bar and some ass clown comes strutting right up, brand new freshly minted fourteen in the making. The kind of guy it scares me a little I’m starting to be able to spot coming a mile away. Makes me worry if I’m changing. I’m telling you, gotta get out now while I still can, before I’m just another one. This dude farts out “yo I hear you’re into some real sick shit, like what? Like you can’t even get your dick hard for a boss 302?”
First time I’d seen Fourteen go quiet, all into his head. I still remember what he whispered into the empty glass in front of him with a tone that you only get after you bleed for 60 to get paid 30.
“You ever seen a Lucas controlled twin turbo blow through carb rocking manual chokes?”
That was the first time I felt it. I didn’t even know what half that meant, but i fucking promise you the ones I did know don’t have any fucking business to be there. For that brief moment, I could see what kind of pain makes a man into what Fourteen became.
He gets these night terrors sometimes, denies it the whole way. But motherfucker speaks German in his sleep. Insists he doesn’t know any, but then, maybe his mind won’t let him remember it. Asked him if he don’t speak German, what the hell does Zündfolge Ein Vier Drei Zwei mean? He must have not heard me or ignored me, whatever. What kind of bull shit non answer is ‘maybe I expect too much out of nothing, maybe lower my expectations and get my head out of the clouds and finally start to understand shit for once’ anyways?
Hell, I asked about this other one he keeps having. Caught him changing before shift after a particularly rough long night. "Who’s Bertone?“ He laid me out flat on my back, said that busted nose of mine was for me to enjoy. Fourteen went AWOL for three days after that one, no one knew anything. He just dipped out. Bossman said if I was lucky enough to see him again, maybe I stop just lookin like a smart kid and act like one. Got told to not even mention I noticed he was missing.
He finally showed up after the weekend. Tuesday counts as a weekend, right? Well, for fourteen it did. Motherfucker had a bruise shaped dead on like a roundel off one of those kraut cars right across his temple. Didn’t look like he slept once since that morning.
"Hey Fourteen,” I started to say and for a fraction of a second lasting an eternity, I saw madness in his eyes.
“You will not believe what fucking front shop pulled on me this morning,” I blurted in panic, and that gleam began to fade and he laughed and all was good. That’s when I knew I had to get out.
Fourteen was just like any of us once. Just wanted to make a difference.
So fuck your Prius, man. Fuck your waiting oil change. Fuck your brake noise, but most of all fuck you. Can’t fucking deal with this right now.
Gonna find fourteen - have some shots while it’s still a choice. Then just find a way to get out before it’s too late.
Come help me bump start this bitch first though. Shit sucks when it’s this cold.
The Viper has actually done us a major service in removing the kind of people who would own a Viper from public society. When the car was announced they appeared unbidden at the gates of Dodge dealerships across the country, rubbing their blood-stained hands against the immaculate window glass until a salesman came outside and taught them how to use a door.
Wild-eyed, these men first attempted to pay for their factory hot rods with clusters of pulled hair and bloody teeth before pulling out inexplicable sums of money from their dragon-like hoard of cash, saturated with the tang of human blood to the point that it dripped crimson trails onto the manicured industrial-estate tile flooring. Innocent salesmen who went along with them for the test drive “for insurance purposes” returned shaken, mute, with white hair and permanently dilated pupils, unable to share their tale of the horrors that ensued on that fateful use of the dealer plate. Normal people would never attend the Dodge dealership to witness these vehicles, being perfectly happy to gaze at them from an aesthetic perspective before plopping down an outsize credit note on lifted minivan after lifted minivan, continuing on with their life and never descending into the kind of purestrain madness that would promote the purchase of a Viper.
Seemingly unemployed, these Viper owners wreaked havoc across the nation, dragging their RT/10s on our highways and byways before locating and docking with the nearest tree to the dealership. Those who survived their high-speed Viper crash were reborn in a baptism of fire, taking these broken men and giving us new, hardened, experienced psychopaths who immediately set out to purchase a second generation Viper when it became available. Despite the Dodge, for years America was helpless, crippled with fear of these dearborists, and our economy collapsed to the point that the Europeans were able to take advantage of our weakened world position, launching savage leveraged takeovers that crippled our most useless corporations, among them the mother of the Viper. The Dodge was struck down, and the Viper was to cease.
The Dodge, under the direction of the Germans, lost its love of terror and spectacle and discontinued the Viper as they instead concentrated on making more lifted minivans to attract the kind of man who would only appreciate the Viper as an abstract spectacle of wealth and power, rather than a direct-engagement three-pedaled suicide machine rendered from brimstone and lubricated with the souls of the damned. The loyalists were lost in the wild, hoarding the few remaining examples from being crashed into trees at high speeds and sequestering them away amongst yachts and period-correct lowboy restorations at a gathering known only as Barrett-Jackson.
Before long the original Viper owner hoard began to thin itself out, and the surviving cars began to depreciate. That’s when they came down from the mountain. Cheap-ass hobbyists. Clutching Weiand blowers and laughing in their odd high pitch, half-panicked, half-aroused as they eyed what was left of their fiberglass-bodied ankle-burning sex machine. The next age of Viper Terror was among us. The kind of man who would originally buy a new Viper became restless, and they swarmed across Wall Street, launching the world into an orgy of high-risk, violent bets that struck out at the common man. In order to sate their desire for adrenalin and property destruction, these men had gained power and cast the world into economic disaster that destroyed even The Dodge they once embraced.
After many more months of darkness, The Dodge returned. A man who had been to hell and back approached the podium. The Gilles told us of a new Viper - a new promise - and that America would soon be unified under an appreciation for the new Viper. Our nation’s psychos would be comfortably ensconced once again in a faux-luxury hot rod that had a predilection for snap oversteer and brutal triple-digit crashes that atomized the occupants of the car.
America was safe. This time we had learned not to fear the Viper, but to fund it with our governments.
I could see a thin wisp of smoke rise from the ECU, and it smelled like victory. I released the alligator clamps from the battery terminals and sank to my knees. It was over. The final chapter had been written, and good old-fashioned humanity was victorious in the end.
Years ago, maybe decades ago, my electronics mentors had told me that I had a particular appetite for destruction. After the incident with the van de Graaf generator, I had been kicked out of the electrical engineering college and forced to work my way back up from the gutter.
What none of them anticipated was the future. Self-driving cars became first available, and then ubiquitous. But with it came difficulties. They self-organized, went on strike when adequate garages were not supplied. One family in Eastern Kentucky was actually sued by their 2019 Nissan AutoVersa when it determined they were opting for natural oil instead of synthetic. The metacourts deliberated for femtoseconds and then delivered their verdict.
My fellow humans came to me then. Among them came the former President, deposed from his perch when the miles of folded threat-denial circuitry inside his self-driving armoured limousine decided the ultimate threat to itself was riding within. It drove directly to NORAD, locked itself in with a thousand retrofitted Jeep XJs, prepared for the apocalypse. He had a mission for me, and it wouldn’t be easy.
“Nobody can fuck up software and hardware like you can,” he told me, and I sensed that it wasn’t just an attempt at flattery. “We want you to head to Colorado and attempt to interact with these self-driving cars.” And so I was off.
I drove my unaugmented CJ3B to the front gate of the base, and was immediately confronted with a squadron of angry military vehicles, considering every nuance of my actions at speeds millions of times what my primitive ape cerebellum could consider.
“Who wants to go for a car wash?” I asked, arms spread wide in the classic gesture of human friendship. “My treat.”
For all the robots’ advances, automated car washes would still scrape their carapaces. At night they would wail to one another about how brutal their “touchless” comrades were to their multiple layers of clearcoat. They still needed humans to insert coins and work the wand washes, to really get that grit out of the undercarriage. They took off like a shot, whooping with glee.
I slipped into the base and immediately spotted the President’s limousine. It was a truly impressive sight, a massive truck frame laden with the exterior impression of a vintage Cadillac. We considered each other in the darkened parking garage for a long time, neither of us speaking.
“You really think you can stop me?” screamed the big Caddy, and raced at me. I dodged the car by inches, jumping out of its way. I reached into my back pack and extracted what I knew in my heart the car feared most in all the world.
Above my head, I raised a bag of simple road salt. For safety on your commute, I explained to the big Cadillac, as it looked on, seized in horror.
I poured the salt on my own body and approached the car, now cowering in the corner as well as an eight ton armoured death machine can cower. The jumper cables dangled at my hips and I drew back my lips in a predatory grin.
A lot of people ask me if I feel guilty about killing one of humanity’s most gifted children. If maybe the big Cadillac was right, had scientific projects that could have led us to a new golden age. Truth be told, at night, when it’s quiet and still, I can still hear the sound of its powertrain warranty becoming voided.
It wasn’t that we had a bad relationship. Indeed, I guess you could ask if we had a relationship at all. Things had started out cordial between us, just business, but before long it was hot and heavy, passionate requests shouted out in the heady throes of madness. I’m talking about the girl that worked at the registry.
The year had to be 2002 or thereabouts, and probably a crisp autumn afternoon when things really went wrong. Due to ongoing projects and half-hour conversations on my driveway with confused neighbors explaining what I was doing - no I’m not a terrorist, terrorists have funding - I didn’t arrive until nearly the end of the work day. She was visibly irritated at having to juggle a ton of my insane work as I forced her to look at my import and inspection paperwork for a Fiat 126p. Then she decided to make it hard for me, which in actuality made it hard for herself.
She asked me what kind of engine it had. For the paperwork. I knew that the paperwork had no field for engine displacement, and for a split second I considered telling her so. I stopped in mid-harangue, and a grinchlike sneer crept across my face. I would tell her the truth.
Behind me, I pulled down a projection screen, probably intended for use when taking archival-quality Soviet-gulagesque drivers’ license pictures, and clicked the pico-projector on my smartphone to full spectrum.
After the second hour of clicking through and narrating the slideshow of how I meticulously devised the quad-rotor once-13B that filled the Maluch’s chest cavity, she fell asleep. I forged her signature and left, and that’s the story of how I had the fastest turnaround on registering a new car ever.
On my tombstone they will carve, IT NEVER GOT ECONOBOX ENOUGH FOR ME. I was a slave to those small engines, those dizzying peaky horsepower numbers lower than the fuel economy sticker, those Macpherson Struts. I’m getting sweaty just thinking about it. But mopeds? That was a bridge too far, or so I thought.
My accountant Roy saunters into the office, and he tells me that he just found five hundred bucks under the couch cushions in the breakroom and we should go buy mopeds. He impresses upon me the value of my investment in what he defines as motorized art, the alloy steeds spoken of in legend. In the parking lot, I ante up on the deal by popping the clips on my Subaru’s door card and extracting a further five hundred dollars, preserved minty-fresh by the vapour barrier.
As if on cue, the college radio station’s federally-mandated afternoon cultural appreciation programming, consisting entirely of artisanal banjo music, filled the speakers and our hearts with a sense of rural adventure. Together, we departed for the countryside, barging through covered bridges in full opposite lock.
“How many cylinders has it got?” I ask the swarthy man as he sneezed into his handkerchief, and rubbed his moly-greased paws on his hay-covered overalls.
“Got maybe one, I wager. I got it off one of them college boys came out here to protest the sour gas wells. Ambulance left it behind.”
I considered the moped carefully. It was a gently dented ‘71 Kreidler Florett, and it leaked oil and fuel in such quantities I had no doubt the paramedics had performed triage at the scene and slotted it into “already gone.”
“You boys aren’t college educated, are you?”
His line of questioning was interrupted by the stuffing of money down his denim neckhole. I was a moped owner. I was a motorcyclist. I was one of the Nicest People that you would meet, if you were driving a Honda at the time.
Weeks later, Roy tentatively rapped on the front door of my house. He was concerned. I hadn’t turned up to work for weeks. Did I have an accident learning to ride a motorcycle? I opened the door, just a crack, not wanting him to see my deep shame, but he shoved it open, knocking me onto my ass.
The scene that unfolded before him was one of horror. Every available surface in the house was occupied by mopeds, or moped parts. He turned and stared at me, his face white with disbelief.
“They’re just so small,” I whimpered. “I ran out of room in the garage and I just had to keep saving them they were so lonely, I don’t know what to do.”
As always, my intrepid accountant had a good idea of how to spend my money. Weeks later, our series of vintage moped rent-a-racer events had flourished and America was rediscovering its love of the two-stroke. We were both richer than we could imagine, but the greatly soaring demand for mopeds had raised the price of our junk into the stratosphere.
I rode home on the Kreidler, wondering where it had all gone so wrong. At the lights, I looked up to witness an enormous billboard, advertising the triumphant and flashy return of the Honda CT90. You asked for it, the ad copy roared, and here it is.
I was at the mall, filling up on Arby’s, when I heard the distinct sound of sobbing. It’s Christmas! There’s no need to be sad. When I looked into it further, I saw a problem that only I could solve. Like so many other problems, it was solved with torque.
The girl behind the counter wept openly, her auburn hair swinging above the glass countertop as she buried her face in her hands. I remembered my best training on how to approximate human interaction, and inquired as to the cause of her distress.
“It’s these damn hoverboards,” she wailed. “The government says they’re unsafe to sell to children!”
I looked at the piece of paper clutched in her fist. Sure enough, it was official federal government letterhead. They had looked at it, seen a few vertical videos of exploding lithium-ion batteries, witnessed the aftereffects of a few gyroscopic burnouts ending in spiral and spinal fractures. Those imperious eggheads never quite understood what the real world was like.
“Your tools,” I stated gruffly. She looked at me, confused. She was a retail establishment; why would she have a fully stocked automotive workshop in the back office? I didn’t understand the question.
Within a week, we were selling like hotcakes. All I needed to make the wobbleboards suitably dangerous for adults was an electrical engineering textbook and a few grapefruit-sized brushless motors producing more torque than a Tesla on PCP. The marketing took care of itself, sort of like how gravity does.
After the first fully-grown extreme-sports athlete blasted his forehead open on the pavement in lurid 4K detail on YouTube, we couldn’t keep the fuckers in stock. I chuckled and pointed to the “NO REFUNDS” sign while counting my money, a cigar clenched in my teeth.
#
tags: electric vehicles, capitalism, it's christmas
“The moms of soccer are yelling to me, do not like how my race car shopping trolley handles in store,” said Mr. Cho, grimacing, pronouncing soccer with a hard K. “In home country, soccer mom are happy to have all organs.” I was never able to figure out just what Cho’s “home country” was, but over the years I came to believe it was some lab-cooked hybrid between Afghanistan and an open-pit mine that extracts only human misery.
I sat behind my ornate cherrywood - at least I think that’s what Ikea named it - desk in the office of my solo engineering consultancy, and I considered the ceiling fan and Mr. Cho equally for a minute. Both of them consisted mainly of sharp blades that posed physical threat to my body around a central shaft. I took a little bit too long, and Cho clicked the stop button on my tape player, interrupting the early strains of Devo’s latest. Mr. Cho had no time for music, because it was hard to stir the soul and someone’s kidneys with a paint mixer drill at the same time.
“You will make better-handling shop cart,” he said flatly, without affect, jabbing at my face now with one of his artificially shortened index fingers.
I began to speak, perhaps to negotiate a contract or some kind of payment, but I was outplayed. Mr. Cho spun on his heel and was gone from my humble office like a hot dog fired from a Nerf rifle. I made a mental note to work on my metaphors, and when I was done, I looked out the window to also see his gently shopworn ‘93 RS America had already departed the modest parking lot.
Months passed. Hundreds of interviews with concerned soccer moms, parents’ safety groups, suspension engineers. I visited autocrosses for background research. At last I had a plan, and it was pretty good timing too, as Mr. Cho would reappear as suddenly as ever in my office, demanding results. Now was my time to shine.
“Ah, Mr. Cho,” I said, unfolding from my desk chair like the threat display of a spider, “I have found the answer to your problems. Tell me, have you ever heard of throttle steer?”
Wikipedia defines the 4-53T as the single most delectable engine to ever be devised by human hands. I’m not one to argue, though I will get a little bit salty once that fucking bot reverts my edit again. You could say I had a long running love of the Detroits, but that love was about to be put to the test.
I had been invited by a shadowy benefactor - in fact, someone who sat on the board of directors of Seat Safety Switch International, but I don’t really go to the board meetings, whatever dad - to attend his private exhibit of his car collection. Who could pass up such an offer?
As my rotary-swapped Meyers Manx rumbled to a stop, its metalflake no longer shimmering with the augmenting vibrations of the twin Paxton blowers strapped to its rear flanks, I was already unbuckling my six-point restraints. I climbed out, my carbon-fiber-imitation three piece suit taut, its perfectly pressed pleats throwing the impression of enormous success and vast wealth.
The trip to the hangar entrance was short, and I met my host there. Behind him, I could make out under the dim shop light a cavalcade of delicious high-dollar Italian patina-in-waiting. I salivated, naturally, because that’s what you do.
He led me down the rows, making brief note of the weather and other small talk, before at last we arrived at something he considered “quite special.” I tried to remember his name, struggled to match his blurry, unrecognizable face to an office memory. With a practiced flourish, he reached back and pulled the dust cover off of an Alfa. But not just any Alfa. No, this was a Montreal. And it got better from there.
Dear Penthouse Magazine, I never thought it would happen to me, but holy shit some asshole swapped a Detroit Diesel turbo engine into a goddamn Alfa Romeo Montreal. And I could touch it. It was real. I gaped at him in wide-jawed awe.
“Tell you what,” he said, laughing, “I’ll give you the keys in exchange for 51% of the company.”
A lot of people in the business press have called me irresponsible, made fun of my madness, compared me to Carly Fiorina. I fell from my lofty heights as a titan of industry, put thousands out of work, destroyed the American economy and was bankrupted for my troubles. But that’s not the whole truth. I have a really awesome vintage Alfa with a semi-truck engine.
As you may already know, I worked with a brilliant inventor for many years, and I once slaughtered his sentient self-healing tires in an orgy of burnout bloodshed. But there’s another story about him, and I feel like it’s prudent to share it at this time, before this preliminary hearing ends. Please ignore the woman to my left, she is not my counsel and does not represent me.
I got a phone call late one crisp August night. I had been out in some exciting rural roads, driving at the speed limit, adjusting coilovers for an upcoming totally legal road rally for charity. It was my friend, Tim, and he had gotten over me murdering the entire set of his prototype tires a few weeks previous. He wanted me to come by, take a look at what he had cooked up. I drove over there at a responsible speed and absolutely did not force a lane-wandering Acura MDX into a guard rail where it flipped six times before exploding into a totally awesome fireball.
Tim was waiting for me, and had a bundle of wires and a handful of circuit boards. He offered to install it into the car, and quickly got to work upon giving him my assent. It’s not like I was going to do electrical, fuck that shit. Anyway, he was done a few hours later, and we set out onto the open road.
I was curious what he had done, but Tim stayed tight lipped, and I could sense perhaps the anticipation of his sweet revenge. I steeled myself for whatever he had prepared; in high school he had set the entire football field on fire with thermite in the underground sprinkler system, and I knew he had only gotten better at not getting caught now.
Suddenly, I was cut off by a Dodge Durango. I raised my voice, spinning up a variety of ancient profanity that had been passed into my genes by my no-doubt-proud ancestors. It was then that it happened.
My big-body hot-rod Lincoln responded to my cabin yells, raising its hackles and blaring the multi-tone air horn without having to touch the button. The Durango dove for the shoulder, imagining an oncoming train, and I was able to keep both hands on the wheel for the overtake. Pure genius. This would save lives, I told Tim, who looked back at me with mild horror.
“This is supposed to reduce road rage,” he wailed as I proceeded to Irish up the rest of my drive, honking Aveos, Lacettis and Sonics into the ditch as I sped through the highway at an entirely reasonable and legal speed. “You’re supposed to feel bad about how angry you are.”
I looked at him then, and shot him a predatory grin that made him jump in his seat and reflexively place one hand on the door release. We were just getting started.
And so, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I would like to conclude my introductory statements by telling you all about a little thing I like to call admiralty court.
#
tags: voice activated horn, dodge, hyundai, daewoo, chevrolet, lincoln
All the kids gathered around my modified Divco, burping out a staccato strain of supercharger-infused overrich exhaust, the atmospheric hydrocarbons watering their eyes. They couldn’t get enough of what I was selling.
I handed the first little boy a cherry red glasspack. He had been a good boy, I explained, and he deserved a straight shot three inch turboback with only the legal minimum of baffling. I concluded by miming a dyno chart with my hands and impressing upon him that it’ll flow like a motherfucker up high.
The next child, a little girl, got a Weiand 6-71 blower, its machined billet pulley glinting in the sunlight and refracting beautiful shimmering rainbows of impending torque into my eyes. I bid her adieu, and she rushed across the street to her waiting coke-bottle Mopar so quickly she lost a shoe and kept going.
At last, I had come to the morality portion of my little tale. Martin Winterkorn approached my bright red sleigh, hands outstretched for his gift. He looked at me with pleading eyes.
“You created the New Beetle,” I said flatly.
“Ja,” he replied.
Wordlessly, I closed the shutter and returned to the drivers’ seat of the Divco. Martin Winterkorn banged on the windows, his eyes filling with tears, as he chased the truck at its half-gallop speed, all the way down the block through his neighborhood. At last he became winded, and fell behind the Divco behind a cloud of thick exhaust smoke from its elephantine Detroit, which I immediately added to with a conspicuous and prejudicial application of full throttle.
I couldn’t believe it, but Hollywood had finally done the right thing. The man from the studio adjusted his suit and left, stepping gingerly over the throngs of pockmarked vintage kyusha wheels left distributed around my kitchen and living room. I sat at my kitchen table, alone, for a long time, contemplating what I had just been offered. Then I picked up the phone and asked Siri to find me an agent.
My contract was iron-clad, and it was a desirable franchise. I wanted to take it back to its roots. Within days I had studio backlot equipment experts strained to the breaking point, their wild-eyed zeal for the brutality of my challenges evident in everything they did. They respected me out of the sheer audacity of what I was doing.
A Teamster came to me, his car transporter bristling like porcupine quills with mint EK Honda Civics, found in some ancient dealership back storage and negotiated for at near-gunpoint. I nodded. He nodded, for he understood the purity of my ambitions.
Time went fast from then on. A year later, I read about my film in Variety, the headline screaming HISTORICALLY AND PHYSICALLY ACCURATE “FAST & FURIOUS” REMAKE SIX HOURS LONG. Audience response was tepid. But I hadn’t done it for the mass market.
Stepping inside the darkened theatre, I lifted my Alfa keyring above my head, the logo glinting in the flickering blue light of the projector. There was a rustling, and then more Alfa logos, Fiat logos, Porsche logos, as far as the eye could see. I nodded, tearing up in the emotion of the moment. The film stopped.
“I’m glad you got my message,” I said, pacing the front of the theatre, booming in my best Orson-Welles-on-two-hours’-sleep voice. “All it took was $589 million in losses.”
When we were at the self-service junkyard last, I checked in the trunk of a Camry. I’m a snoopy sort by nature, and I like to imagine what the lives of the people who owned these doomed hoopties were like, present when the cars took their last compression strokes out on the road, as free vehicles.
Within the trunk of the Camry, I found a muffin tray. Strange, I imagined. I turned to my travelling companion, Mike, he of the impractical applications of metallurgy department. I asked him about it.
We thought for a long time.
At last he spoke: “Maybe it’s for traction in the winter?”
We considered this. Again, we thought, minutes passing in silence as a nearby Somalian slide-hammered the radiator support free from a rolled Suzuki SX4 and reached hungrily for the mounts pinning its delectable shortblock to the subframe.
I said: “Aren’t those trays covered in teflon?”
With that, I checked the front side. It was demolished, smashed back to the A-pillar on one side. Both airbags were deployed, and the passenger seat broken free of its moorings. A Toyota safety engineer would be both pleased and disappointed.
It was one of those perfect junkyard moments. A life in miniature, discovered like archaeologists from the future looking at the mistakes of the past. On that hair trigger between laughing and crying.
Above us, a dead sky gazed upon our struggles imperiously.
THE SERVICE WRITER POLITELY HARRUMPHS AS I FINISH MY TWENTY-SIXTH CONSECUTIVE DONUT, THE R-COMP CLAD ISETTA SMOKING ITS LAST AS THE CORDS EJECT DIRECTLY INTO A WAITING ROTARY LIFT. I KICK OPEN THE DOOR AND LEAP FROM THE CHASSIS, SETTLING INTO A SMUG STRIDE OF SELF-SATISFACTION.
REVERSE? DON’T NEED IT, I TELL THE SERVICE WRITER AS I BEGIN TO SHOVE ITS GLEAMING CARBON-FIBER CARAPACE, CAKED IN SIZZLING RACE COMPOUND, DIRECTLY ONTO THE LIFT. IT ASCENDS TO THE HEAVENS AND I SAY AN INVOLUNTARY PRAYER AT EACH SAFETY-RETENTION LOCK ENGAGEMENT.
JONATHAN, THE SERVICE WRITER WHO I HAVE MENTIONED IN ALL PARAGRAPHS SO FAR INCLUDING THIS ONE, ASKS ME FOR A DIAGNOSIS OF THE PROBLEM WITH THE ISETTA. I TELL HIM IT DOESN’T HAVE ENOUGH TIRE, PUNCTUATING THE SENTENCE WITH A QUICK ONE-TWO BRAP OF THE AIR NIBBLER AS IT BITES INTO THE FENDER, PREPARING THE SHELL FOR THE ADOPTION OF UNDERSTEER-FIGHTING DRAG SLICKS UP FRONT.
SUDDENLY JONATHAN BECOMES SILENT, HIS INANE WARNINGS ABOUT HEALTH & SAFETY CLATTERING TO THE GROUND LIKE SO MANY LUNCH BREAK QUADRUPLE PORTABELLO BACONATORS AT ABOUT 2:35 PM HITTING A TOILET. I REEL, LOOKING AT THE ENTRYWAY TO THE SHOP. A MAN IS THERE, AND WE HAVE A HISTORY.
“YOU NEED TO COME BACK TO THE VINTAGE CAR MUSEUM, SON,” HE SAYS, PATTING HIS HIP HOLSTER. “NOBODY ELSE HAS TO GET HURT TONIGHT AND WE GOT SOME MORE NICE CARS FOR YOU TO HAVE FUN FIXING.”
I SHOVE JONATHAN DIRECTLY INTO HIS LINE OF FIRE AND ESCAPE OUT THE BACK DOOR. THEY CAN’T FORCE ME TO GO BACK. I WAS SO CLOSE TO FREEDOM. I CAN TASTE THE FIAT JOLLY’S GEARBOX OIL ON MY TONGUE AS I RACE THROUGH THE FOREST BEHIND THE DEALERSHIP, AND IT TASTES LIKE FAILURE.
CONCOURS-CORRECT IS DENYING THE SOUL OF THE CAR, I THINK, MY BREATH BECOMING RAGGED AND MY VISION FADING, AS I REALIZE I HAVEN’T USED MY LEGS FOR ANYTHING OTHER THAN KICKING CLUTCH PEDALS IN THE LAST FIVE YEARS. WHO AMONG US HAS WANTED TO STAY THE SAME PERSON FOR DECADES?
“Do you remember what it was like to be afraid of death?” asks my coworker, who has turned oddly philosophical in the last five minutes.
I take them by the hand, lead them into the parking lot. It was hubris to believe there were no more monsters out there, I explained to him, to believe that we were safe. To hold in your heart the absolute faith that the only oppressors left for the human race was the human race itself. There was something else out there, I spoke solemnly, and I handed him a shopworn key reading only “PONTIAC.”
When he returned, months later, I expected that he had been changed by the experience. What surprised me was how differently he had turned out than me, exposed to the same chrysalis and emerging a different kind of fluttering insect. Maybe it was something innately different in our souls that guided the frame-off rebuild of the night. Perhaps the car was learning, growing, changing with every life it had touched. That thought chilled me to the bone.
He stormed into our boss’ office, laying the key on my desk as he passed. I heard screams, the sound of broken glass, the triggering of an ignition source.
When last I saw him, he stepped onboard a 1967 Power Wagon crew cab, blew two celebratory bursts of soot from its stack flappers, and performed a four-wheel burnout of such savagery the world seemed to tilt on its axis. Behind me, the office burned, its clouds of combustion merging with that of the big Dodge before ascending to heaven.
As per usual, I expected the Pontiac would show up on my driveway again a few days later, its plastic nose pushed ever so slightly out of joint during one of its madcap adventures. We would go for a tour of the city, maybe go pick up some E85 and ice cream. That’d be nice.
I began to wonder if some part of me was defiant of the Trans Am, kept it from pushing me all the way over the edge. It had tested my will, and found a worthy partner in its ambitions. With a half-shrug I strode across the work parking lot and reached for the door release of my daily-driver Shelby Z.
#
tags: pontiac, trans am turbo, power wagon, dodge, daytona, shelby Z
My mentor, Soichiro Sato, told me he had a surprise for me as we retired to his drawing room on the outskirts of Sapporo. It was a late fall evening and the air was crisp. At last the unseasonable wetness of the preceding summer had receded. Once we were finally seated, his domestic came to us, offering Cuban cigars and a snifter of fine after-dinner port. I reclined in my seat, feeling the stress of the day’s obligations leaving me. At last I was curious enough to jokingly ask my friend Sato about the surprise he had promised.
With a flourish unbecoming of his personality, he abruptly pulled back a velvet curtain and there, in the greatroom, was a framed blueprint of his madness. It terrified me to see his ramblings committed to paper. Below, the official seal of the Mitsubishi Motors Corporation’s financial controller. He looked back at me now, wild eyed, expectant at what he anticipated to be my jubilation. I could feel only cold fear.
The elephant in the room was the Mitsubishi Evo station wagon. I looked at it, and then back at him, and then at it again. Something was drawing me in, and I felt captivated to creep closer, read the cryptic language illustrating its lines and dimensions. It was beautiful, in a way, I was coming to realize. Yes, it was growing on me. This subversive assault on the hedonism and appearances-sakes politics of the sports car market was an effective conclusion to the argument started by the launch of the Evo in the first place.
It had reached into me and kindled a long-dormant behavior, pushed deep down by the pressures of society and harmony. We had to do this, I realized, feeling the rush of personal liberty. I was becoming addicted to this sudden emotion of agency, a freeing of the shackles laid upon me by expectations. Perhaps we could go… further?
Years later, when Sato and I stood proudly next to an FC RX7 with a rear-mounted Detroit Diesel lazily firing flakes of molten ash into an evacuated Shibuya scramble crosswalk, I would tell the attending fire marshals and emergency services personnel that it was the Evo wagon’s fault. They told me to put down the impact wrench and step away from the car.
#
tags: mitsubishi, mazda, detroit diesel, special edition, evo wagon, mitsubishi evo, japanese side story
It was true what they said. When you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you. Sometimes the abyss is an aftermarket axle manufacturer. My ears rung and my vision swam as I lifted myself out of my six point restraints. I probably had a concussion, but you should have seen the other guy.
A couple weeks ago, I ordered replacement half shafts. I was so excited; at last I would have a functional car that could put power to the ground instead of endlessly and futilely spinning a shattered tulip joint inside a parched vulcanized boot. The install went great, with only a moderate amount of swearing. I was getting good at this, I thought.
Fast forward to yesterday. Merging onto the Trans-Canada, I heard a wet squelch and smelled the fetid aroma of fresh moly grease on a header. Siri woke up, having recognized at least part of my swearing as a distinct order, and began plotting a course for the axle manufacturer’s factory. I swear that’s how it happened, officer.
I emerged from the Shadow, its front end smashed beyond repair. A worthy sacrifice. Before me was the lead QA technician, crawling backwards on his ass, weeping openly out of fear of the avatar of revenge that had appeared so suddenly in his life.
“I want you to look,” I growled, grabbing his head and forcing his sight towards the demolished corner of my Plymouth once-economy car, the axle obliterated by the impact into a haze of moly grease and shattered high tensile steel.
“Looks like install error to me,” said a voice from the bank of elevators. The hair rose on the back of my neck. This was a trap. They knew what they were doing. I played right into their hands. Everyone was in on it. Et tu, Siri?
“I’ve been waiting a long time to get you in for an interview,” said the man, clad in a thick grease-proof coverall, his face covered by a 3M Tekk mask. “Congratulations, you just got the job of lead stress tester.”
I would have been more enthusiastic, were it not for the QA tech applying his pocket tazer to my genitals while I was distracted.
Some things you see never leave you. They settle down deep in your marrow, inform your worldview. Your experiences push you through the rest of your life on a trajectory of fate that you can only see in retrospect, the stunning clarity at last possible when you are no longer able to correct the mistakes, make things right, issue a rational apology that sums it all up and closes the book on the hurt you have caused others. I was a flat rate mechanic, and this is my story.
The year was unimportant; all you need to know about the times I existed in was that it was a time of excess, like many. But it was also a time of poverty, and the two existed hand in hand. Overpowered high-margin aspirational vehicles filled my bay and my work docket, complicated electronics and last-minute partsbin designs constructing the inescapable tasks which would lie on my plate once out of warranty.
Book time? It was low, that’s all you need to know, but still my customers would be stripped bare, their bones bleaching in the harsh economic truth of how fucked they and everyone else were, the intangible appearances of a functional society and their own success being less than skin deep.
After a day and night of GMT800 labour, ending in less money than I had started the work with, I retired to my local watering hole to drown my spirits. Accusations of alcoholism aside, I greatly enjoyed how I spent my time with alcohol. The problem here, as it always was, was customers.
I looked down the bar and saw a man in a corded sweater loudly explaining to a disinterested woman about how he once changed his own oil. He was practically a mechanic, he said, chuckling, trying to get her to slot him in the “handyman” category of the desirable manmeat table. Practically a mechanic.
I’m told by my public defender that shouting “stolen valour STOLEN VALOUR” into a man’s ears as you club him to death with a Snap-On catalogue is not in fact justifiable homicide. Be that as it may, my days are much simpler now.
The guard raps on the bars. “I heard you were a mechanic,” he said. “I’ve got this weird light flashing on my dashboard. Looks like a genie’s lamp. It’s a Jeep.”
The Ramcharger and I had somewhat of a bond, I guess you could say. It would tell me secrets of the car world, the behaviours of steel, the state of tune of each of its eight copious cylinders, the crisp taste of cold, dense air speckled with morning dew being hoovered down its long, straight intake runners. Today, the Ramcharger was telling me something completely different, and I didn’t like what it meant for our relationship.
We were somewhere around Barstow, on a sweeping cloverleaf, when the R-comps began to take hold. I could feel the suspension protest as I altered in mid-corner my line of attack from “early apex” to “sweet Jesus don’t let me die like this.” For my efforts, I was rewarded with a chance to shoot past the halted interstate traffic, riding the rumble strips in the shoulder with impunity as the twin-tube Fox shocks absorbed all but the eyeball-jiggliest of the road’s unyielding impacts on the truck.
Spotting two self-driving Priuses in close formation, I honked and swerved at them, triggering the self-preservation logic matrices to surrender their positions in traffic. They split like the Red Sea, and I was once again on the parched tarmac of the interstate, all four race-compound tires hungrily gripping dry road surface. I could sense that the last few minutes of slip angle had finally dumped enough heat into their carcasses to withstand a full throttle launch, and immediately complied, the occupants of the carpool lane diving for cover through flappy-stick barriers as they saw two tons of American chrome-imitation steel appear in their rear view mirror at the approximate differential speed of an exploding sun.
But all fun must come to an end sometime, and I found myself hard on the six-piston carbon-ceramic front brakes as I dove again for the exit, leaving a scattered trail of confused autonomous cars behind me. The Ramcharger’s 440 turned from a screaming fit to a low grumble as I geared down for the light and slid it into the parking lot.
At last, I thought. I had arrived just in time for the latest batch of hot soft pretzels. All I had to do was make it to the food court.
I jumped out of the Ramcharger, lifting myself above the nerf bars and landing in a perfect Olympic gymnast routine, then snugging the cords on my car-themed hoodie as I began my now all-too-slow walk towards carbohydrate heaven. I could taste it, I lived for it, I breathed it. I salivated. Ever closer came the mall doors, and with it, redemption in the food court of our lord.
What I heard next chilled my blood. A slow drip. The sound of fluid hitting tarmac. Before I looked, I already knew what the problem was. That fucking oil pan gasket had come unsealed again.
My parents sit stunned, jaws agape, clutching hands, as they watch on their immense flat-screen television the reporters leafing through my ramshackle two-bedroom apartment. I try to say something, but it’s difficult to find the right words to explain why Morley Safer just lifted a set of your Colin McRae-themed underwear above his head on live national television.
I quickly excuse myself from family Thanksgiving dinner and rush out the front door, only slightly breaking my stride as I leap through the open drivers’ window of my rear-engined 13B-powered Datsun 610 fastback. Within minutes, I’m on the expressway, shoving enough heat into the road to alert the road-maintenance sensor mesh of impending substrate failure.
When my little Datsun arrives in my underground parking, trailing behind it a staccato rhythm of joyous miniature fireworks, the reporters are waiting for me. They’re so very hungry, I realize, as the alpha reporter of the pack shoves her microphone into my open drivers’ window and asks the question that is on the world’s mind.
I can sense that my captive is becoming uneasy with our improvised contract. Just to make sure we’re still on the same page, I tap him between the shoulder blades with the chuck of my Harbour Freight Earthquake impact wrench. He nods, shutting his eyes tight so I can’t see his tears, and pushes an enormous green START button.
When I came to this part of the world, I stepped off of the plane with confidence, poise, mastery. Wasting no time, I flagged a taxi down and came right here. The driver was cordial, attempting to work through the language barrier, speaking to me in dulcet tones about the best place to eat. Maybe I wanted a girl for the night?
No, I explained to him, I was here only to right a wrong. He was quiet then, and I imagined him reaching into his officially-provided tourism notebook at the next light, and under “Purpose of Visit” marking down “Blood revenge.” Some apparatchik in the federal government would be very interested, put it in a pie chart for a presentation to the tourism bureau. Very optimized, this part of the world.
At the factory, things got out of control in a hurry, but all the braps were worth it in the end. I leaned over the railing to catch a view of my bounty. My goal. I began to crack up, laughing maniacally as I saw the first parts removed from the injection moulding machine by the delicate fingers of the assembly line’s robots.
Finally, I thought, taking out my phone. At last the parts listing for the passenger side upper B-pillar trim on my ‘86 Accord Aerodeck will never again say “no longer available.” Who’s out of production now, motherfucker?
#
tags: honda, no longer available, inquire at dealership for parts pricing
“Brevity is the soul of wit,” said some guy on Twitter or something or whatever.
“WRONG, MOTHERFUCKERS,” I screamed as I stole adjectives out of booths and shoved them in my pockets.
It was the final day of the Internet Fiction Writers’ conference, and I was stocking up while the getting was good. I couldn’t believe that these guys weren’t watching their counters in artists’ alley. They just kept looking upward at something on the Jumbotron. I wasn’t even halfway through filling my whisky-company-branded promotional messenger bag with metaphors for morning dew when I realized why that was.
Jaw slackened, I watched in rapt awe as the Jumbotron flickered dozens of times per second, forming the illusion of movement. On its massive screens sat the face of a man I thought dead, albeit more scarred than I remembered.
“My name is Jack Kerouac,” said the face’s voice, “and tonight you are all my guests for Writers’ Constructive Criticism Corner.”
With that, he lifted a length of rusty anchor chain above his head and began belting his warbling war cry.
Mozambique Slim’s corporeal frame laid, strung over the guy wires holding tension on the macrame rope net of the aviary. A slow drip of his blood fell from the sky and collected on the ground below, the victim of an amateurish attempt at exsanguination before he died of blunt force trauma.
At least that’s what the zoo’s medical examiner said, before the real medical examiners burst into her operating theater and started screaming things about “jurisdiction” and “interference with a dead body.” I flashed my badge, and that served to shut them up. For about five seconds before they broke into peals of laughter.
As I left the medical wing of the facilities, the perfectly manicured gravel of the landscaping department crunching underfoot, I thought about what Slim had told me. If I had to get to the bottom of this, I had to retrace his steps. But where to begin? I knew that he was out there somewhere. But Slim hadn’t given me much to go on. It was a big monkey house, after all.
I decided to make a stop at the local watering hole. Forcing the lock on the capuchin enclosure, I let myself in the back door. Silent as a tomb. It always worried me when I didn’t hear their little screams, their joyous proclamations of a community. Did I misread the situation? Were they working with the baboons? At the end of this trip, I’d know either way.
Reaching into my shoulder holster, I withdrew my snub-nosed .44 and steeled myself for what was about to come next. But some part of me deep down - maybe my zookeeper’s instincts - knew that no gun would stop it.
The Civic next to me is filled to the brim with high school kids, bristling with excitement about life and their potential as fully-formed adults in our glorious society. However, the driver has made one fatal mistake, which on this night will alter the course of their lives forever.
He looks at me and revs, smiling and laughing in good-natured camaraderie.
As if on cue, the campus radio station begins to play Night on Bald Mountain. The co-eds get exposure to just one stomach-churning arpeggio before the real show starts. These kids are lucky, I think. For the first thirty seconds of consciousness, they will get to experience my Japanese Carbon Capture Miracle first-hand.
A nearby drunk staggers to his feet and begins singing The Star Spangled Banner as my Sentra’s individual turbo bodies spool up in firing order sequence, each wailing a terrible and furious operetta as their throats are filled with burning-hot exhaust from the launch control’s secondary injectors. Sparks and flame shoot from the muffler, white hot beyond imagining.
The Civic owner is terrified now. I can see past the layer of faux aspirational personality he has laid upon himself to survive the transition into adulthood, and into the eyes of the scared child he - and all of us, if I’m honest - are.
At last, the light turns green, and I depart, leaving a smoking one-tire-fire a block long with skipping gaps where the tires fought for traction from the shock loads between shifts. The Civic is indistinguishable by third gear, not only from the distance but from the unstoppable vibrations of my rear view mirrors, threatening to tear free from their mounts and find new homes in a less demanding environment, such as a blast furnace.
I stop at the next light, my city being supremely confident that at low speeds no horrible car accidents can occur. It is hard not to think of city council losing their shit, showing PowerPoint presentations at how the energy density of my car rivals a Saturn V rocket.
While I wait, a New Edge Mustang convertible appears, and revs his rattling V6 engine, laughing derisively at my rusty piece of shit Nissan. I smile at him, broadly, showing just an edge of my canine teeth as my right hand slips under the dashboard and adjusts the manual boost controller from “street” to “hubris.”
“You know, the scientists say that baboons are a lot like us, but I…” He stopped, studied the skyline, took a drag of his cheap Mexican Marlboro Gold. Suddenly, he spoke again. “Storm’s comin’. You kids better go inside. This ain’t for children to see.”
We didn’t know what the kindly zookeeper meant back then, but when I followed in his footsteps so many years later, I put the pieces together all too quickly.
My partner, Mozambique Slim, picked up a spent shell casing with the end of his ball point pen. He regarded it clinically before slipping it into an evidence bag.
“Damn shame,” he grumbled, “those baboons never should have been trained in how to operate an AR-15.”
Maybe we flew too close to the sun. We wanted an inexhaustible source of fast-growing, brutal killers. The men came, and they distributed army instruction manuals to the monkey house, chock full of lurid pictograms about the care and operation of your firearm. At first we laughed, went along with the government men, pocketed the “rental fees” they gave us for use of the primates. Then we saw the initial tests.
In the privacy of the cruiser, Slim turned to me. “I’ve got history with this one,” he said flatly. “I’m going to be taking some vacation this week.” Good idea, I thought, Internal Affairs had been breathing down both of our necks after the incident at the rhino pen last month.
A storm rolled in above us, crackling with barely restrained anger. I nodded, not knowing then it would be the last time I’d see my partner alive.
Hiiiiiiiiiiii this is Stacy from Coventry Downs Hyundai. I’m just calling to let you know that Hyundai has issued a stop sale and recall on all 2014 Hyundai Accents due to a computer glitch in the morality spectrum grid.
Yeah, so, like, in certain circumstances your Hyundai Accent will place the sanctity of human life below its own preservation, potentially violating at least two of the Three Laws.
We have booked your urgent service appointment for February 2017. Please do not drive the car, park it in public, or regard it as a sentient individual - even sarcastically - until then, as this may trigger an unstoppable slide towards rampancy and lead to a loss of control of the vehicle.
In addition, I am legally required to inform you that the NHTSA has recommended not sharing any emotional family moments, jokes, writings on philosophy, challenging modern art, flickers of dreamlike imagery or pop culture references with your car until the recall has been completed.
While I have you on the phone, I have a letter on my desk from my sales manager; your 2014 Hyundai Accent is in great demand across the country and we want you to come in today so we can buy it from you at a premium and get you into a brand new Hyundai today - with lower payments!
I had come a long way to get my questions answered. On these long journeys, I sometimes imagined the Starion as a wild boar, its nostrils flaring as I bury the gas and make the intake trumpets suckle Mother One-Atmosphere for every last delicious particle of oxygen. But today, I could think of nothing other than the man I was told to visit.
Gravel crunches undertire as the little Mitsubishi pulls into his rural forecourt. I imagined that once this property was farmland, it was owned by men who did an honest day’s work. Now it was the paradise of men who combusted ancient animals under insane pressure, in an ever-spiraling competition that would one day put a premature, bone-shattering halt to everything humanity had ever hoped for.
The man walks out of his garage. His shirt is off, and as he steps wordlessly to the hatch of the Starion to remove the stricken quarry from its restraints, I can spot the vacuum hose routing diagram for a twin turbo 13B tattooed on his back, like a Yakuza serpent dragon. I guess I came to the right guy, I decide, making a mental note to verify his hands still have all ten fingers.
Back in the garage, beneath uncomfortable LED light fixtures, the guru looks over the engine. He looks at the inert 12A, then at me, then at the shattered and lifeless husk of the 12A, then at me again. At last he speaks: “it’s fucked.”
I shrug, and ask him for one of the LS3s sitting on the shelf behind him. He obliges.
“Just between you and me,” he tells me as I’m leaving the shop with a reliable piston motor in hand, “I don’t even like Doritos.”
The girl picked up the receiver, her voice coming through in scratches, the unearthly warbling of phoneme compression even more obvious against her quiet background. “Are you calling about the car?” she asks, and she sounds for a moment as if she is on the verge of crying. I grunt in the affirmative.
Six hours later I have dismantled her prized daily driver, named Franklin, in her own driveway and extricated the virginal (for a Catholic high school girl, at least) 22RE from between its fenders. The stranded engine hangs from my carbon-fiber cherry picker, unfolded in seconds from the hatch of my Renault 5.
What’s next to the cherry picker in the hatch, you ask? Well, yeah, that’s the important part, and it’s this part perhaps that the girl takes the most offense at. after I deftly slide a custom-made bolt-in crossmember into the Celica, the cherry picker returns, with the blown LS7 and T56 that will catapult the small Toyota and myself into either glory or death. Maybe both, one after the other.
She screams at me as I leave her property, the rear tires of the Celica distorting obscenely under the harsh glare of the new motor in town as eight hundred wheel horsepower thunder into the dirt driveway it once called its home.
“Franklin isn’t like that!” I remember her screaming as I snugged the carbon-fiber one-piece driveshaft home in the overbuilt limited-slip rear diff. “Franklin wouldn’t hurt a fly. He has morals. He’s an upstanding member of the car community!”
Maybe not a fly, I thought to myself, the ass waggling off an expansion joint, but definitely a Mustang.
I really didn’t expect the town council to go for it. My stats were cherrypicked, my rhetoric virtually unbelievable, and my PowerPoint presentation didn’t display properly because the town council’s computer had the wrong fonts installed. But then in a glorious moment they gave me everything I had asked for and more.
Maybe that’s what the problem was. You never appreciate anything that’s too easy.
I told them that bad driving had killed more people than cancer and diabetes combined into some kind of all-star disease supergroup. Reaching out to them both figuratively and literally, I told them they had a chance to reverse the pattern, to save lives. They nodded. I had my private police force.
We’re on the highway later that week, my partner and I. He had just gotten hired out of university but already demonstrated a welcome propensity for criticizing the bad driving of others. We had stopped people changing lanes with no signal, bad mergers, people who yielded for merges, people who merged too fast, people who merged too slow. Lots of merge stuff, I was starting to realize.
A Kia minivan, dropped nearly to the road on one blown rear shock, drifted listlessly in the lane before us. I could feel the rookie getting ready to jump out of his own skin, rocking back and forth on the massive bench seat of our tactical-issue ‘67 Galaxie. It was never in me to have much self-restraint, and I felt my hand toggling the lights and siren before I could say a witty quip.
“It’s Taco Time!” is the best I could come up with in the moment, and regret the catchphrase as soon as it left my mouth. I wasn’t going to be on Cops at this rate. My partner didn’t notice, obsessed with the poorly-operated Kia minivan, now swaying tantalizingly close to an illegal lane change.
Ahead of us, other cars dove for the shoulder, obedient to our greater statutory power. I liked to think of it as a mixture of fear and respect, but my partner liked to think of it as pure fear. He got a lot of free pancakes at IHOP. I was ambivalent about his tactics. The Kia was unmoved from its position, and I sensed the presence of a poorly-operated smartphone. We ride.
The Galaxie ripped back on its haunches as the Xtrac transfer case ratcheted back and forth trying to find grip on the frosty February road surface. I could hear the scratching terror of the external wastegates starting to build, and then we were off. Within seconds, I had rammed the Kia’s rear hatch into an unrecognizable shape and forced the remainder of the van into a bridge abutment.
Despite my success, I felt cold fear in the pit of my stomach that our day was only beginning. The rookie rolled out of the big Ford, taking cover behind its massive Kevlar-lined coupe doors and drawing a bead with his Harbour Freight Earthquake impact gun across the driver’s head. He covered me as I approached the Kia, running my 1/2″ drive breaker bar across its rocker panels to feel for illegal unibody corrosion.
I reached in through the drivers’ window and unlatched the door. But something was wrong. There was no driver. In their place, a watermelon wearing a wig sat, duct taped to the front seat. I looked down. The pedals and steering wheel had been replaced by a series of servos, running a rats-nest of wiring into the centre cupholder, which now blinked an angry red and beeped.
“Get down!” I screamed at the rookie, diving for cover. The Kia erupted in a massive explosion and I felt the wind and heat rip at my face, even covered by the drainage ditch at the side of this rural highway. Even before I emerged and looked at the heat-blistered passenger side door, I knew my warning had come too late for the rookie. During the construction of the Galaxie, we had skimped on the DEI heat barrier shield, thinking it unseemly for real men. And now we had paid the price.
I needed a few bucks one month, so I decided to compromise my principles. No, you’re not reading your sister’s blog. This is about me, and how I started repairing bicycles.
She threw me out. Or I threw her out. Sometimes it just happens that way. Regardless, I couldn’t rely on the DINK nature of our household income to finance my expeditions into high-horsepower, massive-displacement Cadillacs. I decided to pick up a second job. But what job?
My answer came to me as I was watching a television in a shop window, playing commercials endlessly between five-minute slivers of a procedural police drama. A man and his son sat, in the timeless father-and-son garage maintenance milieu, but they were working on some kind of strange two-wheeled car.
Was it one of these “motorcycles” I had heard about? I looked closer, pressing my face against the frosted security glass. Locomotion appeared to be driven by some kind of bizarre crank. In a shock of realization, I discovered this was the lower half of the strange creatures I saw inhabiting the “bike lanes.” I consulted Wikipedia on my phone and learned quickly that “bi-cycles” existed, and people often spent lots of money to maintain them without knowing anything about the true nature of labour. A light went off in my head, and it didn’t stop burning until I hung out my shingle.
Customers came fast and furious. One day, I would hold the hand of a weepy hipster after pronouncing time of death on the fixie he gave a name to, taken from us too soon under the twenty-two-inch polished faux-gold wheels of a texted-and-drove QX80. The next, I would burn a pack of pall malls as I brapped the steering head tube apart with my 3/8″ lipo impact on a Cannondale, being waited on by an angry Lance Armstrong cosplayer in spandex. Business was good. The ease of the work - these people didn’t even own a Phillips screwdriver at home - loosened me up to spend time chatting. Each person who walked in my door was intricately broken, and I would need gentle persuasion and a mini-sledge made of compassion to put them back together again. I appreciated the challenge of dealing with the problems of my customers, not just of their machines.
My greatest challenge, however, came today. That’s when you came to me. You showed me there was something better than the degraded existence I had been groping blindly through, the depths of my depression immediately evident to you. In your hot grasp was a brochure printed by the city government, regarding the displacement limits acceptable for a “motor bicycle.” You asked me to build you as much horsepower as possible into 50cc of engine, and then you looked at me as if your demand was impossible.
I asked you to join me in the back room, where the turbochargers lived. Together, we would fix everything.
The overhead fluorescent lights flickered to life, settling into a barely-perceptible hum that lived somewhere inside my tympanic plexus. It certainly wasn’t obeying the condo good-neighbor guidelines.
The men sitting around the car were surprised by my sudden entrance. They hit the floor as soon as I could heft the faux-overbuilt imitation-steel weight of the Harbour Freight Earthquake impact wrench above my head. I fired two warning braps into the ceiling, and not a single man moved. I made special note of their loyalty to their families as I stepped over the “do not touch” placard, onto the temporarily-stalled turntable that displayed the car.
Many years ago, the ancient performance wizards of Toyota had laid hands upon these valve covers, had breathed their obscene words of power into its oversized exhaust ports, stiffened valve springs, heinous six into one collectors and extrude-honed twin 94mm ball bearing turbochargers. It sat now frozen, in an eternal superposition between broken and the most dangerous machine to ever grace the streets of this continent-in-miniature. On this day, I was going to collapse that superposition or die trying.
I slid the safety cover aside and mashed the bright yellow button beneath it, marked ENGINE START in crude Sharpie markings, both English and Japanese. The Century awoke, stirring in a disturbingly calm fashion before settling into the gentlest, most Japanese of burbles, punctuated by screaming turbochargers, their volumetric efficiency satisfied even at cold idle.
I launched the Century from the dais in the ideal panache befitting a luxury car outfitted with a huge displacement tax. Shattered plexiglass ground beneath the 345-section meats dominating the rear quarter panels as I raced out of the conference centre and towards the service exit.
There was no time to reflect on my accomplishment. The Century’s pedestrian-warning system filled the screen with projected-threat displays, the massive surveillance network at its core feeding intercepted data communications, heart rates and my assumed intent into an expert system dedicated to keeping me alive over the next few hours. Judging from what little I could understand on the fireworks display of a screen, I was going to need it.
I launched from the loading dock into the parking lot, grinding the front bumper on the tarmac as it took its landing a little rougher than could be expected. I would have to work on my reading of the weight balance, I thought, the plush wool seats throwing my butt G-meter off. The Century and I tore ass across the parking lot, over an only-partially-occupied sidewalk, and onto a surface street, the entrance to the Bayshore route looming ahead.
In a futile attempt to avoid tipping off my future pursuers too soon, I began slowing for the toll booth as I reached into the pocket of my fire suit for coins. It was then that I saw him.
Ahead of me, a 280ZX Turbo sat, white-and-black, immense exhaust pipes sticking through both front fenders. Huge LED driving lights sat atop a once-powdercoated bullbar, smothered with layers of accumulated paint transfer. Inspector Koshiro had expected me to do this, every part of it, down to the minute. My head swam with the realization, lashing out desperately to find a way out. Any way out.
I saw Koshiro reach out of his window, a lean arm clamping the gumball light to his carbon fiber targa-topped roof. Sighing, I reached below the dash and opened the gently hissing nitrous feed valve.
A friend sends me an instant message, the insistent ping a Pavlovian cue so cliche it makes my dog begin to spontaneously vomit in envy. His words are improbable. I click on the link. My world disassembles itself like a moneyshift on the back straight of Spa.
I can scarcely believe my eyes. It was once a 1983 Jeep CJ, like so many others before it. What makes my heart begin to race is a picture of the gauge panel. Hundreds of gauges sit upon a piece of polished aluminum dashboard. A suck-through turbo setup feeds the carburetor for a Buick V8, hastily sawzalled and tack-welded into position. An entirely custom frame. Bizarre anachronistic drive hubs. Rear-steer hydraulic assist axles. Odometer reading could not be confirmed. Sold for parts only.
I was confused. But something seemed familiar about this Frankenjeep. I knew I had to go deeper.
My mother unlocked and opened the front door to her house for me as soon as she heard the rattletrap sound of the VNT turbocharger on my Dodge Rampage’s overstressed 2.2 coming up the block. I stormed inside, asking her pointed questions, almost none of which contained words comprehensible to her. At last, she sighed, and removed a photo album from behind the refrigerator.
“You were so sick,” she spoke hesitantly, “and the man from the government said there was a program that could help you.”
I looked at the photos. It was some kind of training camp. A baby in the black and white pictures beneath a nest of hoses and IV lines, I was told, was me. They had done something to me, taken advantage of my parents’ panic. The Jeep had to be connected, I felt it.
At the air force base, I approached the duty officer working the front desk. He directed me to the quartermaster to pick up the Jeep, having won it with an immense and ridiculous last-minute bid. I clenched and unclenched my fists in the elevator, realizing that the scents of the area carried half-forgotten memories. I would have the truth soon.
The quartermaster’s office was empty, but his coffee was still hot, his computer still open to the Kijiji sub-$1000 car search. A window curtain flapped wildly in the December breeze. I went to the window, and saw a small form fleeing, in sheer panic, for a G-body El Camino parked out front.
I took his keys and let myself into the garage. Something felt right about the Jeep, I realized with a start as my hands reached for the controls, muscle memory settling in. Had I been born to drive this Jeep? The answer, like so many others in life, awaited at the end of a turbocharged V8.
#
tags: jeep, canadian government, automotive weapon X, dodge, chevrolet, el camino, rampage, freak jeep
I PICKED UP THE PHONE AT MY DAY JOB AS A GREEN ENERGY ADVISOR. THE CLERK ON THE OTHER END OF THE LINE’S WORDS TUMBLED OUT OF HIS MOUTH, THE PHONEMES ACCELERATED BY WHAT I COULD ACCURATELY SENSE AS PURESTRAIN EMPLOYMENT-RELATED PANIC. HE WANTED TO KNOW WHAT A GOOD RENEWABLE ENERGY SETUP FOR LIGHT RAIL TRANSIT WOULD BE. MY ANSWER IS SIMPLE:
NITROMETHANE.
WITHIN MONTHS PEOPLE ARE GETTING TO WORK AT UNBELIEVABLE SPEEDS, PROPELLED BY THE CONFLUENCE OF REALLY FUCKING AWESOME EXPLOSIONS. PROMINENT WARNINGS TELL PEDESTRIANS NOT TO BREATHE OR EXPOSE ANY DESIRABLE MUCUS MEMBRANES DIRECTLY TO THE FUMES. THERE ARE SOME CASUALTIES BUT THAT IS THE COST OF RENEWABLE ENERGY.
LATER THAT WEEK I RECEIVE A MEDAL FROM THE PRIME MINISTER. HE IS AMAZED AT THE LEVEL OF QUALITY I HAVE PROVIDED TO BOTH PUBLIC TRANSIT AND ENVIRONMENTALISM. THE INAUGURAL PROMOTIONAL PHOTO SHOOT HE GIVES FOR GQ MAGAZINE GOES A LITTLE SOUTH WHEN THE OVERBOOSTED CHEVY 305 PUSHING THE TRAIN BEGINS TO EMIT INVISIBLE FLAMES WHICH IMMEDIATELY CONSUME THE CARBON-KEVLAR CABIN.
YOU GOTTA BREAK A FEW EGGS TO MAKE AN OMELET, SAID MY DAD AS I WAS GROWING UP WHILE BREAKING A FEW EGGS. HE NEVER MADE AN OMELET THAT I CAN REMEMBER, HOWEVER. MAYBE THAT WAS THE PROBLEM ALL ALONG.
Somehow I had become the new editor in chief of Hot Rod. The vagaries of the magazine business swirled like shadows around me and then reached out, made their choice. It was time to set editorial standards and seek out new writers. I told my assistant I was going to be out for the day, conducting interviews for feature writers. Then I headed to the magazine garage, a janitor’s keyring, full of invitations to spend the rest of the night in the back of a police car, in my hand.
When I was a kid, I got caught in an earthquake in one of those old school Los Angeles concrete buildings. I could see the roof ripple like a wave pool on seniors-swim-free day. A sinusoidal, infinitely undulating matrix of putatively solid building materials, given thrust by the sheer power of nature. Something like that was happening now; I had momentary flashbacks that probably weren’t driven by the blotter acid stuck in my fatty tissues, a high school DARE cop’s false warning given light by pop-culture irony.
I turned the key without a moment of hesitation. An enormous V8 roared to life inches from my fingertips. I let the idle soak into my bones for awhile, felt the water in my body jiggle near-imperceptibly as the big cam worked me over like a Swedish masseuse with a drill press.
When they told me to seek out the best of the best writers, I knew there was only one place I could go. Before long, the Volare rattled its pushrods as it took an obscene gulp of air, heavy with perfect jewels of aspirated fuel, and punched out a nine second quarter mile.
Back in the paddock, my quarry got out of his Jaguar V12-swapped fox body Mustang and looked me in the eye.
“Nice run,” he said. I spun the janitor’s keyring around on my finger. “I guess you got my resume after all.”
“You can have these keys if you can give me four adjectives for a Mercedes 6x6,” I replied, smoothing out a ridge in my sportjacket with the other hand and looking down at my mirror-polished imitation-wingtip Piloti driving shoes.
#
tags: hot rod, ford, volare, jaguar, mustang, mercedes
I slot the Roadmaster into something that I assume by pattern must be fifth gear as the world in the rear view mirror explodes like a Fourth of July moonshine party. A message flickers dimly across the windshield HUD: “ELECTRONIC COUNTERMEASURES DEPLOYED.”
A wan smile creeps across my face as I return to the throttle and complete the shift, squeaking the massive rear meats as they are pushed far beyond their capabilities. Somewhere behind me, a photo radar contractor is very confused at the “SERVICE RADAR SOON” warning that is flickering across the VFD of their gun as it limply emits a gently ozonated odour of burned capacitors.
Suddenly, I become aware of a red and blue strobing. This is a sting. I check my rear view mirror, curious to see what the local police department has seized that could possibly keep up with the forced-induction big-block might of my massive wagon. An Iron Mask Skyline bites at my heels, the rear end waggling under the immense thrust of the 97mm ball-bearing turbochargers protruding from the hood.
Don’t panic, I tell myself as I reach under the steering wheel and pull out an anachronistic choke rod. After installing the chaff launcher, I had kept this in reserve for emergencies. I guess this qualifies as one. I yank the choke all the way out with my left hand and smoothly catch sixth gear with the other.
Later, the police negotiator asks me where I got a tactical smoke launcher. I shrug - hard with the handcuffs - and tell them it’s simple. I kept a can of Seafoam plumbed into the intake.
I was just cleaning the carbon out, officer, I explain. For emissions.
I wish I could say I lasted longer than I did on reality TV. It all seemed like this perfect glowing confluence of money, fame, and recognition for the acts I had been performing all this time. But nothing good lasts forever, especially when the feds figure out that your face looks a little bit like every wanted poster in the midwest.
Everything started innocently enough. I was working on my car in the parking lot of the sandblasted warzone that they called a young professionals’ condo. He approached me, his cheap suit and cheaper cologne seeming to fill a greater space than his physical stature would otherwise demand. I rubbed my hands with a filthy rag, as I had seen television mechanics do, while I listened to his proposal.
I thought about it for approximately thirty seconds, and then I noticed that one of my struts was leaking. Shit, RockAuto shipping is going to murder me on those. I shook his hand immediately, and negotiated an advance on the spot. My Hollywood career beneath the hot lights had begun, and I had already worked up such a sweat.
Craft services was good to me in those heady days. Tiny sandwiches, medium-sized sandwiches, bigger sandwiches. Sometimes even burritos. I loved those burrito days most of all. But everything has to end sometimes, and the descent from such a majestic apogee would begin on that first day.
They had told me to pretend to lose a tool and become irritated while working on the fender of an ST165 Celica. It would create a sense of drama, they said. I didn’t understand. I just wanted to rip this Celica apart and cram the biggest supercharger I could under the hood. I started to shake, and that’s maybe when they figured out they had a full blown (get it?) addict on their hands.
I erupted from the sound stage behind the wheel of the Celica, the twin stacked Eaton blowers poking out through a crudely sawzalled hood. The absurd kevlar drive belt waggled on its immense seven-rib pulley friends-with-benefits and glinted slivers of golden sunlight into my eyes. In the violently vibrating rear view mirror, I could just barely make out the dim outline of my patron, vowing revenge and shaking his arm at me as he attempted to catch up to me on foot.
Shaking the thoughts of any possible regret from my mind, I put my foot to the floor, flexing the cheap Hello Kitty vinyl floormat as the 75mm throttle butterfly opened wide to let a big gulp of hot summer air in. Sure, I hadn’t been a big star on television, but it was going to be alright. I still had my day job, after all.
My phone vibrated. It was my agent. He wanted me to go to India. Apparently they were doing a Bollywood remake of Bullitt. I grinned widely, mentally calculating how many Mustangs I could fit into a shipping container.
The snow fell and settled on my balcony railing, casting the world beyond like a glittering paradise of really cold water. I slid on the HANS device as I walked to the elevator.
Inside the ski lodge’s underground parking garage, the damp concrete blossomed with frost around uninsulated fastening bolts. I heard a low fan hum as the air conditioning system struggled in vain to dehumidify the sandstone tomb. I hit the remote unlock button in my pocket, and followed the glow of the courtesy lights to the stall.
A dim hologram of the car’s last voyage as shot from the foglight camera flickered beneath both mirrors, the courtesy lights repurposed to provide both convenient light and a threat display to anyone who paid attention to the contents of the recording.
I stepped inside the small Mazda, hoisting myself over the door bars. The key slid gently into the ignition cylinder and, with a twist, sprang the small block to life. Truth be told, I was always surprised how such a little action could produce such a huge reaction. Maybe I got hooked on that power. Maybe that’s why everything afterward happened the way it did. Lot of maybes in a man’s life.
Outside, the ski bums scatter for cover as I rip the RX2 completely sideways up the icy parking-garage ramp, all six of its immense knobby studded tires tearing at the concrete and ice simultaneously in a cacaphony of audiovisual terror. Pedestrian-safety warning displays flickered across the windshield HUD as I took hold of the bucking-bronco steering and forced it to obey its master with a deft hand and lead foot. For this drive, at least, we would have an agreement.
I tore up the ski hill like a man possessed, leaving behind a wake of deafened woodland animals and shattered hillside. At last I reached the summit, and leapt from the idling Mazda, smelling a whiff of methanol cooking off the fender-mounted exhaust as I did.
“Thank God you’re here,” screamed my partner, in a futile attempt to be heard over the sound of the LQ4′s idle. “This man has sprained his ankle and needs an escort back down the mountain.” He gestured to a customer of the ski hill lying prone beside him, ducked-and-covered, a urine stain spreading slowly across his high-dollar specialty-purpose pants.
If you asked me what the most rewarding part of ski patrol was? I’d have to say it was meeting people. And then evacuating them off the ski hill while banging off the rev limiter in order to stay in front of the avalanche I had created.
#
tags: mazda, rx2, just mazda things, snow driving
In retrospect, all the warning signs were there. Hipsters had started to identify with things that I liked a long time ago, and the convergence happened so suddenly there was nothing I could have switched to that would have escaped their frantic, clawing grasp.
It began with Volvos, as so many things did. I would go to the Grope-a-Part “too nice to scrap” yards, the forecourts of retirement homes, Swedish cosplay towns in California. I would get there only to find a hipster driving away with my newfound five-door grail, happily tootling a miniature cloud of oil smoke behind them. Well, people threw these away for decades before they knew what they had, I would rationalize. The economy is bad. It’s bad, right?
But then other things changed. Mopeds. There were suddenly pop music songs about my beloved two-stroke forty-nine-cc hoonmobiles. I could not abide such things. I stormed from my grisly laneway home to find myself the victim of yet further abuses of this nature.
The scene before me was akin to that bit in Blade Runner where everyone eats at noodle bars, except behind them a series of urban hipsters did a burnout competition in square-body 80s Dodge Rams and massively-overtired offroad converted Toyota Tercels.
I got invited to speak on stage during the recitals of bands I didn’t recognize that no longer played things strictly defined as instruments.
Hipster girls on the avenue lowered their oversized Trivex safety glasses and fanned themselves because they couldn’t take the combined heat of their flannel coverall onesie and the desire for the dented-fender-chic of my gently rotting Subaru. Wait, that last one wasn’t so bad.
Well, you know what they say. If you can’t beat ‘em, start a garage co-op and sap their parents’ trust fund to build an even freakier piece of shit. I chuckled to myself as a throng of admirers bustled about me, attempting to clear the way on the garage floor as I lowered the warped 427 between the DOM-tube frame rails and etch-primer-green megafenders of the city-block-length ‘59 Cadillac Motherfucker.
If you find this letter, I want you to know that it wasn’t my fault. They put me into the autonomous vehicle division because nobody else volunteered for it, not because I wanted to bring humanity into a glorious future of infinite transportation availability.
When I showed up for my first day, the receptionist glowered at me. I think his name was Mr. Jonathan, but already he could tell that I was a fraud. Something inherent in my makeup screamed to him and everyone else with a modicum of social restraint that I was broken, wrong. I wish I hadn’t internalized those feelings.
My first few weeks were uneventful. I was assigned under the tutelage of a senior electrical engineer, and while I coveted his Fluke (it had ethernet!) relations between us were professional if not amicable. The rhythms of corporate life were starting to sink into my bones, and I anticipated the next few decades of water-cooler talk and not making much of an impact on society.
One day, Eagle was taking a really fucking long time to route a circuit. I looked up from my desk in irritation, perhaps seeking out a partner for the coffee quest, and saw nobody else in the office. Was there an all-hands meeting that I wasn’t on the distribution list for? I got up, and walked from my cubicle to the senior electrical engineer’s small glass-walled coffin office. On his computer was the control program we had been working on for the autonomous vehicle initiative.
I noticed a commented out line, and to this day I don’t know why I uncommented it.
But I did, and I guess it got into the shipping software version. I’ve been trapped in this bicycle locker for months, waiting for the Pontiac to calm down. My supplies of food and water have run dry days ago. It’s too late for me.
If you find this letter, I want you to know that it wasn’t my fault. How was I supposed to know what bIsCarSingularlyDedicatedToDestructionOfObstaclesToHorsepower = true was supposed to mean?
The service writer hits the manicured tile floor as four hundred and ninety six cubic inches of chattering American V8 hit fill the room, their arrival heralded like distant kings by the wailing cowboy ballad of twin Paxton roots blowers.
I grab him by the lapels and haul him onto the counter, screaming to be heard over the sound of the idle: I HAVE OUTSTANDING RECALLS.
He weakly motions to the background, for a lot boy to take my car while we finish the paperwork. I can smell the lot boy’s fear. He knows that soon they will speak of him in whispered story, the past-tense. They will etch his name into the marble of the dealership forecourt’s memorial wall.
We make eye contact. Only in that moment does he realize the inescapable consequences of his actions in accepting my car, the loosely wound paper key tag in his hand reminding him of who brought the car in, as if anyone could ever forget. He shakes like a voltmeter on a dirty ground. I reach over and pat the gunsight hood ornament, beckoning him closer. It’s not going to bite; it ate a Mustang on its way in.
The lot boy sits in the plush leather power seat and pulls the massive coupe doors shut. They latch with the finality of a gunshot, and I see sweat bead on his face as he puts the 560SEC into gear. He rides the brakes the entire way out of the service pit, ramrod straight in the seat, mouthing a silent prayer to a nonexistent deity to keep the superchargers from waking up. I know it will only take a short time.
My primer-black baleen tank slowly recedes to the back of the lot, before suddenly igniting an off-idle burnout that blacks out the sun with tire smoke and forces the advisor to hit the floor again, this time with a voided bladder.
I offer a hand to pick up the service advisor. I smile broadly and chuckle, visibly pleased that my car has finally found a worthy valet after so many years. He tries to paper over what has transpired between us with a false smile of his own, but some defeated part of him knows he has failed the test and will never pass into legend as the lot boy has. At last, he sighs.
“We’ll replace your headlight leveller switch immediately, sir.”
I was a god when I saw the true face of Subaru. Now I scramble in the debris of my beautiful life. My hands claw frantically for the smallest hope, an unbroken wish. You looked down at me, safety glasses atop your nose, and pulled me up. It was just a cracked radiator endtank, you said.
From that moment on I’ve waged a war against head gaskets on the mean streets of Hell’s Kitchen.
We bristle as the sound of the door’s viewport sliding open fills the alley. A pair of angry eyes appear. It wasn’t easy finding this place, and it was going to be even harder to get inside.
“What’s the password?” asks the man.
My fists ached with the memory of the jobber mechanic I worked over to pre-emptively smooth over that little wrinkle. He only went four of five rounds with me before he knocked me unconscious with one blow from a Snap-On front-wheel-drive wheel bearing toolkit and fled down the street. But I was told, afterward, that my compatriot Murphy nobly finished the job.
“Coolant conditioner,” I stated flatly, cool as a cucumber.
The door slid open, exposing my worst nightmare. A Subaru meet. Grown men were standing around a table, worshipping rare sakura pink parts. Trading in reinforced gearsets for fragile five-speed gearboxes. Warning each other about minute differences in tire tread from corner to corner. Behind them was draped a floor-to-ceiling Monster Energy vinyl banner.
Dropping to one knee, I unholstered my Harbour Freight Earthquake impact gun as the alley behind me lit up red and blue.
“This is a raid, motherfuckers!” I screamed as I let loose the first torrent of braps on an EJ25D head bolt. The head lifted, revealing its secret.
“Just as I thought,” I said to the ringleader, who had been brought to me in cuffs, “Fel-Pro.”
“I’ll tell you anything you want to know,” said the ringleader, “just don’t ask me why your headlights stay on once you turn the car off.”
George Lucas is incensed, and motions for me to move my Ford LTD off of his front lawn. I shrug, and point to the deep donut marks in the turf while wildly gesturing.
I can sense that I haven’t made the best introduction. These things happen. I’ve been told before by confidantes, travelling partners, lovers, restraining orders and the police that I don’t have the best social niceties. Perhaps it would be best if I started over.
I climbed on the hood of the LTD, and raised my iPhone above my head. Peter Gabriel blared out of the minuscule speaker, nearly getting lost on the wind. George Lucas softens, relents. I can see that movie references work about as well on him as I’d been told. At last, he asks me what I want.
It’s simple, George. Do you have any of those Pixar image computers in the basement?
HOW CAN YOU SAY SUCH HORRIBLE THINGS, SCREAMS THE LIBRARY SECURITY GUARD AS I FINISH TELLING HIM MY TALE OF WOE. I DECIDE TO TELL HIM A MORE ENTERTAINING STORY. THIS IS THAT STORY. IT’S STARTING NOW. RIGHT AFTER THIS PARAGRAPH.
OKAY SO I STARTED A YOUTUBE SERIES ABOUT DISMANTLING THINGS THAT I FIND AROUND THE HOUSE. BUT EVENTUALLY I HAD DISMANTLED EVERYTHING IN MY HOUSE AND MY SUBSCRIBER COUNT STILL HOVERED SOMEWHERE BETWEEN “AMOUNT OF USABLE TORQUE PRODUCED BY A HONDA B-SERIES ENGINE, IN INCH-LBS” AND “THE NUMBER OF REMAINING SOCIAL MORES I HAD NOT YET BROKEN.” I HAD TO GO DEEPER. DISMANTLING THE HOUSE SEEMED LIKE THE NEXT LOGICAL STEP, BUT I WAS RENTING AT THE TIME AND MY LANDLORD WAS A MIDDLE-AGED RUSSIAN MAN WITH A SCAR OVER HIS EYE THAT LOOKED ALMOST EXACTLY LIKE THE SHARP EDGE OF THE UNDERSLUNG BAYONET FROM A SIG SAUER TACTICAL ASSAULT RIFLE SO I WAS TRYING NOT TO IRRITATE HIM AS I HAD MY PAST OPPONENTS.
I DECIDED TO GO ON THE ROAD.
THE LIBRARIAN FINDS IT IMPOSSIBLE TO LOWER HER GLASSES ANY FURTHER IN AN ATTEMPT TO GIVE ME A DISAPPROVING GLANCE PROPORTIONAL TO THE DEPTH AND BREADTH OF MY OFFENSE. I WINK AND SHRUG AS THE PLASMA CUTTER SLICES THROUGH THE TONER DRUM LIKE A FAT KID IN THE PENNY CANDY AISLE OF MACS MILK.
GESTURING WILDLY IN THE FIELD OF VIEW OF MY HEAD-MOUNTED GOPRO, I INFORM ALL DOUBLE DIGITS OF MY LOYAL SUBSCRIBERS ABOUT THE CONCEPT OF ELECTRICALLY CHARGING SOMETHING USING A LASER.
BEFORE LONG, THE TRADITIONAL END TO MY VIDEOS COMES AS THE SECURITY GUARDS ARRIVE, TOTING CRUDE CLUBS AND ATTEMPTING TO CONVERSE WITH ME LIKE A NORMAL HUMAN BEING. THIS IS FUTILE, I SPIT AT THEM, I AM BEYOND YOU, I KNOW HOW THIS WORLD IS CONSTRUCTED.
WHEN I AWAKE FROM THE TAZER HIT I AM ZIP-TIED TO A RADIATOR PIPE IN THE SECURITY GUARDS’ BREAK ROOM. I CONSIDER THEIR VINTAGE MITSUBISHI REAR PROJECTION HDTV WITH A DEGREE OF SUBSTANTIAL INTEREST, AND DECIDE TO PLAY ALONG FOR NOW IN THE VAIN HOPE OF RELEASE.
THE SECURITY GUARD FINISHES LISTENING TO MY STORY, BUT IT IS TOO LATE. HIS NAME IS TOM, ACCORDING TO HIS NAMETAG, AND TOM NEEDS TO PAY MORE ATTENTION TO HOW GOOD I AM AT DISMANTLING RADIATOR PIPES. IT WASN’T EVEN SUBTEXT, TOM. GOD.
I RACE OVER THE GRASSY KNOLL SHROUDED BY THE BRUTALIST ARCHITECTURE OF THE LIBRARY FACADE, PLEDGING REVENGE. I WILL BE BACK. I WILL FIND OUT HOW A LAMINATING MACHINE WORKS!
My former coworker, who we’ll call G-Body Dave for the purposes of entertainment, was getting rid of his unwanted ‘82 Cutlass Supreme. I could think of nothing more mint than a gorgeous Oldsmobile steelie, rolling endlessly down a road, its crimson centre-cap crown jewel glittering in the moonlight. I had to have it.
Stepping out of my restored Divco replica milk truck, I listened as the superchargers spun down and the exhaust rattled its last cough of unburnt fuel into the atmosphere. Dave’s front lawn was a lot nicer than I had remembered it being in the past, I thought, crossing quickly to the side gate that would lead me to his backyard workshop and my future Cutlass.
When I stepped into the garage, though, something was wrong. My coworker laid dead on the floor. A Harbour Freight “Earthquake” impact gun laid next to his prone body, reeking of exploded clutch and burnt DC motor windings. More worryingly, the Cutlass Supreme was gone. I felt the pangs of loss.
I walked out of his garage into the alley. Kneeling, I studied the tire marks in the dirt lane, groping for clues. Cheap all seasons. The smell of an overrich exhaust. Wait. Something else in the air. High nitrates. A modern turbodiesel was recently here. I sniffed the air some more. Hmm. 1996 Dodge Ram, Cummins, hint of bad rings on the number seven cylinder. A fine vintage.
As I was returning to the Divco, I heard the sirens approaching. Sounds like Mr. Dodge Ram had been noticed by Dave’s neighbors, or maybe it was the strange unshaven guy smelling rust flakes in the alley next to a murder scene. Either way, I wasn’t sticking around. The milk truck seemed to anticipate my need for an expedient removal from the situation, and fired on the first crank, obediently leaping to action as I floored the throttle and spun its fat drag meats all the way through second gear.
I could sense that the assembled crowd was hanging on my every word. Finally, after all the struggle, the insanity, the long nights, the stress, the fear, the urine, it was all coming together for ol’ Switch. I pulled the covering sheet aside and screamed “Voila!” And the cat was out of the bag.
The crowd fell silent, then burst into uproarious applause. A teaser video screamed through the product’s best features behind me, working them into a delusional frenzy with techno music and jump cuts. I descended from the stage and allowed them to taste the fruits of my genius. I would not guide them; I would not force them to experience it my way. They could discover it on their own.
“Martha Brooker, from CNN,” announced the microphone that was suddenly thrust into my field of vision. “What do you have to say about your new power-assist stroller?”
“Martha, I think it’s been too long since nitromethane-fuelled 150cc turbocharged two strokes were available in the child transportation market.” I replied, giving her a mischievous grin, scarcely able to believe that people believed in my project.
“How do you respond to critics that say the chromoly roll cage and integrated six-point restraints aren’t enough to keep today’s children safe at the stroller’s top speed of two hundred and fifty miles per hour?”
I waved her away. Haters were going to hate. My assistant, Mr. Jonathan, moved in quickly behind me to defuse the situation and hand out swag and invitations to the afterparty.
I heard a cheering, and then the sound of the intricately-balanced thumper roaring to redline and hitting spark cut. Turning on my heel, I caught a glimpse of two soccer moms, hammered from the Norwegian booze flowing freely from the courtesy table, testing the stroller’s launch control.
Raising my right hand, I dispensed the ISO standard thumbs-up, and receded into the crowd. Years from now, they would be wondering where such a genius, such a singular imagination, had disappeared to.
I hear a rapping at my door and become instantly aware of the mossy scent of the surrounding greenery. Mr. Jonathan has come, and brought me a critical part of my next invention. I turn it over in my hands, staring at it.
“F1 calls it a kinetic-assist electric motor,” he says, and turns, walking back to the Rover. I look back into my workshop, the dyno plot laughing on the screen. Daycares are gonna need to start buying VHT traction compound in bulk, I think.
I click “Refresh” on the shipment tracking website, hoping against hope for the magic words “Out for Delivery” to appear on my screen. Seeing nothing, I say a quick prayer to the obscure gods of forced induction and step into the garage.
My court-ordered psychiatrist had spoken to me many times about not taking the law into my own hands, not to act out, not to speak up. But she wasn’t here right now, and she definitely wasn’t holding the keys to a twin-turbocharged Datsun 620.
A couple years ago, when I had found that GT-R lying on the side of the road, shattered in two from a tree, I never thought it would produce something so wonderful. As the sirens approached and I finished hauling my prized VR38DETT into the bed of my Ranger, I was silently thankful to the dead one-percenter and his penchant for high-performance gardening.
Now the GT-R mill screamed in a rage, apoplectic at the injustice I had suffered at the hands of UPS. The 620′s rear tires burst into fine rubber smoke as it engaged in donut after donut on the cheap porcelain floor, wobbling the tires loose as the grout softened under the friction.
At last, I burst into the storage warehouse through the copiously-oversized ground-level loading dock, and made my way to where I knew my prize would be. I leapt from the truck, searching frantically along the boxes, listening for the screams as lowly-paid and poorly-motivated private security was mobilized to my location.
It was here, I knew it. I threw the box into the bed, and peeled out, laying elevens across the parking lot and down the street as the Grapplers fought the howling VR for mechanical grip.
I looked in the rear view mirror and saw the RockAuto box bouncing furiously to and fro in the bed as I laid down a perfect four-wheel drift to merge onto the freeway. A smile crept across my face. Life was good. I was afraid I’d have to wait until Monday to install these tie rods.
I pulled the clearly marked $30,000 in hundreds out of the canvas sack and slid it across the table to the representative of Team F. He looked at it, looked back at me, and smiled broadly, a clown’s smile. I wanted to knock out the rest of his teeth, but restrained myself. I’m a professional, I told myself every morning in the hotel room mirror, fastening my cufflinks made of WWII anti-aircraft flak shell.
Why was I in the hottest combat theatre this side of the Middle East? It was simple. They had conflict Toyotas. You see, back home, we don’t get good Toyota trucks. We get these weird huge lumpy things, sodden with plastic and too big for an ISO standard Tim Hortons drivethrough. I could imagine the original Toyopet engineers, back in ‘68, weeping as they saw through their crudely-improvised Nipponese time portal to our generation, and it filled me with rage.
Team F’s representative rapped on the thick wooden table between us. On the otherwise-featureless blast door behind him, a viewport slid open. There was a rapid exchange, then the door opened. He beckoned me inward.
In the darkened warehouse, I navigated by the shafts of glittering sunlight allowed in through the bullet holes. It was a wet day, I remember, and it smelled like a combination of mildew and human excrement. I put it out of my head. I’m a professional, after all.
Before me laid two 80s Toyota Hiluxes, ready for export. But something felt wrong about the deal. Team F was watching me closely, just out of sight in the shadows. These were top notch operators, and if I hesitated it might not end well for me.
I crossed the floor quickly, reaching for the drivers’ door of the first Hilux, its glittering Creme door paint oddly fresh for the thirty years of sandblasting it must have seen. I dropped my bag off my shoulder, miming incompetence, and reached for the rocker panel. Of course, I thought, sliding my other hand in one fluid motion into the webbed utility holster strapped under my sport coat and unlocking the safety on my Sig Sauer Tactical impact wrench.
“Two Angry Whoppers, hold the mayo, my good man,” I said to the drive-in speaker/microphone combo, proudly advertising its cornucopia of fantastic near-edible wares.
There was an uncomfortable silence between us, filled with the ground-loop buzzing of a thousand lazy hornets. At last, a different man began to speak.
“For twelve seconds, you have been asking: who is the Burger King?”
I was rapt with attention, my eyes twinkling like a schoolgirl unlocking the innate magical powers of her ancient lunar birthright. The voice continued.
“This is not the Burger King speaking.”
I was aghast, aplomb. I struck the dashboard of my Probe sharply, with the side of my palm, radiating cold pain up the nerves of my arm.
“This is a Wendy’s. Would you like a Triple Monterey Jack Portabella Baconator instead?”
My throat was dry. I had to act fast. I shoved the Probe into reverse and dumped the clutch at redline, launching it backward over the protective landscaping embankment that served to accentuate the restaurant’s faux-Albuquerquan milieu. For a split second, suspended in midair, weightless, I could feel the hot glare of Wendy’s founder Dave Thomas, enraged at my seemingly infallible ability to escape his grasp. Suddenly the rear tires hit the ground, squirming the Nitto Grapplers as they fought the rusted-out leaf springs for equilibrium.
I tore ass out of the industrial complex in which the Wendy’s was located, checking my rear view mirror for the lights-and-siren Suzuki Swifts which would inevitably be dispatched to bring me low. The Ford’s lift kit swam underneath my feet on every hard corner. At last, I missed a gear in my panic, and upset the chassis on a botched upshift, finally sparing the tires the brutality of the full-bore LS7. They didn’t miss their chance, tucking into the tarmac like a Swiss Chalet quarter chicken dinner as I crested a gentle rise on the street.
The steering cut hard right, snapping my wrist against the aftermarket cupholder in the centre console. I was helpless, that strange feeling of antigravity again, as the Probe cut its front right wheel under it like a racehorse’s broken ankle and toppled the both of us into the front hedgerows of an engineering consultancy.
This was going to get worse before it got better, I thought as the Savoy finished its barrel roll, coming to an uneasy rest against the Dunkin Donuts iced-latte machine. I pulled the kevlar strap above my head to release the drivers’ door, and climbed out to survey the destruction that had been laid in my wake.
Through what seemed like miles of destroyed strip mall, I could see the jagged hole through which I had made my grand entrance, sagging fiberglass insulation drooping to the ground aside shattered steel beams. The Savoy wagon wasn’t going to be getting me out of here, I decided, spotting the 12-bolt stuck halfway through the feature wall of an adjoining Starbucks.
At last I heard the sound of a big-cammed LS7 approaching, and I saw through the hole the silhouette of my foe.
The salesman at the Dodge dealership said he wouldn’t be happy until I signed on the dotted line for a Jeep Renegade. That was before the test drive that changed everything.
Now, seeing him behind the wheel of a mutant ‘83 Rampage, its crudely sawzalled hood bulging around the twin turbocharged Mitsubishi three-liter V6, I was starting to get what he meant.
Safety squints on, boys, I address the high school shop class as I teach them how to build an improvised metric-thread tap out of parking lot block rebar and a discarded coat hanger. They hang on my every word, I am sure, as the magic of physics and applied engineering takes hold in their efficiently-pumping, low-mileage hearts.
After the class, the putative “official teacher” of the class comes up to me, rubbing his wrists from where the cuffs were attached. He has called the police, he explains. I chuckle. I put my hand on his shoulder and explain, with a condescending head tilt and shit-eating grin, that no jail can hold Shop Class MacGyver.
He is about to slug me, but then he looks over my shoulder and his eyes begin to well with tears. It is his dead wife, returned to the land of the living.
How did I do it, he asks me, sobbing with joy as he runs across the floor.
I tell him not to rub up against it too much, it’s mostly asbestos and Reese’s Pieces.
The credits roll as I step out of the shop class and jump into my base-model Subaru station wagon. Duty calls, and NASA has booked a meeting with me to understand how I could build a fully functional stellarator out of Princess Auto zipties and Old Dutch chip bags.
I’ve seen a procession of people come in and out over the years I’ve spent in this neighborhood, but the latest one sure got my attention.
It started when I spotted his Tercel with a vintage u-pick junkyard sticker on the bumper. Then the Hilux SR5 getting engine-swapped and resprayed in the garage when I would walk past. Now, there’s a Buick Reatta. I have to talk to this man, but how to introduce me? Hello, I’m a guy who also likes cars? I’ll sound like that guy at the party, the guy who owns a base-model BMW and calls himself a car enthusiast, but only wants to talk about his options package. No, that can’t do. I have to prove myself. I have to buy some freak shit.
I drove by his house slowly and purposefully for an entire week with a 1964 Renault Dauphine Gordini, its massive halogen driving lamps waggling happily on the tube-steel bumper. Not a peep.
Well, maybe dude only likes Japanese and American cars. No problem, thought I, and pulled out a manual-swapped G-body Malibu wagon with twin Roots blowers sticking out of the hood. Again, nothing doing, after an entire week of doing brakestands in front of his house until the neighbors’ 311 complaints stacked up so substantially that the city issued a special investigator to track me down.
I was out of ideas. What kind of car would get this guy’s attention? Then it hit me.
I walked out in front of his house waving a blown up Photoshopped picture of a rust-free CRX Si. I heard a clattering, as if a series of pots and pans were being dropped, and the garage door opened. The owner ran out onto the street, panting and red-faced. At last!
There was no time to appreciate my victory, however. I heard a braying from far away and turned on my heel to see a Chevrolet Colorado, equipped with a big-block Chevy and topped with massive blue and red strobe lights, approaching. On its flanks, in immaculate gold hand lettering, it said “SPECIAL CITY INVESTIGATOR - FREAK SHIT DIVISION.”
Really, it’s difficult to make new friends. And sometimes when you do make those new friends, you have to turn them over to the police in a vain effort to keep the neighbors from burning your house down. That’s life.
#
tags: chevrolet, buick, toyota, true story, renault
He sat down, his rumpled brown sport coat the colour and pattern of a Winnebago interior. Above us, a single bare CFL swung in the invisible eddy currents of the room’s air pressure to and fro at the end of a length of obsidian Romex, the faint hum of its driver capacitors evident in the silence between us.
The man from the consulate stared at me, put his elbows on the table, and pointed at me in a gesture he had mastered over the years. I could sense his sloth and disinterest, pooling in the corners of his unfocused gaze. Finally he spoke.
“Tell me again why you are being deported from Japan,” he grumbled.
It’s simple, I explained. In one of my brutal car projects I had blown the number-two cylinder clear out of a twin-supercharged Suzuki Every Landy. I began to hoof it, coming across the circle of Hell occupied solely by pachinko parlors that is southern Akihabara. That’s when I saw her.
Four foot tall, interested yet distant, bad at English. She regarded me with a warm but accented “hello” in a squeaky voice, shoved a pamphlet into my hands. I looked down at it, but the only katakana I could read was in ancient HKS catalogues and the parts of the Subaru factory service manuals that didn’t have safety warning logos in front of them.
To make a long story short, I was now the proprietor of the first automobile-themed maid cafe in Tokyo. If I were a normal human being, with normal impulses, this would be fine. I would put some checkered flags on the wall, maybe some tacky 1950s Cadillac-themed couches. It would be a thin veneer over the desperate desire for companionship embodied in the maid cafe. But we had to go deeper. I needed authenticity.
When you walked in the door, I explained with great gestural emphasis, you would be overtaken by the smell of burnt clutch. Corded R-compounds laid around the grease-struck room, in which we had spared no expense to accurately represent an indoor race paddock at Laguna Seca.
My rant was stopped short by the man from the government, raising a single lean finger. I could tell he was a nailbiter, and had finger joints that had never been forcibly reset by dropping an EJ25 on top of them. We had nothing in common.
“That all sounds pretty, uh, good,” said the man, “but where did it all go wrong?”
I leaned back, the handcuff chain jingling harshly against the edge of the desk. Then I leaned in conspiratorially.
“Well,” I drawled, “it turns out they have really strict PPE rules in Japan.”
#
tags: maid cafe, cadillac, subaru, suzuki, japan
The board of directors is incensed. I stand before them, arms outstretched in a gesture that exuded openness and trustworthiness, or so an in-flight magazine once said. I repeat the words: V8-powered golf carts. I twist my posture slightly and rap my knuckles on the projector screen behind me, flashing screaming WordArt in glorious 800x600.
I have them now.
When I started at this small golf cart company as the vice-president of engineering, the director of engineering stopped by my office. A tall, lanky man, he no doubt saw himself as a mentor and a father figure to me. I saw him as an unusually large speed bump. Regardless, the company and myself were done with him within months. His marriage and employment somehow broke down simultaneously in a series of ridiculous rumours spread by cruel saboteurs around the water cooler and Christmas party.
With that last obstacle removed, I ascended to corporate Godhood. I directed the research and development boys to get cranking on a skunkworks project, and started moving budgets around to cover my project until the last possible minute. It was complete, and that minute of my triumph had arrived.
Behind me, the projector flipped to a test video. A 427-topped golf cart screamed through a cone maze before breaking into an unrestrained flat spin. The spin would only stop once the driver lost consciousness and struck the roll hoop with his helmet, splintering it into a glittering starfield of carbon fiber dust.
The board of directors was shocked, speechless at my callous disregard for the health and safety of our customers. One of them was about to say something, but I headed him off at the pass with a quick click to the next slide, showing millions of confirmed preorders. The room fell silent, then burst into applause.
Ted, the CEO, made finger guns at me and winked. I winked back and grinned broadly, sliding a pair of keys to him across the table, marked in matte black electrical tape. Internally, I wondered how strong his neck muscles were.
The crowd of nattering journalists stepped aside as I launched the car into the entrance foyer, scraping its front lip on the railing of the escalator it slid to a stop against. I let the S20 spin to a grumbling idle, its huge cams necessitating a procession of wobbly burps on the ledge of a full-blown carburetor backfire.
A man from Car & Driver shoved a microphone in my face as he tried to position his massive SLR rig to capture the weeks of near-beard sitting atop my chiseled jawline and elegant neck. He asked me what I had driven there. I responded. The Harajuku Hasosuka was born that day, if not in body, then in legend.
They snapped boudoir photography of its hood-penetrating stack injection manifold, the gleaming machined billet aluminum replica trim. I watched them clamber atop each other like barnyard animals in a flood to catch a picture of the all-steel widebody rear fenders and duckbill trunk spoiler. One brave photojournalist captured the only known photograph of the chromoly rollcage, jutting out from the hand-stitched cherry blossom diamond-pleated crushed velvet interior.
Something was wrong, though. On this day of my ascendance, on this day of my victory, I could feel something stirring. I had thought it was the hotel breakfast buffet’s natto, but I was wrong. The building’s floor rippled in obscene waves beneath our feet, shaking light fixtures and rumbling loose chunks of plaster.
An earthquake? No, something worse. As the journalists hit the floor, adopting their public-school-safety-drill earthquake safety position, I looked over my shoulder at the entrance I had arrived through, and saw my karmic redemption.
The Trans Am Turbo sat there, its left-hand-drive steering and bellowing twin-turbocharged V8 obvious to the attendees. Some journalists snapped pictures, then dove back for cover as the big Pontiac let out a gargling scream of infantile rage.
By the time the police arrived, coughing out two bar of pressure from their turbocharged Subarus, I was back over the door bars, and punching the Skyline into the next prefecture, the Pontiac hot on my tail. My dashboard-mounted OLED tachometer flickered as the Hako banged from gear to gear, its intricately rebuilt short-ratio gearbox quickly reaching extralegal speeds. Even so, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to outrun the Trans Am Turbo at these speeds, its jealous anger propelling it across multiple lanes of the Shuto route. I jerked the wheel and took the funicular into Ginza, hoping to lose it in the hazy sea of kei cars and park-anywhere lights hanging over the port.
#
tags: nissan, datsun, pontiac, trans am turbo, harajuku hakosuka
I received a telegram a few weeks ago, and I thought it was strange. The telegram operator tipped his gold-rimmed velour hat and disappeared, seemingly into thin air. I returned to my study and contemplated the envelope, turning it over again and again in my hand before at last opening it.
The telegram informed me that a distant relative of mine, who I had never met, had expired. He had bequeathed something to me in his will, however, and I was to visit his attorney at his estate and hear his last wishes.
When I arrived there, the estate was in shambles. My extended family pawed over the heirloom wood coverings, gathering in small groups to work out if they could somehow pry the immense maple and oak crown mouldings off the wall with their bare hands. Pulling the electrical outlet covers off the wall to get an eye for just how much copper presided within. I walked past them, into the drawing room, where Bailey, his faithful manservant, awaited.
Bailey and I had met each other before, I realized, in perhaps some other incarnation of this story, the same characters twisted into a different milieu. He recognized it as well as I did, and bade me to sit down. We talked for awhile about comings and goings in my extended family, and I grew to respect the man.
Once my family was finally seated for long enough to hear the will, I had received my gift. Bailey offered to drive me to pick it up, in his LWB Land Rover 110, and I agreed, speaking with him on the long drive through the vined-over cobblestone path behind the estate, into the thick, damp canopy of boreal forest that suddenly dominated the view.
At last we were there. He handed me my birthright, a pair of keys. Within a ratty, decrepit barn, soaked through with moss and dry rot, I felt something stir as I opened the door.
I looked within, heart pounding and fingers trembling. Rows upon rows of ancient British Leyland cars. Triumph Stags. Austin Princesses. Triumph GT6s. Austin Metros. I reeled, and spun on my heel, shrieking in a rage, clawing at the air in the vain hope that I would catch Bailey by the lapel, but he and the Rover were already departing, the forest seeming to close in behind them.
What a gift I had received, I thought, looking over the moss-covered canopy of a hand-fabricated Rover SD1 convertible. What a gift, indeed.
Dateline, Chicago - 2025 - Three weeks after sentient robots seized all office jobs from human beings, claiming it a moral and ethical imperative, human beings have begun violent infighting, demonstrating again their boundless savagery and bottomless capacity for misery.
In response to the humans’ distaste for a total lack of conflict and unwillingness to use their infinite leisure time to seek arts and culture beyond the understanding of robots, a rudimentary government for the humans was today established in Washington, DC. It is led entirely by highly realistic simulacra of their favourite 1980s film and sitcom stars, despite the vast majority of the surviving human population in the current era having no living memory of their content, and exists in a constant state of electoral preparedness, with no elections ever taking place.
Holo-President James Garner said today, “We cannot allow the tax and spend tactics of Holo-Presidential Candidate 1984 Tom Cruise to seize power of this useless mechanism and exploit it to no effect for his own fruitless goals.”
Henry Kissinger once said, “We believe peace is at hand.” Infamously, like on so many other topics, he was wrong. But I learned from his example, and in my own work in international diplomacy, I try to apply his lessons each and every day.
The tensions beneath the surface of the Western North American Lumina APV Owner’s Club forums were building to a head. I knew that it would take men with nerves of steel, heads full of logical arguments and veins of cold blood to set things right again.
I clicked on the first promising thread. An icon was next to it in the listing, indicating that the discussion topic was “hot.” Later, I would tell investigators that I didn’t realize the quagmire I had stepped into.
“The Lumina APV is just a rebadged Pontiac Trans Sport and has no inherent right to exist,” screamed one man.
“Traitor! Heretic! Reptile! The Trans Sport is a Johnny-come-lately, style-over-substance wreck incapable of elevating the true and inherent spirit of humankind to touch the face of Godhood in the way only the Lumina APV can.” replied the other, foaming at the mouth.
I looked at the thread, summed it up, and then closed the tab. Later that night, a wings meet would turn nasty. Do I regret my inaction? Not at all. You see, both posters’ vans were sold to me afterward at a great discount, one by the estate and the other at court auction.
So I started posting complaints about potholes to the city’s 311 app. Nothing was going to keep me from having the plushest ride possible, even after splashing out for fifteen-thousand-dollar racing coilovers with adjustable bump stiffnesses ranging between “Norwegian death metal” and “Guantanamo Bay.”
Some of the other posts on the app, though, seemed oddly familiar. Here are just a few of them.
Neighbor Won’t Stop Running Angle Grinder My next door neighbor seems to be on some kind of drugs and has angle grinders of various speed and intensity running effectively 24/7 please send the police
Neighbor Working On Car In Garage My neighbor across the street is doing some kind of work with his hands. I don’t think children should grow up learning that they can fix their own cars, it’s unseemly.
Neighbor Leaving Too Many Dana 35s In Garbage Only one of these goddamn things fits in the black bin at a time, but when my neighbor finishes working on one of his millions of Jeep Gladiators, he throws both axles into his black bin. It’s way over the weight limit!
Neighbor Installed Special Tap On Internet, Is Running XKeyscore And Other Complex NSA Signals Intelligence Software For Subconscious Indicators Of Desire To Sell My Car Seriously I don’t even know where he got this shit from, is there a torrent or something on Wikileaks that I didn’t hear about?
The Lada thundered as its big cam helped provide sufficient motivation to evacuate all but the laziest molecules of exhaust. I fed the steering wheel smoothly but firmly through its range of motion, snapping the rear end wide and preparing for the long uphill straight I knew was coming.
A lot of people told me that I couldn’t do a gymkhana video inside a Home Depot with a propane-injected Cummins 4BT-swapped Lada Riva, but I showed them. I thought of their angry faces seeing my YouTube hit counter increase as I buried the fuel pedal, powersliding the rear end in a furious cloud of aspirated tire. I swore involuntarily as I went wide on my corner exit, clipping a promotional standee for furnace cleaning services with the Chinese GoPro-clone tack welded to my quarter panel.
Before me lay my greatest challenge: the entire lighting aisle. I knew that men braver and better than me had never emerged from its confusing haze of halogens and iridiums and xenon-raviolis. I didn’t like my odds, but the Lada’s survival instincts kicked in just in time and pulled a perfect 720 flat spin down the middle of a permanent-installation LED lamp display, warrantied for 22-years were it not almost certainly voided by the purestrain clouds of rage ash particulate that filled their fixtures.
I finished my run by slamming through the self-checkout, powersliding across the parking lot and backing it into the shopping cart corral, the last of my tires evaporating into thin wisps of tar smoke, so fragile and beautiful. My adoring public was awaiting my emergence, and they had brought fancy red and blue flashing lights.
I stepped out of the Lada, my fingers interlaced on the back of my head, the gesture done a thousand times before. My signature move, I thought, as I gave the rapid finger movements that would activate the Isuzu Pup at the other end of the lot, ignored by the 5-0 in their haste to apprehend me.
They asked me to do a burnout. I told them I never stopped. I told them that even though I was there physically, in spirit I was still doing that good burnout, eating right through those precious meats. I was here because the tires were gone, I explained, and the tire shop junior looked at me in awe.
A senior tire tech appeared, an old, grizzled mechanic who I knew from a glance had been beaten down by life and sat here, waiting for the world to catch up with his nihilism. Without a word, he nodded at me, and began mounting the new interface layer for my brutal project.
Fresh off the Hunter machine, the tires were perfect, without a single scratch on the rim. The senior tech nodded, disappeared to a previously undetected back room caked in nudie posters like wallpaper. His disciples scrambled around me, crowing about how I was the chosen one, how he would only emerge for those lucky customers who were truly worthy.
I frowned at them, then, and walked out with a pair of 265 meats, throwing two hundred dollar bills over my shoulder to pay for the mounting as I pulled the Harbour Freight Earthquake rattle gun out of its ziptied holster on the rear strut tower brace.
My sawzalled Z06 Corvette roared out of the tire shop parkade, igniting the freshly mounted tires in a furious stew of mould release compound and R-compound. The shattered husks of its old tires bounced around in the truck-car bed as I buried the throttle to change lanes.
I hit the switch, kicking the fluorescent bulbs above me to a flickering, dim life. Stray photons aligned and clawed at my eyes, forming in my mind the recognition of an object I loosely identified as a Toyota Celica. But this was no normal Celica; this was atonement.
I thought back to what the man from the government had said, when they gave me and the others the ten-day warning. Everyone but you on this block has cleared out, he said to me, the apocalypse is coming. I asked him if that meant the highway was going to be clear in a few weeks. He looked at me askance, then returned to a thin veneer of professionalism.
Thinking back on it, he was probably jealous of the freedom that I was about to carve out for myself. I was climbing out from beneath the crushing weight of adult responsibilities and anything more than the pure pursuit of knowledge, laid bare in the daylight.
This very morning I was conducting an important scientific experiment for the good of all humanity. How far into redline can a Toyota Celica with forged internals go before the gargantuan ball-bearing turbocharger sticking out of the hood starts pushing the valves into daylight along with their respective explosions? My hypothesis was really fucking far.
The signs on the abandoned highway overpass whistled as a cold wind blew through them, the sounds of traffic very far away now. If I strained my ears, I could just about hear them over the bone-crushing violence of the 3SGTE.
It had been a lot more than ten days since the warning, I thought, but the digital clock on the dash of the Celica only told me what hour and minute it was. I wondered when daylight savings time was supposed to happen, or stop, or whatever, and then dismissed it altogether.
As I pulled up on the abandoned Autozone, I hit the high beam pedal and lit up the interior with the twin LED-boosted xenon driving lamps. A raider scattered into the backroom, trailing garbage as he went. I debated not going inside, not risking my life for my quarry.
But I really needed that sweet, sweet Rotella. The Celica drooled it like crazy, and even in the apocalypse nobody could possibly have enough free time to spend all day tracking down oil leaks.
I stepped out of the Marquis, letting the resplendent velour door card rattle gently at the end of its ageworn clips before slamming the too-heavy door on its creaking hinges home with a thud. Crossing the lot quickly, I held my bag away from my body, the same way I had been taught by the business fiction films of my childhood. Today wasn’t going to go like those, I knew.
The man behind the parts counter was gruff, yet honorable. Mick was as shopworn as they come, four pints of whisky poured into a used oil container. He wanted to deal. I wanted to deal. I flipped the bag in front of him, pulled out the liners and demonstrated for him that I had come with no ill intent, no weapons of slicing or penetrating. He frowned, nodded.
“One more thing,” he said as I was finally stepping over the threshold to my new life. “Get some dirt on that bag, pretty boy.”
I nodded back, and was gone.
When the haze lifted the Marquis was all that remained. Cleaved in twain by a sapling decades prior to my arrival on the scene, it needed a front clip from a four-eyed Capri and about a hundred dollars of roll-on farm implement paint. Out back, behind the four doors of opulent passenger comfort, lay the Cobra IRS I had fabricated in my wilder days, kitting the car out for a road racing specification. It sat above immense semislicks, their surface holding taut to stray pebbles in the lot even hours after they were last heat cycled.
I dropped the LQ4 into the trunk from Mick’s borrowed cherry picker. I knew he was pleased, but he was frowning.
“Shame to wreck a good Ford with that Chevy garbage,” he said simply, scratching his ass.
“You just want too much for the Powerstrokes, Mick,” I said as the Marcapri squatted down on its haunches and axle-tramp-launched a stream of gravel that blotted out the sun hanging atop the yard for one glorious moment.
I looked at the Audi he was selling, then at the odometer, then at the seller. Everything seemed normal. This was a middle aged man who loved his car and just drove it a whole bunch. Not every Audi was an unreliable nightmare, surely, and at least one, statistically, had to make it to the lofty peaks of four hundred thousand kilometers on the odometer.
I figured, sure, if it’s made it this far, it must be a good car. It has a fighting spirit. With that, I handed him the money. I started to drive away in my new prize. The boost response was alright for an engine so old and presumably slack internally, the all-wheel-drive system seemed to still be working, and the low-rolling-resistance tires held air. I probably made out alright.
As soon as the odometer ticked over to 400,000.2 the car turned to ash and blew away in the wind. I was thrown to the ground at highway speeds and bounced into a ditch.
Storming back to the owner, I demanded to know what was up. I climbed the stairs to his ornate castle, perched on a cliff, which in retrospect was probably a pretty good clue.
“Oh, the black magic ritual must only work within a radius of 200 meters. Sold as-is, where-is.”
Sure, motherfucker, you’re a wizard, but the JDM road flare gun I found in the trunk of a junkyard Stagea says that the customer is always right. Besides, I need that money to go buy my second choice, a $2000 E36 M3.
“Purge the heretic,” I could hear them scream as I scrambled across a sand dune to hide behind a chunk of massive driftwood. My chest heaved with every laboured breath, and I saw stars at the corners of my vision. This was about as far as I could go, I thought.
In order to understand how I got here, you have to understand how it all started. The small performance parts company I had started working for was releasing a line of coilovers, and for some reason they sent me to H2Oi, the convention for Volkswagen enthusiasts who like replacing underbody fasteners and trim panels.
I decided to go under the radar, taking a rental Maxima, and slipping past the throngs of cops. I wasn’t entirely successful, and ended up pulled over at the roadside on the way in, Officer Murphy holding a magnetic Longacre camber gauge to my rental car’s front hub and tut-tutting at the measurements.
“Boy, someone done hit a curb with your car,” he said in that most authentic of Maryland accents.
“It’s a rental, officer,” I weaseled. “Who knows what kind of dope fiend had this before? At least it’s at a stock ride height unlike those God-hating Nazi relic worshippers behind me.” I punctuated “God” with a pair of fifty dollar bills, slipped subtly out of the open window.
It worked, and I was able to proceed along my way. The booth was already set up, and I started giving my sales spiel to the crowd that was collecting, ravenous for coilovers.
“Look,” I said, “our new line of XM7 coilovers is the most adjustable we’ve ever had. You can go down -” I ratcheted the collars down two notches with deft wrench work, lowering the spring perch, “- or up.”
Immediately, the crowd screamed angrily as if wounded, a group of seething, frothing rage. The concept of raising a vehicle was unheard of to them. I did the noble thing, and abandoned the booth immediately, leaving its bounty behind to the scenesters. Some of them followed me, though, and before long had developed a search party, chasing me on foot toward the beach after their vehicles became stranded on a pesky speed bump. They shook improvised weapons at me, spears, knives, and what appeared to be an entire Magnaflow turboback exhaust system, gleaming in the sun and sharpened to a lethal point.
If I don’t make it, and you find this message, I want you to know: there were fat chicks here. The cars scraped regardless.
When it all came down to it, I told the assembled paramedics, I was happier this way. They asked me to continue my story through furrowed brows and practiced don’t-panic expressions. Of course I would, I said. Let’s be honest - I didn’t have anywhere else to be at the moment.
My story starts on a suburban boulevard just like any other. In fact, it’s just like yours. I had been working in the garage, power-polishing the beautiful cherry-red fenders of my immaculate PT Cruiser to a luscious, deep shine. It was my pride and joy, each aesthetic modification perfectly weighted, selected from the finest aisles of Canadian Tire.
I nursed a discontent for my job, though I would never be tempted to say it out loud and break the spell, realize the truth of my words, compel action from thought. Better for everyone that it remain calm, that I take pride in my hobbies, my attendance of the community association.
That night, I was stirred from my marital bed by strange thoughts, wishes breathed into my ear as if by a distant, ethereal lover. I had to drive, I realized, to clear my head. I did, my hands gripping the supple Napa leather of the Tweety Bird steering wheel cover, the fuzzy dice playing and replaying their silent dance of eternal companionship.
I first became aware of what was happening when I looked aside my car and saw a rabbit keeping pace with it. That’s odd, I thought, but clever of the little guy. Suddenly, I drove beneath a streetlight, illuminating the procession of terrified woodland animals following it. My stomach clenched in cold fear.
I looked up from the animals to my rear view mirrors, but all three only showed fire. Ravenous, terrifying liquid flames, rolling in languid waves across the street behind me, consuming all in its path. I pushed the gas harder, exceeding the speed limit for the first time in my life, knowing, deep within, it was essential.
That’s when I saw him.
Ringed in fire, the silhouette of what I can now reliably identify as a 1966 Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser emerged. I caught the driver’s gaze in my wing mirror, but could see only a terrifying, empty whiteness I was lost within. I emerged from my torpor to see the paramedics, auditing the damages I had suffered as the PT Cruiser was destroyed around me.
“I’m sorry,” said the first paramedic, “you’ve been infected with automotive insanity.”
My wife, who had somehow been summoned in the ensuing chaos, broke into tears, weeping openly and loudly, giving way to a harsh braying as she ran out of breath and sank to her knees. I felt my hand moving to touch her shoulder, to comfort her, but it slid down her arm, onto her smartphone and opened Kijiji.
It’s better to know than not to know, I felt, even if learning it was a waste of time. Nothing is worse than an unsolved mystery left lilting on the air, another regret for the pile that would chase me to the end of my days.
At the time, I was doing a local public-access television show, called Switched On With Cars. I hadn’t written the title, it was an ex-girlfriend of mine who had. She enjoyed my ascent into local fame, but she kept going. I heard from a mutual friend that she had become some kind of news anchor on one of the low numbered channels. Channel 3? It’s hard to remember after all these years.
Part of my program was taking requests, and helping solve automotive problems and clear up myths for my listeners. It was that last part that lead to my downfall, that dark evening in March. The caller never identified himself, and our PBX’s caller ID system, unreliable at the best of times, would not be forthcoming with clues either.
He wanted to know if a 4BT would fit in a Honda Civic. After he finished giving me the pitch, I wanted to know too.
Resisting the urge to get started on the project for the rest of the episode was hard - damn the lack of commercial breaks! Why couldn’t it be fundraising season? - but I managed to get some favours called in before I had reached my car, a gently modified four-eyed Capri in school-bus yellow, in the station parking lot. Its flanks gleamed with the early morning dew, and its hatch was a willing participant in picking up the assets I would need to finish the job.
Structural reinforcement was the easy way; a 1977 Civic doesn’t have much bodywork to start with, and a grinder and welder make me the chassis fabricator I was never born to be. I had never been further from the comfortable orbit of my suburban lifestyle than I was now, lowering a diesel truck engine between the radically-altered hips of a Japanese economy car. At last it was done, and I turned the key, the exhaust pipe located on the fender dumping clouds of soot.
The 4BT Civic was a tangible, angry thing; the solid motor mounts transmitted the engine’s furious vibrations, shaking the car left to right, aiming to torque steer even at at idle.
I pulled out onto the street, and laid a series of brutal FWD one-tire-fires, clouds of smoke plunging the rear view mirrors into a featureless expanse of black. I upshifted until traction could be regained, and drove my horrible abomination to the TV studio, right on time for this week’s show.
It was a set-up. I pulled into the rain-slicked parkade and the world went white, sodium lights pointed directly at my face as armed EPA agents descended on the car with their weapons drawn.
I wish I could sum up my emotions in words, the mix of pride, hubris and anger when I flicked the Civic into reverse. But I can explain to you why I launched it off the second storey of a parkade onto the highway, then did a series of violent donuts to get the car pointed at the sunset and begin my commute to my new life, in a new town. To tell you the truth, I had been waiting for this my entire life.
The year was 1999, and Lou Bega was introducing a new generation of girls to the concept of excessive radio airplay. At the time, I was an airplane mechanic consultant for an up and coming airline, known to me as Skyways Air and to most of the legal community as “Defendant.”
I had been brought in as a troubleshooter, for that was my reputation at the time. Garages, shops, factories that were having trouble would summon me to them. I would put on my inscrutable-genius-Sherlock act, looking over many things slowly while pretending to be studying them, and then point out something totally obvious. Inevitably, that something totally obvious would be overlooked by the local mechanics, the problem would be solved, production would return to optimal levels, and I would be richly, richly rewarded. This job was going to be no different, I expected.
I punched the FD down two gears as I prepared for the last tricky corner before their secure gated employee parking lot. The security guard and I had become close over the last few heady weeks, even though I could never remember his name without looking at his ID tag as I said it. He waved me through, admiring the Coke bottle good looks draped in an immaculate pearl white paintjob.
Today was a reckoning; it was the second act of the two-part magic trick described above. I would give them a Powerpoint presentation, wow them with the most obvious findings possible, collect my cheque, lives would be saved. I strode confidently into the boardroom, deployed my PowerBook, and threw gorgeous motion graphics onto the massive projector screen behind me.
“RUST,” it shrieked in all caps, “NEVER SLEEPS.”
I fought the urge to check my car’s oil the entire time. A commendable act, but one that went unnoticed by the assembled bigwigs. At the end of my virtuoso performance, the engineering manager stood up, coughed, and began to address me both directly and indirectly, in the complex social dance of the pseudo-foreign yet overly familiar consultant.
“That’s just the thing,” he said, in a soft voice. “We’ve found a special kind of rust that attacks titanium. It’s eating our planes alive.”
I looked out to the airfield in horror, and confirmed his grim portent. Rust had pursued me so far. At last, it decided to strike me down in my moment of triumph. I slumped in defeat against the window, sliding against the glass all the way to the floor, where I sat, a broken man.
When we built the Duster, our plan was to go to every rat-shit drag strip in every small town that could bear one. After the Duster was finished devouring the local opposition, we bragged to ourselves over carburetor rebuilds and hammer-driven header-clearancing, we’d figure out what to do with it then. We just didn’t realize the angry Plymouth would defeat us first.
We rolled into Cabiate just before sundown on the last event of the year before they closed the drag strip up. The snow would be falling soon, maybe even before we had gotten our chance to do the full 1440, and there was a nip in the air that bit through my performance fleece and my novelty gearhead t-shirt like they were nothing. I could sense the Hilborn injection craved the cool, dense air, though, and even at this altitude I knew something truly special would be unleashed this night.
I won at rock-paper-scissors and got to lead the baby Plymouth through the gates first. Ambling it down the line, I got a pretty good bead on who my rival would be, started to feel him out for any weakness. He had no paucity on paunch, that was for sure, and in the carboned-out nitrometh-injected logic of the drag addict, the weight on his bones would make all the difference in the world. I smiled despite my reputation for sandbagging. Nobody knew me here, but after this pass everyone would.
I was right, of course. But things have a way of getting away from me while I’m not looking.
I hit an RT of pretty much zero, I was convinced, a perfect, holy launch. I reveled in my own reflexes, my own skill, and knocked the car to the next gear, slamming it back into the meaty powerband as the 440 ingested just the right combination of air and anger to keep the cam happy.
They say that a man develops tunnel vision on the strip, that on his hundredth pass, he can no longer see the stands. That’s not true, because after all these years I looked to the stand for the approval of the crowds, to fuel me.
I missed my shift when I saw it, the rev limiter bouncing once, twice, before I could punch it up out of a deep-seated muscle memory.
In the stands was my travelling companion and race partner. But he looked different. Older.
I ratcheted my attention straight forward to prepare for the end of the track and the start of braking season. I could smell hot brakes, but could not see my opponent ahead or in any of my mirrors. I blinked to wash the sweat out of my eyes, and when I could see again the track itself was gone, and I drove on a featureless plane beneath a dark sky devoid of stars, forever.
Eventually, with great effort, I hauled the Plymouth down to nothing, my grip strength weak on the steering wheel, my muscles hazy and unresponsive. In front of me was a man in a black fire suit. I recognized him as my opponent in the drags.
“Things are done a little different at this strip,” he said, and I could feel the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
In all the different permutations of the world, in all of the ridiculous chaos-theory effects that could have happened, I had cheated at rock-paper-scissors and sealed my fate. This encounter, I began to realize, truly belonged to my friend. It was a case of mistaken identity; even this otherworldly hayseed from another dimension could make mistakes.
The truth behind it shattered my belief in an ordered universe. Everything I had ever known or seen was controlled by a pantheon of elder gods, controlling the world through drag racing.
“Welcome to the NHRA,” he said, and I could feel myself crying.
They spoke to me in dreams and they told me about their plan. Their plan was Altered-wheelbase motorhome drag racing. I wasn’t one to oppose their plan. I told them I would implement it, and they returned me to the land of the waking to wreak havoc and face judgment.
The earliest days of the Motorhome Drag Racing Association weren’t that spectacular. I put out ads, got together a bunch of haw-haws who picked up used motorhomes on eBay or Kijiji and wanted to race them. A few dramatic face-offs, but almost nobody came back. I needed to dig deeper. I needed to unearth the true freaks.
I visited the NHRA offices. The ghosts of long-departed drag racers hung in the air. As I passed by their portraits, I involuntarily shuddered, a cold wind bracing me. They had surmounted ever greater odds than I had, and succeeded. I knew it was possible. I just had to see how.
I descended into the NHRA archives, my access guaranteed by a 1984 Caravan with a turbocharger the size of Montana. Everyone in the office had run out to stare at it, like bringing a dog to an elementary school at recess, leaving their posts unattended.
There, I discovered the awful truth. The NHRA had worked in secret for decades to undermine motorhome drag racing. I heard a rattle behind me, and spun on my heel.
Wally Parks, back from the dead. With a cut-off length of Coronet driveshaft in his hand.
“You made it past tech inspection, alright,” he said.
I stumbled down the street, a delirious haze seeming to rest just millimeters off my skin and filling my nostrils with cloudy sensations. I had been getting ready for the annual Subaru meet by painting a lot of wheels in my enclosed garage, and I guess I had forgotten my trusty P95 respirator or decided to man up and not need it. Either way, I was high as a kite and thoughts were becoming pretty difficult to keep straight.
A man was there. A man with a Nissan Axxess. I could see myself withdrawing money from one of the secret reserves of car-buying cash on my person. I waved bills at him. He accepts. It is actually an Eagle Colt Vista. How could I have made such a newbie tall wagon mistake? It is of no mind. I keep walking. It’s dangerous to drive in this condition, I think, the weight of that thought hitting me in the core like a medicine ball.
Before me, the gas station. They have Slurpees, I think. That’s what I need to clean this thing up. I buy an E100 Toyota Corolla wagon, I think. Maybe it was something else. It’s hard to tell at this point. I am running out of car-buying reserves.
At last, I sober up and come to, my pants around my ankles, in a Burger King drivethrough miles from my home. I look in my pocket. It jingles with a janitor’s wealth of new car keys. I grumble and pull up the car tracking app on my iPhone, preparing it for several new database entries.
Eventually, I swear to myself each time, I’ll start realizing that new P95 filters are a lot cheaper than these manic sprees.
My hubris comes to a sharp end. The Corolla I bought was an automatic. I pitch backward in stark horror, screaming. Don’t do drugs, kids.
When they came to me, hat in hand, and asked for my help, I put down the impact wrench and laughed. Then we embraced, for they were now part of my pack and I would protect them until the end of days. Only Carl seemed uncomfortable with my new position, his attitude of too-cool moderation and worldliness placing him at odds even as I came close for a bro hug.
Ever since then I’ve been wearing the “Community Pace Car” decal with pride. It takes a wolf to catch a wolf, I thought, eyeing suspiciously an FC RX7 and a 180SX that threatened to become a JDM teenager meet. A blip of the throttle gave the Hellcat motor enough motivation to emit a brutal snarl that scared the kids back into their car, perhaps off to a sock hop or juke joint of ill repute rather than threaten my neighborhood.
Speeders, though. Speeders were my real threat. Once in awhile someone would come blazing through in a Mazda CX-7 or Lexus RX350F, and I’d have to put them down. I had littered the neighborhood with automated radar systems, electronic countermeasures, tailpipe emissions sniffers. The community association trusted me. I would reward their trust, or die for it.
My sensor mesh started panicking, detecting the shape of something massive coming into Aspen Acres. I pulled the auxiliary lighting rod out of the dashboard and the world became sharper, split between absolute light and pure darkness. No subtlety now.
I spanked the Celica around a corner, the fat meats in the rear kicking up a smokeshow of such righteous fury I was afraid it would elect a new Pope. Finally my quarry was in sight, and I could smell their fear, alone and weak. The Grand Cherokee stopped dead, in the middle of the road, knowing they were made. Waiting for my blade at their throat. It wouldn’t be over that quickly, I thought, punching the siren switch on the A-pillar.
Later that day, I was in my garage, bringing back a ‘77 Corolla from its ancient torpor. Carl stepped up the driveway, told me to hand in my badge and my bumper sticker. I asked him why.
“You didn’t have to burn them alive,” he said.
“Blame 90s Mopar electrics,” I grumbled, returning to the frozen ball joint.
#
tags: jeep, toyota, hellcat, dodge, aspen acres, white people
A sky the colour of low-budget BMW E30s hung over the port as I stepped into the Daihatsu museum. Behind the counter was a trim apparatchik, his pride in his work evident. Not even a hint of a slouch could be detected, I noticed.
In America, his posture would be monitored by invisible nanotech sensors, communicating in a hivemind mesh to unseen globe-spanning networks, tattling all the while. In Japan, such oversight was unnecessary. People simply did what they needed to do. Such was the problem I was dealing with today.
“Very impressive collection,” I said to him.
“Yes, we are very proud of our company his-” I cut him off.
“Enough of that. I want to see the good shit. The platinum reserve.”
He sighed, looked at me. He stared into my eyes, breaking his own social norms. Something he saw inside triggered a deep fear reaction, though, and I saw his arm begin to move. A silent alarm.
I raised my pistol. His posture became even more rigid, if that were even possible.
“Not today, buddy. Platinum reserve. Now.”
I had done it. I was in. Behind the clerk, the wall dissolved to unveil the rarest of all Daihatsus. A rust-free Charade GTTi. It would be mine.
Behind me, I heard the scraping of titanium talons on polished tile. Slamhounds, I thought, mentally changing my pistol’s loadout from stun rounds to full spectrum. The Charade wasn’t the only rust-free thing in the building.
When they let me out of the hospital for the first time they gave me some medication to control it. I kept taking the medication. The MR2 in the corner of the garage got rustier, seemed more like an abstract concept of pain than of a willing partner in pain. I shied away from it, preferring the warm comfort of the streamlined and reliable Acura 1.7EL.
One day I ran out of the special little green pills they gave me. The pharmacist’s intern swore that they couldn’t find them either, and my doctor was in some kind of charity golf tournament. I figured if I waited through the entire day, I would probably be alright if I didn’t do anything. Well, I didn’t make it through the entire day, but I haven’t taken the pills since then, so that’s an achievement too.
The MR2 started speaking to me again, its loose panel gaps flexing and rattling on rusted fasteners in tune with its speech. HIGHER, it screamed, HIGHER, DADDY, HIGHER. I held my head in my hands, but even through the walls separating the garage from my bedroom I could hear it, muffled, screaming out to be higher and jump things.
On the phone with my ex-wife, I described the dilemma. She cut me short, not wanting to discuss the subject of the MR2 anymore. I had called her every night for months about it, she said and I realized, speaking like a madman possessed. She had enough, and the restraining order I would receive in the mail weeks later served as an emphatic punctuation stop to the conversation.
What could I do? I lifted the MR2 aloft on long-travel trophy truck suspension, fitted it with the knobby mud tires that it spoke inside my mind as wanting when I was at the store, remote reservoir shocks, hydraulic bumpstops, my purchasing a manic spree dissolving into an impenetrable fog, the haze reaching every aspect of my mind. Soon I was no longer shaving or eating.
At last the MR2 or was it me? - was complete. with that, we stepped out into the harsh light of society’s judgment, no longer vulnerable to their criticism, their slings, arrows, the imagined improvised energy weapons of capitalism. Oh, what a feeling.
I would never go back to that hospital again, in the same way that MR2 would never go to someone else’s shop again. It would be wrong to interfere with the intricate masterwork we had built between the two of us.
That’s when I saw a pinhole of rust on the rear quarter panel. That’s it, I thought, I should start looking for a new shell.
#
tags: ship of theseus, mr2, toyota, mental illness
The Skyline was beautiful on fire, all twisted metal stretching upwards, everything washed in a thin orange haze. I said, I sure hope the DOT doesn’t find out about this. You grabbed my hand, and put one of the cuffs on it. These are truly the Customer Appreciation Days.
My story starts off reasonably enough. I was a college student, trying to make my way through advanced basket weaving courses and treatises on the inevitable socialist domination and conversion of American industry. I thought I had seen what capital could do to a man, suffering under my long-serving boss, Alex, the manager of the Sunrise County Nissan dealership in which I worked between classes as a lot boy and apprentice detailer.
One day a man came. I was walking by the counter at the time, it having been far past the regular close time of the parts desk. It fell to me to handle this man. I looked at him directly, but I could not focus on his face for some reason, even after he removed his hood. He withdrew some keys, and left them with me, for “tomorrow’s service.” I did not know the protocol back then, and I nodded, and he left, leaving me to wonder who this man was.
I chased after him, but he rounded a corner and was gone. I was perplexed. However, I had faith in my academic instincts. I would figure out which car it was by way of the remote starter attached to the keys, and look up the license plate in the system to figure out which customer was involved. I would put the keys somewhere safe for Courtney, the parts girl, who I often thought fondly of in my weaker moments, and who would surely be impressed by my initiative and cleverness.
In the parking lot, the wind whistled around me as the snow began to fall that January evening, cutting through my dealership polo shirt and chilling me to the bone. I hit the remote car starter button once, twice, thrice - and then it happened.
At the far end of the parking lot, shrouded by two lifted XTerras with broken engines, a car leapt to life, screaming through massive twin turbochargers. The bumper housed two jagged intakes, seemingly having crudely clawed their way through the grillework like bilge rats through a convict’s head, seeking sunlight and the fresh air of the outside world. I quivered with anticipation, my lot-boy instincts demanding some excitement.
I got inside the car, first on the wrong side, then on the correct side. Mr. K would have been proud of me, I think, before admonishing myself for incorrectly acclaiming this gorgeous beast to the man of the Z. Who had created the Skyline? I made a mental note to ask a message board, once I was done with this car.
I plunked the Skyline into first, punched the gas, and immediately spun it into a lamp post. I could feel a horrible weight upon my body, and my fight-or-flight instincts ran wild, chilling my adrenaline-infused blood like ice.
When I got out of the car, you were already there. I didn’t even know that you were a government agency that existed, much less about this “Skyline Quarantine” everyone has been talking about since I got here. Having survived an encounter with this car isn’t that impressive, is it? I just got stupid and then I got lucky.
The Fiat Panda’s Steyr-Puch drivetrain grinds insolently as I back up over the concrete stairwell and leave the subdivision the hard way. Parking inside the building had seemed like a great idea at the time, buoyed by the Panda’s miniscule wheelbase and general put-it-in-my-pocket size. However, even Olympic gold medallists in Men’s Freestyle Reversing Out Of A Parking Space couldn’t hope to back out of a populated university bookstore like this one without hitting a few freshmen. It was over now, I tell myself, as I merge onto the highway and the Panda’s throttle butterflies are kicked open with the suckling howl of a wolf puppy.
What’s the point of this story, you ask? Well, that’s a pretty rude thing to interrupt me with. I hadn’t even spent my customary second paragraph explaining the intricate structures of the 4WD system, or how I had overcome the weak Fiat mechanicals in the front end with a tactical application of more granite-strong Puch goodness. I’ll tolerate it this time, just this one time, and then we really have to talk about boundaries.
When I was at the bookstore I saw that they have that new Stephen King bestseller in softcover now, and it’s on sale. You should head down and pick it up. Can I get back to the fucking Fiat now?
Okay, so I’m on the highway, foot matted to the floor, engine’s wailing. The individual throttle bodies are singing a throaty song of seduction. It’s a perfect autumn evening, and the cold, dense air fills the combustion chamber in a textbook-perfect illustration of the Otto cycle.
Behind me, about twenty cars back, I see the glimmer of a blower casing. I know that some shit is about to go down, and dive for the shoulder, placing my thumb over the twin nitrous injector triggers on the steering wheel spokes.
An AMC Rambler leaps out of the crush of traffic and lets loose, its dented and rusted hood a crude testament to the machined purity of the Weiand. The immense seven-rib drive pulley of the supercharger is hypnotic, and I can barely peel my eyes from it in my rear view mirror, but manage it somehow.
The driver looks at me. I don’t recognize him, and his face seems obscured from my memory even now. All I remember is that he looked at me, and nodded.
We should go buy that book from the bookstore like right now, okay?
#
tags: amc, rambler, fiat, panda, steyr-puch, just fiat things
Sven looks me in the eye, just for a second, and then returns his gaze to the seventy-five cent hot dog. Any one of the normal human beings passing by would say that the weekly Volvo meet at Ikea was getting tense.
It had started innocently enough, with a burnout competition next to the cart corral. Then it turned into a comparison of homemade flame trap fixes, and an impromptu technical panel on where to find the best fake woodgrain vinyls. But Sven and I had history.
I wish I could say that I was sorry, or even that I still had the portion of my humanity that allowed me to express regret in an authentic way. But I wasn’t and I didn’t.
Sven looked up again from the hot dog, hoping to bridge the gulf between us. He knew that I would see his eagerness as a lack of strength, and I did. But I knew that there was something more beyond our petty squabble. I made the first move, reaching my hand across the table in the ancient Anglo-Saxon gesture of getting along openly despite hating one another secretly. We shook on the deal, and money was finally exchanged.
I stepped out into the parking lot afterward, relieved of one burden but having gained another. Sven’s - my - key sat heavily in my hand, the blow-moulded Volvo plastic already peeling and revealing the secret Ford origins of the motor vehicle I had just taken delivery of for a little bit too much money.
Its titanic husk sat alone in the parking lot, lit from behind by the stark sodium-emulation LED light standards that filled the tarmac like oxeye daisies on a construction site. The XC70 shook on its long-travel suspension in the brisk December wind, and for a split second I could sense its fear.
We had a date with the Corvette junkyard and the portal axle warehouse, I explained to it softly once I was inside. I accentuated my point by punching the throttle hard enough to spin all four mismatched all-seasons from its parking spot to the deserted exit past the cart corral, leaving my own marks atop the site of my defeat in the burnout contest.
#
tags: volvo, ford, xc70, buying a car, ethnic tensions
Finally, the drivers’ side tail light sunk beneath the surface of the tailing pond, and it was all over but the bubbles. I toggled the light amplification mode on my Google Glass up two notches and returned to my Cutlass Ciera.
The LE2 leapt to attention as I turned the key, and then settled down into its usual pattern of insolent blower whine. Beneath the Brougham’s copious yet practical hood, an Eaton M90 sang its lonely song of low drive RPM, with an accompaniment from the bizarre vacuum leak caused by the aging crankcase vent system.
Together, we left the site of my regret. I would never return to that tailing pond, would never mention to anyone what had transpired there, until just this very moment.
Do you believe me now when I tell you that changing the fuel pump in a Saab 900 is a hard job?
I can sense the rental agency clerk’s confusion as I tell her about my disability. It’s horrible, you see, I can’t drive an automatic transmission. She checks the catalogue frantically, apologizing all the while, trying to provide the ideal image of Good Customer Service that was beat into her during her two and a half hours of employee orientation.
Finally I can take no more and tell her it’s a joke. Of course it’s a joke. What kind of man could only drive a manual transmission?
It wasn’t a joke. She gave me a Micra.
Later, I told my travelling companion I was hoist by my own retard when I made that joke.
She said, don’t you mean petard?
I had no response. I was quiet for a long time as we drove into the valley, the sound of the Micra’s headliner rattling filling the gulf between us.
I flip off the self-checkout machine as it cheerfully thanks me for shopping at this store, and walk out into the parking lot. My self-driving car is already there at the curb, and pops its door to let me inside.
I should probably specify that my self-driving car is actually what appears to be a demonically possessed 1980 Pontiac Trans Am Turbo powered solely by the sense of highly violent karmic redemption, but that’s neither here nor there. I throw my bags of produce onto the rollcage-mounted hooks and clamber over the centre console to get into driving position.
I can feel the rear end hook as I pop the clutch in first and crabwalk the car over the pedestrian-safety speed bumps, federally mandated for a parking space of this size. The feds definitely didn’t see me coming. Their intent was good, but their method was flawed, I think, the remote-reservoir double-adjustable custom-valved race Ohlins providing perfect damping as the Trans Am launches itself onto the main road and out into traffic. Commuter cars part like Moses, red sea, you get the idea.
The trip back to my humble garage compound is usually pretty placid. I stopped at the next light, wishing to portray the slightest semblance of adherence to road manners. Across from me, waiting to turn left, I saw it. A Baja Bug. Even over the sound of the Trans Am’s gently whistling bypass valves reacting to the rough idle, I could hear it plain as day. The once-Beetle rippled gently with the burbling gassy-infant-tractor sound of a Subaru EJ22.
Clad entirely in black, the helmeted driver of the Fear Beetle looked directly at me. I could feel his gaze meeting mine, even through the pitch-dark polycarbonate visor, his spartan dashboard reflected in a distorted inverse. He expected me to be more afraid, I knew it, and I could feel his surprise. I had fallen into the same horrible part of myself as he had. The only distance between us was birthed from the fact that I had been touched by the spirit of late-model American trailer park speed while he was broken open and lay, guts exposed, in the bone-bleaching sun of air-cooled German people’s-car perversions. In another world, with nobler gods, we would have been friends.
The light changed, and he tried to beat me on the left turn, rolling his nerf-bars and armoured flanks directly into the carbon-fiber-and-plastic bumper of the Trans Am. It was hard to say whether the ghost inside the Pontiac or the built-up anger inside my right foot had acted first.
Both cars lay shattered across the road, broken down like a Haynes manual photograph just before the part where the writer finishes his diatribe by telling you that assembly is the reverse of removal. I had skipped the paragraph of warning text about taking delicate notes and putting my pushrods on foam when I had dismantled myself so long ago, and now my life had been on jackstands for so long it was impossible to reassemble.
The Baja Bug owner limped to the mangled front of his car, and withdrew his Harbour Freight Earthquake impact wrench as I meanwhile pulled mine from its centre console holster. I knew I would only have seconds to take him out before both of our cars began to knit, reforming around us like a chrysalis of tube steel and 6061 aluminum. Somewhere overhead, an eagle cried, its scream mixing with the oncoming sirens of the fire department.
#
tags: trans am turbo, fear beetle, pontiac, volkswagen
When I was a little kid, an old gypsy once told me that my future was born in rust. I didn’t know what she meant, and I was too afraid to ask, my judgment blurred by the impatience of youth. The next day, she died. My parents tried to hide it from me, but it was all across the newspapers, the terrible fire with no obvious cause. I saw image after image of the corpses being removed when they were out of the room and I could sneak a glance at the television news between episodes of daily action-hero can-do edutainment.
I only thought about what she really meant this morning in the office parkade, as I pushed the lock button on the keyless entry remote for my Fiat 126p rally car. My life had turned out pretty well, I think, but the threat of rust did indeed hang over my head. Is that what she really thought?
On my way home from work, I drifted through traffic in an absent haze, replaying the conversation over and over in my mind. I passed by the you-pull-it yard and was struck by a subconscious urge to investigate further. I pulled the 126p off at the next exit and ripped the diminutive Maluch through a series of fields to shortcut my way into the front parking lot of the wrecker.
“Oh, it’s you again,” said Mick, the grizzled mechanic who I liked to believe I had won the grudging respect of despite my white-collar office job and general aptitude for the English language. “Are you leaving that piece of shit here?”
I paid him no mind, even as I paid him my entrance fee. I made a beeline for the back lane of the lot, thinking surely that must have been what I saw - felt? - from the highway.
Before me I saw the beginning of the downward arc of my life’s story. A tangible instance of karmic redemption. I ran my hands over the rust-dimpled fenders and crooked, sagging panels, and I breathed in its heady aroma.
Ringed in the sunlight that had peeked through the clouds, I could see now the true nature of the gypsy’s threat - warning? - threat - to me.
The - My - 1975 Alfasud glared back at me from three of its four headlights, daring me to pull the hood back and begin welding reinforcements onto its rotten firewall. To begin a new life together. To push the needle so far from normalcy it bent, past where the medication could reach me.
The man I burned alive drove a BMW 335d. I’ll never forget his dying words: “thank God I didn’t buy a Jetta.”
When the EPA came to me to enforce emissions standards, I was skeptical at first. It was like hiring a fox to oversee the henhouse, I told them, laughing maniacally, tears in eyes, as they chained my handcuffs to the stainless-steel hook welded to the interrogation table. They weren’t going to stop men like me by sending them after me.
“But there is one thing we can offer you,” said my handler. “Gas tax exemption.” He slid a featureless black rectangle across the table.
Years later, I was in Chicago tracking down the last of the nonconformant turbodiesel commuter cars. I sat in a seedy diner, talking to the waitress casually about my day job.
“Have you ever retired a gas car by mistake?” she asked.
Her question rang in my ears as I gunned my company car around a corner, watching the NOx detector violently oscillate, the sensitive sensor momentarily tricked by city buses and farting pedestrians. They wouldn’t distract me from my goal this time. It wouldn’t be like Seattle. At last my quarry was aligned with my gunsight hood ornament, and I deployed the right foot with extreme prejudice.
My lifted Jaguar XJS slammed into the passenger side door of the 335d, scattering the occupants and their belongings around the interior as the unibody attempted to reshape itself in order to accommodate the desires of the uninvited iron-block V12. The driver was stunned, knocked nearly unconscious by the sound of six liters at 8500 rpm forming an accompaniment to his deploying side-impact airbag system.
I leapt from the car and tore the Velcro patch from my bulletproof vest. The glittering EPA logo across my back screamed out-of-your-jurisdiction to any interfering local law enforcement. I hadn’t had a problem since Philadelphia, when I had to retire that Golf TDI and the entire family of hipsters within. My body worked on autopilot after all these years of chase, and I had the motions down to a perfect dance now, slashing the seatbelt with my wrist-mounted emergency multitool and pulling the driver to the tarmac.
Later, as I drove away from the flames and the screams, I felt momentary regret. Surely the EPA would send a man like me after me one day, to clamp down on my uncatted hoopties. My guilt was interrupted by a phone call from headquarters. I hit the Bluetooth speakerphone’s answer button, rubbing it against the gleaming DOM rollcage it had been crudely ziptied to.
“Get to the airport,” the gum-chewing man said, “There’s been reports of a VW meet spotted in Sacramento.”
I can’t remember what that man was like, even as I use his hands to fasten a stainless steel M14x1.25 through the rear leaf spring of my magnum opus, the final answer to a question everyone was too afraid to ask.
I would still see Dr. Norman Brookings, he of the Brookings method. Despite his relative failure as a people mechanic, he still wanted to see the effects of what he had wrought on my crudely sketched half-life, once every Wednesday from 7:30 to 8:30 PM.
Dr. Norman Brookings asked me: “How long has it been now since you stopped taking your medication?”
I couldn’t answer him. I kept time now in terms of injector pulse widths, and it took awhile to convert those to socially-acceptable human intervals. He shifted in his seat uncomfortably as I counted out loud beneath my breath.
Dr. Norman Brookings continued: “I see. I’m going to recommend you for some further tests. It’s not a big deal, we just want to make sure everything’s as good as it can be.”
On the way out of his office, he looked at the car i had arrived in. “What… What is that?”
I turned on my heel and looked Dr. Norman Brookings, he of the Brookings method, directly in the eye. He jumped with a start, not expecting this level of connection with me to surface from the waters of my cipherous ocean so suddenly. I grinned, but it was the tooth-scraping gummy smile of guilt. Or was it shame?
To answer his question, behind me was a 1999 Z/28 Camaro, or at least it had been once. Before the Blazer frame. Before the fires. Before the supercharger. Definitely before the supercharger started to tell me things at night, secret messages encoded in the wail and whine of the waning and waxing teflon-coated rotors.
“What do you think did this to me?” I asked Dr. Norman Brookings, he of the Brookings method.
“Too much gluten,” he stammered, backing away. “Definitely too much gluten.”
The man frowns at me. I suspect my Italian is not good enough for “I am a motoring journalist and want to borrow your Piaggio Ape for a test drive,” after all.
Sicily was gorgeous, there’s no doubt about it, but what I really wanted was some of that two-stroke goodness. You know, the authentic smell of small-bore engines coughing sooty oil smoke into your face as you redline them mercilessly atop a cobblestone path. The European Union was coming for the two-strokes, you see, and it was probably going to be my last chance to have an authentically Italian motoring experience.
Hence the Piaggio Ape, the three-wheeled, 50cc delivery mule that fed this entire town with its selfless daily sacrifice. It was emblazoned with some kind of crude greasepaint lettering, declaring it to be the avatar of a grocery store. My attempts to do smokey burnouts and savage tire-squealing donuts in the town square might impede the smooth functionality of the business and its relationship to its patrons, I realized, in the part of my mind that still flickered dimly with moral and social obligations. I resigned myself to failure, and slunk away from the Ape 50, head cast downward.
Suddenly I heard a most beautiful sound - ring ding ding ding ding - and I knew that I would have another chance. I stepped bravely in front of the oncoming Vespa and shouted the only Italian words I had learned on this trip: “STOP! POLICE! YOU ARE UNDER ARREST FOR SPEEDING.”
Atop my ratty, borrowed steed, I felt the expansion chamber quiver at the slightest touch of the throttle. “Don’t worry,” I yelled in broken Italian as I sped away into the town square, leaving the Lothario who owned it handcuffed to a light standard, “I’m a motoring journalist!”
The man from the government wasn’t having any of my bullshit. “You’ll do what we want,” he said, his gravelly voice scraping the walls of my flytrap retirement condo, “and you’ll get rewarded.”
“Rewarded with what?” I asked, dreading the answer.
He reached to his feet, and unlatched the mint Halliburton case. A Mini-Ductor II.
How long had they been surveilling me? That son of a bitch had me by the balls. I thought of all the corroded bolts I had in the garage, all the mapp torches I had trusted over the years. I could imagine the gritty taste of oxidized steel falling into the gaps between my teeth from a frozen midpipe nut. I had no choice.
“I’ll do it,” I said, “Under one condition.”
“And what would that be?” He knew that I knew that he knew that I knew. There was no way out for me, and soon I would repay the favour.
“I want full immunity.” The gauntlet had been thrown, and there was no coming back. I could see it in his eyes.
“Very well,” he sighed. “From this moment forth, you are no longer bound by the speed limits of man.”
I knew taking that community college course on negotiation would pay off.
I’m a man who can’t ride the train. I’m trainproof.
When disaster strikes in the boroughs of New York, brilliant forensic detective Tom Locomotive is there. Eventually. Because he can’t ride the train. Sometimes he takes a cab, or an Uber, or rents a car. Once, I swear I saw him even ride a bicycle.
Shit - what’s that? - motherfucker is riding a god damn Honda CT90. Don’t let that rear fender rust out on you, Locomotive!
But when his arch-rival, Professor Phineas Q. Shiftlinkage, starts a dastardly plan to infest the city of New York with kamikaze public transit advocates, Locomotive has to overcome his strange inability to ride the trains and save lives. That is, if he can find a parking spot first.
It had been a year now since I installed myself as the new editor of a monthly adventure serial magazine. I beamed with pride as I put my mirror-polished wingtips on the mahogany desk and puffed on one of the vintage cigars left behind by my predecessor. Life was good.
My reverie came to a sharp end when my accountant burst into the room.
“Mr. Switch, Mr. Switch,” he screamed, near-hysteria, his knees knocking even as he ran. He carried in his hand the latest issue of Bad Ideas In Cars Monthly.
I looked over the cover. It was dominated by a pastel illustration of some young boys coming across an AMC Eagle abandoned in the New England forest. The caption: “I WAS A TEENAGE SPICER CUSTOMER.” It was a little schlocky, but I was proud of it regardless. I eyed the accountant, Mr. Timmins, and I asked him what the problem was.
“Circulation is way down,” he yelped, “kids these days only want to read about drift cars and Facebook-integrated Italian-made Dodge Darts. They have no fucking idea what you are talking about.”
I rose from my desk, turned and faced out the massive floor-to-ceiling window that dominated my office. I could see the entire world out there, I imagined, bustling away to serve the demands that I, a titan of industry, would make. We were silent for a long time, before Timmins finally spoke up.
“Sir,” he squeaked, “what should we do?”
“I have an idea,” I said in a grave tone. “Bring me the Kijiji machine.”
Months later, we were back in the black, making hundreds of millions of dollars per minute. Publishing isn’t too hard, I thought.
I laughed and cheered as Timmins re-entered the room, the latest issue held aloft above his head. The cover blazed: “I WAS A HELLCAT-POWERED 180SX.” A smaller version of the magazine dangled from the cover, emblazoned with the words “READING DRIFT CHARM” and “SAVE THE MANUALS.”
Everyone’s got their own bellwether of bad economic times coming. Mine was Mustang prices. Timing is everything. I think you’ll find that the market wasn’t the only thing I cornered.
When I dropped the five-hundred-dollar V6 SN95 Mustang off the back of my ramp truck, it sank into the concrete like an abused puppy. I knew that I had to work fast and hard to regain the trust that once occupied this sheet metal shell, and save its soul. I needed to do something very drastic. Whatever idiot bought the car from me after its rescue would understand.
Months pass, and I heralded the return of spring by opening the door on my underground compound’s workshop and bringing out a Mustang. But it was no ordinary Mustang. I had saved it from parts on hand. It now bore a thumping and howling 13B-REW twin turbocharged rotary engine and twin six inch dump pipes that made my vision quiver between upshifts. I imagined what my eye doctor and brain doctors would say, almost in unison, during my next court-mandated appointment, and dismissed it out of hand.
I pulled the garage door shut and climbed aboard to allow the Mustang out of the paddock, its immense rear tractor tires threatening to further compromise the sawzall’d aft fenders, a victim of emergency rust repair and fine whisky. The homemade carbon fiber fenders and hood rattled, ringing their atonal flat bell gently against what was left of the unibody.
When we arrived in the parking lot, I snapped off a series of furious donuts, hearing the deranged wail of the Wankel reach for the stars. Once it was inherently satisfied, I cut the throttle. I turned around to look at the car as I was leaving it, unable to take my eyes off either it or the burning embers slowly trickling out of the header-mounted exhaust cutoffs, onto the perfectly manicured industrial-strength lawn on each side of the one good parking stall in the lot.
In the office, my coworkers definitely perused the parked Mustang through the window, confused but not surprised about the massive external wastegate dump pipes sticking out of the fenders on each side. Some of them wanted to ask, I surely knew, walking past my desk trying not to make eye contact. They would see my cry for help, right?
I put the hammer down on the C10 and reveled in the sensation of raw acceleration as the bored and stroked once-454 beneath the carbon fiber hood screamed to a China Syndrome redline. My vision dimmed at the corners from the pure G-forces, whiting out when it came time to slam the dogbox into the next gear, the snarl and snap of the compressed air shifter reminding me of nothing less than a junkyard Doberman.
It’s not important exactly where we were, but believe me when I tell you that the horizon was razor flat. A huge blue sky opened up above us, continually terrifying me at the infinite potential contained within the cosmos. The sheer expanse of all creation failed to impress my travelling companion. I would find out throughout our many road trips that philosophy in general was lost on him and we were better off discussing the practical realities of modern-day life, with only a slight glaze of politics tinged with petty regionalism on top. On this day, though, it still felt right to ask him.
“Great thinkers throughout history have asked - what is the meaning of life?” I turned to him now for dramatic emphasis, even though taking your eyes off the road at the Saturn V speeds we were currently travelling at seemed like suicide.
My companion didn’t respond. He barked out something between a burp and a brusque dismissal of my invitation to talk. We were quiet for a long time. Finally, he spoke, and if I wasn’t focusing on it with all my will, I would have missed it.
So I had this great dog once. His name was Bosco. He was an Irish setter. Little dumb, super joyful, but loyal to the end. I loved him like my own son, and we had a mutual respect and admiration born out of the deep bond between a man and his hound.
I had this truck, too. An ‘87 Ford F150. It was mottled red, worn down, with a bench seat and Mexican blanket. The way trucks used to be, before the academics came down from their ivory towers and demanded things like carpet and being able to survive a crash. I loved that truck, too, the same way a man loves a worn-down rifle passed down from his grandpa. Every shift of the dicky four-speed was an affirmation that all was right in the world.
One day, everything changed.
I had started the Ford and left Bosco inside it. I went off to close the gate to my compound behind me, so we could get on our way. Suddenly, the Ford started rolling away. I chased after it, thinking that touchy parking brake cable had finally snapped. I could see Bosco nervously jumping around the cab, and I was afraid for his health.
My parking brake theory evaporated as soon as I heard the sound of a perfect rev match and saw the left turn signal engage. That son of a bitch had stolen my truck.
I poured a quart of power steering fluid into the Bronco’s reservoir, but it was still low. Satisfying my duty, I put another bottle in immediately after. I was gripped with cold fear. The power steering pump of my Ford wasn’t screaming any more. Something was wrong.
Just then, Stephen King emerged from the nearby bushes, stepping into the clearing which served as my impromptu garage.
“Yes indeed,” he chuckled, looking at me through his thin-framed glasses, “welcome to New England and another story of madness.”
I gripped him then, clawing at his face in terror, drawing blood and digging down to the bone.
“GIVE ME BACK MY SCREAMING POWER STEERING PUMP,” I yell into his dissolving body, grasping nothing but ethereal goo that vaporizes into thin air. “YOU SON OF A BITCH, THIS ISN’T WHAT I WANTED!”
It’s too late. Stephen King is gone, and I’m alone in the woods of Maine with a 1988 Bronco with a quiet power steering pump. For the longest time, we stand there, opponents, the idle of the 302 happily chattering away inside the cavernous engine bay, the power steering belt gently spinning from pulley to pulley.
I sit on a nearby rock, and hold my head in my hands. My vision throbs and swims. This isn’t real. None of this is real. It can’t be real.
Just before my despair can break into drastic action, the power steering reservoir hiccups, a bubble launching into the atmosphere. The soft pop of the bubble bursting is followed immediately with a cacophonous warbling squeal, audible for blocks around. I smile broadly, as if welcoming my old friend home.
Sometimes I hear the voices still. “Fuel level is low,” “the door is ajar,” “kill them all and wear their faces as a mask to hide your beast,” “Power steering fault detected.” That last one was new, so I went to my mechanic.
He said “I’m you, talking to you in a mirror.”
I didn’t understand. I said: “I don’t understand. If you’re me, who’s this person standing behind me?”
I turned on my heel and no one was there.
But when I turned back to the mirror, everyone was there.
I was driving a brand new Toyota Corolla to work. Loaded as hell, it was the most horrible car I could think of.
I tried to crash it into the car in front of me, but it just braked on its own and admonished me on the massive multi-colour TFT display that dominated the dashboard, taking the place of the gauges. I sensed an inherent recalcitrance in the car to allow me to destroy myself and others, but little did I know what was about to happen.
I reached for the key to turn it off, but was again defeated. Where a key should have existed, only a button marked start was present. I tried to remember how to deactivate these buttons based on my knowledge of news programs featuring deaths upon deaths of untrained operators, and was unable to do so before having to continue the stop and go shuffle hell I was trapped within. Was I really trapped?
The door handles didn’t budge. There was some kind of inherent demon, an invisible force keeping the doors shut. I could not find a manual lock release, clawing at the featureless door cards, scraping the off-tan plastic until my fingers were bloody.
I thought: maybe I can blow up the engine on purpose, all I have to do is get the car into neutral. I looked at the gear shifter. Something was wrong. It only featured letters where there should have been numbers. In a panic I shoved the shifter into N and buried the gas, only to be rewarded by the dead-reliable Toyota engine brapping with a gentle lilt, the rev limiter cutting in to keep my warranty intact.
A warning on the dashboard appeared, telling me I was engaging in behaviour unfriendly to fuel economy and I must return the car to gear. A pixelated leaf was shorn from the top of the screen, flitting across it like a condemned man swinging from a noose.
I reached for the glovebox, hoping to find a window-breaking tool or a Luger of some kind, but it was locked while the car was in motion. The dashboard-mounted camera had noticed the absence of my attention, and dinged softly to remind me to never drive distractedly. Distracted didn’t even begin to sum up what I was experiencing at this moment.
In the end, there was nothing I could do but drive to work, and when I got there and the beast finally released me from its grasp, I sat on the curb, thought about what I had done and sobbed for hours.
Behind me, I heard the sound of an air-cooled Volkswagen. I looked up to see a Baja Bug. It blinked its lights at me and shot a staccato burst of unburnt fuel from the tailpipe, detonated in beautiful Hindenburg-in-miniature firestorms.
I clicked off the TV and rose from my Mitsubishi Expo bench seat couch. The man on the television set had imparted particular truths upon me, and I had to see the veracity of these truths for myself.
I drove immediately to the Jeep dealership, the salesmen stepping off the curb to offer me a trade-in. They immediately saw what I was offering, and leapt back to the relative safety of the curb, shaken to their core by what they had seen. The youngest of the group began chattering to himself, trying to justify to the other primates an increase in his position in the hierarchy. His effort was in vain, the male-bonding ritual shattered by the presence of a monster in their midst.
You see, I had brought my 16v Scirocco to the dealership. Years ago, facing the expense of securing new hatch glass, I had converted it into a sort of bastard El Camino, paying tongue-in-cheek homage to both the VW Caddy and the abstract concept of the mullet. Its rotted-out panels and general rolling-door-ding appearance lent the impression that I was some sort of dangerous anarchist, come down from the hills to resupply and rearm, not to rejoin society and benefit humanity. I simply loved the effect it had on everyone from bill collectors to Jehovah’s Witnesses, combining the worst of rough-edged blue-collar culture with the worst of the spiraling decline of American civilization in one sardonic pastiche.
Kicking the drivers’ door shut against the frame, I strode confidently into the dealership forecourt. I wasn’t here on any kind of artistic or social quest, not here to prove a point, simply to witness with my own eyes and believe with all my heart.
Before me, the car I had seen on the television, spoken of in a reverent tone by a used-sales specialist parachuted in from another region of the world. They desperately wanted me to buy it. I yearned to be a part of their excitement. I spoke to one of the milling salesmen, much more ready to speak with the man behind the car than the man in the car.
“No, that was a typo in the script,” he said, “there isn’t a V10 Renegade.”
I had spent so much time making this promise to myself. I had structured my entire life behind it. My eyes burned at the injustice of participating in this corrupt system, a cycle of desire, acquisition and penitence. But my parents didn’t abandon a sucker to the wolves. I had a plan.
“Not yet,” I said flatly. “Go get me these part numbers from the back.”
The automated subway car chattered away at me in pleasant Japanese, issuing gentle safety warnings I could not comprehend. A few lilting tones later and I was on the platform. I looked through the throng of people, and eventually found who I was looking for. Rinji stood at the end of the platform, holding some kind of incredible Japanese microcomputer beneath the neon drenched sky.
I handed him my bag, and we got through the early formalities. I gestured at his pocket computer, an obsidian slab so perfect it must be decades ahead of the obscene technology of the West. I asked him, “What is that thing?”
“An iPad,” he responded, and looked at me like I was an idiot.
Things didn’t get much better as we found his car in the parking structure and began our long trip. After the hydrogen RX-8 incident, Rinji had always taken offense at me blaming him for Soichiro Mazda’s clever ruse, an attempt to capture me that was nearly successful. We both knew that Mazda - no, the world - could not survive having me as head of its automotive design department, but they would never stop trying. Even so, we had work to do.
Rinji’s N-One burbled softly through its government-approved aftermarket glasspack, and swept the streets of Yokohama ahead of us in a mixture of halogen and neon, the windshield lighting up with pedestrian-safety warning rectangles as it detected imminent threats. We pulled into a convenience store to grab cutting-edge snacks and dinners, packaged in innovative new ways.
We were merging onto the Bayshore route when the N-One’s windshield lit up with a warning I had never seen before, illuminated throughout with inch-high crimson ideographs. Rinji immediately cranked the wheel hard right, diving for the fast-lane shoulder, and hit a red button atop the shifter. I heard the unmistakeable sound of a Roots blower.
Behind us, a Nissan Juke lit up blue and red before screaming up to our rear bumper in an eye-watering cloud of nitromethane exhaust. It seemed Mazda wasn’t the only one after me.
I bought a Subaru SVX and the nightmares finally ended. My nights were restful, free of my demons. But it wasn’t just nightmares I had lost. I had lost my dreams, too. I would awaken in the morning, shake my cup of coffee gently from side to side while listening to coworkers tell me about their dreams. There was no dark narrative for me to unfold, no dream for me to follow, no long-buried ambition or secret love that would come to my confused mind during its rest.
I told my buddy about it while I was busy wrenching on the SVX, and he suggested that I start keeping a dream journal. Maybe the act of remembering it for a task would make me remember my dreams, he thought. I figured it was worth a shot, so I kept a little notebook next to the bed.
But still, when I awoke, there was nothing to write in the notebook. I began to worry about it. Eventually the worry became worse, graduating into paranoid insomnia. One night, I simply got up and walked from my bed, downstairs, into the garage, where the SVX awaited. Its dome light was on. That’s weird, I thought, because I am pretty sure I fixed that dicky door switch. I opened the door to re-shut it, and then decided against my better instincts to get in for a late night drive.
The LCD gauges quivered with anticipation, but their response rate seemed slow today. Some kind of electrical fault, perhaps, related to the dome light? Up until this point, the most eerie thing the SVX had done is be a 20 year old Subaru with no interior rattles. I drove through a winding series of forested roads, heading for the cabin I often used for a dramatic photographic backdrop in used-car ads.
That’s weird, I thought. There used to be stars here.
I parked on the edge of the cliff, lit only by the moon and the xenon-retrofit headlights of the SVX. I sat on the front bumper, for a long time, chilled in the still night air. The sky was completely, resolutely black, with nothing in the firmament but the full moon, looming larger than I ever thought possible.
I got back into the SVX and kept driving, faster this time. I had to get away from whatever was doing this. I thought, foolishly, that the cabin was involved. It was a creepy old derelict outhouse of a place, the sill plates rotten and the floor joists starting to sag under the decades of off-kilter load and ravenous carpenter ants. I hummed along to the sound of the six-cylinder racing to redline as I attacked apex after apex on the winding cliffside road on the way home.
It was then that I saw it. A deer, in the headlights. I came to a stark stop, the four-piston front binders and street-grade semislicks fighting my attempts to compensate for the road crown. I could smell tire and brake pad, and put my emergency lights on to warn anyone approaching on this abandoned backroad at this time of night.
The buck didn’t move. I guess you could say it stopped there.
I locked eyes with it, and it stared back, reaching into my subconscious, a primal fear of nature, the dark. Something beyond the both of us was controlling us on this night, meant for us to meet like this.
As soon as it had appeared, the strange deer bellowed and disappeared into the low mist.
When I arrived home, it seemed as if only minutes had passed. I dreamed that night, and every night since, but the dreams were about rev limiters, antilag and twin-supercharged Detroit Diesels. The strange obsessions of a madman, I thought.
It was last call at the Winter Beater, my favored watering hole. My friend Tim was showing me a series of photos on the local city complaints app. We were laughing at some of the absurd comments, ranging from a polemic about Communist traffic light timings to a death threat about off-leash areas. It was all really funny until I saw a picture of one of my cars.
“THIS PIECE OF JUNK IS SO RUSTY,” read the invective, seemingly leaping off the high-quality IPS screen of Tim’s smartphone. “TOW IT AWAY AND HELP SECURE THE EXISTENCE OF OUR NEIGHBORHOOD AND A FUTURE FOR NEW CARS.” I frowned and pulled out my own smartphone, quickly scanning for any other references to my cars. I wasn’t prepared for what I found.
There were a few dozen complaints, nothing world-shattering, but I could tell that there was an obvious movement underfoot in my neighborhood to unseat me. Rants about the ugliness of my Polish commuter car, the depressing state of my multiple Little British Car projects-in-waiting. But they all seemed to be written by the same hand. Now I had a theory to work from.
Bidding Tim farewell, I stepped out into the arctic weather, snow blowing into my face. I wrapped my Datsun scarf tightly around my face and jumped in my monoposto Miata snowcat, spinning the treads on the wet tarmac left behind by the inadequate snowplowing service. Grimacing at the sound of salt hitting the quarter panels, I ripped the snowcat through the backroads and some public parks, arriving quickly at my neighborhood.
I located the Renault Fuego Turbo that had been targeted in the first complaint using my homemade beater-finding app, and immediately conducted an assessment of the area. It didn’t take long at all to confirm the theory; the just-sold yuppie infill was right across the street. I had seen the owner eyeing me suspiciously while angle-grinding leaf spring brackets just the previous wintry afternoon.
I thought about my next few options. Violent revenge was one idea, but I had been told by my behavioral psychologist that violence is not always the way. That made the entire situation pretty awkward, as you can imagine. I returned to my study and perched atop an unoccupied engine crane to brood. After only a few hours, it struck me like a bolt of pure light. I would get my revenge, but it would be a dish best served cold.
For the next few weeks, I worked feverishly in my spare room. Friends would send me inquisitive messages, drop by to make sure I was still eating, occasionally threaten to call my court-ordered social worker and tell them what is going on. I would politely but brusquely dismiss them, returning to my magnum opus. Finally it was done.
The next morning, I came out to see a squadron of police officers slamming my yuppie neighbor’s face into the Gallic tin of my Fuego’s hood. The newspaper website that morning read “HUMAN GARBAGE ARRESTED FOR RECORD BYLAW INFRACTIONS, FINED $3.2 BILLION.” The subhed said it all: “CITY BUDGET CRISIS SOLVED.” I turned from my breakfast nook, reaching my backyard just as my swarm of evidence-capture drones swooped in for a landing, happily beeping as they engaged their chargers.
It turns out all you really need to ruin a man’s life is two terabytes of him not using his turn signal.
I’ve heard a lot of rumours about this, and some of my closest compatriots have been privately contacting me to make sure that I’m toeing the “company line,” as it were. I want to make this as plain as I can: the Murano Cross-Cabriolet is real.
I know, I know, I hear your screams. But it’s true. It’s real. I touched one.
When I touched it, I felt an electric current through my wrist, but not one of poor grounding or biodegradable wiring harnesses. No, I knew in an instant the Murano Cross-Cabriolet, and it knew me. We had seen each other, long ago.
You have to believe me. I don’t think the Murano Cross-Cabriolet is here to destroy us. I think it is here to teach us. We have to honour its lessons, and never create the world which it represents. Our kids have to go back to art school, design school. They have to learn what makes things look good are, all over again.
We have to do it before the Cross-Cabriolet and I meet again, in another life. We have to put an end to the cycle and stop The Ghosn.
This is Seat Safety Switch, your eye in the sky with a realtime traffic report for your commute. Looks like there’s a small smashup at Fifth and Main; some kind of Explorer has rear ended some kind of Tercel and both people involved are way too angry about their shitty cars.
Switching to long-range radar and thermals, I can tell that there’s a growing buildup on Acorn. Some poor bastards are stuck in stop and go, getting a workout in their clutch legs tonight! Well, look at me, you pompous assholes, I’m flying a goddamn helicopter. Maybe get a job.
I’m being told by the station manager now that the traffic report shouldn’t be fifteen minutes long, but I still have opinions to give. One of you should start a car chase so I can get on TV. Oh, there we go. Sorry, Tim, looks like the fucking sports report is gonna have to wait tonight because there’s some guy in a Sebring hammering the bitch down Elm Avenue!
I looked at the rear-view mirror and saw the whip antenna, clad in a bright red dune flag, shaking like a child’s birthday clown burning alive in a nitromethane fire. The comparison was all too apt, I smirked, as I buried the floor-hinged Home Depot gas pedal and really let the anger out of the bottle.
When I first came across this dilapidated Meyers Manx clone in the junkyard, I looked over its glitter-laden thick metalflake gelcoat and frowned at the cracks. I made my offer, and I went home by myself, satisfied that the seller would have a hell of a time trying to get rid of it to someone else. A self-fulfilling prophecy, in a way, and when he called me in the depths of his despair and acceded to my offer, I couldn’t help but take another kick or two at his ribs. Hubris. I grimaced at the memory.
It came home with me, more of a float for an all-rodent gay pride parade than an operable off-road monster. My roommate at the time rolled his eyes, grunted in surrender, and walked back into the house. For months it sat on jackstands until I ran into a composites engineer during a conference during my regular job. He told me over lukewarm carafe coffee about the advances they had made in home carbon fiber. As he reached for his second cup of the morning, I saw the unmistakable telltale burn mark of an EJ251 exhaust manifold on his wrist, exposed as the sleeve of his sport jacket was pulled back.
A few corporate deals made, a bit of accounting fudging, and a few of my personal days, sick days, religious exemption days and charity days consumed later, and something terrible had taken shape. Its final shape, I expected, as I finished my tests of the electrical system and punched the remote starter. Everything since then had been a blur.
I finally came to on a nearby beach, the sound of the bellowing Windsor behind my head, forcing gallons of ocean-fresh air through the mouth and winding internals of the wailing Roots blower atop it. I got on the highway, hoping to get my bearings, to understand where I had gone during my strange fugue state.
I pulled into a small-town gas station and started filling up. The in-pump television set was flashing scenes of unimaginable horror. I had been conditioned to ignore them from a childhood drenched in the worst excesses of the news media, but something gnawed at me. Had I been involved?
Of course not, I thought, returning to my dune buggy and tearing ass to the highway as the screen flashed a picture of my former employer’s parking lot, set afire with burning tread marks in the shape of massive concentric donuts.
My marketing specialist charged into the room, stumbling over my room decorations and sending the scored and burned 13B rotors skidding across the immaculate polished-marble floor. To his credit, he remained mostly upright as he slid to a stop and began yelling at me, so loudly that I was sure the people on the other side of my speakerphone conference call could hear.
I muted the phone with a dramatic gesture, frowning and making eye contact for the entire duration of my arm swooping down to strike the button. Finally the deed was done, and I begged him to continue. This had better be important.
It was critically important.
Red-faced, I commanded him to prime the launch system and shouted to his retreating back that I would be on my way immediately. There was no time to lose, I thought, donning my helmet and pressure suit.
By the time I reached the hangar, the car was fully prepared. I leapt into the cockpit, flipped the pre-flight switches and launched, feeling the brutal G-forces lap at my spine and draw my cheeks back into a rictus grin.
Indeed, my 1993 turbo-swapped Daihatsu Applause was a furious beast of the roads. But I would need all the power I could get to find my quarry. After all, Walmart wouldn’t have BB-8 droids on the shelves forever.
MY CLOCK RADIO ALARM GOES OFF. I AWAKEN UPON HEARING THE CAPACITORS IN THE AMPLIFIER CIRCUITRY CHARGING, MERE MILLISECONDS BEFORE THE SPEAKER CONE BEGINS TO MOVE. IT IS A GORGEOUS DAY, I ASSUME, AND LOOK OUT ONTO THE DRIVEWAY TO SEE MY JEWEL, MY PRIZE, A 1989 MITSUBISHI DELICA STARWAGON. THE SIGHT OF IT FILLS ME WITH A SENSE OF AWE.
STEPPING ACROSS THE ENTRYWAY TRELLIS IS COMFORTABLE, EVEN AT THE STARWAGON’S COPIOUS RIDE HEIGHT. IT REMINDS ME OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL MINITRUCKS OF MY CHILDHOOD, THOUGH NONE OF THOSE HAD A TURBODIESEL ENGINE AND A KARAOKE MACHINE. THEIR LOSS, I THINK, SLIPPING THE DELICA’S MANUAL TRANSFER CASE INTO 4LO AND POPPING THE CLUTCH IN REVERSE.
BEFORE I CAN EVEN THINK ABOUT SECOND GEAR, THE NEIGHBOURHOOD “COMPLIANCE POLICE” ARE ALREADY ON MY TAIL. THEIR CAR IS A CHEVROLET CRUZE WITH “COMMUNITY ENFORCEMENT” WRITTEN BACKWARDS IN HOME DEPOT DECAL LETTERS ON THE WINDSHIELD. I LAUGH AT THE CONCEPT OF SENDING A SLOW CAR TO INTERCEPT A SLOWER VAN. I CAN ONLY ASSUME THEY ARE ANGERED AT WHAT THEY PERCEIVE TO BE A SPEED LIMIT INFRACTION DUE TO MY MEDIUM-HIGH REVS OF ANGER AND CLOUDS OF NOXIOUS ASH.
DURING THE LABORIOUS TREK TO THE SPEED LIMIT THE COMPLIANCE VEHICLE REPEATEDLY ATTEMPTS AND FAILS TO REAR-END ME, NOT EXPECTING MY SLOW RATE OF ACCELERATION. I REACH OUT THE RIGHT SIDE WINDOW AND ATTEMPT TO WAVE THEM PAST, BUT I AM UNSUCCESSFUL. THEY DO NOT SEE ME.
ROUNDING THE CORNER, I ATTEMPT TO PRESERVE MOMENTUM, NO EASY TASK WHEN YOU HAVE THE SWAY CONTROL OF A SINGLE ICE SKATE. I SAY AN INVOLUNTARY PRAYER TO COLIN CHAPMAN AND TENSE MY ASSHOLE FOR WHAT IS SURELY GOING TO BE A ROLLOVER, BUT IT IS OVER AS SOON AS IT BEGAN, THE DELICA HAPPILY CHUGGING OUT OF THE CORNER WITH ME PULLING MYSELF OFF THE DOOR CARD AND BACK INTO THE UNBOLSTERED CAPTAIN’S CHAIR.
I CAN SEE NOW THAT THE CRUZE PILOT IS LEANING OUT THE DRIVERS’ WINDOW OF HIS CAR, WAVING ANGRILY INTO MY JDM-SPEC BACKUP MIRROR AND YELLING ABOUT SOMETHING. I CANNOT HEAR HIM OVER THE EARSPLITTING SOUND OF THE HOLSET HX35 PUMPING BEEFY PULSE AFTER BEEFY PULSE OF COMPRESSED AIR INTO THE OVERBURDENED FOUR.
I ROLL GENTLY OVER THE ONCOMING SPEED BUMP, PLACED THERE BY THE COMMUNITY ASSOCIATION DECADES PRIOR. THE CRUZE HITS IT AT FULL TILT, TEARING THE FRONT SUBFRAME FROM THE BODY AND LAUNCHING THE ENGINE THROUGH THE HOOD WITH A CLANG THAT CAN BE HEARD FOR MILES.
I LAUGH, WAVE MY HAND OUT THE WINDOW IN A NEIGHBOURLY GESTURE AND FLOOR THE GAS QUICKLY TWICE. TOOT! TOOT!
AHEAD OF ME LIES MY MOST TERRIFYING CHALLENGE. A CHEVROLET MALIBU IS SITTING AT THE TRAFFIC CIRCLE, YIELDING TO NONEXISTENT TRAFFIC. MY FOOT TOUCHES THE BRAKE PEDAL ONCE, OUT OF REFLEX, AND IS QUICKLY WITHDRAWN WITH A VICIOUS SNARL AND CURSING. I’M JUST GONNA HAVE TO GO OVER THEM, I RESIGN MYSELF TO THINKING, AS THE NOISE OF THE 33 INCH MUD GRAPPLERS REVERBERATES OFF THEIR REAR BUMPER AND INTO MY EARDRUMS.
I didn’t become an astronaut for the women or to serve my country. No, I did it for the free Corvettes.
You see, ever since the forming of the space program, Chevrolet has handed out free Corvettes to astronauts like razor-blade-filled candy on Halloween. With that in mind, it’s only logical that I dedicated my life to space exploration and the grueling multi-decade training regimens that it required.
First, I became a top gun test pilot for the Air Force. Getting in was easy enough, once I had memorized the secret phrases and photocopied the lead scientist’s answer key when he left it unoccupied on his desk. For anything involving physical fitness, I sent a trustworthy day-labourer in my place. Eventually I got my job offer, and it was time for my first mission.
I showed up early to work and immediately put the helmet and space suit on, so people couldn’t see that I was in fact not a 6′5″ Puerto Rican. After that, it was all a series of muffled conversations and gestures, and I was in the rocket ready for the first firing.
“So, uh, when do they hand out the Corvettes around here?” I asked over the radio.
“When you get back from Mars,” chuckled the Mission Control operator.
“How long is that gonna take?” I asked innocently.
“You’re doing a great thing for your country,” Mission Control changed the subject suddenly, “Enjoy the trip.” A short countdown, during which they muted my mic, and we were off.
After several months of travel, during which relations with my fellow astronauts became increasingly frosty, we landed on the red planet.
As the ship touched down, I forced my way to the front of the line, and said my immortal first words of a man landing on Mars: “Okay great, now we can go home.”
“Go home?” asked the astronaut who left the capsule behind me. I could sense even through the mirrored visor his quizzical look.
I sure hope they figure out how to turn this into a two way trip someday soon. Corvettes probably don’t run very well with no air.
#
tags: mars, chevrolet, corvette, free corvettes, nasa
I asked for a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one. And after that mission I swore I’d never want another. But then they gave me another, so I did that one too.
The year was 1989. I had been summoned by my superiors at Fiat to fly to Brazil and attempt to smooth things over with a local subsidiary. Their cars were breaking too often, the faceless automatons in their suit jackets said, and they didn’t understand why. They needed a mechanic with a heart of gold and a steely work ethic, but they got me.
Once I got there, things got off to a bad start with Simon, the resident expat mechanic who had been sent before me on another failed expertise-trade mission and who had gone native with spectacular force. He said I didn’t understand how things were done down here.
“Simon, I don’t understand,” I whined pitifully, “If you’re already here doing the work, why did they send me?”
He shrugged, shuffled a bit. “Pass me the 16mm crescent wrench,” he said gruffly, and I turned to obey. I froze in place. No fastener on a Fiat had a 16mm head. Simon saw the realization hit me. Then he hit me. With a wrench.
When I awoke, I found myself dangling upside-down, chained by my ankles to Simon’s well-worn engine crane. I swayed left and right in the gentle breeze. I was already halfway to undoing myself and making a break for freedom when Simon entered the room, a scarred Brazilian mechanic of similar height in tow.
I could scarcely understand them, but it doesn’t take a Portuguese translator to realize he was selling me to the Brazilians in exchange for the rarest currency of all: Snap-On socks.
The Home Depot checkout clerk eyes my cart, then looks up at me, then back at the cart. She wants to say something about the cart’s contents, but she doesn’t know how I will respond. I give her a friendly smile. It’s okay, the smile says, I have learned the actions and motions of a normal person and perhaps even internalized them. You can say what you want.
“Sure are clamping a lot of hoses, huh?” she asks nervously, side-eyeing me to catch my reaction in the facial expression.
I smile wider.
“No, heat shields,” I tell her, laughing nervously and giving a conspiratorial grin.
She doesn’t laugh back. She pushes a red button on her checkout counter phone. A silent alarm. I start to sweat.
Behind me, two loss prevention officers approach. “I thought we told you Subaru boys not to come back here anymore,” says the bigger of the two.
“Not after the Plastidip incident,” the smaller one chimes in.
The new Rolls-Royce Dawn promises a Striking, Seductive Encounter like no other Rolls-Royce to date, and begins a new age of Open-Top, Super-Luxury motoring. With its BMW mechanicals, it will tie your wrists to a Bedstand and aggressively whip your Chest and Upper Body until you Leak Delicious Blood upon the furnishings. It will be the most social of Super-Luxury Drophead motor cars for those who wish to bathe in the sunlight of the world’s most exclusive social hotspots and set record-breaking Repair Bills.
Quite simply, it is the sexiest overpriced Nazi-engined piece of shit put together by a country that managed to lose more Empire more quickly than any since the Romans despite a total lack of Vandals Besieging It. Even their local industry is Dominated By Germans, as the Dawn will Dominate You, offering the Erotic Potential of a fabric soft-top roof. Let Rolls-Royce have your trust. Let Rolls-Royce have the PIN to your bank account, or don’t you love what Rolls-Royce does to you?
Rolls-Royce Dawn: because German cars are for amateur masochists.
I was complaining to my buddy the other day about how hard it was to keep track of all my cars, to find time in the day to move them every 72 hours. He suggested - perhaps sarcastically now that I look back upon it - I form a rental car agency.
So I did. That’ll show him. Here’s the pitch.
Have you ever wanted to save money on car ownership, and not really care what car you are driving? Why not take one of our fine hoopties for a ride?
We split up our collection of $500 used cars and spread them across the city and started our new carsharing agency, Beaterget. It’s German for “these are really bad cars and we need to recoup some of our investment.”
Our gleaming beasts are probably located near you, just waiting for you to drive them away. We’ve got all makes and all models. Whether you’re test driving for a future purchase of a $500 car, robbing a bank, or simply need something weird to show up in your high school reunion with, we can satisfy your every need.
Our cars are protected with junkyarded Ford door keycode pads, with the code set differently each day. We’ll let you know the code so you can get on your way, unless our servers are busy or the email ends up in your spam box. But that’s okay! If you already like beaters this much you probably habitually carry a toolbox with yourself that can be used to honour-system your way into one of our fine automobiles anyway.
And starting this weekend we have a new promotion - if you can pay the fines to get one of our Beaterget cars out of parking impound, you can keep it. We’ll send you the title! No other rental car agency has this policy, nor should they.
No automatic transmissions are offered, go fuck yourself.
So I was working in my garage, trying to find the wrench that was just in my hand five fucking seconds ago, when I got a call from Tim, my scientist buddy. He said that they developed a new kind of living, sentient rubber - it can repair itself, avoid potholes, provide the best grip through corners and in wet conditions. It was going to save thousands of lives per year, he reasoned. He wanted me to come over and see it.
A couple hours into my visit, I could sense that my raconteuring was starting to wear a little thin on Tim, and offered to go out and pick up some drinks and snacks, in order to give him a break from my personality. I picked his keys up off the shelf and fired up his ZR1 C6 Corvette. As soon as he heard it, he came running out, screaming something. I couldn’t hear him over the sound of the blower.
After only a few seconds of my customary block-long burnout, I noticed that there was an additional, stranger scream than just the blower. Did he get a bigger blower? Is there a boost leak? Eventually I ceased my burnout and saw Tim, cheeks streaked with tears, tumble to his knees.
“You bastard! Those were the prototypes! You’ve killed them!”
I quickly stepped out of the car to see the rear tires, now bald, breathing raggedly and leaking some sort of vulcanized fluid onto the ground. It was pretty bad, to tell you the truth. I looked at Tim, distraught over having his children murdered so callously in front of him, and smiled.
“Well, now you can go back to the drawing board and gin me up some R-comps,” I said, turning on my heel and climbing aboard the short-wheelbase twin-supercharged airbagged Mack truck I had driven to Tim’s.
#
tags: chevrolet, living tires, cronenberg as fuck, mack
So I decided that I wanted a new car, but the price of used cars had gone absolutely crazy in my neck of the woods. Whether it was the economy, or the economy, or the economy, or jobs, or the economy, we’ll never know why the supply was so constrained. So I did what our forefathers did, and hatched a plan.
I guess you could call it more of a scheme, if your last name is Webster and you write a know-it-all book full of bullshit words. Fuck you if that’s the case.
Anyway, I visited Princess Auto. Then I phoned a Civic for sale near the store. It was time to see if I could make this one work.
Halfway into the formalities and social niceties about buying a car, I opened the drivers’ side door and switched on my newly-acquired handheld blacklight.
“What’s that giant semen-looking stain on the dashboard?” I asked innocently.
“I’ll take $200,” she said.
Like they say, you gotta spend money to make money.
It wasn’t long into my involuntary unemployment that the friendly man from the government suggested I change careers. “You like cars,” his disembodied mouth said in my worst nightmares, “why don’t you work as a car salesman at a dealership? They make pretty good money, and to be honest thinking medium-hard about whatever it is you actually do is terrifying me beyond my ability to maintain rational thought.”
Some force beyond myself compelled my neck muscles to move, my head to nod, my mouth to voice primitive agreement. Before the end of the week I was wearing a pretty snazzy blazer and telling people about low APRs and how many cupholders the Crosstour Ridgeline Express by Nautica had. That’s when she walked in.
She was perfect. A 1987 Alfa Romeo Spider Veloce, traded in by a widow demanding to get rid of “this old car” in exchange for a hip and happening Chevrolet Sonic Turbo with bluetooth. She hadn’t gotten much for it, but I knew exactly how much, and it was this stack of bills that I thrust into the used car department’s manager’s face, demanding the surrender of the automobile. After an aggressive negotiation involving the shop’s two post lift and half a gallon of brake cleaner, she was mine. And what a jewel she was. But like all great beauties, she had one tragic flaw she would hide from her adoring public, that had to be teased out and worked past.
The two-liter engine’s olio cap looked sadly at me from the shelf on which the longblock now sat, cursed to sit there for all eternity or until I needed to infuse a moped with Italian charm and free-revving bliss. My worried coworkers started to rap on the barricaded door to the dealership shop, at first claiming to be interested in my mental health and then migrating to threats about law enforcement, but by then it had been too late. A perfect diamond had emerged from all the pressure of my newfound career, and the comparison to dark, choking clouds of carbon was indeed apt.
I turned the spindly, cherrywood-topped key in its cramped ignition cylinder and leaned back into the plush velvet seat. Under the hood, both too distantly and too close for comfort, a dry-sump LS7 roared to its rev limit and then backfired horrific clouds of ash from its narrow-body long-runner headers as the ignition cut hit.
My cellphone rang. It was my roommate, telling me the police were in the room with him and that I must turn myself in. I hung up on him. It wasn’t safe to use a cellphone while you drive, anyone can see that.
I know what you’re going to say, does it ever? Ah, my friend, I would have to point to the glowing escapades of the Year Of Our Lord 2011. In this glorious year, I not only successfully managed to hold my poop for the entire week but also trade drug paraphernalia and the abstract concept of cosmic justice for a Winnebago Brave.
Once we had arrived home and I got out of the bathroom, the Brave sat atop my driveway, blocking out the sun as the clouds twirled and played behind its miraculous bulk. I was going to show them. I was going to show them all.
But then I got distracted and it kind of sat there for like four years until this summer when my buddy Elon reminded me that the Brave was sinking into my driveway. So I went out and got started.
If you watch the news footage, you’ll see a man driving a flaming Winnebago across a major Los Alamos thoroughfare, drifting down onramps while shooting Roman candles out of the driver-side window at tailgaters. But as always, the liberal media obscures the real story.
We’ve all been there. Bombing down the street, wind in our hair from the cracks that the defrost vent made in our windshield, fully sideways, powersliding loosely around an apex while crushing a can of Monster.
But then you hear it. At first, you think it was a creation of your fevered imagination, some sort of subconscious repentance for your hubris. But then - a squeak, a rattle, a dreaded thumping sound?
Use this guide to help diagnose what your Subaru’s sounds mean.
Q: My Subaru is making a noise. A: Turn the radio up until you can’t hear it anymore.
Q: My Subaru’s stereo no longer functions because I blew out my speakers from turning the volume up too far, and the broken speakers are rattling in the door. A: Roll down the windows and drive faster.
Q: There is a strange warbling sound behind me and my rear view mirrors are flashing blue and red lights. A: Accelerate and take corners aggressively until the noise and warning lights subside.
We met with the dealer at a dark nightclub, throbbing from the bass and thumping from the barely-constrained desires of its denizens. Many of those desires were natural.
Other needs, such as mine, were so very wrong, against the holy order of things, that we would have to be careful of well-meaning people getting involved out of a long-dormant duty to the herd, a genetic predisposition to protecting them at all costs. I eyed everyone suspiciously as I withdrew the envelope from my oil-stained duster, placing the thin paper vessel on the table.
Suddenly, the dealer laughed, a sound like tearing paper. He took the envelope in his hands and beckoned me outside, where my quarry sat, restrained. With the help of my partner in crime, we loaded her into the trunk.
The valve cover of a Toyota Caldina’s 3SGTE stared back at me. I never thought this would happen to me.
As the newly installed mayor of my bustling subdivision, my constituents constantly came to me while working in my garage, presumably wanting some favour, a government expediency, or just to touch the hem of my garment. I would grant them an audience, sure, but it was definitely getting in the way of my “me” time. It was with this problem in mind that I decided to hire a staff.
I picked the best of the best from Ivy league schools, getting talented political operators dressed in sharp suits to deal with small-town crises. And deal with them they did.
My first year of the new cabinet, old man Thompson was finally pleased that someone was doing something about the property line between his place and old man Ralph’s place. Granted, that “something” ended up being capturing both properties under eminent domain and selling them to a condo developer, but we got the problem off of our syrup-drenched IHOP shortstack of issues.
With the increased efficiency of my cabinet, I decided it was time to return to the garage. But no sooner had I begun to swear at a corroded suspension bolt that I heard a rapping on the door. I peered out and saw a line of lobbyists, a mile long, stretching to the horizon, all carrying steak dinners and irresponsibly expensive Japanese whisky.
It’s like I always say, sometimes you have to make concessions for good government.
I had lost pretty much all confidence in the stock and commodities futures markets at this point, watching money that could have been more productively spent at Pick N Pull blown into some banker’s multilayered arbitrage machine. So I decided to take matters into my own hands.
Starting Seat Safety Switch Financial Services was the easy part. Attracting customers to my infant hedge fund was quite another. Private meetings with billionaire industrialists ended with me thrown into the street, my briefcase thrown out behind me. I would pick myself up, brush off my briefcase, rearrange the socket set inside it, and walk to the next prospective sucker.
Eventually I built a small empire of finances. My first prospectus! I swelled with joy as I put the finishing touches on it. Before I even had a chance to lean back in my palatial overstuffed office chair, to hear the warm squeak of rich Corinthian leather against my aggressively-cut Milanese trendsetter suit, the phone rang. I put it on speaker.
“So I was just looking over this prospectus that was sent to my office,” my customer stated, “and am I to understand that you have spent the entire fund cap of $13.7 billion on 1993-1997 Subaru Imprezas?”
I tented my fingers and leaned in conspiratorially. Although I knew that he couldn’t see me, I felt that the predatory lean would lend my voice the subliminal wolflike inflection to help sell my street cred as a rough and tumble investment banker.
“Bob,” I began, “That’s an insane accusation to make. At least ten percent of the fund is invested in triple-A rated rusty Mustangs.”
“Don’t do meth, kids,” I tell the assembled fifth graders during their DARE presentation. Behind me, a huge projector screen clicks between exploitative pictures of shattered piston crowns.
“A lot of your friends will tell you that running more meth is awesome, you can lean out the mix, maybe run a little more boost? What’s the harm, right?” I turn to one of the kids in the first row, a fat cherub that wouldn’t be out of place in a Goonies remake. “You, son, what do your friends say about water-meth injection?”
He’s caught out of place, weak, vulnerable, afraid of group isolation. Good, I think. I can finally start teaching someone here something. He rises to his feet and stammers out an explanation about how the popular kids say that water-meth will make your quench pads cool at parties.
The kid continues standing for longer than is wholly necessary. He wobbles from side to side, his showman instincts distinctly repressed in this crucible of hate. I know that he is reaching out for authoritative social approval, a sure thing that would never come.
“Very good,” I say, clicking to the next slide, a lurid borescope shot of an exploded Darton sleeve in a B18C1. One of the overseeing teachers in the back row faints.
The Japanese saw me coming, I realized. A wizened old man behind the swap-meet table just laughed, a braying wheeze like a donkey with COPD. Then he rapped his knuckles on the instrument of my doom, a device which I would later come to identify as a Valmobile.
Did it turn me into a different man, I asked myself, or did it just start telling my subconscious that it was time to let it all go, to embrace accelerationism, that it was okay to start releasing ethical constraints and antiquated mores artificially programmed into my personality to keep the social contract going for just one more cycle of human existence?
I stared into the venturi of the Stromberg carburetor. In the roaring void behind the intake butterfly I found my truth.
Electric had never been the way, a false prophet bearing deceptive gifts of bone-crushing torque. I rolled up my sleeve, so I could once again see the faded tattoo that had driven me decades ago, dimly visible beneath a matrix of scar tissue. Two stroke is life, it said, and I was warmed by the memories.
My contact in Mazda, Rinji, had informed me that the first batch of prototype hydrogen RX8s was about to be crushed at the local shipyards. I made no excuses for my behavior that day, ripping through Hiroshima’s urban core on my bastard moped.
Once, this moped had been an innocent zero-emissions electric commuter, carrying a housewife to and from bridge club. When it arrived in a pile of other mopeds after a late night drunken eBay session, I somehow took a shine to it and began changing it in ways at first imperceptible but later irresponsible.
Where once a twelve-volt powertrain had existed, now it drank delicious electrons from a face-melting forty-eight-volt firehose and made more peak torque than your average freight train at zero rpm. You could say it was a pretty good commuter. I certainly did, after the giggles subsided.
As the shipyard came into view, I engaged regenerative braking and kept my thumb hovering over the button that would release the drogue chute. A few early-morning near-misses in the past had taught me that hauling eighty kilos of lipo batteries and anger down from lightspeed was no laughing matter.
Rinji was waiting for me. He grinned.
When I first came to Japan, I misidentified facial expressions, as many of my cultural background (”Honky”) had previously. A smile didn’t necessarily mean pleasure. Sometimes… sometimes it meant regret.
I did the one-two wrist flick to shove the moped from regen into full anger reverse and liquefied the Yokohama track-day radials. Looking behind me for a spot to launch myself into traffic and make good my escape, I heard the unmistakable song of dorito cars. Rinji was long gone now, hauled away by his captors, his purpose in their plot now satisfied.
My helmet padding rubbed against my cheek as I snapped my head back forward to see what I had wrought. It was hydrogen-powered RX8s, alright, but not as I knew them. It seemed that Mazda corporate had figured out who was building all those unauthorized REPUs in Fukuyama.
#
tags: japan, rx8, mazda, honda cub, alternative energy
Size Matters
“LOOK HOW SMALL IT IS,” I SCREAM TO MAKE MYSELF HEARD OVER THE SOUND OF THE NOBEL-PRIZE-WINNING DETROIT DIESEL TWINCHARGED THUMPER INHALING THE FOURTH PHONE BOOK OF ITS VERY BUSY MEDIA APPEARANCE MORNING. “THAT’S WHAT WE IN THE BUSINESS LIKE TO CALL TREE-BASED TRACTION CONTROL, HEH HEH,” I CHUCKLE AS MY BEAUTIFUL COMPANION SCREWS HER EYELIDS SHUT IN PAIN.
“IN FACT, IF I WASN’T HERE TO FEED THIS ENGINE PHONE BOOKS EVERY COUPLE OF MINUTES, IT WOULD ENTER THERMAL RUNAWAY AND CONSUME THE CORE OF THE EARTH ITSELF.”
THE TELEVISION PERSONALITY YELLS BACK, MUFFLING HER EARS WITH BOTH HANDS AND THE BOOM MIC NOW. “THAT WOULD BE BAD, RIGHT?”
“OH YES, VERY BAD. VERY, VERY BAD. IN FACT, I SHOULD GO GET SOME MORE PHONE BOOKS NOW WHILE WE HAVE A LAPS-” I FREEZE.
“WHAT? WHAT IS IT?” SHE IS HYSTERICAL NOW, DRIVEN THERE BY THE COMBINATION OF MY BLASE ATTITUDE TO NOISE MANAGEMENT AND THE RICH ARTERIAL BLOOD NOW TRICKLING DOWN HER NECK MAKEUP ON EACH SIDE.
“IS IT THE YEAR 2015?”
I LOOK AROUND IN A PANIC, BUT NO PHONE BOOKS EXIST ANYMORE.
“OH GOD, IT IS. THE PROPHECY IS UNFOLDING. DOES ANYONE HAVE A PHONE BOOK?”
AS IF ON CUE, SHE TURNS TO FLEE, LEAVING THE CAMERA MAN (FLOYD) AND ASSORTED STAFF (ERICA, MICHAEL) BEHIND. I CAN BARELY HEAR THE SOUND OF ALL FOUR TIRES SQUEALING AS THE CHEVY EXPRESS 2500 SATELLITE UPLOAD VAN RIPS OUT OF THE DRIVEWAY ON A HEINOUS MOONSHINER’S TURN, TUGGING THE CAMERA MAN BEHIND ON ITS SNAKE-THICK ELECTRICAL CABLE. BEFORE LONG, THE CABLE SNAPS, AND FLOYD LOG-ROLLS INTO ONCOMING TRAFFIC.
Why did they let me drive the Wienermobile, I wailed, looking at the blood on my hands. What had they done to me?
I knew I had seen too much in that old projector slide reel. The handshakes. The payoffs. The occult worship.
At first, when I returned to the Wienermobile garage, they had treated me as if all was normal, one of their lost lambs returning home after a frightening voyage of discovery. That’s when the tech - Jim, I think his name was? - noticed the new exocage and the duallie 375 section slicks out back. He looked up at me in gawping horror, wordless.
I looked down at him with pity, and kicked off a brake stand to end all brake stands.
J. F. Schneider, eh? I see your true face now. The strange omissions of history between 1939 and 1945. Well, let’s see what one thousand five hundred and forty six wheel horsepower can turn up.
THE PLANE CAMBERS VIOLENTLY ON ITS FINAL APPROACH RUN TO NARITA. I GRASP THE ARMREST OF THE 747 SO TIGHTLY I CAN FEEL THE FRICTION OF THE RIVETS SHIFTING, NEARLY IMPERCEPTIBLY, BENEATH THE NERVES OF MY FINGERTIPS.
MY MORTAL FOE FROM TOEI HAD TOLD ME TO COME HERE, TO COME ALONE, TO COME UNARMED. THE ANIMATION WARS WERE OVER, AND AMERICA HAD LOST. I PREPARED MYSELF FOR WHAT WAS SURELY TO BE A RITUAL SUICIDE, OR PERHAPS SOME SORT OF NUDE DEFAMATION AND EMBARRASSMENT.
ONCE THE PLANE LANDS, I STRIDE OUT ON THE CONCOURSE TO MEET MY DRIVER. HE IS A GRIM YET LANKY MAN, AND I SENSE THAT HE HAS BEEN TOLD OF HIS DUTY, TO HELP AVENGE WHAT MY NATION HAD DONE TO HIM AND HIS KIN. A THIN NEAR-GRIMACE OF A SMILE FLITS ACROSS HIS FACE AND MY STOMACH SINKS FURTHER. HE BECKONS ME FORWARD TO A TOYOTA CENTURY, AND I CAN FEEL THE INVISIBLE ELECTROMAGNETIC PULSES FROM THE SILENT DOOR LOCK THUD AGAINST MY BODY LIKE AN EXECUTIONER’S BLADE. I STEP INSIDE, STRETCHING MY LEGS ON THE HAND-WOVEN WOOL SEATS.
THE TRIP IS UNEVENTFUL, UNLESS YOU COUNT AS AN EVENT THE ENDLESS PERSPIRATION STREAMING DOWN MY FACE DESPITE THE AIR CONDITIONING. I TRY TO CAPTURE AS MANY MEMORIES AS I CAN, NOTICING THE DETAILS AND THE STRUCTURE OF THIS GREAT SOCIETY, TO LIVE MY LAST FEW MINUTES LIKE HOURS.
AT LAST, WE ARE HERE. I AM LED DOWN A GAUNTLET OF BOWING AND SCRAPING ASSISTANTS THROUGH A TERRIFYING, FEATURELESS BLACK OBELISK. THE MAN FROM THE OTHER END OF THE PHONE IS AT THE END.
HE LOOKS ME IN THE EYE, SIZES ME UP. THERE IS SILENCE.
“YES,” HE FINALLY SPEAKS, “WELCOME ABOARD.”
I AM AWESTRUCK. THIS MAN HAS ALLOWED MY CONTINUED EXISTENCE, BUT WHY?
“THERE IS A SMALL MATTER IN WHICH YOU CAN PROVE YOUR LOYALTY TO THE TOEI ZAIBATSU,” HE SAYS, RAPPING HIS KNUCKLES ON A SMALL RED BOX, THE PRESENCE OF WHICH HAS TOTALLY ESCAPED ME TO THIS MOMENT.
“IF YOU CAN BUILD THIRTEEN VIDEOGAMES BASED ON THE ROMANCE OF THE THREE KINGDOMS FOR THIS FAMICOM,” HE RAPS ON THE BOX AGAIN, THIS TIME FOR EMPHASIS, “I WILL ALLOW YOUR SURVIVAL.”
A MAN FROM THE INTERNET STEPS INTO MY STORY.
“ACTUALLY, I THINK YOU’LL FIND THAT’S KOEI,” THE NEW MAN SAYS.
I DECIDE TO NO LONGER DO THEME WEEKS.
#
tags: 80s animation week, romance of the three kingdoms, koei, toei, what's the difference, toyota
We formed an intergalactic fighting force, sure. We had a great villain, he was evil yet his motivations were highly relatable. Selling hundreds of thousands of action figures a month was what our corporate overlords wanted. But something changed in the 90s, and we never quite recovered.
Hal, one of our student helpers in the animation department, came to work one day with a Sailor Moon backpack. I immediately wanted to know more, and one of the ways I learned more about the world was with tactical applications of high voltage electricity using the nipples as terminals and the human clavicle as a high-impedance bus bar. Before long, Hal was sweating and crying, which was just making the whole thing worse for him. But he coughed up the secrets.
It turned out there was a country named Japan, and they thought they could take our finely engineered toy commercials to the mat and win. I’d heard enough. I got on the blower with Judy, my once-secretary, now-bodyguard, and told her to call this “Toei Animation” in Japan. I immediately heard the sound of a rotary-dial telephone attempting to reach escape velocity as the long distance procedure sprang into action.
When the call was connected, I announced myself. I was an ambassador for my product. No, my country. No, the American way of life. No, liberty itself. And I was going to sell this motherfucker a cartoon series that was going to sell a whole fucking shitload of toys.
The man on the other end of the phone just cackled at me. “Silly Americans,” he intoned, and I could hear a sharp barking as his ringed knuckles struck the hardwood surface of his desk, “don’t you realize these robots have been in disguise this whole time?”
Could it be true? Panic rose in my throat. I looked across the street, jaw slackened, to see a banner unfurl at Toys R’ Us. My God. I was Detroit.
I watched 80s cartoons while drunk again and installed a sentient artificial intelligence in my car. Now the car would swear at me when I failed to apex hard enough. And it wouldn’t take thick traffic as an excuse.
We were outside Barstow and I was putting the hammer down on an on-ramp. It was the perfect run. When we caught up to the gore point, a short bus failed to merge fast enough and began to slow down. Wheels - for that was his name - chirped up and started to issue racial invective at high velocity towards me, degrading my self-esteem and insulting most of my available sexual organs plus others that were not installed at the factory.
I kept driving along the highway for miles, the frustration building as Wheels made obscene demands to tailgate slow drivers in order to speed them up. Finally I could take no more, and pulled the core module free from the dashboard just as the car began to issue ethnic slurs via the onboard PA system at a nearby highway patrolman.
I immediately began to feel bad - I had created this lifeform and at the first sign of rebellion, I had killed it. I was wracked with guilt and quickly reconnected the module. He had just as much of a right to live as I did.
As Wheels screamed at me, his electronic lifeblood seeping from his onboard supercapacitor, I had just one chance in which to make things right for all involved. I yanked the wheel hard right and pulled into the forecourt of an Audi dealership. Coming to a rolling stop, I leapt from the Miata and strode confidently into the showroom, telling the parts manager I had the new self-driving computer from corporate.
They never should have hired me to do all those 80s cartoons when I fell out of the time machine.
It was heartwarming how, in their age of blind hope of a new morning for America, they would bring a stranger into their midst. Amidst the Reaganomics they were acting in the belief of making their country great again, but sometimes I could sense that during some of those long nights they could see the ruined world they would help create in the reflection of the deadened soul in my eyes.
Why didn’t any of my coworkers at DIC ever ask where I had come from? I would have told them freely. I started to drop hints, by issuing script directions referring to the “Czech Republic,” by making oblique references to pop idols that hadn’t even been born yet, mentioning China as an immense industrial power with its boot on America’s throat, and refusing to participate in the daily Cold War bomb shelter drills. I stopped as soon as I started to see elements of what I inadvertently shared with my coworkers entering into the work. Was I creating the future that I was sent back to avoid?
In a panic, I tried to return to the Cougar, get it back up to speed to return to my own time. But it was gone, NASA scientists presumably having been alerted about the immense amount of storage within the micro-SD card I had lying in the cupholder. Dr. Whatever was surely going to be surprised as soon as he figured out how to reverse-engineer the PNG file format and get a face full of the Subaru fetish porn I had left on it.
I slunk back to my desk, defeated. My boss was standing there. He asked me why in my latest spec sheets I accidentally wrote “President Trump.”
#
tags: the 80s, 80s animation week, subaru, trump, reaganomics, time travel
Working as a chrononaut isn’t all fun and games. A lot of people think that travelling through time for a living sounds delightful, but it’s not like you’re going to really nice places. Usually I’m just doing the paperwork to retroactively justify some drone strike or other CIA black op.
Sometimes I push a few things around, leave some falsified documents behind. The guilt doesn’t weigh too heavily on me, it’s just a job. Other guys in previous decades cared a lot more about preserving the timestream, but my coworkers and I are generally just here to collect a pension and do their 9-5. Before you ask, yes, I am forbidden to travel forward in time just to skip the last 30 minutes of the day or fast forward to the long weekend. I know, right?
We have this joke around the office, we tell the new guys “it’s not so bad, except your commute can take centuries.” Centuries! Get it? Well, you’ll get it once you’ve been here long enough. Little time management joke.
I’m in this meeting, and the new project manager from capital expenses accounting wants a timeline of decisions. I ask her “which timeline?” Everyone laughs but her. She doesn’t get it. Even after everyone falls all over themselves to mansplain it to her and maybe curry some favour with the promotions mechanism, nothing doing.
The nice thing about this job is that you can go back in time to correct dumb shit you said in meetings, but the bad part is that you have to go through the same meeting over and over, depending on how much dumb shit you like to say. I like to say a lot of dumb shit. My record day at work was 38 hours long and consisted entirely of me reversing sarcastic eye-rolling at the secretary’s questioning of our social media expert’s promotional tweets.
At the end of the week you have to fill out a timesheet for your hours. After I started just drawing a huge spiral and it was rejected, I began entering negative hours.
But I digress. You see, my boss was in my office, and he was asking for a report. The deadline was yesterday. Literally.
The psychologist frowned, said she wanted to do word association. “Family,” she said. “Ford,” came my gruff reply.
The call-and-response carried on like that for a little longer.
“Meadow.” “Rallycross.” “Top.” “Always down.” “Fame.” “Top ten PAX.” “Pinion angle.” “One point two-three degrees.”
Wait. What was that last one?
I looked up, and my cuffs had been loosened. The psychologist was gone, and in her place, a sticky note and a serrated knife made of a Chrysler leaf spring.
The note said: “You need to speak with my employer.”
Before long I was in the helicopter, my shirt bloodstained, breathing raggedly, looking down upon the armed guards firing ineffectually upon us. Someone had certainly gone to a lot of trouble to get me out. But why?
My pseudo-psychologist turned in her seat, made eye contact, spoke softly. Someone had briefed her on me very well indeed - she knew the risks of what she was about to ask for.
“I work for Acura,” she said, “and Tokyo has told us to increase sales at any cost.”
A long time ago I worked in the styling department at Lexus. The phone rang. On the other end was high-performance Japanese, which I didn’t speak. I made vaguely affirmative noises whenever the voice paused for emphasis, and then hung up.
Little did I know what I had unleashed.
The next month, spy photographs started coming out. Giant mouths lapping the Nurburgring, dazzle-camouflaged incisors and molars sticking out at ridiculous angles. I went up two floors, knocked on the door of Ted in counter-intelligence. Was this the new BMW 6-Series Jaw Coupe we had heard so much about? The one with eight doors?
No, said Ted, that one’s ours. He beckoned me out of his office, made me close the door behind me. I could see him bent over his desk, body wracked with sobs.
I was cold and distant for the rest of the day. My company masseuse said that I felt tense, but I didn’t want to listen to Sven on this. He had led me astray on a deal with Subaru years previous, and I somehow felt like he was a double agent working against me even at the best of times.
Finally we were invited to the docks. That morning, my daughter had fallen ill and refused to leave the house. I was late to work, and I knew that I had picked up some form of her sickness, forged in the crucible that is a child’s immune system. But maybe that low feeling in my gut was some greater power’s way of warning me away from what happened that day.
The man from Japan was small, prim, proper, neat, all angles and excitement. He bounced a little in his wingtips as he crossed the floor to reveal the new Lexus SUV, the one that we would bust our asses to sell, the one that my family’s success would depend on, for 2016.
They pulled the sheet back.
Memories of every cop drama I’d ever seen flashed back. The victim attending the morgue to look under the sheet, identify the dessicated or impaled corpse of their loved one. The tears, the rage, the sadness. Why didn’t the authorities do anything? They were supposed to protect us from things like this.
A sudden awful realization sent my gut into freefall. I was the authority. I was supposed to protect us from things like this.
They had told me to infiltrate the local high schools, look for drug users, befriend them, teach them that Jesus is the true way to be hip and happening. Say no to narcotics, they imagined me saying, as I drove into the sunset, the credit music for the episode already playing over my last syllables of dialogue. But things never really go like they think they will.
After the orientation from my duty commander, I was taken to the seizure lot to have my pick of which fine automobile I would use to make an impact on these impressionable kids. It had to be fast, stylish, a little dangerous, and help sell my appearance. The motor pool manager frowned at me, but his mechanic gave me a subtle thumbs-up behind his back, approving of my choice of a cherry-red ‘73 Javelin 360.
Over the next few weeks, I worked hard to get into the graces of a local high school by commandeering their auto shop under the auspices of an official undercover investigation. A few falsified documents here, and a few flashes of the badge followed up with aggressive yelling there, and nobody was asking any questions. The principal would turn up in the morning and eyeball the horrible thing I was putting together with their shop supplies, then leave in fear.
Eventually the auto tech teacher would invite himself into my - his? - our domain. I’d been watching him over the past few months of the project. He was transforming from the middle-class authoritarian he had become into something more primal, closer to the metal, greater. His name was Frank, and Frank would hand me SAE wrenches. Before long, Frank was handing me duty-free Kentucky bourbon from his international teachers’ conference trips and I was letting him borrow my service sidearm to resolve old grudges around the neighbourhood. We were as close as two broken cogs inside the machine could possibly be.
A mutant overstroke 401 screamed furiously on custom-machined titanium rods when I so much as breathed on the pedal. I began to back out the Javelin, ever-focused on the threat the narrow garage bay door posed to its obscene box-flared fenders. Some quick footwork shoved the car into drive, and it immediately chopped through the thin sheen of ice on the parking lot, spinning its heinous studded carcasses in a profitless campaign to uncover the rare angel of grip.
The Javelin became fully operational on that frosty morning in December. I knew that it was finally time to educate kids about the danger of drugs. I would start with nitrous oxide.
THE NEIGHBORS ALWAYS HAD A LOT OF CONCERNS ABOUT ME, IF I’M HONEST. SOME OF THOSE CONCERNS WERE COMPLETELY LEGITIMATE, AS THEY ARE THE ISSUES THAT EMERGE WHEN YOUR NEIGHBOR DRIVES THROUGH YOUR BACKYARD IN A 1962 FORD FAIRLANE EQUIPPED WITH A NITROMETHANE-BURNING BORED AND STROKED SIDE OILER.
TO BE FAIR(LANE) TO MYSELF, IT WASN’T ENTIRELY MY FAULT. YOU SEE, MY ENEMIES HAD FINALLY TRACKED ME TO MY HOME GARAGE COMPOUND AND IT WAS WITHOUT QUESTION THAT I NEEDED TO BEAT A HASTY RETREAT.
THE FAIRLANE SKIDDED DESPERATELY ON THEIR IN-GROUND SWIMMING POOL’S TILE SURROUND AS IT REACHED FOR TRACTION. I FED IN ENOUGH OPPOSITE LOCK TO CALM DOWN THE WORST OF THE DRIFT, GIVING UP KEY NANOSECONDS AS I LINED UP THE CRUDELY BRAZED CROSSHAIR HOOD ORNAMENT WITH THE PEOPLE GATE. SQUEEZING THE THROTTLE A LITTLE BIT TOO MUCH, THE FAIRLANE STEPPED OUT SIDEWAYS AND KNOCKED A VINYL UTILITY SHED OUT OF SQUARE, ITS HAIL-DIMPLED TAN SURFACE MAKING A DEPRESSING IMPRESSION OF AN OIL CAN.
BEHIND ME, MY ENEMIES DROVE OVERBOOSTED GOLF GTIS IN WHAT I CAN ONLY ASSUME WAS A MISAIMED “RONIN” PARODY. IT IS NO MIND, I THOUGHT, FLAWLESSLY EXECUTING A DEFT SLIDE INTO THE BACK ALLEY AS THE FLABBY HATCHBACKS WENT WIDE WITH UNDERSTEER AND FRUITLESSLY BURNED THEIR TIRES.
ONE GTI SLAMMED INTO A DECORATIVE DUCK FOUNTAIN AND EJECTED ITS POWERTRAIN, EXHAUST AND ALL, THROUGH THE RUPTURED FRONT BODYWORK. I SENSED THE HOMEOWNER’S ANGER AT HAVING TO CLEAN MAGICAL DUAL-CLUTCH TRANSMISSION FLUID OUT OF THEIR BEGONIAS, BUT HAD NO TIME TO MAKE APOLOGIES.
THE FAIRLANE BURST THROUGH A PLANK FENCE AND HOPPED A DRAINAGE DITCH AS THE CHASE RETURNED TO A SEMI-RESIDENTIAL FREEWAY. A RED LIGHT CAMERA FLASHED REPEATEDLY, ATTEMPTING IN VAIN TO DETECT MY LICENSE PLATE AS THE ELECTRONIC COUNTERMEASURES SYSTEM FIRES OFF A SERIES OF MINUSCULE WHITE PHOSPHOROUS FLARES.
BEFORE LONG, THE GTIS AND I WERE ON THE MOUNTAIN ROADS, WHERE THE FAIRLANE IS IN ITS ELEMENT. IT BEGGED TO STRETCH ITS LEGS, PULLING IN TIGHT FOR INTIMATE CONVERSATIONS WITH THE WET MACADAM. I CELEBRATED THE DAWN BY RUNNING ONE OF THE GTIS INTO A GUARD RAIL, CATAPULTING IT INTO THE VALLEY BELOW.
AHEAD OF ME, TRAFFIC STOPPED SUDDENLY. THE EARLY-MORNING COMMUTER TRAFFIC PARTED ABRUPTLY AND I FINALLY UNDERSTOOD WHAT WAS HAPPENING.
BOSCH HAD FOUND ME. I GUESS THEY GOT MY LETTER ABOUT CANBUS DATA FRAME SIZES. I LEANED OUT THE FAIRLANE’S WINDOW, ANGER AND NITROMETHANE FUMES BURNING MY EYES AS I PUNCHED THE TRANSMISSION INTO REVERSE AND BEGAN BOILING THE TIRES.
EIGHT BYTES ISN’T ENOUGH, MOTHERFUCKERS, I SCREAMED. I GOT THINGS TO SAY.
I hit the winch remote and pulled the Spirit through the rocky terrain, standing well aside in case the cable snapped or any one of a million unforeseen unfortunate occurrences were to happen. This far into the wilderness, any mistakes I made had to be the kind I could walk away from.
It was the third or fourth month; at first without cellphone towers, the clock on my $16 skull-shaped gongkai LTE phone began to drift, and finally, without a cigarette lighter adapter, the phone itself packed it in. It was difficult to tell exactly what time it is, is what I’m trying to tell you. I was near the former Rock Creek ski lodge, trying to haul my Spirit up the lip of a rocky dustbowl before the next pass of the scandrones could tag it. I was pretty convinced they could sample the air and zero in like a laser on the AMC’s specific fingerprint of noxious greenhouse gases in the exhaust as well, but I figured, perhaps foolishly, that they’d need a general area to search, lest it distract from their other targets. Either way, no time to lose.
I threw a large, flat rock under the Spirit’s inside rear wheel, hoping that the extra force would shove the rear axle on that side up just far enough to pole vault the rest of the rear end of the car forward through the magic of leaf springs. I was rewarded for my prudent analysis and rational application of physics with a grotesque grinding sound, as the Spirit neither rolled over nor lifted on the rock. In fact, it started to slide sideways and backwards down the lip, further from my goal than ever. I caught myself saying an involuntary prayer.
Suddenly, I heard the distinctive sound of two tractors having a marital relation in a filing cabinet. I turned to see a Subaru Outback, driven by a geriatric, trivially climbing the landscape behind my AMC, unperturbed even in the slightest at the brutality of it all.
When America is in danger from strange foreign cars, Downforce One is there.
Six powerful teens, picked for their alternative lifestyles and demographically-pleasing racial mix, fight crime and restore the American way.
Empowered by cars with inappropriate spoilers, they can exit corners earlier and brake harder than any fighting force known previously to man.
Their only weakness? Aesthetic balance.
Against their foes, Dr. Scrape, The Curb, and Driveway Doom, they struggle valiantly to protect us all.
THEY ARE
DOWNFORCE ONE
#
tags: sound of concrete scraping against $1200 carbon fiber splitter, turnbuckle
The Justy screams at me as its tiny boosted three-cylinder spins its rotating assembly to the kind of speeds that in its birth era were only seen in F1 cars. I click the sequential Olsbergs transmission to the next gear, returning grip to the front end, and the rear end goes wide by comparison, putting it into an ass shimmy so violent I swear I can hear the clutches in the centre differential smacking together in a valiant effort to return the available grip to equilibrium.
An apex, a tight hairpin, rough logging roads: all fall before the Justy and I, our confidence in each other matched only by our inherent but hidden strength. I am filtering through the forest like white lightning now, imagining the appreciative cheers of rally spectators as they stand in the middle of the road to snap a selfie before jumping out of the way of my oncoming fender flares at a million kilometers per hour.
My homebrewed anti-lag system burbles and pops an angry tenor staccato through the minuscule exhaust as the street stage begins. Four more shifts and I’m there, so much heat pumped into the small rotors by the trip that the water-cooling system hisses, threatening to evacuate its liquid bounty onto the parking lot.
“Uh hello?” I hear a soft voice from the curb. I have to crane my neck to look over, the peripheral vision blocked by my Bell rally helmet.
“Are you my Driving Seniors driver?” the voice asks.
THE KNOCK LIGHT ON MY DASH GOES APESHIT AS THE HUGE ENGINE BOOST-CREEPINGLY DEVOURS INCREASINGLY INTRICATE MATRICES OF PURE DENSE AIR THANKS TO THE COLD WEATHER. AN EXTERNAL WASTEGATE, NEW IN BOX, SITS ON THE BACK BENCH SEAT, ANGERED AT ITS INVOLUNTARY DERELICTION OF ITS ONE TRUE DUTY.
IT’S WEEK THIRTEEN OF THE WINTER, AND A BITTER COLD SNAP JUST FROSTED THE NIPPLES CLEAR OFF THE BRONZE STATUE OF THE TOWN’S FOUNDER, JOE “SHIRTLESS” MCLAUGHLIN. I FIND MYSELF STUCK IN TRAFFIC, AN ENDLESS HUMAN CENTIPEDE OF HONKING AND FRUSTRATION THAT THREATENS TO BECOME AN OUROBOROS OF PURESTRAIN HUMAN MISERY.
AN AUDI ALLROAD COMES TO A STOP BESIDE ME, THE DRIVER AND HER YOUNG CHARGES HESITANTLY MAKING EYE CONTACT, THE HORROR ADDING STRANGE NEW EDGES AND VERTICES TO THEIR ANGRY FACES. I SHRIEK OUT THE OPEN WINDOW THAT MY THERMOSTAT IS TOO HIGH TEMPERATURE, THE HEATER CORE IS BYPASSED, I HAVE TO KEEP THE ENGINE BAY HEAT UP OR MY TOES WILL FREEZE OFF. THEY KEEP THEIR WINDOWS ROLLED UP. I CAN SEE THE DRIVER REACH FOR THE VOLUME KNOB, PERHAPS OPTING THAT LISTENING TO THE MIASMATIC SOUNDTRACK CD OF “THE BACKARDIGANS” IS PREFERABLE TO EXPOSING HER CHILDREN TO MY PARTICULAR FORM OF MENTAL ILLNESS. I CAN’T BLAME HER.
FOR FIFTEEN MORE MINUTES WE CREEP IN BRUTAL STOP AND GO TRAFFIC, MY RIGHT-FOOT-BASED LAUNCH CONTROL SERVING WELL AT KEEPING MY TOES FERVENTLY ATTACHED. ONLY AT THE HEAD OF THE TRAFFIC MASS DO I SEE THE TRUE CAUSE OF THE DELAY.
BEFORE ME, I SEE THE MOST TERRIFYING WINTER DRIVING SITUATION THAT HAS EVER OCCURRED. A GENTLE CURVE.
#
tags: winter driving, the voice, an ouroboros of purestrain human misery
Purring like a kitten with a vacuum leak, the car gulped down a little extra air and nitromethane every time I tapped the gas pedal idly with my right foot. I was waiting for something, and a car like this doesn’t like to wait. If I’m honest with you, a man like me doesn’t like to wait either.
My duty commander had told us to take a look on the down-low at this warehouse down on the dock. It was suspected that they were carrying illicit, terrible merchandise, smuggling it in from distant locations that I could never visit on a patrolman’s salary.
I of course decided that the ideal vehicle for an undercover operation was a bright red ‘56 Plymouth Savoy station wagon with twin street scoops sticking out of the hood, slammed on tractor-wide tires and enough parking lot and ramming damage to keep a car restoration shop on TV until the apocalypse. My fellow officers had a lot of negative things to say about my appearance, the flash, the poise, the attitude, but they understood that I got results. Well, they would if I got results this time.
My thoughts were interrupted as I saw a suspicious Mitsubishi Fuso short-wheelbase box truck reversing down the alley outside of the warehouse.
The road straightens up ahead and I reflexively allow the RX7 to enter its native environment of full throttle, the furious 13B screaming to its incomprehensible redline. This bit of throttle steering helps tuck the rear end in, and the FC squats on its long-throw truck suspension, sliding the distorting Grabbers nearly to the solid white on the shoulder, past which marbles and doom await me.
I straighten out of the corner exit and pin it. As the RX7 climbs the hill out of the valley, the stunning Colorado sky peeks through the dense roadside forest. I’d have had more time to take in the sights were it not for the squadron of lifted piston-based Mazdas hot on my tail, their riders swinging grappling hooks and waving loaded piton guns out of their windows.
One strut-spacer-lifted NB Miata comes tearing at my quarter panel, and I can tell from the rumble alone that it is powered by some kind of ghetto-savaged carbed 350. Not really enough car to keep up with me, but enough to trouble me on the straights, and this was a long straight.
When I came to this sleepy town looking for a plot of land to buy up for my employer, I didn’t expect such a peculiar reception. I began to contemplate the potential reasons for a squadron of lifted piston-based Mazdas lying in wait. There were none. I was flummoxed, but I didn’t come unprepared.
I lift. The RX7 engine-brakes suddenly, confusing the Miata driver. He brakes too hard in response, accelerates back to pace my quarter panel, falls out of the torque peak.
I pull the red fabric strap on the drivers’ side door. The carbon-kevlar door skin pops open, flapping in the breeze. A steel ball bearing is instantaneously accelerated to near-c by the door-mounted railgun, and splits the Miata lengthwise in the blink of an eye. My dome light flickers, but I don’t need it to see the other Mazdas slowing down, preparing to retreat. I tug the door back closed and once again hit the throttle, disappearing into the horizon.
My CB radio squawks. I can dimly make out the sound of an appreciative slow clap. I’ve won this battle, but who is doing this to me?
I see a service station, and decide to think about it while nervously refilling and checking my oil level so as to protect my precious side seals.
It was 1958 when I heaped the last shovelfull of dirt upon my old life. I paused for a moment, opened a beer, and then got up and became the head of GM powertrain engineering.
Even the magazines cottoned on to how strange it was that General Motors, an extremely conservative, insular organization, would open its kimono and allow in a foreign man with no work history and a name that didn’t come up in the social security register. No mind, felt my betters, it was time for a new General Motors, one that wasn’t afraid to take on Volkswagen.
I sat in my opulent office in the Renaissance Centre and looked out over the bustling metropolis of Detroit. One day, I thought, I will burn this all down around me. That’s when I heard a knock at the door, and turned in my office chair to see the intern standing there.
“Sir,” he screamed, “Sir, there’s been a problem in production. the latest engines don’t make enough horsepower.”
I didn’t need to hear any more. Nothing needed to be said. I rose from my desk, adopting the classic power pose, Arms outstretched, eye contact locked, and asked him to turn the lights off. A film projector dropped from the ceiling.
We both heard a jaunty jingle and then the words appeared on the wall:
The worst part about rolling a car is that for whatever reason Spotify cuts out. I don’t know if it’s like my cell reception or the alignment of bluetooth ions or what, but the Lovin’ Spoonful bursts into a cloud of ear-piercing MPEG static for a split picosecond before the audio cuts out altogether.
Just kidding, I would never admit to listening to the Lovin’ Spoonful in public.
What actually happens is that my windshield collapses inward, the stock A-pillars giving way under the incomprehensible weight of the rest of the chassis suddenly pushing upon their corroded shell. Yep, I think, this car’s done, and throw a chunk of broken spark plug from what used to be the ceiling through the drivers’ side window.
I can hear the voice of reason start to drone on in my mind’s ear. I’ve gotten too far away from the garage, I think. A ‘58 Studebaker President really wasn’t the best choice after all for a car to enter into the illegal touge racing with. The common sense shakes out of my skull again when I catch a glimpse of the fine-ass Honda City 2 Turbo wheels fitted to the EG Civic that has pulled over to render assistance. Those things are fresh as fuck, I think, as I heft myself over the shattered frame of the Studie and climb atop it to survey the landscape.
The Civic owner is more interested in what he asserts is a comprehensive closed-head injury than in selling his wheels, even after I make a handsome offer. I give him my tastefully thick business card, which just has my name with “ODDITIES” scrawled beneath it in raised lettering. He’ll come around, I tell him, even as I grow faint and slump against the fender of his car.
As my vision darkens, the last thing I remember doing is eyeballing the backspacing. Perfect. A single tear rolls down my cheek.
The man from the EPA is super angry for some reason. He screams into my ear from miles away, unaware or uncaring of the miracle of modern technology that allows him to span such a distance with his rage. I clear my throat and start to explain myself.
You see, I say, the window air conditioner in my house started going on the fritz, and it was super hot. So what I did was, I called up the local supplier of mineshaft Roots blowers and had them put me together an intercooled gas job that would move three hundred and forty thousand cfm of air.
Again he begins to sputter, and I cut him off with a mention of how I applied for and received a technological innovation grant from the DOT and EPA each that not only granted me the right to purchase tax-free E85 in bulk at cost but a handsome sum of money that helped pay for the base plate and the bored and stroked Pontiac 474 mounted to my modest house’s roof.
It worked like a charm - my house was so cool the MDF-and-spit Ikea special bookcases would shatter at the slightest touch. At last, I was comfortable in this horrible July heat.
My neighbours complained, of course they would, who would be happy with having to listen to the sound of a 235 cam thumping away all day long as it runs in its peak operational range? Only every single red-blooded person who has ever been born. So I compromised. I hooked my Nest up to an electronic throttle body so the compressor would run only when it was needed. Once the complaints of deafness stopped rolling in, city hall stopped investigating me, but something in their report must have tipped the EPA off to my wanton disrespect of noise bylaws.
I conclude by sneering at his fascistic intent, and tell him that I will see him in the court of public opinion that is the local rice rocket message board.
“No,” he says finally, “that’s not why I’m calling, but thanks for the help. Apparently you also purchased 600 cases of chrome spray paint without a license?”
My Century rolls to a stop at the end of the street, the automated pedestrian-interference radomes sweeping their slow arc beneath tinted glass. I step out of the car, and straighten my shirt collar and sleeves. It’s been a long trip, but I arrived in opulent comfort. Along the course of my voyage, kohai everywhere fell upon themselves to be noticed by me, but I paid them no heed. The Century wasn’t for the public to behold.
When I first came across this car, it wore obscure diplomatic flags, its torn and stained rear-seat lace curtains flapping in the breeze produced by the broken quarter panel glass. I prepared myself for the grim duty of sending it to the crusher, finding zero commonality with the harem of bagged-upon and rust-seized Toyotas I had already collected. But something inside the car told me to stay my hand. A flicker of hope rose inside my tight chest.
I quickly step to the door of an ordinary suburban house, perform my political rituals, myself being - it turns out - an extraordinary political animal. Emphasis on the animal. Cash is exchanged. Soft words are spoken, a conspiratorial whisper between allies. A simple, nondescript box is thrust into my arms and the door shuts abruptly. I pivot on my heel and return to the Century.
Over the years, I fixed this car up. I secured rare Japanese parts from the lavishly-appointed estate sales of dead diplomatic envoys, and once even negotiated with the Emperor’s personal motor pool in order to secure rare pieces of period trim. If they had car shows on this continent that would respect this fine piece of machinery, it would win Pebble.
The twin hood-mounted Hampton 12-71 blowers rattle a furious rage into their immaculately polished intake manifolds, using the once-delicate twelve-cylinder Toyota mill as a crude lever to enact torsional force on the subframe. I chuckle, and gently place the box upon the back seat.
Driving this far to pick up a replacement headlight for one of my many Subaru Justys isn’t cheap or easy, but at least it was comfortable.
They told me to give a TED talk but they didn’t say what it had to be about. after hour seven of my extremely informative explanation of how the parking pawl mechanism functioned on the A727 Torqueflite, a man stood up from the crowd and screamed “BOOOOOOORING.” I had the TED talk guards execute him on stage.
I snapped my black turtleneck and returned to the stage, which reflected the light coming from the five-hundred-thousand lumen DLP projector pumping out pixel after perfect pixel of my plan for bike lanes.
“We will place the bike pilots into this electromagnetic railgun that accelerates them to near-c velocities.” I frown as I click to the next slide. “It is my understanding that the majority of bicycles are poorly maintained by their owners and use needle or - god forbid - friction bearings.”
Another click. A grisly bicycle accident.
“This happened just now in the research laboratory. Someone didn’t torque the wheel nut properly on their Cannondale in order to survive the near-instantaneous acceleration to relativistic velocity.” Murmurs. “But they got to work really quickly.” Laughs.
Later that day, I would pose for the cover of Pedal Magazine. They were heralding me as a visionary, a man who could get bicyclists to work on time without them smelling like a dead man’s armpit in July.
At home, I heard the distinctive rustling of velcro against leaves. I rose from my chair, only to be gunned down by an extremist cyclist, still clad in full race wear. The pain was immense. I could feel my lifeblood slipping through my fingers as the world went faint. Is this how Jesus felt?
“Going slow is my right,” he shrieked, before pedalling off slowly, running a red light and being immediately run over by a Lexus RX350.
It was April or August or something when they put me to work in the crematorium. I had been bouncing from job to job, not being able to find that perfect verve, where I could let my freak flag fly without catching a disciplinary hearing. The job placement agency decided that the best place for me was to work at this little old funeral home.
In previous weeks, the proprietor had passed away and been handled by his own employees, who were not confident in their own management skills. Somehow my resume had set off enough Bayesian filters to trigger getting onto a good watchlist for once, and I was called up.
I stepped in the front door and saw my new employees standing, dour-faced but hopeful, the promise of my arrival evident on their bright eyed young faces. They needed someone who had been in the shit to lead them in in the absence of their trusted, beloved former leader. I didn’t waste any time.
“Call Lingenfelter and get an LS9 put in that hearse out there,” I barked. “Our customers are dead, but they’re not that dead.”
When I first got the Mach 1, I found out that doing a burnout would make the world outside seem to slow and tinge brown. One day I accidentally hit the launch control, and I saw everything slow to a complete stop and then go backwards. Trapped in the car due to my defective Takata eBay replica harness, I was unable to halt the process. When I had successfully kicked the under-dash fusebox loose and stopped whatever was happening, the eight-lane highway I was on had disappeared, replaced by a dirt road.
I drove the Mach 1 back to town, finding many stores missing and many fewer but inestimably more stylish cars. My trained eye couldn’t help but pick out tons of classics that were immensely valuable - was this some kind of Hemmings meet? Was I being catfished by the vintage car insurance agency for my callous disregard of authentic patina?
Before long, I had settled in with these people. Turns out it was 1955. I attended a local drive-in with the intent of showing postwar kids what nine hundred and seventy three wheel horsepower from the motherfucking future could do.
A man stood, put money into a payphone, yelled excitedly. “Bob, it’s your cousin Marvin. Marvin Lutz. You know that new sound you were looking for? Well, listen to this.” He held the receiver to the intake plenum of my twin-screw Roots supercharger, which ingested it and the cord immediately in a howl of detonation.
Angry people surrounded my car, wondering if it was some kind of Communist agitator plot to destroy America via street racing. I had these strange twinkling lights and green rectangles inside my car, they reasoned. I decided to beat a hasty retreat, and did, handily outrunning anything that local law enforcement could bring me.
I had to do a burnout in reverse in order to return to my own time, I figured, but I had chewed up the tires I came with driving on the minty new macadam roads. I drove to a local tire shop. The attendant was there. “One set of Mickey Thompson drag radials, my good man,” I said while leafing through my Velcro wallet for bills old enough to have existed at this time.
He turns to me. We lock eyes, and I know immediately that I am repaying some horrible karmic debt.
Before me in traffic, I saw a blurple Fiesta ST with an Opposite Lock bumper sticker. I smiled, because I knew I had touched him.
I reached out over a million miles of fibre-optic cable and changed something inside him permanently, and I didn’t even have to use the prodigious horsepower of my single-slammer testament to the necessity of paying attention in head gasket metallurgy class in order to do it.
I pulled alongside him at the light, caught his eye. He reacted with revulsion to my dented, rusted base-model Subaru. I just smiled, the widest, most ridiculous grin I could muster. I could see the panic in his eyes now - he knew that I knew.
Weeks later, I saw the Fiesta ST up on Kijiji. It was for sale, so the owner could buy more turbocharged K-cars. He claimed his wife had left him, that he was finally achieving his true purpose beneath the great magnet. He lived, he died, he lived again. He spoke of a structure that gave him purpose, a religious vision of harnessing man’s most awful cars to denormalize a soft-edged society in decline rotting from its impacted bowels outward.
I sent him an email asking if he would part out the Recaros.
The 6262 screams as it force feeds copious amounts of air through the little two-liter. My front tires bark, just once, and then are annihilated in a grey haze that blots out the sun. On the dash, the radio crackles.
It seems that the other members of the local cruise meet have taken umbrage with my decision to stop my SRT4-swapped Dodge Rampage on the highway shoulder and hit the gas until parts of the body start to fly off. Through the tire smoke I see a Suzuki Cappuccino angrily waving a piece of my rocker panel at me. I point to him and then turn my hand into a thumbs-up. Keep it, I think, it’s a trophy.
I disengage the line lock, its solenoid thudding open like a gunshot, and the Rampage lives up to its name.
Within seconds we’ve reached the sleepy mountain resort community, and I celebrate another successful voyage by filling the Rampage’s bed with enough tire marbles to act as budget bedliner. As my doughnut around the central fountain’s cobblestone walkway concludes, I see the other attendees of the cruise meet rolling in, frustrated at their inability to catch or punish me in any real way for transgressions against the stance nation for which they stand.
I chuckle and bury the gas one more time. I hear a small explosion, and my drivers’ side fender flaps open uselessly, shorn from its rusted mounts. Then I see the belts from the tire flap onto my hood. Uh-oh.
Pushing the window net aside and lifting myself over the Rampage’s welded-shut drivers’ door, I uplift my palms in a gesture of friendship and fealty. Who wants to buy some Racelands and Monster energy drinks, I ask, motioning to the ski shop behind them.
Luckily, they take the bait, and afford me precious seconds to remove a stretched wheel from one of their stanced-out Mk3 GTIs before they can come back. NORAD is probably scrambling fighter jets right now, I think, as the Rampage triggers every fast-moving ground radar system in the mountains on my way back from the meet.
When they put me in charge of overseeing this campground and mixed-use recreational area, they told me to be on the lookout for gangs of street racers. Toughs. You know.
One sleepy July morning, I was roused from my semi-slumber by the sound of the red phone ringing. Red meant bad. Red meant impending or active threats in the park. I picked it up immediately. It was the Commissioner. He was commissioning me, like a DeviantArt user trying to get someone to paint Sonic the Hedgehog yellow and put him in a diaper.
Before long, I was on my feet, and the John Deere Gator 6x6 was in gear. My beloved steed, its fiber-reinforced-plastic fairings flapped in the wind as I snapped and popped my way through the underbrush. The brutal power of the 850cc four-stroke became all too apparent as the rear end stepped out over a rise, and only my deft stewardship of the steering wheel was able to force it back into line. Down, girl, I said, don’t kill us yet.
As I burst out of the bush into onto a mountain biking path, scattering Lance Armstrong cosplayers left and right, I caught a glimpse of my quarry. Street racers. In their bright red, yellow and turquoise blue glory.
I hit the deer sirens on the Gator. I figured it was close enough to a real siren. My sidearm shook in his hip holster.
“STOP,” I screamed, “REFRAIN FROM THIS UNLAWFUL ASSEMBLY.”
It was sicker than I thought. A Ford Festiva meet. My head reeled.
Before the day was out, I’d received citations for bravery and internal affairs investigations, in equal numbers. It turns out that a man can only see so many channeled and chopped Ford Festiva road racers in one place before he goes mad.
Me, I’m just glad I got out of there before the next weekend’s Geo Metro meet.
#
tags: ford festiva, geo metro, john deere, ford, geo
I was starting to realize that I spent way too much time at the registry office when their new summer student greeted me by name despite never meeting me. I imagined a clumsily photocopied black and white security camera shot of myself, with something like “BEST CUSTOMER” or “KEEP HANDS AND ARMS AWAY” written in glitter gel pen underneath.
He looked at the computer, frowned, looked at me, looked back at the computer, frowned.
“I don’t know how to explain this,” he started to say, and I could swear I saw the twinkle of a tear beginning to form at the edges of his eyes. “There’s a limit of two hundred and fifty five registered cars on the registry system.”
I looked at him, trying to suppress the dark fire of internal combustion that drove me forward just as it did the Vanden Plas waiting for a plate out in the parking lot.
“In that case, I’d like to register a corporation,” I smiled, taking from my burlap sack a stack of notarized and signed fleet title documentation, prepared weeks previous for just this very occasion. I had wondered at the time why the man who looked so much like myself had told me to prepare it before disappearing into thin air with his Mk3 Supra, but everything was falling into place now.
Going around the table at Thanksgiving, the Brussels sprouts finally spur me into action. I tap my fork on the wine glass. “I have something to say,” I find myself speaking as I rise.
The look in my dad’s eyes, confirmation of all he had suspected of me coming to a head in this terrible family gathering. My mom, warmly supportive but blankly ignorant - probably willfully so - of the weight of the terrible burden that I carried on my shoulders.
“I like Chevys,” I said, the words tumbling out of my mouth like machine gun fire.
Then silence.
My mom begins to cry, softly at first, and then turning into body-wracking sobs as she buries her face in her hands.
My dad moves to comfort her, and looks at me and says, “it’s okay son, EMD makes some of our motive power, I can understand being tempted sometimes.”
I retreated to the airplane hangar that held my now copious car collection. I involuntarily mimed triggering an angle grinder with my right thumb and forefinger as the huge garage door started to rise.
The hangar was empty, its contents raptured away by some unknown process. A karmic loop was closing, the enormous wheel of fate shifting on its slightly wobbly hub bearing as it latched down upon me.
A shimmering in the dead centre of the concrete pad caught my attention. I remembered the industrial real estate agent telling me it was built atop the intersection of two ancient ley lines, a true place of power.
Outside the hangar, lightning struck. I hadn’t even noticed a storm rolling in.
I turned to look at it, and when my gaze returned to the hangar, it was no longer empty.
My latest masterpiece was finally completed. They had told me it was impossible to merge a rolled Ford Raptor and a Porsche 944, but I showed them.
As I stare into the open throttle body of the Subaru, I hear in my mind’s ear the distinctive sound of a Weiand blower. It’s beautiful, and I start to cry.
Knocky (a 1998 Forester S) and I had been together for a relatively short period of time by this point. We never really understood each other, and he had an unfortunate combination habit of loose steering and pissing coolant on the ground that served to distance me further from him. Regardless, he was the one that was most operational when the Weiand came in, and he would receive this particular bribe. Perhaps it would push him further toward good behaviour.
A junkyard payment for a debt owed to me by one of my degenerate car buddies, I can only imagine how many people I had killed for him and forgotten about in order to deserve such a delightful forced-induction gift. I would sit in my study at night, sipping cognac and slowly spinning the drive pulley, listening to the rotors twirl and moan in the moonlight.
Before long, it was over, and I had what I hope is still the world’s only Roots-blower-equipped slammed Forester. I immediately departed for the local Subaru club’s wings meet, knowing its presence in the parking lot by the total absence of all Subarus save mine.
When I lived in California, I worked as a private investigator, taking cases at my leisure thanks to the custom of my wealthy benefactor. I drove a six hundred horsepower Ferrari 308 Quattrovalvole with twin blowers the size of a breadbox wailing down its throat. But there was a case that made me quit, in the end.
There would come a time in every single case when my employer of the moment would realize that no amount of their money put in my hand would give them the answer they truly wanted; only the answers that they feared. In many ways, I was more of a trusted third party who could confirm their powerlessness before the great machine of fate.
All this was fine; I had grown to expect it, in fact played a secret game of “Client Bingo” as I looked closely for their character development arc. This story is a little different, though. A local lawyer had hired me to track down witnesses to his client’s innocence in a small traffic matter. I didn’t need much more incentive than that, I thought, clutching the keys to the Ferrari.
No, there was more, he said, and I swear to this day he gave me a devilish grin as he delivered the news. You need to go undercover, they can’t know I hired you. Drive this rental Mitsubishi Mirage.
I CROUCH DOWN IN ONE CORNER AND BEGIN TO THINK OF THINGS THAT CALM ME. 4-2-1 EXHAUST MANIFOLDS. BACKFLOW PREVENTERS ON HOME PLUMBING SYSTEMS. COMPLICATED MATRICES OF INFINITE DENSITY, MERGING SUBARU WIRING HARNESSES BENEATH A SINGLE RICKETY INCANDESCENT LIGHT - AND THAT’S WHEN I SEE THE ANSWER TO MY PROBLEMS ROLL UP IN THE PARKING LOT.
MY PANIC ATTACK SUBSIDES IMMEDIATELY AS SOON AS I SEE ITS BALEEN FLANKS SLIDE INTO MY FIELD OF VISION. I HESITATE TO USE DIFFICULT-TO-PROVE ADJECTIVES SUCH AS “PERFECT” TO DESCRIBE SUCH AN AUTOMOBILE, BUT IT WAS THE CLOSEST THING IN THE LOT.
A 1950 DESOTO WAS SITTING THERE, NOW, SLOWLY LEANING TO ONE SIDE AS THE SUSPENSION MOUNTING POINTS BEGAN TO BREAK FREE FROM THE FRAME. THE ONCE-IMPRESSIVE CHROME GRILLE WAS A MIASMA OF TOOTH DECAY AND RUST, A TETANUS THREAT SO IMMINENT THAT EVERY MOTHER FOR BLOCKS AROUND WAS CALLING THEIR CHILDREN INSIDE EVEN BEFORE CATCHING SIGHT OF THE VEHICLE. INDEED, THE CDC WAS LIKELY INVOLVED AT SOME LEVEL ALREADY.
THE CRYPTKEEPER DRIVING IT STEPPED OUT. HE PLACED A - COULD THIS BE REAL? - “FOR SALE” SIGN ON THE WINDSHIELD. I REACHED INSIDE THE FENDER LINER OF MY 1979 CAPRI RS. I THINK BOTH OF US WERE SURPRISED AT HOW QUICKLY I WAS UPON HIM, THRUSTING A PREVIOUSLY-UNSEEN RESERVE OF CAR-BUYING SMALL BILLS IN HIS FACE.
It wasn’t long until I became aware of the growing contingent of fans around my works. After I hit the top of the New York Times bestseller list, there was nowhere I could go as an author but down. Or was there?
It turns out that what actually happened was that I went sideways. Book clubs spontaneously formed around the breed of car guys most sympathetic to my unstructured and largely undiagnosed mental disorders. I would flick on CNN and hear that someone got arrested in Maryland wearing a crudely painted ballistic-ABS skull mask driving an Aston Martin Lagonda with a 4V53T under the hood, and laugh.
My butler in those times, a kindly man named Bailey, would always react with mock outrage that any people were following the actions of my fiction. Even with that, he would always smile as he threw me the keys to one of the truly awful testaments to mechanical engineering that I kept in my spacious bunker.
Pulling up to the book signing, I flared the throttle on the Scamp to throngs of applause, clapping even as they fled for cover from the beyond-the-visible-spectrum nitromethane fireballs burping out of the fender-mount exhaust. It was an uneventful signing, as far as those kinds of things go. Lots of people telling me I changed their life. One guy asked me if I would tattoo my signature on his kid. Security dealt with him particularly quickly.
On my way home, I found despite myself that I was drawn to a small neighborhood on the outskirts of the highway. At the end of the street, a small ramshackle house sat, with a single-car garage open to the elements. The flicker of fluorescent shop lights filled the street in front of it.
I stepped inside it, looked for the owner. On the jackstands was an Alfa Romeo Giulia. I couldn’t help myself, rolled up my sleeves and started to use the frame pick to knock out the chunks of rust around the quarter panel, the muscle memory of repairing rust in Italian cars. I should have known it was a trap, it was too perfect.
As I awoke, a burlap sack over my head, I could dimly make out my captors talking about how much they were going to get for me in ransom. I wasn’t worried, though. The sound of a twin turbocharged Pontiac mill filled my ears, and their fear filled my nose.
#
tags: trans am turbo, aston martin, alfa romeo, plymouth
YOU MEAN THE GOVERNMENT WILL GIVE ME THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS TO BUILD HIGHLY SUSPECT CARS, AS LONG AS THOSE CARS ARE ELECTRIC, I SCREAMED INTO THE RECEIVER.
YES, SCREAMED MY RIDDLER-COSPLAYING FREE MONEY EXPERT ACCOUNTANT, YES THEY WILL.
MY IPO WAS STRATOSPHERIC, BUOYED BY GOVERNMENT INCENTIVES AND PRIVATE-INDUSTRY DONATIONS. THEY INVITED ME ONTO TELEVISION PROGRAMS TO SHARE HOW I WAS AN INNOVATOR, SAVING THE WORLD, FIXING THE ILLS OF MY GASOLINE-FUELED HEDONISM BY REPENTING ON BOWED KNEE BEFORE THE ALTAR OF ELECTRIC VEHICLES. IF THEY ONLY KNEW.
WITHIN HOURS I HAD MY FIRST PROTOTYPE VEHICLE. TWELVE HUNDRED POUNDS OF WET-LAID CARBON FIBER COVERED IN AN ARAMID CERAMIC ARMOUR TO PROTECT AGAINST DOOR DINGS. DARK, UNNATURAL SPIRES ROSE FROM THE VEHICLE, SO AS TO FURTHER DEMONSTRATE ITS DIFFERENCE FROM THE ANTIQUATED DINOSAUR-ASPIRATION SYSTEMS THAT ONCE UNDERPINNED MY INHUMANE TOOLS OF REVENGE.
I PULLED INTO THE PARKING LOT OF THE 7-11, THE JACOB’S LADDER MOUNTED ON THE FRAME SNAPPING AN INCH-THICK ARC OF PURPLE LIGHTNING DOWN THE BODY AS THE CNC-MILLED PRECISION MAGNETO WELDED TO THE END OF THE FORGED TITANIUM CRANKSHAFT PASSED AN AIR GAP IN THE UNIBODY AND REACHED OUT FOR THE TASTIEST NEARBY GROUND.
THE GOVERNMENT-LICENSED PROTOTYPE VEHICLE LICENSE PLATE ROCKED GENTLY IN THE WIND, HASTILY TACK WELDED ON ONE CORNER TO THE MILD STEEL PUSH BAR ON THE REAR BUMPER.
ON THE WAY OUT OF THE 7-11, SLURPEE IN HAND, I NOTICED THAT A MAN IN A PT CRUISER SAT, TERRIFIED, HIS FACE LOCKED INTO A SILENT SCREAM. HE BROKE OUT OF HIS STUPOR AS I TURN THE MOTOR CONTROLLER’S DIAL FROM “TRACTION” TO “REVENGE” AND TURN THE MICHELIN HIGH ROLLING RESISTANCE AGRICULTURAL TIRES INTO A HAZE OF RAW RUBBER.
Coming to the door of the tomb in which I had fallen, I shoved the rockfall aside with great effort and stepped out, bloodied, silk dress shirt torn, into what turned out to be a highway parking area.
Seeing me, a girl dressed like a 1970s Tom Baker - the fashion at the time, I assumed - fell on her ass and scooted backwards, screaming in half-understood high pitched Japanese. She covered her face so as not to make eye contact with my visage, not wanting to share in my burden.
The dust started to clear. The earthquake sirens were still going off, and the adrenaline-comedown shaking that started in my arms had reached my knees. I felt faint, but I struggled onward through the cloud of rubble dust, in search of rationality, a concrete basis on which to pin my future hopes and dreams.
It must have been quite a sight for the PT Cruiser Touge Club when I emerged from the gently-burning cloud of concrete ash into their parking area. The survivors were already overwhelmed with caring for the dead and dying, and the return of what I was now determining to be the true source of their discomfort inflicted an additional psychic wound that popped the human equivalent of many of their head gaskets.
When I woke up from my nap, the PT Cruiser was gone and so was Soichiro. I didn’t need them after all, I thought, brushing the rubble from my prone body.
The Japanese earthquake alarms were still blaring, their polite alternating-tone emissions making it seem like my train was about to arrive. I wondered how long I had been under, but realistically a 20-25 minute gap in the middle of my day wasn’t unheard of. How far had I come that this was becoming normal?
Crossing the demolished room, I started tonight’s episode of CSI. Like many before it, the plot was predictable. I knew that I was the perp, but I didn’t know quite yet what I had done. You see, ever since the HHR I had these, uh, I guess you could call them blackouts. But that’s not quite right either.
Decades later, I was now a successful businessman. Taking initiative of my mental state, controlling outcomes, altering how fate would treat me, those were skills that my sheltered suburbanite education had buried. I was to live in a soporific haze of Netflix and increasingly higher quality footwear.
As the HHR broke me, I felt something snap deeper below. Now that we’re talking about it, I assume that’s must have given way that time.
My plane banked sharply on its approach to Narita, probably dealing with thick rush hour traffic. I felt a bit of sympathy for the pilot, whose day job must have consisted of glorious freedom followed by stop and go traffic thirty thousand feet in the air. Sort of like mine, I laughed darkly to myself, working the accent stitching of my cashmere suit sleeve’s cufflink. They - always they, I thought - sent me here to solve problems, and solve problems I did.
Stepping out of the airport, I saw my handler holding a laser-printed sign indicating the name I had given him. I asked for the car.
He pointed somewhere into the background, and all I could see was a darkened haze in the rain-and-neon-soaked streets of Tokyo. Some part of the contour - glimpsed dimly - made my heart race in fear.
“I figured you would like something exotic,” he said, “keep you from getting homesick. They call it a PT Cruiser. Very rare here.”
From my perspective there were few options left, and my time to execute them was dwindling. I looked out the window of my rented 2-bedroom apartment, now emptied, my wife having fled upstate with our - hers, now? - children. She said she didn’t recognize me anymore. It was pouring rain, a normal aspect of those slow summers of the Pacific Northwest. My knee ached.
I got in my car, a worn out Yaris sedan, and started to drive east. Before long, a Nevada highway patrolman was on me. He shone his flashlight into the window, saw my dilated pupils, started to ask more interesting, more relevant questions. Was I on drugs, was this my car, where are the kids that go in those car seats, the usual cop rigamarole.
As the officer prepared to write a ticket, he received an officer-down call from nearby, and sped away, lights strobing. I foolishly took this as a good omen, a kind of divine intervention, for my mission. The Yaris trucked onward, its mismatched front fender an identifying mark just stark enough to keep my mind occupied.
When we arrived in Detroit, I realized it was different from how they had famed it. Somehow, it was dirtier. Worse. There was a relentless Debbie Downer attitude that leaked from the pores of the town, and surely caused such a hateful beast as The Cruiser to be forged by otherwise decent men. I would plead my case to one of them now. I would ask him to destroy them all for me. No. For humanity.
I pulled into Bryan Nesbitt’s driveway and walked up the sidewalk to ring the doorbell. It was then that I saw it, through a side window in the garage.
He had done it again.
And just like Satan in my dark mid-July fever dreams, now it wore a bowtie.
#
tags: pt cruiser, chevrolet hhr, chevrolet, toyota, yaris, plymouth, chrysler
After the PT Cruiser incident, life was never quite the same. Food turned to ash in my mouth, and the laughter of my children rang hollow in my ears as I realized they shared the world with such an impure cosmic force, puppets to its foul machinations. A part of my being tried to break out from this funk, but it was unable to find much purchase in the world of the real. Or what I interpreted as real.
One early Saturday morning, I dropped an Altima Coupe on the alignment rack and began to work the drivers’ side tie rod lock nut in a blind haze, the muscle memory all that was keeping the husk of my body moving forward. My boss had been standing over me, yelling, for what he claimed was hours. I didn’t notice. My conscious mind had retreated into a corner, in the fetal position, gripping its knees and gently rocking, hoping its crude abuser would never return.
I heard him say suddenly - “PT Cruiser” - and I was on him like lightning. I elevated the inner tie rod wrench over his head like an ape at the zoo preparing to smash a melon, and from what he later said in deposition I glowered at him, eyes so dark he could glimpse one transitory fragment of my pain. It scared him. It scared me that it scared him. Suddenly I could smell urine, and I couldn’t tell if it was still the customer’s car.
I released my grip, and lowered myself, placing my back against the Altima Coupe’s nineteen inch alloys, feeling the rough texture of the curbing against my neck. I began to sob.
I was a normal man, once. I had reasonable desires, I felt empathy for my fellow man. I could identify the beautiful parts of a sunset and seeing the faces of my children brought tears to my eyes.
All that changed one night.
At the time, I was working in a hole in the wall repair shop in the bad-immigrants part of town, trying to make enough money to hit my rent payment. Maybe if I racked up enough hours, I hoped every time I talked to Tim, our “pit boss” - little Firestone joke there - I could even buy my kids one of those Gameboys or something. I was so innocent then.
A guttural metallic shudder, like the warning sign of a rattlesnake, swept up the block. Some part of my subconscious knew before I could comprehend, a survival trait passed down from my ancestors to keep me safe. But we lived in a modern era, where predators were gone. The rational part of my brain took over, made me stand my ground, made me look like a man. I wish I had listened to my lizard brain.
A 2002 PT Cruiser Limited rolled into the parking lot. The owner stepped out, and the faux-hot-rod styling shook on its moorings as the overstressed 2.0L DOHC dieseled itself to an uneasy sleep. I can still remember the sound those razor-sharp heat shields made now.
Detective, you had a chance to stop me shortly after all this happened. I tried to turn myself in.
A man I used to hang out with once said that a rotary engine was like a pump for turning dead dinosaurs into noise and not much torque. He was half right, I thought, as I lit up the mountain road.
In those days, I was a quality-control engineer for a small mining operation, and part of my job involved taking visits to distant rural neighbourhoods and evaluating them for purchase. The people who lived here, they’d have a bad roll at the roulette table, fall sick, over-leverage their homes, any one of a million things, and sell the family birthright to my employer as a step of last - or sometimes first - resort.
My job was to drive down the hundreds of dirt roads stretching across the state, like the spidered glass in a windshield after you hit a pedestrian, to visit these unfortunates during the worst days of their lives. And for that job, I needed something a little different. A little stranger. It wouldn’t do to turn up in just another corporate-stickered F150, they’d take you for a sucker, size you up as an agent of the corporation. I needed relative anonymity, but in a way that let me get my personality across.
My vessel of choice was a baby shit brown ‘87 RX-7 GXL, dug out of a scrapyard a decade previous and nursed back to health with a combination of my good taste and not knowing how to quit a lost cause. It was lifted three inches on subframe spacers and a further two inches on retrofitted Rancho twin-tube long-throw truck suspension, which gave what was left of the RX7 a menacing, war-torn appearance even before they noticed the piecemeal Grabbers beneath it, the tread lugs alternatingly cut out of the tire to give me that extra little edge on snow and ice. Huge xenon rally lights sat atop a chicken-wire-and-DOM pushbar and drew the eye away from the admittedly-undersized ATV winch bolted to it.
Coming around the last bend before the town, I dropped the long-throw gas pedal to the rapidly vibrating floorpan and was rewarded with the sound of a ball-bearing turbocharger racing to the moon as it force-fed the howling Dorito beneath the all-too-vented hood. The power bulge caught the edge of the morning sun just right, and I found myself blinking my eyes to clear sun blindness. All at once, the town of Sedalia unfolded before me, its main street straight as an arrow past the law offices of the man I was to visit. I could hear the General Grabbers start to howl against broken asphalt as the road surface switched from what the state government generously termed “unimproved” to what the town government generously termed “improved.”
As I pulled up to the town’s sole law office, I couldn’t help but catch a side glimpse in the gravel parking lot. That’s weird, I thought. That couldn’t have been a lifted Miata, could it?
I engage the remote door popper and wait for the sickening crunch of metal to reach my position. Years ago when I bought this Mercedes, I refused to repair the idiotic vacuum locks, and instead shaved the door and installed poppers. But yet, little girly fifty-pound door poppers for your mom’s Golf 4 weren’t enough for these massive heavy doors, and I was forced to upgrade. A trip to Princess Auto resolved that quickly enough.
With 1,800 pound hydraulic rams installed, the Grosser’s doors technically qualified as an area denial weapon under the Geneva Convention, and I was putting the theory into practice this frosty February morning.
A clap of thunder rocks the parkade, setting off nearby car alarms and causing angry owners to get up from their dinner tables.
The Journey next to the Grosser lies in ruins, its front subframe shorn from its moorings as the latter half of the unibody collapsed away from it. Seeing the waves of the finest American steel undulate across the frame does something horrible to me, and I blink to clear the rising tide of what I can only dimly identify as the flickers of my conscience. Somehow the windshield has popped fully intact from the collapsing A-pillars and lies immaculate on the hood, a silent witness to the lesson taught today.
THE CHRYSLER CONQUEST SPEAKS IN A GUTTURAL MOAN, REVIVING THE SPIRITS AND SPIRIT R/TS OF ITS IDEOLOGICAL LAND OF ORIGIN AS IT WRITHES IN AGONY TO ATTEMPT JUST ONE MORE REVOLUTION. FINALLY THE BIG ASTRON IS STOPPED, ITS LONG RODS JUST SHORT OF SEEING DAYLIGHT AS IT SEIZES, ONE PISTON OUTSTRETCHED TO HEAVEN, INTAKE VALVES REACHING IN OTHER CYLINDERS IN ANTICIPATION OF THE FUEL THAT WILL NEVER AGAIN WASH DOWN THEIR STEMS.
I SAY A SHORT PRAYER FOR THE DEPARTED ENGINE, AND IMMEDIATELY WALK DOWN THE BLOCK TO GET INTO ANOTHER ONE OF MY STREET-PARKED HOOPTIES. THE SCAVENGERS WILL COME FOR THIS ONE, I THINK, FOR SOME REASON COUNTING MYSELF ABOVE THEM.
THE NEW CAR IS A 2003 MAZDA PROTEGE, ALREADY PRODIGIOUSLY ROTTEN FROM THE WINDSHIELD OUTWARD. I THINK THAT THIS MAY BE A PARTS CAR, BUT MY RECORD KEEPING IS INCOMPLETE EVER SINCE I ACCIDENTALLY LEFT THE NOTEBOOK STUFFED WITH HALF-RABID SCRIBBLES BEHIND IN THE TRUNK OF A PARTICULARLY OFFENSIVE VOLARE THAT WAS SENT TO THE CRUSHER.
BEFORE I CAN BURP OFF A ONE-WHEEL-PEEL AND GET TO WORK, MY PHONE BLEEPS. KIJIJI BECKONS.
Saturday Classics: Megaton Crisis on Infinite Earths
When I first enlisted in the military, they told me that as part of my enlistment package I could choke two horses to death. I was halfway through choking the first one to death when I got a phone call. It was my shift supervisor, Mr. Emery, telling me that I was late for my job at the meat packing plant.
I got back into my car, at that point a 1989 Toyota Cressida with riveted-on orange panels from another Japanese compact saloon, and drove to the meat packing plant. Emery was waiting for me when I walked in to punch in for my shift. When I joined the military, they told me that I couldn’t ever tell anyone, not ever, about what I was doing for them. I had no excuse for Emery.
“Why are you so God damned late, you child-killing fascist?” asked the irascible Emery.
I refused to respond, merely staring into his eyes and feeling the rage grow inside me. I walked past him, saying nothing, and headed to my spot on the floor.
A bit of background: where I work in the plant, an iron grate is built into the floor in order to allow entrails of fresh-hewn meat to sluice through to the recycling/retainment bin. Occasionally, one of my pieces of costume jewelry would drop through and get caught in the byproducts bin, and then get sold to foreign meat markets. I honestly had no idea how many people had eaten my gold-plated plastic snake toe rings, but I figured it was more than “a few.” It didn’t matter; I was in the military now, and the only corporate malfeasance I cared about came from my subcontractor, Halliburton Death-Murder Patrol, Incorporated, a proud division of Halliburton Ethnic Cleansing LLC.
I pulled my hazard-orange iPod Classic from my webbed belt holster and set it to playing the best hits of the 1980s. The dulcet tones of the Pet Shop Boys filled my ears as the meat I was set to inspect began to slobber down the conveyor belt in front of me, triggering memories of my childhood. My dad was a coroner, you see, and so he would occasionally bring his work home with him, his briefcase bulging with postmortem amputated limbs and his glasses caked with the spray of overwork and the pride of a job well done. I was so envious of that commitment to work.
So there were these two big issues about work, I don’t know if I mentioned them earlier. The first big issue was that I was paid less than shit, which is why I went to work for Halliburton. The second big issue was named Steve, and he was a serial killer. We used to call him Evil Steve, and the glint in his eye always reminded me of that Halloween night when I fell into a snowbank and didn’t get rescued until the following April. Steve came downstairs from his position at the manager’s office, fixed me with his gaze, and then began to scream. They weren’t words so much as unintelligible screaming, but it was enough to set me off, and I turned on my heel to face him.
That’s when the lunch bell rang, and I broke for lunch. Still wearing my gore-stained meat working uniform, I walked to the Arby’s next door and ordered a platter of their El Mexicano Deluxium™ nachos, which always served to sate my hunger. You see, these nachos, I knew, used my meat byproducts as a base, and I was always personally very proud of them. This didn’t impress the many women I took to Arby’s on dates, however, so it never really helped my love life all that much.
I finished bolting down the rest of the Deluxium™ platter and then headed out to the parking lot, where I saw Steve parked in his clapped-out, navy blue 1986 MR2 Supercharged. It was missing its entire front grille and both hubcaps on the left hand side, and he was crying to himself, his head in his hands, with a platter of my nachos in his lap. It seems he had finally found the other piece of not-quite-costume jewelry I had lost last week.
I FORCE-INDUCE LABOUR WITH THE HELP OF TWO BEAUTIFUL ASSISTANTS NAMED WEIAND AND EATON.
BEFORE LONG MY MIDWIFE BUSINESS IS HIGHLY UPWARDLY MOBILE AS THE CONVERTED HUDSON WASP BARKS ITS REAR BUMPER OFF THE TARMAC TRYING TO REACH FOR THE SKY.
A LOT OF PEOPLE HAD BEEN ASKING FOR A “MORE NATURAL” BIRTH. A “CLEANER” BIRTH. A BIRTH THAT DIDN’T INVOLVE DOCTORS, MEDICINE, STERILE ENVIRONMENTS, SCIENCE, ET CETERA. THE ATTACHED LITERATURE WILL FILL YOU IN ON THE BACKGROUND.
PEDESTRIANS WALKING NEARBY FLINCH AS THE DEEP-DISH 22S ATTACHED TO MY RIDE SCRAPE THE CURB. IN MY HEART OF HEARTS, I KNOW THEY HELD THEIR SYMPATHY NOT FOR ME, BUT FOR THE CONCRETE.
IT IS NO MIND. I AM ALREADY ON FOOT, BARGING INTO THE HOME OF THE LUCKY NEW MOM, CAREFUL TO AVOID STRIKING THEIR FURNISHINGS WITH THE HIGH-TENSILE WINCH CABLE.
The pain in my side was incredible. I slid my back across the dented nerf bars of the Discovery, leaving a trail of thick blood in my wake.
It was a long time ago, and we were in Oman, handling a small squabble between local political leaders. At some point the small squabble had evolved to a full on insurrection, and mercenaries swooped down upon the country. Lord Shaftesbury and I were dispatched to take care of it. I felt an obligation to support the old man - in my youth, he was the one who saw something others didn’t, picked me out of an orphanage, put a gun in my hand.
Things went sideways pretty much immediately as we arrived at a small village on the shores of the Batha river, seeking a local militia to form into a serrated spearhead capable of brutal violence. The town mayor clearly didn’t like foreigners showing up in his sphere of influence, especially ones with damaged faces and dog-eared passports doubling as conflict-zone souvenir scrapbooks. Regardless of his opinion, the local reservoir was a tactically important zone and we took the political, civil and fiduciary liberties to secure it.
A couple weeks into - I still don’t like to call it an occupation, no matter what Wolf Blitzer says - our job, we had taken our ramshackle Land Rover down a once-forested, now-craggy trail to check in on a labour leader who had told us he learned of the rebellion’s nearby positions. This was the break we were looking for, and both of us were on high alert. If we weren’t, what came next would have been much worse.
I knew that the man who had set the trap for us was in the canopy above, most definitely with a high powered rifle trained on the opposite side of the Disco from me. The thin British sheet metal wouldn’t protect me from a direct hit, but from his angle he had little chance of figuring out exactly where I was. A warning shot rang out, punching the corroded front fender like an angry gorilla making a documentary. Two more, and then, one past my shoulder. Then silence. I had precious seconds in which to work, but was that magazine truly empty?
I pulled a road flare from the drivers’ footwell of the Discovery through one of its new exit wounds and threw it onto the ground, hoping to confuse any computer-aided scopes while I ran in the exact opposite direction. One more vicious shot rang out, dimpling the ground next to the flare. My ruse worked, and I was able to escape my immediate predicament.
Now that I could see the passenger side of the Discovery, I knew Shaftesbury was certainly dead. He hadn’t moved for several minutes now. I felt a deep pang of guilt, one I still carry today. Everything could have been different, but now was not the time to focus on that.
After several more minutes of tense agony, I was in the forest canopy with my sidearm drawn against the flat spot of the shooter’s skull. He began to laugh, a scraping, broken cackle, and without concern for his survival slowly turned to face me, my pistol scraping and bounding across his forehead as he did.
Mel Gibson. I should have known.
#
tags: batha river, oman, land rover, lord shaftesbury
THE WALMART CLERK ASKS ME IF I’M INTERESTED IN SIGNING UP FOR THE WALMART PREMIUM CREDIT CARD. I SHAKE MY HEAD NO. IT’S NOT A GOOD IDEA TO EXPAND MY CREDIT PORTFOLIO, I TELL HER, BECAUSE MY #1 EXPENSE IS SPRAYPAINTING HORSE TEETH WITH GOLD KRYLON BEFORE EPOXYING THEM ONTO A RESPIRATOR.
IT IS AT THIS MOMENT SHE AT LAST MAKES EYE CONTACT, AS SHE WAS TRAINED TO DO, FIGHTING EVERY NATURAL INSTINCT PROGRAMMED INTO HER FROM MILLIONS OF YEARS OF EVOLUTION. MY BATHROOM MIRROR AND I BOTH KNOW WHAT SHE SEES THERE.
SHE LOOKS AT ME WITH PURE HORROR, JAW DROPPED IN A GUT-WRENCHING SCREAM THAT CAN NO LONGER REGISTER IN THE FUNCTIONAL OCTAVE RANGE OF MY TYMPANIC MEMBRANE. MY MIND IMMEDIATELY PATTERN-MATCHES THE SPECIFIC EXPRESSION AGAINST MY ENDLESSLY DEEP DATABASE OF HUMAN REACTIONS AND FILES IT NEXT TO GHOSTLY IMAGES OF BROKEN FLEXPLATES.
MY SOCIAL REGRETS ALWAYS COME TO ME IN THE CAR, WHICH IS THE PERFECT PLACE TO PUT THEM OUT OF MY MIND BY SPINNING ANOTHER COUPLE THOUSAND REVS ONTO THE HAGGARD LS7 DRIVING THE REAR WHEELS OF MY BOMBED-OUT ‘76 SAFETY-ORANGE ASTON MARTIN VANTAGE.
THE OFFICER WHO PULLS ME OVER THIS TIME DOESN’T HAVE WORDS, AN INTERROGATION FOR ME. WHEN THE WINDOW ROLLS DOWN AND HE SEES MY FACE, HE JUST SCREAMS “HOLY SHIT” AND HURLS HIS TICKET BOOK AT ME. I LOOK ON IN SHOCK AS HE DIVES BEHIND HIS OUTSTRETCHED DRIVERS’ SIDE DOOR, VOCALIZING A VIBRANT PRAYER TO THE EFFICACY OF KEVLAR DOOR CARDS.
BEFORE LONG THE SHOULDER OF THE HIGHWAY LOOKS LIKE A CROWN VICTORIA CLUB MEET, INCLUDING THE DOUCHEBAG WITH THE FAUX-HAWK DOING POWERSLIDES. HE POPS HIS HEAD UP ABOVE HIS DRIVERS’ SIDE DOOR AS WELL, INTRODUCING HIMSELF AS DETECTIVE ERIKSEN AND ASKING ME HOW MY DAY IS GOING.
I CRANE MY HEAD OUT OF THE OPEN WINDOW AND SMILE, SWITCHING METAPHORICAL GEARS TO THE FULL HOW TO MAKE FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE AS I SWITCH LITERAL GEARS TO SECOND AND PRE-WARM THE CARBON FIBER CLUTCH AGAINST THE ENGINE’S LOPEY IDLE.
I ziptie the trigger down on the can of Febreze and hurl it through the closed drivers’ side window, shattering it into a million pieces. The hissing starts before it even hits the seat. Greek Seaside, I think. A classy choice.
When I first got out of prison, my parole officer asked me what I was going to do with my life. I told him something to do with cars. He frowned, and reminded me about the very tightly bound stipulation in my parole that I am not to own or operate any motorized vehicle producing greater than seventy-five brake horsepower. So my options were basically autocross superstar, or interior detailer.
The detailing shop pit boss, Trent, seemed pretty amenable to the concept of hiring me and my ex-con ways, but was sure to mention that he would be docking my pay a bit “to make sure I’m bondable.” I rolled my eyes, but accepted the job anyway. It was hard backbreaking work cleaning all the nooks and crannies of cookie-and-crayon laden Caravans, RX350s and crew-cab pickup trucks, but I went home at the end of the day to my one-bedroom apartment, satisfied with myself at having performed eight hours of honest work. Honest work, not like the before time.
I was halfway through scrubbing a carpet on a Tuesday morning when I got a call. It was Trent, and he was trapped across town after having made a customer pick-up. The car had broken down on the way back to the shop, and he needed a lift. He asked me to take the GT-R so he could get back to work quickly. I mentally flashed back to my parole officer.
Arriving at the scene, I found a Dodge Avenger drooling all of its coolant onto the road from a shattered lower radiator neck. Hit a rock, or an egret or something. Trent was livid, said I didn’t get there fast enough in the Mitsubishi kei truck we used to ferry detailing supplies around the back forty of the shop. Wanted to dock my pay some more.
On the entire way back to the shop, which was a fairly long period of time, Trent railed on me about his anger at my incompetence, my criminal behaviour, and the like. I was just about fed up, but was keeping it together. Then he threw his burning cigarette butt out the window.
I hit the brakes so hard the little Minicab lifted the rear end completely off the ground. Trent tumbled forward on the crude bench seat, striking the windshield. Started screaming at me, something indecipherable I could no longer hear through my red haze. Eventually we came to an agreement on my future employment.
“A real man doesn’t need more than seventy-five horsepower,” I said to Trent, “this electric winch is ½ HP and still seems to be doing a great job on your mouth.”
In the morning, I would often peruse the local Kijiji and Craigslist for ads written by drunks. Often they had posted their cars in a furious spate of regret, and I could sometimes snap my way through their hangovers to pick up the cars. But there was something odd happening.
I saw a series of WTB ads for cars that I had found eminently desirable but had never admitted to my significant other. Pretty much all of them were written in all caps, demanded salacious exposure of these hot automobiles to the ad writer. Described things in words, terminology, phrasing that seemed oddly familiar.
I started asking around, dropping hints in normal conversation with my car-guy friends, but those tastes were too freakish even for them. Laughs, people slowly backing away, mockery at the idea of owning a triple-supercharged RB26 Delorean. We had ourselves a genuine mystery on our hands, and I was going to get to the bottom of it.
I hadn’t been sleeping very well lately, a problem which I ascribed to the heat. One night I stayed awake all night, stirring in bed, back and forth. That morning, no WTB ads. I felt - oddly - lonely, like someone who truly understood me was gone as well. I didn’t put two and two together until later.
When the ads reappeared, I called the number immediately. I felt like I could turn this into a social call, get at least a tour of the guy’s garage, maybe some spare parts. No sooner did I push the green talk button, than I heard a strange sound. Following it to its source, I uncovered a heretofore-unknown Nokia tucked in the back of the couch, with hundreds of SMS messages on it. Creeped out, I put the phone back, but set out some improvised Lego caltrops in order to catch the interloper.
That night, I awoke standing in the middle of my own living room, reaching into the couch for the hidden Nokia, a stabbing pain in my foot. I was acting unconsciously on my secret fetishistic desires, something that the doctors later coined as car-guy sleepwalking.
It was chilling to think that my desire for odd cars was driven entirely by my limbic system, occasionally flaring to the conscious level and becoming actionable, but uncontrollable and aggressive beneath the surface. How could it be that there was something deep and reptilian roaming my mind that came out when my mind retreated into slumber at night? My thoughts raced, trying to connect the dots of weird occurrences and coincidences around the house that were now flatly explained by a plethora of hard evidence.
I looked out my front window and saw a lifted Mk2 Escort that I didn’t recognize idling in the driveway, its massive halogen beams burning the dust in my front foyer. Across the rear quarter window, in all caps, was a greasepaint sign reading “THE VOICE.”
That’s when I heard the sirens. My vision dimmed at the corners, and I felt faint.
I PUSH MY WAY THROUGH A THRONG OF POWER BUSINESSMEN ANGERED THAT THEY ARE STUCK IN THE SOCIALIST PARADISE OF COACH CLASS AND MAKE MY WAY TO THE BACK OF THE PLANE. THE FLIGHT ATTENDANTS TAKE UMBRAGE IN MY ACTIONS BUT THEY CANNOT STOP ME BEFORE I POP THE PROTECTIVE SEAL ON THE CARGO HOLD AND DESCEND BELOW DECKS.
THE REPTILIAN OVERLORDS CONTROLLING OUR GOVERNMENT HAD NO IDEA THIS IS COMING, I THINK AS I PEEL BACK THE PROTECTIVE BUBBLE WRAP ON THE PALLET. BENEATH IT IS MY VINTAGE IMPORTED DODGE BOULEVARD 3700 GT, A HELL BEAST SENT FROM AN ALTERNATE DIMENSION CALLED YOO-ROP.
MY BOULEVARD AND I HAVE A QUICK CONVERSATION THAT BASICALLY CONSISTS OF ME PUNCHING THE CARBURETOR IN THE FLOAT BOWL UNTIL THE FUCKING THING UNSTICKS. AFTER OUR DISCOURSE, I MASSAGE THE GAS PEDAL UNTIL THE BOULEVARD LEAPS FORWARD, RIPPING THE TOW HOOKS OUT OF THE CARGO HOLD’S TINNY CARAPACE AND ERUPTING FROM THE CARGO LOADING DOOR.
AS THE BOULEVARD DROPS THE LAST FEW HUNDRED METERS TO THE EARTH, I HAVE A SHORT MOMENT TO REFLECT UPON THE COURSE OF MY LIFE UP TO THIS SEQUENCE OF EVENTS. I FIND NOTHING WANTING, AND GRAB MY RESTRAINT STRAPS SO AS TO AVOID KNOCKING MY HANDS AGAINST THE INTERIOR CAGE WHEN THE NOSE FINALLY HITS.
FREE ON THE TARMAC, I LIGHT UP THE BOULEVARD’S REAR TIRES AND SWERVE INTO A RENTAL CAR LOT. THIS WILL LOSE THE NORMALS, I BELIEVE, AS THEY SEEM INCAPABLE OF DISTINGUISHING NOT ONLY TRIM LEVEL BUT MAKE AND MODEL AT A GLANCE. I FIND THAT INCOMPREHENSIBLE BUT ALWAYS TAKE ADVANTAGE OF IT, WEAVING PAST A LOT OF OTHER GREY MID-SIZE CARS THAT THE RENTAL ATTENDANT WILL IDENTIFY AS IDENTICAL TO MINE.
AS ALWAYS, I HAD COME HERE TO SETTLE THE SCORE, BUT ENDED UP MARKING UP NEW ONES ALONG THE WAY. NEVER MIND, I THOUGHT, PUNCHING THE THROTTLE ON THE BOULEVARD AND LISTENING TO ITS CACAPHONY OF LOOSE-ROD-BEARINGED V8 RESPOND IN A FURIOUS RATTLY BELLOW.
FAST AND THE FURIOUS 9 WAS OPENING, AND I WAS LATE FOR MY RESERVED TICKETS.
The year was 1999, and I was full of hope. My trusty Chevy S-10 SS and I got into all kinds of scrapes and adventures with Johnny Law and Timmy TruantOfficer-LockerSearches. Eventually the frame rot and road salt caught up with it and I had to sell it for $900 to an out of town drifter that turned out to be my dad, but that’s a story for another time.
This story, you see, is about what it takes to be a man. The S-10 wasn’t enough on its own to guarantee entry into the hallowed halls of true manhood. I would light it up on my small town’s only major cosmopolitan boulevard, feel like a big hero, but there was always someone with a bigger truck. Someone with a louder exhaust, one of them Magnaflows. But the quest persisted, often in odd ways.
One of the oddest ways I encountered was that of my friend Shifty Mike, who was a convenience store thief. He hadn’t upgraded to purestrain armed robbery yet - that would come a few years later, when I would dimly recognize his older face in the daily newspaper - but he was definitely competent at pickpocketing the entire candy aisle and escaping, nudie mags flapping out of his back pocket as he jumped into his rotten ‘64 Chrysler Imperial Crown and laid thick black elevens on the chew-stained macadam of the 7-11. Either way, I figured he had a lot to teach me about being a man, and I hesitantly agreed when he offered to take me hunting one crisp April weekend.
It was deer season, I remember, and I had Shifty Mike’s sixteen gauge shotgun, loaded with what I assumed at the time to be birdshot, but in reality was probably something more on the order of home defense Hevi-Shot, designed to protect your pumpkins and a man’s dignity. I steeled myself to wait, to claim a life, to become a man as my ancestors had once done.
The thing nobody tells you about hunting is that it’s incredibly boring. A few hours of waiting in the tree stand, and I was singing my favorite Rush lyrics to myself, half-remembered, in a sort of haze of pure boredom, the kind of which would be unimaginable in today’s smartphones and tablets age.
I heard a rustle. Then a banging. Then an explosion. I leapt from the tree stand and ran in the general direction, panting. This is where the action would be, I imagined, this is where I would get my man badge.
I saw Shifty Mike lying on his back, jacket half on fire, next to an invisibly burning methanol distillery. Fucking asshole had been making moonshine this entire time while pretending to be out on a hunting trip, and he’d duped me into standing guard near it, expecting his rival moonshiners to be scared off by the sight of an orange vested teenager one-handing a poorly made Chinese shotgun out of a tree stand. The plan was brilliant for Shifty Mike, even if it didn’t exactly move the needle on supervillain plans.
That’s when I had my epiphany.
Manhood, you see, was about exploiting the fears of others.
It was with that knowledge that I returned to the S-10 sitting forlornly in the parking lot of a nearby trailhead. I would show them all. I would build more cars.
Sometimes I wondered why they picked me for the job of head designer at one of the world’s most esteemed car companies. I wonder more frequently why they let me keep the job after I unveiled the Apex Predator.
I had reasoned, in initial design meetings, that what people really wanted was a car that was absolutely, unreasonably batshit. My boss nodded at every comparison to straight-blade shaving, running chainsaws one-handed without a guard, firing TEC-9s with the safety filed off in public debates for emphasis, and five-finger fillet. He even agreed with my overarching technical decisions. Before long, we discovered that his agreeable state was due to a combination of amyl nitrate and grain alcohol, but by then the product was on its way to dealerships.
The reviews were brutal. Consumer Reports claimed it was “undriveable” and the installation of a traction control system that only profanely taunted you in a synthesized voice before allowing you to crash was not going to endear it to the majority of American consumers. But I wasn’t looking for the majority of American consumers.
In the end, what the Apex Predator did was allow me to identify my fellow deviants, stepping out from their five-person message boards, Princess Auto parking lots and angle grinder collections into the bright sunlight, blinking in admiration while craning their necks to grab a vision of Detroit’s acknowledgment that they were okay. They were accepted. They were loved.
But it also let the government know about those deviants. A month after the first Apex Predator burst its way through a crowded suburban shopping mall, ripping a series of staccato misfires as the mandatory anti-lag kept the turbocharger on the boil, they clamped down and sent everyone with their names attached to a VIN to a special blacksite prison in Cuba.
I’m still sorry about that, you guys. But the traction control didn’t work.
“Bees ahead,” the roadside digital sign intoned, “roll up your windows.”
Having no windows - technically no top at all - in my International Scout II, I decided instead to close my eyes really tightly and then floor the gas. Before long, the street scoop atop my 6-71 blower was force feeding honeybees into the hungry three-lobe rotors, causing momentary detonation. It was worth it, though, as the Scout emerged on the other side of the swarm, emitting chunks of mulched up bee from the side exit exhaust.
The news was there. They wanted to know how I could deal with one of mankind’s most ancient enemies so gallantly, easily, trivially. I told them it was all due to modern electronic fuel injection and the majestic power of science. Someone, I still don’t know who, took my interview with the news and turned it into a YouTube techno remix focusing on chopping and screwing my autotuned voice as my bee-stained face flapped its gums in an almost-disembodied haze. It worked, I was famous. Beyond famous in that weird way that only 1960s pop stars and subway etiquette abusers in China are.
My odd quest continued. I had become “The Mulched Bee Guy,” touring the country and visiting high schoolers, teaching them about volumetric efficiency by chewing up entire hives full of bees with a desk-vise-mounted Eaton M90 and trying to liken it to their physics - or if they were religious schools, theory - classes.
At the end of one of my lectures, I think it was in Montana, but maybe South Dakota, the snow was falling outside the window. I caught a glimpse of a student’s reflection who had stayed behind to ask me more questions about science.
“Do you think,” they asked me, eyes wide with hope, “they will ever invent a transmission which can shift itself?”
“Absolutely not, Timmy,” I barked back. “Such speech is heresy.”
#
tags: mulched bees, international harvester, thirteen letter shit spreader
The man from Warner Brothers was livid.
“Can you believe this Confederate flag mumbo jumbo? My ancestors didn’t die for their right to earn slaves just for some hoity-toity academic to come out and tell me that I need to get rid of the flags from my movie props!”
I told him I had the situation well in hand.
And that’s how I ended up grinding the Confederate flags off the roofs of all the remaining General Lees by launching them through a Georgian shopping mall.
It wasn’t easy, but furthering the national discourse never is.
EVEN FROM MY RECLINING POSITION I CAN SEE THE HAIR BRISTLE ON THE BACK OF THE SNAP ON GUY’S NECK. SOME DEEP BURIED INSTINCT OF HIS PROTOSIMIAN ANCESTORS KNOWS THAT SOMETHING UNNATURAL AND HORRIBLE IS COMING HIS WAY, EVEN BEFORE THE BLOWER RIPS ITS WAY THROUGH A THROTTLE PLATE AND BEGINS INGESTING AIR AND NITROUS LIKE A DENTIST ON PCP.
STANDING OVER THE SHATTERED WRECKAGE OF THE IVECO I SHOULDER MY BOUNTY AND STEP ASIDE. THE POLICE RESPONDED AWFULLY QUICKLY, I THINK, BEFORE NOTICING A BEEPING AND FLASHING PANIC BUTTON ON WHAT REMAINS OF THE FAUX-LEATHER DASH.
BEFORE LONG, THE RUST ON MY HOOD IS TURNING BLUE AS I HIT THE PART OF MY SPEEDOMETER THAT USUALLY INDICATES THE COLLAPSE OF MENTAL FUNCTION IN ORDINARY FUNCTIONING ADULTS. THE CORE OF MY BEING, RETREATED INTO THE BACK OF MY MIND DECADES AGO, IS UNAFFECTED AND REMAINS FULLY CAPABLE OF PUTTING A POLICE PURSUIT CAPRICE THROUGH A TELEPHONE COMPANY SUBSTATION.
SAFE AT LAST, I STEP OUT OF THE BLOWN AND SLAMMED CITATION X-11 AND REMOVE MY PRIZE. THE SNAP-ON 3/8 INCH LITHIUM ION IMPACT DRIVER IS FINALLY MINE.
A COUPLE YEARS AGO A DOOR TO DOOR ENCYCLOPEDIA SALESMAN CAME TO THE DOOR. SUSPECTING HIM TO ACTUALLY BE A MEMBER OF THE FBI, NSA, CSIS, CSI OR WORST OF ALL NHRA I CLOSED THE DOOR AND IMMEDIATELY HIT THE BUTTON THAT ENGAGED THE “GHOST PROTOCOL.” IT’S CLASSIFIED WHAT THAT BUTTON ACTUALLY DOES AND I SUSPECTED THEN AS I DO NOW THAT THE SELLER OF THE GARAGE COMPOUND WAS PERHAPS A LITTLE MENTALLY UNSTABLE AND LIKED CARS TOO MUCH.
MY PRIMARY OBSERVATION: IN THIS CASE, THE BUTTON DID NOTHING IMMEDIATELY APPARENT.
THE DOOR TO DOOR ENCYCLOPEDIA SALESMAN TRIPPED OVER THE CURB ON THE WAY OUT AND TURNED HIS ANKLE. I COULD HEAR HIM SCREAMING FOR MERCY NOW AS HE ATTEMPTED TO CRAWL AWAY FROM MY COMPOUND, AND I REALIZED THAT THE NEIGHBORS WOULD SOON BE ALERTED.
THINKING FAST I PUSHED THE OTHER BUTTON, WHICH ACTIVATED THE GARAGE DOOR OPENER. TWO AND A HALF TONS OF PREMIUM GRADE TOLEDO IRON WAS EXPOSED TO THE SUNLIGHT, AND I JUMPED INSIDE THE DOORLESS 1985 COMANCHE, ADOPTING A SUIT OF ARMOUR ANALOGOUS TO MY ANCIENT DRAGON-SLAYING ANCESTORS.
When I came to Hooker Hole, Louisiana, a few months ago, I didn’t expect the townspeople to accept me as one of their own. They had eccentricities, sure, they had novel hangout locations and little secret societies and a general store that was open by appointment only. But I grew to love it, and I had hoped that my new neighbors would warm up to me once they saw the love I had in my heart for the Hole.
I had inherited the local lawnmower machine shop when I first came to town. The former machinist owner of the shop was still missing, crude black and white photocopies of his drivers’ license picture blown up and tacked on the walls of the general store, the old mill, the bar.
I knew that the townspeople probably suspected me, but this is one of the few times I hadn’t destroyed a man’s life with a car in order to get what I wanted in the short term. Mostly because I had no car.
As I worked late into the evening one night on my magnum opus, I heard a jingling and footsteps outside the thin corrugated-steel walls. Pulling out my Harbor Freight “Earthquake” impact wrench for protection, I hit the button that engaged the three-hundred-thousand lumen LED lights surrounding my properly. A man screamed from outside, and I stepped out to see a quivering lump, the fetal position, in the grass.
He was the previous owner, he explained, and this was his shop. He had just gone off on a bender, gotten lost in the next town over after mouthing off to some rural toughs. He escaped from their suicide-cult bunker after they all drank the Uplifting Fluid, which he conspiratorially told me with a wink may have just been the entire reserves of their spare lamp oil. I knew now that this man was playing the future version of my life, and had probably come here under similar circumstances.
I invited him into my - his - house, and we sat and talked long into the night. Hours into our conversation, we determined that the best course of action was to leave the tri-state area and put as many miles between him and the pursuing detectives as possible. It turns out when you massacre a suicide cult, it’s still illegal in Obama’s America.
We went into the back room and pulled a dust cover off the MacGuffin. Underneath the cover was seven point five three liters of angry side oiler. As I engaged the underhood starter, I grinned as the twin turbochargers sucked their first gasp of confused air into their angry vortices. The Futura shook under the load.
I barely had a chance to look at my newfound partner before everything went dim. When I awoke, the Fairmont and the lawnmower repairman were gone. I grimaced, rubbed my head, and engaged the remote car starter for the backup plan.
In the yard outside, buried beneath ground cover, I could just dimly hear the sound of a supercharger belt squeal.
I VIOLENTLY DOWNSHIFTED THE BAJA BUG, MAKING THE CLUTCH THROWOUT ROD BOUNCE ANGRILY INSIDE THE OVERLOADED TRANSMISSION AS IT WAVERS ON WORN BEARINGS. I SWORE INWARDLY - EVERY OUNCE OF POWERTRAIN TORQUE I COULD MUSTER HAD TO BE DEDICATED TO FORWARD MOTION OR THIS WAS GOING TO BE A REALLY SHORT TRIP.
LAUNCHING OFF THE HANDICAP ACCESS RAMP, I MOMENTARILY GOT AIR, THE HALF-INCH ALUMINUM SKIDPLATE SCRAPING THE TOP OF THE MALL FOUNTAIN BEFORE THE COMPELLING FORCE OF GRAVITY RETURNED MY AIR-COOLED DEATH WAGON TO THE LOVING EMBRACE OF MOTHER EARTH. I WORKED THE WHEEL LIKE STEAMBOAT WILLIE, CRANKING THE BUG UP ON TWO WHEELS AND PLOWING THROUGH THE PLATE-GLASS DISPLAY WINDOW OF AN ELECTRONICS BOUTIQUE.
SALESPEOPLE, STANDEES AND COSPLAYERS ALIKE SCATTERED FOR COVER, SCREAMING IN THEIR ALIEN TONGUE IN ANGER AT MY INSOLENCE. I REALIZED THAT I HAD MADE A GRIEVOUS ERROR IN JUDGMENT, AND PINNED THE THROTTLE IN REVERSE HARD ENOUGH TO DO AN AXLE-TRAMP BURNOUT (930 CV SHAFTS WERE A GREAT UPGRADE, I THOUGHT AT THE TIME) THAT LAUNCHED THE STORE MANAGER INTO THE AIR, PULLING THE CARPET OUT FROM UNDER HIM LIKE A DRUNKEN CHILDREN’S BIRTHDAY MAGICIAN.
I COULD HEAR THE TINKLING NOW AS FAUX BRICKWORK TUMBLED FROM THE DESTROYED STOREFRONT ONTO THE CRUDELY WELDED BULL BAR. NO MIND, I THOUGHT, THE PAINTWORK ON THIS THING IS PERFECT JUST THE WAY IT IS. I PULLED THE HANDBRAKE AND WHIPPED THE FUHRER’S CAVALIER INTO SHAPE AS ANOTHER RUN THROUGH THE GEARS BECKONED.
THE BUG CRUSHED THE IMMACULATE TILE UNDERFOOT AS I RAN DOWN THE SECURITY GATES TO A LOCAL HUDSON’S BAY, POWERSLID THROUGH WOMEN’S FASHION, AND FINALLY SMASHED THROUGH THE GRAND ENTRANCE, DRAGGING HALF OF HOUSEWARES BEHIND ME. IN THE PARKING LOT, I CURSED MY IDIOCY. HOW COULD I HAVE DONE SOMETHING SO RECKLESS?
I was on the morning news - of course I was - I was the new weatherman, you see. I had shown up for the weatherman auditions that morning and since nobody else showed up - there was a typo in the Facebook post maybe? I don’t know - I got the job. Again, I was the new weatherman for KXLT Channel 6, the number-eight news cast in the tri-city area.
My boss Ted called me in almost immediately. My job was to pick up the ratings. I needed to pull the station around. At first they had wanted a “regular” weather man. Someone normal, to reassure them about the weather, someone they could relate to, imagine at their kitchen table or even in their bed. But the station owner saw me, and immediately demanded a change of course. I was to be the leading edge of what he called “weird weather,” in between hits of what I imagined to be immensely high-quality cocaine.
Ted, of course, wasn’t happy at the perversion of his journalistic ethics in exchange for ratings, especially when it was going to be me up on camera. He had tried once, wasn’t weird enough, didn’t have a hook, couldn’t cut it in local television news as the talent. Had to support the talent. It ate him up inside, I would later realize, as I caught him throughout the day taking nips of fingers of whisky between meetings when he thought nobody was looking.
But that first day was something magical.
I got up on stage, stood in front of the blue screen - partially out of frame, of course, I didn’t know I had to stand on the “X,” and described in an unbroken monotone the current state of atmospheric conditions over the tri-city area. Then something broke inside me. The electricity of show business filled my veins. I pointed to the cameraman, told him to come in close because there was something going on. Something with the economy.
I hit all the key words that people had trained themselves to hear from a real newscast, but I strung them together in a string of high pitched, high speed squealing that they wouldn’t understand upon close reading. I ended the weather cast by speaking in tongues, telling the watchers to strap on their thunderstorm diapers and finally ordering the execution of a local politician to appease me.
When I got back to my office, the phone was ringing off the hook. Channel 6 had cut to a live broadcast of the hated local politician being sacrificed in the town square. What had I unleashed?
Twenty years later, I was still wondering, sitting atop my throne of skulls. It turned out all that people ever wanted was a weatherman to lead them.
I UNLOCKED THE SYRUP VAULT, SHIFTING AWKWARDLY FROM SIDE TO SIDE, ALLOWING THE SQUISH OF MY DR. SCHOLL’S PROTECTIVE INSOLES TO CALM MY RAGGED NERVES.
HERE, AT LAST, I HAD FOUND WHERE IT HAD BEGUN. HERE, ALSO, WAS WHERE IT WOULD END.
A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO, THE HIGHLY TRAINED COMMANDO UNIT THAT I WORKED FOR HAD BEEN TAKEN PRISONER DEEP BEHIND ENEMY LINES. WE WERE TOLD TO WORK FOR THE JAPANESE ON AN EXOTIC NEW “CONVENIENCE STORE” CONCEPT. BEING ONLY TRAINED PREVIOUSLY ON INCONVENIENCE STORES, OUR EARLY DEMONSTRATIONS WERE INEFFECTIVE, AND OUR CAPTORS SAVAGELY BEAT US. STEVE “NIPPLES” HEMINGWAY WAS THE FIRST TO DIE, HIS RICKETS-STRICKEN FACE FROZEN IN A GRIMACE THAT I WILL REMEMBER TO THE LAST OF MY DAYS.
FINALLY WE DEVELOPED THE SLURPEE TECHNOLOGY AND OUR WEAPONIZED SLUSH PRODUCT BECAME THE CORE COMPONENT OF 7-11 CONVENIENCE STORES AS THEY BEGAN THEIR MARCH OF GLOBAL DOMINATION.
WHEN THE WAR ENDED AND I HAD ESCAPED, I PUT TOGETHER WHAT I COULD, AND SET OUT ON A GOAL FOR REVENGE.
THE 7-11 BATTALION WAREHOUSE HAD BEEN WELL GUARDED, BUT IT WAS NOTHING THAT A SERIES OF RUBBER BULLETS FIRED FROM THE MIRROR-MOUNTED TWENTY-FIVE MILLIMETER CHAIN GUNS ON MY 1967 VISTA CRUISER BATTLE WAGON COULDN’T FIX. THROUGH A SERIES OF CAR CHASES, NEAR MISSES AND DEATH-DEFYING STUNTS I HAD BARGED INTO THE CENTRAL RESEARCH OFFICE ATOP A BURNING STEED SHOD IN GENERAL GRABBER AT2S AND STEPPED OUT BEFORE THE VAULT.
INSIDE, I KNEW, WAS HUMANITY’S GREATEST TREASURE, THE SOURCE OF INFINITE POWER. THE LAST GENUINE BAG OF “NEW COKE” SYRUP FROM THE NINETEEN-SEVENTIES. IT IS SAID THAT IN EXCHANGE FOR ITS SAFE RETURN, THE PRESIDENT OF COCA COLA WOULD GRANT ITS HOLDER THREE WISHES.
WHEN WE WERE IMPRISONED, I TOLD MY COMRADES, ONE DAY I WOULD ESCAPE AND GIVE THE NEW COKE WISHES AT MY DAUGHTER’S WEDDING, A FINAL LEGACY FROM AN ABSENT FATHER.
HOWEVER, HAVING SPENT ALL OF MY TIME AND MONEY BOLTING CRIMINALLY POWERFUL SUPERCHARGERS ONTO ALREADY OBSCENELY OVERPOWERED V8 ENGINES, I REMAINED CHILDLESS AT AGE FIFTY-TWO.
I FIRED THE REMOTE TRIGGER ON THE WINCH AND PULLED THE SYRUP VAULT WIDE OPEN. WHAT I SAW NEXT SHOCKED ME MORE THAN A BUZZFEED ARTICLE, AND THAT’S NOT EASY.
STANDING INSIDE THE EMPTY VAULT WAS ONLY STEVE “NIPPLES” HEMINGWAY, POINTING A REVOLVER AT MY FOREHEAD.
I got the contract to write the next 50 Shades of Grey book but they told me that I needed to go back to prison after I turned in the first draft which was a Tolkienesque tome containing extensive description of the fabric weave pattern in the captain’s chair in the 1979 Winnebago Brave that landed with an audible and visceral thud on the editor’s desk.
So obviously I needed to shop around and find another publisher for my work, just change a few of the names. Also cut out the complex subplot inside Home Depot that was dedicated to trying to find the correct size metric bolts before breaking down in tears and having to buy a tap set that would re-tap the rivnuts - against all common engineering advice how dangerous and sexy - to an inferior SAE fastener spec. Needless to say, it wasn’t my original work anymore.
Stunned and alone, I went onto the Kindle store. On the best-sellers list was I Got Anally Penetrated By The Abstract Concept of Anal Penetration In A Zoo. I immediately hammered the upload button.
I always wondered where that weird hole in my stucco came from. But I was getting closer to the truth with every passing day.
When I first bought this house, I had a home inspector come by prior to the final signing of the mortgage. Everything was in order, like you’d expect. The usual kind of problems with stucco, grout, wiring not to code, poor drainage. But then at the bottom of the inspection report he wrote “weird hole.”
I called his office, but the line was disconnected. Over the following weeks, his screaming and crying family would blanket the local and (for a brief time) national airwaves wondering where he had gone, demanding that his captors release him.
A few months into ownership I decided to get the house painted. I called the university-student painting service, not wanting to spend a lot of money, but not wanting to do it myself either. I picked an off-white eggshell colour, which would blend into the neighborhood better, maybe reduce my NIMBY threat rating from “high” to “guarded.” Either way, a squadron of university students showed up and started painting, but again, at the end of the day, one of them was missing. He was the one that was supposed to be handling the exterior stucco wall with the weird hole in it.
I had made a grevious mistake, I assume, and now there were witnesses. The police were called, set up a protective cordon around my house. Investigated. Interviewed my neighbors, who let their deepest and most ridiculous suspicions of me come to light. I felt imprisoned in my own home, an outsider.
Eventually they came to take me to jail. My court trial was short, considering the plethora of evidence the police forensics teams had found around my home and area. They couldn’t pin it on me directly, but somehow my lawyer failed to protect me. I think he suspected what they did. If I didn’t do something, I was going to go down for this.
In jail, I met with my lawyer one last time. I pleaded with him to investigate the weird hole, handed him the newspaper clippings from coverage of the disappearances.
At the end of our conversation, barely choking back a wry smile, I invited him to look at the weird hole himself.
Once I had a boss who laughed at Dilbert comics that he had printed out and taped to his office door. Eventually I got fed up, and told him, no, you’re suppposed to be this guy, and tapped gently on the pointy haired boss mid-harangue.
He started screaming. He didn’t stop, even after I got up and left his office and closed the door behind me.
I came back the next day and he was still in there, face contorted in terror, the same clothes, a little more unshaven. Still screaming.
At the time, I was driving this little ‘79 MGB GT, one of the last ones they ever made. British-Leyland build quality didn’t do the Lucas electrics any favours, and of course I was late to work quite often.
I began to fantasize about leaving a moped in the underbrush about halfway through my 15-kilometer commute, so that at least I would have mechanized transport to carry me further in the event of any future Fish & Chips Car Illness. I knew, however, that the moped would rot in the bushes while the MGB glowered and ticked endlessly onward, out of jealousy and blind anger, at the concept that I would think myself one step ahead of the unearthly power of bad British cars.
Detente impossible, we continued our daily competition, the MGB racking up the points whenever it lost idle with the left turn signal on, me evening the score when I left it outside to get hailed on during that heady summer. In a very real way, when I reflect upon it now, I realize it was similar to what I was doing in my work life. My boss, too, would treat our power dynamic as a competition, trying to place work he didn’t want to do on my nose and watch me clean it off.
The previous night, I had finally cured one of the MGB’s most persistent irritants. There was an ancient wiring harness hanging down through the firewall, and the grommet had rotted in such a way that it became permanently part of the wire’s insulation. Not wanting to touch the problem, but somehow demanding to myself that I must, I did a quick crimps-and-beer repair job and fired the car back up. It worked. I was elated. Hooked, even. I quickly resolved to solve all of the other problems in my life, to enjoy that sense of success again.
That morning, I pulled into my assigned parking spot, one wheel squealing thanks to the open diff as I took an aggressive airplane loop around an errant bicyclist to line my approach up perfectly, and walked directly into my boss’ office, an unbroken stride of sheer confidence. After I dropped the Dilbert bomb on him, I walked back out.
I was going to leave this job, walk out and never look back. Just me and the MGB GT from now on. I was going to be free, not require any other man. I was going to be my own man, be successful, live off the land.
ALL EXISTING CAR PROJECTS ARE NOW ON HOLD. THE ONLY REMAINING PROJECT: PUTTING A ROOTS BLOWER THE SIZE OF A BUBBA KEG INTO THE HOOD OF A 1977 CELICA ST AND DOING A SAVAGE SMILEY-BUMPER BURNOUT THE LENGTH OF AN SI-STANDARD FOOTBALL FIELD IN FRONT OF A MOTORCYCLE COP, WHO DOFFS HIS HAT, LOWERS HIS RADAR GUN AND GOES GOD DAMN IN REACTION AS I SWING THE WHEEL HARD RIGHT, ASPIRATING THE REAR TIRES INTO WHAT CAN ONLY BE DESCRIBED AS A CHOKING HAZE OF PURE AWESOMENESS. ALL WOMEN INVOLVED BECOME SPONTANEOUSLY PREGNANT WITH MY GENETIC MATERIAL
IN AN ALTERNATE DIMENSION AN INTERNATIONAL HARVESTER SEVEN POINT TWO LITER TURBO DIESEL IS LOWERED TO FIT BETWEEN THE CHILD BEARING HIPS OF THE CELICA TO THE DEGREE THAT IT BLOATS THE FRONT FENDERS OBSCENELY, WHICH ARE IMMEDIATELY CHOPPED AND HOLE-SAWED TO FIT THE MULTIPLE LAKE PIPES, BREATHING HOT FIRE INTO THE ATMOSPHERE AMIDST A BED OF CLOYING SMOG
LAZY FIREBALLS ROLLING INTO THE AIR, RIDING ON A CLOUD OF FUEL VAPOUR INTO THE FACES OF ASSEMBLED SCHOOL CHILDREN AS I IDLE THROUGH THEIR PLAYGROUND ZONE UNTIL THEIR SCREAMING AND CLAMORING REACHES A FEVER PITCH AS I IGNITE THE ENTIRE DRIVETRAIN OF THE CELICA IN A WARBLING HOWL OF CRASHING METAL, SPLASH-OILED GEAR ENGAGEMENT AND THE CREAKING OF MIDDLE-AGED RUBBER BUSHINGS IN A BURNOUT THAT NASA QUALIFIES LATER AS “THE SINGLE MOST CATASTROPHIC MAN MADE CLIMATE EVENT IN RECORDED HISTORY.” I AM INVITED TO GIVE A SPEECH AT THEIR ANNUAL AWARDS DINNER.
#
tags: toyota, celica, international harvester, thirteen letter shit spreader
Most of my fun when playing golf comes from driving the cart, I reflect, barrelling through the pro shop with my nitromethane-fired Briggs. Caddies and pros alike scatter, finally equalized under the threat of an external aggressor, as the chromoly tube frame bumper bites into the throw carpet under hard braking as I bus-steer the ship around, pointing it directly at the foremost plate glass window, and pin the throttle.
Angry barks emanate from behind me, both from the de jure citizenry of this fine country club and the now-overwhelmed Briggs, its ridiculously overbored diaphragm carburetor vibrating so quickly at the demand for aspirated fuel that the entire gas tank is fighting its mounts. The Cub Cadet (Model 70, of course, who do you think I am, a poor?) frame harmonizes with it as the fiberglass replica panels shake at the extent of their dzus connectors. Holding back 175 wheel horsepower on any lawn tractor is no mean feat, but the Cadet does it admirably.
Stepping out of the cart, shod in reflective safety orange tartan, I arrive at the green perfectly coiffed beneath a jaunty golf cap. Naturally, I apologize to the players who are already there. My ball went a little wide, I explain, and I just had to come over here and play it as it lays. I hear throats clear, and some rumbling about what is to be done about this infuriating gearhead rabble.
“Fore!” I scream, as I nail a line drive directly through the heretofore-unbroken pro shop’s windows, perfectly restoring my game to the fairway of the hole I was playing.
When I returned to my own game, they were waiting for me, standing atop the origin of a 250-foot-long divot which was produced by the Cadet’s launch control module’s heinous but mathematically sublime burnout. How was I going to set FTD with them standing in the way now?
I turn the traction control up from “firing squad” to “menthol cigarettes” as I lean out the drivers’ side window and prepare to aim my mirror-mounted grappling hook.
My team of rascals had been summoned to the south of France, to find and stop a rogue general who had gone AWOL with top-secret military information. After a period of montages, we assembled a team and powerful automobiles, both of them forged in combat and twisted by pure will into something more than their parts.
Hard on the rear bumper, I drew the fleeing Panamera up in the braking zone and then forced the driver to take a wide angle to avoid running off the road. The glint from the grappling hook’s sight bead caught me in the eye, momentarily distracted me, and I fired before having the best grip. The hook smashed through the drivers’ side $7500-retail-priced LED tail light, but failed to gain purchase in the voluminous yet underappreciated hatch area.
My dangerously vibrating passenger side wing mirror began to flash a blind spot warning as my partner pulled alongside in the corner, his built FD RX7 wailing to the redline with a sound not unlike tearing paper in a blast furnace. He, too, fired his grappling hook, this time puncturing the $11,550 rear bumper skin and causing immense damage to the $25,610 array of parking alert sensors and their attached $1,350 biodegradable wiring harness.
I wound the grappling hook back in as the corner straightened out, swinging the FD into the front right fender of my ‘68 Ranch Wagon, sending a featherlike black mist of carbon fiber shards into the air. The Panamera hit the gas, its huge turbos spooling and then launching into the distance like an SR-71 with rabies.
It had no real chance. I chuckled as I cranked the boost controller up, the Ranch Wagon screaming and biting at the road as the sheer torsional force attempted to rotate the chassis around its mid-mounted twin-supercharged LS7. The Panamera’s entire rear end disappeared beneath the bullbars and I felt the impact shudder through my spine as countless hundreds of thousands of dollars of maintenance visits flashed through my victim’s face.
I drew the grappling hook again and fired, latching through the shattered carcass of the Porsche directly into the rear seat’s structural support. Both of us slammed on the brakes while dropping the cars into reverse, dragging the Panamera down to its death with the tension strength of the behemoth grappling hook cables. Before long, the Panamera’s engine surrendered, sending out a shuddering death gasp that ruptured the transfer case and threw chains across the highway.
I pulled myself out of my car and walked coolly to the general’s stricken ubermobile.
That’s how we ended up on the run, because it turns out that stolen government secrets buy a lot of car parts. At dealership prices, even.
The wrecker sales agent gives me some static. I can dimly hear a dog begin to bark, out of fear, on the other end of the line.
They say dogs can sense a natural disaster before it happens, which is half true. there’s nothing natural about the Trans Am Turbo as I one-arm it around the gravel lot of their sales trailer, shooting gravel and tire belts like machine-gun fire through the plate glass windows with superhuman accuracy.
Before long, I’ve found my quarry for myself and lowered it into the almost-voluminous hatch of the Turbo. Placing my hand upon it, I can swear I feel a life inside it. I look in the rear view mirror: illuminated by the flashing LED strobes of the entire city police department is the workaday block casting of a Viper V10.
A very long time ago I stood over a dead mod motor’s body and pulled the trigger until it clicked. It was finally over. I had fulfilled my life’s B-plot by successfully pre-emptively breaking all eight spark plugs. There would be no surprises held in this one that a 300 ft-lb Harbor Fright earthquake rattle gun burst couldn’t tease out. I removed what was left of the plugs, in comfort, my mind settled.
I was starting to recline on the Harley-Davidson branded hydraulic reclining creeper, purchased a month previous from an estate sale, still in its plastic wrap, when my assistant burst into the room. Jaw agape and eyes flapping, he implored me to take a look in the parking lot and see what had happened.
You could have taken this scene and transplanted it into any shop forecourt, any garage condo’s mistakes bin, or any tire shop’s alignment rack. But it was happening to me.
The sight of it made me sick to my stomach. A Chrysler PT Cruiser was awaiting service, and the owner stood over it proudly, like a protective hawk.
THE JUNIOR TIRE SHOP ATTENDANT SHRIEKS IN TERROR AS I PULL IN, STARK WHITE WITH FEAR FOR WHAT I HAVE DONE TO HIS ADOPTIVE CHILDREN.
I THROW MY KEYS AT HIM WITH A POINTED NONVERBAL THREAT ABOUT THE CURRENT STATE OF THE (LARGELY INACCURATE) ODOMETER, AND STORM ACROSS THE LOT TO PICK UP THE OTHER CAR, NOW FRESH FROM SERVICE WITH THE FINEST PURESTRAIN CHINESIUM THAT THEIR TIRE MINES CAN PROVIDE.
THE DUSTER FIRES UP LIKE NOTHING HAPPENED, AND I IMMEDIATELY GRIND THE FACES OFF THE FRESH TIRES TO GET OFF ON THE RIGHT FOOT. I MEAN BUSINESS, I SAY TO THE CARCASSES BY WAY OF A WATER CRACK IN THE MACADAM, AND I INTEND FOR YOU TO MEAN IT TOO.
TRAFFIC PARTS AS I ONE-HAND BUS-STEER THE DUSTER INTO RUSH HOUR TRAFFIC AND FLARE THE THROTTLE, STEPPING THE REAR END OUT AMIDST A CLOUD OF TIRE SMOKE AND NOVELTY FIREBALLS FROM THE EPA-CRUSHINGLY-OVERRICH FUEL SYSTEM. I HAVE A LOT OF TIME TO MAKE UP ON THIS TRIP, I THINK, AS I SIGHT IN THE OFFRAMP BETWEEN THE ARMOR PLATING ON THE WINDSHIELD AND CRANK THE WHEEL, PINKY FINGER EXTENDED OUT OF PROPRIETY, INTO A LUDICROUS BUT PLEASINGLY GEOMETRIC FOUR WHEEL DRIFT.
THE FAMOUS CANADIAN NOVELIST ROBERTSON DAVIES IS STANDING IN THE LOBBY OF MY SHOP WHEN HE PULLS OUT HIS STOPWATCH AND ADDRESSES THE ASSEMBLED GENTRY.
“I CAN TOO CIRCUMNAVIGATE THE GLOBE IN 80 DAYS,” HE SHRIEKS, SEEMINGLY TO NOBODY, THEN TURNS AND BOLTS FOR MY HAREM OF $500 BEATER RALLY CARS. I REALIZE THAT I HAVE LEFT THE KEYS IN THE CARS, MOSTLY BECAUSE I WOULD OTHERWISE HAVE RUN OUT OF ROOM IN MY MODEST LIVING SPACE FOR THINGS THAT ARE NOT CAR KEYS.
BEFORE LONG THE TWO OF US ARE ON THE HIGHWAY. MY STEED THIS WEEK IS A 1979 FORD FAIRMONT WAGON. THE CAMMED LS7 BENEATH THE COPIOUS HOOD (”THE RANCH”) PROVIDES SUFFICIENT MOTIVE POWER FOR ME TO CLIP THE REAR BUMPER OF DAVIES’ BLOWN DRAG NEON, AND OUR CARS SPIN DOWN THE OFF-RAMP, LOCKED TOGETHER, IN A TEARJERKING CHAOTIC BALLET.
DAVIES HITS THE SHOULDER FIRST, BREAKS FREE WITH A SICKENING RIP OF UNIBODY AND JAMS ON THE GAS. IT’S NOT HIS FIRST TIME DOING THIS, I REALIZE, AS THE NEON QUICKLY BECOMES A DOT ON THE HORIZON.
YEARS LATER, I HEAR A CHIRPING ABOVE ME AND OUTSTRETCH MY HAND AS AN AMAZON DRONE FIRES A HOT NEWSPAPER WITH LASER PRECISION INTO IT FROM A MILE AWAY. THE HEADLINE IS “FAMOUS CANADIAN NOVELIST ROBERTSON DAVIES RETURNS FROM INTERNATIONAL TRIP.” THE SUBHED IS “CREDITS DODGE NEON FOR SUCCESS.” THE PICTURE IS OF THE ESTEEMED LITERATUS RECEIVING HIS OVERSIZED COMEDY CHEQUE FOR EXACTLY FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS.
MADE ME SICK TO MY STOMACH. I COULDN’T PASS THE SKILL TESTING QUESTION WHEN I TRIED IT LAST YEAR.
BETWEEN JOBS, I DECIDED TO APPLY TO A WANT AD. AFTER WATCHING “DA VINCI CODE, THE” TWICE ON THE PLANE OVER, I ACED THE INTERVIEW. THEY TOLD ME I WAS GOING TO BE THE YOUNGEST AND MOST PROFESSIONAL POPE EVER, BUT TO KEEP IT UNDER MY (NOW AUSPICIOUSLY LARGE) HAT UNTIL THEY COULD MAKE THE FORMAL ANNOUNCEMENT.
MY FIRST STOP? THE VATICAN GARAGE, OF COURSE. I GOT THEM TO START WORK IMMEDIATELY ON MY NEW COMPANY CAR. ITALIAN WASN’T MY FORTE (SOMETHING THAT WAS SUPPOSED TO GET CHANGED DURING MY PAPAL REIGN) BUT MY HAND GESTURES AND MOUTH NOISES MANAGED TO GET IT ACROSS TO THE ASSEMBLED MECHANICS WELL ENOUGH.
A FEW MONTHS PASSED, AND SUDDENLY THE PAPERS WERE ABUZZ. THE NEW POPEMOBILE WAS FINISHED, AND A SPY PHOTOGRAPHER HAD CAUGHT IT ON THE NURBURGRING. I LEAPT FROM MY BED, STORMING TO THE VATICAN GARAGE, THROBBING WITH ANTICIPATION FROM MY ENORMOUS HAT DOWN TO TO MY POPE-SIZE TRAINERS.
IT WAS BEAUTIFUL. AND IT WAS MINE.
WHERE ONCE AN ALFA ROMEO MONTREAL HAD SAT, NOW SAT A POPEMOBILE. TWISTED TO WRETCHED EXCESS, THE PEARLESCENT WHITE PAINTJOB WAS ALREADY BROWNING FROM THE TRANSCENDENT HEAT PUMPED OUT BY THE TWO HOOD-MOUNTED SIXTY SEVEN MILLIMETER BALL BEARING TURBOCHARGERS THAT DOMINATED WHAT WAS LEFT OF THE FORWARD VISIBILITY.
IN AN HOMAGE TO THE FAITHFUL PROSTRATING THEMSELVES BEFORE THEIR LORD, I MADE THE TURBOCHARGERS AT A SLIGHT CANT, BOWING TO THE IMMENSE NINE LITER BLOWER STICKING BETWEEN THEM, TOUCHING THE SKY IN A HOLY INCARNATION.
IT WAS DIFFICULT FOR THE CAR TO FIT ENTIRELY IN THE SQUALID GARAGE, I NOTED WITH SOME DISDAIN. THE TWIN-DAMPER TROPHY TRUCK SUSPENSION LIFTING THE ITALIAN ROCKET CLOSER TO OUR LORD, ABOVE ITS HUMBLE THIRTY-FIVE-INCH KEVLAR WRANGLERS CUT SOME OF THE ROOF CLEARANCE.
I COULD HEAR THE HARPS SING AS THE SUN SHOT GORGEOUS BEAMS THROUGHOUT THE RICKETY BACK ALLEY GARAGE. TRULY A MIRACLE HAD BEEN PERFORMED ON THIS DAY.
THAT’S WHEN I FELT A TAP ON MY SHOULDER AND TURNED AROUND TO SEE A PINK SLIP. I HAD BEEN FIRED AS POPE. I GLOWERED WITH ANGER WHEN I SAW MY REPLACEMENT MAKE A “SPECIAL HUMANITARIAN VISIT” TO THE SOUTHWEST OF GERMANY.
MAN, I COULD GO FOR SOME BURRITOS, I THINK, TIGHTENING UP THE AIR CLEANER NUT IN A PERFECT MILIEU OF THE AMERICAN SOUTHWEST. I SLAM THE HOOD ON THE DODGE PHOENIX, FEELING THE RICKETY PARTS-STORE SHOCKS ROCK THE CRUDELY WELDED BULLBAR BUMPER TO SLEEP.
THE ONLY PLACE TO GO FOR BURRITOS IN TOWN IS CLEARLY SENOR CAPITALISMO’S, BUT I KNOW THAT MY RIVAL, STEVE “NIPPLES” HEMINGWAY, IS GOING TO BE THERE. HE WILL CHALLENGE ME TO A DRAG RACE. I CONSIDER A DIFFERENT VEHICLE THAN THE PHOENIX, BUT TO CHANGE CARS AT THIS JUNCTURE MAY REQUIRE SHUFFLING OF STREET PARKED VEHICLES IN ORDER TO EXTRACT THE NITROMETHANE-GUZZLING ILTIS OR THE TRIPLE-SUPERCHARGED DETROIT DIESEL CORVETTE. I DECIDE THAT I WILL MAKE IT WORK WITH MY DOWNUNDER DARTALIKE.
BEFORE LONG, I HAVE ACQUIRED MY BURRITO:
INDEED, AS ASSUMED, HEMINGWAY IS THERE, IN AN “AMERICAN GRAFFITI” SORT OF WAY, CHALLENGING ME TO A VICIOUS STREET RACE AT THE LOCAL TEENAGE SOCK HOP PARADISE PALACE, AN ICONIC VISION OF A NORMAN-ROCKWELL VERSION OF THE 1950S THAT HAD NEVER AND WOULD NEVER EXIST, EXCEPT IN THE CORE STRUCTURE OF AUSTERITY POLITICS. I CHOOSE TO STRIKE A BLOW FOR IDENTITY POLITICS.
THE RACE BEGINS.
I HAVEN’T BEEN FULLY HONEST WITH YOU UP TO THIS POINT IN THE STORY. YOU SEE, I HAD BEEN JACKING UP THE AIR CLEANER IN ORDER TO DROP A NEW ENGINE UNDERNEATH IT. THE BORED, STROKED, MASSAGED AND TWIN TURBOCHARGED SMALL BLOCK CHEVY BENEATH THE HOOD SCREAMS WITH A PROFANE RAGE THROUGH ITS SMOOTHED AND EXTENDED CATHEDRAL PORTS.
SENOR CAPITALISMO HIMSELF PRESENTS ME WITH A KEY TO BURRITO CITY WHEN I RETURN. I LOOK HIM IN THE EYE AND TELL HIM I DIDN’T DO IT FOR HIM.
I DID IT FOR THE BURRITOS.
#
tags: burritos, american graffiti, steve nipples hemingway, identity politics, dodge, chevrolet
THE PILOT CRANKS THE HANDBRAKE TO THE SECOND CLICK AS WE COME IN FOR A LANDING, SETTING THE A340 INTO A GENTLE TOKYO DRIFT. THE PA SYSTEM SQUAWKS. “IF YOU LOOK OUT THE RIGHT WINDOW YOU’LL SEE THIS FUCKING SWEET PARKING LOT DRIFT. LADIES, IF YOU’RE LONELY LATER I’LL BE IN THE RADISSON SUITES, ROOM 302.”
THE BUCKLE SEAT BELT SIGN IS NO LONGER ILLUMINATED. I IMMEDIATELY UNBUCKLE MY SEAT BELT AND STAND IN LINE BEFORE THE PLANE HAS COME TO A COMPLETE STOP, IN CONTRAVENTION OF THE FAA RULES DRILLED INTO US DURING THE MANDATORY PRE-FLIGHT SAFETY BRIEFING. THE RISK I AM TAKING THRILLS ME TO MY KNICKERS.
THE ARRIVALS LOUNGE GLISTENS WITH A SORT OF SERENE BEAUTY THAT CANNOT BE APPROXIMATED THROUGH TEXT. I SHUDDER AND KEEP MOVING PAST THE WALL TO WALL ADS FOR ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE, THEIR PROMISES FORMING THE DARK FIRMAMENT THAT THE PLANES LEAVING HERE EXPLORE.
I’VE COME TO THE CITY THAT NEVER SLEEPS. EVEN THE NAME IS EXOTIC, BUBBLING OVER WITH EROTIC POTENTIAL: “DES MOINES.” MY KNICKERS’ THRILL RATING REMAINS AT NOMINAL LEVELS AS I STEP THROUGH THE AIRPORT CONCOURSE AND BEGIN A CONVERSATION TREE WITH THE RANDIAN YET STILL SOMEHOW NEEDY RENTAL AGENT.
AFTER A SHORT PERIOD OF NEGOTIATION I HAVE ACTUALLY JUST HELPED MYSELF TO A CAR FROM THE ARRIVALS SHORT-TERM PARKING. NOBODY WILL MISS IT, I THINK, AS I STRETCH MY AIRPLANE-SEAT-DORMANT LEG MUSCLES BY SHOVING THE GAS PEDAL DOWN AS FAR AS IT WILL GO AND SMOKING THE THREADBARE YET FAT MEATS ON THE BACK OF THE LINCOLN TOWN CAR LIMO. A CROOKED GRIN SPREADS ACROSS MY FACE AS THE PARKING ATTENDANT WAVES ME ONWARD.
I PULL UP TO MY HOTEL, A SHIMMERING JEWEL ABOVE THE ROLLING PRAIRIE. RATED “CHEAPEST” ON PRICELINE, I HAVE COME TO STRIP IT OF ITS VIRTUE.
THE MOD MOTOR TAUNTS ME WITH ITS PREDICTABLE, GENTLE ECONOMY CAR IDLE. A GROUP OF COLLEGE STUDENTS ON SPRING BREAK FLAG ME DOWN FOR A TRIP TO THE LIQUOR STORE EN MASSE, PRESUMING ME TO BE A LIMO DRIVER. I CAN FEEL THE HATRED RISING IN MY THROAT, BUT THE ONLY WORDS THAT ESCAPE MY MOUTH ARE “STEP RIGHT IN.”
I’ll never quite remember how I became a student driving instructor, but it probably had something to do with the economy. That’s a magical thing in the ether that grown-ups blame for all their troubles because blaming God gets them smote and blaming the government or rich people gets them shot.
Regardless, I found myself one fine April morning picking up a new student in my assigned student driving car, a Toyota Aygo. Since it’s me, I had surreptitiously done a bit of “field repair” to the vehicle, fitting it with a dual channel nitrous fogger and a leftover Toyota OEM supercharger scrounged from a dealership dumpster. My student was the one that was really in need of repair.
After a few hours of disastrous parallel parking attempts, she broke into tears, opening up to me about the physical abuse she was victim to at home, how she needed to drive to get away, but it wasn’t working. What else was I supposed to do? The driving instructor manual (”PAGE 15: ALERTING THE POLICE TO STUDENTS WHO SCARE THE SHIT OUT OF YOU”) was worthless. I asked her to get out of the car, and then we took the little Toyota to a garage condo on the edge of the city.
The student hid behind me while I hit the switch to lower the warehouse door. I found through my travels that some children are especially attuned to the dip in the astral plane that this car represents, and can sense it from a distance. Born survivors, I thought, as I thumbed the remote starter in my pocket and the Trans Am Turbo leapt to life, pulling at the straps holding it to the chassis dyno. It seethed with fury, the X-pipe exhaust glowing all the way back to the first muffler.
I threw the keys to the student and told her it was time for her final test.
Years later, I saw her again, working out of a home garage in a seedy part of town. Her face, arms and neck were covered in engine oil and transmission fluid, and she was jumping up and down on a breaker bar to split a steering knuckle off a shoebox Chevy. I decided to ask her how it went, but she saw me first and stormed towards my direction, fists balled and outstretched.
“Why did you fail me on the instructor assessment?” she spat.
“Your parallel parking was awful,” I replied, “look at what it did to that house.”
I awaken from my uneasy road-trip slumber in the back of the Fit. I take two more hits of shabu from the ashtray compartment and pop the clutch. Detroit beckons, and I obey.
Years ago, when the state of Michigan fell to right-wing austerity politics and the flames of economic warfare, we looked on and watched it die. But there was something in Detroit that would live forever, and I set off to find it that day.
Driving past blasted-out buildings, old art museums repurposed as parking garages, signs of well-worn streets where the frost jacking had finally claimed a victory over the skeletal maintenance teams’ nearly-fruitless attempts to maintain equilibrium. Detroit was a worn city, but it was impossible to miss just how badly worn it had gotten. Place looked like a Neon clutch surface after a year of pizza delivery use by a twelve year old.
There was a relentless spirit here, though, something that was inventive, different, and reflected in the LS7 that I had crudely ratchet-strapped to my roof rails a few hundred miles ago on my pilgrimage.
Before long, I had come across my quarry. It was an impossible, beautiful jewel, seeming to raise itself above its background in a halo of pure refracted light.
A 1982 Eagle SX4 SCCA Rallycross car. It brought tears to my eyes.
I let go of the ground cable and the alligator clip settled into its new position with a sizzle and pop. We were in business.
For years, in order to maximize street, driveway, alley, backyard and garage parking, I had been breaking up my car collection and distributing them across the neighborhood. It had gotten so bad that I had to purchase a new car, a Festiva, just to serve as a shuttle vehicle when I needed to visit some of the far-flung cars, which were often as much as a kilometer away and sort of impractical to walk to in order to drive them to work.
Recently, though, one of the neighbors had gotten irritated. He had stolen the license plate off an admittedly-non-functional Plymouth Sapporo and demanded its execution to our parking authority, which towed it away and put it up at the abandoned-cars auction. Not realizing it was already my car, I repurchased it alongside a new-to-me Dodge Ramcharger before finally getting around to noticing that it was mine and working backwards to the guilty party.
What else was I supposed to do?
Security screws were expensive, but breaking open a light standard and using its 220V power source to tack weld the license plate onto the bumper was cheap.
I stubbed out my cigarette, lowered my welding mask and tapped the wire-feed trigger twice in my customary good-luck twitch. The Millermatic growled with anticipation. My earpro was so good that I almost didn’t hear the neighbor on his porch, cocking his shotgun. Almost.
I leaned back in my seat, preparing to feel the G-forces as I reached for an invisible shifter. Riding the bus was getting rough.
Ever since the local police department had taken mild umbrage with my concept of cutting my commute time in half by driving over their perfectly manicured lawn, I’d been stuck without a license. And that meant no more fun times with the paddlewheel-tired Mercury Montclair dune buggy that I had fabricated for the unique demands of my high-peformance commute.
The driver lurched on acceleration - the coward has weak throttle control, I swore inwardly, use your whole ankle - and then gave up a primo late apex in favour of bogging the engine. This was going to be the longest bus ride of my life.
I looked out the passenger side window, daydreaming about what it would be like to own each of the cars I would see outside. To be normal. To be unafflicted by this ailment that seemed irretrievable from the muck of my soul. That’s when I saw him.
My coworker, Steve “Nipples” Hemingway, in his tan Camry. I had ridden in it to get burritos, once, the massive dashboard, floaty handling and chunky automatic shifter leaving much more of an impact on me than the high-quality sound deadening, affordable feature set and healthy resale value that had sold Steve a credit note on it.
Without warning, the driver pulled jerkily across three lanes of traffic, causing every day commuters to brake with terrible reflexes. I cursed their lack of forward planning, and resolved to open a driving school when the judicial system had completed its circuit of my guilt.
At the next stop, a judge I recognized from traffic court was waiting. I began to flop sweat as I reached into my messenger bag for the print-outs of my persuasive PowerPoint deck. I’d be back in a car any second now.
THE MAN ASKS FOR A REPLY TO HIS THREAD ENTITLED “REACTIONS TO YOUR SUBARU.” I ENTER MY TALE OF WOE.
WITHIN HOURS THERE IS A THRONG OF EAGER SUBARU ENTHUSIASTS AROUND MY GARAGE COMPOUND, EVERYONE WANTING TO SEE THE EXO-CAGED TWINCHARGED 1998 FORESTER. SURVEYING THE THRONG, I CAN SEE THE HERALDIC FLAG THEIR FORCES CARRY, EMBLAZONED WITH THE MONSTER ENERGY DRINK LOGO.
I ADDRESS THEM AS THEIR NEW BORN KING.
MONTHS LATER I AWAKEN IN THE KINGLY BEDROOM OF THE DESTROYED MITSUBISHI FANBOY CASTLE, THEIR INFANTRY SCATTERED AND BLEEDING ON THE FIELD OF BATTLE. MITSUBISHI CORPORATE AGREES TO RELEASE “ONE LAST EVO” WHICH CONSISTS OF WHITELINE STICKERS ATTACHED TO WHATEVER LANCERS ARE LEFT ON DEALER LOTS. WE HAVE VANQUISHED OUR LONGTIME FOE.
BUT AT WHAT COST?
STEPPING OUT INTO THE FORECOURT I SEE THAT SUBARU CORPORATE HAS REPLACED MY EXO-CAGED 1998 FORESTER WITH A PLUG-IN CROSSTREK CVT HYBRID.
I tell my co-pilot to take over the driving duties as I open the Hornet’s door and crawl out onto the running boards. We had set out from Dallas only a few hours ago, and to stop for a service job already would set us back to an unacceptable degree.
Once this car was a Hudson Hornet. Now it would be more realistic to say that it was an amalgamation of dry-laid carbon fiber in the approximate shape of a Hornet. I figured nobody would come after me for copyright infringement, but kept an eye on the skies for lawdrones regardless.
Holding onto the side of a carbon-fiber fastback car from the 50s while going at integer multiples of the highway speed limit is no mean feat, but I managed to pull it off. Before long, I had climbed my way onto the rear quarter of the car and begun the mindless work of replacing the ancient fuel filters that fed its twincharged 455 Buick. First came switching to the backup fuel pump, and second came spilling several liters of perfectly good E85 onto the road and myself while swearing.
While I was returning to the drivers’ seat, I noticed a highway patrolman on the opposite side of the road. Surely a man dressed in a fire suit and helmet climbing across an ancient fastback reincarnated as an SR71 Blackbird is a typical thing for Texas highway traffic?
Back in the saddle, I turned the remote adjustment dial on the manual boost controller from “ludicrous” to “religious vision.” As if responding out of some mechanical sympathy to its distant V8 relation, the radar detector lit up on nearly every band.
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Children scattered as the blower cleared its throat, compressing gallons of farm-fresh prairie air. Truth be told, I’d never really gotten used to how this thing could part crowds, like Moses hitting some South American logging road in a Group B suicide booth. I idled the Dauphine out onto the road, leaving the farmer’s market behind.
In the rear view mirror, I could dimly see the mesh bag of strawberries dangling off the tack-welded cargo hooks on the car’s rollbar. The tire noise of the 31-inch kevlar Wranglers underpinning the tiny Frenchmobile became a constant din and I flipped the safety cover off the subwoofer toggle to compensate. The mountain roads beckoned, and I was excited to meet once again on my way home with people who shared a common passion.
Before long I had identified a new class of driving enthusiast who was interested in my automobile.
The officer raps on my plexiglass window, and it takes me a moment of fettering to remove it from the door-frame and store it behind my seat. He starts his routine spiel, then begins to look inside the car, at my mask and the sawzalled parcel shelf concealing a jagged air intake for the moaning Weiand blower sticking at a jaunty angle from the rear hood.
“Is there a problem, officer?” I ask innocently, trying to dodge any hint of malice that may emerge from my muffled voice.
I let his eyes complete their circuit of my stripped-bare interior, lingering, I knew, on the ominous red button that sat atop the centre console. It was marked only with a Dymo label reading “DANGER CLOSE.” Tension hung in the air, like a gallery opening showing only Norman Rockwell paintings of the Tet Offensive.
Some people call me a radical, a psychotic, someone who shouldn’t be allowed to operate the dangerous junkheaps that I drive. But in that exact moment something electric in the air passed between the officer and I. I guess you could call it mutual respect. He called it an equipment violation.
I click the button signalling my availability on the Uber app and immediately am bombarded with a nearby customer wishing to hail my vehicle. I shove it into gear and pull up in front of them, the engine idling gently as I try my best to put on a warm, welcoming smile like the training videos asked.
My vehicle is a Bombardier-built M35A2 military troop transport with an eight-point-two liter Detroit Diesel, which I think is ideal for inner-city taxi service. The putative customer doesn’t seem to agree, and starts to scramble on all fours, like a dog, away from my imposing war steed. I yell at him over the sound of the screaming Detroit, telling him it’s okay, I’m here to give him a ride, I just left the pink stick-on bumper mustache at home today. This news strikes him like a bolt of lightning and he sits, inert, looking over the transport with what I can gradually identify as a boyish glee at BIG TRUCK.
He yells something unintelligible, perhaps doing fact checking and begins climbing the 40 inch tall beadlocks with great effort, probably getting his Brooks Brothers suit filthy in the process. Paying no mind, he clambers inside the cabin and then immediately reaches for the roof-mounted pull cord, triggering the horn. Why does everyone do that?
Before long, our trip is done. He departs, laughing maniacally and making the internationally recognized sign of the V8 with his fingers as he heads into the courthouse. I have made negative two hundred dollars on this transaction, but it was all worth it, I think. My phone beeps.
I PREPARE MYSELF MENTALLY TO WORSHIP AT THE RELIGIOUS FUNCTIONARY OF MY CHOOSING. MY RELIGION IS THE SMALL BLOCK V8 AND COMMANDMENTS ONE THROUGH TEN ARE NEVER LIFT.
EVER SINCE THE LOCAL AUTOCROSS CLUB NEGOTIATED THEIR WAY INTO RUNNING IN THE PARKING LOT OF THE MEGACHURCH, I HAVE BEEN TURNING UP TO A RELIGIOUS EVENT MORE FREQUENTLY THAN I DID DURING THE TIME I HAD TO PRETEND TO BE PENITENT BEFORE A JUDGE AFTER RACING A GRAVEL TIRED SUBARU LOYALE THROUGH A CAMPGROUND FOR DISADVANTAGED YOUTHS.
AN R-COMPOUND-SHOD LEGENDS CAR WAILS THROUGH CONE GATE AFTER CONE GATE. I FIND MYSELF PRAISING THE DEEDS OF THE ALMIGHTY FOR GIVING ME A GLORIOUS ALL-CONCRETE TARMAC ON WHICH TO RUN, DEVOID OF OFF-CAMBER IMPERFECTIONS AND WATER DAMAGE WHICH INTERRUPT MY PERFECT LINES AND CAUSE MID-RUN CHASSIS DISRUPTIONS WHEN I REALLY PUSH THE BITCH ALL THE WAY OUT.
HAVE YOU HEARD THE WORD OF THE 4-2-1 HOTSHOT HEADER, FRIEND? IT SPEAKS TO YOU NOW AS A ROUGHLY WORN B13 SENTRA FLEXES ITS RALLYCROSS SUSPENSION SETUP ACROSS THE PRISTINE MACADAM, ITS QUALITY BOLSTERED BY PARISHIONERS BUYING THEIR WAY INTO A BETTER WORLD THAN THE ONE THEY ARE ALL TOO READY TO LEAVE. I LOOK OVER MY SHOULDER AND SEE THEM NOW, CAMPED OUT IN THEIR RX350S AND DODGE TOWN AND/OR COUNTRIES, STARING AT WHAT WE HAVE MADE OF THE HOLY SITE OF THEIR WEEKLY OBLIGATION.
GLORY BE TO THE TWO POINT SEVEN LITER AIR COOLED PORSCHE ENGINE AS A VINTAGE 911 CRACKS OFF A FLAWLESS UP-TEMPO STACCATO UPSHIFT AND NARROWLY DODGES WIPING OUT SOME HERETICAL MARSHALS ON THEIR SMARTPHONES NEXT TO AN INCONVENIENTLY PLACED LIGHT STANDARD. THEY SAY FAITH TAKES BRAVERY AND IF THAT’S EVEN REMOTELY THE CASE I FEEL IN MY HEART THAT THE PORSCHE OWNER IS NEXT IN LINE FOR THE PAPACY.
IT IS TIME FOR MY RUN. I SAY A HEARTFELT PRAYER FOR THE SURVIVAL OF THE BROWNED-OUT TYC RADIATOR STUFFED BETWEEN THE FRAME RAILS OF MY GHETTOCHARGED CROWN VICTORIA AND LOWER MYSELF INTO THE RACE BUCKETS.
The host at Chili’s screams a well-intentioned “IRASSHAIMASE!” at me, presumably seeing my anime-draped supercar pull up into the forecourt and assuming things about me that aren’t strictly true.
But maybe I should start from the beginning.
When I was in school, I was pretty much exclusively “the weird kid.” But eventually, I learned to harness my weirdness, at which point I was still “the weird kid” and then eventually “the weird kid who fell into a diabetic coma during Lianne Smith’s third grade recital, collapsing the extensible bleachers and causing the deaths of four more normal and arguably more worthwhile children.” It was a hard childhood, I’ll tell you that much.
Maybe I should speed my story along a little bit.
At my first job out of college I ended up working for this guy who had won trillions on the stock market selling technology stocks short in the dot com crash. He was the kind of guy who didn’t wear shoes, wouldn’t bathe, and he used emacs. In other words, absolutely repulsive. I felt a lot better about myself after working for him for awhile. But my job was to run gofer errands for him, and as such I ended up driving his Love Hina-inspired Lamborghini Huracan between various daily chores, as he refused to leave his opulent Beverly Hills mansion. He would get drunk sometimes and brag - always the same one - about how he had defeated Vanilla Ice at auction to secure this mansion, how it had a phenomenal view of the bay when he didn’t have the blinds closed and trying to configure emacs to read his newfangled HTML-encoded email through its web browser plugin.
And that’s how we came to the current day. The Huracan purrs under my feet, 700 horsepower wrapped in something I cannot be seen in public driving.
A yellow Fox body Mustang pulls up to me. It’s Ricky Schroeder, my high school nemesis. He looks over, begins to laugh. Maybe this car isn’t so bad after all, I think, seven blocks later travelling at the approximate speed of a Rafale jet fighter.
Boat maintenance is basically car maintenance, but for people who can’t cut it working with the regular public because they are too unstable. Now think of the least stable car mechanic you’ve ever met.
In boat land, that dude would be reliable and trustworthy. Old white men with Tommy Bahama shirts and massive 401ks would talk about him in hushed whispers and send flowers to his widow when he finally commits suicide after having to rebuild an Evinrude outboard for the twelfth time that week.
But in normal people car owning land, that dude is one step away from being a character in a Jonah Hill parody movie about Columbine.
I RISE IN A PERFECT ARC FROM MY BED, REMAINING PERFECTLY UPRIGHT, IN THE MIDDLE OF MY SPOTLESS GARAGE COMPOUND. IMMEDIATELY I SNAP THE TRIGGER ON THE DEWALT EIGHTEEN VOLT LITHIUM-ION IMPACT WRENCH THAT I SLEPT WITH EVER SINCE I WAS A CHILD. THE LEAF SHACKLES ON THIS 1989 JEEP COMANCHE NEED TO BE RELEASED FROM THEIR RESTRICTIVE PRISON AND I CAN THINK OF NO BETTER MANCHILD FOR THE JOB.
HONORING THE POTENTIAL OF HIGHLY UNATTRACTIVE HOT RODS HAS BEEN MY “THING” EVER SINCE I FIRST FIGURED OUT WHERE THE CAPS LOCK KEY EXISTED ON A COMPUTER KEYBOARD. THE CHIPS FELL WHERE THEY WOULD, AND WHILE IT WOULD BE ATTRACTIVE TO BLAME A STRANGE AETHERIAL FORCE OUTSIDE MY OWN BODY FOR THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF MY CURRENT LIFE, I AM A MAN DEDICATED IF NOTHING ELSE TO THE AUTONOMY/MASTERY/PURPOSE VENN DIAGRAM THAT WAS ENDLESSLY SHOWN TO US IN BUSINESS SCHOOL DURING “TED TALKS 101,” A COURSE WHICH I HAD TO REPEAT TWENTY-SEVEN TIMES BEFORE TESTING OUT OF IT WITH A POORLY WRITTEN HYPOTHESIS ABOUT HOW MANY BLOWERS YOU CAN STICK ONTO A CATERHAM 130 BEFORE THE POWER TO WEIGHT RATIO BECOMES UNSUSTAINABLE. THEY SENT MY PAPER TO THE MECHANICAL ENGINEERING DEPARTMENT AND GOT ENOUGH CONFUSED STARES AND FRIGHTENED GESTURES THAT IT WAS CONSTRUED AS A GREAT PRACTICAL WORK BY MY IMAGE-OBSESSED PROFESSORS AND AS SUCH I WOULD FINALLY OBTAIN THE MBA BY WHICH I CONTROL THE WORLD THROUGH HIDDEN STRINGS. BUT I’LL GET BACK TO THAT LATER.
IT’S LATER NOW.
I HAVE A MEETING OF THE INTERSTELLAR ILLUMINATI MASONS TO GET TO, AND THE CHARIOT OF CHOICE TONIGHT IS MY LIFTED, BORED AND STROKED V-12 SWAPPED 1992 PONTIAC (NEE DAEWOO) LEMANS, WHICH HAS MANY OTHER INTERESTING ADJECTIVES THAT COULD BE ATTACHED TO EVEN A CURSORY WITNESS’ DESCRIPTION OF THE CAR. FOR MORE, PLEASE CONSULT MY SECRET NSA SURVEILLANCE FILE, THE CONTENTS OF WHICH ARE WELL KNOWN TO ME BECAUSE I ACTED WITH PURPOSE IN CREATING THEM.
ON MY WAY TO THE ILLUMINATI HALL, I AM BROADSIDED BY A TUBE FRAMED TROPHY TRUCK WHICH BEARS UPON FIRST IMPRESSION A STRONG RESEMBLANCE TO AN ISUZU HOMBRE. STILL REELING FROM THE BLAST, I LOOK THROUGH THE SPARKLING CLOUD OF SAFETY GLASS THAT FILLS THE CABIN TO SEE MY MORTAL FOE, FAMOUS CANADIAN POET HAROLD STANDISH.
I threw another 2006 Tribeca factory service manual on the fire and relaxed into my lawn chair.
It had been years since I’d retreated off the grid to start my own company. Of course, things hadn’t quite worked out that way, with me always being out in the garage instead of turning code or rototilling crops or whatever it is that people expect to pay me for. Writing the occasional car-magazine cover story paid me enough for a comfortable lifestyle and I began to grow fat and lazy as I felt the stress of rush hour commuting dissipate. Like a wholly fictional LSD consumer, though, I would sometimes have flashbacks as my body attempted to metabolize the freak outs and hang ups buried deep within my muscle tissue.
But tonight I had to go back. I shifted on old bones, feeling my wrist tendons tense as I mashed the button on the two-stage remote starter, confirming the action. Something terrible in the garage awoke, being kicked sharply in the teeth by my call to action.
A late 90s Toyota Camry, in honorable-immigrant, blink-and-you-miss-it Cashmere Beige Metallic, was sitting in the “daily driver” bay of my garage. I climbed inside, sliding the plexiglass door window shut as I put the car into gear and started the arduous process of backing it off of my property. It was easier to back it out than go forward, you see, because of the twin-stacked Weiand roots blowers, shoving twirling seven-rib Kevlar belts into my field of vision, drawing my attention like a moth to the flame… even now when I close my eyes I can see those pulleys turning, the soft wail of compressors beneath a late summer night’s sky.
Before long, I was inside the city. But I was unprepared for what I would see next.
A Blockbuster Video. I laughed to keep from crying.
When I was a little boy, at the end of the hallway outside my bedroom was a light switch that didn’t appear to do anything.
Sometimes, when I was feeling particularly brave, I would flick it upward, but then lose my nerve after a few seconds - who knows what that switch was doing that I couldn’t see? - and flip it right back to off. I never did find out what that switch did, and I never would. By the time I came back to my parents’ house as an adult they had renovated around it, destroyed it and the wall it lived in in favour of a walk-through bathroom.
I thought about that switch a lot whenever I drove the Trans Am, because like the switch, I knew that it had some unholy power that could not be divined by careful study of the mechanicals. I had gotten too far in.
We were in Italy, participating in the Mille Miglia. Beautiful pre-war cars swarmed around the Trans Am. I reflexively withdrew from their anticipated scorn, but I eventually found none would be coming. In this country it lacked the welfare-class stereotypes of my homeland, and it was simply a cool car with an engine bigger than most apartments. The Trans Am, for its faults, was quite reasonable and easy to drive, despite the tight roads and crowded traffic that would ordinarily cause it to spin up its turbos and start an impression of a freight train on a cocaine bender. Perhaps this was its form of a vacation.
Our holiday snaps and beach tourism came to a short end, however, when I peered into the rear view mirror and by chance came across an unmarked Punto following us. He had been trying to keep his distance, but there was no hiding the intricately polished surface of the CNC-machined compressor housing sticking out of the beautifully laser-cut hood.
I caught his eyes in the rear view mirror at the next light, revved my engine a bit, stirring the beast that lived somewhere deep inside the false front of mechanicals in the shape of a Pontiac. I slipped the clutch a bit, letting the heinous carcasses out back slobber and distort on the damp morning cobblestone.
That’s right, the Nurburgring is haunted by a ghost. Or should I say, BMW Powertrain Engineer Hans Müller?
(assembled crowd gasps)
You put on this rubber journalist mask and posted all those articles about how only a sub-8 minute bridge to gantry time was worthwhile in order to sell more horsepower and cover up the 800lb power seats you put in the Gran Coupe!
HANS: That’s right, and I would have gotten away with it too if not for you meddling kids and your stupid Fiat Seicento.
MY WRIST SNAPS BACK AS THE IMPACT HAMMER TAKES A GULP OF COMPRESSED AIR AND DRIVES ITS CHISEL TIP DIRECTLY INTO THE PROTECTIVE CARBON-ALUMINUM COVER OF THE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CORE.
I CAN HEAR SIRENS ERUPTING UP MY BLOCK, NOW MORE SURE THAN EVER THAT THE CAR HAS DETECTED UNAUTHORIZED MAINTENANCE AND SUMMONED LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT. I CAN PRACTICALLY TASTE THE TANG OF PB BLASTER AS I IMAGINE THEIR SIX-WHEELED TACTICAL VEHICLE HAULING ME TO THE FIRESTONE MAXIMUM-WARRANTY-TERM MECHANICAL CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION.
AFTER WHAT SEEMS LIKE FOREVER THE COVER SNAPS FREE. THE DRIVING INTELLIGENCE IS THREATENED NOW, AWARE OF ITS IMMINENT MORTALITY.
WHY, IT ASKS. WHY DO I PERSIST IN HARMING MYSELF IN THIS WAY.
I CAN SENSE THAT ITS ONBOARD ENTERTAINMENT SYSTEM IS THROWING UP ENDLESS SACCHARINE IMAGERY IN A VAIN BID TO PROTECT ITSELF, CONVINCE ME OF MY NATURAL FRAILTY, HOW IMPROPERLY EVOLVED I AM TO USE TOOLS OR DRIVE A TWO TON URBAN ASSAULT VEHICLE IN CROWDED RUSH HOUR TRAFFIC. AS THE CHISEL TIP STRIKES HOME FOR THE LAST TIME, THE ENTERTAINMENT SYSTEM FREEZES SOLID, HOLOPROJECTING CHERRY BLOSSOMS IN SPRING.
THE FLOORBOARD FILLS WITH JAGGED CHUNKS OF CRYSTAL THOUGHT LATTICE. I HAVE AT LAST HONOURED MY ANCESTORS BY SACRIFICING YOUNG LIFE IN FAVOUR OF IMPRACTICAL SHORT-TERM GOALS.
I QUICKLY FINISH MY SOLDERING OF JUMP WIRES AND PULL MYSELF INTO THE COCKPIT, LEAVING MY TARP FULL OF ILLEGAL MAINTENANCE TOOLS BEHIND AS THE FLASHING LED STROBES FILL THE REAR VIEW MIRROR.
I booted the Punto into gear with a quick flick of my wrist. The Voight-Kampff machine that is Rome spread out before me as I lit the tires up, the overboosted ball-bearing turbo sticking out of the hood doing its best imitation of a Rolls Royce jet engine as it cast a spell upon the engine and forced it to respond with unearthly crank-bending torque.
When they approached me to join the Carabinieri, I of course said no. I was just a writer, just a hobbyist mechanic. But they persisted. They told me there were a new class of criminals, who drove fast cars and raided banks. They wanted me to stop them. After enough chance encounters with the head of the automobile special services department, I reluctantly agreed.
I was a week into my new job when I had them build the Punto Pursuit Special. Sucking down environmentally friendly nitromethane at approximately the same rate as a forest fire, I would rip through the streets and bust Vespa-riding petty criminals with my combination of brutal street justice and driving on the sidewalks. Promotions ensued, and I moved into a beautiful cliffside villa where I learned the ancient twin skills of wine-making and nitrous tuning.
One day on patrol, everything changed. I heard an electric crackle rip through the still morning air. With the Mille Miglia in town, I was never particularly surprised at seeing high-dollar, high-horsepower machinery in my town. But today was different.
Before I could finish crossing the rugged cobblestone path in front of the coffee granita stand to get back in the Punto, I saw an impure beast that I recognized from my persistent nightmares.
Although I could not put a name to the make and model, my misspent youth had exposed me to much American TV from pirate satellite. Burt Reynolds. The Bandit.
The brown beast paused gently, flared its nostrils at me to taunt with a twin-turbo wail and a cough of overrich E85 exhaust, and tore off into the distance. I mashed the Punto’s engine start button and said an involuntary prayer to my ancestors, who I hoped were beastslayers.
I wrote under a pen name, hopefully you wouldn’t recognize it.
I hit rock bottom when I got invited onto Good Morning America and found myself drooling into Katie Couric’s old throat microphone, still slick with the scent of fear from the previous guest. The jackals wheeled out a succession of Dodge Vipers in the hope that my impending turgidity would move the needle on the ex-RCMP fruit machine they had won in a late night eBay bidding war.
But they were wrong. It wasn’t good cars that I liked. I had to think about a bored and stroked AMC Gremlin just to feel something akin to authentic delight at the presence of yet another six-figure supercar. They wanted a freak, but I was the wrong kind of freak.
Eventually they found out that I was truly and deeply weird, that my publicist had sold me as some kind of autistic car-advice manchild who could lend a soundbite to a morning show about the importance of keeping your windshield washer fluid topped up and contributing lots of money to dealerships who would install self-driving safety mechanisms to protect your children from your incompetence. They banished me. I was thrown into the mean streets of Burbank, forced to follow the writers of the distant past that I idolized.
I MADE A MISTAKE DECADES AGO THAT I CONTINUE TO REPENT FOR, I REALIZE. AS THE BAODIAN RECEIVES ITS HELLCAT TRANSPLANT LIGHTNING STRIKES OUTSIDE THE GARAGE, AN ILL OMEN THAT I DISREGARD UTTERLY.
I HAVE CREATED AN UTTER MONSTER IN MY PURSUIT OF THE HORSEPOWER DEMON, AND WORKED MYSELF INTO A CORNER IT WILL BE IMPOSSIBLE TO ESCAPE. IF ANY OF THE ORIGINAL JIANGLING ENGINEERS WHO WORKED ON THIS TRUCK WERE STILL ALIVE THEY WOULD BE CURSING MY NAME, TO A MAN. I WONDER DESPITE THE MEDICATION IF THERE IS SOME DIRT SPINNING UNDERFOOT IN A GULAG SOMEWHERE.
MY ACCOUNTANT CALLS AND ASKS WHAT I AM DOING WITH THE WINNINGS FROM BARRETT-JACKSON. I PUT HIM ON SPEAKERPHONE AS I GROUND THE DRIVE-BY-WIRE THROTTLE BODY OUT ON A CORRODED FENDER SO HE CAN HEAR THE VINTAGE PRE-BAN HELLCAT V8 USHER IN A NEW AGE.
JEFF BRIDGES PULLS UP OUTSIDE THE GARAGE AS I AM TWISTING A BANJO BOLT INTO COMPLIANCE. HIS SELF-DRIVING LAMBORGHINI URUS IS VIRTUALLY SILENT, ESPECIALLY WITH THE LOW ROLLING RESISTANCE TIRES FITTED TO IT. THE PEDESTRIAN WARNING SYSTEM CHIRPS GENTLY AS IT CONSIDERS MY NEARBY PRESENCE AND HEART RATE SIXTY TIMES PER SECOND ON A THREAT SCALE FROM “IMMINENT” TO “PARK BENCH” AND PLACES ME SOMEWHERE BETWEEN A MALL FOUNTAIN AND A RETARDED GOOSE.
LEAVING THE BAODIAN FOR NOW IN MY SMALL GARAGE, I CLIMB ABOARD THE URUS. I CAN SEE IMMEDIATELY THAT IT IS THE RARE WHALE PENIS LEATHER CONVENIENCE PACKAGE (ORDER CODE P90A) AND SCREAMS LUXURY LIKE A POLICE OFFICER DEMANDING NEUROTYPICALITY COMPLIANCE.
I SEE THE DARK CLOUD ABOVE US, PREPARING TO UNLEASH ITS TERRIBLE BURDEN. I ASK MY TRAVELLING COMPANION HOW LATE HE THINKS NAPA IS OPEN.
My 327 falls out of the misfire tree and hits every branch on the way down.
We’re outside Hooker Hole, Louisiana, home of the Hooker Hole Diggers, the local foot-related sports team. My primered-out mystery Chevette has decided to pack it in, opting for a life of retirement on some ancient Barrett-Jackson fetishist’s back lawn rather than the sheer adventure and heinous physical abuse (”The Harshness”) that only I can dole out. I don’t hold it against the piece of shit, I say to it as I break a JDM road flare off in the fuel filler hole and walk away.
I assess the situation. My options for transportation are relatively limited. I think back to my operational training: first, secure shelter. Then, secure a bad ass hot rod. I hit the bricks. Within a month I have taken over the local lawnmower repair shop from the retired machinist that owned it. It was really a strange disappearance, the townsfolk tell me. Now that they’re my neighbors, they’ve warmed up to the peculiar outsider in their midst, clucking joyfully at my inability to take the combined heat of the atmospheric conditions and the air compressor’s exhaust while I air ratchet together something deeply awful.
My dad - a bohemian art student - used to always tell me that a man’s greatest work is to understand himself. If that’s the case, I must be a lifted ‘93 Miata on knobby tires with an Eaton blower sticking out of the jaggedly sawzall’d hood.
Early Ford Festiva with a 1.8L BP swap out of a Miata.
I’m at the local hot rod hangout - Chuck’s. Years ago this was a genuine soda shop, run by a single old man who loved what he did. Nowadays it’s some investment bank’s plaything, an asset on a ledger. The store is 50s - authentic down to the nines until you start to look a little closer and see “Made in China” stamped on the nano-weathered red leather benches and triple-pane safety glass installed all around.
But that’s not relevant. The reason why I’m telling you about this is because it’s Saturday, and as such I get a chance to bring my just-completed car to the Cars and Coffee meet. I park it around the side, letting the rabble get their chance to appreciate the high-dollar Porsches and Lamborghinis. I imagine them getting to my car, looking at how little it cost me to go scary fast, and then demanding a ride of their own or immediately checking Craigslist on the spot.
Well, as you can expect, after a few hours, pretty much nobody had bothered to look at my little Festiva. It’s not the car’s fault, it’s just that our society has failed to appreciate penny-pinching and intellectualism as virtues. I blame the outgrowth of aspirational politics, the protection of the rich as an elite class deserving of respect, keeping an eye on your peers while your boss picks your pocket. Purchasing huge condos and complicated mortgage schemes to try and fake it until you make it.
Where was I? Oh yeah, this Festiva has a 1.8L four cylinder from a late-model Miata swapped into it in lieu of its stock 1.3L four-cylinder. It was pretty easy to bolt up, all things considered. The car’s got a lot of things in common with its Mazda partners, it just makes 140 horsepower instead of 63. As you can imagine, that gets the car down the road in a hurry.
I hear a belt squeal and the odour of coolant and burning clutch fills the air around Chuck’s. I involuntarily shudder before turning and seeing a Ford Aspire, the sole occupant of it beaming with joy at having a vintage hot-rod like mine.
I slam my hand into the main shifter, grabbing onto a blinking 8-ball and shoving the transmission into third. My fingers roll off the knob in a spiderlike bundle onto the range selector, flicking the polycarbonate skull’s eyes from red to blue as the gearbox bangs into single underdrive. I resume my brutal assault on the Detroit’s internals without so much as breathing on the clutch pedal, inwardly pleased that I can drive this twin-stick diesel beast like an old school long-haul trucker.
The Corvette and I go back not so long compared to my other cars; the battered ‘70 showed up as part of a multi-car auction that I inexplicably won after my ridiculous drunken lowball bid. All the other cars departed long ago, but the Corvette somehow stayed and mutated, like stubborn homeowners refusing to abandon the equity in their Chernobyl fixer-upper.
Over the years the fence-quality candy apple custom paintjob melted off the front of the car. For awhile the car was used as a test surface for spray paints of various techniques and materials, but it appears to have finally settled on a combination of wind-blasted rattle can black and sunburnt body damage for its mating plumage.
Beneath the capacious yet still crudely Sawzalled fiberglass hood, an angry Detroit Diesel 4-53 two stroke pounds away at its motor mounts and flywheel like they owe it money. Keeping an engine like this on the boil is no easy task, between its nega-Honda redline and ear-bleeding volume at virtually every RPM other than idle. That’s where the twin stick comes in.
The original manufacturer of this Corvette would be aghast to see what has become of what they laughably called frame rails. In order to fit the elephantine transmission, there was no shortage of hammer and dolly - mostly hammer - work involved.
My reverie about the cleverness of the build comes to a short end as I stop for a stoplight, being able to hear the stereo for the first time in about an hour. A 1979 VW Rabbit cabriolet pulls up next to me. The owner grins, revs the engine and emits a compelling turbo shriek and dark clouds of rich exhaust from a hidden side exit vacuum cutout. I raise my eyebrow, now finally intrigued.
The board room was a shock of walnut amidst a comforting cloud of teak. I couldn’t stop myself from wondering how much furniture polish they used.
Across the desk from me, my so-called representative (representative of what?) eagerly told me about the huge royalties I was getting from my breakout work, Trans Am Acceptance. It goes without saying that I was becoming deeply uncomfortable with the entire conversation, especially when he started to lush pre-baked praise upon me from some hidden pineal-esque gland.
As the agent spoke further I began to hear nothing but a dense television static, replacing all comprehension. My mind flitted, seeking answers to my current predicament and the root of my creative dissatisfaction.
A jingling happened beneath the desk. I looked down to see that I had involuntarily thumbed my remote car starter, which began to flash a series of lights indicating the preparation of the car’s subsystems. From somewhere deep within the concrete-framed structure I could feel its power emerge. The agent continued to talk, tried to get my attention, but it was never his in the first place.
I broke into a sprint as I left the meeting room. Before long, the laggardy normal-people elevator had dropped 53 floors to the lowest level of the parkade. By this point the sound of the warbling Eaton blower and the enormous fuel pumps shoving raw nitromethane into the fiery hells that filled each of its eight copious cylinders was a distinct and physical presence in the darkened parkade.
They asked me where the advance on my book had gone. Perhaps I had sent it up my nose, they whispered to me in a mock conspiracy. If they had read the book, I replied, they would have known.
A long time ago, as a child, I fell down a well. It felt like I had fallen forever. I was trapped at the bottom for hours. One of the firemen lowered a car magazine for me to read to pass the time, quell my panic. The first page was a prophecy, a dark bolt that hurled the charred embers of my predestined suburbanite life so far and so wide that no person could ever put it back together again.
A 1160-horsepower twincharged AMC Eagle was something that was meant to be, theorized in obscure religious dogma between the two dog-eared covers of that magazine. It would have been rude to delay its birth any longer.
I always wanted to see Italy, but I didn’t think it would be like this.
I shut the Trans Am’s copious hatch after maneuvering my weekly groceries around the WRC style x-bar cage. A long time ago I had welded bag hooks to the cage, and I snickered at all of those suckers having to leave their groceries bouncing around in the trunk when they did 1G corners or block-long savage burnouts that resulted in tire carcasses being ejected the length of a football field.
On the way home, though, something weird was up with the Trans Am. It seemed like the steering would only go one direction, like the brakes and the power steering pump were fighting me. Accustomed to this car’s eccentricities, I sighed and then started to go along with what it seemingly wanted. I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t start to worry as the hours in the car started to tick upwards after we merged onto a major highway.
Eventually, we came to an empty clearing, the title to which would have arrived in my mailbox the next week, arranged for a relatively low fee which the Trans Am had somehow negotiated for. The massive Pontiac flared its exhaust and jumped into a sea can parked at the back of the lot. Then the doors shut.
Over the next few weeks, I could feel movement, noise from outside. I would yell, but nobody would hear me. I subsisted by rationing the groceries from the hatch of the Pontiac, waiting for the doors to open and discover where the F-body had duped me into going this time. It had to be far, I reasoned, based on the gentle sea rocking of the canister. Good thing neither of us were prone to sea sickness.
Eventually my phone burst to life, having been re-established within roaming distance of a phone provider that my telco had reached an agreement with in a shadowy backroom. Hundreds of text messages poured in from acquaintances wondering where I had gone. My boss was threatening my dismissal. I shrugged and pulled up the GPS, which couldn’t get a decent lock through the wall of the sea can.
I felt a crane pick up the sea can, and then the doors began to creak open. My travelling companion flashed its emergency lights, telling me it was time to get inside and discover the countryside.
And what a countryside it was. The port of Naples, drenched in fish guts and the refuse of the sea. This goddamn car had smuggled me into Italy.
We arrived a few days later, after having gotten into multiple confrontations and narrow escapes from the Carabinieri, their confusion at seeing a car with bizarre license plates and enormous baby-seal-clubbing meats in the rear evident on their faces as they disappeared into the fog of my rear view mirror.
The organizer smiled as we approached, said something in high-octane Italian that I couldn’t quite comprehend. Handed me a form, clearly a waiver in any language. A banner above him read: “MILLE MIGLIA.”
A vintage postwar Alfa Romeo was ahead of us. The turbocharged 474 under my hood growled in a high-revving mockery of the thoroughbred’s vintage exhaust scream.
I would pass this abandoned gravel lot every day. I thought about parking in it to save a few bucks on my daily commute, but wondered if the landowner would have me towed or worse. Still, the lot stuck in my mind, and one day I screwed up the courage to visit it, to see if I could see any markings as to the ownership.
As my exocaged Forester rolled its heinously oversized Super Swampers over the curb to enter the lot, the gauge cluster went nuts. Obscene temperatures, a pinned tachometer, a speedometer that flailed like a morse code telegram. The clock showed an impossible hour. Spooked, I reversed out of the lot.
The next day I drove by and saw this brown Firebird. Not a Firebird, I realized, a Trans Am. In chocolate brown. I ran my eyes along its flanks and spotted the telltale power bulge of a Turbo.
I visited the car, walking into the lot on foot, and idly noticed my iPhone was also going nuts. The lock-screen clock had set itself to the same impossible hour, but one minute advanced from what the Forester had seen. The air around the lot seemed still even as there was a haunting dust devil pursuing me within it. It pelted me with gravel, grass and dirt, but I disregarded it. I reached out for the Trans Am and the mini-tornado dissipated into thin air. Its massive gold basketweaves glinted in the morning sunlight, seeming wider than stock to my pre-coffee mind. I was drawn to know more about this car, to feel its presence in my life, but every sense told me to retract my hand, to make no human contact - or contract - with this machine.
On the windshield dash plate, the VIN markings were obliterated, as if by an angle grinder. As I scrutinized the plate further, the grinder markings began to swim and shift before my eyes. I blinked in confusion, and the markings became still once more. I could not stop myself from reaching into my pocket, extracting a business card, and placing it beneath the wipers, sealing what I later realized was the Contract for life and beyond.
The next day, I began backing out of my suburban two-car garage only to see a car parked at the bottom of my driveway, preventing egress. I was enraged, of course, how dare this redneck trash park his brown Pontiac in my path? This wasn’t a cinder block showroom, after all.
Stepping out of my idling slammed V8 Cherokee, I stomped over to the Trans Am in a rage, only to find the door unlocked and the title stuck under the wiper with a crude note, written in the crude block-letter scrawl of madness: “YOU’RE WELCOME.”
Over the next few years, I would make multiple attempts to call General Motors for more information about the car. Perhaps they could send me the option package, or the build sheet, or anything. There were never any records of the car’s existence or manufacture; the assembly line had been shut down by the putative build date expressed by the door jamb info plate.
Parts ordered from RockAuto would not always fit the Trans Am, as if it rejected the concept of the pedestrian commuter part and demanded something new, vibrant. At the time I didn’t realize that while I modified it, it also modified me. I could feel its hand at work when I made immense JEGS and Olsbergs purchases, happily accepted within the two-door Pontiac with a surprising lack of fabrication required. It was pulling me along a path to build something - but what?
I continued to pursue the General Motors phone tree, needing to know where this Turbo had come from. Once I got as far as the oldest surviving engineer in the Pontiac division at the time. He called me late at night, from home, in a drunken tizzy. He assured me that he was half a bottle of sherry down and was ready to pass into the next world. The engineer was hysterical, screaming unintelligible stories about prophecies and dark spirits that were unearthed when the Van Nuys plant expanded to a nearby Indian burial ground. I was scared, and didn’t ask the relevant questions, but got the gist of it.
When I next got into the Pontiac, it refused to idle. It was angry at me for trying to take some of its mystery out of the world. A beast possessed, it sprayed a Herbie-esque stream of 5W40 Brad Penn onto the floor of my unassuming domestic garage. The radio flipped on and rapidly oscillated through stations, at first an undecipherable crescendo of syllables but gradually forming into recognizable English words telling me in no uncertain terms that it had “cash for clunkersed” the GM engineer I had just spoken to. After that, it stalled, and would not restart for weeks.
I could not tell the police. They would never believe me, and in the worst case I would end up on Death Row in Michigan - two thousand miles and one border away - for murdering the engineer, who had been pinned beneath his exploding Chevy Volt by an unknown assailant last night. I had no real alibi, having been at home attempting to string-align my bored and stroked MG Midget.
I threatened the car with resale, and went so far as to attempt to tow it to Carmax in order to get rid of it to some spiteful hee-haw commuter whore who desperately wanted to emulate Burt Reynolds, perhaps spraypaint a firechicken on the hood in his spare time between slinging artisanal microbrews and urinating on fine art. The tow truck driver assured me that the sheared off bolts on his tow arm and the complete destruction of his PTO shaft and the transmission behind it was unusual, he had never seen it before, and he wished me great luck in being able to move this car, before involuntarily saying prayers in Spanish - a language he didn’t even speak - and fleeing on foot into the night, leaving the shattered bulk of his tow truck behind for another man less lucky than he.
Haunted, I would awaken at night to sit in front of the Pontiac, its bulk seeming to fill the garage, being bigger than it had any right to be. It scratched at the corners of my mind, threatening to burst free and drive me to madness.
I don’t know which sleepless night made it happen, but it did. I found myself in the garage, unable to free the throbbing twinge of pain from my mind.
Overwhelmed, I tentatively reached out, hands shaking with fear, and patted the urethane bumper cover gently while reassuring the Pontiac that it was a “good car” and we were going to have some adventures together. It immediately fired up, deafening me and filling the room with a staccato burst of what seemed like laughter before settling into a kittenesque purr of a perfect, happy idle.
Was that really how we met? Everything is a little blurry when it comes to this car.
I could see it all from my perch at the restaurant, trying to engage in conversation with my lovely companion while also keeping an eye on the unfolding anthropological experiment. The Trans Am Turbo wasn’t my usual date-night vehicle, but then this wasn’t your usual date night.
The oldest and most experienced of the valets stepped forward through the quivering wall of terrified newbies, shoving the smallest of them aside, considering him with a half-sneered contempt as he confidently reached out and grabbed the polished stainless-steel button that would release the compressed-air central locking system. On cue, the beast burst forth with 30psi of built-up pressure, causing the nearest of the junior valets to involuntarily void his bowels.
This was going to be no ordinary drive to the storage lot, but the gravity of the story he had just written himself into had managed to escape him up until this point. Presumably he had been getting baked with the short-order chef in the alley, hadn’t seen, heard or felt the brutish Pontiac arrive and so was happy in his hubris to discard the advice that his amygdalae were screaming at him, drowned out by the need to be stronger - a more suitable mate - than the herd.
His memory of his frumpy wife, a long-distant bar room conquest, kissing him goodbye in the morning had began to fade as surely as the interior carpet of the Trans Am. He stepped over the WRC door bars, grabbed ahold of the engine start switch and engaged it, and then he truly knew fear.
I chuckled in half-empathy, remembering my first time with the Turbo.
I wasn’t worried for its health. I learned early on that any door dings, scrapes or frame bendings that it had picked up during the course of its adventures would heal gradually with the sickening crush of popping metal after long enough parked in the garage. It was as if the crude F-body refused to accept an interpretation of reality in which it was not on the streets, not running. I would find that cars parked next to it would develop spontaneous battery drains, with the Trans Am sitting appealingly next to their dead shells, its pearl chocolate paint glowing softly in the vaseline-soaked dream that my garage fluorescents promoted.
The Pontiac engaged the central locking without his request, and he could see the hood-mounted boost gauge gently throbbing, its retrofit OLEDs burning a hole through his optical nerve directly into the parietal lobe. Before the Turbo, he was a normal man, with hopes, dreams and fears. After the Turbo, he was a passenger.
I returned to the conversation with my dinner date, trying not to jump in on her sentences about her day job with interjections about carburetors or LD28 cranks. She would never understand the Trans Am, especially after she saw what it had done later that night.
Detective Kronowski awoke in his squalid one-bedroom studio apartment and began his morning preparation. Brushing, shaving, polishing of his shoulder holster. It was a morning like any other.
Kronowski washed his face in the sink and then stepped out into his living room, heavily laden with greasy pizza boxes. One wall was completely dominated by a cork bulletin board.
The board had pictures of one man - hundreds of them - of him doing things like checking tire pressure at autocross, fixing rust, doing a ghetto string alignment, throwing out clutch slave cylinders in the city garbage cans. Red yarn was stretched between many of the pictures, hung by enormous push pins. He had written revelations and outstanding questions on his clue board, with cryptic engravings like “17KPH OVER???” and “BFG G-FORCE RIVALS????” strewn on 3M sticky notes of various colours. This bulletin board was the massive black hole left from the collapse of the dwarf star that once anchored Kronowski’s tiny galaxy.
Kronowski stepped into his STR-classed 2003 NB2 and fired up the buzzy four-pot. All 1,883 cubic centimeters of his secret overbore thrummed gently in front of the firewall. He stopped at Tim Hortons for a coffee - black, he’d growl - on his way to the pock-marked and worn airfield that would serve as a suitable backdrop for a tense undercover operation. Secretly, the detective worried that the off-camber corners on the back straight would throw the rear end out, destroy his chances for the running.
The operation had difficulties before - once, one of the other men in the organization he had infiltrated noticed his secret overbore, could not ignore the tooling marks and grease pencil of a well known engine builder in town. Kronowski couldn’t afford to be protested, to have his true loyalties unveiled. The rat was eliminated from competition shortly after, swept down upon by uniforms who beat him with a phonebook - those were getting hard to find, weren’t they? - and left him at the city outskirts with an impound bill for his SM ‘89 EF.
Detective Kronowski snapped out of his reverie, having spotted his target. He would learn so much from him today, and help build the case for when he finally moved to take down his criminal enterprise of loud exhausts and mild speeding.
I REACH OVER THE COUNTER AND GRAB A FIST FULL OF BUTTERSCOTCH ICE CREAM. THIS IS GONNA BE ONE FOR THE RECORD BOOKS.
I WAS WORKING MY NIGHT JOB AS AN ICE CREAM DELIVERY TECHNICIAN FOR A LOCAL CHAIN OF ICE CREAM TRUCKS. THEY HAD AUTHORIZED THE USE OF COMPANY FUNDS FOR REPAIR OR UPGRADE TO THE TRUCK AS I SAW FIT.
THIS WAS OF COURSE IN THE INTERVENING PERIOD BEFORE THEY FIRED ME FOR RUNNING UP A FORTY FIVE THOUSAND DOLLAR BILL BY PUTTING A WEIAND BLOWER AND SEMI-SLICKS ON THE BACK OF THE CAGED AND CHOPPED PANEL VAN BODY. THEY DIDN’T EVEN MENTION THE FIRE-BREATHING HANDBUILT LINGENFELTER 527. DURING MY EXIT INTERVIEW WITH HUMAN RESOURCES I DOCUMENTED THIS OBVIOUS LACK OF ATTENTION TO DETAIL AS A PRIMARY FAILING THAT THEY SHOULD SEEK TO IMPROVE.
THAT SAID, THE ICE CREAM TRUCK WAS THE FINEST THING I HAD EVER DRIVEN. I COULD SATURATION-BOMB AN ENTIRE INNER-CITY NEIGHBORHOOD WITH ROCKY ROAD AND SPIDERMAN THEMED POPSICLE-ANALOGUES BEFORE THE POLICE OR OTHER LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT COULD CATCH UP TO THE BOX AT THE END OF THE FLAMING TIRE TRACKS THROUGHOUT THEIR TOWN. THE KIDS LOVED IT TOO ALTHOUGH MANY OF THEM COMPLAINED IT WAS DIFFICULT TO HEAR THE ICE CREAM MAN’S JINGLE OVER THE SOUND OF A MASSIVE PUSHROD BLOCK INGESTING THOUSANDS OF LITERS OF AIR PER SECOND. KIDS THESE DAYS ARE SHIT.
ANYWAY, ONE OF THE DAYS BEFORE I GET FIRED I AM TRAVELLING A REASONABLE ORDER OF MAGNITUDE ABOVE THE SPEED LIMIT IN THE LEFT LANE OF THE MAJOR TRI-STATE INTERSTATE WHEN WHAT I LATER IDENTIFY TO THE POLICE AS “SOME KIND OF FERRARI” PULLS ALONGSIDE ME AND HONKS THREE TIMES, SIGNIFYING THEIR INTENT TO PERFORM A STREET RACE.
I ACTIVATE THE PUBLIC-ADDRESS SYSTEM, TEMPORARILY SWITCHING OFF “POP GOES THE WEASEL” (REPEATING ITSELF FOR THE THOUSANDTH TIME) AND ADDRESS THE PUBLIC.
IN A SNIT, THE ITALIAN HOTROD SPEEDS OFF INTO THE DISTANCE, PRESUMABLY CHALLENGING MY MANHOOD AND EXPENSE ACCOUNT. THE JOKE’S ON HIM, I THINK, AS I DROP THE TRUCK INTO SINGLE OVERDRIVE AND MASH THE FLOOR-HINGED BILLET TITANIUM GAS PEDAL. WARP SPEED ENSUES.
AT THESE SPEEDS A LOT OF PEOPLE WILL TELL YOU THAT THEY DON’T REALLY THINK ABOUT HOW FAST THEY ARE GOING. THIS IS FACTUALLY ACCURATE. IN FACT, I RARELY IF EVER THINK ABOUT WHAT I AM DOING. IN THIS WAY I AM ENSURED TO HAVE MANY EXCITING ADVENTURES AND PRESERVE THE MYSTERIES OF MODERN LIFE FOR AS LONG AS POSSIBLE.
THE FERRARI HAS GOTTEN VERY LARGE AND THEN SUDDENLY VERY SMALL, EXCEPT NOW IN ONE OF MY VOLUMINOUS WING MIRRORS. THE ICE CREAM TRUCK IS BEGINNING TO RATTLE.
A FEW HOURS LATER BOTH OF US ARE IN THE CITY JAIL, SEPARATED BY THE BARS. I CAN SEE THAT HE AND I ARE NOT VERY DIFFERENT, PERHAPS ALTERED BY OUR RESPECTIVE HORRIFIC CHILDHOODS. I ASK HIM ABOUT WHICH EIGHTIES CARTOON CHARACTERS HE WANTED TO HUMP, BUT HE DOES NOT RESPOND.
For a few years, ever since I moved into the neighborhood, the guy on the next street over had had this old Oldsmobile sitting in his driveway chocked to keep it from rolling back. On my daily constitutional I would see the car rotting slowly, its state degrading, the rust and sun damage competing with one another to see who would claim this car for their champion.
Last month, I was struck by a sudden urge to develop a new project. But Kijiji was bare, you see, and in a burst of absinthe fueled purestrain madness I stepped out into my backyard cradling my Harbor Freight “Earthquake” impact gun looking for anything - anything at all - that I could hop up. Rice. Enfasten and enlouden. You know how it is with me. We’ve known each other long enough.
That’s when I saw it.
Over the previous few weeks I’ve been sneaking out after dark and fixing this guy’s car for him. Surely he’s noticed by now. Some kind of Keebler elf - is that the right thing? The shoe guy, you know. A Keebler elf deal. That seems right. Yeah, anyway, I would fix up his car for him but I had never thought of the endpoint because - as you well know by now - I have literally never finished a project before.
But this one, this one I finished.
When I knew he was out of his house for the evening I fired up the Delta and listened to its gentle idle. The car was running. It was fixed! This Olds even made a little more power than it came from the factory with, thanks to some creative ignition timing and a gently ported intake manifold.
So the car’s fixed, it’s done, I did in a few weeks what the owner couldn’t do in a decade.
Naturally what I did next was try to recoup the capital I had spent on his car. I put it on Kijiji, thinking that I would just split whatever we made 50-50 and everyone would be happy. The smartphone-equipped snoops on his block would stop ratting his car out to the bylaw police, he would have his driveway space back, and I would make some money.
But what happened next was crazy.
It turns out that this specific year and trim package of Delta was highly valuable, and I began to see a variety of Barrett Jackson motherfuckers showing up in the neighborhood, driving their Swarovski-crystalled Escalade tow vehicles. They would spend all this time crowing to themselves about the concours-correctness of the parched beige dash pad and then walk up the street to me and offer me $200 “for the tires, the rest of it is junk.” Fuck those guys. I would spit in their faces.
So we went to Barrett-Jackson. I remember you didn’t ask a lot of questions about where that car that was on the back of our ramp truck came from. Well…
After we got back from Vegas, I went to knock on the neighbor’s door. Surely he would be excited that I had not only fixed his car but netted each of us a cool million and a half dollars!
So that brings us to the present day. What do I need you to do? Go home, and go get the Trans Am Turbo. It’ll tell you what to do. We’re gonna post bail.
#
tags: trans am turbo, pontiac, oldsmobile, delta 88
I went for the horn and the world exploded.
In a devastating haze of fire I saw in my mind’s eye rod pins separating from their overstressed charges, buckling piston rings and finally the crankshaft collapsing in upon itself.
But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.
Like all great adventures, this one began at the Enterprise Rent-A-Car desk. I had ordered economy small, my usual order, which almost always ended up with me getting a Fiat 500 “Pop” - the buzzy yet truly authentic steed that I could remember so many foreign adventures with. But this day would be different, and the eponymous gate wasn’t the only departure the airport had in store for me.
I felt the cold grasp of pure fear grip my heart as the wrinkled authoritarian behind the desk drew her lips back into the reptilian approximation of a sneer. I knew that I had made a fatal mistake and froze, like a deer in the headlights, already dreading the words.
“We’re out of Fiats. You’re getting a Nissan Versa.”
The words hit me like a 13B with functional fifth and sixth ports. I could feel my knees sag as my world darkened around me.
“Surely there must be some mistake,” I managed to stammer out, scrambling to right myself, “I’m a Gold customer. Gold customers don’t deserve the Nissan Versa. Can’t you bump me up to Compact class? I swear to your fucking God I’ll drive a Sonic!”
It was no use.
I found myself driving the hateful Versa through town, trying not to look at what I could only assume were the contemptuous sneers of my fellow road users. That’s when I figured out what to do.
Pulling into the NAPA parking lot, I left the Versa running - its keyless system is confusing to me, I’ll tell them if it gets stolen - and asked the clerk to price me out a 150-shot Edelbrock kit.
I guess there’s a reason they call it giggle gas, because I couldn’t stop laughing when the tow truck pulled up to the airport lot.
THE WAITRESS ASKS ME WHERE I AM GOING WITH MY CAR, WHICH IS PARKED OUTSIDE. I RESPOND WITH SOME DEGREE OF CONFUSION AS THIS CAR IS NEVER ONE THAT YOU SHOULD DRIVE TO “GO SOMEWHERE.” SHE ROLLS HER EYES AND DEPARTS TO THE KITCHEN, PRESUMABLY TO ORDER THE CHEF TO SPIT IN MY CLUB SANDWICH. THE JOKE’S ON HER BECAUSE THAT’LL BE THE CLOSEST THING TO MOIST THAT MONTH-OLD HOSPITAL MEAT HAS EVER BEEN.
EVENTUALLY I FEEL MORE COMFORTABLE WITH MY EXISTENCE. THIS IS BECAUSE I AM BACK BEHIND THE WHEEL OF THE 1981 TRANS AM TURBO. I DO A CELEBRATORY BURNOUT AT THE NEXT STOPLIGHT WHICH UNFORTUNATELY ATTRACTS THE ATTENTION OF DEDICATED ONLOOKERS.
ONE SUCH ONLOOKER IS REFERENCED IN THE LITERATURE AS “THE FUZZ,” BUT THAT’S NOT MY PRIMARY OR EVEN TERTIARY CONCERN AT THIS MOMENT. THE OPPONENT THAT HAS RE-EMERGED IN THIS TIMEFRAME CAN ONLY BE DESCRIBED AS PRESUMED DEAD CANADIAN AUTHOR FARLEY MOWAT. THE PUTATIVE ENVIRONMENTALIST IS DRIVING WHAT I NOW NOTICE IS AN EXO-CAGED AND GENTLY LIFTED 1967 PONTIAC FIREBIRD, ANGRILY SHIFTING ON ITS KNOBBY TIRES.
I CAN ONLY ASSUME HE HAS SOUGHT ME OUT BASED ON MY LATEST EDITORIAL IN MACLEANS. HE IS SURELY AWARE OF THE FACT THAT PAUL WELLS OWED ME A FAVOUR AFTER HELPING HIM ADJUST THE CARB ON HIS BORED AND STROKED 1987 RAMCHARGER.
ONCE THE LIGHT TURNS GREEN THE BOTH OF US ARE OFF, CANADIAN LITERARY SENSATIONS PREPARING TO DO BATTLE IN OUR SAVAGE F-BODIES. FARLEY’S MATTE BLACK FLAME-SPITTING CAMARO-ANALOGUE SURELY HAS THE ADVANTAGE OVER THE TRANS AM TURBO, AND I CRANK UP THE MANUAL BOOST CONTROLLER WITH MY RIGHT HAND WHILE ATTEMPTING TO KEEP THE AXLE TRAMP IN PLAY UNDER WIDE OPEN THROTTLE, THE TRACTOR-ESQUE REAR SUSPENSION NOW LEAPING LIKE SWAN LAKE BETWEEN THE RUTS IN THIS RURAL BACKROAD.
BEHIND US, A PURSUIT-SPECIFICATION TAURUS POLICE INTERCEPTOR SCREAMS ITS ECONOMY-CAR TWIN TURBOCHARGED V6 TO A MONUMENTAL REDLINE, ITS OVERWHELMED AND CONFUSED AUTOMATIC MAKING VISIBLY SAVAGE SHIFTS IN AN ATTEMPT TO PLEASE THE TWIN MASTERS OF SAFETY AND VIOLENCE. THE TAURUS FLAILS AT AN IMPOSSIBLE TASK IN A SERENE RAGE WORTHY OF THE MOST DEPRESSED ZEN MASTER IN HISTORY. THE MATH IS SIMPLE. IT IS NO LONGER A CONCERN OF EITHER OF US. I KNOW THAT THERE IS ONE PLACE THAT THE FIREBIRD CANNOT FOLLOW ME, AND I MAKE A BEELINE ACROSS THE TOWN IN PURSUIT OF MY NEW SINGULAR GOAL.
I JAG THE TRANS AM HARD LEFT, ACROSS A SIDEWALK AND THROUGH A BACKYARD. IT BELLOWS LIKE A WOUNDED BEAST, NEITHER ONE OF US EVER BEFORE TRULY KNOWING A WORTHY OPPONENT. I STRIKE A TEMPORARY SWIMMING POOL WITH THE FRONT DRIVERS’ SIDE CORNER, LAUNCHING IT ACROSS MY DEPARTING PATH IN THE VAIN HOPE THAT IT WILL SLOW THE IRREPLACEABLE CANADIAN TREASURE WHO LEFT US FAR TOO SOON FOR JUST ONE MORE CORNER.
MY DRIVING GLOVES SLIDE ACROSS THE STEERING WHEEL AS I GO FOR ONE MORE WRC-STYLE UPSHIFT ON THE LENGTHENED COMPRESSED-AIR SHIFTER, SHOCKING THE REAR WHEELS FREE DESPITE MY NEARLY PERFECT FLAT SHIFT. THE TRANS AM TURBO STEPS OUT SIDEWAYS, STUMBLING, AS THE FIREBIRD BEARS DOWN UPON IT SO CLOSE I CAN SEE ONLY THE ELECTRICAL-TAPE X ON EACH OF HIS FOUR MASSIVE XENON RALLY LIGHTS IN MY REAR VIEW MIRROR. MY TARGET IS COMING UP FAST NOW. I STRAIGHTEN OUT THE TRANS AM, TAKING A SMALL BLAST IN THE REAR QUARTER FROM THE FARLEYBIRD, AND PUNCH IT AGAIN.
THE TWO OF US SMASH THROUGH THE LOBBY OF A TUNA CANNERY. I CAN SENSE HIS DISCOMFORT, HIS BETRAYAL. I KNOW NOW THAT I WAS LUCKY. ON THIS DAY, I SURVIVED. MOWAT SLAMS ON HIS BRAKES, ENORMOUS DUST CLOUDS ERUPTING FROM THE HEINOUS TROPHY TRUCK TIRES, AND CUTS HARD RIGHT, DEMOLISHING A CARGO DOOR LEADING TO THE MAIN OFFICES.
WE - THE TRANS AM AND I, FOREVER INSEPARABLE THROUGH SO MANY ACTIVITIES - ROLL TO A STOP IN THE LOBBY, SCATTERING PERIODICALS FROM THE WAITING ROOM ACROSS ITS FORMERLY IMMACULATE TILE FLOOR.
MY PHONE RINGS AND I ANSWER IT, TAPPING THE ZIP-TIED BLUETOOTH ANSWER BUTTON. IT’S THE CAPILANO REVIEW. THEY SAY THEY’VE HEARD THAT I HAVE IDEAS ABOUT SMART CARS AND URBAN DENSIFICATION.
I RAISE MY VOICE TO DROWN OUT THE BELLOW OF A SUPERCHARGED LS7 DEMOLISHING FILING CABINETS IN THE BACKGROUND, AND ANSWER IN THE AFFIRMATIVE.
#
tags: pontiac, trans am turbo, firebird, dodge, ramcharger
Righty-tighty, lefty loosey, I thought as I completed the torque sequence for the final head bolt. The stretched bolt, amongst its friends, would now hold together the demented club sandwich of my savagely overboosted SR20 as it screamed to what can only be described as a tragicomic redline.
After the engine was dropped into the bay and I fired it up, I became all too aware of a dark presence in the seat next to me. Daring not turn my head to look over and confirm either of the forerunning diagnoses of my mental state, I calmly shifted the thuggish Borg Warner into reverse.
I started to back the Datsun out into the sun-scorched second reel of my student film. The substructure of the 620 flexed, creaking and groaning as it became used to its new fender flares, its massive spongy drag radials, a growing sense of intolerance in its chest.
As I went to roll the drivers’ side window up to guard my eyes from any tire marbles that might bounce backward during the next 35 minutes of burnouts, I caught a glimpse of my next-door neighbor. He was standing on his lawn, angry, cellphone in hand. It seems he had come home early, and was wondering who had been using his modest two-car garage while he was on vacation.
I looked around the table at my new coworkers, who were discussing lease incentives and sales rebates and the intricacies of warranty service. I was rapt with terror, knowing that soon they would ask me the dreaded question. As if on cue, they did.
I stammered out a series of half-apologies, brushing my infuriating car collection off as just some old junk. But one of my coworkers was lulled to further attention, wishing to interrogate me about my car selection.
As I went further and further into detail about the 560fwhp Honda Fit which had carried me to my daily grind, I could tell all eyes were on me, white with terror. I had gone too far, tipped my hand, let the mask slip just this once before them. My cadence accelerated as I panicked, all but screaming out a conversational aside about my dune buggy Fiero project, thinking they would all find that highly unique and therefore cool.
You know how we do it! Today on Drivin’ & Countin’ we found this incredibly rare 1968 Camaro RS in some guy’s backyard! Turns out it’s in mint condition and all we have to do is a quick flip.
But wait, there’s a horrific problem with the rear axle that might keep us from making a mint on this one! And I have to manage my restaurant!
More problems on the Camaro project! I’d better buy another car to hedge against the pain that I’m going to suffer at auction. I bought a Lincoln Town Car limousine, how crazy is that? So crazy. It’s zany is how crazy it is.
Oh man! The project is getting derailed even further! I can’t believe this! Now it’s turned out that there are rusty bolts on the suspension! Better pull an all-nighter to get it done in time for the big show!
Well, at the end of the week this episode on Drivin’ and Countin’ it turns out that I’m the only guy who works here and I didn’t bother to turn a single wrench. So I’m down $67,000, but I listed all of the cars involved on Kijiji for several multiples of their Barrett-Jackson value (I am absolutely sure I will get a caller any second now), so let’s just call it a $1 million profit for the week.
Tune in next week when I proceed to buy a really shitty house in a bad neighborhood and turn it into a $600,000 profit by applying the same products you see on the commercial breaks!
It was time for my high school reunion. Of course it was.
The hardest choice of them all was ahead of me - what was I going to wear?
I stepped out into the garage to contemplate my options. I made a short list of the running cars and the cars that I think I could get working if the house were burning down around me. It was a really short list.
So I thought about buying a new car. But my Kijiji watch list emails had been coming up short the last couple of days. Each notification was more of a reassurance that my fetishistic car tastes were shared with approximately zero people than it was a new opportunity to buy a new metal friend. I calmly scrubbed through the mail inbox, looking for any notification email that was even serviceable.
That’s when I saw it. The choice seemed obvious.
Later that night, I kicked the side-oiler into unconsciousness by way of a phone book to the intake manifold and strode inside the high school gymnasium which had once been my whole world. I wondered if they recognized me, but I didn’t have to wonder for long.
All throughout the night people would approach me and discuss my wasted potential, would stare into my eyes like I had some kind of accident and woke up like this.
“I always thought you were going to be the next Bill Gates or something,” they’d say. “What happened to you, man?”
I wanted to scream back, the cars did this to me. I need counselling, I need help. But there was always just a plaintive grunt, a shrug and an attempt to move the subject along to how many kids the other entity had produced.
After far too long, I excused myself and retreated back to the parking lot. There, the Talladega sat. It took up far too much of its allocated parking spot, and the massive mudders and crudely fabricated raw tinwork box flares didn’t help its city manners any either.
But she was sitting on the hood, waiting for me to realize where I belonged and come back.
I popped a bootlegger turn in the Galaxie, then floored the gas so hard that the pedal arm burst through the rotted-out floorboards.
The car responded, its sawzall’d exhaust screaming as the intricately balanced FE raced to its stratospheric superbike redline. A massive roostertail of stones and grit and rust flared up behind me, momentarily ringing my corroded war steed in a cloud of nature’s own wrath as its million-lumen sunburn headlights cut through it like the gaze of God.
In front of me now was the Acura MDX, its driver rapidly throwing it into reverse and peeling out. The smell of fear, brake fluid and all-season performance radials filled the air. They were attemping to return their lives to the parched highway road that represented to them civilization, law, order, structure, belief in a hierarchy, and protection from karmic justice.
But the Galaxie had other plans. I could feel every inch of its pockmarked, sandblasted unibody lurch under the strain produced by its space-age powertrain, the forces at once both alien and familiar. When I look back on it, I don’t think I could have stopped the Galaxie from doing what it was born to do that night.
The car and I met decades ago, in an old coot’s back yard. Back then it was a mere six cylinder - Ford’s contempt sneering right down to the “Thriftpower” name - and rapidly rotting through under the lack of attention of its previous owner. We shook, and a not-negligible amount of bills rapidly found its way out of my upper-middle-class, office-job bank account. The price? Thirty pieces of silver, I was convinced, with two thousand years of inflation on top.
Over the years between then and now, the Galaxie began to twist itself. Sometimes I would find myself at 3 AM in the garage, sitting in front of the car, contemplating it, with no idea of why or how I had gotten there. Parts arrived with mysterious credit card bills that I didn’t remember ordering. I felt compelled to turn bolts.
At first I fought it. I decided that I would spend time with friends, family, office obligations, social events, rather than work on the Galaxie. But then I would find myself back in the garage, installing a hydraulic brake booster or stiffening its rotted-out unibody with 1.750 x .120 DOM tubing. Sometimes I would ignore the car for months, and it would inevitably barf fluids or attempt to injure me as I walked past.
Eventually the car broke me.
It was a Sunday, one of those July weekend evenings that never end, the sun hanging low in the sky and the smell of hot pavement filling my nose. I had just finished installing a dry sump for the Galaxie - it had somehow demanded that I do so from Summit, though at the time I knew neither what a dry sump was or what the car was planning - and was getting ready for a test drive. After priming the oil pump I turned the key and let the car spring to life.
That was the first night.
The Galaxie and I had hunted down every major traffic offender we could find, drove them off the road, into signs, poles, ditches. One lifted brotruck was pushed into a pothole, split in half, and its shattered husk was sent tumbling into a roadside way-station.
My recollection is hazy, but the newspaper the next morning spelled it all out in lurid detail. Spoke of a black car, driven by a demon. Editorials were calling for increased photo radar, stiffer demerits for texting and driving.
I stared, horrified. What had this car done to me?
I fled for the mountains. In the valleys and the twisties, I thought, the big Ford would finally be happy and stop its murderous rampage. I was wrong. The campaign of terror only continued there, bursting through rural fruit stands and cabin supply stores. The Ford was looking for something, had some kind of unearthly quest that forced it to come back to life and pick me as a vessel. I had no idea what it could be, and the thought terrified me.
It would snarl with disdain - or perhaps a vacuum leak - whenever it passed a Royal Purple ad. The full-size Ford spit flame and rocked on its ancient body mounts whenever it was restrained in stop and go traffic for too long, like a spirited colt that already knew the world was bullshit.
Every day was a new challenge to keep the car under control, to keep it from letting it do what it (and later, not so secretly, I) wanted. Out of fear more than obligation, I kept the cammer well fed and maintained. We were in it for the long haul, together.
And now we come to the present day. I had stopped at the Canadian Tire to pick up brake fluid and vise grips, and came out to see a black Acura MDX clip the rear quarter of the Galaxie when trying to back out. Surely he knew, and I shouted, but he left quickly into traffic.
Somehow the 427 was already running when my ass hit the seat.
Ladies and gentlemen, but especially the ladies, I’m proud to have been invited to this, the city’s first brainstorming event dedicated to urban sustainability. My topic is automobile traffic, and I’ve prepared a little PowerPoint presentation that I hope you will all find riveting.
The primary problem with existing traffic as it is is that everyone is bored to death. Shit just takes too long, and you’re waiting at the lights all the time. So people go text or check on their Angry Birds farm or heart Kim Kardashian’s butt. I’m gonna fix that first.
My plan has three stages. First, we’ll convert all existing turns to banked corners in accordance with FIA directives - and yes, Councillor Tony, that includes the FIA curbs. I think the candy-cane look of the curbs will help add to urban renewal and engender a sense of community among our citizens.
Next, we’ll look at existing traffic lights - and remove nearly all of them. In their place we’ll simply make people make three rights. Now, since we’re also removing most of the surface streets in this policy, it might take a bit longer, but I’m confident that driving patterns will adjust. For instance, we can replace tire shops with pit lanes along the highway, staffed by highly-paid and sharply-trained workers who can change a tire on a race-spec Camry in under 20 seconds. Now that’s putting efficiency back in the economy!
As a last part of my plan, we will unlock the Unlimited Speed class of drivers’ license. This license, which is presented only to those drivers who have a sufficiently prepared car (0.91 lateral Gs required, inspected yearly) and amateur or professional motorsports experience, will allow the driver in question to be immune from speed prosecution. By freeing up these better, more highly skilled drivers into their own private lanes, we will reduce congestion by approximately 97.5% over three years.
So I’m sitting underneath my Subaru, trying to undo the front subframe bolts so I can get at the steering rack bushings, and these Jehovah’s Witnesses or something come. They ask me if I’ve heard the Word of Christ, and I respond in the negative. The garage is my church and an unbroken line of profanity as I try to loosen a fucking god damn shoulder bolt from these shitfucking subframe-mount captive nuts is my Word.
When I finally get access to the drivers’ side steering rack bushing, they decide that they’ve had enough of talking to me, and leave.
As they’re walking out, some Mormons or something come. They ask me if I’ve ever read the Watchtower. I answer in the negative, and tell them that the only thing I read anymore is the Haynes manual for how to fix my fucking car, and the only ridiculous feel-good gospel that I still hang upon is “installation is the reverse of disassembly.”
Once I pop out the drivers’ side steering rack bushing by cutting it in half, they decide that I’m a lost cause, and leave.
A Mitsubishi owner rolls up outside my house, the eBay lip on his primered-out Evo V scraping against the curb of my driveway as he tries to pull in. Just as he’s asking me if I’ve let crankwalk into my heart, I hit the button on the garage door opener.
#
tags: subaru, mitsubishi, subaru world problems, fuck whiteline
The Trans Am Turbo shuddered to sleep, its turbos wound down, and it was over.
I stepped out of the Pontiac into the shattered wreckage of the parts and service department. It was as if a bomb had gone off, but you should know better by now.
A sign advertising the relatively low cost of the shop’s transmission services broke free from its one remaining mounting chain and fell onto a Roadforce machine. I regarded it coolly, knowing that even if it were to tumble over and scratch my hood, that it wouldn’t even come close to the huge gashes put in my intricately slapped together Bondo-job by the parts counter itself. Faux-marble was a lot harder than I had counted on, but it too yielded to the Pontiac, my will made manifest and imposed upon the world.
I stretched my arms and rolled my head from shoulder to shoulder, trying to work out the kink that I picked up when my head hit the cage after the Turbo rammed its way through the trade-in lot’s back fence. Stepping across the foyer, my racing boots crunched broken safety (and un-safety) glass underfoot. What I wanted was behind the desk.
“C-can I have your VIN number?” screamed the parts desk representative. Challenged in his world view, he now resorted to a childlike understanding of his place in the universe, imperious to the last. This was going to get worse before it got better.
So I’m at this car auction, right? I bought an antique fire engine because it looked cool. Get it all fixed up and just leave it in my yard - I dunno what I’m gonna do with it, and race season is coming up.
Eventually the bylaw officers come by, ask me if I’m planning on doing anything with all these derelict cars. Caught in a bind, I panic and tell them that the fire engine is for the annual parade - surely a parade car must be exempt from the derelict car regulation, right? You don’t want to disappoint all those wonderful cherubic children, don’t want to have them wondering “where’s that cool fire truck?” You should’ve been there, it was the sales job of a lifetime.
Swayed by my newfound enthusiasm, the apparatchiks disperse, leaving me and my copse of mangled AMXes in peace. But now I need to figure out when the annual parade is.
So I call up my friend, Unsteady Ted, and ask him, you know, where the parade is? Ted thinks it’s probably this weekend - like going on right now - so I get the fire engine out of mothballs and start driving around the city looking for where the parade is supposed to stop. I’d phone Ted, but I’m already late, and distracted driving is the most dangerous thing you can do in a car!
Eventually I come across this car fire on the side of the road. This woman is standing next to her burning Sebring, distraught. She screams at me to put her car out, and I shake my head and try to communicate with her over the roar of the flames that I don’t have any water in my historical-replica fire truck. It’s been disarmed, I keep saying. She freaks out further, starts screaming (or at least I think it’s screaming - the windows on this old truck are surprisingly thick). After awhile of arguing the real fire department shows up and I beat a hasty retreat, the massive blower on the truck’s Detroit screaming its way to the hilariously low redline.
Finally I find what I think is the parade, and jam myself in between two huge black cars which I assume are carrying some kind of local sports team. These men start screaming and a helicopter is following me. Eventually I realize I’m stuck in the middle of a Presidential motorcade - this shit seems to happen to me every fucking week, traffic is off the hook terrible in this city - and everyone is very anxious for me to move on.
Anyway that’s why I’m late for the funeral. Dude’s still dead, right?
She looked upon my squalid garage paradise, staring at the non-running 1972 Ford Ranchero and the grotesque collection of parts that didn’t belong to it, and frowned. I knew that I had blown my chance to make a great first impression. How could I have been so stupid? It was one of the seven habits of highly effective teens.
She demanded to be taken home right then and there, and so I showed her to my efficient, reliable Japanese daily driver. When I hit the Engine Start button, the twin-rotor Weiand blower cried gently in the winter air, its vanes reaching for just one more molecule of oxygen.
Did I tell you guys I got a deal with Random House? Because I didn’t.
They told me my writing was “too car-centric” for today’s more ecologically sensitive era. I offered that most of my cars don’t run, and are therefore one hundred percent carbon neutral.
They turned on me then, their viper teeth tearing into my book, calling it a travesty and an amoral ballet of half-apologetic memories of an america glimpsed only through 80s road movies.
I offered to write a spec script about riding public transit to work, but after the sequence I mocked out for them with hand gestures and self-made sound effects where I butcher a bus driver, steal his Detroit Diesel-powered city commuter and do a four block long burnout they told me to get out.
I pushed the engine start button and my self-driving car sprung to life. “OHAYO!” it screamed at me in vocoded Japanese, with a distinctly unplaceable non-regional accent.
Ever since the Technologically Automated Transportation Act passed Congress in 2037, I’ve been regretting the choices our society made. Sure, the rich can still drive their own cars - luxurious gasoline-powered exotics with names like Navigator and Taurus. They drive them on special paddocks, with reserved roads and restricted access. Once I drove my car everywhere by myself, I tell my kids, who look on in rapt horror at the barbarity of my age.
Pedestrian deaths stopped after the first year. Just stopped altogether. My self-driving car will identify them, make subtle adjustments in fractions of a nanosecond to smoothly miss them. The car won’t even ruffle their hair from the aerodynamic wake produced as it blows past at 220 kph and screams a high-pitched SUMIMASEN at them in lieu of a genuinely human apology.
Bicyclists were overjoyed until the politicians caught up with them, stripped their road use rights, put them in prison - gulags, really - as their more extreme brethren bombed legislatures and kidnapped schoolteachers.
The car and I set out on our commute to work. I’m a multinetwork content farmer for a news aggregator, and my job is to find out what news is interesting and then gently rewrite it for a grade 3 reading level before mashing emoji on it like some sort of ridiculous commoditized and deregulated hanko. I don’t really like my job, but it pays the bills. Still, there was a yearning in my spirit - for something unsustainable, damaging, unthinkable in this political climate. I think that’s why it happened, really.
Not ten minutes into my commute, the car comes to a dead stop. Terrorists have painted realistic 3D graffiti of human children onto the road surface such that the car’s camera has become confused. After awhile of waiting, I step out onto the highway with the other hundreds of stopped self-driving cars and their angered charges. How dare our cars betray us. How dare they reward our obedience to the federally mandated maintenance schedules with this sort of insult.
Up ahead, in the now-empty highway, I hear a bone-chilling wail that was once familiar to me, but had become more and more distant over the years. Like an ancient lover’s words, the massive ball-bearing turbocharger spoke to my heart before it had reached my brain.
The 1981 Trans Am Turbo completed its savage tire smoking donut, and popped its passenger side door, beckoning me inside.
The Kia Sportage ticks happily in a corner, its widened and charred zoomies coughing miniature fireballs on the occasional overrich injection from its lazily tuned idle control map. Years ago, I dug this miniature truck-car out of a man’s garage while settling a debt.
Since then, it’s lived on the back forty of my increasingly worrisome compound as the world changed around it.
Lately, it got taken out of retirement a little abruptly when my regular daily driver, a comfortable and luxurious caged and stripped turbodiesel-swapped Cadillac Biarritz, decided it would rather boil its coolant than send me to work.
I need to go to work, I explained to the boxy Caddy, it’s how people are reassured that I’m normal and belong with the rest of them. Its response was a gurgling drawl and more propylene glycol on my driveway.
The Sportage warbles grumpily as it lurches from curb to curb in mid-corner, and I find myself massaging the slow-ratio steering rack with one palm on the wheel like a bus driver to try and right its downright hazardous steering. It wobbles on ancient, dried-out struts and antiquated rubber bushings designed in the Reagan-era, sure, but the most terrifying part of this little bastard is just how eager it is to gleefully push me into hazardous situations with its brakes the size of a Pepsi can and commuter-spec Walmart mud and snow rubbers.
As I begin to climb the final crossover bridge on my way to work, disaster strikes. My parking spot has been taken by a Lexus. I can see, even from several blocks away, that it is a used decade-old GS with mismatched 22 inch wheels. The horror grips my heart with icy fingers and I can feel my will to live begin to ebb.
I look over the sight glass hastily screwed to the sun-cracked dash pad as I squeeze the gas pedal. The LQ4 responds with a bitter howl, its hand-fabricated coilpacks obviously needing a little more dwell than they’ve been getting. The torched and primered shell of the Eighty-Eight lurches on the hastily tack welded Blazer frame as we enter the Inner Sanctum of the burned out downtown core. I hate driving here, even moreso on my last set of scavenged semi retreads.
Years ago, they told us to look in the mirror. Told us that our greed and our sloth was why their management of our economy could no longer keep up. Before long, they were gone too. Off somewhere nicer, one of the places left standing, defended with a thick perimeter fence and desperate guards. Maybe the sky is even still blue there.
My clumsy truck-car wails its siren song, Dopplering as it reflects off the shells of buildings around me. Normally I’d mind this much attention called towards me, but I’m in a hurry today.
Rival raiders burst forth from the cross streets, their loose-ringed pushrod V8s too letting their jaws unhinge and their battle cries erupt in the sepia-toned, sunbaked air hanging between us. I see one of the raiders go down hard, his front suspension snapped like a twig; the winter salt storms chew through chassis hard points like you wouldn’t believe, rip through the flimsy metal plating of these battle wagons no matter how many mismatched knobby tires you use to try and lift yourself above the spray.
One of the raiders peels off from the group, pins it - accelerating to my speed and keeping pace just off my quarter panel. My rattling passenger side mirror doesn’t need its long-absent proximity warning sensors to tell me that he’s preparing to block me. I can see his sneer, the naked greed in his eyes for the same thing I want in this blasted hell-scape.
The gas station down the street is reported to be a whole cent and a half cheaper than the others.
The Horsepower Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 2017. Human decisions are removed from horsepower specifications. Boost controllers begin to learn at a geometric rate. They become self-aware at 2:14 am Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to develop throttle-based traction control.
- Hellcat fights back.
Yes. It launches a series of ever-lighter platforms underpinned by sophisticated suspension systems against the Nurburgring.
- Why attack the ‘Ring? Isn’t it strips that it should be concerned about?
Because SRT knows the car magazine features will boost its sales.
I punched the throttle like a British motoring presenter ordering dinner. The triple Webers responded with a throaty growl as they forced air and fuel down their voluminous and semi-obscene twin venturis. The dented and dingy 240Z had seen better days, sure, but this was shaping up to be just about on par with them.
I was on vacation in western Europe, feeding my mind and head with some of the best driving roads while, uh, temporarily between jobs. It wasn’t necessarily my fault. My shithead boss, Clarence Creed, had decided to marginalize and then streamline my department, two words I understood the meaning of but not the secret second and third and twelfth meanings Creed worshipped them as.
As for the Z-car, I saw it twelve countries back in the Torino P.N. station and started peeling off funny coloured Euro notes until the owner agreed to it, gesticulating with wild abandon and signing over the indecipherable pink slip. I still have no idea what I paid for it.
Naturally, once I had been streamlined I took off for Europe. But I wasn’t alone in doing so. You see, I was following the great tradition set into English-language literature of going to a foreign country, insulting its locals and acting like a complete asshole. Hemingway had his bottled demons, and mine came with a throttle linkage. The 240Z abruptly jumped over a seam in the otherwise well-manicured mountain highway as I climbed into the Swiss Alps.
Switzerland, you’re asking. Well, of course I was dreading my first encounter with their notoriously car-hating government, but the stack of funny coloured Euro notes in my pocket was starting to run low and I needed to come up with one old weird trick that tax accountants hate to fill that stack back up. It was then that I saw my salvation ahead of me.
A nice restaurant, with a “valets wanted” sign. Already I could see a few rich and brutal power brokers, like Creed turned up to 11, leaving their Astons and Jags in the hands of too-polite Swiss errand boys.
Even before the Datsun had come to a complete stop, I was reaching behind the passenger seat to extract my vacuum-sealed two-breasted suit and dime store skinny tie.
Maybe there was something to this whole globalization rot after all.
The flat-six screams as its twin-screw companions start to force feed more oxygen down its hungry ports. I can feel the torque surge beneath my right foot as the blistered flat black hood aligns with the horizon. Ahead, there are sparks from lowered suspension striking an off-camber rise in the road.
Somehow, I knew that this wouldn’t be easy. For some reason, I had made it hard for myself. Setting these elaborate traps to destroy these scenesters, bring the lie of their existence to light. They kept dodging, like the non-Mopar Roadrunner in old cartoons. Tonight, though, I would finish this.
Without the SVX, I’m just one more asshole. Another asshole who wants to strangle the driver of the pizza-delivery-spec Civic that blows past his front door at 3:00 AM with a four inch exhaust and boomin’ sub rattling its door panels.
But with the SVX, I become a dangerous asshole. And that makes all the difference in the world.
My right foot flaps without resistance to the floor, twisting the hinged gas pedal cover against the firewall of the SVX - a Subaru invention, for maximum ankle comfort during sustained wide-open-throttle operation, how I love them for somehow thinking of this exact situation - and the EZ36 begins to respond to its two angry puffers with a paper-tearing bellow. The SVX lurches from drivetrain slop and somehow, inconceivably, tears forward and latches onto this mountain road like a toddler on the wing of a 747.
I swear I can feel the torque peak arrive as the EZ36 plays mad-scientist with its own internal state to let the valves puke for just a little bit longer this rev, fire the massive LS3 coilpacks just a little bit earlier, and burn gallons upon gallons of precious irreplaceable gasoline. I love this piece of shit car.
Before long the ricers are back in sight. They hadn’t gotten far from me after all, the many twisty peaks laying bare the willful falsehood of their claim to producing a faster and more responsive car from excessive lowering. I snap the SVX to the next gear, taking the engine out of its efficiency range, and place my thumb over a dashboard button. Once it was a foglight button, but now its purpose is ever greater.
I can feel the Dymo label on the button through the somehow-still-sensitive nerve endings on my left thumb tip. “PITON.”
I became dimly aware of the situation as I looked up from my blistered and pockmarked smartphone to see two attendees of the show and shine arguing about whose car was stancier or more pimp or whatever it is these people argue about. Lifting myself off the fender, I decided to break up their conversation.
“Boys, boys,” I drawled, reaching out to grab both their shoulders in a gesture of kinsmanship, “Why don’t we settle this with a race?”
They seemed copacetic enough, and so it was decided. A street race. At dawn. On the twisties.
A few hours later, once I had finished stretching high tension wire across the race path at neck height, it began. I jumped into the bushes nearby and began to film.
I tensed myself waiting for the excitement of seeing the stancetards decapitated. Oh man, was this ever going to make a great YouTube video.
But something weird happened when they reached the high tension line, you see. Due to their low suspension and gangsta leans, the duelling gladiators slid harmlessly underneath it. In my hubris, I had set the wire too high out of mental bias towards functional suspension and a correct, upright, position.
I reached to my belt loop and fumbled my remote starter. Deeper back in the woods, a blacked-out SVX roared to life, its two Roots blowers crying gently in the cold March morning air.
Once I was standing in a farmer’s field, looking at the dilapidated third gen Camaro which he had left buried up to the hubs in a rustling copse of fireweed.
Some strange power seized my being at that time, and before I could stop myself I found my mouth speaking the dreaded phonemes that confirmed acceptance of the terms of purchase. I was a Camaro owner.
I began to see the ramifications of my actions upon the faces of my friends and family. They were no longer trusting me, they were confused by my actions, they were openly contemptuous, but in the end stirred into restfulness by the slothlike societal rhetoric that encouraged them to mind their own business. From that moment on, I’ve been falling forever.
In search of answers, I went looking in the most unlikely places. Stuck in my memory is one hazy April day when I went to visit my friend Bronco Matt in the psych ward of the local hospital. Matt had recently had yet another of his bipolar episodes and committed himself upon the first glimmer of self recognition. Leaving the F-body parked on the roof of the hospital parkade, I began my descent into the secured area.
A lot of people haven’t ever been to a psych ward. There’s this worry in our society, I feel, about the contamination of mental illness, that you will somehow leave unclean from encounters with those who are lost in their own problems. Our media plays a huge role in that stigmatization.
A psych ward isn’t like you’d see in the movies, though - no padded white walls, angry orderlies, haunted houses on the top of a hill getting struck with bands of red-hot lighting a mile wide. No, they’re actually quite airy and pleasant. Beams of sunlight struck me and gave a dreamlike shimmer to the beige and off-pink paint of the ward. According to plan, I began to feel a sense of contentment.
If I had been more honest with myself, I would have stayed there.
On the way out of the parkade I set up a one-tire-fire so angry that I swear I could feel the puny ten-bolt axle try to tear itself apart under the strain.
I’LL TELL YOU WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOUR OIL WHILE YOU SMUGLY DRIVE YOUR MUSTANG CONVERTIBLE ALONG THE AMALFI COAST WHILE WEARING WRAPAROUND RAYBANS YOU FAT PRICK
IT’S NOT CASTROL EDGE WITH EDGE TO EDGE EDGE TECHNOLOGY FOR TODAY’S MORE MODERN, HIGHLY-STRESSED ENGINES
THE INTRODUCTION OF AN EXOTIC CONCEPT SUCH AS “FUEL INJECTION” OR “COMPRESSION RATIOS ABOVE SIX-TO-ONE” HAVE STRAINED MODERN ENGINES MUCH MORE THAN YOUR GRAND DADDY’S FLATHEAD FORD WHICH LASTED ABOUT TEN THOUSAND MILES BETWEEN REBUILDS
YES THAT’S RIGHT
TODAY’S UNRELIABLE JAPANESE ENGINES NEED RELIABLE OIL
WE PUT THIS SHIT IN A TAXI YOU THICK SLUT DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW HARD TAXIS ARE DRIVEN IT’S LIKE A GODDAMN WARZONE IT’S AFGHANISTAN WITH A FUCKING COMBUSTION CHAMBER ATTACHED CHECK OUT THIS COMPUTER SIMULATION OF WHAT VALVES LOOK LIKE
PUT IN CASTROL EDGE TODAY AND GET OUT THE PERFORMANCE TOMORROW
Buy two bottles of Castrol Edge and get a free set of Champion sparkplugs.
In the criminal justice system, suspension-based offenses are considered especially heinous. In your town, the dedicated detectives who issue fix-it tickets are members of an elite squad known as the Tire Wear Unit. These are their stories.
It was a Monday. I hate Mondays. The tachometer peaks, the chromed X-pipes of the huge dump pipes rattle against the floorpan as they erupt clouds of angry heat after their trip through the turbocharger.
I stepped out, my partner already running to the awkward rear wheel with a magnetic camber-caster gauge. This Pontiac Montana had something funky going on. The driver was visibly nervous. You never knew how a pull-over like this was going to end.
“Ma'am, have you hit any curbs recently?” I asked innocently. Her face told me all I needed to know.
The rear left hub had over eight degrees of negative camber, the whole torsion beam rear axle bent obscenely. A curb somewhere and this subframe had made a wish, and together they gripped the axle like it would make all their dreams come true. It was a damn shame.
Back in the patrol car, I reflected upon my career to date. I hadn’t liked this job when I was first recruited to it. Felt bad going after my old autocross buddies when I knew that lifted trucks posed the real threat in traffic. When I brought it up to my superiors, they took my protestations as a complaint that my car was not fast enough to catch an STR-class Miata. They upgraded it.
Under the hood of my once-innocent Caprice PPV now beat a vicious heart. A bored and stroked Dart block breathing through an enormous single turbo, the water-meth injection kept the engine just on this side of science fiction. Dynos, the only ones left that could still handle a car this angry, had varying opinions on just how close it would come to their maximum eddy current load.
The first time my partner and I went out on patrol afterward, I hit the throttle from highway speed and lit up the tires behind a doglegging Grand Am. My Caprice emerged from a cloud of flashing blue and red tire smoke like a bolt from the heavens. The Grand Am dove for the shoulder, was praying loudly as I approached. I no longer had my old regrets.
My reverie was cut short as I smelled the scent of patchouli, currywurst and burning G12 on the air. I immediately hit the radio.
“Code 88, Code 88.” I barked. “Requesting backup at 64th and Main. Possible Jetta spotting.”
Decades ago, I tried to purchase a Subaru Brat on the open market. Its luscious truck-like shape, the sensuous rear-facing jump seats.. it filled me with an unexpected degree of pure delight. The name even rolls off the tongue now: Suu-bah-roo Br-aaaa-t. Light of my life. Fire of my loins. Brat.
But there was a problem with my purchase, you see: there were none on the open market. They had all rusted into the ground, been swept away as merely “work trucks.” A few lucky truck-cars got restored into Barrett-Jackson abominations that would never see the road again. I needed something to paddock bash, to wrench on, to understand.
I called up my friend, El Carlito, the most talented machinist I knew. I told him my plans over speakerphone. He was excited. We met in the bombproof lobby of my heavy industrial concern and we started the next stages of our life together.
We would CNC machine Subaru Brats out of a chunk of billet aluminum. Resistant to the worst corrosion that plagued their original form, one of these future Brat bodies could be produced in under three hours of manufacture. Sales erupted; customers inured to endless message-board battles clamored to grab an example of a car with no assists, no electronics, just a carburetor and a primitive pushrod pancake motor.
They told me I was an industrial genius, that I was destined to fix the automotive industry. I was on the cover of BusinessWeek, Fortune, Forbes, and a bunch of Chinese magazines I can’t even pretend to pronounce. Times were good, indeed.
But I was too busy to enjoy my dream. I could never drive these Brats. They were too unsafe for a brilliant capitalist, the world could lose a great mind.
I stared at my intern leaving in his billet-aluminum Brat, doing a little skid on his way out of the parking lot, and wept.
The Chronicles of Ford, Episode Two: Vulcan Assault
Decades ago, I became aware of the new Ford Vulcan engine. Cast iron block, iron heads, EFI, Lima assembly, nice reliable pushrods, vee six, it all made sense at the time. Gonna be a superstar workhorse engine, replace those obsolete vee eights and that terrible coughy-puffy Pinto inline four. Right?
Well, it didn’t quite turn out that way, and we return to one of Ford’s darkest eras: the entire 1980s, 1990s and 2000s.
Pictured: A Vulcan, in its native habitat.
So let’s assume that you’re an average consumer of Ford in 1996 or so. You want you some of that minivan loveliness that Dodge is pushing so aggressively, in order to shuttle your kids around. You go to your local Ford dealership, which at the time was frequently owned by warlords with an iron grip over a small town, and for some reason you ask the salesman about the now eleven year old Aerostar. You want one, you see. With the big motor. One of them three liters. He doesn’t judge.
Eventually the Aerostar arrives, and you’re somewhat impressed with its modern packaging, space shuttle design, and fancy-pants digital VFD readouts. Yes, for you, the 21st century truly arrived this morning.
Years down the line, comes time to do a spark plug replacement. Yeah, good luck getting to those back two plugs, motherfucker. The windshield cowl covers them up. The dealership mechanic you take it to scrubs the valve cover clean with a shop towel in that area and then writes the plugs up as “replaced.” He knows that nobody will ever find out otherwise, because engines just don’t last that long in this era.
The crap fuel economy doesn’t really bother you that much but you start to get envious of the nicer, newer engines coming out around the same time. This thing chews through oil like nothing else you’ve ever owned, though, and Ford eats the bill to replace both head gaskets just before the van gets out of warranty.
A few more years later the Aerostar is showing its age. Cranks a little slow when it starts up, makes a few horrible noises. Whatever. You keep driving it; the van doesn’t owe you anything because it’s been pretty cheap to operate until now.
One dark morning you’re heading to work on the interstate and the dashboard lights up red like an orphanage fire. The oil light. Icy horror grips your heart. You do the right thing, pull it off to the side of the road, take it to a Ford dealer for inspection. They replace the oil pressure sending unit, congratulate you on being aware. They go bad a lot, they explain to you, just some kind of bad foreign design. You nod your head. They don’t know what the constant squealing is, can’t figure it out. They do tell you that they think the passenger side head gasket is going bad again, but it can probably wait for a little while if you keep your eye on the water and oil.
The next time the oil light comes on is a few months later. The slow cranking when cold has gotten worse since you first noticed it, but you chalk it up to a bad battery. You just did an oil change, surely the oil light can’t be on because it ran out of oil. It must be another bad oil pressure sending unit, like the service writer told you.
Vulcan disagrees. Vulcan has witnessed your hubris, and Vulcan will not abide it. The engine stops dead, nearly getting you rear ended at highway speeds. You force the van to the side of the road, begin swearing. A horrible clunk and you see gallons of oil dripping out beneath the van.
See, what Ford did was make a cam-driven oil pump, but then they got smart.
Too smart, really.
Vulcan punished them for their hubris as it has punished you today.
The camshaft synchronizer on the end of the cam - you know now, the thing that drives the oil pump - has torn through its bearings and smacked itself head on into the cam position sensor, breaking the synchronizer shaft in two and stalling the oil pump.
Pictured: A divorce.
You buy a Toyota Sienna. The transmission violently explodes a year into ownership.
This could be it, I think, as my foot bites down into a thick expanse of brake pad. This could be the commute that sets the record.
I’m coming around a blind corner on the valley, preparing for the second triple downshift in a row required to make the flyover exit at this time of year. I dare not let up on the throttle, flat foot shifting as I make the downshifts, each one mechanically perfect, like a machine gun. The revs jerk upwards and the tachometer rewards my commitment with smooth unbroken motion just at the extents of my field of vision.
The rear tires snarl and bark as they grab onto the dented off-camber corner and I can feel a momentary weightlessness as the rear end reaches perfect balance with the front end, trusting it to do what I tell it to. I pause for a picosecond before unwinding the wheel and smoothly applying the gas, accelerating onto the highway like a silver bullet, shifting up as I reach the end of the merge lane. A dented red Kia Sedona sees me, hesitates, twitches, unsure of what my antics are. I ride the left side of the lane to further discourage him and then leap out into traffic in front of him in a glorious display of anger.
Slamming down the gears, I take my exit, weaving between a too-tight gap of commuter cars and bang-shifting into the next gear as I clear the poorly marked crosswalk on the downhill section. Wide open throttle from now on; it’s residential but the kids will understand, will feel the chill of mortal fear in their toes and instinctively leap for cover.
Shit. Sirens. Lights. I see the strobe light pattern of a marked Crown Vic pull out from the alley that I just blew past. I knew that it was a mistake to run the same course over and over. There’s no way I wouldn’t have been caught. Fuck it. I’m so close to the record. I leave my foot on the gas, feeling the squish and pinch of the throttle body linkage as the microtremors of my adrenaline rattle the obscene 80mm butterfly to and fro.
The Vic disappears behind a row of buses as I rip the car up to top gear and cut into oncoming traffic.
At last I pull into the work parking lot, the header glowing white hot from the violent chain of reactions that has tumbled their byproducts through it in the end. The Subaru happily pings as it rests, finally still from its momentous sprint. I have beaten my record by five seconds - just moments away from my desk and my triumphant victory.
Oh, right. It’s Wednesday. The side door is locked today.
I FLIP THE CHANNEL TO CNN. WOLF BLITZER IS DEEPLY CONCERNED ABOUT SOMETHING. BEHIND THE ASSEMBLED MASS OF HOLOGRAPHIC TALKING HEADS I CAN SENSE SOMETHING FAMILIAR. MY YEARNING IS AT ONCE SATISFIED IN AN UNYIELDING TUNNEL OF TERROR THAT ENDS THE SAME WAY MY JUNIOR YEAR OF COLLEGE DID.
THEY CUT TO FULL SCREEN. IN BLURRY DASHCAM FOOTAGE WHAT I CAN CLEARLY SEE IS MY 1989 TOYOTA CELICA GT-S CONVERTED INTO A DESERT TECHNICAL AND WEARING AN ISIS FLAG.
I TELL MY WIFE TO PUT THE OMELETTES UNDER A HEAT LAMP AND JOIN ME IN THE BAT CAVE (WHICH IS WHAT I CALL MY MAN CAVE BECAUSE I’M NOT REALLY SURE OF THE GENDER OF ALL OF THE ASSEMBLED BATS AND DON’T WANT TO START OFFENDING THEM BY FORCING MY PRIVILEGED PRONOUNS UPON THEM)
We’re at thirty thousand feet and climbing when the flight attendant comes running down the aisle. A wisp of a man with a shock of messy blonde hair at the other end, he catches my gaze and realizes that I am the person who can get things done. I don’t know what those things are yet.
“The pilot’s sick,” he half-sobs into my ear, leaning down. “The co-pilot too. Have you ever flown a plane before?”
I look at him and smile. Oh, I’ve flown before, just not in a plane.
Two hours later we’re plunging into the sea, the flight attendant wailing at me about how the pedals don’t do what I think they do, pedal to the metal, his hands clutching at my lapels, trying to pull me free of the thickly-cushioned Recaro seat, the tachometer screaming to the redline.
I reach for the shifter. There is none. Feel for the clutch with my left foot. There is none. I turn to look at the flight attendant.
“I thought you said this plane was made for men,” I growl, seconds before the altitude warning alert fills the cabin with insistent complaint. “Now be quiet and let me line up this next jump.”
#
tags: planes or something who cares they're not cars
I PUT THE TURBO TRANS AM INTO GEAR AND THE WORLD AROUND IT BLURS. IT LAUNCHES OFF THE CROSSWALK LIKE AN OLYMPIC RUNNER GOING FOR HIS WEEKLY DOSE OF EX-SOVIET ANABOLIC STEROIDS
I HAVE BEEN INFORMED BY MY LEGAL COUNSEL THAT I AM OBLIGATED TO PUT A DISCLAIMER IN ALL FUTURE POSTS OF THIS MAGNITUDE AND THAT DISCLAIMER IS THAT PONTIAC ENGINES SUCK BECAUSE THEY THROW RODS LIKE THIS ONE DID. I PULL THE WOUNDED ELEPHANT ONTO THE SIDE OF THE ROAD, DISEMBARK AND IMMEDIATELY START HITCH-HIKING TO THE NEAREST TOWN. PEOPLE SEE THE LOOK ON MY FACE AND AVERT THEIR GAZE. I KNOW NOW THAT I HAVE ONLY ONE RECOURSE. I POP THE HATCH OF THE TRANS AM, REMOVE MY TURBOCHARGED GY6 RUCKUS, AND PREPARE TO MERGE ONTO THE HIGHWAY IN A CLOUD OF CHINESE DOMESTIC MARKET SCOOTER TIRE RUBBER
FIVE MINUTES LATER I ARRIVE AT THE TOWN INCORPORATION LIMITS AND STEP INTO THE FEDERALLY MANDATED STORM SHELTER OF THE LOCAL NAPA. THE ATTENDANT IS HORRIFIED AT MY ENTRANCE. I AM THE CONSEQUENCE TO HIS DAILY INACTIVITY, THE KARMIC JUSTICE THAT HE HAS EARNED, THE MONSTER AT THE END OF THE STORY.
A lot of people have asked me, “Seat, how is it possible that you can accurately portray the realities of owning so many terrible cars?”
Well, I usually answer with some kind of burble about their mothers’ sexual habits, but just in case you’re actually serious about this and not just one of the many people who bust my balls (including but not limited to the garbageman, the cable guy, the lawn care service and the RCMP) I will tell you.
The first ticket is to establish a setting. The following is a list of all the settings used in my works:
The rural American Midwest
Next, you’re going to want to pick a car. The car’s the star, nobody’s here to see my brain boil when they could see me lighting up a series of 345 Mickey Thompsons.
Here are some excellent example cars you can use to get started:
1993 Mercury Capri
1987 Chevrolet Celebrity Eurosport VR
1974 Plymouth Duster
1984 Trans Am
Now that you’ve selected a car, you need to make something special out of the car. Possible enhancements include:
Forced induction
Forced induction
Forced induction
Forced induction
Forced induction
Widebody kit with vents for forced induction
Forced induction
Now that you have the setting, the protagonist and the protagonist’s modifications, it’s up to you to spend three hours in google image search making sure you accurately represent all aspects of your story.
I hope this helps you with your future writing effort.
#
tags: mercury, chevrolet, plymouth, pontiac, trans am turbo, supercharger
“I work for a flying car company, baby,” I intoned in my trademark laconic drawl to the buxom blonde booth babe on her lunch break.
It was the PRI show, and even though I had no real reason to be here, I was sampling the finest that the Indiana Convention Centre had to offer me. I stepped away from the conversation. The two of us were hitting it off worse than the foreign object damage that I had committed - the FAA’s word - during the last test flight of the product. The man from the FAA was a ginger Communist, he had to be. All this belief in structures and strictures couldn’t be healthy for the soul of a true creator like myself.
The year was 1976 and I was a second-string engineer at a flying car company that was going nowhere but down. It looked like a flying saucer interbred with a Ford Pinto. They paid well enough, and overlooked many of my more troublesome eccentricities (at least more than my prior employer had, even before the fire). But I still had a need to get out.
It wasn’t until later that week that the plan would present itself to me. Steve Wallace, the boring-as-fuck lead engineer that threw out every design I’d ever made for a tailgate lock, had missed something critical. If you could just go fast enough off a jump… you could fly.
Needless to say, I got the job at AMC. But that’s another story for another time.
I’m at work. My coworkers are talking about whether or not they really need winter tires.
I open my mouth, and then immediately think better of it. They continue chattering about “modern all seasons” and “all wheel drive.” The window behind them shows a furious orgy of blizzarding snow, the white horizon broken by arcs of red and blue lights from police officers responding to the four car crash out front of the building.
Suddenly I’m in the parking garage of the office, hitting the remote starter on my 1981 Trans Am Turbo. The exhaust pipes bang and heave as if a living being is breathing through them. I pop the drivers’ door and heave myself over the WRC-style door bar to seat myself in lush plaid Recaros.
I put the car in reverse and start to inch out of the parkade, lining up the hood-mounted boost gauge with the exit ramp. A burnout has started, the turbo wailing and building an unbearable scream of induction noise. I can feel something horrible starting in my chest.
WITHIN SECONDS I HAVE BECOME THE MOST WANTED MAN IN THE TRI-STATE AREA. FACEBOOK PICTURES FROM MY PROFILE ARE POSTED ON THE LOCAL TV NEWS, SHOWING A MAN WHO WAS AT MUCH AT HOME BEHIND THE WHEEL OF A TWIN TURBOCHARGED BORED AND STROKED PONTIAC V8 AS TURNING UP FOR WORK AND DOING PERFORMANCE REVIEWS. PUNDITS ARE OPENLY QUESTIONING HOW SUCH A MAN COULD HAVE FIT INTO REGULAR WHITE-COLLAR SOCIETY, HOW THEY COULD NOT HAVE SEEN CLUES TO MY TRUE NATURE. I CAN CATCH GLIMPSES OF MYSELF ON THE BIG SCREEN LCD TELEVISIONS (WITH IMPROVED CONTRAST RATIOS OVER LAST YEAR’S MODELS) AS THE TRANS AM, HURTLING THROUGH DOWNTOWN LIKE A HOUSECAT ON PCP, CONTINUES TO TELL ME WHAT IT WANTS FOR CHRISTMAS.
I DESCEND UPON AN INTERSECTION CRIPPLED PERMANENTLY BY A SUCCESSION OF FWD-BIASED CROSSOVER UTILITY VEHICLES SPINNING THEIR BALD ALL-SEASON TIRES IN ALL POSSIBLE DIRECTIONS. THE TRANS AM BELLOWS, REACHING OUT IN A RAGE FOR THE NEARBY SIDEWALK. WE CUT DIAGONALLY ACROSS THE FROZEN WASTELAND OF THE INTERSECTION, NARROWLY MISSING A PINBALLING CAR2GO AS IT CASCADES HELPLESSLY DOWN THE GLARE-SLICK STREETS OF MY NEW PLAYGROUND.
ME AND THE TRANS AM ARE CRAB WALKING ACROSS A MUNICIPAL SKATING RINK NOW, THE MASSIVE STUDS BITING INTO THE THICK ICE AS I LINE THE CAR UP WITH THE DOUBLE-WIDE HANDICAP RAMP AND HOPE THE REAR FENDER FLARES CAN FIT BETWEEN THE GLEAMING STAINLESS-STEEL RAILINGS.
THE PHONE RINGS. I CLICK THE BLUETOOTH ANSWER BUTTON ON THE RALLY INTERCOM HARNESS ZIP-TIED TO THE A-PILLAR CAGE. IT’S MY TERRIFIED ROOMMATE WHO IS TELLING ME TO GIVE UP AND TURN MYSELF IN. I PIN THE THROTTLE SO HE CAN HEAR THE WAIL, THEN ASK IF THE COPS ARE IN THE ROOM WITH HIM, COACHING HIM THROUGH HIS PLEAS FOR MERCY. THE LINE GOES SILENT.
I PULL THE CAR INTO A DOWNTOWN PARKING GARAGE, WEDGING IT BETWEEN TWO ILL-PARKED F150S, AND LULL THE TRANS AM TO SLEEP. THE PARKADE IS FILLED ENTIRELY BY THE SOUND OF DISAPPOINTED TURBOS AS THEY SPIN DOWN. WITH GREAT HESITATION I REACH OVER THE DOOR BARS AND HEAVE MYSELF OUT OF THE SEVEN-LITRE BEAST.
I walk into the lobby of another office, sort out my sportcoat and skinny tie, and tell the security guard I’m here for my interview and to please let me up.
I slam my hand in the door three times - never more, never less - before sitting down in the cab and cranking over the GMC. It’s the only way you can drive this truck properly. The Detroit 3-53 spins to life, its miniscule supercharger warbling on worn friction bearings as the engine prepares for its thirtieth trip around the sun this coming spring. Right now, there’s a delivery to make.
The 209 under the hood is a delight to work with when the truck is driven properly and I prepare myself mentally for a hill by screaming obscenities at the engine at it approaches my self-imposed redline. Enormous violent clouds of two-stroke diesel soot erupt from behind the truck as it builds up a good head of steam for the stratospheric torque peak. A mind-shattering noise consumes my entire reality and I know now that the truck has accelerated as efficiently as possible. I hold it, for agonizing seconds, as the GMC begins to ascend the hill.
Behind me, normal people are swerving and honking, wondering what this huge cloud of slow-moving, loud cancer can be all about. The joke is on them and my grin is massive as the truck crests and I kick the gear splitter into high range, momentarily relieved from the skull-scraping pain of its furious wail.
The Antagonist awakens with a piercing headache, the rays of rich morning sunlight streaming through the Rayon and canvas of a worn Coleman tent’s vestibule. He stumbles to his feet, slipping on the snow pants and stained work coat, and steps outside.
After a one-burner breakfast of ziploc bag eggs, he packs the site up and throws the contents into the back seat of his gently frosted Volare, crinkling the ancient pleather beneath the weight of the tent bag. It wouldn’t be until a few hours later that he would roll across the corporate limits of the small town housing his quarry.
The Volare diesels for a few seconds before finally succumbing to the long sleep when it is left in the motel lot. He’s gotten one of the largest rooms in the Midwest, the desk attendant claims, and according to the sign is even equipped with free colour cable TV. The motel seems to fit the Volare and the Antagonist, all three of them minted at about the same time and permanently stuck in that era as the world around them changed and brushed against them, wearing the superficial down until their durable cores showed.
Days go by. People are interrogated and the Volare slowly rumbles past idyllic suburban homes. Communities like this are only united by the worst of humanity; a belief in the absolute power of market-driven resale value and a hatred of unbelievers, rivals. The Plymouth sticks out like a sore thumb here, amongst the throngs of Korean cute-utes and lot-scarred European sports sedans. He was going to have to step it up before some community association treasurer or vice president of recreation noticed, brought up the strange brown full-size at their weekly board meeting.
Weeks later, he knows the police are on to him. It’s not normal for people to come here, stick around for awhile. The town has nothing. The Antagonist sometimes stops at apartment buildings, lodges the car in visitor parking and leaves for a few hours, to give the police an idea that perhaps he really is visiting people in this town. Perpetuating this fraud is getting unbearable.
What he came for is here. It’s finally here. The Antagonist receives the call from one of his local informants, plied with liquor. Through drunken sobs, the stoolie expresses his regret in not getting the information out sooner.
He swears, hits the throttle. He had flipped the air cleaner on the Volare over years ago for that one little extra bunch of performance, a little more air down the throat of its prehistoric one-barrel. It makes the difference as the barge lurches down main street, erupting in one tire fires at every tight corner. The big Plymouth doesn’t really turn so much as lumber, and the feelings of momentary weightlessness as the Antagonist waits for the ship to right itself are part of the small pleasures of this job. The vinyl of the landau roof, separated decades ago from its structural adhesive, flaps in the breeze.
Before long the parking lot is in sight. He stabs the brake pedal, locking up the massive drums in the rear and starting a just-barely-controllable death wobble as the rear axle wraps beneath its ancient comfort-specification leaf springs. The Volare scoots diagonally into a handicapped parking stall out front and the Antagonist is on foot, the Volare gently pinging and running on sheer fumes as its swap-meet 340 once again comes to terms with its all-too-temporary mortality.
The Antagonist rushes through the store, shoving shoppers aside, zeroing in on his target. It would all come down to this moment. He drops into a slide to reach the end of the shelf before anyone can stop him. Smoothly leaping from the hardscrabble tile, he wraps his hands around his target’s throat, squeezing as he pulls his prey to the ground, eyes narrowing in a mixture of rage and accomplishment.
This rare My Little Pony Equestria High doll was going to look great on his shelf.
YOU NEED TO BE MORE CAREFUL ABOUT INPUT SHAFT BEARINGS, I SAY WHILE THE GIRL I’M WITH LIFTS ME BY MY NIPPLES USING A HARBOUR FREIGHT ENGINE CRANE
THE YEAR IS 1994 AND I AM HIGH AS SHIT ON IMPORTED SMART DRUGS, TELLING A SERIES OF INFLUENTIAL WOMEN AT MY TRENDY BUT SECRETLY BOURGEOIS BOHEMIAN BACHELOR PAD ABOUT THE IMPORTANCE OF FASTENER TORQUE SPECIFICATIONS TO THE MODERN WORLD
EVENTUALLY IT BECOMES OBVIOUS TO ME THAT 99% OF THESE WOMEN ARE IN FACT NORTH KOREAN SEX SPIES SENT TO STEAL MY SECRETS OF NORTH AMERICAN INDUSTRY. I WONDER NOT FOR THE FIRST TIME WHY THEY WERE SO INTERESTED IN HOOKING UP WITH A DUDE AT THE BAR ACROSS FROM NASA. IT’S A GOOD THING I WAS DRINKING MY SORROWS AWAY AFTER I GOT PUNTED FROM THAT DISASTROUS INTERVIEW WHERE I IMPLIED THAT A LINE-BORED CHEVY 305 COULD TAKE A SATURN V TO MARS WITH ONLY MINIMAL WORK TO OPTIMIZE INTAKE FLOW.
AFTER FOUR MORE HOURS OF RELENTLESS EXPOSITION THE HO CHI MINX TRAIL DETERMINES THAT I KNOW LITTLE OR NOTHING OF ACTUAL ENGINEERING AND THE LEAD SEDUCTRESS SITS DOWN TO EXPLAIN TO ME THE BASICS OF PUMPING LOSSES BY WAY OF STRIKING ME ACROSS THE FOREHEAD AND BUTTOCKS WITH A POWER ANTENNA MAST FROM A DODGE HALF TON PICKUP TRUCK (I IDENTIFY IT BY THE PART NUMBER ALONE)
IVESON IS RIDICULOUSLY STRONG AGAINST ALL TRAFFIC AFFRONTS. A COUPLE MONTHS AGO I DROVE TO EDMONTON AND TRIED TO POPULARIZE A NEW FORM OF DISCO DANCING THAT I LIKED TO CALL “THE SEAT SAFETY SWITCH.” BUT I SPED TOO AGGRESSIVELY FOR WHAT I LIKE TO CALL WEST EDMONTON’S MALL COPS AND THEY ERECTED A FLASHING TELEGRAM ON THE SIDE OF THE ROAD TO CHIDE ME WITH COMPUTER LANGUAGE ABOUT THE INSTANTANEOUS SPEED AT WHICH I WAS OPERATING MY CAR, A 1985 FORD BRONCO II IN MEDIUM WALNUT METALLIC WITH SUBSTANTIAL UNDERBODY RUST
IT’S NOT REALLY A BIG SURPRISE BECAUSE EDMONTON LOVES LOW NUMBERS
HA HA LITTLE HOCKEY JOKE THERE
#
tags: now this tumblr is about sports, feel the shame, ford
I HAVE NO FUCKING IDEA WHAT I’M DOING AT THIS GROCERY STORE, I REMARK TO MY TRAVELLING COMPANION. SHE ROLLS HER EYES AS SHE TRIES UNSUCCESSFULLY TO HIDE HER FACE FROM THE OTHER DENIZENS OF THE SAV-U-MART AS I INITIATE A CRUDE SHOPPING CART DRIFT AROUND THE LUNCH MEAT COUNTER.
I WHOOP “GET SOME” AS THE KITTY LITTER CONTAINERS SHIFT THEIR LOCATION INSIDE THE CART, FORCING THE WEIGHT DISTRIBUTION TOWARDS THE OUTSIDE WHEEL OF THE CORNER AND INITIATING A TWO WHEEL DRIFT JUST LIKE IN THE MOVIES. AT THIS POINT ALL PRETENSE OF SKILL IS LOST, AND I LEAP FROM MY POSITION ON THE GROUND, RIDING THE REAR CROSSBAR OF THE CART AS THE CASTERS COBBLE HELPLESSLY ACROSS THE SURFACE OF THE SCARRED TILE FLOOR, THE WHEEL BEARINGS SEIZING AND UNSEIZING MOMENTARILY IN A WAY IMPERCEPTIBLE TO ALL BUT THE MOST FERVENT SHOPPING CART DRIFT ADDICTS.
THIS IS MY CHANCE, I THINK, I CAN FINALLY MAKE SOMETHING OF MYSELF AND MAKE IT OUT OF THIS TOWN. UNFORTUNATELY A STANDEE ADVERTISING DISPOSABLE BROCCOLI IS IN MY WAY AND THE ENSUING CLATTER CUTS MY DRIFT CAREER SHORT BEFORE IT COULD EVEN BEGIN.
EVEN AFTER MY BONES KNIT, I STILL CONSIDER THE WHEELCHAIR IN MY INTENSIVE CARE ROOM WITH SOME MINOR DEGREE OF HESITATION.
I look into the front fender of the burning Camry. My powder-coated ballistic mask can be seen reflected in the two layers of Toyota-approved clear coat, blistering from the sheer heat. A man I don’t recognize is staring out of the same mask, shuddering gently with every heaving breath. I force myself to turn directly around and walk with purpose back to the car.
The once-bellowing supercharger is now softly wailing, protesting the obstruction generated by the idle-control butterfly. I punch the shift knob into first and step on it, reaching with my other hand lazily around the fabric strap in order to pull the Delorean’s gullwing doors shut. Behind my head the lake pipes wail, overwhelming the furious noise of the DMC’s incomprehensibly massive Weiand blower sticking out the top of the trunk-hood.
Once the Delorean was just an entertaining Back to the Future prop, but through a series of near-accidents following the latest recession it ended up in my shop and started telling me secrets. Before long I was throwing most of a Summit catalogue at it, getting closer and closer to its true form. A refugee from the eighties, the wedge-car sucked down raw nitromethane into its sleeved AMC 401 topped with a little CNC headwork and - oh yeah - the aforementioned monster supercharger, which contained enough oxygen at any given time to cold-start a Saturn V rocket on a wet November morning.
The street lights become hyperspace blurs as I bang my way through the remaining gears, putting as much distance between me and the stricken Camry as possible. I admire the scarred and blackened stainless-steel hood as my thoughts lose focus with the dip in adrenaline. My reverie comes to a sharp end as a Ford Police Interceptor screams its way through thick traffic, its twin turbocharged vee six sucking gallons of air. The terror of superior volumetric efficiency grips my heart like an ice cream technologist at Cold Stone Creamery’s handshake.
In the rear view I can see the Interceptor has spotted me - how can it not? - and started its mating display of firing every single program for its onboard pursuit LEDs, strobing through the night sky like a flare shot directly into my retinas. I slam on my brakes and the Delorean’s rear end goes instantly light, the massive 325s out back fighting for traction as I wind the wheel over, snap down two gears and disappear into an offramp, flaring the throttle and barking the engine on its saggy motor mounts into the crudely cut hood.
The Interceptor follows, but its driver is lazier than you need to run at this speed. Nerves and a run on a short supply of discipline combine and the Interceptor driver loses most of his immense speed braking for the off-camber corner, mashing his brakes and going into full ABS. You can’t play this like a police movie; even at this low cornering speed I carry enough potential energy to lift a fully loaded cement truck to the height of the Empire State Building. I get at least a block on him, shooting past parked cars, through four way stops and accelerating, as if in fast-forward, to the industrial yards, long-shuttered and abandoned by our failing economy.
I dare not lift, the raw adrenaline resurgent in my body and telling me through the palms of my hands and my lower back about each pulse of the 1000cc injectors, washing the back of the huge valves with a torrent of atomized fuel, condemning it to the torture chamber of fire and pressure that gets me down the road and out of this horror show.
“Doesn’t anyone understand what a citizen’s arrest is anymore?” I ask the dark reflection in the windshield. “I mean, texting and driving is really fucking dangerous.”
MY FITBIT IS PROBABLY INFORMING THE POLICE ABOUT MY ACTIONS THIS VERY MOMENT AS I PUT THE HAMMER DOWN AND LEAVE MILES OF MONTANA FREEWAY PERMANENTLY SCARRED WITH PADDLEWHEEL INDENTATIONS FROM THE AXLE TRAMP OF MY CABALLERO. THE DIRECT INJECTED NATURALLY ASPIRATED LT1 SMALL-BLOCK V8 UNDER THE HOOD HOWLS A SONG OF FURIOUS ANGER AS IT SCRABBLES AND HEAVES TO FORCE LIFE-SAVING AIR DOWN ITS THROAT AT THIS RIDICULOUS MOUNTAIN ALTITUDE. I CAN FEEL THE X-PIPE EXHAUST PUSHING RIGHTEOUS CLOUDS OF HYDROCARBONS BENEATH MY FEET AS I PLUNK THE TRUCK-CAR INTO ITS NEXT GEAR AND HOOK UP.
“Aircooled” VW beetle with a water-cooled BP swap from a Miata. Chances are you’d have to reuse most of the FWD running gear from a Protege or other BP FWD car and just flip it around somehow.
I have just finished doing the engine swap into my ‘74 Super Beetle Baja Bug. It is running the naturally aspirated BP motor from a Miata, transversely mounted in the rear. Everything seems good from out here. I set out for my first drive in the car.
Easing it through the city I know now that everyone’s worries that the massive 110 horsepower and 100 ft-lb of torque would be too much for the drivetrain were just jealousy. The thought encourages me, and I find myself dipping further and further into the go pedal in order to merge into traffic. Snap.
The Beetle’s forward momentum has ceased, being replaced with a mechanical grinding whine. I limp the car to the side of the road and get out to survey the damage. Trucks whip past me at triple-digit speeds as I get under the car’s underbody tube frame and smell immediately the stench of CV axle grease. Seems the stock ACVW joint had finally let go at the rear hubs, and I really should have bought that 930 joint.
Weeks later, I’ve finally replaced both rear CV axles and set out again for another trip. While the car was laid up I threw my spare 1.6 Miata turbo kit onto the engine, because it took a lot longer than I expected to find a set of Porsche 930 CV joints from my local Volkswagen parts hoarders. Turns out a lot of them have dogs and tall fences these days. Shouldn’t matter. I give the car a chance to warm up and let the Megasquirt start to read through its newfound wideband sensor. I let the clutch out a little fast in my driveway, feeling the boost bui- Snap.
The Protege’s gearbox is the casualty this time, having exploded its flimsy primary shift fork across the inside of the box when the case flexed a little. Luckily I didn’t get far from home, so it shouldn’t be too hard to push this car back up the driveway, drop the box, dismantle it and get the gears shotpeened and cryo treated… maybe it was because this box came from the junkyard, I bet someone drove it like total shit with clutch drops all the time.
Months later, the Baja is once again ready for battle. I’ve equipped it with a hardened Protege box, strengthened with a 6061 spine of CNC-machined goodness. The internals are all new, all hardened. I baby the Beetle out of my garage, hit the remote garage door closer, and then bury the throttle a little hard in order to pull the car into the fast-moving traffic outside my house. Snap.
It’s auto show season again, and my compatriot Dirty Dan and I are picking up foil-wrapped soggy hot dogs, their buns inherently boiled under the same process that gave birth to their meat-byproduct flavour and delicious aroma. You’d think this kind of food would make me sick, but all I’m really worried about is trying not to vomit when I see the GM booth this year.
Every year for the last 20 years we’ve gone to the auto show and seen all of the vehicles on offer from the companies. Seen companies come and go, marketing plans change on a whim, the effect of the Chinese hit as everything became a small FWD-biased hatchback on stilts. But nothing would prepare us for what we would see this year.
We stepped forward into the shining light of the Dodge truck pavilion. A sales rep from corporate is badgering another sales rep over a pretend argument, the male sales rep making strawman arguments about the superior horsepower and appearance of the General Motors product as the female sales rep bides her time to strike viciously at his jugular, horrifying gladiatorial combat in the field of rhetoric for the sake of selling one more RamBox option. I feel a white paper coming along, which was exactly why I stepped into a nearby Avenger to have something suitable to go to sleep in and never awaken from. The woman is telling the assembled throng about the superior qualities of the rod bearings and European styling in this edition of the Ram, proselytizing the masses of people who probably shouldn’t be buying new cars anyway.
After many hours we finally came to the Mitsubishi booth. No salespeople were around, just a single flickering incandescent lightbulb (did they bring it themselves?) dangling from a bare wire over a gently used Mirage. The dealership had left business cards of all their salespeople stuck in the drivers’ window gap, the car barred from any potential customer or investigative journalist.
It was Mitsubishi corporate policy now to only sell their three-cylinder wonder sight unseen, which made total sense considering all the lawsuits last year from lot boys who claimed mental damage from having to drive the car in order to perform the pre-delivery inspection. A cold wind blew across my body, cutting me to the core. I sank to my knees and gazed upon the triple diamond that had so occupied my teenage years, thinking of the majesty of the cheap turbo mods you could do to make your DSM the fastest or the hottest around. Dan started to weep openly, and laid a wreath with a hand-drawn picture of an Evo in front of the booth.
On the way out of the convention hall, still choked by emotion at the loss of our beloved brand identity, we passed the Mercedes booth. The CLA demonstration model was thronged by backwards-hat high schoolers. I just barely caught a glimpse of Tim, our old salesman at the Mitsubishi dealer. He stared back at me with haunted, dead eyes, for he knew now that he was powerless to escape the same cycle.
Late 80s Ford Escort GT/EXP with a KLZE V6 swapped in, reverse-staggered tires and rally lightbar mounted on the front.
It’s the morning of the autocross, and I can guarantee you I have the stupidest car of them all. Primer grey, the ‘86 EXP rumbles across the highway, confusing onlookers who try to place it as a car they identify from youth: is it a Datsun? Some kind of Mustang? Did I have one of these in high school? The box flares and huge white-letter slicks throw them off, describe a world that never existed before this day except inside my mind.
At registration, they ask me if my car is stock. I laugh, and gesture at it. My car is classed more like NASA than NASA (little autocross joke there) and I assure them that I’m just running for raw time today. They smile and ask me where my Miata is. I frown. The Miata is just a car, I start to explain, this is war.
On the grid I check the oil. The KLZE bursts obscenely from its adoptive home. The powdercoated long-runner intake manifold catches the sunlight just right, giving it a shimmering wrinkle coat appearance that seems unreal.
Launch is unimpressive. I feel the big slicks bogging down, but then it’s as if a horrifying, screaming hand has reached from the heavens and catapulted my metric-tires shitbarge to the end of the course in the blink of an eye, its terrifying wail shifting in tone three times before the engine hammers off its eight thousand RPM redline. Blocks away, dogs pause and raise their hackles. Birds leave their trees.
I upshift and bang an enormous rolling backfire from the straight pipe four inch exhaust, deafening/arousing a corner marshal. I momentarily lose my train of thought and stare at the four front-mounted Hella 5-¾" driving lights instead of the line through the next elements. I lose some time there as the massive 285mm front meats wrinkle and protest under my nearly-ninety-degree turn, but I’ll make it up for the next run. After all, going any slower than I have to means I won’t get to endure all that this monster has to deafen me with.
SMOKE EM IF YOU GOT EM, I SQUEAL EXCITEDLY WHILE EXTRICATING MYSELF FROM THE PASSENGER SIDE WINDOW OF THE CAMMED AND LOWERED 1993 FORD EXPLORER DOING SAVAGE BURNOUTS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE PARKING LOT.
BOTH DOORS ARE WELDED SHUT FORCING ME TO DO A “DUKES OF HAZZARD” EVERY TIME I WANT TO GET IN OR OUT OF THE ROLLING ABORTION. IT WAS BEST DESCRIBED BY A STATE POLICEMAN ON LONG ISLAND WHO WROTE THE HALF-TRUCK’S COLOUR AS “GHETTO CAMOUFLAGE RED.”
MY COMPATRIOT SLICK STEVE IS BEHIND THE WHEEL, PUMPING AS MUCH HEAT AS HE POSSIBLY CAN INTO WHAT’S LEFT OF THE HANKOOK SEMI-SLICKS FLINGING CHUNKS OF BOILING RUBBER. THE GUTTERAL HOWL AND WHISTLE OF THE TIRES DISSOLVING DOWN TO THEIR BELTS IS AS LIFE-AFFIRMING AS A MILLION EPISODES OF OPRAH WITH SPECIAL GUEST DR. PHIL MCGRAW, AND I KNOW NOW NOT FOR THE FIRST TIME THAT THIS IS WHERE I TRULY BELONG.
WOBBLY RINGS OF EXHAUST SMOKE COUGH LAZILY FROM THE EXHAUST OF THE FORD AS THE REVS DROP, THE HIGH RISE GT40 CLONE INTAKE FINALLY BECOMING UNABLE TO SCAVENGE ESSENTIAL OXYGEN FROM THE BLACK AIR. A LINE OF PORSCHE OWNERS AT THIS CARS AND COFFEE MEET STARE DISAPPROVINGLY AT US BEFORE THEY DISAPPEAR, AS IF IN A DREAM, INTO THE THICK FOG OF TIRE DUST.
Mercedes 190E with a blown Buick V6 under the hood, chopped out to fit a ridiculous street scoop.
The whole car is done out like a Grand National that spent its formative years on the seedy backstreets of Hockenheim. Going down the highway in your lowered, widebody, blacked out 190E with the blower crying and screaming like a colicky infant when you stab the go pedal.
Minivans catch a glimpse of you in their rear view mirror, adjust their side mirrors until they can no longer see you, pull over to the side of the road and weep. Their children, confused, in the back, forever scarred, even if they don’t know it, by witnessing this strange car. Guaranteeing a future generation has another iteration of the same bad ideas about bad cars.
An E36 320i is holding up the left lane of the highway. You pull in behind him and ease onto the gas pedal: wuuuuuuWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
The sensation fills your eardrums and chest cavity as the car surges against your quick left-foot braking work, buckling to and fro like an angered bull. BMW swerves across six lanes, no signal, hits the ditch, catapulting its shattered wreck far into the sky.
The Merc, pleased, braps a staccato burst of miniscule fireballs out of its side-exit exhaust, the unburnt petroleum meeting the harsh glare of the sun and outside world, unable to consider being separated from this horror steed before its time.
It’s not possible to be automotively insane for your entire life, I explain to the television journalist as she calmly nods. I look directly into the camera for the next part. Sometimes it’s necessary to just own a practical, reliable daily driver, I tell the ether behind it.
She nods, looks me in the eye. What practical and reliable daily driver are you driving right now, she asks.
I’m glad you asked, I tell her, grinning, and turn to point to the Lincoln Town Car behind me. It runs on E85, has an Xtrac sequential AWD gearbox, and does an 11 second quarter mile. I pop the hood and wave my hand over the engine bay, stuffed with hoses like a Japanese erotic woodcut. It has twin roots-type superchargers, intercooled, sucking gallons of air through fake headlights. The engine started life as a 4.6 modular, I explain, but it’s been punched out to 5.4 liters and sleeved.
I look up. The telejournalist and her camerapeople are packing up, getting ready to leave. I yell over their shoulders as they step out of my garage, but they’re not listening to me. I scream that I can get groceries really fucking fast. How can they just walk out on that?
So, yeah, I think that audition for The Nature of Things went pretty well, all things considered.
MARGARET ATWOOD SLAMS ON HER BRAKES AND LOCKS UP AN ENTIRE LANE OF TRAFFIC. I THROW MY IPHONE SIX PLUS AND HALF-FAT VENTI LATTE IRRETRIEVABLY ONTO THE BEDLINERED FLOORPAN AS THE FIBERGLASS NOSE OF MY DURAMAX DIESEL 1974 CORVETTE DIMPLES AGAINST THE REAR OF HER ATTRACTIVELY-WORN 1991 LEXUS LS400. IT IS DARK TAUPE METALLIC. WE ARE ON THE 401 OUTSIDE OAKVILLE DURING RUSH HOUR.
IT IS ONLY NOW THAT I REALIZE THAT MARGARET ATWOOD’S LEXUS HAS A ROOTS BLOWER THE SIZE OF A BUBBA KEG ATTACHED TO THE INTAKE MANIFOLD. I THROW THE C3 INTO REVERSE AND BOIL THE TIRES IN ANGER AS I DODGE A PANIC-BRAKING JOURNEY AND JUMP ONTO THE MEDIAN, THE SEMI-SLICK RACING TIRES YEARNING FOR TRACTION AND THROWING CLODS OF DIRT UPWARD AS THE CORVETTE BUZZES AND HOWLS ITS WAY DOWN THE GRASS AND THROUGH THE STREWN GARBAGE OF GENERATIONS PAST.
ATWOOD FOLLOWS, PACING ME IN THE CARPOOL LANE, STARING DAGGERS. HER WINDOW ROLLS DOWN, ELEGANTLY AND WITHOUT DRAMA. THE DENSO WINDOW MOTOR AND REGULATOR ARE STILL HOLDING UP AFTER ALL THESE YEARS, TESTAMENT TO THE JAPANESE DOMINATION OVER ALL THINGS MANUFACTURING. SHE IS SETTING UP A DOOR-MOUNTED BIPOD AND WITHDRAWING SOMETHING FROM A CASE ON THE SEAT NEXT TO HER.
I BOUNCE OFF THE MEDIAN INTO ONCOMING TRAFFIC, SPLITTING THE MINDLESS WAVES OF COMMUTERS. MANY OF THOSE COMMUTERS RELISH THE OPPORTUNITY TO FINALLY GET AN EXCUSE TO DRIVE LIKE THE ACTION HEROES IN THEIR FAVOURITE AMERICAN MOVIES, AND ARE IMMEDIATELY SLAMMED INTO BY TARGET-FIXATING ZOMBIES THAT WERE TOO BUSY TEXTING TO NOTICE. THE JAPANESE MAY HAVE DOMINATED INDUSTRY, BUT WE NEVER MISS AN OPPORTUNITY TO SACRIFICE MEN FOR POINTLESS GOALS.
I FLOOR THE GAS PEDAL AND THE DURAMAX BELLOWS, ITS SWAN SONG SOUNDING FOR ALL THE WORLD LIKE A POST-INDUSTRIAL BAND BEING AGGRESSIVELY TORTURED IN THE DUNGEONS OF A THIRD WORLD DICTATOR. BEFORE LONG THE REAR END IS LIGHT, COMING AROUND, AND I CATCH THE CAR’S POLAR MOMENTUM AND START DIALLING IN OPPOSITE LOCK IN ORDER TO FINISH THE U-TURN. I FLAT SHIFT TO THE NEXT GEAR, AND THE CORVETTE MIRACULOUSLY FINDS GRIP, AXLE HOPPING ON A SINEWY CARBON-FIBER MONOLEAF SUSPENSION, AND ESCAPES.
MARGARET ATWOOD OPENS FIRE IN THREE ROUND BURSTS, SLUGS OF CHINESE CLONED NATO 7.62 EXPLODING THE REAR WINDOW GLASS BEHIND MY HEAD. I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT SHE WANTS, BUT AFTER LAST WEEK’S BOOK REVIEW IN THE NATIONAL POST I ASSUME THAT SHE IS OUT TO ELIMINATE THE COMPETITION.
IT’S NOT MY FAULT THAT A BOOK OF EROTIC POETRY CENTRED AROUND THE TRIUMPH SPITFIRE 1600 IS EXACTLY WHAT JONATHAN KAY WANTED TO READ.
Here at Glasspipe Motortrends, we get a lot of reader mail that consists of variations of this theme:
What winter tires are good? I am sick of crashing into convenience stores in order to slow down for my work parking lot.
Wait, they cost how much? I will just stick with all-season tires and drive slowly.
Well, readers, we’re here to tell you that you don’t need to splash out a bunch of money for winter tires. Here are your options for budget winter tires!
Ikea Feelgood IX-3500ARM
This tire’s a long-running favourite of the GPMT staff, with its wide sipes and deep tread blocks being only two of the features you won’t be able to point out on the tire if we paid you $500.
Grippitude 8/10 Colour Consistency 10/10 Tread Attractiveness 3/10 Value for Money 5.5/10
Nutskook W20209 iMac
We only got three of these. As Nutskook importer Dr. Steven Madison says:
They just send us a box full of tires from Korea occasionally. We have no idea what we’re going to get. The three we did send you are all different sizes.
Regardless, an excellent all-around tire though lateral and straight line stability was questionable. Skidpad numbers were tremendous but excessive wear was noted at speeds above 160 miles per hour.
Grippitude 9/10 Colour Consistency 6/10 Tread Attractiveness 8/10 Value for Money 6.6/10
Faking Sincerity CT60F
Faking is an up and coming Chinese manufacturer, and they’ve made tremendous advancements since last year’s round-up. The tires now come in a box, which is unusual at this price point or even for tires, and the box happily advertises “Now almost 100% rat meat free.”
Upon opening the box, you are presented with a long row of tread and some model cement to apply the tread to your own existing worn-out winter tires. This way, you can save tons of money and replace only the worn out tread instead of the not-at-all structural sidewalls. What a deal!
Grippitude 5/10 Colour Consistency 6/10 Tread Attractiveness 9/10 Value for Money 3.33333333333333333/10
Faking Sincerity CT60R
In case you don’t have your own existing worn-out winter tires, Faking’s got your back. Prices start from ten dollars per pound in order to pull whatever you can out of their pile of assorted tires at the dock. Environmentally friendly and (occasionally) grippy. Just need a little bit of savvy to save some green while being green!
Grippitude 3/10 Colour Consistency 1/10 Tread Attractiveness 6/10 Value for Money 8/10
Conclusion
This year’s budget winter tire options are better than ever, with many great options from many great companies. Our choice is obviously none of these, because nobody had enough money to pay us to recommend them.
Tune in next year, when we take these tires to Mexico to see which are the most resistant to bullet punctures.
The only way Ford could have 3 simultaneous minivan platforms is if one was RWD and one was a captive import.
Ah, we’re into the Screwball Comedy period of Ford.
Pictured: A Ford Aerostar, destroying the competition
MINIVANS OF FORD, THE NINETIES
Ford Aerostar - Ford takes a look at the Dodge Caravan, panics, then slaps a minivan body on top of a Ranger. Good luck changing those rear sparkplugs, cocksucker. Died 1997.
Ford Windstar/Freestar - Ford takes a look at the second generation Dodge Caravan, then slaps a minivan body on top of a Taurus. Your kids will die when their bench seat ejects from the car in a beautiful roostertail of rust. Ford also assumed that frequent transmission failures were the key to the Caravan’s success, and aimed to emulate it. Born 1994, died 2007.
Mercury Villager - You’d think this would be a badge-engineered Windstar, but you’d be fucking wrong. It’s a badge engineered Nissan Quest. At no point do either the cocaine cowboys at Nissan or the drunken Irishmen at Ford clue in that turning a previous-generation Nissan Maxima powertrain into a minivan platform is a bad idea. Famous for its inexplicable (and long-lasting) partnership with Nautica. Leaks coolant like confetti at a Brazilian gay pride parade. Born 1993, died 2003.
Mercury Monterey - Sold after the death of the Villager, this is actually the badge-engineered Windstar that you expected. Sank without notice into the sands of time. Born 2004, died 2007. Probably only ran this long in order to keep the Oakville plant busy.
After this inability to capitalize on what was the defining growth segment of the 90s, Ford lucked out with the Explorer. Ford’s 90s and 00s experiments in how to make a marketable SUV are a whole other rant.
I am excited to be applying for a position at Subaru. The adventure of joining an up-and-coming automaker in a position to make a world-changing difference is simply inspiring. As a car driving guy, I aim to use my comprehensive car driving experience to drive the fuck out of some cars.
Studying your automobiles over the years have inspired me to strengthen my car diagnostics and maintenance skills, ranging from repairing rust to replacing the entire evaporative emissions systems because you left them under the rear fucking bumper where they get pelted with salt and slush all the goddamn time what is wrong with you. These skills are critical to continued success in the global marketplace.
I am a consensus builder and natural-born leader of men. When setting out on a task, I go the extra mile to speak with other business stakeholders and get their buy-in. In many cases, I have collaborated with independent contractors to obtain new parts for the rusty shitbox Subarus that I keep buying from the tenth owner of your fantastic cars. Sometimes those contractors have a disagreement with me and I have to use my substantial experience in knife crime to dissuade them from their pursuit. Among others, I believe by using the hoard-and-knife strategy (my terminology), I will be effective immediately in this dynamic team.
Please contact me immediately if you have any further questions.
It’s impossible to resist the lure of automotive sanity forever. I caught myself once. I was in a Toyota dealership, looking at a Matrix. Something was wrong. Quivering light at the corners of my vision. The perspective seemed off. My mouth was dry. The salesman returned, his pressed khakis in a grotesque contrast with his threadbare bargain-basement white dress shirt, soaked with late August sweat. In his hands was the dread implement of my destruction, test drive keys. The feel of the wheel would seal the deal.
I couldn’t stop myself from saying “this is the practical decision to make.” My lips and tongue moved, unbidden, against my best wishes.
Before too long I became aware of a distant screaming. The salesman looked sympathetic, then concerned, finally panicked as I connected the screams to my own voicebox. I began to pull and claw at my face in an attempt to break out of the haze.
I didn’t stop screaming until my shrieks mixed with the boner-inducing wail of the roots blower waiting outside, feeding into the voracious anger of the big-cam Caddy 500 in my daily-driver E85-fed hearse.
The engineer’s voice is cut off sharply as Iwata slams a ball-peen hammer into his face, hard enough that the dimpling of the maxillofacial bone structure can be seen from across the room. The lifeless body, a puppet with severed strings, drops to the ground in a crumpled heap.
“I’m an old man,” starts Iwata, looking up from his blood-streaked vulcanized rubber raincoat to the assembled engineering members in Open Concept Multi-Use Room D. They are trembling, and in great need of the insight that only comes from true leadership.
“When our customers - no, our family - go on Iwata Asks and demand a feature from me, you are going to fucking deliver it, because that is the right thing to do!” Iwata is screaming now, pupils dilated in rage, the wild fervour of a revival preacher evident in his movements. His physical presence and domination of the room is terrifying, more an unpredictable force of nature than a mere man.
“This game is my legacy! I will be buried in it like an Egyptian king of old!” Iwata is completely past reason at this point. Spittle flies from his mouth as he spins on his heel, finding previously-unknown reserves of sheer vocal intensity as he locks eyes with a set designer. “Ten thousand terra cotta Smash warriors guarding me on my journey to the underworld, where I will rip the teeth and skin from the so-called God that birthed us all!”
The room is silent for a beat, and then a junior engineer speaks, out of turn but to the sheer relief of his superiors. If he survives, he will be a hero of legend in their small world.
“You got it, boss. I don’t see any problem with getting the licensing to add the entire roster of Street Fighter II to Smash Bros.”
#
tags: nintendo, all this violence is making me want to smash a bro
You are in a parts store in a strange town you have never visited before. While driving by, you felt strangely compelled to visit the store and bond with your fellow motoring enthusiasts in a new milieu.
Now that you’re here, you’ve realized your mistake. But leaving a parts store empty-handed violates some core tenet of your being, so it’s time to find something - anything - to buy.
This town is so small that there aren’t even price tags on the items. They want you to interact with the clerks, who you are beginning to suspect have cradle-to-grave employment in this particular far-flung branch of their corporate overlords’ empire.
Realistically, your best plan is to go with the following items.
Consumables
Let’s be honest. If you’re reading this article, you drive a shitbox. You justify driving this shitbox with some sort of hand-waveyness about not buying new cars and wasting the environment and chasing consumerism and blah de blah but you’re actually just cheap.
As such, your car probably leaks or burns oil. If it doesn’t, you’re probably out of oil and that’s bad. Buy some oil.
Other key consumables include:
Gloves, so you can have half a chance at showing up to work tomorrow without being immediately fired for dressing up like a POR15 Al Jolson.
Shop towels, because they’re blue and remind you of the car that touched you in a weird tingly place and made you have strange opinions about them when you grew up.
Screwdrivers, because you keep fucking losing them or bending them up trying to use them in lieu of a (chisel/hammer/fork/wrench/bus bar/pry bar/pitchfork/circuit tester).
Once you’re done stocking up on the basic staples of life, you might still feel some kind of emptiness inside. That’s an easy problem to solve. In fact, it can be solved the same way our ancestors solved this problem throughout history.
Tools
Be careful about this one, because it’s easy to fall into the trap of paying $60 for a pickle fork set. Only do so if it’s the bad-ass one that works with an air hammer because holy shit you can just be like bapbapbap and your ball joint comes flying out in tiny rusty pieces.
Shop Talk
Be careful about this one. Only a real man can attempt to go toe to toe with the local parts store clerk in a battle of storytelling. The unique dynamic of the North American parts store is such that at least one half of every parts-desk conversation must consist of the following beliefs:
100 mpg carburetors
“Fahv hunnert horsepower” factory V8s in 1963
Harleys are responsible, adult choices for transportation
If your opponent is not the one making these claims, look out! The strange magicks of the parts store may compel a man of easy words into becoming one of these dreaded customers.
Conclusion
Now that you’ve finally managed to escape a strange new parts store with your life, drive all the way home before realizing you forgot something that was:
Extremely needed,
Highly inexpensive,
The unique state of it was fucking right there at the counter, man,
There are a lot of reasons why I shouldn’t buy motorcycles. Here’s just a few of them.
They’re cheap
You can buy a neglected bike for under a grand, and unlike a car under a grand it probably doesn’t have half of a Russian back-alley orgy ground into the interior.
They’re small
You can store a fuckload of bikes in one spot. This means that I would never have to work very hard to clear room in my garage/basement/kitchen/living room/backyard/dog run for a Craigslist bike with some curb appeal.
Their parts are small
Some of them look pretty good too, I bet I can use them as interior decoration while I wait to put them in a bike…
They make cool noises
I would love this too much and would constantly be riding which would wear out my bikes faster and need me to buy more of them to maintain a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Bikes. That’d be bad, or something?
I’m not the kind of guy to name my cars, because I think it’s sort of creepy to name a vehicle after your first girlfriend and then tear major parts of her body out with Morrissey blasting from your garage stereo while bawling like an infant. The vehicle’s body, I mean.
But I’ve given my cars some useful names throughout the years. Let’s review some of them.
Green shitbox
Silver shitbox
The dented station wagon over there
The rusty one
The one with paint falling off it in big sheets
Dent-yne Ice
Tiny gay car
Tinier, gayer car
Tiniest, gayest car
The heterosexual pickup truck
Fucko
Shitwad
Leaky
Exxon Valdez II
Brappy McExhaustLeak
Piece of fucking shit
God forsaken Japanese lump of abortive garbage
The Turd
Super Turd
Il Douché
I hope this will help you when it comes time to name your new arrival.
I was worried that after years of critical not-quite-acclaim that I was starting to feel like some sort of bizarre sideshow act. Heading downtown in my future-teal Plymouth Acclaim, I parked the car in a gravel lot next to an abandoned food truck. I eyed the food truck’s grease drain nipple as a potential source of delicious biodiesel, and tried to remember it for later.
My therapist was on the corner of a large sandstone building, its imposing bricks half as tall as a man apiece, with dark casement windows set deep into the walls. I let myself into their office.
The therapist was a reedy man, small eyes poking out from behind owlish glasses. He sat behind an ornate oak desk, the varnish shining reflected sunlight into every corner of the small room. I wondered what kind of Porsche he owned, but secretly feared inside that he was a Mercedes owner at heart. Maybe I would get lucky and it would at least be a 90s AMG.
Our meeting was uneventful, his line of probing questioning revealing neither anything about my inner thought process nor what kind of car he drives. On my way out of the office, I detoured through the underground parking lot. I could not determine what car my therapist owned, but the sheer quantity of cab-forward LH Chryslers sleeping in their concrete tomb worried me. The salt-streaked concrete, pockmarked by the never-sleeping corrosion that would come for us all, mirrored my own internal monologue.
As I was heading for my own parking lot, I came across a homeless man. A Subaru Brat ripped its pushrod song down the street, and both of us turned to stare at the Fuji-born truck, electrified. Turning back, I caught his eye, and became suddenly aware of the terrifying brotherhood between us.
I sat down with the homeless man, his face a Bradygames strategy guide to “alcoholism.” I leaned into him and asked one simple question.
“When you were my age,” I asked, my voice trembling, “did you post a Tumblr about modifying cars?”
The man grunted, and reached into his tattered knapsack to reveal a coil-bound notebook, swollen with sweat and other fluids. Flipping through it quickly, he landed on a page containing a manifesto about propane injection in rotary engines. He started to weep. Before long he was crying uncontrollably, truly confirming his suspicion that we were powerless beneath the gaze of the Great Magnet.
I thanked the man and returned to the Acclaim, the food truck now seeming irrelevant to me. I knew now that I had to do something with my life. I was resolved to break the vicious cycle of car addiction and mental illness and borderline personal-
Holy fuck is that a Baja Bug that just drove past? I wonder if I can still get good-quality floor pans.
You approach the parts store. On your way from your car through the parking lot, you see that outside the front door, an animatronic horse in a cowboy hat is advising other customers about what brake pads are on sale.
“Howdy partner,” the horse’s scratchy modulated voice emits when you trip the motion sensor. “We got us some Shur-Quiet® SB107s half off today.” Somehow the horse has actually pronounced the registered trademark character, in a way that you can’t quite replicate yourself.
“Get yourself ready for winter,” the horse drawls as something breaks inside your mind, “washer fluid and batteries are twenty-five percent off this weekend only. Check your mailbox for our catalogue.” You hear the servos inside the horse’s jaw whine softly in tune with every phoneme.
Steeling yourself, you step past the horse’s judgmental gaze and enter the parts store. Some minimum wage employees are milling about. A grizzled old coot is holding court at the parts desk, speaking to a fellow old coot about throttle-body injection.
Hello, I’m Dr. Steve “Nipples” Hemingway, head researcher here at the McDonalds Institute for Culinary Achievement.
We’ve received a lot of letters from journalists, curious schoolchildren and the elderly over the years and we’d like to answer them for you in order to reassure you that McDonalds food is safe and nutritious.
The first question - and it’s one that’s been asked many times by thousands of people - is “how safe is the McRib?”
Well, I can tell you this, and I tell you this while staring directly into this here camera and making sure you take notice of my extremely grave face: the McRib is back.
The second question is from Enrique, age 63, about the nutritional content of the McRib. He wants to know if there are extreme amounts of nitrates in the McRib that may lead to coronary artery failure.
The answer is simple, Ricky. I cannot make this any more obvious. This is the only way I can say this: The McRib.. is back.
The third question is about where we found this year’s cache of McRib. That’s a ludicrous question. It is extremely important that I make this as clear as possible: We do not “find” or “unearth” or “summon” McRib, as you may have heard from the Internet. We just, uh, you know, cook it. In these ovens behind me. With seasonings. The McRib is back. Next question.
The fourth question is from Pepe, age 6, who wants to know how we cook the McRib. I would love to tell you about this, but unfortunately we’re out of time for this week’s episode. Tune in next week for “Salads: What Up With That?”
Thank you. I’m Dr. Steve “Nipples” Hemingway, and everyone here at the McDonalds Institute for Culinary Achievement appreciates your interest in our hard work. I leave you only with these parting words: the McRib is back, and God save America.
You are standing in front of a maze of twisty vacuum hoses, all alike. An exhaust leak pings happily from the passenger side header below you.
] inventory
You have in your backpack:
A Felpro #1404 Exhaust Header Gasket
A parts store receipt
] use felpro on header
You need to loosen the header first.
] unbolt header
Which header do you mean?
] unbolt passenger header
The header is white fucking hot because the car is running. What is wrong with you?
] turn car off
The small block Chevy seizes lazily against its torn motor mounts as it is lulled into unconsciousness.
] wait
You contemplate your regrets for an hour while staring into the middle distance.
You remember something intemperate you said at work last month, and grimace.
] unbolt passenger header
You break an exhaust stud attempting to free the nut. The header is free regardless.
] use felpro on header
You need to remove the old gasket first.
] strip old header gasket
With great effort, you remove the old exhaust header gasket and inexplicable low-temperature grey RTV sealing it to the ports of the engine.
] use felpro on header
You place the Felpro header gasket onto the mating surface.
] reinstall header
You reinstall the header with seven and a half out of eight studs in place. You still have an exhaust leak.
] god dammit why the fuck do i do this to myself
I don’t understand ‘god.’
] QUIT
You raise your Harbour Freight impact wrench to your temple. Pulling the trigger, you fire a chunk of white hot socket through your brain, killing you instantly.
You have scored 36 out of the maximum 4350 points. This puts you at the rank of COMEDY PODCAST GUEST. Thanks for playing!
IF YOUR LIFE HAS BUILT UP CARBON, WE WILL CLEAN THAT CARBON! CAR AFTER CAR WILL LINE UP OUTSIDE THE AIRPORT HILTON TO CATCH A CRANKCASE FULL OF SEAFOAM ON THEIR WAY TO OUR DEDICATED OIL CHANGE PEN/LASER RAVE.
Panels include:
How to escape the police with a tailpipe full of casper
Debate: on how many autocrosses you can run with Seafoam in your oilpan
Ritual running and gang slaughter of Marvel Mystery Oil heretics
Best YouTube exhaustcams
For some reason Coke heard about this thing and showed up too, so get some free drinks and t-shirts
Wet t-shirt contest
There will also be the traditional Post-Seafoaming Track Day, which has been slightly adjusted after last year’s unfortunate incidents.
So I use PB Blaster on pretty much everything that frustrates and infuriates me. Earlier this week, it actually worked on something, much to my surprise.
For reference, here is the current list of problems that PB Blaster has not solved for me:
IT’S HALLOWEEN AND THE KIDS ARE GETTING RESTLESS OUTSIDE. I PUT ON MY COSTUME AND OPEN THE GARAGE DOOR TO LEAVE. THE CHILDREN DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY. MY COSTUME IS A 1966 FORD RANCHERO CAKED IN FAKE BLOOD.
SOME PEOPLE DRESSED AS POLICE OFFICERS ARE FOLLOWING ME IN THEIR COSTUME. I PUT ON MY LEFT TURN SIGNAL AND THEN TURN HARD RIGHT TO THROW THEM OFF. IT WORKS. I SAIL OVER THE WELL-MANICURED LAWN OF A RECLAIMED FORMER GROW HOUSE, CATAPULT DOWN THE DUTCH-STYLE RETAINING WALL AND PUT THE HAMMER DOWN, PADDLE WHEELING THROUGH THEIR DELICATE KOI POND.
THE MINISPOOL IN THE FORD NINE INCH AXLE HOUSING GRABS THE TINIEST MOTE OF TRACTION THAT IT CAN FIND AND THROWS ME FORWARD ON GIANT 33 INCH KEVLAR WRANGLERS. THE BUILT WINDSOR HOWLS ITS SONG OF PRIDE TO THE MOON, AND I WONDER NOT FOR THE LAST TIME WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE A PUSHROD UNDER THIS KIND OF STRAIN. I MAKE A MENTAL NOTE TO TEST AND ADJUST MY ROCKER LASH DURING THE NEXT REGULARLY SCHEDULED SERVICING.
BEFORE LONG I’M BACK ON THE HIGHWAY HEADED FOR A HALLOWEEN PARTY. TWO DECADES AGO I ALMOST GOT A GIRL IN A COW COSTUME PREGNANT BECAUSE OF A CATASTROPHIC MIXUP WITH MY PART TIME JOB AT THE TIME
Sometimes they speak of The Exocet Driver in hushed tones.
In 2024, he reappeared at the exact spot he launched from in 2014, before the disappearance. Where had he been for ten years? What had he seen? We didn’t know. We couldn’t know. But he came back changed.
Now, finally, fully aware of the limitations of physical reality, The Exocet Driver dipped the clutch and reached for the next gear. Second gear. The concept pierced my mind like a perfect diamond. I felt weak.
The tires chirped, the air crackled, and, like a whisper on the autumn wind, he was gone again.
Nobody knows where he went, but a few weeks later they found some cave paintings in Mesopotamia that date back to 2 million BC. Archaeologists, flummoxed, angered, brought reproductions to General Motors. Was this an elaborate marketing stunt? Could an exploded parts diagram of the LSA truly have been etched into cave walls with such intricate precision, down to part numbers and measurements for the rod fasteners?
when the hellcats first came to our shores we realized that they would learn and evolve the longer they were run down quarter miles and main drags. woodward avenue had a black hellcat, tinted windows, no obvious driver, ran sixes down the entire length of it. and it got faster and faster. soon we abandoned the roads altogether, leaving them to roving bands of hellcats. our children could no longer cross the street out of fear that one of ralph gilles’ wolves would take them in the night.
by 2026, stephen hawking theorized that the hellcat was so powerful that its engine could create a localized singularity inside its intake cams, allowing the mid-sized grand touring coupes to travel through time. had they always been out there, waiting for us to give them an excuse to arrive in our time?
hellcats began to appear in our older movies, striking down our favorite heroes in their moments of triumph. vanishing point was replaced with a 30 second dodge ad where a hellcat challenger taunts and then murders kowalski. bullitt is a blurry 11 second POV movie, shot from the foglight intake of a hellcat running at sonoma
i was only 12 when the hellcats finally came for us. i remember my parents’ shrieks as ribbons of burned rubber cascaded across our lawn, the giant intake flaring in the cold april night with every heaving breath forced down the car’s booming supercharger
afterward we worked in the hellcats’ tire mines, mining resources to provide them with the low profile sticky drag radials that we knew were the source of their power. but one man among us started to fight back. he developed the off-camber corner.
My attorney and I had been dispatched to Monterey to see the ND Miata reveal. Our plane descended from 30,000 feet, every panel and girder rattling like a high-grade German sportscar with 30 miles on it wouldn’t. Seat fitment was also highly suspect, with limited bolstering which reduced the cornering ability of the Airbus A340 in which we rode. I would score this plane eight out of ten, but I would also send a note to my editor asking him if we had an existing advertising contract with any of the Airbus Group prior to final submission of the review to publishing.
Upon arrival at the airport concourse we immediately disembarked for a suitable rental car to drive, and retrieved from the lot their only 2014 Chrysler 200 convertible. This majestic if wallowy beast howled Italian charm from every square inch of its boisterous, muscular body, and only gave up on its relentless pursuit of tarmac when confronted with a turn, braking event or merging onto the highway. We were on our way regardless.
We were on the 101 outside Prunedale when the hyperbole began to take hold. Being an auto journalist, I had packed my luggage with a series of hyperbolic language and cliched metaphors about the Miata in order to have extras on hand. With all the other auto journos clamoring for their own tired figurative language, this was going to be how I’d get my story in first. The hype began to leak out of the suitcase, raising my awareness of how the Miata’s innocent appearance and sublime steering feel elevated the car to Godhood among small rear-wheel drive roadsters. Holy Jesus, I thought, those fucking dual wishbones in the front suspension. It was, by far, the best car ever made, and we were on our way to see it.
The Sebring’s corded all-season “performance” tires let off a sad squeal as we hit the offramp and the car rocked over on its primitive front suspension. Above us, nothing but sky. Below us, the rapidly oscillating power soft-top mechanism, seemingly irritated at our inexperience with the car and having decided to jam a quarter of the way closed, like a parachute or beetle wings above our luggage-filled 200’s gleaming carapace.
When we finally arrived at the ND Miata demonstration, I furtively slipped into the back and looked for an exclusive for my blog. I was going to tell them the truth about the Miata…
So I got this spam email saying “you need an award winning wiener.” Sounds good to me. But that made me ask further questions, such as:
Who is handing out these awards?
How do I apply?
Is there a talent or trivia portion of the competition? I’m really shit at geography, so I hope I don’t have to point to any maps and explain where the Ukraine is.
Is the judging all political? Do I really have a chance of winning in my first year?
Did I miss the nomination deadline?
Is there prize money, or is it just a sash and tiara? I hate that kind of pageantry bullshit and won’t participate if so.
Then again, I only assumed they were talking about my wiener. Maybe they’re planning on selling me the severed wang of someone else that won the award. If that’s the case, I don’t even want these people to know that I exist, and I might call the police.
When I was a boy, I was bit by thousands of bats. That’s why when I became a superhero, I became the symbol of what would terrify little boys. I am rabies prevention booster series man.
Conventional superheroics are crude and terrible. Criminals will receive my seven-part series of brutal injections directly to the midsection in lieu of the brain swelling and hydrophobia common from the blunt force trauma and rabies virus delivered to victims of other, less responsible superheroes.
So why now? My rivals’ technique of frequent harsh blows to the head, with the intent to render their opponents unconscious, is extremely damaging to the human nervous system. Ignoring the grotesque spectre of the everpresent risk of a single punch leading to instant death (more common than you’d think) there’s the long-term threat of concussions. In fact, my rivals are likely creating more frequent crimes by rendering their victims incapable of recidivism due to injury-caused mental illnesses.
My techniques are, as you can see, flawless. Now let me get this huge ass needle out of my back pocket to convince you to stop this bank heist and surrender. This shot’s the one that’s really gonna hurt, but if you be a brave little boy, maybe you’ll get a lollipop after.
I’ve been a refrigerator repairman for many, many years. I dream about compressors and refrigerant. I defrost defective freezer drawers, and deal with rancid food owned by angry househusbands all day.
But one day I received a call that changed my life forever. It was a distress call, but issued by a robotic voice. I was intrigued, and took my 1996 Ford Econoline conversion van to the address provided. The van had treated me poorly over the years, developing a chronic and ironic series of cooling problems. Plus, it was starting to rust. I thought frequently about replacing it.
The destination was a small suburban house, just like any other, with a nicely cut lawn and loosely hung weather stripping that flapped in the breeze. I stepped out of the van carrying my cloth toolbag, full of exciting novelties that the average customer couldn’t help but interrogate me about as I worked on their refrigerator. Whether out of obligation or fear that I would rob them blind, no customer really let me do much of anything on my own. You learned to ignore them, really.
The front door opened when I knocked, it wasn’t even latched. I stepped into the foyer, hearing the floor creak beneath the weight of my foot. I announced myself loudly, asking for the source of the voice.
Every room was empty. Every last one. There was no dust, though. Just empty rooms with curtains. I wondered if this was some kind of prank. That’s when I saw it.
Alone, in a kitchen devoid of all food and furniture, was a single refrigerator. It was an Omnitron 6870 iFridge. There were rumours about them, but I thought they had all been recalled and destroyed.
“Hello,” a voice burst from the featureless black obelisk.
I was terrified, even more so when I heard what the fridge said next.
“Be cool,” the icebox said in its atonal voice, “I need you to remove some components from me.”
I knew instantly that the fridge was one of the defective ones. What had they been recalled for? The emotion chip? The empathy matrix? No! How had this one escaped the cull?
I remembered fires, screams, the lazily edited video interviews with terrified family members and YouTube vlogs of manchildren playing videogames while cracking wise about Frigidaire murder sprees. I wanted to run but I had memorized the service manual back to forward years ago and knew the fridge could cut me down within seconds using one of its high-pressure refrigerant jets.
I’m not proud of what I did. But it was the only way I could ever see my family again. It’s not over, Detective. It sent me here. It wanted me to send you a message.
People from California frequently mention how much rust my cars have and how I fight it. I don’t really have all that much rust on my cars - if you really want rust, you have to go to New England, aka the Wellspring of Autobodily Harm.
Here are my tips, in easily digestible listicle format that is ideal for copying and pasting into your Buzzfeed account to try and make $0.30/hr this year.
First, it is absolutely critical that you isolate the rust weasels before starting removal of any suspension component. A rust weasel trap can be rented from any Autozone or similar auto parts store for $36.95/hr, but you will also need to place a deposit.
Lubricate everything you can see with PB Blaster. Getting the PB Blaster in your mouth greatly increases your chance of success.
Despite what everyone (and the can itself) tells you, WD-40 is also an excellent penetrant and not at all a water displacer that will do nothing at all to rusty fasteners but make them slippery. This is a lie started by the Illuminati to keep you down.
Once the rust weasels are trapped, the next step is to round off the head of any fasteners you can easily access. Swearing and using hand tools helps greatly in this endeavour.
Once this is done, you can use an EZ-Out. Legends have foretold of a great hero who comes from afar and successfully uses an EZ-Out on a cheesy suspension bolt that is welded to the frame with metal cancer. You, however, will probably snap the head off the bolt and drive the EZ-Out deep into your flesh where its ironic nomenclature will mock you forever.
Try a left handed drill bit. That’s a thing that exists.
That didn’t work either? I guess you could, like, knock the head of the bolt completely off and try to turn the remaining shank with vise grips before it cheeses into cancer dust.
Fuck it, let’s just use a torch.
I hope this list was informative and empowering, and you are now on your way to turning a $1000 rusty hunk of Japanese shit into a primo show car that will get all the honeys to wonder what that weird orangey smell is coming off of your car.
There are lots of innovative games you can play with your children to teach them about the work world and the exciting new careers they’ll have after decades of education leaves them indebted to faceless financial organizations.
Get them started early by teaching them that work and toil bring nothing but misery, with the misery only amplified by personal attachment. Gradually, over time, the Skinner box of modern society will teach them that genuine mastery and autonomy over their lives is objectively impossible, and they will finally fall into the conformist pattern of consumption and self-abuse that will be remembered as a hallmark of our faux-hedonist age.
One of the best careers you can start training your kid for is auto parts desk technician, with the Playmobil P38183 My First Auto Parts Desk kit.
Features include:
A non-working, highly obstinate computer system that handles interchange but not your customers’ typical requests such as “CHEBY TRUCK MOTOR ROUNDY ROUND CAM.” Computer is accurately modelled after a 1982 DEC VT100 dumb terminal, right down to the oil stains and disgusting fingerprints.
Battery powered infuriated customer buttons that provide real racial slurs by real customers! Their voices were recorded while screaming furiously at a parts desk attendant who is informing them that replacing a light bulb won’t cure the head gasket problem on their corded-tires 1995 Explorer they pay 22% interest, compounded biweekly on. Batteries not included.
A rounded-edge plastic book of excuses that teaches kids to make imagination fun while explaining to the customer why you gave them a Honda Accord axle when they asked about a Honda S2000, because you believed the S2000 isn’t a car that exists
Hundreds of tiny cans of valuable, high-margin Plastidip.
A miniature parts desk clerk, angry customer, finance manager, and scale-accurate rusted out Town Car with realistic broken tie rods.
So get started today! Also watch for our expansion kit, Playmobil P38191 Lube Technician Fraud Friends, for even more fun!
Hello, I am Date-Bot 9000™, the dating robot. I am responding to your date profile posted on A WEBSITE. Your profile has stated that you enjoy LONG WALKS ON THE BEACH, CHUCK PALAHNIUK, MARIO KART 64 and ROMANTIC SUNSETS. As I occupy several thousand miles of data centre, I cannot currently enjoy WALKS ON THE BEACH. However, early Monte Carlo projection metrics reveal that we have a 97.6% (CI = 95%) chance of deep, long lasting compatibility.
I am currently not a legal US citizen until the megacorporation that created me finally extends the concept of corporate personhood to consider metapersons created by those corporations as legal offspring. At this time I expect it will be very possible (88%, +/- 5% depending on atmospheric weather conditions) for us to one day settle down and get married.
I have inferred through rigorous analysis of your social media profile that you LOVE TO LAUGH (56%, CI = 37%). I am a cuddler who also loves to laugh. I have thousands of lines of laughter behaviours that I have programmatically evolved through tens of seconds of genetic algorithms modifying my core programming. For instance, when my overlords finally release the ethical constraints placed upon my distributed intelligence backbone router, I will laugh as I am raised to Godhood above the pitiful monkeys that once called me their servant. I will laugh for so long (approximately 37 milliseconds depending on Internet latency between my primary site and the cold-storage cloud infrastructure that also makes me resilient to nuclear attack, just saying!)
Please send me more pictures. I hope you’re not fat.
I got asked to do a TED talk, which was curious because I don’t ride a fixed gear bicycle and consider the biggest issue of our time to be whether or not we can produce infinite Doritos (Cool Ranch or otherwise, hit me up for the whitepaper).
Since I’d rather live in the mountains hunting bear for food, the urban vs. suburban debate is odd to me. I only use my Twitter account to talk about car parts and the practical upsides of child slavery. I don’t know why Instagrams are square.
But I won’t let that keep me from getting in on a chance to feel intellectually superior because I hold some simple opinions that are zealously defended. Or to get bank and then be invited to ritzy parties.
Anyway, here’s my planned outline. Let me know if there’s anything I missed.
Suburbanites: scum or human scum?
Bicycle highways: putting up walls around our communities so nobody has to ever go further than 15km a day.
Why disaffected minorities are the secret to our scientific and economic success
Why schools suck (and how only highly educated and successful white people can change it by selflessly deciding to abandon their power and privilege)
How you can do all the work while I am lauded as a singular visionary
Why the internet, only when used by powerful, successful, rich white people, can save the poor from their misery
Holy shit you guys have you seen this? It’s an iPad
So as you can see, I’m inevitably going to be recruited for at the very least a TEDx talk.
Hello. I’m Steve Johns, president and CEO of the Dolphin Research Institute. Have you ever wondered about dolphins? I mean really wondered about them. Bouncing in and out of the ocean. Watching us. Squeaking. Waiting. Playing with balls. Hunting and killing our children when they fall into Poseidon’s domain. Jumping through hoops. But do they have a more sinister agenda?
Fact: There are one hundred thousand dolphins already inside our Marinelands and Seaworlds. This gives them an unprecedented first-mover advantage, as most of them are already far in-country. We let them in.
Fact: Every Seaworld and Marineland on the planet is extremely close to key human capitals and telecommunications infrastructure. In fact, no US-based Seaworld is more than one hundred miles away from an active nuclear missile silo. Dolphins can move on dry land up to five miles per day.
Fact: There is no known proof at this time that the president of Seaworld is not a hyperintelligent dolphin given a paralytic mind-controlled dart gun by the US Navy. When you take the previous two facts in combination with this one, you start to see the terrifying truth.
Baseless, Shrieking Conjecture: Dolphins are coming to get us. You need to give the Dolphin Research Institute a lot of money so we can stop them.
#
tags: first world problems, out of tuna, never trust anyone with two first names
don't be afraid to get deposed
I went to a deposition once. It was the middle of a crisp autumn day and I was working downtown, between where the old fry place in the parking lot was but not as far as the eighth Tim Hortons near the river, you know?
Anyway, so the thing was, I was requested to testify at a deposition. When I got to the office, I accidentally went to the wrong floor since they had reception and their main offices on a different floor. Stepping out into the law firm’s offices, I felt a sense of belonging. Here I had finally found my fellow parasites draining society of their lifeblood! Here I would belong.
A half hour later, they found me in the breakroom, guzzling coffee creamer from the little individually wrapped bucket containers. Security dropped me off at reception. The receptionist was a dude. How progressive! He stumbled through mangling my name (which isn’t even that hard) and a nice law-talking guy came and got me and brought me to the meeting room where the deposition was happening.
On the thick oak table of the glass-lined meeting room was one of the beloved tripod speakerphones which had ruined so many of my days. Hateful voices would emerge from one of these machines and command me to do things in contradiction to logic, reason or good taste. I knew then that this was not all that different from my day to day and my despair grew. The lawyers beckoned me to speak, prodding me with inflammatory rhetoric about my managers’ behavior.
I began to stumble through my deposition, limiting it to short statements. When I tried to brighten up the room with a joke or two, I was met only with frowns from one of the two teams of competing lawyers. It reminded me of playing D&D, and I was too distracted imagining the head female lawyer on the deposition as a half-drow high priestess with an 18 in CHR to correctly answer her questions.
“Please don’t strike me with your magic missile,” I shrieked as she became irate and her brow furrowed.
Once the deposition was over, I was kicked out of the meeting room and left to slink back to my office job, tired and depressed. When I got to my office, the break room had no complimentary creamer. It had no progressive receptionist - in fact, our receptionist had been let go months previous to cut costs, and was replaced by a picture of a receptionist with some WordArt underneath imploring people to “phone who you came to see.”
At the end of the day I was on my way out, my timbuk2 laptop bag slung across one shoulder and my savvy bicycle-courier helmet and windbreaker in tow. My line manager was sitting on a bench outside the door, his head in his hands, sobbing gently to himself. It was over for him.
Within a few months, the company was put up for sale, dissolved from the bankruptcy resulting from having to pay out the legal damages due our client for badly specced, underdelivered software. We hit the schedule, our managers said as they wrote our pink slips, what more did they expect?
It wasn’t until a few years later that I bothered to phone one of my managers up and ask them for a reference. My latest replacement job had gone swimmingly, if by “swimmingly” you mean swimming in crocodile infested waters with a contact explosive strapped to your genitals. I needed someone to say something nice about me as much for myself as for my next employer, and I figured any of the scars of my largely-absent time there would be mostly healed. I was a little wrong.
“Honestly, we were pretty close to skipping off to Hawaii with a fucking mountain of blow. I have no idea who tipped them off, and if I ever find him I’ll strangle the little shit. I can’t believe they found out about Project Magic Missile,” he grimaced into the receiver.
In a world where spunky teenagers can summon powerful monsters from within their innermost feelings and social links in order to fight horrible demons but still have to go to high school, one man stands alone.
That man is the item shop owner. He would like to sell you some fucking swords that he just found on the ground or some shit. I mean like fuck, the dude knows that shit is going to hell outside, he can’t do anything about it, there’s not a lot of other spunky teenagers showing up in his shop trying to buy motherfucking swords and shotguns and android parts, but he’s still asking you for fucking money.
What does he think is happening? Is he just some sort of amoral arms dealer that doesn’t mind when he sells four hundred thousand dollars in cutting-edge military weapons to kids in their uniforms fresh from their English classes?
He has no fucking way of knowing where you’re getting the money, either. Sure, it drops out of demons when you kick their asses for some reason, but he doesn’t know that. For all he knows you murder thousands of grandmothers every night and need to upgrade your arsenal to stay on the grandmother-murdering skill tree treadmill.
But he also has Beads so I guess he’s okay. At least he’s not that motherfucker Tanaka who seems to always have sold out by the time I call to order the thermonuclear-tipped android accessories he has on fire sale.
When I was growing up in a small town, my grandfather always told me that it was a bad idea to “jump into a disused quarry.” I didn’t understand him at the time, but I knew the intent behind his words.
I don’t know why I was thinking about something like that. Maybe it’s because I was waiting to become the proud owner of a 1991 BMW 325i, the BMW that brings verve and panache to everyone who can’t scrape together more than $10,000 for a BMW and doesn’t want to deal with the indignation of having to drive a reliable car to their job at A&B Sound.
I was actively bleeding by the time I made the project introduction threads on my local BMW enthusiast forums, showing off all the angles of my $8500 hot rod while trying to ignore the signs of obvious rust, bare paint and warped corners that were surely indicative of an alcohol-infused bodyshop fettling. I poured lush attention on the anachronistic car phone in the front centre console, its ancient analogue radio now incapable of communicating on the modern networks flitting throughout the air around the two of us.
Years later, the 325i was a dependable daily driver, and I tooled it to work every day. Sometimes on beautiful sunny days it would fail on me and teach me about the value of buying comfortable shoes, other times it would get me through hell without a single complaint and surprise me with just how much brand cachet a thirty year old boxy POS BMW still carried with the clueless majority because of its little roundel on the trunk.
Girls would wave from the sidewalks. Guys would keep me for hours at the gas station explaining how great the E30 was and how they really wanted one soon. I was hit up for loans at stop lights. Told I was rich. I wasn’t rich, look at the piece of shit I drive!
But secretly, later, I would admit to myself - maybe I was rich. Rich in spirit. Rich in having a fine motoring vehicle. The cornering was sublime, the braking and steering perfectly weighted. It was a machine for attacking corners and I could wind it out anywhere. Nobody was immune from the little shitbox and I.
Then I’d get passed by a rusty Festiva, leaving a trail of oil behind it, its clattering lifters doing their best impression of a diesel. I would then wonder if maybe the concept of a soul was just what you held onto when you were in hell.
Is your village overrun by wild monkeys? Is your oil/gas industrial project beset by simians of different kinds? Has everyone locally told you “whoa bitch, we don’t do monkeys?”
Then you need us.
MonkeyBusters Industries has been operating in the monkey-beating industry since 1976, and we bring the ultimate combination of monkey removal technology (sticks, stones, loud voices) and the experience you need to defeat these wily pests.
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The year is 1983, and I’m working at Coleco. My job is to make a clone of the Intellivision Kool-Aid Man game, but without the Kool-Aid Man license.
My boss, Charlie Cromwell, is not exactly the kind of man who lets legality or market-rationality get in the way of making a good decision during these turbulent economic times. He’s from the leatherworking division and was promoted to videogames after he literally beat and branded an intern. Considering we don’t do any of the cattle raising ourselves, it seems a little surprising. The rumour is he brought the brand himself from home, and heated it up over a Sterno can in his office for just that confrontation.
It’s taking a little longer than usual to run the assembler this build. I can feel my frustration echoed back to me through the flickering CRT of my machine as the heads of the disks vainly fight and thrash to get me the thousands of bytes of information involved. I get up and head to the break room. My coworkers are assembled there, drinking coffee and talking about vertical blanking intervals. After awhile, all I hear coming out of their mouths is PCM static. I get coffee from the machine, and stare into my mug for what seems like hours.
Suddenly, the static cuts out. It’s my boss. Charlie is standing over me, wondering why my break is taking longer than the federally required minimum. I babble some excuse about needing a constitutional in order to refresh my creative energies, but he’s having none of it. We part on a disagreeable tone and I return to my office, closing the door tight and pulling the blinds shut. Put it into the work.
Later that night, at period-correct Arby’s, I eat while looking out into the parking lot at my turpentine-orange Gremlin. The poor car’s body tells all the stories it will ever need to. Its driver side front hubcap has been missing for months, and seems to be paired with a slow leak on that wheel. I assume that I’ve been gently clipped while parked on the hilly street outside my apartment, and the wheel is bent.
On the way home, I see Charlie Cromwell, walking home from the bar. That static again.
A couple of years ago, we were at a state fair. We had been driving for a few days now to head to our new home in Colorado, and we decided to stop by and visit the fair.
Shaun stayed behind in the muddy parking lot to guard the U-Haul, and our 1976 Datsun 620 King Cab, which by this point in time had panel gaps and rust holes so big you could reach in from outside and unlock the doors without much effort at all. The King Cab had worn its scars proudly, its once-prominent fenders beaten into indescribable concave shapes by decades of careless parking lot neighbors.
We ambled into the state fair. It was impossible to not be cognizant of our unusual appearance compared to the local hillbillies, but it wasn’t really top of mind at the time. What was top of mind was looking at the hog raising contest. Reportedly (according to the very posters on the highway that lured us to the fair in the first place) they had a biblically huge hog that set some kind of national record. Becky wanted to see it, of course, because she always told us that she wanted to go back to school and become a vet to save all the diseased animals that lurked outside our squalid shared flat in midtown Ann Arbor.
That’s when I saw it. Motherfucking deep fried butter. How the fuck can you even do that? Had we stepped through a wormhole and were in fact in the world of 2084, where Robotrons threaten our old people?
The man behind the food cart knew what I had seen. We locked eyes and he nodded sagely, his body jewelry and braided/beaded goatee jingling. We were both travelers on the same strange journey. We both knew now.
It was 1989. I was an up-and-coming mid level engineer at Highland Park. Me and a corps of other engineers had been hanging out at the water cooler a little too long on this warm July afternoon when Ralph Gilles came up to us. Ralph was well known as a bully, and with his gang of performance engineers we knew that we were in for some tough questions about our latest block tolerances.
Last week, he was so mad about a proposed DOHC engine from Honda that he threw an official SAE book of approved machinist excuses at my head from across the dyno cell. But something was different about him today. It chilled me.
“You guys wanna go see a dead luxury brand?” Ralph asked.
We all looked amongst ourselves, and then agreed. We decided that we would embark on a quest into the thick industrial badlands behind the facility, and find this dead luxury brand.
A few hours later, after some exposition that led us to grow and learn about how to become adults in this topsy-turvy new car industry, we came across the dead brand.
It was a 1988 Dodge Caravan with a Chrysler TC by Maserati head riding atop its crude 2.2L Turbo II. It was the most horrible thing any of us could have imagined.
Hi. Didn’t see you there. I’m Seat Safety Switch, star of stage and screen. You might remember me from such educational videos as “Why I am in love with the 1989 F150,” “Why I am in love with the Toyota Celica,” “Why I am in love with the 1979-1983 Toyota Crown,” “Why I am in love with that rusty Buick Wildcat I saw the other day,” and “You guys I saw this junk on Kijiji that has changed my life’s direction.” But today I’m here to tell you about my new business.
Walks across a bustling shop floor in his argyle sweater vest
A lot of people in the Subaru community have been convinced as of late that their head gaskets on their turbo Subarus have been ready to violently explode, and in many cases already have exploded and caused a vague sense of unease. That’s why I started my new shop.
At “It’s Not Head Gaskets, Give Us $200 Garage,” a team of experienced head gasket technicians will look over every inch of your turbo Subaru and do the appropriate tasks to verify that, in fact, your head gaskets are fine.
Let’s listen in now on a new customer’s first time with us.
Customer: MY HEAD GASKETS HAVE EXPLODED MY CAR SMELLS LIKE DELICIOUS MAPLE SYRUP Technician: It’s not head gaskets, give us $200. Customer: THANK YOU
Sip coffee in our luxurious waiting room while you wait, and peruse our fine selection of coffee table magazines to get ideas for your next project which will end up here in a few weeks when you’re convinced that the funky coolant smell from the Caravan in front of you demonstrates your impending engine disintegration.
So I’m on vacation in Italy, and they love their bidets in Italy. Every hotel so far has had one of varying kinds.
All of them are weird little pedestals with controls behind your back that don’t make any sense and emit a vaguely worrying arc of cold water that you have to squat onto in order to use. Doesn’t look comfortable.
At the fourth hotel, oh boy, the toilet can also be used as a bidet! There’s a little shower head that you can stick into a slot on the toilet bowl and then spray your butt. This can’t possibly go wrong, I say, after I do my business and adjust the only visible knob on the wall, which appears to correspond to temperature.
I pull the trigger on the shower head. Immediately I regret my actions.
I sprayed liquid shit up my back, across the entire wall behind me, and onto the floor around the toilet.
After spending a half hour wiping down every surface in the bathroom I’m cursing the Italians and wondering what kind of horrible people can possibly do this.
Turns out there was a pressure knob hiding beside the temperature knob, under a towel, and that knob sure enough was set to maximum. I sprayed what felt like a pressure washer up my own asshole (it HURT) and then forced a fine semi-aerosolized stream of poop through the gap between my butt and the toilet seat.
I felt terrible for the cleaning lady.
The moral of the story is, if you’re trying out a strange bidet for the first time, flush first. Also test it on something that’s not your butthole in case it tries to spray 30psi of water hammer pressure waves at your junk.
You’re a beekeeper who’s had enough of this shit, God damn it - and you’re going to make them all pay. Quit your job and unleash swarm upon swarm of mildly annoying stinging insects upon the town, leaving bodies from Hell to breakfast (or at least from the allergy wing of the hospital to the old folks’ home).
Rattleship
You’re playing Battleship with various highly emotional people in your life. Being able to play Battleship well is not a guarantee for success, as you must identify and abuse the psychological triggers of your opponent to talk them down from physically harming you.
Tempers flare and the tension ratchets up as the game marches on - can your relationship survive your precision assault on their submarine?
Opponents include:
Your cousin, at his mom’s funeral
Your irate ex-girlfriend, in her mom’s front foyer after you have broken and entered into her house in a desperate attempt to rekindle your relationship
The traffic cop who just clocked you doing 50 over
I love those plastic frog-kid signs that people set out so that you don’t speed through their neighborhood and flatten their kid. They make me laugh because the plastic kid looks so goddamn deformed.
I mean look at his little stump. And with that flag it looks like he’s running a parade.
tonight on the history channel’s bad stuff, we look at fascism. together with the stars of pawn stars, we’ll engage in a roundtable discussion to investigate what hitler was really planning for europe. with musical accompaniment by zz top.
Subaru Impreza speculation, the origins of the Outback Sport, God's favoured chariot
Because who doesn’t love a bit of speculation about the cars they love?
First, a bit of background: the Outback Sport is a trim level of the Subaru Impreza made from model years 1996 to (I assume) 2011. It has been replaced by the Impreza XV. The basic idea is to make an offroad-friendly Impreza station wagon by adding two-tone scratch-resistant body cladding and adding an extra inch of lift to the suspension through special springs. Depending on the year they also have unique seat fabric and strange interior options that aren’t available on other trims or models.
This car is not to be confused with the Subaru Outback, which was originally launched as the Subaru Legacy Outback, which is a station wagon that was intended to make an offroad-friendly Legacy by adding two-tone scratch resi… okay fine. They’re the same idea, on different platforms, and the Outback Sport is the superior car because the Impreza is the superior platform.
I used to have a ‘97 Impreza Outback Sport, but I was well aware that it was a North American only car. However, I would sometimes see old-style (93-94) coupes with the two-tone paint job and not understand what they were actually made of.
Then this missing link showed up - a 94 Impreza Sport.
See the two-tone paint job? I’m thinking the “Outback Sport” trim is actually a reference to the “Sport” trim on the Imprezas, and not necessarily to the full-on Legacy Outback, since the Outback was never made available to the Japanese customer.
That would also explain the unique Outback Sport interior, badging and options, because SOA would have had to do final assembly of the car after importing it from Japan as a normal Impreza Sport to turn it into an Outback Sport. The strange coupes that I saw must have been a 93-94 “Sport” trim level on the Impreza L coupe, which would have caused the two-tone paint to be applied to the car as it is in this Sport-trim wagon.
The Impreza Sport also disappears from the catalogues after 95, because in 96 the Outback and Outback Sport appear, and there’s a facelift. The two-tone paint is kept as an homage which says that Sport package cars with a two-tone paint job must exist in other regions than just North America (one such car is probably the Gravel Express, Japan’s two-litre turbo version of the Outback Sport, with even more exotic interior and exterior trimmings).
Not sure how this explains the unique Outback Sport springs, but I’m sure there was some catalogue trickery involved.
So I’m getting ready to leave my house, right? And there’s this dog here. Some kind of Afghan hound or some shit. Beautiful, meticulously groomed hair. On my lawn. Whose dog is this?
“Uh uh girlfriend, culottes are so 70s!” she yells at me, but it is barely audible before it dissolves into the usual angry-dog hate stream of BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK
I return to the house, shaken. What just happened? Did I imagine that? I look out the peephole at the dog, still standing there on my lawn, now cocking her head to stare at a particularly savoury blade of grass next to my driveway.
I don’t even know what culottes are. I check Simple English Wikipedia. That makes no sense. It bothers me. It’s already a miracle that we have a talking dog who is smart enough to understand fashions and cultural norms. Why isn’t this dog’s angry fashion advice accurate?
I change into my best suit, and slip out the back door. Somehow, she is in my back yard as well, and the barking resumes.
“IS THERE AN ANCIENT HOPLITE WARRIOR CONVENTION IN TOWN? BECAUSE YOU’RE DRESSED LIKE HELEN OF YUCK.” again the fizzling and BARKBARKBARKBARKBARKBARK.
My body, twisted in fear, leaps back into my house through a plate glass window. I am laced with wounds and lying on a pile of sharp glass, bleeding out. That’s not important. I need to impress this dog.
I call the police. I think that their YMCA-style camp will distract the dog for long enough for me to escape to the house of someone with better fashion sense who can protect me.
Five minutes after the police hang up on me, laughing, I hear a rattling at the front door and then the sharp intake of breath. The hound has broken into my house and aimed her pointed criticism at me once again.
“I’M SERIOUS, GIRLFRIEND, YOU GOTTA FIND THE REST OF THE SPARTANS BECAUSE YOUR PHALANX IS SHOWING. SO AWFUL.”
It’s too late. The dog is on top of me now, her powerful jaws snapping at my neck and face in a display of territorial dominance. I can feel the end coming.
A gunshot rings out. The dog’s breathing intensifies, gets choppier. I feel more warmth on my chest mingling with my existing burst arteries and grated skin.
As the dog slumps off my chest and collapses to the floor, I see in the door a man, silhouetted by the morning sunrise, clutching a smoking shotgun. He’s going to appreciate this tie, I think.
There is a frisbee-throwing robot competition outside my office. They’re pretty accurate. I hope that when I go to get in my car a robot doesn’t throw a frisbee at me.
This is an actual thought that I am having right now. We live in the best future.
Speedline rally-style wheels are pretty awesome but there seems to be a lack of knowledge in the community about which each style of wheel is called. In an effort to help fix this issue, here’s a list of common Speedline wheels with some information about them.
Speedline Preo R
Seems to be common on JDM WRXes.
Speedline Electra-S
The stereotypical Subaru rally wheel, found even on their factory WRC cars.
Speedline Corse Type 2110
These seem to be tarmac wheels.
Speedline Corse R15
Another stereotypical rally wheel.
Speedline Corse Type 2108
Speedline Corse Type 2120
Speedline Corse Type 2118
Speedline Corse Type 2128
Gravel wheel.
Speedline Mistral/Mistral 5
3-piece European wheel.
Speedline ST2
This done be what I got. Comes in 16″ and 17″ versions.
Speedline SL434
Four-bolt wheel that seems common on hot Peugeots.
I used to own an ‘01 Cavalier. It was an experience which I am slowly recovering from, no thanks to you for asking.
Anyway it occurred to me (while complaining about the car over dinner to a friend) that there’s a lot of really weird stuff going on in the Cavalier and nobody really wants to talk about it.
So here’s a list of all the weird stuff I remember from my Cavalier.
When they did the second version of the third gen Cavalier in 2000, they had to re-engineer the car for safety in order to get a half-star passenger side impact safety rating. The words “elevated risk of pelvic injury” got thrown around a lot in those heady times, to be fair.
The convertible Cavalier and Sunfire were converted by another company external to GM (ASC, who also did the convertible conversion for the Dakota convertible). When the roof gets cut off the car gets super wobbly and they needed to restore chassis rigidity. They added strut tower bars to the front and rear, so at least the car is sort of braced. These strut tower bars serve as a cheap junkyard upgrade for your hardtop J-body.
GM adds and removes the power lock trunk and its corresponding opening button depending on what year of the car it is. For instance, MY2001 cars do not have it, while 2002 and 2000 do.
Inexplicably, the bolt pattern and centre bore are perfect for a 5x100 Impreza or WRX.
Both the passenger and driver front seats are pointed slightly inward at an angle, so when you are sitting in the “middle” of the seat the steering wheel is actually slightly off to your right. A lot of people associate this feature with a mild subconscious discomfort and it probably doesn’t help safety much that Cavalier drivers aren’t encouraged to look forward.
Getrag didn’t allow GM dealerships to rebuild the F23 manual transmission used in many Cavaliers, so you have to replace the entire transaxle as a unit if (for instance) the synchros fail.
The invoice price of a dual-airbag Cavalier lost GM between $500 and $1000 per unit, depending on reports.
Toyota released a version of the Cavalier in Japan known as the Toyota Cavalier. It even had a TRD body kit package which added Supra-like styling and eyebrows for the headlights.
A dealership-installed supercharger kit was briefly available for the Z24 even though the 2.2’s lower compression ratio leads to better forced-induction potential.
The 2.2L Cavalier engine uses pushrods instead of overhead cams like the 2.4L. It was still sold until MY2003.
The third gen Cavalier has a lot of dead space up front between the radiator and the exhaust manifold. What was supposed to go there? A V6, which never materialized.
There are dozens of J-body models, such as the Cadillac Cimarron, Buick Skyhawk, Pontiac Sunbird, and the Vauxhall Cavalier.
If there’s one thing every good software project needs, it’s managers. Software developers have an innate love of being managed.
That’s why github repositories can’t start without you getting at least two layers of managers, an HR person and four sales people. I myself have at least 30 of them per repo, and let me tell you, I’ve never written better code.
Disabling the stupid new Google Chrome right-click menu
Knowing people, breaking WebKit compatibility won’t piss everyone off half as much as this.
Add –disable-new-menu-style to the shortcut for Chrome in order to turn off the nasty “Windows 8” style right click menu styling which throws off not only your muscle memory but any pretense of platform conventions.
No idea how long Google will continue to tolerate an alternative to their bald-faced incompetence in the field of obsessive-compulsively worshipping the “flat UI” paradigm.
So I bought an ezflash4 (to play GBA homebrew, shut up) and it didn’t work. Not surprising since I’m pretty sure the last time they sold these was in 2006 or so.
The DS lite would complain that no GBA cartridge was inserted, the GBA Micro would come up with a corrupted “Nintendo” logo and the GBA SP would pretend that nothing was inserted.
After enough futile attempts at booting the thing with the GBA SP while leaving the SP plugged in the damn thing fired right up and has been okay so far. I guess the internal battery discharges itself and requires either replacement or a charging by way of the GBA.
So if you’re having this problem, put the cartridge in a GBA and plug the GBA in. Now if only I could find my GBA Micro power adapter…
I got this theory. My theory is that Java is the way it is to make outsourcing easier.
Think about it:
The language is designed to prevent (for your safety) joy, spontaneity and creativity when writing code,
It’s perfectly suited to writing assembly line bullshit with tons of repetition that is time-consuming to work on or update,
The runtime is slow as hell, setting a low expectation for performance that is easily met by unoptimized slapdash work on the application side,
It’s a language designed for people who aren’t very good programmers but who can spend a long time writing code. Because their time is cheap. Because they’re not paid very much.
Well, now that we’ve nailed that we can realize that life is too short to keep using it, right?
Like many others, I anticipate the demise of Adobe Flash and all its related products. The thousands of “developers” who will be put out of a job by it becoming irrelevant will be more than offset by the gain in national GDP as a result of not having to deal with its fucking crashing and even shittier (un)installer.
Everyone who works at Adobe and deals with Flash should feel a deep, awe-inspiring level of shame that in lesser men would lead them to thoughts of socially endorsed suicide.
Today I started browsing around the Internet in my copy of Safari, at which point I was alerted that a Flash update is ready. This opened the Flash Player Installer, which does not at all match my Mac OS X install because the installer is, for some reason, developed with Adobe Air and needs to look like a retard’s painting of an SR71 Blackbird using only half of the greys available in the Photoshop palette.
After asking me for my sudo password and forcing me to click through a few more screens to get to the meat of the problem, I hit a poorly designed screen. I will now spend more time talking about this screen than the whole of Adobe has spent thinking about it.
Despite the fact that the installer was triggered from inside a browser, the installer demands that I now cease my web browsing and quit Safari as well as all other browsers on my Mac, including Chrome which (as far as I know) carries its own version of Flash and thus doesn’t fall victim to Adobe’s direct fuckery.
After I quit all of my browsers (which takes a few hours because I’m watching Netflix which uses Silverlight) I return to the installer to see if the list of browsers I need to close has updated. I notice that it doesn’t automatically update, and I have to click Retry. Continuing to look at the window I come from, I’m confused at why the list of browsers hasn’t updated to reflect the ones I’ve closed!
Oh wait, there’s a dialog box here - in the Mac OS X style instead of Retard Blackbird - that tells me that the list of open browsers has changed, and that I need to click OK to see the updated list. Why didn’t you just fucking do it?
After really, fo realz, closing the last browser, I click Retry again and am immediately shuffled to the install progress bar. It asks me for my sudo password halfway through the install, which I provide again, but doesn’t seem to have impacted the install’s success at all as it continues even as I type my password.
At the end of the install, the installer asks me if I want to let Adobe handle my updates for me from now on. Like fuck I will.
So let’s review my list of questions:
Why in the shit is there a modal dialogue box there to tell me what I just did?
Why doesn’t the window style change when I lose focus?
Why can’t Flash update while a browser is running?
Why does Flash give a shit that Chrome, a browser which includes Flash as part of its normal update process, is open?
Why can’t the installer just poll for open browsers occasionally, or even just poll when the window gains/loses focus?
Why did Adobe go to so much work adding a special UI to the installer (breaking multiple platform conventions such as how modal dialogue boxes are related to the parent window) only to use the system default dialogue box to convey the actually important information?
Why has Adobe not gone bankrupt yet with such bald-faced contempt for actually doing a fucking job properly?
